Magna Graecia: the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily

From the 8th century BC, groups of Greeks left their home cities and sailed west, to the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily. Historians still discuss their reasons. Good farmland was scarce in many parts of Greece, some people wanted to trade, and others had to leave after quarrels at home.

A new settlement was called an ἀποικία, a colony: literally a home “away”. The city the settlers came from was their μητρόπολις, their “mother city”, and the man who led them, chose the place and shared out the land was the οἰκιστής, the founder. A colony was not ruled by its mother city. It was a free city-state of its own, but it usually kept the same gods, festivals and dialect.

One of the oldest Greek settlements in the West was on the island of Ischia, near Naples, which the Greeks called Pithekoussai. Settlers from Euboea lived there in the 8th century BC, and around 750 BC they founded Cumae on the mainland opposite. In a grave at Pithekoussai archaeologists found a small cup from about 730 BC with three lines of Greek verse scratched on it, one of the oldest Greek poems ever found written down.

Thucydides, writing in the 5th century BC, tells the story of the first Greek colonies in Sicily (6.3). Chalcidians from Euboea, led by Thucles, came first and founded Naxos, where they built an altar to Apollo the Founder. A year later Archias of Corinth founded Συρακοῦσαι, Syracuse, after driving the native Sicels off the island of Ortygia, where the old town still stands. From Thucydides’ figures, historians traditionally date Naxos to 734 BC and Syracuse to 733 BC, but these dates are only approximate.

On the mainland, the toe and heel of Italy filled with Greek cities: Ῥήγιον (Reggio) on the strait facing Sicily, Sybaris and Croton on the Ionian coast, and Τάρας (Taranto), which, according to Antiochus of Syracuse quoted by Strabo (6.3.2), was founded by a group of Spartans who had to leave their city. Settlers from Cumae later founded a second town nearby and called it Νεάπολις, the “new city”: today’s Naples (Strabo 5.4.7).

Each city was independent, and they often fought each other. Syracuse became the strongest power in Sicily, and in 415–413 BC it defeated a huge Athenian expedition, as Thucydides describes in books 6 and 7.

The Romans called the region Magna Graecia, a translation of the Greek Μεγάλη Ἑλλάς, “Great Greece”. Strabo (6.1.2) explains that the Greeks there grew so powerful that they gave this name to southern Italy and to Sicily. Ancient writers did not always agree on whether Sicily belonged to it, and many modern books use the name mainly for the Greek cities of the Italian mainland.

Many of these cities grew rich from farming and trade. Sybaris was so famous for its wealth that “sybarite” still means a lover of luxury in English, French and Italian. Around 510 BC it was destroyed in a war with its neighbour Croton. Diodorus (12.9) says that Croton’s army was led by Milo, a six-time Olympic champion, although the hundreds of thousands of soldiers he mentions cannot be true.

The Greek West was also a home of ideas. Pythagoras came from Samos to Croton around 530 BC and gathered a community of followers there. Parmenides and Zeno taught at Elea, Empedocles came from Akragas (Agrigento), and Archimedes, the great mathematician and engineer, was born in Syracuse. The poet Theocritus, the first to write pastoral poems about shepherds, was probably Syracusan too.

In the 3rd century BC Rome took control of southern Italy, and then of Sicily. Syracuse fell in 212 BC after a long siege. Livy (25.31) tells how Archimedes, absorbed in geometrical figures he had drawn in the sand, was killed by a soldier who did not know who he was, and how the Roman general Marcellus was grieved by his death.

Greek did not disappear at once. Writing around the time of the emperor Augustus, Strabo says that most of the region had become “barbarian”, except Tarentum, Rhegium and Neapolis (6.1.2), and that Naples still kept its gymnasia, its brotherhoods, the φρατρίαι, and a Greek way of life (5.4.7).

Even today Greek is spoken in a few villages of Salento, in Apulia, and of Calabria, near Reggio. Linguists have long debated where it comes from. Some see it as a direct descendant of the ancient colonists’ speech, with old Doric features; others think it came mainly from the Greek of the Byzantine period, when southern Italy was ruled again from Constantinople. Both views have supporters, and the question is still open.