It is no great wonder that the Greeks, having once overcome the terrors of the ocean on the night side of the world, crossed over in large numbers to the fair coasts which are in sight from the Albanian mountains. So short a ferry must have been constantly at work. There are still Greeks in Italy--not Greeks by descent alone, nor of Greek origin mixed with other elements, but Greeks of pure blood and speech. No less than twenty thousand of them dwell in two colonies in southern Italy, one in the Terra d'Otranto, the other some twenty miles south-east of Reggio. Neither maintains communications with the other, nor does either possess traditions of its origin. Both maintain themselves apart from the surrounding people, whom they call "Latinoi." Their language is unwritten. It differs from modern Romaic, and is apparently not derived from the Greek spoken in the cities of Magna Grecia. The colonists are probably descendants of immigrants who came from Greece not later than the eleventh century, or perhaps in those earlier days when refugees crowded into Italy for shelter from the fury of the iconoclasts. But whencesoever these mysterious colonies came, they have shown not a trace of the great heart and spirit which animated the earliest settlers of their race upon Italian shores. Pæstum, or rather Poseidonia, to give it its Greek name, was a city less ancient than Cumæ. It was not founded by settlers direct from Greece. It was a colony thrown off by Sybaris, that great city of Calabria which became a byword of luxury while Rome was young and counted for little in the Italian land. Five centuries before Christ was born that mighty city was destroyed by its rival Croton, destroyed so utterly that the River Krathis was led over the ruins; yet Poseidonia, its distant colony, still remembered the greatness of her origin, and grew and flourished splendidly, till she became the mightiest town of all this coast, powerful upon sea, potent to thrust back the swarming tribes which looked down enviously from the mountains on her wealth.