Old Calabria by Norman Douglas
page 276 of 451 (61%)
page 276 of 451 (61%)
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raging and foaming in its narrow valley. It rises among the mountains
called "Fallistro" and "Li Tartari"--unquestionably Greek names. On this river and somewhere above Acri stood, according to the scholarly researches of Lenormant, the ancient city of Pandosia. I do not know if its site has been determined since his day. It was "very strong" and rich and at its highest prosperity in the fourth century B.C.; after the fall of Sybaris it passed under the supremacy of Croton. The god Pan was figured on some of its coins, and appropriately enough, considering its sylvan surroundings; others bear the head of the nymph Pandosia with her name and that of the river Crathis, under the guise of a young shepherd: they who wish to learn his improper legend will find it in the pages of Aelian, or in chapter xxxii of the twenty-fifth book of Rhodiginus, beginning _Quae sit brutorum affectio,_ etc. [Footnote: _Brunii a brutis moribus:_ so say certain spiteful writers, an accusation which Strabo and Horace extend to all Calabrians. As to the site of Pandosia, a good number of scholars, such as old Prosper Parisius and Luigi Maria Greco, locate it at the village of Mendicino on the river Merenzata, which was called Arconte (? Acheron) in the Middle Ages. So the Trionto is not unquestionably the Traeis, and in Marincola Pistoia's good little "Cose di Sibari" (1845) the distinction is claimed for one of four rivers--the Lipuda, Colognati, Trionto, or Fiuminica.] We have here not the Greece of mediaeval Byzantine times, much less that of the Albanians, but the sunny Hellas of the days when the world was young, when these ardent colonists sailed westwards to perpetuate their names and legends in the alien soil of Italy. The Mucone has always been known as a ferocious and pitiless torrent, and maintains to this day its Tartarean reputation. Twenty persons a |
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