The Greeks in Italy

About the same time as Syracuse appealed to Corinth, the Tarantines, whom the non-Greek Lucanians were now attacking, sought help from their mother-city, Sparta. By 345, Sparta’s best days were long past, and men such as King Archidamus III chafed at the want of opportunities to display their martial talents. So Archidamus, gathering together some mercenaries left over from the Phocian War (see chap. 18), departed from Sparta for Taras to seek fortune and glory there. He led the Tarantine forces for some seven years before falling in a battle against the Lucanians in 338 (Diod. XVI 62-63 and 88).

Deprived of one defender, Taras in 334 appealed to Alexander of Epirus (brother-in-law to Philip and uncle to Alexander the Great) for help. Alexander, it seems, had more success than Archidamus. He defeated the Tarantines’ foes and then turned to rescue other Greek cities such as Heracleia on the Gulf of Taranto and Terina on the western coast. The new rising power in central Italy, Rome, which had slowly displaced the Etruscans as the major power there, even made a treaty with him. When a Lucanian exile assassinated Alexander in 331, it made little difference to the overall result - he had succeeded in shoring up the Greek cities’ position against the Italian tribes in the interior (Liv. VIII 3, 17, and 24; Just. XII 2).

Away to the north, however, the Greeks on the Bay of Naples, where Euboean settlers had founded Cumae in the mid-eighth century (see chap. 5), fared more poorly. After the successful conclusion of a war in Campania the dominion of the new Italian power, Rome, extended to the territory of Neapolis (Naples), a daughter-city of Cumae’s, which by now was the most important Greek city in the region (Liv. VIII 22). War broke out between Neapolis and Rome in the 320s. Although the Romans gained the upper hand, they could not take the fortified city by storm and, lacking a fleet, had no means to conduct an effective siege. The Neapolitans, however, apparently had little desire to see hostilities continue indefinitely. Unlike in 474, no Hiero appeared to deliver them from a central Italian enemy (see chap. 10). In negotiations the Romans proved reasonable, and the Neapolitans accepted their terms. Thus they became the first Greeks to fall under Roman dominion (Liv. Per. VIII).