The Italiotes (, ') were the pre- Roman Greek-speaking inhabitants of the Italian Peninsula, between

Naples Naples ( ; ; ) is the Regions of Italy, regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 908,082 within the city's administrative limits as of 2025, while its Metropolitan City of N ...

and Calabria.

Greek colonisation Greek colonisation refers to the expansion of Archaic Greeks, particularly during the 8th–6th centuries BC, across the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. The Archaic expansion differed from the Iron Age migrations of the Greek Dark Ag ...

of the coastal areas of southern Italy and Sicily started in the 8th century BC and, by the time of the Roman ascendance, the area was so extensively hellenized that Romans called it ''

Magna Graecia Magna Graecia refers to the Greek-speaking areas of southern Italy, encompassing the modern Regions of Italy, Italian regions of Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania, and Sicily. These regions were Greek colonisation, extensively settled by G ...

'', that is "Greater Greece". The

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

is a derivative of the

Western Greek alphabet Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the Archaic Greece, archaic and Classical Greece, early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that ...

used by these settlers, and was picked up and adopted and modified first by the Etruscans and then by the Romans.

Notes

References

* ''A history of earliest Italy'' By Massimo Pallottino, 15 April 1991, Page 118 * ''The Cambridge ancient history'' By John Boardman Page 709 * ''Rome and the Western Greeks, 350 BC-AD 200'' Page 103 * ''Gender and ethnicity in ancient Italy'' By Tim Cornell, Kathryn Lomas Page 40 * ''Calabria, the first Italy'' By Gertrude Elizabeth Taylor Slaughter Page 107 {{Ancient Greece topics

See also

Notes

References