Magna Graecia

• 1. Introduction

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  Magna Graecia, the ancient Greek-speaking world transplanted to the southern tip of Italy, was once home to a city so large it may have held half a million people. Sybaris, at its peak between 600 and 510 BC, stood on what is now the Calabrian coast, and its population has been estimated at between 300,000 and 500,000 residents. That is not a village or a market town. That is a metropolis. And it was Greek. In the southern Italian regions now called Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania, and Sicily, a civilization grew that did not merely imitate the motherland. In architecture, urban planning, philosophy, drama, and sport, it sometimes surpassed it. The questions worth asking are how it got there, what made it distinct, and why so little of it remains.

• 2. Why They Left Greece

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  Pithecusae, on the island of Ischia, is considered the oldest Greek settlement in Italy, founded in the 8th century BC by settlers from Chalcis and Eretria in Euboea. They did not arrive because they had been invited. The Greek homeland was running out of room. During the Archaic period, the Greek population grew well beyond the capacity of the limited arable land at home, and by one estimate the population of the widening area of Greek settlement grew roughly tenfold between 800 BC and 400 BC, from around 800,000 to as many as 10 million people. Famine, overcrowding, political strife, expulsion after wars, and the need for new commercial outlets all pushed Greeks outward. From about 750 BC, they began what would become 250 years of sustained expansion, sending settlers in all directions. The colonies they founded were not outposts controlled from home. Unlike Roman colonies, Greek settlements in Magna Graecia were independent city-states in their own right, with their own armies, fleets, and governments. The first great migratory wave aimed at the Gulf of Naples and the Strait of Messina. A second wave, led by the Achaeans, pushed south to the Ionian coast, arriving shortly before 720 BC. From Pithecusae, the mainland colony of Cumae followed, becoming the Greeks' first permanent foothold on Italian soil.

• 3. Cities That Rivaled the Motherland

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  Kroton, in modern Calabria, was founded in 709-708 BC by settlers from the Achaean city of Rhypes, led by a man named Myscellos. By the 6th century BC, Kroton had become a center of athletic excellence and philosophical ambition. Pythagoras moved there and founded his school in 530 BC. Athletes from Kroton alone won 18 titles across 25 Olympiads. The city's troops, commanded by the famous athlete Milo of Croton, destroyed Sybaris around 510 BC, a defeat so total that the city's population was condemned to exile. Syracuse, founded in 733 BC by the Corinthian Archias, grew into the most powerful city in the western Greek world. Its tyrant Gelon defeated the Carthaginians at Himera in 480 BC. His successor Hiero I led the fleet that protected the city of Kyme from an Etruscan assault in 474 BC, a victory that effectively ended Etruscan ambitions in Campania. Taras, founded around 706 BC by Spartan settlers led by Phalanthos and the Partheniai, became the most prominent city-state for coinage. By the 2nd century BC, some of that coinage had evolved under Roman rule into what can be classified as the first Roman provincial currencies. These cities did not simply copy Greece. The Doric architectural style they favored was enriched with local decorations, and in Magna Graecia a Doric style blended with Ionic influences also emerged. The Riace bronzes, the Darius Vase, and the Temple of Concordia at Agrigento are among the works that survive.

• 4. A Civilization of Ideas

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  Parmenides of Elea, Zeno of Elea, Gorgias of Lentini, and Empedocles of Agrigento were all born in Magna Graecia. So were the mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse, the poets Theocritus of Syracuse and Ibycus of Reggio Calabria, the doctors Alcmeon of Crotone and Democedes of Crotone, and the musicologist Aristoxenus of Taranto. Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophanes, and Plato all visited the region. The playwright Aeschylus died at Gela in Sicily in 456 BC after a long stay in the Sicilian colonies. His contemporary Epicharmus, considered Syracusan in every meaningful sense, worked with the tyrants of Syracuse across the 6th century BC. For Aristotle, writing in his Poetics, Epicharmus and Phormis together formed the origin of Greek comedy, with Aristotle quoting directly: "As for the composition of the stories (Epicharmus and Phormis) it came in the beginning from Sicily." Epicharmus was the first to stage gods in comedy, a device that would later become a staple of the tradition. The city of Thourioi, founded in 446 and 444-443 BC under Athenian sponsorship as part of the Delian League, hosted Herodotus, Protagoras, Hippodamus of Miletus, and Lysias at various points. The Chalcidean and Cumaean variety of the Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans, evolved into the Old Italic alphabet, and from there became the Latin alphabet, which became the most widely used alphabet in the world.

• 5. War and Absorption

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  The first Greek city absorbed into the Roman Republic was Neapolis, in 327 BC. The process was not swift. At the start of the 3rd century BC, Rome was already a great power but had not yet come into direct conflict with most of Magna Graecia. The Greek cities of southern Italy, facing pressure from the Bruttii and Lucanians from the late 4th century BC, turned to Rome for help. Rome sent military garrisons in the 280s BC. After defeating Taras following the Pyrrhic War in 272 BC, Rome tied most of the southern Italian cities to itself through treaties known as foedera. Syracuse held out longer than almost anyone. Its king Hiero II was a devoted Roman ally, and the city remained independent until 212 BC, when his grandson Hieronymus defected to Hannibal, prompting a Roman siege. The full annexation came after the Second Punic War. Many cities had sided with Carthage and were absorbed into the Roman Republic in 205 BC as a consequence. Roman colonies were then planted across the region. In 194 BC, garrisons of 300 Roman veterans each were placed at Volturnum, Liternum, Puteoli, Salernum, and Buxentum, and at Sipontum on the Adriatic coast. The colonies of Kroton and Tempsa followed the same year, with the Latin colonies of Copia in 193 BC and Valentia in 192 BC soon after. Yet the social, linguistic, and administrative changes of Roman conquest only fully took root in this region by the 1st century AD.

• 6. What Survived

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  After the Norman conquest of southern Italy in the late 12th century, the Salento peninsula, up to one-third of Sicily in the Val Demone, and much of Calabria and Lucania were still largely Greek-speaking. Byzantine Christian Greeks had continued to arrive throughout the Early Middle Ages, reinforcing what the ancient colonists had left behind. The Eastern Roman Empire governed parts of southern Italy through the Catapanate of Italy from 965 to 1071. Following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Greek nobles took refuge in Italy again. After the Siege of Coron in 1534, large numbers of Greeks settled in Calabria, Salento, and Sicily. The Maniots, from the Mani Peninsula of the Peloponnese, brought with them traditions of fierce military pride and, the source notes, vendettas many of which continue today. The Italian parliament now formally recognizes the Griko people under the official name Minoranze linguistiche Grike dell'Etnia Griko-Calabrese e Salentina. Their language, Griko, is considered by linguists to be a descendant of Byzantine Greek, combining ancient Doric and local romance elements. At its peak the community numbered around 30,000 speakers; most have since shifted to Italian. The Valle dei Templi at Agrigento, since 1997 a UNESCO World Heritage Site, preserves seven Doric temples across 1,300 hectares, making it the largest archaeological park in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. It is a remnant of the prosperity that once made Greek-speaking southern Italy, in the phrase first attested in the 2nd century BC by Polybius, worthy of the name Magna Graecia: Great Greece.