This, naturally, brings us to perhaps the most famous myth: that southern Italians are Greek. Of course, this has become a very common and widespread misconception, believed in not only by Greeks. However, Greeks are the most fanatical proponents of this myth.
The roots of this myth derive from the fact that, beginning in about 740 BC, Hellenes began to establish colonies in Sicily and along the southern coast of Italy. It is also known that beginning in the 4th century BC, the Gauls invaded northern Italy. From this has arisen a reductionist narrative according to which “Northern Italy was Celtic, Central Italy was Etruscan/Italic, Southern Italy was Greek”. You can find this simplistic and inaccurate characterization repeated over and over again in books, articles, and even videos about Italy.
Northern Italy is beyond the scope of this topic, so I will not discuss here the myth of ‘Celticity’. Right now we are concerned only with the claim that southern Italy is Greek.
In the first place, it needs to be emphasized that when the Greeks arrived in Italy, they did not find an empty peninsula. They encountered indigenous Italian peoples there, and in some cases subjugated and assimilated them. Several of the Greek colonies were founded on earlier settlements created by the Italian tribes. Let’s briefly consider some of the historical centers of Calabria, for example: Reggio and Crotone were indeed founded by Chalcidian and Achaean Greeks, but the area was originally inhabited by Italic tribes (Ausoni and Enotri); the oldest coins found at Reggio Calabria use an Oscan (Italic) language; Catanzaro was founded by the Byzantines in the Middle Ages, but the area was originally inhabited by Italics (Enotri); meanwhile, Cosenza was founded by Italics (Brutti); Corigliano was founded by Italics (Ausoni or Enotri); Sant'Eufemia Lamezia, Rossano, Rende, Vibo Valentia, Castrovillari, Acri, Palmi, Cassano all'Ionio, Bisignano and Paola were all founded by Italic peoples (Ausoni, Enotri and/or Morgeti). Even the area of Sybaris was the site of a pre-Greek acropolis:
“The Greek colonists who established cities in southern Italy around 700 BC owed their wealth to exploiting prosperous native villages. This has been demonstrated by archaeologists from the University of Groningen. The excavations were conducted in the settlement, which had a large necropolis and a monumental sanctuary on a hill called Timpone della Motta in Calabria. ... According to classical [Greek] historians, it was only with the arrival of the Greeks that civilization reached this part of the world, but it now appears that the hills around Sybaris were permanently inhabited before the Greeks settled there. ... Excavations at the summit of Timpone della Motta show that the Enotrians venerated a local female deity there long before the Greeks dedicated temples to Athena on the same spot. ... The latest finds show once again how unreliable Greek and European historians are on the subject of Greek and Roman colonization.” (Source: EurekAlert, Greek Colonists Exploited Native Populations In Southern Italy, 9 February 1999)
At the time of the Greek colonization, they found on the Italian mainland tribes such as the Enotri, Itali, Morgeti, Lucani, Brutti, Oscans and Ausones. In Sicily there were three indigenous peoples: the Sicani, Siculi and Elimi. The Greeks did not exterminate these peoples. In fact, they were at war with most of these tribes down to the days of the Roman conquest. The Brutti in particular (who inhabited Calabria) are remembered for defeating and expelling Greeks from their territory, and the Campani too (who inhabited Campania) conquered several Greek cities, re-occupying areas which Greeks colonists had previously taken from them. Meanwhile in Puglia in 473 BC the Messapi defeated the Spartans in what was called in ancient sources “the greatest slaughter of Greeks ever recorded”, after which the Greeks were unable to expand into the land north of Taranto.
