Dr. Tiziana D'Angelo

If we're looking at Peacestome as, say, a visitor walking into the city, it would have been a walled city with quite imposing monumental gates.

It would have had the new temple, which was visible from the sea.

So if you were arriving by sea, that's pretty much the first thing you would have seen.

It's on the Gulf of Salerno, and it's about two to three kilometres inland, so we're talking coastal plain with a low plateau, which is where the city actually is.

Basically, we're talking about somewhere which is quite close to the coast.

It's about 10 kilometres south of the River Sele, which is one of the major waterways of southern Italy.

So it's got very good maritime connections and a good way of bringing goods in, shipping goods out, keeping connections, which obviously is important because land transport is slow and expensive at this date.

Basically, it's got the Apennines sort of

inland, and also the Calabrian Mountains to the south, with passes leading southwards, which may have been significant in why the site was chosen.

The area is quite prone to flooding and waterlogging, which is significant in its later history, so that's quite important.

But also, it controls a very large territory of very fertile land, so it's got really good resources and good connections with the wider world, both Greek and non-Greek.

Magna Graecia, or Megale Hellas as it was known in Greek, literally means Greater Greece or Great Greece, and it's conventionally used to refer by scholars to the Greek settlements in Italy.

These are conventionally termed colonies, but that's actually really contentious.

Quite a lot of scholars reject that term in favour of something much more neutral like migration.

But the reason why the Greeks were there in the first place is that this is the culmination of a very long-standing network of social and economic contacts between Greece and the Western Mediterranean, stretching as far as Spain, which goes right back to the Bronze Age.

So what we have is a very long-standing...

trade route, which basically means that the Greeks of Greece are very familiar with the Western Mediterranean.

But eventually, at some point around about the 8th to the 7th centuries BC, that really seems to ramp up in intensity, and we find that we have a period of quite intensive and quite rapid permanent settlements growing up in Southern Italy and also Sicily.

The contributory factors to that seem to have been a combination of economic opportunism.

These are areas with vast amounts of arable land compared with Greece.