SYBARIS, according to tradition, was the most ancient among the Achaean towns. It has a great name, but in the period of historical certainty it had ceased to exist. The greatness of Sybaris is beyond a doubt, but all the details related about the luxuriousness of its inhabitants, their wealth, their works of art, and their final catastrophe, are either doubtful or altogether fabulous. The numbers of its inhabitants and of the men capable of bearing arms are exaggerated in an almost oriental fashion, for at its destruction, the city is said to have had 300,000 men capable of bearing arms; the manner also, in which Croton is said to have gained the battle, is a mere silly story. But we need not wonder at the fabulous character of these accounts, or at the obscurity of the history, for all the early history of Greece is in the same predicament, and Roman history too begins very late. We must be on our guard not to measure the history of the western nations by the standard of eastern annals. Even if we trace the contemporary records among the Hebrews only as far as the time of Solomon, we already reach a very early period compared with that to which history ascends in Greece. There can be no doubt, that the Egyptians had annals from the period of the seventeenth dynasty, that is, from the time of Sesostris and Amenophis, or the expulsion of the Hycsos; but the Greeks had no such ancient contemporary records, and although there existed certain annalistic tables, as for example, the list of the priestesses at Argos, still they did not, like the oriental annals, constitute a history, but were mere lists of years. It is of extreme importance to an historical philologer, to know how late Greek history commences. At the period of my youth, I and those of the same age with me grew up under the most erroneous notions in this respect. I was already a young man, when it first occurred to me to doubt the truth of the stories about the Messenian wars and about Aristomenes; in the common histories of Greece no doubts were expressed, the events were assigned to definite years, and were narrated as confidently as if they were reported on the best historical authority. People are not yet sufficiently free from these thoroughly erroneous notions, although a right view has already gained some ground. All we know about Sybaris with certainty is, that it was destroyed several years before the period which we regard as the time of the expulsion of the Roman kings; Greek writers place the destruction three years before this event; but synchronistic statements of this kind are of no value. Posidonia and Laos on the opposite coast were colonies of Sybaris, whence we may suppose that all Lucania, with the exception of Metapontum, was subject to it. Sybaris and all those towns became great and powerful within an incredibly short period, which probably arose from the fact of their being commercial colonies. The rapidity, with