Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology 9780199744275, 0199744270

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University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

Title Pages (p.i)

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Italy's Lost Greece Greeks Overseas

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Italy's Lost Greece

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Italy's Lost Greece

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This series presents a forum for new interpretations of Greek settlement in the ancient Mediterranean in its cultural and political aspects. Focusing on the period from the Iron Age until the advent of Alexander, it seeks to undermine the divide between colonial and metropolitan Greeks. It welcomes new scholarly work from archaeological, historical, and literary perspectives, and invites interventions on the history of scholarship about the Greeks in the Mediterranean. A Small Greek World Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean Irad Malkin Italy's Lost Greece

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Title Pages

Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

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Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland  Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey  Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

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Title Pages

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ceserani, Giovanna. Italy's lost Greece : Magna Graecia and the making of modern archaeology / Giovanna Ceserani. p. cm.—(Greeks overseas) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-974427-5 1. Magna Graecia (Italy)—Antiquities. 2.  Classical antiquities. 3. Archaeology—History. 4. Humanism—History. 5. Hellenism— History. I. Title. DG55.M3C48 2011 937'.701—dc22  2010035770 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Dedication

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

Dedication (p.v)

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To Tirin and Emilia

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Acknowledgements

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

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Acknowledgements

This book would not have been written without the financial support of several institutions in Europe and the United States: the Bologna University Study Abroad Fund (1995– 1996), the Cambridge University Faculty of Classics (1995– 1996), the Cambridge University European Trust (1996–1997), Saint John's College and the British Academy (1996–1999), the John Carter Brown Library (1999), the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (2000), the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2000–2003), the Getty Research Institute (2006), and the Stanford University Humanities Center (2007– 2008). Since 2003 I have received generous funding from Stanford University's Classics Department and Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences. Many libraries at numerous institutions have offered essential material, and their staff invaluable expertise for approaching it, especially in the rare book collections at Cambridge University, Princeton University, the Getty Research Institute, the Istituto Archeologico Germanico, the Scuola Francese in Rome, and at Stanford University. I have also incurred debts of gratitude to many fellow scholars, colleagues, students and teachers. Riccardo Di Donato first introduced me to the challenges and pleasures of

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Acknowledgements

disciplinary history. Anthony Snodgrass's foresight enabled me to make this the field of my professional training, and he has been constantly giving of advice and encouragement, from the original focusing of the topic to the reading of the final manuscript. Peter Garnsey initially encouraged me to explore the topic of this book, and he has since provided rich feedback on it. Mary Beard asked the hardest questions of the initial project and has

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remained a vitally inspiring interlocutor.

Alain Schnapp has been tremendously giving, helping me to secure crucial institutional support and generously offering from his immense learning and insight. I have long benefited from Salvatore Settis's deep understanding of and passion for the subject, from early on until his attentive reading of the final manuscript. Anthony Grafton helped fundamentally to reshape the project from its earlier incarnation as a dissertation; its current form owes deeply to his generous readings and rich comments. Suzanne Marchand's inspiring observations have profoundly influenced my approach, while her exacting, supportive criticism on the entire manuscript has been invaluable. Ian Morris offered perspicacious reading and crucial advice. The intellectual dialogues that have long accompanied my friendships with Emma Dench, Miriam Leonard, and Tamara Griggs, have informed this book possibly even more than they already know. Karen Newman has again shown me her steady commitment, combining intellectual rigor with affection while gracing every page with her unfailing sense of style. Chris Rovee has been extraordinarily giving of his time and insight, discussing with me many rewrites of the entire manuscript. I am also grateful to those who read and commented on sections of this book: Alessandro Barchiesi, Paul Cartledge, Claire Lyons, Maud Gleason, Barbara Naddeo, Robin Osborne, Giovanni Salmeri, Susan Stephens, Walter Scheidel, Phiroze Vasunia. For stimulating conversations at crucial junctures I am indebted to Sue Alcock, Horst Blanck, Mark Buchan, Emmanuele Curti, Paula Findlen, Simon Goldhill, Michel Gras, Alexander Nehamas, Lucy Riall, Matthias Roick, Barbara Scalvini, Michael Shanks, Caroline Winterer. Ryan Johnson's help has been crucial at various instances. Nick Valvo much helped with editing. The rich exchanges with the students in my Stanford seminars have offered profound inspiration for completing this book,

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Acknowledgements

and for years of work to come. A number of them have also contributed essential and varied research assistance for which I thank Melissa Bailey, James Kierstead, Sarah Murray, Dan-el Padilla, Ross Perlin, Suzanne Sutherland, Darian Totten. I am grateful to my editor at Oxford University Press, Stefan Vranka, as well as the press's ‘Western Greeks’ series editors, Carla Antonaccio and Nino Luraghi, the production editors, Tamzen Benfield and Maureen Cirnitski, the project manager Niranjana Harikrishnan, and the anonymous reviewers, who all helped to see the book through production. I also thank, for careful copyediting, Anita Grisales and, again, Melissa Bailey and Ross Perlin. This book would also not have been written without the support of family and friends. For unfailingly being there and reminding me where home is I am thankful to Tom Brooks, Barbara Colonna, Bruno Feitler, Gianna Franceschini, Ludovico and Francesca Geymonat, Carrie Herbert, Ellen Lin, Ruth Loshak, Carlotta Nanni Buscemi, Laura Nuccilli, Barry McCrea, Ornella Matarrese, Liz Naskau, Niall O’Connor. I record here also my gratitude for those whom I can

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longer thank in person and miss deeply, Giovanni Piemonti, Giovanna Gronda and Muriel Green. The confidence placed in me by my parents, Remo Ceserani and Anita Piemonti, has always been a major source of inspiration, along with their passion for the world of ideas. My sister Teresa's attentive presence and illuminating perspectives do more for my life and work than can be acknowledged. During the writing of this book my daughter was born; I thank here the many who made it possible for me to continue writing while the baby she was grew into a wonderful little girl, especially her teachers Bertha Gonzalez and Vicky Tafoya. To her father, who lived with the ups and downs of writing for however long it would take, and to my daughter, whose inexhaustible capacity for wonder and joy has been my constant inspiration, this book is dedicated. (p.xii)

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Acknowledgements

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Map of Southern Italy

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

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Map of Southern Italy

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Map of Southern Italy

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Map of Southern Italy

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Introduction

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

Introduction Giovanna Ceserani

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords This introductory chapter delineates the longstanding marginality of Magna Graecia within classical studies in contrast to its important role in the histories of antiquarianism and classical archaeology, as well as the relationship between the study of Magna Graecia and the emergence of the Southern Question. The approach taken in this book is discussed in the context of recent works on history of archaeology and on the imagining of the South. A brief survey of the debate over the name of Magna Graecia introduces the intricate history of this region's study, including the differentiation of Sicily and Magna Graecia; prominent contrasts between Italian and non-Italian scholarly approache. A consideration of recent exhibitions dedicated to Greek South Italy, both in Italy and in the United States, introduces the current status of these issues, and offers a point of departure for returning to the rich history of the study of Magna Graecia.

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Keywords: history of archaeology, history of antiquarianism, Southern Question, marginality, name of magna Graecia, Exhibits on Magna Graecia

The best-preserved Greek temples in the world are found not in Greece but in Italy—several of them in Magna Graecia, along the southern Italian coasts, where Greek settlements flourished beginning in the eighth century BCE. Such an essential fact is nowadays easily forgotten in the sense of loss that so deeply colors views of this southern region. Forgotten, too, has been the region's importance in giving shape to the modern imagining of the ancient Greek world. Monuments such as the temples still standing today in Paestum, just sixty miles south of Naples, made Magna Graecia one of the focal points in the passionate eighteenth-century turn to the Greek past that lies at the origins of modern Hellenism, its ideals, and institutions. Perhaps it is the pervasive idea of Magna Graecia's decline and destruction, so well articulated since antiquity, that has eroded the memory of its significance. Among the earliest attested users of the term, Cicero, the famous Roman rethor and politician, referred in passing to Magna Graecia as a territory “which was flourishing in the age of Pythagoras … now destroyed” (De Amicitia 13). South Italy has been haunted, ever since, by this stark contrast between present-day desolation and the lost glory of the past—“cut off,” in Carlo Levi's mid-twentieth-century words, from both “history and the state, a land without comfort or solace.”1 A profound sense of nostalgia, embodied in a fascination with ruins, abandoned cities, and once-splendid landscapes, has undoubtedly been a crucial feature of the ambivalent gaze with which moderns have regarded the ancient world. Magna Graecia, however, presents a special case. If the past of Magna Graecia is in fact more multifaceted than this long history of marginalization suggests, its reception through (p.2)

time has been yet more complex. A more nuanced story

—the history of “the history of Magna Graecia”—has by and large remained untold. Italy's Lost Greece seeks to fill this void by showing how South Italy's distant past has been imagined and used from the Renaissance to the present day. This recounting not only illuminates local dynamics previously overlooked but enriches our understanding of certain central features of modern intellectual history. The story of Italy's

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ancient Greece—its displacement and loss as well as its various recoveries—reveals contradictions that lie at the core of three distinct yet interrelated phenomena: the Humanist investment in the ancient past, the evolution of modern Hellenism, and the making of modern classical archaeology. Around the middle of the eighteenth century Paestum became an increasingly popular destination—so much so that it came to be spoken of as having been rediscovered. After being ignored for centuries while standing in plain view, its ruins became famous, prompting Arnaldo Momigliano's poignant comment that “anyone who ever believed that eyesight is a sufficient condition for seeing should meditate on the discovery of the temples of Paestum.”2 Travel to Italy was of course increasingly common at that time, but, by comparison with the beaten track of the Grand Tour, which traditionally stopped at Rome or Naples, its extension to South Italy was an adventurous and exotic undertaking. Still, it was an easier and more common alternative to the Greek mainland, at the time still little known. Indeed, until the Napoleonic Wars disrupted the traditional route in Italy, and until Greece became more accessible after centuries under Ottoman control, South Italy was the main destination for travelers and scholars in search of the Greek ideal and its material traces. The growing passion for painted Greek vases, which for the most part were being unearthed in Italy, was a major part of the region's appeal to travelers. The consequences of these encounters with Greek material culture in Magna Graecia were enormous. It was in Naples, for many years the principal marketplace for painted vases, that “pots were turned into vases,” as James Whitley puts it.3 In other words, vases became highly sought-after works of art, in addition to models for industrially-produced wares, foundations for museum collections of classical art, and finally, research subjects for a new classical scholarship. The site of Paestum in particular, etched by G. B. Piranesi and enthused over by J. J. Winckelmann, became crucial to the eighteenth-century Greek Revival movement, which changed the architectural face of European capitals and shaped a new image of the classical world. Since then, ironically, Magna Graecia has become something of a historical anomaly, even as it has helped to shape our

