But the question becomes more curious still when we bear in mind that there was in a distant age of the world an use of a kindred phrase which is strikingly like, not the old, but the new use of the phrase “Greater Britain.” As there was a Greater and a Lesser Britain, so there was, perhaps not a Lesser, but assuredly a Greater Greece. And the Greater Greece did not answer to the “Major Britannia” of our older use, but to the “Greater Britain” of our newer. The Greater Greece was not an older Greece from which settlers went forth, as they went forth from the Greater Britain of old, to found a younger and a lesser. The Greater Greece, like the Greater Britain of modern times, was an assemblage of settlements from the elder Greece which were deemed, or deemed themselves, to have become greater than the mother-country. The Great or the Greater Greece (Ἡ μεγάλη Ἑλλάς, _Magna Græcia_, _Major Græcia_) became the received geographical name for the Greek colonies in Southern Italy. And they may be thought to have deserved the name in that short and brilliant time when those colonies distinctly outstripped the mother-country, when Sybaris and Tarentum ranked among the greatest cities of the earth, more brilliant and flourishing, beyond doubt, than Athens or Sparta or Corinth or any other of the cities of the older Hellenic land.
As in the former case the contrast, so in this case the analogy, is so striking that we again cannot help asking whether those who brought in the modern phrase of “Greater Britain” ever had it in their minds? One point of unlikeness however must be mentioned. By “Greater Britain” seems now to be commonly meant the whole aggregate of the scattered colonies and dependencies of the Great or Lesser Britain--those names have in the new use become synonymous--all over the world. But the name Greater Greece by no means took in all the scattered Greek colonies all over the world; it was confined to a single group of them. The name seems hardly to have spread from Southern Italy even to the neighbouring island of Sicily; it was certainly never applied to the Greek settlements in Asia or Libya or any other part of the world. Indeed the name had a peculiar fitness as applied to the Greek settlements in Southern Italy which it could not have had elsewhere. The geographical structure of the land enabled Southern Italy to put on the character of a second Greece in a way in which none other among the lands in which Greeks settled could put it on. Everywhere else out of old Greece there was merely a Greek fringe along the coast. For the Greek settlements were planted mainly on islands and promontories, along the coasts of solid continents the inland parts of which remained barbarian. Even in Sicily the Greek settlements strictly so called were little more than a fringe; the inland parts of the island did indeed in the end become Greek; but it was not by real Greek settlement, but by the spread of the Greek tongue and of Greek culture among men of other nations who became Greek by adoption. In Southern Italy alone, the shape of the land, branching off into two narrow peninsulas, enabled Greek settlement to become something more than a fringe on the coast, and to spread, as in the older Greek land, from sea to sea.