Corsican Natives in 218 B.C.

Corsican Natives — Spring 218 BC · The Wild Tribes of Kyrnos.

The indigenous mountain peoples of Kyrnos — the island the Romans call Corsica and the Greeks Kyrnos — a scatter of small, fiercely independent tribes among the wooded crags and the thorny maquis of the interior. Peoples such as the Tarabeni, the Titiani, the Balatoni and the Vanacini live apart in their highland valleys, herders of goats and sheep, hunters and keepers of bees, owning no lord but clan and kin. Greek and Roman writers reckon them among the wildest of men, living on milk, honey and meat, and the honey of their isle is famous for its bitterness, the gift of the box and the yew on which their bees feed. Phocaean Greeks, Etruscans and Carthaginians in turn tried to hold the island; none mastered the mountains. In 237 BC Rome seized Kyrnos from Carthage together with Sardinia, but her grip is light — a toehold on the coast, the interior unbroken — and the tribes are raided for slaves yet never truly tamed.

While Rome and Carthage drift toward a second great war, the highlands of Kyrnos keep their own ancient quiet — the quiet of peoples no outside power has ever bent. Twenty years ago Rome stripped the island from Carthage along with Sardinia, in the bitter aftermath of the first war between them, and planted her authority on the shore. But authority on the shore is not mastery of the mountains. Inland, beyond the river-valleys that climb into the crags, the tribes hold to their pastures and their hunting-runs as they always have, owning no master, raided for slaves to be shipped to Italy yet never conquered. They are poor, hardy and many, broken into small communities that share no king and offer no single throat for a conqueror to cut. To take the coast of Kyrnos is one thing; to take its mountains is another, and that no power has done.