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ideals of classicism. Lying outside the national boundaries of modern Greece and sharing in the complicated regional dynamic of the Italian Mezzogiorno, it has always fit awkwardly, at best, within commonly accepted paradigms of Hellenism. As knowledge of ancient Greece expanded— materially, through extensive exploration of the mainland, and conceptually, through disciplinary developments and

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the

structuring of institutional research—Magna Graecia came to be seen less as a splendid site for understanding the Greek past, and more as the mere colonial periphery of the ancient Greek world (even if at times colored with all the appeal of such exoticism). Within Italy too, scholars have long struggled to make sense of Magna Graecia's past, be their center of geographical and political reference the southern provinces, Naples, Rome or farther North. As far back as the Renaissance, and in fact continuing in earnest in the present day, through the various shifts in Italian political peripheral boundaries and political centers, they have faced a dual challenge: conceptualizing the region as a part of Italy (an Italy imagined, before its national unification, as a unity based on Roman models) while negotiating the competing claims of its Greek and native Italian pasts. After Italy's unification, starting in the late nineteenth century, Magna Graecia would be portrayed with increasing frequency as the site of the first encounter between Greek and Roman civilizations, where a momentous passing of the torch took place. At junctures of heightened nationalism, culminating in the imperial dreams of the Fascist regime, Magna Graecia has also been claimed by Italians as different from, and even better than, Greece itself. Yet as implied by the term “anti-classical,” a coinage proudly used at one such juncture,4 these Italian interpretations speak to an underlying dialectic in which Magna Graecia is defined in relation to the centrality of mainland Greece. This subordination of Magna Graecia undoubtedly has much to do with certain features of its distant past. Its ancient grandeur is a long-standing trope that continues to have currency among scholars who pay otherwise nuanced attention to the modern history of the area.5 Such references run the risk of skimming blithely over the texture of Magna Graecia's antiquity—an antiquity at once Greek, Italian, and a

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complex blend of the two. Coming to grips with the subtleties of this intermixture is yet another challenging aspect of its modern representations: does Magna Graecia count as “classical,” or simply as “antique” (to use Nigel Leask's words)?6 For some commentators, especially in the nineteenth century, the classical quality of Greek South Italy has been attenuated, most notably, by the role that native Italians played in its making and by the secondary status of Greeks of this region—Italiots, as the ancients called them—vis-à-vis their countrymen on the mainland. From these points of view, Magna Graecia's classicism is doubly suspect, leaving the region stranded and not fitting well into any of the neat modern visions and divisions of the classical world famously dichotomized by Edgar Allan Poe's verses on “the glory that was Greece” and “the grandeur that was Rome.”7 When considering how the achievements of Magna Graecia's ancient inhabitants and culture have been undervalued or overlooked, one must attend to the contemporary development of the questione meridionale, or the Southern Question.8 A deep divide between the Italian North and South continues even today, fracturing the Italian nation-state and rendering fragile the country's unification, a phenomenon itself barely 150 years old—a belatedness one can

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never recall too

often. At the heart of the Southern Question is the unevenness of the economic development between the “forward” North and the “backward” South (industrialization may have come late to Italy, but this was especially true of the South).9 But the Southern Question also includes a fierce ideological dimension in which stereotypes that still echo early modern travelers’ descriptions of Naples and the South as a “paradise inhabited by devils” are kept alive.10 Modern images have become entwined with, and draw heavily upon, earlier ones; already in the ancient world, Greek South Italy was depicted as a specter in steep decline, a pale reflection of the prosperous city-state mosaic of preclassical times. Its image today, which crystallized in the eighteenth century, perpetuates this view, dwelling on South Italy as a povertystricken and archaic place, despite (or all the more because of) being blessed by exceedingly productive nature. From the aftermath of the Punic Wars to the present, this idea of a

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region lost to history and alienated from modernity has persistently been projected onto South Italy and repeatedly confirmed in diagnoses of the area's general conditions: economic depression, the scourge of malaria, impoverishment from feudal exploitation, and so on. Carlo Levi's devastating commentary on the dire state of the South belongs to this long tradition. Recent work, however, has begun to revise this entrenched image of the South. Well into the eighteenth century, for instance, Naples was one of the largest cities in Europe, a great modern metropolis and the capital of a substantial kingdom. On the other hand, it is also true that the kingdom's provinces were even then perceived as remote by worldly Neapolitans and displayed many signs of underdevelopment. (The fact that the only university of the entire kingdom was in Naples is telling enough.) Yet it was this imbalance and the problems it created that inspired much original thinking from the Neapolitan Enlightenment through to the Neapolitan revolution and the city's Napoleonic regime. A growing body of scholarship is bringing to light Naples's cultural vibrancy in the early modern period when the city was a major center of innovation and experimentation in a variety of fields, ranging from political and historical thought to music and science.11 Indeed, some are even arguing for a wholesale reevaluation of the kingdom's economic trajectory.12 Beginning in the eighteenth century and culminating in the nineteenth, the shift northward of political and economic power shunted South Italy to the margins of European modernity. This process of marginalization would prove decisive in the making of the new centers. The Southern Question, in essence the issue of the South's marginality, was constitutive, Nelson Moe has argued, of a modern unified Italy (and, conversely, as Lucy Riall has written, it was to a large extent the result of how the Risorgimento unfolded). One might even extend this dynamic notion of center and periphery to understand the emergence of Europe as a political and economic entity (as Roberto Dainotto has suggested).13 Indeed, these issues are still very much at the fore as the continent struggles to define its identity in the twenty-first century.

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How then do we trace the connections between, on the

one hand, these modern historical, political, and ideological processes and, on the other, contemporaneous developments in the history of archaeology, particularly those that involve changing conceptions of Magna Graecia's ancient past? Such a task is part and parcel of what Suzanne Marchand calls “the nightmare” from which “intellectual historians shall never fully awaken,” namely the challenge to explain how ideas become active forces and, conversely, how external factors influence the history of ideas.14 The way forward charted by Marchand and others has been to trace a history of ideas in which individuals and the lives of their minds are richly contextualized within institutional developments and disciplinary practices. For the study of archaeology—an intellectual pursuit in which searches for the ideal and the material interact at close quarters, and whose individual heroics are often enmeshed in mechanisms of funding, circumstances of diplomacy, and the efforts of state-sponsored organizations—this contextualizing approach has already proved fruitful.15 Perhaps inevitably, given the scarcity of written sources, archaeology has been essential to the modern study of Greek South Italy. Less obvious, however, is the foundational role of studies of Magna Graecia in establishing classical archaeology as a professional discipline. Telling the story of the individuals and institutions involved in the marginalization of Magna Graecia means unearthing the origins of our ideas about ancient Greece and classical archaeology itself. In this regard, the story told here is analogous to the ones told by scholars such as Moe and Dainotto, who, in rethinking the relationship between centers and peripheries, have contributed to the ‘provincializing’ of Europe from within, excavating particular European histories and thereby modifying any monolithic understanding of its historical unity.16 As modern scholars established a classical ideal centered on mainland Greece, it was all too easy for them to relegate Magna Graecia progressively to the status of a peripheral ancient colony. It was a displacement predetermined, to some degree, by the hybridity of South Italy's ancient past, which resisted easy categorization, and also by the contemporaneous pressures of

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nationalism; both of these were crucial in shaping the Southern Question. But the displacement was, more immediately, a consequence of lively debates between local (Italian) and foreign (primarily German, French, and English) scholars. These debates were seminal in establishing the disciplinary framework of modern archaeology, indeed the ideal of Greece that emerged from these scholarly and institutional clashes became integral to the development of the field. As the institutionalized study of archaeology took hold in the nineteenth century, the expertise of antiquarians and travelers was disregarded in favor of professional archaeologists and classicists working within new academic frameworks. There is a growing body of work devoted to recovering the various ways in which the antiquarian tradition contributed to the emergence of the archaeological discipline—an approach inspired by Momigliano's path-breaking essay

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“Ancient

History and the Antiquarian” (1950) which highlighted the tremendous debt of modern historical research to earlier antiquarian practices.17 Magna Graecia is an essential part of this story. As the tradition of its study extends back to early Humanists, it displays antiquarianism through its full modern trajectory. Moreover, the relegation of Magna Graecia to the periphery of the ancient Greek world is inseparable from the significant shift by which the new professionals excluded erudite provincials from the imagined community of modern classical archaeologists. Most of these new specialists saw themselves as experts in a quasi-national history of an entity they called “ancient Greece,” whose heart and soul was located in Athens, not in Paestum, Halicarnassus, Delos, or Salonika. This contradiction, of the professional archaeologist whose training centers on Athens but whose actual research often deals with far different regions of the ancient Greek world, has a particularly long history with respect to Magna Graecia. Though this paradox gains prominence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it stretches back to the Renaissance study of the region, which was formative for many of the ways we continue to think about antiquity. This book owes a significant debt to the Italian scholars who have sketched this

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story in its full chronological scope.18 Italy's Lost Greece expands on their work in the direction of wider problematics, highlighting the importance of Greek South Italy in the birth of Hellenism, but also reassessing the role played by local scholars of the region in the history of archaeology—a role generally obscured in stories about the discipline's emergence. Genealogies of modern archaeology have tended to focus on the involvement of specific, national traditions in the rediscovery of Greece, or, when assuming a wider scope, even a worldwide one, positing Hellenism as a ready-made object for competition.19 Lost in all of this has been Italy's Greece, which took shape in a more complicated set of scholarly relationships, involving an in-depth dialogue between locals and foreigners, left unresolved by Italian unification and continuing to the present day, as the region's material culture was repeatedly measured against a Greek ideal primarily located elsewhere. By inserting the lives of individual scholars and connoisseurs into this dynamic, this book offers a less teleological perspective, challenging the idea of a conventional and straightforward narrative of how professional scholarship, official institutions, and nation-states developed in tandem.20 Ultimately it seeks to inspire a more intricate understanding of the history of classical archaeology, while also introducing a more nuanced analysis of the creation and operation of Hellenism. Many of the issues highlighted thus far are adumbrated by the very name of Magna Graecia and the ways in which that name has been understood and explained over time. The name is stranger, indeed, than it might first appear. Well-known epithets, such as Alexander, or Pompey, the Great, might lead one to perceive “Magna Graecia” as a familiar form. But the combination of its constituent terms is in fact quite unusual for an ancient geographical designation, where it

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would be

more common to find the comparative form of the adjective— for example, “Asia Minor.” Whether “Magna” refers to an extension in space or to cultural splendor has long been a subject of debate, as has the question of whether the name implies any kind of comparative meaning (and if so, what such a comparison would refer to). Even the age of this toponym is shrouded in uncertainty. The first definite attestation of

