1 THE END OF SYBARIS (510 BC) Richard Evans University of South Africa Sybaris is famous or infamous in the ancient literature for its apparent sophistication and wealth. A little more than thirty-four kilometres (21 miles) from the town of Castrovillari brings one to the Museo di Sibaritide which is situated on the edge of an area identified after prolonged excavation work, as the site of Thurii beneath which lay Sybaris. The landscape is a rather non-descript coastal plain of mostly cultivated fields criss-crossed by roads and irrigation ditches. The museum is also about three kilometres (¾ of a mile) from the sea and the modern lidos which characterise the landscape of the Italian coastline. This countryside has that timeless quality which is quintessentially Mediterranean although, as is often the case, it hides well the fact that much has changed here since the Ancient World, not least it seems the disappearance of so powerful a city of the Greeks. How and why did Sybaris cease to be and how much truth can we attach to the ancient accounts of its end? These questions and a search for answers are the focus of the discussion here. Not least among the intriguing aspects of this subject is the widely reported information that once the city of Sybaris had been occupied by its besiegers the Crotoniates they not only levelled the whole urban area to the ground but they then covered it with water. Indeed the geographer Strabo, writing in the first century AD, states (16.1.14) that the local river or rivers, the Crathis and the Sybaris, were diverted over the site so that its whereabouts would thereafter be completely forgotten. Yet it was not forgotten and in fact tales about Sybaris and its end seem to have quickly sprung up during or soon after the Classical period of Greece, initially perhaps within a generation or two of its apparent demise. The result was that the city’s name became forever linked with wealth and unimaginable riches, and its citizens described as devotees of an unparalleled decadent lifestyle. However, scepticism has not surprisingly been voiced even in antiquity. Aelian in his Varia Historia also pours cold water on the notion that Sybaris was destroyed for its luxurious lifestyle. Aelian (1.19) calls the destruction of Sybaris a widely circulated popular tale (δημώδης λόγος) but that the Ionian city of Colophon was also destroyed for its attachment to luxury and that this information was much less well known. So too the downfall of the Bacchiadae at Corinth was caused by what Aelian describes as excessive luxury (τρύφη). Aelian was writing about AD 200 and his dismissal of the tale should alert us to the fact that the destruction of Sybaris even if a real event had become embellished by extraneous details. 1 Therefore the discussion here will also focus on why these have entered the tradition and, having advanced some reason for such material dominating what should be a straightforward account of a war between two states some idea about what occurred in 510 and which brought about disaster to Sybaris will be presented. The Greek cities of the southern coast of Italy from east to west were: Taras (Tarentum), Metapontion (Metapontum), Heracleia (Siris), Sybaris (later called Thurii and later still Copia), Croton, Caulonia and Locris Epizephyri (‘Locri towards the west wind’), which were roughly fifty to sixty kilometres (25-30 miles) from one another, with finally far-flung Region (Rhegium) which completed this line of cities at the Straits separating Italy from Sicily. 2 Sybaris is said to have been among the first to be established in the last decades of the eighth century BC. It was therefore among that initial wave of settlements set up by the Greeks as they ventured into the western Mediterranean from mainland 1 Elsewhere, 9.24, however, Aelian relates without any criticism the accepted tradition about the luxurious habits of the Sybarites. 2 From Heracleia (Siris) to Metapontum is just nineteen kilometres (12 miles) hence probably the reason for its relatively brief existence as an independent community because it was situated too close to a more powerful neighbour. Metapontum was founded within twenty or so years of Sybaris and these two sites have many striking resemblances: low-lying and inclined to flooding, wealth supposedly based on agriculture yet neither has yielded the physical remains of other Greek cities in Magna Graecia and Sicily. Metapontum, meaning the ‘place beside the sea’ had a much longer identifiable history but was a place of little importance by the first century BC.