[Sidenote: Appearance of the city at the time of Cassiodorus.]

For the appearance of this Roman colony in the seventh century of its
existence the reader is referred to the letter of Cassiodorus before
quoted (Var. xii. 15). The picture of the city, 'hanging like a
cluster of grapes upon the hills, basking in the brightness of the sun
all day long, yet cooled by the breezes from the sea, and looking at
her leisure on the labours of the husbandman in the corn-fields, the
vineyards, and the olive-groves around her,' is an attractive one, and
shows that kind of appreciation of the gentler beauties of Nature
which befits a countryman of Virgil.

This picture, however, is not distinctive enough to enable us from it
alone to fix the exact site of the Roman city. Lenormant (pp.
360-370), while carefully distinguishing between the sites of the
Greek Scylletion and the Latin Scolacium, and assigning the former
with much apparent probability to the neighbourhood of the promontory
and the Grotte di Stalletti, has been probably too hasty in his
assertion that the modern city of Squillace incontestably covers the
ground of the Latin Scolacium. Mr. Arthur J. Evans, after making a
much more careful survey of the place and its neighbourhood than the
French archaeologist had leisure for, has come to the conclusion that
in this identification M. Lenormant is entirely wrong, and that the
Roman city was not at Squillace, where there are no remains of earlier
than mediaeval times, but at Roccella del Vescovo, five or six miles
from Squillace in a north-easterly direction, where there are such
remains as can only have belonged to a Roman provincial city of the
first rank. For a further discussion of the question the reader is
referred to the Note (and accompanying Map) at the end of this