3.1.10) but it is probable that this distinction was introduced only by the later geographers, and did not correspond to the original meaning of the term. Sometimes, indeed, the name is confined within still narrower limits, as applying only to the cities on the Tarentine gulf, from Locri to Tarentum ( Plin. Strabo seems to imply that the Greek cities of Sicily were included under the appellation but this is certainly opposed to the more general usage, which confined the term to the colonies in Italy Even of these, it is not clear whether Cumae and its colonies in Campania were regarded as belonging to it: it is certain at least that the name is more generally used with reference only to the Greek cities in the south of Italy, including those on the shores of the Tarentine gulf and the Bruttian peninsula, together with Velia, Posidonia, and Laüs, on the W. Nor is the use of the term, even at a later period, very fixed or definite. It is perhaps still more significant, that the name is not found in Scylax, though that author attaches particular importance to the enumeration of the Greek cities in Italy as distinguished from those of the barbarians.
2.39) and it appears certain that the name must have arisen at an early period, while the Greek colonies in Italy were at the height of their power and prosperity, and before the states of Greece proper had attained to their fullest greatness.īut the omission of the name in Herodotus and Thucydides, even in passages where it would have been convenient as a geographical designation, seems to show that it was not in their time generally recognised as a distinctive appellation, and was probably first adopted as such by the historians and geographers of later times, though its origin must have been derived from a much earlier age.
The name is not found in any extant author earlier than Polybius: but the latter, in speaking of the cities of Magna Graecia in the time of Pythagoras, uses the expression, “the country that was then called Magna Graecia” (Pol.
MAGNA GRAE´CIA MAGNA GRAE´ CIA ( ἡ μεγάλη Ἑλλάς), was the name given in ancient times by the Greeks themselves to the assemblage of Greek colonies which encircled the shores of Southern Italy.
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