History Summarized: Greece... TWO (it's in Italy)

Just when you think history can't get any wackier, they go and invent Second Greece. Sure, we have original Greece, the land around the Aegean Sea with your Spartas and Athenses and co, but jump one peninsula to the left and there's an entire ecosystem of cities in the south of Italy, just as culturally Greek as our pals back home and maybe even a little shinier. In those early centuries before Rome painted the map red and became practically synonymous with Italy, Greeks were among multiple groups calling that peninsula home. But aside from location, the biggest difference between OG Greece and this Greece, too, is why it exists at all. This region is known to history by the name Magna Graecia, a Latin rendering of the original Megali Elas, meaning Great Greece, and it was, in a word, colonized. Bit of a loaded term, but it helps us understand what sets it apart and makes it so darn interesting in the classical world. So, to see why the Greeks settled this big old boot and how it grew from nothing to a region worthy of earning that grandiose title, let's do some history. When the first Greek city-states took shape in the 800s BC, there were nearly zero of them outside the Aegean Basin. However, the Greeks themselves were not so sedentary, as many seafarers traveled across the Mediterranean to trade with Phoenicians, Etruscans, Egyptians, and others. Now, to avoid ending up like Odysseus, ancient sailors liked to stay within sight of land, and that meant seeing a lot of coastline in the course of their travels. Sooner or later, one of those shores will look like an appealing place to beach the ships, count the inventory, and take a nap. So it was in 775 BC, when, just a year after the first recorded Olympics, sailors from the island of Evia picked a comfy-looking bay a short way south of their friends the Etruscans and founded the trading port of Pithecuse. Despite its humble beginnings, this settlement began a trend that transformed the Mediterranean. If the Greeks could reach beyond the Aegean to build a quaint little waystation, they'll inevitably make more, and the next logical step is to found cities. First came the city of Kyme in that very same bay, later expanding to a new city called, well, New City. Neapolis, in Greek, known today as Naples. This establishes a trend I like to call, Hey, wait a minute, that name is Greek! Indeed, from the Black Sea to North Africa to the coast of Iberia, there are several thriving modern cities still sporting a version of their original Greek name. Marseille was originally Massalia, Nice was Nikeia, Emporio was Emporion, and they comprised a network of colonies in the far west, which all sprung from a single mother city. As was the case in the Bay of Naples, trade was a clear motivating factor, but sending out shipfuls of citizens was a complex and risky operation, so what motivated these cities to embark on distant expeditions? Cop-out answer, multiple reasons, all interlocking but balanced uniquely for each circumstance. In some cases, it was a problem born of progress, as the 700s marked the rise of city-states across Greece and the start of the so-called Paulus Age. But mainland Greece is a rocky place, with only pockets of good farmland to go around, so cities could only get so big before resources ran thin. Therefore, this period's rapid population growth was a genuine danger, so shipping off batches of citizens to make new settlements was an elegant solution. But sometimes, the home city just didn't cut it anymore, like when the people of Theoda fled either a famine or a civil war, records are inconclusive, and booked it south for the coast of Libya, founding the city of Cyrene, or Kyryne, in 631. That city, in turn, founded its own colonies over the following century to create a lovely little pentapolis, a five-city network spread along the lush plateau. This region, known by the name Kyrenaiki, got fabulously rich, exporting a miracle plant called Silphium, and they soon boasted a massive temple to Zeus, bigger than the Athenian Parthenon, and several decades earlier. These cities were, lest we forget, built from nothing, yet were plenty capable of upstaging their fellow Greeks on the mainland. Now, for lack of a better term, I referred to these cities as colonies, but this was far from the vast overseas dominions of modern Europe, or even the imperial grabby hands of classical Athens. Rather than painting the map one big shade of red, this was a pan-Mediterranean ecosystem of multiple cultures sailing, trading, roaming, interacting, and learning from each other. To give a sense of this cultural braiding, the Greeks picked up maritime trade from seeing the Phoenicians do it, and also adapted their alphabet. Greeks, in turn, passed their little letters on to the Etruscans, which a few dominoes later resulted in the Latin alphabet. In