![]() ![]() In their native land they had been weak, but now they were strong, and in the ancient world, the strong triumphed over the weak. Even as Greeks found themselves forced out of their homes by the Persians, to flee across the treacherous Mediterranean, they imposed their hypocrisy on the peoples they encountered. As all Greeks who sought homes abroad, the triumph of their settlement was the tragedy of another displacement. Perhaps not wholly new, an echo of an idea they watched in their native land from the horizon of Attika, but certainly new in their new land.Īnd what a land it was! Well watered and rich, but not without enemies. Instead, they quarreled as men did, but out of their quarrels something new arose. That the city often did not meet the ideal was no great insult, for to reach such heights would surely herald a punishment from the Gods for hybris. ![]() It was a city of ideals of the people as polis, ideals of the low and the high united. This was not just the city of stone and clay that sat perched upon a promontory jutting into the Adriatic, but a city of men and women. Not only physical walls and temples, but a city had been built on the ashes of another. They were also times of building, of construction. These were the lean times, the times of suffering and discontent and trouble. It is amazing to historians and geographers that Magna Graecia, once a center of immense wealth and culture geographically, was concentrated in what today many consider to be the poorest and most backward areas of Italy.It came to pass that the early days of Eretria faded into history. The chief city colonies of Magna Graecia (and their home city) were Tarentum (colonized by Spartans) Heraclea (by people from Tarentum) Metapontum (settled by Achaeans) Sybaris (Achaean immigrants) and then known as Thurii (settled by Athenians who replaced earlier colonists from Sybaris) Paestum, or Posidonia (settled by people from Sybaris) Laos (also settled by people from Sybaris) Siris (migrants from Colophon) Caulonia (people from Crotona) Epizephyrian Locris (settlers from Locris) Hipponium (migrants from Epizephyrian Locris) Cumae (people from Chalcis) Rhegium (now Reggio de Calabria, settled by people from Chalcis) Neapolis (now Naples, earliest people came from Cumae) and Elea (migrants came from Phocaea in Ionia). And it was through contacts and trade with Magna Graecia that the Etruscans and the Romans first came into early contact with Greek civilization, especially its pottery and the practice of minting coins. Culturally, Magna Graecia also was the center of two philosophical groups in the 6th century B.C.E., Parmenides, who was at Elea, and Pythagoras (originally from Samos), who resided at Croton. Unlike Greek Sicily, Magna Graecia on the Italian peninsula began to decline by 500 B.C.E., probably because of malaria and endless warfare among the colonies, but certainly with the onslaught and emergence of the Roman Empire. This process dispersed Greek culture and arts throughout the central and western Mediterranean. In the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries B.C.E., Sicily and the southern part of the Italian peninsula (today the poorest areas in ITALY) were colonized by Greeks, and it is claimed that the area boasted more Greeks and Greek temples than homeland Greece itself. Because these colonies remained closely linked to their home cities in Greece proper, they together were known as Magna Graecia.ĭespite the existence of earlier trading colonies established by the Phoenicians, Greek mythology and folklore eventually asserted the greatest influence on Sicily. These new colonies were concentrated south from the Bay of Naples to the Gulf of Taranto and along the southern and eastern coasts of Sicily in the MEDITERRANEAN SEA. Competing city-states such as Sparta, Corinth, and Athens began to found new cities (colonies) that, in turn, became centers of an economically thriving and internally competitive expansion of Greek culture. It was a process that began in the 7th century B.C.E., largely because of overpopulation. MAGNA GRAECIA (or “Greater GREECE”) was the geographic expression of Greek colonization originating from many different Greek cities. ![]()
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