You and I would probably be satisfied with such company as that of Herodotus and Charondas and Lysias. So we hunt the history down to see if there may be lodgings to let there this summer, but only to find that it all pales out in the ignorance of our modern days. The name gets changed into Lupiae; but there it turns out that Pausanias made "a strange mistake," and should have written Copia,--which was perhaps Cossa, or sometimes Cosa. Pyrrhus appears, and Hadrian rebuilds something, and the "Oltramontani," whoever they may have been, ravage it, and finally the Saracens fire and sack it; and so, in the latest Italian itinerary you can find, there is no post-road goes near it, only a _strada rotabile_ (wheel-track) upon the hills; and, alas! even the _rotabile_ gives way at last, and all the map will own to is a _strada pedonale_, or foot-path. But the map is of the less consequence, when you find that the man who edited it had no later dates than the beginning of the last century, when the family of Serra had transferred the title to Sybaris to a Genoese family without a name, who received from it forty thousand ducats yearly, and would have received more, if their agents had been more faithful. There the place fades out of history, and you find in your Swinburne, "that the locality has _never_ been thoroughly examined"; in your Smith's Dictionary, that "the whole subject is very obscure, and a careful examination still much needed"; in the Cyclopaedia, that the site of Sybaris is lost. Craven saw the rivers Crathis and Sybaris. He seems not to have seen the wall of Sybaris, which he supposed to be under water. He does say of Cassano, the nearest town he came to, that "no other spot can boast of such advantages." In short, no man living who has written any book about it dares say that anybody has looked upon the certain site of Sybaris for more than a hundred years.[C] If a man wanted to write a mythical story, where could he find a better scene?