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Magna Graecia comes surprisingly late: in the works of Polybius, a Greek writing history in Rome during the second century BCE (see Histories, 2: 39.1). (Strikingly, for all their discussions of the Greeks of Italy, neither Herodotus nor Thucydides ever employs the term.) In short, neither the time of the name's origins nor its precise meaning nor even the exact area to which it first referred is at all clearly established. The elusiveness of any ultimate explanation has led to a debate that, one could say, is as old as the modern study of Greek South Italy. Acknowledgment of this long-standing controversy is almost obligatory in any discussion of Magna Graecia, and the issue is worth a brief elaboration here, as well, for it illuminates many of the core dynamics at work in the history of the study of Magna Graecia—particularly the disparity between Italian and foreign perspectives on Greek South Italy, and the ultimate interdependence of these points of view. The argument over the name Magna Graecia begins in 1550, in a work by Leandro Alberti (1479–1552), a friar in the Bolognese Dominican College, whose Descrittione di tutta Italia (Description of the whole of Italy) included the first modern description of Magna Graecia committed to print. Alberti—whom I will discuss at greater length in the next chapter—had traveled to South Italy, and his experience became a major source of authority for his account of the little-known southern regions of the peninsula. The question of the name Magna Graecia offered him the opportunity to further burnish his intellectual credentials by citing his friend Giovanni Antonio Flaminio, another Bolognese humanist, distinguished for his unusual knowledge of Greek matters. Based on Flaminio's authority, Alberti rejects earlier opinions that had variously claimed “Magna Graecia” to be the name given to Italy by the ancient Greeks, or an Italian coinage referring to the number of Greek settlements in their country. Instead, he asserts that the name originally referred to the area surrounding Taranto, and that it expressed the admiration felt by Greeks who were newcomers to the region. Alberti thus at once bolsters his own scholarly authority against earlier chroniclers and geographical poems, and

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establishes a native Italian polemical tradition concerning the name. Foreign scholars would approach the question quite differently, as was demonstrated more than seven decades later by the Dutch geographer Philip Clüver, who dealt extensively with the Greek cities of South Italy in his Italia antiqua (Ancient Italy, 1624). Although he titles one chapter “Magna Graecia,” Clüver is nevertheless quick to rule out the search for the name's absolute origins, meaning, or geographic reference: “the Greek settlements,” he wrote, “were too widespread and far apart from each other for it to be possible to establish certain boundaries

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for the

region.”21 Clüver's skepticism is echoed in most foreign works that subsequently have taken up the subject of Magna Graecia —by and large, their authors use the name Magna Graecia, but refrain from entering into detailed discussion about it. Italian scholars, by contrast, would choose to delve into precisely this set of issues—indeed often taking up the debate ferociously. Long after Alberti's work, the prevailing opinion that the name “Magna Graecia” expressed Greek admiration for Italy continued to dominate Italian accounts. For example, seventeenth-century South Italian scholars, reflecting the wider Renaissance passion for Pythagoras, took it upon themselves to highlight the ancient philosopher's connection to Magna Graecia, with some even claiming that Pythagoras had been a native of the region, born in the small Calabrian village of Samo rather than on the Aegean island of the same name.22 But in early eighteenth-century Naples, any emphasis on Pythagorean associations was considered suspect or even heretical; therefore, justifying it along more limited lines became a concern for Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi (1684– 1771), the Neapolitan antiquarian, biblical scholar, and canon. His contribution appeared in a section of his Commentarii in regii Herculanensis Musei aeneas tabulas Heracleenses (Commentaries on the bronze inscriptions of Heraclaea in the Herculaneum Museum, 1754–1755), which examined and glorified the ancient past of the newly independent kingdom of Naples. Mazzocchi maintained the Pythagorean connection,

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but (with more than an echo of Giambattista Vico) was keen to establish an earlier, native South Italian greatness. He was the first to bring a relevant passage by Polybius into the debate: “When in the district of Italy, then known as Great Hellas, the club-houses of the Pythagoreans were burnt down” (Histories, 2: 39.1), out of which he highlighted the word “then.” In addition to giving him the opportunity to chide the great scholar Isaac Casaubon for omitting this word in his 1609 translation, the word “then” offered Mazzocchi grounds for arguing that the name had existed before Pythagoras. His exhaustive search for ancient sources, careful examination of those sources, and systematic approach to the discussion— which Mazzocchi was the first to organize around the origins and reasoning behind the name Magna Graecia—proved to be particularly innovative and influential. Indeed, Italian scholars have long considered Mazzocchi the founder of the modern study of Greek South Italy, foregrounding his discussion of the name Magna Graecia in particular. His analysis certainly represented a successful model, although much of the original context for his work, as we shall see, is lost in laudatory genealogies that have tended to obscure the memory of significant work done by his predecessors. There is more than a little irony in privileging Mazzocchi in describing the origins of the modern debate on the name Magna Graecia. It is true that starting with his work, one can trace the history of the scholarship on Magna Graecia in close connection with the modern history of classical philology, along with its intensifying specialization and disciplinarity. But Mazzocchi sits by and large

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quite comfortably on one

side of this development; he certainly examined texts closely and aimed for exhaustiveness (exhausting his readers in the process with his interminable convoluted footnotes, appendices and etymological speculations), though source criticism, the idea of texts layered with history, eluded him. But it was these new approaches to classical philology, as they developed in Germany at the close of the eighteenth century, that rapidly spread elsewhere, making their way into the classical scholarship of Mazzocchi's successors who studied Magna Graecia.23 Conveniently, these successors could thus claim Mazzocchi as the founder while distancing themselves

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Introduction

from what they were eager to dismiss as his antiquarian quibbling.24 Yet as they followed in his footsteps by taking on discussion of the name Magna Graecia, the nature of the question and its scarcity of sources exposed the limits of such modern approaches. Their own speculations did not fit well within the bounds of modern philology as they professed it, just as Magna Graecia did not fit into the national traditions that developed in tandem with it and hosted the new scholarly discipline. Hence, the ideological complications of scholarly research were laid bare, as a few examples suitably demonstrate. In 1894, Ettore Pais dedicated a full chapter to discussing the name in his Storia della Sicilia e della Magna Grecia (History of Sicily and Magna Graecia). This was the first postunification historical synthesis to treat the region, and Pais intended to make a strong case for including Greek South Italy firmly within the new nation's ancient history, as we shall see. His claim that the name was a self-defining term originating in the fifth century BCE reflects this intention, just as national pride governed the careful balancing of a German philological model and Italian originality in Pais's construction of his own scholarly authority. It was left to one of Pais's students, Emanuele Ciaceri, to author the next major synthesis on Greek South Italy, Storia della Magna Grecia (History of Magna Graecia, 3 vols., 1927–1932). Detecting even in his teacher traces of an alleged foreign bias for ancient Greeks over ancient Italians, Ciaceri argued that the name was a sixthcentury coinage celebrating the splendor of Greek South Italy, a unique achievement owing as much to the native Italians as to the incoming Greeks. It was in this context that Ciaceri first argued that Herodotus and Thucydides refused to use the name in order to avoid recognizing the cultural primacy achieved by the Greeks of South Italy over those of the mainland.25 Ciaceri's intense nationalism was part of his strong support of the newly established Fascist regime, as we will see, and it is in this charged context that one should also read the young Arnaldo Momigliano's intervention on the question of “Magna Graecia” at the close of the 1920s. Momigliano opposed Ciaceri's boastful, ideologically-driven explanation of the name by arguing that its meaning referred

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Introduction

solely to spatial extension. This would, however, remain a solitary position, just as Momigliano was alone in defending (as part of his argument) Strabo's inclusion of Sicily in Magna Graecia—“they call this part of Italy, together with Sicily, Magna Graecia” (Geography 6.1.2)—a

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passage

otherwise the object of many modern emendations (starting with Mazzocchi).26 If such stark divides softened in the postwar period, the discussion of the name Magna Graecia nonetheless continued in earnest, ever suspended in an ambiguous space between current usage and the reconstruction of a putative original meaning, and offering a convenient stage on which most major Italian scholars of the ancient past could display their philological and historical prowess. As late as the 1980s, the dominant trend was to place “Magna Graecia” much earlier than any of its attestations in ancient sources.27 Today the most widely accepted view instead traces the origins of the name to the fourth-century (or perhaps only the third-century) BCE Pythagorean tradition, in recognition of the accomplishments of that school's founding polymath.28 Moreover, the varied history of the term in antiquity, rather than the identification of an ultimate fixed origin for it, has become of most interest to scholars, as demonstrated by Domenico Musti's treatment of the name in his recent masterful survey of the history of Magna Graecia.29 Nevertheless, as recently as 1996 an entire book was devoted to debating the name, staking a claim for more ancient origins and dismissing Thucydides's and Herodotus's silence as evidence of the jealousy felt by mainland Greeks over the success of their overseas cousins.30 It would be easy to dismiss this last work as peripheral scholarship outside the academic mainstream; in fact, the same can be said of much of the history of the debate over the name Magna Graecia. Undoubtedly, the discussion of the name is by and large an Italian phenomenon; even the hybrid expression used in Italian, “Magna Grecia,” half ancient Latin and half modern Italian, employed in popular and academic contexts alike, reinforces the local resonance of the discussion. It also poses in interesting ways the question of boundaries, not only between ancient and modern knowledge but also between

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Introduction

scholarly and popular understanding, and the flow of reciprocal influences between those two spheres. With these considerations in mind, the relevance of the question begins to emerge more clearly, eclipsing what might at first have seemed a merely parochial tendency in Italian scholarship. As Musti does for Magna Graecia in antiquity, I too, in exploring the modern history of the study of this region, am concerned to include different uses of the term, rather than to limit my scope of analysis according to a predetermined interpretation of the name. Through time and the various cultural and political contexts that make up the history of its modern study, the prevailing sense of Magna Graecia's boundaries and characteristics has profoundly changed, and attention to these transformations in understanding Magna Graecia is crucial to the historical investigation here undertaken. I have, however, been prescriptive in one respect, by not extending my analysis to Sicily. The ink spilled in explaining and dissecting the passage in Strabo, and all of its possible emendations, has not changed the fact that Sicily is typically not included within Magna Graecia. In Italy, the annual conferences devoted to

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these regions are two

separate events, in spite of repeated appeals to study the two regions together—appeals that are bolstered by, but which far predate the recent appreciation for, networks and patterns of interrelatedness within the ancient Mediterranean world.31 One of the obstacles to taking a more comprehensive approach that encompasses both Greek Sicily and South Italy is precisely their separation throughout later history. This began in Roman times, when Magna Graecia became part of Roman Italy and Sicily was made a province, creating a sense of political and cultural separation that continues to the present day (especially considering that even today Sicily retains the status and privileges of a “special region”). I agree that Greek Sicilian and South Italian history and archaeology ought to be treated in tandem, and that scholarship on each would benefit from this more holistic approach. That the histories of the study of these regions are to a large extent divergent is, however, a reality reflected in my focus in this book on Magna Graecia as centered on the South Italian mainland.32 Sicily certainly remains an essential reference