addition to profit and resource motives, these cultures flourished with each other, rather than trying to flatten each other. Let's not glaze it, conflict will play a large part in this ecosystem before long, but there was no mutually exclusive empire building like we might associate with the word colonization. Perhaps a better word for these cities is the Greek one, Apikia, literally meaning, away from home. Maybe that's ancestral bias, maybe I'm excited I found a new word during the research. In any case, home in this context being the mother city, the Metropolis, who sent out those settlers in the first place. From the 7 to 500s or so, each Apikia maintained a cultural kinship with their mother city, Especially true when one Apikia had multiple founding cities, sometimes speaking different dialects of Greek. That new civic identity was the thing keeping them together. In 735, one such joint operation between Naxos, Evia, and other Ionians founded the first Greek city in Sicily. Also called Naxos, so points for teamwork, if not for novelty. These far-flung cities were plenty new, but no lesser in culture, in purpose, or accomplishment. The individual reasons for their founding varied by time and place, trade opportunity, resource pressure, population management, upstart youth seeking fame as a city founder, and a handy way to offload troublesome factions by yeeting them somewhere else, but the ultimate reason is because they could. In this post-Bronze Age ecosystem, the Greeks and Phoenicians were well-adapted species with almost zero predators. With exceptions for the Etruscans in the north and Egyptians in the south, every coast on the Med was a candidate for beaching a ship and building a city. Then, once they got running, their only threat was the occupational hazard of being Greek, which is perilous, but eminently survivable. So in the 7, 6, and 500s, the Greeks founded so many Apikias that the total polis count doubled to over a thousand, and nowhere was the settlement so extensive, densely packed, and prosperous as Magna Graecia. Now, given why the Greeks set sail and how it spread their society, what exactly did they do to win southern Italy peak prestige as best Greece since Greece? Well, like we saw back in Chirini, it rarely stopped at just one Apikia. Settlers got a tiny foothold in Italy with Bithycusse. Later that century, they built Gyme, who in turn founded Neapolis. So by the year 600, they had a tidy little operation running from their personal bay, trading with the Oscans and Samnites inland, the Etruscans up north along the coast, and the rest of the Greeks who later rolled in further south. Such as, of literally all people, the Spartans, who ejected an undesirable batch of non-citizens by dumping them on a boat and telling them to figure it out. Yeah, that sounds like them. After consulting the Delphic Oracle, they sailed west and founded the city of Taras in 706. Consolation prize to the Spartan reject, the gulf which gives Italy its delightful high heel shape, got named after the Tarantines, Taranto in the modern Italian. But they also did remarkably well for themselves. Their custom-issued coinage crops up all over Magna Graecia, they had among the finest and most prolific pottery on the peninsula, and in the 300s, their leading statesman Archytas was best buds with Plato All that, and they got to leave Sparta? Man, the hits keep coming. Taras really lucked out. Meanwhile, across the gulf, the city of Sybaris was best known for living fast and dying hot. It became so legendarily wealthy from trade, abundant agriculture, and dominion over its neighbors, that the word Sybarite became an insult for really expensive hedonism. Just as well that Sybaris founded towns of its own, like Poseidonia, because it made for a good escape route when Sybaris got sacked and conquered in 510 by their neighbor Croton. Some portion of the citizens stayed in the gulf to continue their long struggle with Croton, while others booked it up to Poseidonia. In its day, that city was just one of many in Magna Graecia, but we recognize it today as having three excellently preserved temples. Built from a mix of local limestone and sandstones, these Doric-style temples to Athena and Hera are but a few of the disproportionate number of temples in southern Italy still standing. Listen, I love the Parthenon, but isn't it cool to see what it looks like when the pediment is still there? Poseidonia also gives us a neat window into the interplay of Greek and native Italian cultures, such as the Etruscan influences in the gorgeously fresco Tomb of the Diver, and, sometime after 400 BC when the Lucanian people conquered the city, the ensuing blend of Lucanian and Greek art as the city continued to thrive under its new rulers. On the other side of that, native Italians took eagerly to Greek culture, like the Alemian people of northwest Sicily, who were