Now is not this a very remarkable thing? Here was a city, which, under its two names of Sybaris or of Thurium, was for centuries the regnant city of all that part of the world. It could call into the field three hundred thousand men,--an army enough larger than Athens ever furnished, or Sparta. It was a far more populous and powerful state than ever Athens was, or Sparta, or the whole of Hellas. It invented and carried into effect free popular education,--a gift to the administration of free government larger than ever Rome rendered. It received and honored Charondas, the great practical legislator, from whose laws no man shall say how much has trickled down into the Code Napoleon or the Revised Statutes of New York, through the humble studies of the Roman jurists. It maintained in peace, prosperity, happiness, and, as its maligners say, in comfort, an immense population. If they had not been as comfortable as they were,--if a tenth part of them had received alms every year, and a tenth part were flogged in the public schools every year,--if one in forty had been sent to prison every year, as in the happy city which publishes the "Atlantic Monthly,"--then Sybaris, perhaps, would never have got its bad name for luxury. Such a city lived, flourished, ruled, for hundreds of years. Of such a city all that you know now with certainty is, that its coin is "the most beautifully finished in the cabinets of ancient coinage"; and that no traveller even pretends to be sure that he has been to the site of it for more than a hundred years. That speaks well for your nineteenth century. Now the reader who has come thus far will understand that I, having come thus far, in twenty-odd years since those days of teetering on the pea-green settee, had always kept Sybaris in the background of my head, as a problem to be solved, and an inquiry to be followed to its completion. There could hardly have been a man in the world better satisfied than I to be the hero of the adventure which I am now about to describe. * * * * *