Submitted for award of PhD September 2006. - King's College London

mentioned by Thucydides, who says that they drove out the Sicels from mainland
Italy. 674 Other ancient sources say that they inhabited the central Apennines before the
Samnites and most of Campania before the arrival of the Etruscans. 675 Sources
occasionally identify them with the Ausones. As regards the origins of the tribe of the
Picentes, Strabo and Pliny the Elder mention that they were led out by the Sabines in a
Sacred Spring. Dench argues that most of the Sacred Spring myths go back to expressing
ethnic identity in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Exactly when the Picentes arrived at
what became their tribal territory on the Adriatic coast cannot be established with
certainty, but it must have happened before the fifth century BC.
We need to consider why Pseudo-Scylax used the word glossa to describe
divisions among the Samnites. His work is traditionally dated to the mid-fourth century
BC. Its main purpose was to construct a map of the Greek colonies on the coasts of Italy
and to provide Greek travellers, probably merchants, with useful information about the
nature of the inhabitants and distances between towns on the coast. In another passage
Pseudo-Scylax reveals that he obtained his information about the region from the Greek
colonies, not from the Samnites themselves. Ile identified territories by their inhabitants,
who spoke different dialects of the same language. This is the kind of information that
the Greeks living in coastal cities could have given to sailors enquiring about the nature
of the inhabitants of the inner parts. It is possible, however, that these dialectic
differences also reflected tribal divisions.
It would be interesting to look at the vocabulary used by fourth-century BC Greek
authors to describe political institutions and ethnic divisions of tribes which had nothing
in common politically or culturally with the Greeks at that time. The mention of the
673
Dench (1995) 53
674
Thyc. 6.4.5
192