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
year, they tell me, are devoured by its angry waters: mangia venti
cristiani all' anno! This is as bad as the Amendolea near Reggio. But
none of its victims have attained the celebrity of Alexander of
Molossus, King of Epirus, who perished under the walls of Pandosia in
326 B.C. during an excursion against the Lucanians. He had been warned
by the oracle of Dodona to avoid the waters of Acheron and the town of
Pandosia; once in Italy, however, he paid small heed to these words,
thinking they referred to the river and town of the same name in
Thesprotia. But the gods willed otherwise, and you may read of his death
in the waters, and the laceration of his body by the Lucanians, in
Livy's history.
It is a strange caprice that we should now possess what is in every
probability the very breastplate worn by the heroic monarch on that
occasion.
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