The story is the same across much of Italy and Europe, although this article focuses on the Apulia region.Īncient Apulia in South-East Italy has a rich archaeological record stretching back to the Neolithic period. Nor were the Greek cities surrounded by a “barbarian” hinterland. However archaeologists have established that the ancient Greek cities of Italy, although culturally Greek, were created by a mixed population of both Greek settlers and local populations. The influence of Greek culture was so strong that Romans later called the area “Magna Graecia”: Great Greece. Cities such as Naples, Syracuse and Taranto are among the more well-known of the string of cities that dotted the coast of southern Italy and Sicily. Southern Italy was a major site of Greek colonisation during the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Recent decades of archaeology of southern Italy however tells a much more complex story of the realities of the ancient world. Indeed, they often consciously claimed to be the heirs of that ancient culture.
It is an example of how ancient thinking re-emerged as the European empire builders drew parallels between themselves and the colonial and imperial projects of the ancient world. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, during the European colonisation of the world, Europeans had a similar view of the world – dividing it between “civilised” and “tribal” or uncivilised. The Greek and Romans often described the people around them as “tribal” and led by kings or chiefs. The peoples of Ancient Apulia are a case in point. To the extent that other peoples of ancient Italy appear in the written record, they do so as “decoration” in Roman and Greek centred stories. This is despite writing having spread to their neighbours. Virtually no written material except the Greek or Roman has survived the ancient period. When we read stories of ancient pre-Roman Italy, often the point of view we absorb is that of the Greek city-states of southern Italy, or of their later Roman neighbours.
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