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Introduction

point. At many junctures the understanding of Magna Graecia is closely entwined with that of Greek Sicily—be it when eighteenth-century travelers to South Italy compare it to Sicily as much as to Greece, or when historians, be they foreign or Italian, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentyfirst, divide over whether to treat the two regions together or separately. These very instances, however, reveal a dialectical relationship between Greek Sicily and Greek South Italy that shows the importance of appreciating the distinctiveness of Magna Graecia's position in modern studies of the ancient world. In addition to helping to delineate the extent of this study's subject matter, the debate on the name Magna Graecia puts into sharp relief some of its central themes. While the debate is almost exclusively populated by scholars working within Italy, the controversy over Magna Graecia also raises important issues that resonate beyond the Italian context: the Italian provincialism brought out by this long-standing debate, for example, is the flip side of a sense of inferiority, the origins of which go well beyond matters of scholarship. Long after the question seemed safely set aside by non-Italians, yet another foreigner coined a new word for the Greek settlements in South Italy. T. J. Dunbabin first used the term “Western Greeks” in his 1948 book of the same title, and despite appearing to be merely descriptive in nature, it nonetheless raised as many issues as it solved, demonstrating yet again how Italian and foreign points of view on Magna Graecia have remained inextricably bound to one another. This remains the case today. An Italian version of Dunbabin's coinage supplied the title for the 1996 exhibition I Greci in Occidente, installed on the Grand Canal in Venice, at Palazzo Grassi—a venue that, having been restored in 1982 and managed until 2005 by the Fiat Foundation, has been more responsible than any other for introducing onto the Italian scene the model of glamorous, private sponsorship of major cultural events. I Greci in Occidente was a lavish production:

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remarkable objects

—statues, pottery, jewels, plans and photos of temples from collections across the world—were exhibited in compelling settings designed by the renowned architect Gae Aulenti. The

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Introduction

organizers did not shy away from beauty; in their words: “as much as possible, the choice of the exhibits has been based on aesthetic criteria,” while “a minor role has been assigned to what is merely of documentary interest.”33 However well their selection criteria fit with the tradition of displays organized by the Fiat Foundation at Palazzo Grassi, such an avowedly aesthetic emphasis on the presentation of archaeological materials from South Italy was certainly unusual in the long history of how the region has been perceived and portrayed. Not since the eighteenth-century craze for the temples of Paestum—when, in the span of twenty years from 1764 to 1784, no fewer than eight illustrated books were published— did aesthetes take such a deep interest in this area of the ancient world. Yet the aesthetic turn of the 1996 exhibition, made so explicit by the organizers, was destined for a mixed reception in the scholarly world of classical studies, one which shows subtle fissures persisting within the imagined, supranational, modern community of classical scholarship. While Italian scholars themselves expressed reservations about the show's aesthetic bias, Jasper Griffin could not help linking the aesthetic focus of Palazzo Grassi's I Greci in Occidente to Italians’ proclivity for fashionable appearances and showy displays, contrasting it to the more prosaic tastes of museums in the English-speaking world.34 While rehearsing familiar stereotypes, Griffin concluded by applauding Italy for not being ashamed to display its cultural debt to Greek culture, in positive contrast to what he called the “anxieties of influence” that he perceived in Martin Bernal's work. This remark finds Griffin aligned with statements of official governmental support for this privately sponsored exhibition: the Italian minister of cultural assets, endorsing the project, wrote in the catalogue introduction that the migration of the Greeks to Italy “marked the dawn of modern civilization”. But in fact, a number of “anxieties of influence,” along with their costs, are what emerge from I Greci in Occidente. The term “Western Greeks” supposedly refers to all Greek settlements in the western Mediterranean; indeed, various maps and essays in the exhibit, along with a few of the objects, extended the reach of the 1996 show to lands beyond Italy and Sicily. There was little doubt, however,

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Introduction

that the question of Greek civilization in Italy formed the core of the project, and that in this emphasis persisted an unspoken comparison to mainland Greece—apparently irrepressible regardless of whether one invokes “Magna Graecia” or “the Western Greeks.” Indeed, the exhibition's aesthetic bias is significant precisely in reference to this unspoken comparison, for it calls to mind the vexed debate over whether classical Greek art ought to be considered the pinnacle of the Western artistic tradition. To a certain extent, the public reception of the show spoke to such questions; while I Greci in Occidente shared in the success of other archaeological exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi, which had all enjoyed higher numbers of visitors and earned

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more revenue than modern art

shows held in the same venue, it was distinctly less successful than exhibitions held in the same space and similarly dedicated to the glory of ancient civilizations, be they Celtic (1991), Phoenician (1988), Etruscan (2001), or Mayan (1998). Apparently, the appeal of the western Greeks could not compete with the distinctive charm exercised by these more exotic civilizations. In still other ways, I Greci in Occidente and the context of its creation highlight issues that reflect the long history of how Greek South Italy has been studied throughout time, issues that are in fact the subject of this book. The Venice catalogue, a hefty tome whose more than fifty essays take diverse views of the political and cultural history of the Greek settlements, was clearly meant to reach a wider audience than the one that actually attended the show. In fact, the English translation of this catalogue represented the first synthetic work of scholarship on the Greek colonies since the 1968 reissue of Dunbabin's The Western Greeks. But widening our focus beyond the megaevent at Palazzo Grassi complicates the picture. Smaller exhibits were held in Paestum, Sybaris, and Taranto, among other traditional Magna Graecian cities, complementing the Venice exhibition and bringing it to the very region it treated. Sponsorship for these local exhibitions came from the European Union, which has invested significantly in South Italy over the years. The catalogues from these exhibits were not as lavish as the one produced for Palazzo Grassi, but their production quality and scholarly

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Introduction

value were still high, if destined to remain untranslated and thus more peripheral. Perhaps fittingly, moreover, exertions that went into I Greci in Occidente have left their most lasting mark on the South, as the museums renovated for that occasion still stand today, surviving even in the face of economic crisis and restricted budgeting for cultural productions. If the league of Greek-Italian poleis led by Taranto in the fourth century BCE failed in its attempts to resist the native Italians and later the Romans, this city has nonetheless succeeded, a few millennia later, in establishing itself as a scholarly capital of Magna Graecia studies, with an annual conference on Magna Graecia that has now been running since 1961. This conference has formed the backbone of a long-term scholarly effort that goes well beyond the ballyhooed Venice exhibition, but which remains, ironically, on the peripheries of the classics world. From the vantage point of this conference, traditionally held at the tile and concrete Hotel Delfino, situated on the unfortunately modern lungomare, the view is not only very Italian but also far removed from the international network of classical scholarship. Belying the bold assertions of the epoch-making character of the Venice exhibition—“the most complete picture of Greeks in the West ever attempted”—the marginality of Magna Graecia in the modern scholarly landscape of the ancient Greek world has proven to be a lasting phenomenon, reflected even in the readiness of foreign critics to read the Venetian extravaganza as an event that was strictly Italian. Two more recent exhibitions dedicated to Magna Graecia have reinforced this impression, though in vastly different ways. In 2002, Magna Graecia:

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Greek Art from South Italy and

Sicily opened at the Cleveland Art Museum in Ohio, later moving to the Tampa Art Museum in Florida. Despite its modest scale—the show focused on eighty objects, most of them on loan from Italy—the exhibition yielded a beautifully photographed catalogue complete with essays that made contemporary Italian scholarly expertise available in English translation.35 This exquisite catalogue, firmly in the tradition of art-history studies, will certainly play a role in the wider appreciation and understanding of Magna Graecia's material culture, beyond the borders of Italy. More ambitious and

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Introduction

innovative was Magna Grecia: Archeologia di un sapere (Magna Graecia: archaeology of a knowledge), a 2005 show that was, in every respect, an Italian undertaking.36 Displaying objects rarely seen by the public, and presenting them in comprehensive, nuanced historical context, this Italy-wide effort enlisted major contemporary scholars in the field and resulted in cutting-edge concepts. In particular, under the leadership of Salvatore Settis, the exhibit succeeded in aligning the history of archaeological research in Greek South Italy with a display of the archaeological finds themselves. It won wide praise for its innovative installation that, one critic wrote, “in its simplicity touched on perfection.”37 The occasion for this innovative exhibit was to celebrate the recent foundation of the Università della Magna Graecia based in Catanzaro, and it was in this Calabrese town that the show was located, at the heart of ancient Magna Graecia, but far from more obvious locales that usually attract visitors in Italy. Taken together, the Cleveland and Catanzaro exhibitions, so disparate in aim, scale, and scope (though perhaps equally unusual in their respective locations), highlight once again the profound gap between Italy and the rest of the world on the historical understanding of Magna Graecia—a gap that remains difficult to bridge, even within the current postcolonial phase in classical scholarship that in many ways has brought new attention to Magna Graecia. (The very establishment of the series on the Western Greeks in which this present book appears attests to the expansion of interest in Greek South Italy).38 This book is dedicated to explaining that disjunction, and to transcending it; to understanding the developments in intellectual history that have persistently sidelined Magna Graecia, casting doubt on its place in history and obscuring the important story it has to tell; and to unfolding the challenging dynamics of scholarship on a region both “Greek” and “Italian,” both exotic and within reach. It is to the earliest origins of these scholarly developments that we must first turn our attention.

Notes (p.15)

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Introduction

Notes:

(1.) See Levi 2006: 3. This sentence from the 1945 novel Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli (Christ stopped at Eboli) indeed has been used as an epigraph to modern archaeological studies of the region, see Barker 1991: 35. (2.) Momigliano 1984b: 142. (3.) Whitley 2001: 23. (4.) The coiner was the archaeologist Pirro Marconi in 1930; see Settis 1994: 875–877 and 2006: 32–33. (5.) For example Moe 2002: 42–43. (6.) See Leask 2002. (7.) From the poem “To Helen,” see Poe 2000: 166. (8.) For a succinct and insightful introduction, see Davis 2006: 3–6, and, with an emphasis on the historiography of the question, Salvemini 2006, both with further bibliography. For a suggestive collection of essays in English on this topic see Schneider 1998, which approaches Italy's “Southern Question” within the paradigm developed by Edward Said's Orientalism. (9.) On uneven development see Smith 1984. (10.) See Moe 2002: 46 and Davis 2006: 3. (11.) For an introduction in English, see Imbruglia 2000; see also Robertson 2005 , and Schnapp 2007. (12.) Petrusewicz 1989 and Davis 2006. (13.) See Moe 2002, Dainotto 2007 and Riall 2000 and 2009: 100–116. (14.) Marchand 1996: xxii. (15.) For classical archaeologies see Marchand 1996, Dyson 1998 and 2006, Barbanera 1998, Morris 1994 and 2000, Shanks 1996 , and Hamilakis 2007.

