Greek colonies in the West

The story

Setting out to found a city

Imagine a Greek harbour of the 8th century BC. A group of men, with their families, board ships with their tools and belongings. Ahead lie the open sea and a distant destination, where they will build a new city from scratch. For the Greeks this was not an isolated adventure, but an enormous movement, which we now call colonisation, and which lasted more than two centuries.

Where, when and who

According to historians Greek colonisation begins at the start of the 8th century BC. The first to set out towards Italy were the people of the island of Euboea, near Athens, who founded Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia, the oldest Greek settlement in Italy. Then came Cumae, in Campania, the first colony on the Italian mainland, and, in Sicily, many others. The dates we find in books are those handed down by ancient authors, and should be treated with caution: for example, Thucydides, a historian of the 5th century BC, tells us that Naxos was founded a year before Syracuse (734 and 733 BC by modern reckoning), while Croton (709) and Sybaris (708–707) have dates that come from later chronologists, such as Eusebius. Taranto, according to another ancient author, Jerome, was founded in 706. Rhegium (Reggio) around 730.

The cities that founded the colonies were different. Syracuse, the strongest centre in Sicily, was a colony of Corinth. Taranto, according to the geographer Strabo, was founded by Spartan exiles, the so-called Partheniai. Marseille, in Gaul, was founded by people from Phocaea. On the Black Sea, then, the ancients counted from 70 to 90 colonies, mostly founded in the 7th century BC.

How a colony was founded

At the head of each expedition there was a leader, the oikist, chosen by the colonists themselves. Before leaving, advice was sought from the oracle of Delphi, where the priests gathered a lot of information about distant places. This does not mean that Delphi decided everything: colonies set out from many different cities and nobody directed the movement from above.

A Greek colony was not a province. It was a new city, with its own laws, its own magistrates and an independent government. It remained, however, tied to the mother city, the metropolis, by relationships that, according to the sources, lasted over time.

Why they left

The reasons were various. In the Greek cities the population was growing and good land was scarce: people with no fields to farm could look for them elsewhere. Then there was trade: landing places on the coasts of the West, where metals and products were to be found, were useful to merchants. Finally there were political struggles: a defeated group, or a group of malcontents, could choose, or be forced, to leave the city. The case of the Partheniai of Taranto, in Strabo's account, is an example.

Magna Graecia

The name “Magna Graecia”, that is, “Great Greece”, was given by the Romans to the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily where the Greeks had settled. It was a Greece on Italian soil, made up of cities that each remained independent.

A script that starts from Cumae

The colonists brought with them not only goods, but also the alphabet. The variant of the Greek alphabet used at Cumae, in Campania, was adopted by the Etruscans and other Italic peoples, and from it, in the end, the Latin alphabet derived. In this way the letters we use reached us by way of the Greek colonies of Italy.