Tristan Hughes

Okay, the big question.

So we've got this beautiful scene here found in a tomb.

What do we think this scene represents?

But the diver was not the only image found in this tomb.

The symposium was the drinking party of ancient Greek culture.

Guests would recline on couches, listen to music, discuss politics and philosophy, drink wine out of rounded cups called kailikes.

One of the men shown reclining at the banquet is engaged in a drinking game called kotobos, where you threw the dregs of wine out of your cup towards a target elsewhere in the room and

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.