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Introduction

(16.) ‘Provincializing Europe’ is a reference to Dipesh Chakrabarty's crucial work (see Chakrabarty 2008, especially 3–26); see Lianeri 2011: 7–10 for a subtle discussion of Chakrabarty's approach in relation to modern constructions of Europe's classical antiquity; Salvatore Settis's 1989 essay on the nineteenth-century study of Siciliot and Italiot art, foundational for this present work, poignantly already revolved around the terms of “center” and “periphery”, an argument he developed further in Settis 1993 and 1994. (17.) See at least Schnapp 1997 and Marchand 2007 on archaeology and antiquarianism with further bibliography; see other essays collected in Miller 2007 for the indebtedness of this reappreciation of antiquarianism to Arnaldo Momigliano's foundational essay (Momigliano 1955a) and Phillips 1996 for a careful analysis of Momigliano's evolving thought on this topic. Momigliano's argument, subverting any simple assumption about the progress of modern historical knowledge, involves a reassessment of terms, reclaiming “antiquarian” from its association, developed in the course of the eighteenth century, with lack of professionalism, scholarly seriousness or relevance. It as important to remember that “archaeology” itself did not circulate widely before the early nineteenth century – something of a caveat for any work on history of archaeology extending into the early modern period. In this book I use both terms as carefully as I can, but certainly slip at times into looser usage. (18.) See Galasso 1989, Ampolo 1985, Settis 1989 , and Salmeri 1996. (19.) Contrast the national focus of Dyson 1998, Marchand 1996 , and Hamilakis 2007 with the wider one of Dyson 2006, Díaz-Andreu 2007: 100–110, and Trigger 2006: 40–68. (20.) Notable exceptions incude Grafton 1983 and Marchand 1996, which trace how, in Germany, Hellenism came to fully realize its particular sociocultural and political cachet, establishing many of the institutional characteristics that still underlie modern classical archaeology, philology, and ancient history.

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Introduction

(21.) Clüver 1624: 1323. (22.) See Casini 1998: 145. (23.) For a nuanced and careful reading of these developments in classical philology see Grafton, Most, and Zetzel 1985 , and Timpanaro 2005: 43–118. (24.) Mazzocchi's “sofisticherie” in Ettore Pais’ words (Pais 1894: 525). Note that, unless otherwise stated, all translations from other languages into English are my own. (25.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 184–203 and 1930. (26.) See Momigliano 1975 and 1992. (27.) See Cantarella 1968 and Maddoli 1982 and 1985. (28.) See Cordano 2005. (29.) See Musti 2005: 103–187. (30.) See Ameruoso 1996. (31.) Crucial work for this line of research has been Horden and Purcell 2000, but see also the earlier Gras 1995. (32.) And, significantly, the history of the modern study of Sicil has often been told, and with no sense of necessity to include Magna Graecia; see for example Momigliano 1984a and b, De Vido 1997, Ceserani 2000, Pelagatti 2001 and the ongoing work by Clemente Marconi, for which now see Marconi 1997– 2002. (33.) See Bottini 1996: 17. (34.) Griffin 1996. (35.) Bennett, Paul, and Iozzo 2002. (36.) See Settis and Parra 2005. (37.) Vittorio Sgarbi quoted in ilgiornaledicalabria.it on August 5, 2005.

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Introduction

(38.) In English see, recently, van Dommelen 1998, Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002, and Rowlands and van Dommelen forthcoming. For the readers interested in following up specific questions concerning Magna Graecia's ancient material culture and history the most up to date surveys are Musti 2005, Greco 2008 and La Torre 2011.

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Discoveries and Rediscoveries

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

Discoveries and Rediscoveries Giovanna Ceserani

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords This chapter complicates the received notion of the Magna Graecia's modern discovery during the 'Hellenic turn’ of eighteenth-century Europe. The historical geography of Leandro Alberti and others shows earlier Renaissance antiquarianism's perceptions of Greek South Italy as a place of picturesque natural beauty and lost antiquity, seemingly irreconcilable with the wider Italian classical past. The eighteenth-century rediscovery of Paestum is examined within its Neapolitan intellectual context, which includes the figures of Giambattista Vico, Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi and even J.J. Winckelmann, and in relation to the emergence of vase studies analysis that reveals the differential investment of Italian and foreign scholars in Magna Graecia, with latter bent on a search for an ideal conception of classical Greece that would effectively relegate Magna Graecia to the margins of classical study.

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Keywords: Renaissance, Eighteenth century, historical geography, antiquarianism, Leandro Alberti, Giambattista Vico, Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi, J.J. Winckelmann, Paestum, vase studies

In late 1777, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, old and fragile, took one of his rare trips out of Rome, journeying to Paestum in the company of an architect, an assistant, and his son Francesco. The great idiosyncratic Italian artist, most famous for his Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) and etchings of Rome, returned with a wealth of material for what would be his final work, published after his death: a collection of twenty-one views of the Paestum temples’ ruins.1 The plates are vintage Piranesi, who made the most of the temples’ proximity to one another—from each temple, a second one is almost always in view—and of the local atmosphere. The visionary dreariness of the scenes is enhanced by a certain intimacy with the buildings: ruin gives way to ruin, with the crumbling temples populated by a jumbled assortment of locals with their oxen (see figure 1.1). It may seem surprising to find Piranesi, who had strenuously championed Roman architecture against what he saw as the rigidity of the Greek revivalists, treading Greek soil and standing in awe of Greek monuments.2 The simple explanation is that the elderly Piranesi, at long last, capitulated to the contemporary passion for all things Greek; his journey to Paestum was, in this view, proof that Greece's time had come. But this account overlooks Piranesi's own words, in the captions to the frontispiece and at least one of the plates, which manifest an admiration for the temples that, rather than highlighting their Greek character, is bound up with their apparent freedom from rigid rules.3 He even implies that their grandeur is enhanced by their location —not in mainland Greece, but on the Italian peninsula, where they absorbed what he considered to be the aesthetically enriching flavor of the local culture.

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The

belatedness of Piranesi's journey reminds us Figure 1.1. Plate 6 of Piranesi's work on that the Paestum, depicting the pronaos of what process of today has been identified as the temple of Paestum's Hera 1. It had previously been called the rediscovery Basilica, but Piranesi considered it a was long—the meeting hall for the amphictyons. From first architect Collection of the engraved works of to visit the site, Giambattista and Francesco Piranesi as we shall see, had done (Rome, 1761–1793). (Research Library, so in 1750. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles More [90-B18303 v.11].) trenchantly, however, Piranesi demonstrates that the evolving reception of Paestum crucially involved an understanding of both its Italian and Greek pasts.

Piranesi's images are among the most haunting and evocative to emerge from the eighteenth-century discovery of Paestum— the moment when these temples, which had been standing in the same place since antiquity, suddenly began to be seen again. This specific moment often doubles as for the modern discovery of Magna Graecia tout court. Indeed, Piranesi's trip to Paestum is an apt point of departure for considering modern scholarship's involvement with Magna Graecia, particularly since his complex understanding of these remains troubles any easy assumption of discovery or rediscovery, be it of Paestum or of Magna Graecia as a whole. Scholars have long privileged the eighteenth century as the era of Greek South Italy's discovery, with Paestum offering a representative instance.4 Such a story dovetails conveniently with the contemporaneous enthusiasm for Greece and its material remains. Fittingly, it was Johann Joachim Winckelmann—the German art historian and acknowledged founder of modern Hellenism and classical archaeology—who is credited as the first, in Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff 's words, to “really see” Paestum.5 (This visit in 1758 was probably as close to Greece itself as Winckelmann

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ever got.) Nevertheless, for all its pivotal significance in the history of the modern study of Magna Graecia, this story requires a bit of nuancing. The eighteenth century saw the invention of many powerful genealogies and foundational narratives, and Paestum offers one such compelling story of discovery. But such tales need careful handling: Winckelmann, the self-professed explorer of new continents, tells us as much when he wonders aloud how strange it was that no one had made more of Paestum before.6 To make full sense of the modern investment in Magna Graecia, we need to resist the lure of these narratives and examine the alternative layers they contain. Paestum's reputation as a place to experience “Greece” was in fact shortlived. Moreover, the eighteenth-century discovery of Magna Graecia was a rediscovery; indeed it was one in a series of rediscoveries, each of which entailed competing interpretations. My purpose in this chapter is, first, to set these various rediscoveries of Magna Graecia in relation to one other; and, second, to approach the blossoming of interest in Magna Graecia as more than a mere spin-off of excitement over the so-called discovery of Greece. What this discussion will make clear is the profound instability of the very concept of “Greece,” and the evolving scholarly practices that sought to establish it. Long before the eighteenth century, Renaissance humanists had written about Magna Graecia, while barely mentioning Paestum. The sense of discovery

(p.20)

that permeated later

treatments of the region depended on the dismissal of these previous writings (many of which had been reprinted early in the eighteenth century). The new generation of scholars and travelers sought features of Magna Graecia's past that Renaissance humanists had neglected or failed to appreciate— Paestum is indeed a perfect case in point. Though a close look at the work of this new generation reveals the distinctiveness of their approach to Magna Graecia, it also makes clear the considerable debt they owed to their predecessors. These Renaissance works, when considered in their original context rather than seen merely as embryonic, introduce a world in which debate about South Italy's past was far more rarefied than it would later become, and in which ancient Greece was

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not at all prominent. Yet the challenge Renaissance humanists faced in fitting Magna Graecia into a primarily Roman-based past led to tendencies that persisted in later historical investigations, including the differential treatment of the region's past by foreign and local scholars. Thus it is from the scholarly world of the Renaissance humanists that my reassessment of Magna Graecia's “discovery” begins.

