Back to a time of legends

Homer and Hellenism in South Italy

Hello, ciao, buongiorno!

Think of me as you drink your coffee (if you drink coffee). I’m back in Italy, land of exquisite coffee and delicious desserts, and have given up both for Lent! There are plenty of consolations, though. As you read this, I’m on the Amalfi coast in southern Italy. I’ll share some of the highlights with you in future posts.

For now, though, I’ve only just arrived so this is more of a pre-tour taster. Coming here has given me a golden opportunity to go back to a subject I haven’t looked into for (scarily) nearly twenty years. Back in 2008 I was at the University of Birmingham studying a Masters in Greek Archaeology and I was a bit surprised to find that so many of our courses were actually about Italy.

It was a great course and a wonderful year and one of the many amazing things about it was being taught by a specialist in something I’d never heard of before: Magna Graecia (or ‘Greater Greece’, or indeed, Megale Hellas in Greek). This is the term (ironically usually given in Latin, not Greek) for the territories that Greek cities and states colonised between roughly the 8th and 4th centuries BCE.

At its greatest extent, the orange parts show territory controlled by Greeks or their colonies.

The deal was usually that a ‘mother city’ in Greece (the origin of the term ‘metropolis’) would send a few ships of colonisers overseas to a likely spot - somewhere with good farmland, on the coast - and they would found a new city. These cities gradually spread around the Mediterranean and created something not quite like an empire but with a lot of the qualities of one: Magna Graecia.

Prof. Gillian Shepherd, one of our tutors on the Birmingham MA course, has spent her life working on especially the Greek colonies in Sicily. It was fantastic getting stuck into cutting edge debates with somebody who was right in the middle of them. Then I finished my MA and went on to do my PhD on Byzantine coins in India, dating from about a thousand years later, and I more-or-less left Magna Graecia behind.

Now for the first time, I’m visiting Positano, probably one of the most famous Greek sites in Italy. So, I pulled up my sleeves and dived into what has happened in the study of Magna Graecia in the last two decades and it’s a lot!

The massive Greek temples at Positano, on the Amalfi coast, have been fascinating scholars, artists and visitors since at least the eighteenth century, but how much do we know about the world that created them?

The past is never what it used to be

History is always changing. Back when it was getting going as a subject of formal research, around the turn of the 19th century, some people did think that the point was to gradually ‘fill in the map’ of times and places, so that we would one day know roughly what happened everywhere. And at that point, there was so very much we didn’t know that it was reasonable to think that the most important thing might be to get ‘what happened’, in the most basic sense, squared away.

Other people disagreed even then and thought that the point was to tell stories that mattered, whether that was the rise of the West or the development of democracy or why recent wars happened. And, of course, ‘what happened, in the most basic sense’ is always a judgement call about what matters. Is having a list of kings, in the right order, really getting all that much squared away? There’s an argument in favour: lots of other documents were often dated according to which king or emperor was in charge, so having that list can help to put a lot of other things in order, too. But there are good arguments against, including that a king-list doesn’t tell us all that much about how most people lived and thought about their world.

These days, we still don’t have those ‘basic’ lists of kings for everywhere but in some places we’ve found other ways to order events. We’ve expanded our field of view to care about places that didn’t have kings at all and to include the people whose lives happened far from the royal courts. And we’ve realised that a lot of things might matter just as much as the rise of the West or the development of democracy or how recent wars began.

This is why history never stays the same. How we understand it is always changing. As we ask new questions we often find new evidence and we always find different perspectives. We do establish things as true, we get more certain and more detailed about parts of the picture, but there is always plenty more to know.

Greek cities to Italian hinterlands

The biggest difference I’ve noticed coing back to Magna Graecia is that, when I was first reading up on it, most attention had focussed on the Greek cities: how Greek were they? Answer: pretty Greek! They usually had grid plan layouts and the buildings were designed and kitted out like they would be back in Greece. Did the people in them consider themselves Greek? Tough to answer but it seems yes! There are texts and evidence of burials and homestyling that are similar to those in Greece and temples to Greek gods. Did they have any contact with the local population? Yes! This was the cutting edge of much of the research that I was reading during my MA: archaeologists were beginning to show that Greek colonies may have looked really very Greek but trade, slavery, intermarriage and craft production brought different groups into contact and created a distinctive local culture.

A lot of that research, though, was still focussed on the Greek, coastal sites. In the intervening years scholars have done more and more work on the inland regions where the people lived who were not Greek. There have been excavations at farm sites, in villages and at sanctuaries where people left votive offerings to gods. Archaeological surveys (basically walking across large areas and counting finds on the surface, like pottery) have shown how densely populated apparently forbidding hilly regions were. Landscape studies and analysis of where goods were made, traded and used have shown that people were closely connected via mountain passes and valleys.

The site of Roccagloriosa, perched high on a hill, gives soe indication of the steep, forested terrain. The modern town sits on a site that goes back to the period of Magna Graecia, but was an indigenous settlement site.

