Poleis and politeiai in Southern Italy (8th – 2nd cent. BC)

The Hellenic and Hellenised communities identified in Magna Graecia specifically in the current Italian regions of Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, and in Puglia Taranto and its hinterland amount to about fifty. Throughout the period prior to Roman domination in Italy, i.e. between 8th and 2nd cent. BC, each community differentiated from the others in the administrative system, titles and/or functions of local officials, names, number, composition of the assemblies, civic subdivisions, laws and costums, etc. The project leader aims at gathering and studying all the available evidence (literary, epigraphic, archaeological and numismatic sources) concerning the political, administrative and constitutional history of all these communities in pre-Roman times. The different kinds of sources for this subject are related and complement each other. The entire accessible tradition will be examined in an interdisciplinary manner: i.e. the historical-juridical approach to the available sources, mainly Greek inscriptions, will indeed require a parallel linguisticerminological investigation of their content and their parallel contextualization within the environmental and cultural backdrop provided by archaeological data as well as within the historical-political framework described by the literary tradition. This documentary collection will be presented in a related monograph, containing sections devoted to each single community as well sections devoted to specific topics (federal experiences, specific civic and/or sacral charges, etc.). Furthermore, selected epigraphic and literary evidence particularly relevant to the subject will continue to be presented in www.arcait.it. A monographic study on the political and constitutional history of Magna Graecia in pre-Roman times has long been a desideratum of modern historiography. Franco Sartori`s important volume on Problemi di storia costituzionale italiota (1953), still constitutes the unique example of a detailed and systematic treatment of the subject. The subject now deserves to be taken up again and updated, with an analysis embracing the results achieved so far by modern investigations in this multi-ethnic area as well by modern discourse on ancient Colonisation and on Greek and Hellenised communities in general. The research will also include all the important documentation, especially epigraphic (in Greek and non-Greek languages), that has come to light in the individual communities of Southern Italy during the almost seventy years that have elapsed since Sartori`s work. The monograph is to be used as the starting point for future research in this field, and also for comparisons with national and international research results on political-institutional history and structures of other areas of the ancient Mediterranean world.