Tristan Hughes

Another figure plays the lyre.

Another is a cup-bearer.

Very rarely do we see humans depicted in Greek wall paintings, and these frescoes speak to an influence from the neighbouring Etruscans, the most powerful Italian people at the beginning of the 5th century BC.

So this could actually be showing the meetings that the Greeks who were here in southern Italy were having with other Italian peoples at that time.

That's extraordinary.

These stunning wall paintings from the Tomb of the Diver are some of the most beautiful from anywhere in the Greek world, showing just how prosperous Pestum had become by the 5th century BC and how prominent a place it was.

But nothing lasts forever.

Two hundred years after its foundation, Pestum, this idyllic Greek city, gradually came under threat.

Not from abroad, beyond the seas, but from closer to home, from inland.

As the 5th century went on, Lucanian power only increased, and they began to pressure Greek cities all across southern Italy, including Pestum.

By 400 BC, the scales had tipped and Pestum fell into the hands of the Lucanians.

It doesn't seem to have been a violent takeover, no destruction layer has been found in the archaeology.

Instead, there appears to have been an ethnographic shift, with the Lucanians now outnumbering the Greeks in the city.

For the people of Pestum, a new age in their story had begun.

An age where Lucanian overlords ran the show.

For haughty Greeks elsewhere, seeing Pestum fall into the hands of these so-called barbarians led them to deride the city.

They saw this as the beginning of a dark age in Pestum's story, where Greek culture was suppressed and barbarity reigned supreme.

One person who held to this view was a philosopher called Aristoxenus.

who hailed from Tarentum, which remained free of Italian control.

Remarking on Pestum's Lucanian takeover, he bemoaned the tragedy of the Greeks that lived there.