I’ve been reading most about the region known as Lucania, just inland from Positano, concentrated around the Vallo di Diana.¹

A lot of questions are still very open. For example, various writers refer to the people of this region, at least at some points in time as ‘Lucanians’ but none of those texts are by people who called themselves that, so it isn’t completely sure if this was a label other people gave to the region or something that came from within.

Other things, though, are much more certain. For example, it would appear that Lucania had no temples. There were places where people apparently came together to honour specific gods. At many of them, they left votives, or offerings of various kinds, including curse tablets! But they did not build temples - the sort with columns and wide open halls, as in the picture earlier on in this post. Temples belonged to the Greek-speakers down by the coast.

The people inland also had their own styles of cookery, pottery, housing and farming. They spoke their own language (which we knew before the last 20 years): south Oscan. But over time, just as the Greeks in the colonies were influenced by the people they lived around, so the people around them were influenced, too. There are signs of trade and of copying of styles and shapes, for exampe of cooking or serving vessels.

This is a nestoris. It is a large vessel for mixing and serving wine. Things like it were used across the Greek world, with very much exactly this style of decoration, but those high, bunny-ear handles - they are 100% Italian.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the colonists and the people inland was their social organisation. This has been described by archaeologists working on the region as ‘fairly egalitarian’. It wasn’t a blissful utopia where everybody was equal - if one of those has ever existed, we haven’t found the evidence for it yet! But there is very little evidence for some people living or being buried in ways that were very different from their neighbours and designed to show wealth or higher status: there are no palaces, no manor houses and no ostentatious tomb monuments.

Plus, there were no city states because there were no cities. Most settlements seem to have been individually small, ranging from clusters of farm houses to larger villages in valley bottoms or flat areas of the mountains, but each group of houses was not isolated from the others. It is common in a lot of modern writing, not just in history and archaeology, to imagine mountains as lonely, empty places where people go, if they go, to hide, have adventures or travel to the other side. That, though, is not what the archaeological evidence from Lucania shows.

Instead, settlements up and down the valleys and mountains were linked econmically and socially. Economically, there are archaeological traces of goods and livestock being moved around. Socially, people shared the same cults, especially to the goddess Mephitis, and house designs and technologies were shared throughout the region. Plus, surveys of the area have located dense networks of pathways linking places together. Some may have been impassable or difficult to use in winter but in summer the hillsides would have bustled, connecting people and giving access to plant and animal products best suited to different altitudes and climates.

This isn’t the only region where mountains were used this way, either. Far away in South America, anthropologists and archaeologists have referred to the management of the Andes as a ‘vertical archipelago’, or a chain of islands but arranged top to bottom along mountain sides, rather than across the sea.² Like a regular archipelago, they argue, each island has its own unique ecology and can grow or produce distinct things but each island is connected to the next, by the sea in one case and by well-known paths and passable routes in the other case. As far as I know, nobody has referred to the theory of the veritcal archipelago when talking about ancient Lucania, but reading about it, that is what I thought of.

Different things, connected things

While it has been incredibly useful to know more about what was going on inland, next to but not in Magna Graecia, though, all of the archaeologists agree that neither the Greek colonies nor the inland Italian populations stayed the same. Cultures meeting always share, whether through conflict, cooperation, imitation or all three.

By the fourth century, for example, Lucanians appear to have made up a large proportion of the population of the ‘Greek’ city of Poseidonia (which became Positano). They are visible in painted tombs, which show a distinctive art style but which distinguish between richer/more important and poorer/less important tombs: so Lucanian traditions, including tomb painting, met with Greek social haibts to do with distinguishing people based on status.

This tomb painting shows a Lucanian warrior, wearing a distinctive breastplate made out of three circles, that isn’t found in Greek depictions of armour. But the fact that somebody was being given such a lavish tomb at all shows the influence of Greek social norms.

This mixing and creating something new is evidence throughout Magna Graecia and its inland neighbouring regions. The poems of Homer, for example, seem to have circulated like wildfire throughout the Greek areas of Italy, but the idea of ‘symposia’ or poetry and drinking parties, where Homer’s works were widely shared, also attracted the Lucanians.³

I’m not going to draw any big conclusions in this post, beyond the obvious-but-still-true fact that everyone we encounter makes us a little different and changes them at the same time, but I can’t wait to see what all of this looks like on the ground, in Positano but also driving through the landscapes of the ancient Lucanians. And who knows what we will know in 20 years from now?!

1. I have beenr eading around quite a bit but if you are looking for one place to get a good, readable, up-to-date perspective, I would recommend: Isayev, Elena, ‘Inside Ancient Lucania: Dialogues in History and Archaeology’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement 90 (2007), pp. iii, vii–xiii, xv–xvii, 1–7, 9–167, 169–85, 187–89, 191, 193–97, 199–235, 237–84.

2. This seems to be where this idea started and it has since been discussed extensively: Murra, John V., ‘An Aymara Kingdom in 1567’, Ethnohistory, 15.2 (1968), pp. 115–51, doi:10.2307/480555.

3. This is a fascinating article considering the evidence for when Greek began to be written in its current alphabet and what this might have had to do with Homer: Powell, Eric A., ‘When the Ancient Greeks Began to Write’, Archaeology, June 2017, pp. 44–49.