In the second place, the territory actually colonized by the Greeks was extremely small compared to what is commonly imagined; it absolutely did not encompass all of southern Italy. Excluding the islands, southern Italy consists of six regions: Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia. Of these six regions, two of them (Abruzzo and Molise) were never colonized by the Greeks. Of the remaining four, none were ever entirely occupied by the Greeks in ancient times. Moreover, all of these regions were densely populated by Italic tribes with a warrior-based society. The Greeks, therefore, were never able to penetrate inland. The territory in which they settled was mostly limited to the coastal areas of Campania and Calabria, and to a lesser extent the southern coast of Basilicata and Puglia. The Greeks never settled in the interior of Campania, nor in the interior of Calabria, nor in the interior of Basilicata, nor in the northern and central areas of Puglia, all of which remained populated by Italics.
It was not only the indigenous Italic populations which prevented the Greeks from occupying the hinterland, but also the very nature of Greek colonies and of Greek society itself. The ancient Greeks were not colonists in the modern sense of the term, nor in the Roman sense of the term. The Greeks were first and foremost merchants and traders, not agriculturalists or militarists; they did not build roads or construct highways; they were a mercantile trade-based society consisting of fishermen and seafarers; hence why everywhere they went — Italy, Egypt, Iberia, Black Sea region — they always settled on the coastal areas, founding coastal cities and trading posts; they rarely ever colonized the inland of a country.
As for Sicily, the Greeks were primarily concentrated on the eastern seaboard of the island. At their maximum extent, the Greeks controlled about a quarter of Sicily: they never occupied the entire island, due to fierce resistance from the indigenous Sicilian tribes, especially in the western and central areas of the country. For centuries the Greeks attempted to subjugate the whole island, before finally giving up in the 3rd century BC. And although the eastern and east-central portion of the island became strongly influenced by the Hellenic culture (while those living within Greek-controlled territory became Hellenized themselves), this does not mean that the population itself was Hellenic. It is recorded, for example, that in the 5th century BC a man named Ducetius — who was Hellenized but who was a Sicel, therefore an Italic by origin, not a Greek — led a Sicilian revolt against the Greeks. Despite Hellenization, Ducetius was conscious of his Sicilian origins and conducted a war of resistance with the native Sicels against the Greeks. As for the rest, most of Sicily was never Hellenized at all.
By the 3rd century BC all of southern Italy and Sicily had been conquered by the Romans and the process of Romanization and Latinization began. Modern Greeks argue that the southern Italian population at that time was predominantly Greek; that the Roman population of southern Italy were simply Romanized Greeks; and that the Italians living there today are therefore Italianized Greeks.
However, a large part of the population in the Greek-ruled parts of southern Italy consisted in fact of Hellenized Italic peoples, that is to say, native peoples who were already living in Italy long before the arrival of the Greeks, but who were later Hellenized and absorbed by the Greeks. Contrary to what modern Greek nationalists assert, therefore, what occurred in the former Hellenic colonies during the Roman period was, for the most part, a re-Italicization of Hellenized Italic peoples; people who in the preceding centuries were Italic-speaking but had come under the influence or subjugation of Greek colonists, and were not themselves of Hellenic origin. However, even if one were to concede that the Greek colonies consisted only and exclusively of Hellenic-descended people, this still would not mean that southern Italians are Greek, since, as already stated, the areas colonized by the Greeks were rather limited to the coastal zones, and the population size of the Greek colonies by no means would have been able to rival the much larger Italic population living in the regions next to those colonies.
To argue that ancient and/or modern southern Italians are Greek would require us to either completely ignore the Italic tribes who inhabited most of the territory in southern Italy, or else downplay their importance by relying on extremely exaggerated Greek population sizes provided by ancient authors (for example Diodorus Siculus, who claimed that the Greek colony of Sybaris had 300,000 inhabitants in 510 BC — a figure which is certainly inflated and completely unrealistic for that time period, and not supported by archeology). Curiously, Diodorus also stated that the reason the city grew so large was due to it granting citizenship to several thousand foreign aliens, i.e. to the neighboring Italic people (Enotrians).
