As Idomeneus and Diomedes, so Philoctetes, Epeus, and some of the descendants of Neleus, were brought over to Italy, with Greek warriors and Trojan captives, by other legends, which appropriated and interpreted a variety of relics and monuments. But from none of these pretended settlements did any Grecian people arise; these Greeks must have been metamorphosed and have vanished, like the companions of Diomedes.

The most ancient settlement which acknowledges them, is the Chalcidian at Cuma; originally planted on Ischia and the adjacent small islands. The Alexandrian chronologers assigned it to times of vast antiquity; undoubtedly merely for the sake of connecting its founders with heroic genealogies. For where they were destitute of positive statements, like those as to the time at which the Greek cities in Sicily were founded, they had recourse to computing by generations, which pushed the earliest epochs much too far back. With regard to Cuma they found no era; because that city had long ceased to be Grecian: and if they tried to date its foundation from references to genealogies, then, contrary to all credibility, it came out long anterior to that of the earliest among the less remote Grecian colonies. That the leaders of the emigrants who settled there, bent their course over unexplored waters, is intimated by the legend, that their ships were preceded and guided in the daytime by a dove, at night by the chime of the mystic bronze: but even from the eastern coast of Sicily, the first settlement on Ischia would still have been a bold adventure.