![]() ![]() ![]() The most important cultural transplant was the Chalcidean/ Cumaean variety of the Greek alphabet, which was adopted by the Etruscans the Old Italic alphabet subsequently evolved into the Latin alphabet, which became the most widely used alphabet in the world. ![]() An original Hellenic civilization soon developed and later interacted with the native Italic civilisations. With colonization, Greek culture was exported to Italy in its dialects of the Ancient Greek language, its religious rites and its traditions of the independent polis. Ancient geographers differed on whether the term included Sicily or merely Apulia, Campania and Calabria, Strabo and Livy being the most prominent advocates of the wider definitions. The Romans called this area Magna Graecia (Latin for "Greater Greece") since it was so densely inhabited by the Greeks. Colonies began to be established all over the Mediterranean and Black Seas (with the exception of Northwestern Africa, in the sphere of influence of Carthage), including in Sicily and the southern part of the Italian Peninsula. In the 8th and 7th century BC, due to demographic crises (famine, overcrowding, etc.), stasis, a developing need for new commercial outlets and ports, and expulsion from their homeland after wars, Greeks began to settle in southern Italy. Strabo also used the term to refer to the size of the territory that had been conquered by the Greeks, and the Roman poet Ovid used the term in his poem Fasti.įurther information: Greeks in pre-Roman GaulĪccording to Strabo's Geographica, the colonization of Magna Graecia had already begun by the time of the Trojan War and lasted for several centuries. The Greek expression Megálē Hellás, later translated into Latin as Magna Graecia, first appears in Polybius' Histories, where he ascribed the term to Pythagoras and his philosophical school. They also influenced the native peoples, such as the Sicels and the Oenotrians, who became hellenized after they adopted the Greek culture as their own. These settlers, who began arriving in the 8th century BC, brought with them their Hellenic civilization, which left a lasting imprint on Italy (such as in the culture of ancient Rome). 'Great Greece' Italian: Magna Grecia, Italian: ) was the name given by the Romans to the coastal areas of Southern Italy in the present-day Italian regions of Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania and Sicily these regions were extensively populated by Greek settlers. ![]() This is an Italian story of European resonance, which transforms our understanding of the transition from antiquarianism to archaeology, of the relationship between nation-making and institution-building in the study of the ancient past, and of the reconstruction of classical Greece in the modern world.Magna Graecia ( UK: / ˌ m æ ɡ n ə ˈ ɡ r iː s i ə, - ˈ ɡ r iː ʃ ə/ MAG-nə GREE-see-ə, - GREE-shə, US: /- ˈ ɡ r eɪ ʃ ə/ - GRAY-shə, Latin: Ancient Greek: Μεγάλη Ἑλλάς, romanized: Megálē Hellás, Greek: both lit. Drawing on antiquarian and archaeological writings, histories and travelogues about Magna Graecia, and recent rewritings of the history and imagining of the South, Italy's Lost Greece sheds new light on well known figures in the history of archaeology while recovering forgotten ones. The unfolding of this process provides a unique insight into three developments: the humanist investment in the ancient past, the evolution of modern Hellenism, and the making of classical archaeology. It was here that the Renaissance first encountered an ancient Greek landscape, and during the "Hellenic turn" of eighteenth-century Europe the temples of Paestum and the painted vases of South Italy played major roles, but since then, Magna Graecia-lying outside the national boundaries of modern Greece, and sharing in the complicated regional dynamic of the Italian Mezzogiorno-has fitted awkwardly into the commonly accepted paradigms of Hellenism. Giovanna Ceserani's evocative and nuanced analysis recovers its significance within the history of classical archaeology. This "Greater Greece," at once Greek and Italian, has continuously been perceived as a region in decline since its archaic golden age, and has long been relegated to the margins of classical studies. Italy's Lost Greece is the untold story of the modern engagement with the ancient Greek settlements of South Italy-an area known since antiquity as Magna Graecia. ![]()
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