Ross King

Why did Julius Caesar speak his last words in Greek? Why are the world’s best-preserved Greek temples in Sicily and the South of Italy? Why did Plato visit Italy? This lecture will look at how in Plato’s time the South of Italy was known as “Greater Greece”—the beautiful land settled in the centuries after 800 BCE by colonists from the Greek mainland. These settlers brought trade and prosperity as well as their religion, their customs, their alphabet and their language. They also nurtured on Italian soil the political, philosophical and artistic foundations that would profoundly influence and support the world of the Ancient Romans and, much later, that of the Italian Renaissance.