The Renaissance Turns South: Magna Graecia and Humanist Historical Geography The Greek past of South Italy first made its appearance in print in a trio of works published in the second half of the sixteenth century: Leandro Alberti's Descrittione di tutta Italia (Description of the whole of Italy, 1550); Antonio De Ferrariis Galateo's Liber de situ Iapygiae (Book on Puglia, 1558); and Gabriele Barrio's De antiquitate et situ Calabriae (On the antiquity and geography of Calabria, 1571).7 In order to appreciate Magna Graecia's significance in these works it is crucial to understand how deeply rooted they were in a Roman-dominated view of the ancient past, and not to approach them, as is often done, simply as precursors to the later infatuation with Greek remains. It has long been recognized that the Renaissance affair with antiquity was primarily a Roman one.8 This is all the more clear in the Renaissance rediscovery of tangible remains. Aside from the Arundel marbles, Greek coins and a few Greek inscriptions, and the Parthenon sketches by Cyriac of Ancona, most of the material to be seen was Roman, not Greek.9 This was the case not only in Italy but throughout Europe, as the Renaissance spread north from its Italian roots. This Roman dominance, however, was particularly charged in the Italian peninsula, where the ancient Roman world was centered; here, the desire at the core of Renaissance humanism to establish continuity with the ancient past confronted the all-too palpable fact of classical antiquity's pastness. To this Romanocentrism of the Italian Renaissance, Alberti, De Ferrariis Galateo, and Barrio added a new dimension by investigating the Greek sites of Magna Graecia.

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(p.21)

Despite their common grounding in humanist culture,

these authors came to publish on Magna Graecia by different routes. Descrittione di tutta Italia by Alberti, a Dominican preacher and inquisitor in Bologna, reflects the scholarly emphasis of this friar's order. His final and most ambitious book, for which he abandoned the Latin of his early writings in favor of the vernacular, it assumed the responsibility of illustrating the entire Italian peninsula for a growing reading public. De Ferrariis Galateo (ca. 1444–1517), often referred to simply by his academic name “Galateo”, was a physician who served in Naples as court doctor to the last kings of the Aragonese dynasty, under whose sponsorship the Neapolitan Renaissance flourished. He wrote of Magna Graecia in Liber de situ Iapygiae, a passionate work dedicated to his native region of Puglia, which was not published until long after his death. In it, Galateo praised Puglia's natural wonders and cultural and ethical virtues, which he attributed to the region's Greek ancestry, drawing crucial inspiration from them at a time when the French invasions of Naples threatened to wreak havoc on the Italian states’ fragile political balances. Like Alberti, Barrio (ca. 1506–ca. 1577) was a man of the church; but, like De Ferrariis Galateo, he wrote of Magna Graecia from a regional perspective (though his focus was on his native Calabria, not Puglia). A protégé of Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto, himself a native of Calabria and the secretary of the Vatican library, Barrio composed his De antiquitate et situ Calabriae with the aim of defending the region against mistaken claims he found in Alberti's work, as well as in the writers of the Neapolitan Renaissance. For all the differences among them, the commonality between these men's accounts, as they introduced Greek South Italy in the humanist antiquarian tradition, resides precisely in the fact that they belonged to a world in which ancient Greece as such barely figured. Like their antiquarian counterparts across Europe, these writers located themselves in relation to Renaissance historical geography, as invented a century earlier by Flavio Biondo (1392–1463).10 Primarily based in Rome, Biondo focused in his antiquarian work on Italy's Roman past. Yet, while Biondo's knowledge of Italy remained incomplete (he never traveled south of Naples, let alone to

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Magna Graecia)—Alberti, De Ferrariis Galateo and Barrio explicitly widened the investigation of the past from Italy's center to its southern regions. As they did so, they opened fissures in Biondo's model, straining his reliance on the Roman past as a means of holding together a description of the Italian peninsula. More problematically, perhaps, the addition of an ancient and elusive Greek grandeur to Roman antiquity unsettled the fragile balance between past and present, which characterized Renaissance historical geography as shaped by Biondo. From their work an image of South Italy emerges as a poorly managed and even primitive land, despite its abundant natural resources and glorious, if elusive, past. In addition, these writers gave rise to an element that would long characterize studies of the South Italian past, namely the dialectic between foreigners and locals as they contested Magna Graecia's representation. (p.22)

Biondo's Historical Geography and the Italian Past

To appreciate these early works on Magna Graecia one must first understand Biondo's methodology and his vision of the ancient Italian past. There is no overstating Biondo's significance; in Roberto Weiss's words, “he was in archaeology what Valla was in philology.”11 He was vitally involved in the remarkable collective intellectual enterprise that was the fifteenth-century rediscovery of antiquity in Rome.12 In fact, the collective character of this effort was integral to the shaping of Biondo's vision of the Italian past. The efforts made by the Papal States to expand political and military influence had been accompanied by great cultural investment: along with the most prominent architects and artists of the time, leading humanist scholars converged on Rome, employed in various capacities by the Papal Curia.13 Biondo, a native of Forlì, spent most of his career in Rome; so did other major fifteenth-century Italian humanists, in spite of their cities of origin and, often, of their open anticlerical positions. Scholars such as Poggio Bracciolini (originally from Arezzo), Ermolao Barbaro (from Venice), and Lorenzo Valla (from Piacenza) worked to ground the cultural and political prestige of the Papal States in Roman antiquity.14 To be sure, the ancient past was not always suited to this task; the case of the Calabrese Pomponio Leto, a professor at the Roman Gymnasium who was

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imprisoned for hereticism and republicanism on account of the pagan rituals adopted at his Accademia Romana, tells us this much.15 From this charged cultural moment emerged ideas that would hold sway for many centuries. The centripetal power of Rome, while increasing the mobility of many Italian humanist scholars and intensifying their interactions, also lent a newfound concreteness to the ideal of a unified Italy.16 There would be no politically unified Italy, of course, until 1860, but in this fifteenth-century highly mobile humanist scene, of which Rome was a major center, the earlier invocations of “Italia,” such as those by Petrarch and Macchiavelli, gained new cultural force. This same impetus lay behind Biondo's strenuous imagining of Italy as a unified whole, with the Roman past as its basis. Among the efforts taking place in Rome at the time, Biondo's work was methodologically distinct. In Roma instaurata (Rome restored, 1446) Biondo analyzed not only ancient writers and inscriptions but the actual remains on the ground—the gates, obelisks, baths, theaters, and so on—in order to offer the first architectural and topographical reconstruction of the ancient city. His next work, Italia illustrata (Italy illuminated, 1453), took on the whole peninsula. Proceeding region by region, town by town, Biondo took as his point of departure the contemporary territory, using it as a springboard for recovering its ancient memories. Italia illustrata did not include an analysis of ancient monuments, yet antiquity was crucial to establishing the character of each place. The past was evoked and investigated in various historical digressions, in the listings of each town's past famous citizens, and in Biondo's keen interest

(p.23)

in linking ancient and modern

names—an operation that often entailed research to identify the modern location of ancient sites. The model of antiquarian research that Biondo generated would be adopted and then applied elsewhere in Italy and beyond. Countless works of Renaissance historical geography followed Biondo's lead, as humanists adapted his approach to the topography of their own towns, regions, and countries. The results were of course varied, with perhaps the greatest single variant being the degree of attention with which monuments

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were actually examined. Although Biondo's method flourished in Rome, such endeavors often lagged behind in the rest of Italy (the persistent lack of scholarly interest in the temples of Paestum is a case in point). On the other hand, scholars as far north as England and Scandinavia began looking at their own countries through the prism of historical geography, realizing that their own antiquity consisted primarily of material remains, which they set out to explore without the support of ancient written sources.17 Ironically, Biondo forged his approach in dialogue with Greek and Roman writers who had paid limited attention to ancient remains; Strabo, for example, stated clearly his lack of interest in destroyed cities, unless they were famous ones (Geography 6.1.2).18 But Biondo's distinctive version of historical geography ensured that scholarly discussions and even disagreements about the past would employ a range of tools, including source criticism and examinations of tangible remains. In the case of the Italian peninsula—Biondo's own locale and object of study—further ironies were at play. Ancient authors had not only provided a model for Biondo's approach, but they also served as the principal sources for classical Italian history. Moreover, the ancients depicted the peninsula at the perceived pinnacle of its past glory; they inspired calls for renewal, then, even as they revealed how distant such a goal might be. Biondo's belief in a possible resurgence of past glory is evident in his Roma triumphans (Rome triumphant, 1459), which includes a celebration of the greatness and splendor of fifteenth-century papal Rome (itself, ironically enough, constructed substantially from dismantled ancient remains). In Italy Illuminated, ancient Rome justified Biondo's vision of, and hopes for, a unified Italy. The book's regional divisions, for example, were drawn directly from those of Augustan Italy, which he had painstakingly labored to reconstruct. (Today more than half of the twenty Italian regions continue to claim an ancient Roman name.) This envisioned unity, however strenuously Biondo imagined it, undoubtedly contrasted with the contemporary political division of Italy into many different states. After Biondo's time, the contrast sharpened. In 1494 dynastic disputes concerning the Kingdom of Naples set in motion a number of conflicts among Italian city-states, the

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Papal States, and major foreign powers.19 By their conclusions in 1559, these “Italian Wars,” which climaxed dramatically in the 1527 sack of Rome, had diminished the relevance of Italian states, allowing for increased foreign domination of the peninsula.20 In addition, as Italian

(p.24)

Renaissance culture

took hold and spread throughout Europe, it spurred the rise of other centers, thus undermining the cultural precedence of modern Rome.21 The writings of Alberti, Barrio, and Galateo were shaped by this political decline. Moreover, these writers encountered an additional, if less well defined, grand antiquity within Italy's history: its Greek past in Magna Graecia. Most of the classical authors who served as models and sources for these humanists framed the history of Greek South Italy as something already concluded, decidedly a part of the past. There were also challenging gaps to bridge between Magna Graecia's antiquity and its present; the Greek past, after all, had been interrupted by a Roman one, and since both of these pasts had involved intimate contact with ancient local populations, their intricacies were difficult to trace (especially given the scarcity of ancient sources). The very names of the southern regions attested to the complexity of these layers. These ranged from names with Greco-Roman origins, like Lucania, Bruttii, Apulia, and Campania, to some rooted in the late mediaeval history of the Neapolitan Kingdom and its administrative partitions, like “Terra del Lavoro,” to a few that drew their origins from the time of Byzantine rule in South Italy, such as Basilicata and Calabria (the latter, moreover, transferred from the peninsula's “heel” to its “toe” sometime around the seventh century CE). As a result, humanist scholars were unable to draw a seamless portrait of Magna Graecia's history from past to present, regardless of whether the region was considered part of Italy (as in Alberti's work) or identified in strictly regional terms (as in the work of Galateo and Barrio). Faced with such difficulties, these writers elaborated distinctive tropes that would resurface time and again in later treatments of Magna Graecia. Magna Graecia in Alberti's Descrittione di tutta Italia

Discussions of the Renaissance depiction of Magna Graecia typically begin (and often end) with Galateo and Barrio.22 In Page 10 of 82

