Greek Influence in the Adriatic Sea before the Fourth Century B.C.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the evidence for early Greek enterprise in the Adriatic, and to ascertain, within such limits as the scanty material imposes, its nature and extent. The Greek cities of Illyria and the eastern coast of Italy were always unimportant, though not, perhaps, quite so unimportant as has often been supposed. But it may be worth while to try to discover why no literary tradition has survived and why these cities remained without influence on, though not uninfluenced by, he main current of Greek history.I. The sources and the credibility of Greek enterprise in the Adriatic.Alcman is the only seventh-century author whose fragments betray an interest, albeit an incidental interest, in the Adriatic. He wrote for a Spartan audience, and would write what they could understand, and his poetry was sung at festivals in which many must have joined. Spartans of the late seventh century had heard something of the tribe in the northern corner of the Adriatic and of the Illyrians on the eastern shore or farther inland. In the sixth century Greek knowledge of Adriatic geography, human and physical, began to take shape. Not only the allusions in the poems of Mimnermus of Colophon and Ibycus of Rhegion, which shew that Greek legends were thus early being attached to the coasts of the Adriatic, but the systematic works of Scylax of Caryanda and Hecataeus of Miletus are as old as the sixth century.