not Greek, yet built a marvelous Doric temple in their city of Segesta. But the real archaeological treasure of Sicily is the Valley of the Temples, outside the southern city of Acragas. Between the nigh-miraculous preservation of the Temple of Concordia, and the gorgeous countryside surrounding it, this is peak. This is simply... ...freaking peak. However, tucked away in the very bottom corner of Sicily was the last gem in Magna Graecia's crown, the massive and magnificent city of Syracuse. Founded by Corinthians in 734, the city of Syracuse, as it's known in English, grew strong enough to rival Athens at its imperial peak in the 400s. Might sound like hyperbole, if not for the fact that Athens sailed to Sicily, in hope of conquering Syracuse in 415. But Syracuse beat Athens ass so badly, it sent them spiraling towards losing a completely separate war. Let there be no doubt, Syracuse had the sauce. Yet, even by Greek standards, it was turbulent to actually live there, as the city was ruled by multiple lines of tyrants from 485 onward, who usurped the citizen government to run things themselves. This began with Gellon, the nearby ruler who conquered Syracuse to install himself as tyrant. Despite this aggressive onboarding, he was remembered fondly by the Syracusans for repelling an attack by Carthage, extending his city's hegemony across Sicily, and for building temples and a theater. But surely less fondly by the countless war prisoners and civilians from nearby cities he enslaved to enact that building program. His successor, Huron, was a man of literature, hosting Aeschylus, Pindar, and others at his court, but Huron was also an Olympic athlete, headlining three of Pindar's victory odes. Huron's successor was deposed within a year, and the city returned to a republic-esque government. But a long-term solution this was not, and Syracuse embarked upon the Cycle, a nearly 300-year rotation between competent tyrants, incompetent tyrants, republics of alternating competence every other cycle, and repeat. Syracuse remained the top dog in Magna Graecia, but it had gotten fragile, and in the wake of the scuffle with Athens, Carthage carved out a foothold in the west of Sicily, which queued up two centuries of near-constant warfare with those western cities, with Carthage itself, and eventually with the Carthaginians' big bad nemesis, Rome. Surprise! It ends really fast. From the Greek perspective, Rome enters the scene in 326 with the conquest of Neapolis. By the start of the 200s BC, north and central Italy had been painted that deep Roman red, and the upstart republic began dabbling in Greek diplomacy. Tartus was quite understandably alarmed, and enlisted the mercenary services of King Pyrrhus of Epirus to slap the Romans around and make them back off. This had the opposite effect. Rome bested Pyrrhus and conquered the whole south of the boot. The cities retained local autonomy, but Rome was clearly the one in charge now. From Sicily's perspective, there was a giant military power on each side of them. Logical outcome? The Punic Wars. Roman Carthage fought the first of three wars for control of the Mediterranean, but Sicily was the battlefield, and once the war was over, Sicily was Rome's prize. Syracuse alone was allowed to stay independent out of respect for it being very cool, but that was conditional on good behavior. And in the Second Punic War, they team-swapped to Hannibal. Wrong choice, buckos. In 213, Rome besieged Syracuse, fighting through the weapons of their genius local inventor Archimedes, whom they killed, and captured the city the following year. The sack of Syracuse was so violent, and the plunder so grand, that historian Livy marks it as the beginning of Rome's moral decline. Uh-oh. But with that, Magna Graecia was inexorably on Team Red, forever binding their story to that of Rome. But that is another story for another time. For now, this story was how the Greeks sailed from their homeland to create something quintessentially Greek yet completely new, and rising from nothing to a thriving ecosystem in an astonishingly short time. While we shouldn't pretend that Greece was the only civilization in the Med capable of doing this, no Phoenician erasure in this house, it's worth acknowledging how the cultural foundations of the Polis system supported this vast and complex network. Each city was a complete unit of society, yet they all meshed seamlessly with the wider Greek world. The civilization of Magna Graecia was as extraordinary for its roots as it was for its heights. The Romans were right to take notes. Thank you for watching. Truly the plot twist of Ancient Greece is that no matter which direction you travel, there's always somehow more of it, and you won't find me complaining. Extra special thanks to our wonderful community of patrons, whose names you can see scrolling by right now, and I'll see you in the next video.