An important part of the history of Greece is that which embraces the age of Grecian colonization, and the extension of the commerce of the Greeks to nearly all the coasts of the Mediterranean. Of the various circumstances that led to the planting of the Greek colonies, and especially of the Ionic, Æolian, and Dorian colonies on the coast of Asia Minor and the islands of the Ægean Sea, we have already spoken. These latter were ever intimately connected with Greece proper, in whose general history theirs is embraced; but the cities of Italy, Sicily, and Cyrena'ica were too far removed from the drama that was enacted around the shores of the Ægean to be more than occasionally and temporarily affected by the changing fortunes of the parent states. A brief notice, therefore, of some of those distant settlements, that eventually rivaled even Athens and Sparta in power and resources, cannot be uninteresting, while it will serve to give more accurate views of the extent and importance of the field of Grecian history. At an early period the shores of Southern Italy and Sicily were peopled by Greeks; and so numerous and powerful did the Grecian cities become that the whole were comprised by Strabo and others under the appellation Magna Græcia, or Great Greece. The earliest of these distant settlements appear to have been made at Cu'mæ and Neap'olis, on the western coast of Italy, about the middle of the eleventh century. Cumæ was built on a rocky hill washed by the sea; and the same name is still applied to the ruins that lie scattered around its base. Some of the most splendid fictions of Virgil's Æneid relate to the Cumæan Sibyl, whose supposed cave, hewn out of the solid rock, actually existed under the city: A spacious cave, within its farmost part, Was hewed and fashioned by laborious art, Through the hill's hollow sides; before the place A hundred doors a hundred entries grace; As many voices issue, and the sound Of Sibyl's words as many times rebound. --Æneid B. VI. GROTE says: "The myth of the Sibyl passed from the Cymæ'ans in Æ'olis, along with the other circumstances of the tale of Æne'as, to their brethren, the inhabitants of Cumæ in Italy. In the hollow rock under the very walls of the town was situated the cavern of the Sibyl; and in the immediate neighborhood stood the wild woods and dark lake of Avernus, consecrated to the subterranean gods, and offering an establishment of priests, with ceremonies evoking the dead, for purposes of prophecy or for solving doubts and mysteries. It was here that Grecian imagination localized the Cimme'rians and the fable of O-dys'seus."[Footnote: The voyage of Ulysses (Odysseus) to the infernal regions. Odyssey, B. XI.]