SYBARIS AND ITS EMPIRE – part 1

The colonisation process of Southern Italy and Sicily lasted a couple of centuries and began in the 8th century B.C.

The first Achaean colony seems to have been Sybaris, in the middle of an alluvial plain between the mouths of the Crathis (Crati) river and the Coscìle river, the ancient Sybaris. According to Ephorus of Cyme, a Greek historian – c.  400 – 330 B.C. this Achaean city lived for 210 years and was destroyed in 510 B.C. by Kroton.  It can thus be traced back to 720 B.C. for its foundation. Strabo (VI, C 263) reports that oikistes (see Note) of Sybaris was Is who was a native of Elice, unknown city of Achaea in Greece.

The innumerable studies carried out on the proto-historic centres in the area of Sybaris, confirm that the arrival of the Achaeans in that territory and the subsequent foundation of Sybaris represented a strong impact on the indigenous villages.  All the centers of the early Iron Age (IX-VIII centuries B.C.) were destroyed and abandoned at the end of the 8th century B.C.   But as it happened for Syracuse, very probably Sybaris also did not exterminate the indigenous populations that inhabited the district. Many of them were probably enslaved or at least used as labour in the countryside and in the cities.

The Achaean “pòlis” (town) soon succeeded in creating a real empire, its merchants ascended along the rivers that flow into the Ionic Sea, they reached the central Apennine mountains and from there they descended along the rivers flowing into the Tyrrhenian Sea. They created a district totally controlled by Sybaris. Strabo (VI, C 263) described Sybaris as a real “empire” that in the Archaic period (600 B.C. – 480 B.C.), controlled 4 populations and 25 cities.

To understand the precocious territorial growth of this Achaean pòlis (town), it is interesting to consider also what Diodorus reported (XII, 9, 2): he wrote that Sybaris granted its citizenship to foreigners with relative ease.

This vast empire of Sybaris was articulated internally through different gradation, ranging from the direct control of the chòra politikè (territory outside the walls where farmers cultivated the fields and dedicated themselves to agriculture), to formally equal relations with some of the more distant communities. An important inscription found at Olympia, datable to the second half of the 6th century. B.C. preserves elements of fundamental importance that integrate the Strabo’s description. This is a peace treaty signed between Sybaris and their allies (Sýmmachoi) and the Serdàioi, an indigenous community that recent studies tend to place in the “Valle del Noce”, on the border between northern Tyrrhenian Calabria and Lucania. Ultimately the empire of Sybaris, beyond the original chòra, where indigenous people most probably worked as slaves, consisted of a substantial group of subdued communities (probably 4 populations and 25 cities, as Strabo says) and finally in a circle of allies (the Sýmmachoi of the  Olympia treaty), at least formally independent. In the Greek colonial world, this is probably the first example of a complex territorial entity, extended beyond the limited boundaries of traditional pòlis.

Very important were also the extra-urban sanctuaries of Sybaris, real projections of the city in the “chòra”. Through the sacred dimension, they marked the progressive control of this Achaean “pòlis” (town) on the territory and, at the same time, attracted the indigenous populations of the district, also assuming the role of privileged places of contact and exchange in the border areas. Since the time of the foundation, the sacred marked the limits of the “chòra” of Sybaris.        NOTE: The individual chosen by an ancient Greek polis (town) as the leader of any new colonisation.

 Excerpt from: Gioacchino Francesco La Torre, Sicilia e Magna Grecia , Editori Laterza, 2011, pp 84-90

 
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