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what follows, Alberti will receive more extensive consideration. There are several reasons for privileging his work. First, by conceiving of Magna Graecia in supraregional terms, he escaped the limited regionalism of Galateo's focus on Puglia and Barrio's on Calabria. Indeed, Alberti was the first to consider Magna Graecia in the comprehensive terms in which scholars now conceive of it, and the first of many who struggled to find a meaningful place for Magna Graecia within the Italian past. Alberti enacted a crucial methodological turn within the humanist tradition, taking up the model of Biondo's historical geography—the antiquarian mode of systematically describing one's own country—in order to describe countries to which he traveled.23 In doing so he laid bare the disparity between foreign and local accounts of any given region. Although, as a Bolognese, he does not express the passionate investment in the South that characterizes the

(p.25)

later publications by

Barrio and Galateo, his status as an outsider may have encouraged those subsequent expressions. It is not simply that Alberti's view as a Bolognese can be contrasted with those of native writers, but that the interactions between foreign and local accounts together helped to lay the groundwork for the image of Magna Graecia that is still with us today. It is in this way that Alberti, who does not attend to material remains in the way we might expect of a figure in the history of archaeology, proves fundamental to our sense of the evolving study of Magna Graecia. Writing a century after Biondo, Alberti has long been cast as a mere epigone—at best an updater—of his illustrious predecessor. This was, in part, due to his use of the vernacular and his reliance on Annio da Viterbo's infamous forged accounts (a fault from which chronology had saved Biondo), which led scholars to dismiss Alberti as little more than a verbose popularizer of historical geography.24 But while he was, indeed, the first to follow Biondo's lead in describing the whole of the Italian peninsula, he is best appreciated on his own terms. He was a writer well versed in contemporary philological methods, to such an extent that he even corrected some of Biondo's mistakes.25 His perceived verbosity can be

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attributed to a certain nostalgia for a glory he saw as irrevocably lost, swept away with the foreign domination and political uncertainty that followed the Italian Wars of the sixteenth century. Indeed, Alberti's eerie silence on contemporary political and religious upheavals is the flip side of his garrulity in relating myths, legends, and anecdotes from the long-lost past.26 In certain respects, the breadth of Alberti's work extended well beyond that of Biondo. After all, he had an additional century of events to narrate, not to mention a wealth of new information drawn from the local antiquarians who had been inspired by Biondo's model. He also broadened Biondo's geographical scope, taking in not just the Italian peninsula but also the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. But what sets Alberti apart from Biondo the most—and makes him essential in any treatment of Magna Graecia's modern representation—is the simple fact that he actually completed his project. Biondo's “illustration” of Italy was crucially unfinished: he had stopped short just at the threshold of the southern regions, in part because he lacked direct experience of the area, and in part because he had no secondary sources to compensate for this lack.27 Alberti, in contrast, was not hampered by either of these limitations. The fact that Alberti managed to cover the whole of Italy, including its farthest southern regions, is tied to the genesis and development of his larger project. Unlike Biondo, when Alberti set out to write his Descrittione di tutta Italia, he was able to refer, for Naples and its surroundings, to works that had emerged from the Neapolitan Renaissance, as well as to Pandolfo Collenuccio's Compendio de le istorie del Regno di Napoli (Compendium of the histories of the Neapolitan Kingdom, 1498).28 More significantly, he could resort to his own firsthand experience of the southernmost Italian regions. This experience, as

(p.26)

with much else that shaped his

intellectual life, he owed to his vocation as a Dominican friar. Entering the order at fourteen, he then moved from Forlì to Bologna; he was educated there and subsequently spent most of his life within the walls of that city's Dominican College, in close proximity to the university's humanist circles.29 Through

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the powerful new tool of the culture of the printed book, he directed his humanist learning to the benefit of the educational and popularizing aims of the Order of Preachers. For example, he wrote his edifying De viris illustribus ordinis Praedicatorum (Lives of famous Dominicans, 1517), which applied the model of classical biography to religious history, with some help from prominent Bolognese humanists, including Alberti's longtime friend Giovanni Antonio Flaminio. The latter was a scholar whose Greek learning meant a great deal to Alberti, and toward whose son's suspected heresies Alberti turned a blind eye. For his Historie di Bologna (Histories of Bologna, 1531), commissioned by the city itself, Alberti resorted to the vernacular, preferring a more accessible idiom to that of most humanists at the time. This choice reflected his interest in reaching a wider audience, as did his predilection for describing events and anecdotes of daily life. Such scholarly and stylistic variety also characterized Alberti's Descrittione di tutta Italia, a work, in his own words, of “geography, and topography, history and anthropology.”30 Alberti's position within Bologna's Dominican College was also crucial to his ability to travel throughout the Italian peninsula. At the college he had become close to Francesco Silvestri of Ferrara, who was elected master general of the order in 1525. When Silvestri set off on the traditional official visit of the newly elected master to the numerous Dominican monasteries and convents, he brought Alberti along. The group departed from Rome in 1525, headed toward Puglia, and spent time in Sicily, Calabria, and Lucania before arriving in Campania in 1526. They then headed north, through the Veneto and Lombardy, crossing the Alps into France. Silvestri's unexpected death in Reims put an end to the journey in 1528. Alberti, however, continued to work for the next twenty years on his description of Italy; a letter dated June 1542 refers to him as that “old priest, minister of the muses, who collects all things about Italy.”31 As he composed his Descrittione back in Bologna, mementoes of his travels provided crucial fodder for his descriptions, especially of the South. His time there had given Alberti access to untapped resources; for example, in Palermo he consulted, and even made a personal copy of, the

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unpublished manuscript of a description of Italy by another Dominican, Friar Pietro Ranzano.32 Along the way he met local scholars, and his interactions and disagreements with them appear frequently in the Descrittione. In some cases, Alberti's references to these writers are all that endure of their work; this is the case of the “rhymes in vernacular” by Giovan Battista Martorano of Cosenza, a man of “rare and curious wit,” who helped Alberti understand Calabria's ancient places.33 In the South, Alberti's descriptions take on a more personal quality. Of Naples, where he could rely on Collenuccio's work but not much else, he

(p.27)

described his own impressions,

adding these to the ancient sources’ praise of Campania as the most blessed of Italian regions: “the garden of Italy,” or Pliny's “Campania felix.” His vivid account of touring the ruins in Pozzuoli, Campi Flegrei, and Baia is one of the earliest such descriptions.34 As Alberti traveled south from Naples as far as Calabria, moving through little-known territory that seemed to him miraculous, the impressionistic quality of his prose became even more pronounced. The ancient trope of Campania felix became, for him, Calabria felix: the wonderful variety and abundance of produce, the landscapes, and the climate inspired Alberti to praise the region for providing all “things not only necessary for men's living, but also for their delights”35—a turn of phrase that the ancient geographers had coined and reserved previously for all of Italy (the garden of the world) or for Campania in particular (the garden of Italy). His anecdotes evoke the fragrance of citrus trees and landscapes that seem to him like perfectly cultivated gardens (“ornate gardens rather than wild places”) where December turns to May;36 they also evoke the hospitality offered to the traveling friars by a local noblewoman, who provided a meal of wonderful produce in her own citrus- and rose-scented garden. At times, he even gives the sense of being overwhelmed by nature, as when he writes of the cold and inaccessible peaks of Calabria's mountains. Alberti also turns a curious gaze on the local inhabitants, describing them as unusually innocent, securing their houses only with wooden locks. But they are also seen as brutish: these same houses, he marvels, are “grossly built, carved out of the entrails of

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mountains,” with no “chimneys, nor anywhere to deposit the weight of nature, that is to say feces.” The smoke-filled interiors and putrid streets of the region are a “nauseating thing” of which, Alberti declares, “I can offer direct testimony.”37 The aesthetic overload Alberti experienced from the vivid impressions inspired by the Calabria of his own time was matched by his difficulty in tracing the region's past. The alignment of ancient and modern sites and the recovery of place-names and regional boundaries—key to humanist historical geography—were particularly problematic. With only Ranzano and occasionally some locals as guides, Alberti ventured into uncharted territory, relying on contradictory ancient sources and little else. Alberti explicitly addressed the intensity of the scholarly effort required to piece together the story of Magna Graecia. Readers might be surprised, he wrote, to “find this description under the name of Magna Graecia, a name that is not of common use and will not be understood by the common opinion,” but he hoped “to satisfy the curious and elevated minds, of those who enjoy, and are fond of, ancient and rare things.”38 These words strike a different note from the usual popularizing tone of Alberti's work and suggest how he himself perceived the novelty of his scholarly enterprise, which moved beyond the familiar contours of the Roman past. But this venture into the Greek past of Magna Graecia involved complications that Biondo, stopping short of illustrating Italy's South, did not have to

(p.28)

face. This

much is clear from Alberti's prefatory discussion of the various ancient names for Italy, which is not only longer and more detailed than Biondo's but also actually includes mention of Magna Graecia. Not surprisingly, most of Italy's ancient names—Enotria, Ausonia, Saturnia, Vitullia, Esperia, and so on —have their origins in South Italy, since the earliest written traditions of the peninsula go back to the first Greek interactions in the South. Like the ancient authors before him who had struggled to explain and organize these names, Alberti sought to emphasize the primacy of Rome. The name “Italy” itself, he claimed, derived from the legendary figure Italus, the first king of the region that would become Calabria. However, following the Roman historian Fabius Pictor, Alberti

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recentered the name's significance on Rome, recounting how Italus applied his own name to the whole peninsula after inheriting lands in Etruria from his brother Hesper. The one opinion that Alberti dismissed straight away was that Magna Graecia had ever been the entire “country's name … from the Greeks who came to live here,”39 as Fazio degli Uberti had claimed in his fourteenth-century geographical poem Dittamondo and as repeated by the Paduan chronicler Elia Capriolo. Alberti argued adamantly that Magna Graecia had only ever referred to the area around the Gulf of Taranto. This delicate question of how to relate Italy and Magna Graecia returned once again in the discussion of the name “Magna Graecia” itself. Some previous commentators had ascribed the name to Italians who were referencing the region's many Greek settlements. Quoting his friend Giovanni Antonio Flaminio—“a well learned man”—Alberti determined that this appellation came in fact from the Greek settlers themselves “to attend to the magnificence and the excellence of the part of Italy in which it is found.”40 Alberti's contribution stands as what is possibly the first extended and published discussion on the name “Magna Graecia,” reflecting the author's commitment to including Magna Graecia in the Descrittione, while also hinting at what an awkward fit it might be. Establishing Magna Graecia's regional boundaries also raised difficulties. Alberti, following the administrative partitions of the Neapolitan Kingdom, divided Calabria in two: Calabria Inferiore and Calabria Superiore. Like Collenuccio, he gave Bruttii and Magna Graecia as the ancient names of the two regions. Yet in Collenuccio's work, these names appeared only once, in a list carefully organized into two parallel columns that suggest a clear demarcation between past and present; and within that past, between the Italian populations and the Greek settlers. This hopeful clarity could not stand up to Alberti's historical-geographical approach. It soon became evident that no simple partition of Calabria would fit the historical record, and that there would be pitfalls in attempting straightforward correspondences between ancient and modern names. Unsettling the neat regional divisions of Alberti's Italy, sections of historical Magna Graecia fell outside the boundaries of modern Calabria Superiore, spilling into the