It also requires us to presume that the Greek colonies were perpetually stable and ignore well-documented demographic shifts and fluctuations, namely the fact that so many of the ancient Hellenic colonies decimated themselves through warfare with each other; that most of the Hellenic city-states had declined by the 3rd century BC; that several of their cities were destroyed already before the Roman conquest; and the fact that many Greeks were killed and driven out of Italy after their colonies were conquered by ascending Italic tribes such as the Brutti, Lucani and Oscans. Not to mention the later influx of Latin colonists during the Roman period.
Furthermore, we know that in the Greek-controlled areas of eastern Sicily, the majority of the population consisted of Sicel and Sicanian serfs and slaves. Also in mainland southern Italy there is ample evidence of Oscan (Italic) populations existing in the Hellenic colonies and intermarrying with the Greek colonists. The most serious and well-researched scholars — relying on historical, linguistic and archeological sources — maintain that the majority of the population in the Greek zones of southern Italy and Sicily (poetically known as ‘Magna Graecia’ only in literature; it was not actually a real country, nor is it synonymous nor interchangeable with ‘southern Italy’) consisted predominantly of Hellenized Italic people, with only a smaller part of the population consisting of actual Hellenes.
Karl Julius Beloch placed the number of actual Hellenes at 80,000 people. Professor Mario Cappieri placed them at 33,000 in 600 BC and estimated the Italics of southern Italy and Sicily during that same period at about 1.6 million people. The classical historian P. A. Brunt estimated that in 225 BC the total free population of Central-Southern Italy was 2.962 million, of which nearly all of them were Italian. In any case, the Greeks would have been only a small fraction of the population in southern Italy. The Hellenic colonization was more cultural-economic than demographic.
Southern Italy is by blood, by culture, by language and by ethnic origin Italian; indeed, together with central Italy, it was the heartland of the Italic tribes, being home to the Samnites, Lucanians, Bruttians, Ausones, Campani, Irpini, Marsi, Osci, Peligni, Vestini, Frentani and numerous other Italic peoples.
Furthermore, the most reliable genetic studies affirm that the Italians, from a genetic point of view, have remained substantially unchanged since the Bronze Age and show very little population-sharing (IBD) with non-Italian populations in the last 2,500 years (See: Ralph et. al. 2013, among others). This means that genetic similarities are the result of common Neolithic ancestry, not “mass Greek colonization”.
It is enough to look at the following maps to understand how minimal in scope the Greek colonization was.
Map of Southern Italy in the 4th century BC:
(This map shows that out of 248 or 253 settlements in Southern Italy, only 14 were Greek; all the rest belonged to indigenous Italian tribes.)
Principle Areas of Sicily Settled by Ancient Greeks:
It is completely wrong therefore for Greeks to claim that all southern Italians (or that even a majority of them) have Greek roots. The vast and overwhelming majority of southern Italian are not of ancient Greek stock and never were. And in any case, Greek rule is long over: for the last 1000 years southern Italy has had nothing to do with the Greek world, neither politically nor culturally — and many provinces of southern Italy were never under Greek rule at all, neither in ancient nor medieval times.
One might almost forgive the ignorance of certain foreigners, such as British or Americans, who are profoundly ignorant when it comes to Italian history and geography. In their minds, ‘southern Italy’ means Sicily, Calabria and Naples; they are unaware that many other regions and provinces exist in the south as well, and that most of them do not have any ancient Greek history. The existence of very inaccurate historical maps which get passed around the Internet nowadays also does not help matters (user-made maps which, for example, often incorrectly depict Greeks as inhabiting a much larger territory than they actually did, showing them as occupying areas which they never occupied).
For the Greeks, however, it is inexcusable, because they should know better. They know that the ancient Hellenes never ventured inland and never inhabited more than some relatively sparse coastal territories. They know that southern Italy was largely inhabited by indigenous Italic populations both before, during and after the Hellenic period. Their claims regarding southern Italians are a result of their typical exaggerations and of their obsessive attempt to link themselves to Italians.
The reasons behind their wanting to connect themselves to Italians are numerous. I will discuss in a later section the various reasons why Greeks are so obsessed with Italy in general, and with southern Italy in particular.
