jan 1, 280 - Justinus "Historia Philippicae et Totius Mundi"
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[ca. 300 BCE] § 20.1 DIONYSIUS, after expelling the Carthaginians from Sicily, and making himself master of the whole island, thinking that peace might be dangerous to his power, and idleness in so great an army fatal to it, transported his forces into Italy; with a wish, at the same time, that the strength of his soldiers might be invigorated by constant employment, and his dominions enlarged. His first contest was with the Greeks, who occupied the nearest parts of the coast on the Italian sea; and, having conquered them, he attacked their neighbours, looking upon all of Grecian origin who were inhabitants of Italy, as his enemies; and these settlers had then spread, not merely through a part of Italy, but through almost the whole of it. Many Italian cities, indeed, after so long a lapse of time, still exhibit some traces of Greek manners; for the Etrurians, who occupy the shore of the Tuscan sea, came from Lydia; and Troy, after it was taken and overthrown, sent thither the Veneti (whom we see on the coast of the Adriatic), under the leadership of Antenor. Adria, too, which is near the Illyrian sea, and which gave name also to the Adriatic, is a Greek city; and Diomede, being driven by shipwreck, after the destruction of Troy, into those parts, built Arpi. Pisae, likewise, in Liguria, had Grecian founders; and Tarquinii, in Etruria, as well as Spina in Umbria, has its origin from the Thessalians; Perusia was founded by the Achaeans. Need I mention Caere? Or the people of Latium, who were settled by Aeneas? Are not the Falisci, are not Nola and Abella, colonies of the Chalcidians? What is all the country of Campania? What are the Bruttii and Sabines? What are the Samnites? What are the Tarentines, whom we understand to have come from Lacedaemon, and to have been called Spurii? The city of Thurii they say that Philoctetes built; and his monument is seen there to this day, as well as the arrows of Hercules, on which the fate of Troy depended, laid up in the temple of Apollo. (Justin, History of the World, 20.1
[ca. 200 BCE] § 32.3 After Demetrius was killed, and his rival removed. Perseus grew not only more careless in his behaviour towards his father, but even more insolent, conducting himself, not as heir to the crown, but as king. Philip, offended at his manner, became every day more concerned for the death of Demetrius, and began at length to suspect that he had been deceived by treachery, and put to the torture all the witnesses and informers. Having, by this means, come to the knowledge of the deception, he was not less afflicted at the dishonesty of Perseus than at the execution of the innocent Demetrius, whom he would have avenged, had he not been prevented by death; for shortly after he died of a disease contracted by mental anxiety, leaving great preparations for a war with the Romans, of which Perseus afterwards made use. He had induced the Scordiscan Gauls to join him, and would have had a desperate struggle with the Romans, had not death carried him off.
The Gauls, after their disastrous attack upon Delphi, in which they had felt the power of the divinity more than that of the enemy, and had lost their leader Brennus, had fled, like exiles, partly into Asia, and partly into Thrace, and then returned, by the same way by which they had come, into their own country. Of these, a certain number settled at the conflux of the Danube and Save, and took the name of Scordisci. The Tectosagi, on returning to their old settlements about Tolosa, were seized with a pestilential distemper, and did not recover from it, until, being warned by the admonitions of their soothsayers, they threw the gold and silver, which they had got in war and sacrilege, into the lake of Tolosa; all which treasure, a hundred and ten thousand pounds of silver, and fifteen hundred thousand pounds of gold, Caepio, the Roman consul, a long time after, carried away with him. But this sacrilegious act subsequently proved a cause of rain to Caepio and his army. The rising of the Cimbrian war, too, seemed to pursue the Romans as if to avenge the removal of that devoted treasure. Of these Tectosagi, no small number, attracted by the charms of plunder, repaired to Illyricum, and, after spoiling the Istrians, settled in Pannonia.
The Istrians, it is reported, derive their origin from those Colchians who were sent by king Aeetes in pursuit of the Argonauts, that had carried off his daughter, who, after they had sailed from the Pontus Euxinus into the Ister, and had proceeded far up the channel of the river Save, pursuing the track of the Argonauts, conveyed their vessels upon their shoulders over the tops of the mountains, as far as the shores of the Adriatic sea, knowing that the Argonauts must have done the same before them, because of the size of their ship. These Colchians, not overtaking the Argonauts, who had sailed off, remained, whether from fear of their king or from weariness of so long a voyage, near Aquileia, and were called Istrians from the name of the river up which they sailed out of the sea.
The Dacians are descendants of the Getae. This people having fought unsuccessfully, under their king Oroles, against the Bastarnae, were compelled by his order, as a punishment for their cowardice, to put their heads, when they were going to sleep, in the place of their feet, and to perform those offices for their wives which used previously to be done for themselves. Nor were these regulations altered, until they had effaced, by new exertions in the field, the disgrace which they had incurred in the previous war.
(Justin, History of the World, 32.3)
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