Ancient Tarentum was a very extensive place; the modern town with its 18,000 or 20,000 inhabitants, though, it is true, they live very close together, does not occupy more space than the ancient acra, the original Laconian colony, around which the new town arose and extended. This immense new town has disappeared, though its circumference can still be recognised. It is well known, that the origin of Tarentum is connected with the history of Laconia; the story has indeed some historical foundation, but is evidently perverted; and the statement about Phalanthus and the Parthenii has no historical character at all. In very many states, in which no connubium existed between the different parts of the population, the persons sprung from unlawful marriages between members of the ruling and those of the subject people, endangered the government of the ruling class. Such were the Parthenii. For about two centuries and a half the Tarentines were powerful far and wide, but an attempt they made about the time of the Persian wars, to reduce the Messapians to the condition of helots, failed, and they suffered a defeat from which for a century they could not recover; the defeat, according to Herodotus, was the most bloody that had ever been sustained by a Greek nation. Still, however, Tarentum afterwards recovered, and that too at a period when we should least expect it, when Thurii, Croton, and other towns sank, and when in many parts the towns entirely disappeared. It may be, that Tarentum offered a place of refuge to the Greeks expelled from Caulon and other places; but the people must have made every effort to overcome their difficult circumstances, for their city became very powerful. It now assumed altogether a commercial and manufacturing character, and became the real emporium for southern Italy, and perhaps for Samnium also. Salt was a lucrative article of its commerce; it had excellent wool, cloth manufactories, and dyeing establishments; purple in particular was made there in the greatest perfection. Tarentum was in every respect an industrial place, with extensive navigation and fisheries. Such a population could not possibly feel inclined to serve in the army as a heavy-armed infantry, such as was then required; their cavalry was anything but contemptible; it was distinguished for peculiar tactics of its own. The fact that they enlisted foreign mercenaries, ought not to be made a subject of reproach to them, as they were a commercial people, and as it was the general practice of the Greeks at that time. That they took into their pay foreign princes with their whole armies, may have been imprudent; but in this respect too they did no more than what was done by England, which, during the eighteenth century, often took whole regiments of foreign countries into its service, a system which the United States of the Netherlands followed ever since the time of Maurice of Orange. It was