Dr. Tiziana D'Angelo

Familiarity with the area through these trade contacts, which probably helped mediate this, and civil strife in Greece itself.

Quite a lot of the foundation legends that we have handed down through the ancient sources feature stories about individuals or small groups of people who were forced out of their home cities

for various reasons.

And in fact, the foundation of Peacetime itself is a case in point because civic discord in its founding city, Sybaris, which is on the south coast of Italy, seems to have been a big factor in why Peacetime was founded.

If we're looking at Peaceton 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 is currently under excavation, which was visible from the sea right near the Porta Marina in the western end of the city.

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

And then you can walk down these long, narrow streets of houses and workshops and shops and

And when you got to the centre, you would have the agora, which was very big by Greek agora standards, probably somewhere around about 330 by 300 metres.

And in the middle, it's got a hero shrine, a heroon, which may have been the cult of the founder, the oikist, as the Greeks called them.

By the beginning of the fifth century, it's also acquired an ecclesiasterion, which is a circular building with stepped seats, a bit like a theatre, which is where political assemblies are held.

And that, again, gives you some sort of insight into the size of the city, because at a guesstimate, that could have probably seated about 1,500 to 1,700 people.

And if you take into account the fact that the Greek cities only allowed adult male citizens into places like an Ecclesiasterion, therefore you've got a multiplier that you can add on for wives, children, slaves, non-citizens, that gives you a really quite substantial population of probably in the region of 10,000 to 12,000 people.

So it's quite a substantial-sized city.

The main question about Pistum's relationships with the indigenous Italians is really centred on the Lucanians, which are a group that speaks a language called Oscan, which is the common language of Apennine and large parts of southern Italy.

and seems to be culturally related to the Samnites who live in the Apennines.

But by this stage, they were migrating south and developing their own very distinct cultural and ethnic identity as they went.

Quite a lot of them move into peacetime territory, settle there, may be brought in as mercenaries.

They have quite a ferocious military reputation.

So by this stage, what we've got is a situation that the fall of Sybaris has created a bit of a power vacuum at the end of the 6th century.