The country between Oenotria and Tyrrhenia was called by the Greeks Opica or Ausonia. Aristotle says: bordering on the Oenotrians, toward Tyrrhenia, dwelt the Opicans; formerly and to this day known by the additional name of Ausonians. He does not confine their country to Campania; for he terms Latium also a district in Opica. Cuma in Opica was distinguished by that addition from the Æolian: Nola was called by Hecatæus an Ausonian city; others will have called it Opican. The south-east boundary must be placed at the Silarus; and the Roman account, that Ausonia was once the name of the country between the Apennines and the lower sea, is not to be understood of the more southern coast. The notion that Temesa, far south of the Silarus, whence the Greeks of the Homeric age drew their copper, was founded by the Ausonians, seems to rest only on a misunderstanding of the expression used by an Alexandrian poet.

Before the people who gave the country their name, took possession of the coast, then a part of Tyrrhenia, the name Ausonia or Opicia was applied to their territories in the interior, Samnium was the country of the Opicans before it was conquered by the Sabellians: and it was preserved in recollection that the land about Cales and Beneventum was the first which was called Ausonia.