Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The study of the Greek western Mediterranean has sometimes been regarded as marginal to mainstream Greek history but at the same time not entirely accepted within the study of the native populations – a problem especially acute in Italy, where Magna Graecia tended to fall into a gap between the study of Greek history and that of Roman Italy. This is due in part to artificial boundaries created by the structures of Classical education, and in part to a rather Athenocentric approach to Greek history which took the mainland classical democracies as the norm and dismissed the western poleis, which had a different line of development, as an aberration. In doing so, scholarship was following the lead of Thucydides (Thuc. 6.17), who dismissed the Sicilians as being weakened by their demographic flexibility and lack of a strong bond between land and citizenship; but at the same time, this focus on fifth- and fourth-century Athens as the norm has drawn attention away from areas which provide fascinating evidence for culture-contact with the non-Greek world and for the development of alternative state identities and forms of political behaviour within the Greek communities. The Greeks of the western Mediterranean lived in a multi-cultural region, interacting with a wide variety of non-Greek populations. Their settlement history spanned a wide range of experiences from migration by individuals ... log in or subscribe to read full text