Then if we turn for a moment to the historic period, it is in this very country that we find planted the great and luxurious cities of Sybaris and Crotona[458]. Now as the people called Siceli, and the country called Sicania, are thus placed in relations of proximity by Homer, so they continue throughout all antiquity. The reports collected by Thucydides represent the Sicanians as giving their name to Sicily, and displacing the former name Trinacria, which is identical with the Homeric Thrinacie. At a later time, the Sicilians passed from Italy into Sicily, and, as was said, upon rafts; that is to say, across the strait, and consequently from the country which, as I contend, is the Homeric Sicania. These Siceli were rumoured to have overcome the Sicani, and to have again changed the name of the island to Sicily. It is yet more material to note, that Thucydides says there were still Siceli in Italy when he himself lived: and he adds the tradition that Italus, a king of theirs, gave his name to the Peninsula[459]. To these reports, which form a part of the account given by Thucydides, we may add the statement of Dionysius, that the Σικελοὶ were the oldest inhabitants of Latium, and were displaced by the Pelasgi[460]. This implies their movement southward, and makes it probable that we should meet them in Bruttium, on their way to Sicily, perhaps pressing, in that region, upon the Sicani. Such an hypothesis would be in entire agreement with Homer, who evidently represents the Sicanian as older than the Sicelian name: for the first had become territorial, when the latter was only tribal or national. And all this is in agreement with Thucydides in the essential point, that he makes the Sicanians precede the Siceli: while, though the tradition he reports brings the Sicani from Spain under pressure from the Ligures[461], he need not mean to exclude the supposition, that they may have come by land down the Italian peninsula. Though it is probably wrong to confound the Siceli with the Sicani[462], it would thus on all hands appear, that they were but successive waves of the tide of immigration advancing southward. There is a further evidence that Homer meant to place Sicania within the Greek maritime world, and not beyond it. It is this. In his fabulous narrative to Laertes, Ulysses apprises the old man, that he had seen his son five years before in Sicania, hopeful of reaching his home[463]. Now this is a proof that the place was in the Inner or known sphere of geography: for in the outer circle, as for instance at Æolia, he never has any knowledge or reckoning of his own as to the power of reaching home: it was Æolus who gave him the Zephyr to take him home, not he who knew that if he got a Zephyr he would reach home. And in like manner he is supplied with express directions by Calypso: while Menelaus, not being absolutely beyond the known world, has no instructions for his voyage from Proteus, who plays for him the part of divine informant.