What we know of the history of Cuma is very obscure: the foundation of no Greek town in those parts is dated so early. This would not have been the case if Cuma had not so soon ceased to be a Greek town, and had come into the power of the Oscans before the time when the people in those districts began to write Greek. All towns in fact have surely had eras dating from their foundation; and by this means it became possible to get definite chronological dates, which were afterwards reduced to Olympiads. For it was only at a very late period that the Greeks reckoned by Olympiads. The first who does so is Timæus (Ol. 120 to 130): Theophrastus does not yet use this computation. But when a town like Cuma happened to have been lost to the Greeks, there was then no trace of this era, and consequently nothing on which one could lay hold but the genealogies of its Ctistæ (Founders). If therefore it was stated, that this man or that man had founded a city, people made out his descent as far back as Troy and the heroic age. Thence it comes that Cuma was looked upon as so wonderfully old, as two hundred years older than the neighbouring Greek towns; for the real era of this city was lost at an early period, and it was surely not older than the other Greek towns. What was known of Cuma probably existed in Neapolitan Chronicles, which Dionysius also made use of. His description of the war of the Etruscans against Cuma is indeed mythical: the Volturnus flows back to its source, &c. yet this is only a matter of secondary consideration. Herodotus is also mythical; for instance, at the destruction of the Carthaginian army against Gelon,--yet for all that the war which he relates is not to be doubted of. The people of Cuma were then at the height of their prosperity, and possessed Campania. If therefore the Etruscans besieged Cuma about the sixty-fourth Olympiad, this shows clearly that they were at that time conquerors, which is in perfect agreement with Cato’s account, that Capua had stood only two hundred and sixty years since its foundation; that is to say, it was an Etruscan colony. Thus therefore, with regard to the passage of the Etruscans over the Tiber, we have the date 250 to 280 according to our usual chronology from the building of Rome; and as late as 220 to 230, Herodotus represents Agylla as a town which consults the oracle at Delphi. That this had been done by Etruscans, who thought so much of their own religion, is inconceivable; and the more so, as there existed a deep-rooted hatred between the Etruscans and the Greeks, owing to which it was that the Romans received the command to sacrifice a Gaul and a Gallic woman, and also a Greek and a Greek woman,[64] from the _Libri Fatales_, which were of Etruscan origin; and not from the Sybilline books, as Plutarch would have us believe. This national hatred already displays itself every where: in Pindar, in the Bacchian fable, it is transferred to the Tyrrhenians, but it is to be understood