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neighboring regions of Basilicata (as, for example, with the site of Metaponto) and Puglia (as with Taranto).41 (p.29)

The very question of the boundary separating Bruttii

from Magna Graecia—the river Alesso, demarcating Calabria Inferiore and Superiore—turned on a series of narratives that exemplify Alberti's characteristically anecdotal way of dealing with this region of Greek antiquity. First, he presents Strabo's remark that the cicadas found south of the river sing louder, because the wings of those wet with dew on the shadier northern side are less mobile. Alberti rebuts this claim by pointing out that cicadas’ cries are produced not by the wings but by a movement of the whole body, “as one can plainly observe in them,” and that since cicadas thrive in warm weather it should not be surprising that they sing louder in the sun.42 At the same time, Alberti cites the verses of Fazio degli Uberti, which propose a mythological explanation: the gods made the cicadas silent so as not to disturb Hercules's sleep. In a seamless transition, he recounts Strabo's story of a lyre contest in which a cicada intervened to help Eunomos of Locris. At the crucial moment, when a string broke on Eunomos's lyre, the cicada's cry replaced the needed note, carrying Eunomos to victory. From the mere mention of the river Alesso, Alberti then conjures the vision of a bronze statue in the shape of a cicada that the Locrians had built to celebrate their lyre player. This illustrates Alberti's unhurried progress through Magna Graecia; historical sites, place names, and features of the landscape inspire networks of related stories and interlocking anecdotes. In Magna Graecia there were fewer ancient remains in plain view than in the region surrounding Naples, and certainly no comparable tourist guides to help make sense of them. Alberti was unable to do much with the meager remains he saw on the ground. At Locris, for example, he reports Plato's declaration that this city was the flower of Italy, both on account of its wealth and of the virtue and courage of its men, but he adds that a walk through the site, called Palepoli in his time, “barely revealed any vestiges” of its former grandeur.43 All that remains of Greek Locris, according to Alberti, is its noble memory, preserved in stories. Alberti pieces these narratives together, from the story of Locris's legendary

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foundation to that of the heroes Castor and Pollux, who helped the city fight against the Crotoniates, and later to its conquest by Rome, as recounted by Livy. In some cases, even the location of the ancient city that Alberti sets out to describe is unknown or open to debate. For example, he reports his disagreement with the local antiquarian Martorano, who considered a place called Simari on the Tyrrhenian coast to be the ancient Sybaris; similar uncertainties surrounded the location of Siris and Heraclaea, as well as Metaponto and Policoro. As if in compensation for the absence of intact remains on the ground in Magna Graecia, Alberti's stories about the past tend to foreground material objects whenever possible. The number of stories in which statues figure is remarkable in itself: besides the lyre player at Locris, we encounter the statue of Athena brought from Troy to Siris, which moves its lips and eyelids in defense of its new city; the golden Apollo sent by the Metapontines to Delphi;

(p.30)

the statues of Athena and fifty

young men that Delphi's oracle orders to be built by the Crotoniates to escape a pestilence; and Taranto's giant bronze statue of Zeus, which rivals Rhodes's Colossus. In Thurii, as if to conjure up the “noble palaces … ancient streets … and aqueducts” that he had admired in Pozzuoli,44 Alberti describes the ancient layout of the streets and squares from a “pleasant and instructive” passage from Diodorus.45 Only once, at Capo Colonne, did “wonderful vestiges, that include many large and tall columns still standing”46 match the grandiose ancient stories about the fabulous temple of Hera Lacinia that Alberti reports from Diodorus. Yet it was from this same cape, where today only one column survives of the many seen by Alberti, that his eyes surveyed the whole Gulf of Taranto, contemplating the sites where the Greek cities once stood: “but at present,” he writes, “except for Taranto, almost no remains of them at all can be seen.”47 Facing this coastal arc, where the key centers of Magna Graecia spread along the Ionian Sea from Capo Colonne to Taranto, Alberti promises his readers that he will do his best to “endeavor to call to memory” these sites,48 but the ensuing challenge forces him to break from the usual uniformity of his

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historical-geographical approach. The difficulty of any straightforward mapping of ancient sites onto the contemporary terrain of Calabria prompted Alberti to include, uniquely for this region, a separate section for “modern sites in between land and coast.” Lively towns such as Corigliano, which he praises for its wonderful agricultural production, and Amendolara, birthplace of the humanist Pomponio Leto, prompt Alberti to speculate why these “modern sites” do not appear in the ancient sources: perhaps “they did not exist in ancient times, or, if they did, they were not deemed worthy.”49 Returning to the coast, Alberti reencounters the indeterminacies of ancient history: on the wheat-covered plain where “beautiful and noble” Metaponto once stood, “one sees nothing except for fragments of earthenware mixed into the dark soil.”50 He reflects at length on Metaponto's destruction, expressing frustration at the vagueness of the historical sources that fail to tell by whom or for what reason the city was so utterly ruined. By contrast, he devotes little attention to the so-called Tavole Palatine—the surviving columns of the sixth-century bce extraurban sanctuary of Hera. These columns, the most substantial standing remains on the Gulf of Taranto, would impress eighteenth-century travelers, and they are to this day Metaponto's main archaeological attraction. Concerning them, however, Alberti simply notes in passing that “one sees twenty tall and grand marble columns in two rows where (according to the common opinion) once was the school of Architas from Taranto.”51 (Curiously enough, the name “Tavole Palatine”, which originated in the late middle ages, reflects a different popular memory: the resistance of the heroic and legendary paladins of Charlemagne against the Saracens.) Moreover, Alberti separates these few lines on the Tavole Palatine from his description of Metaponto and places them instead in the following chapter about Puglia. (p.31)

With Taranto, Alberti at last stands on firmer ground.

Here he is able to tell a fluid, detailed story, beginning with the city's foundation myths and continuing up to its present position as a principate of the Neapolitan Kingdom. The port, the city's most distinct feature, had been carefully described by the ancients; it was also still observable firsthand by Alberti, whose description of Taranto is propelled by an

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emphasis on its history of maritime power. His Magna Graecia ends here. Turning next to Italy's ninth region, Terra d’Otranto, Alberti is back among clearly demarcated regional boundaries. The ease with which Alberti writes about Taranto suggests that he is most comfortable when able to account for a site from antiquity to modernity. The bulk of his work on Magna Graecia, however, registers his frustration with the region's fragmented and less-known past. Despite his firsthand travel experience, conversations with local scholars, and close study of the ancient sources, Alberti's effort to recreate “the boundaries designated by the ancient writers … and [report things] in the ways these ancient authors had”52 is thwarted repeatedly: “today all is confused in this area, even among the experts and knowledgeable men of the region.”53 In fact, Alberti's way of storytelling is characterized by a struggle to fill in the silences of this elusive past. For example, he records Strabo's remark that Petelia was a well-populated town in ancient times and that Philoctetes was its founder. Then, as if to compensate for the desolate mass of ruins that faces him, Alberti proceeds not only to narrate the entire story of Philoctetes as told by Strabo but also to add variations on the legend gleaned from ancient sources, before closing, laconically, with the stark observation that the town now “lies in ruins.”54 For all its peculiarities in comparison with the other Italian regions featured in the Descrittione, including its brevity, Alberti's representation of modern Calabria and his understanding of its ancient past proved influential. His depiction of an area rich in wondrous nature—a paradise on earth where gardens sprung up spontaneously with no human intervention, and where the inhabitants were quite primitive— would prove to be long-lived. Alberti was, for example, the first to popularize the belief that in Calabria “manna falls from the sky,”55 which would be repeated for centuries—a belief loosely rooted in the region's long history of producing and exporting the gum of the manna-ash tree, widely used as a laxative in early modern medicine. In the sixteenth century, experiments began to prove that Calabrese manna was a natural secretion of trees, not a wonder from the skies; and, in

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the late eighteenth century, the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt's Encyclopédie article on manna dealt extensively with the controversy.56 Yet an idealized image of Calabria's natural abundance persisted, becoming a matter of local pride and a focus of foreigners’ accounts that emphasized the region's exoticism. Even today this image, with its unwarranted exaggeration of Calabria's natural resources, is said to have contributed to the modern Southern Question.57 (p.32)

Alberti's idealizing of Calabria's natural qualities

exemplifies again the complex interplay between the ancient and the modern in Renaissance humanist culture: Alberti drew abundantly from ancient tropes in describing the natural wonders of Calabria, even though the classical sources never expressed particular admiration for the region. Calabrese manna itself, for example, was unknown to the ancients. In fact, the first source we have praising the richness and wonder of Calabria is an early sixth-century letter by Cassiodorus, in which he describes for the Ostrogoth king Athalaric the surroundings of his hometown of Scyllatium, the “provincia Bruttii.”58 But it was left for Alberti to disseminate these tropes in print many centuries later. Ironically, though, he was also at a loss when it came to accounting for the Greek antiquities of Calabria, as the ancient sources were so unhelpful in explicating what he encountered on the ground. For all this uncertainty, however, Alberti's work on Magna Graecia made widely available, for the first time, a modern compilation of ancient information about Greek South Italy. Moreover, what Alberti may himself have perceived as deficiencies in his work somehow became enduring aspects of the later imagining of Magna Graecia. In his ambitious attempt to reconstruct a recognizably “Italian” past in the ancient world, Alberti had trouble accommodating Magna Graecia's complexities. He framed the territory as problematic and its history as long ago concluded, thus undermining any attempt at establishing continuity between past and present (the usual strategy of humanist historical geography, and Alberti's own elsewhere). Such attitudes had a long afterlife, as in the perennial argument about Magna Graecia's uneasy fit within the boundaries of either Italy or Greece.

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Greek Pasts in the Southern Italian Renaissance

The wider framework in which Alberti situated Magna Graecia proved to be the most consequential difference between his work and that of the other Renaissance humanists writing on the topic of Greek South Italy. Recent scholarly work on these other texts has varied in tone, ranging from the dismissal of Gabriele Barrio's De antiquitate as a product of parochial pride, and nothing more than a response to Alberti's inclusion of Calabria within Italy, to the vindication of Barrio and Galateo as the original modern investigators of Magna Graecia.59 The history of these books offers grounds for both claims: Barrio took issue with Alberti, but, as we shall see, he was reacting to other works as well; and while it is true that Galateo's work was composed well before the Descrittione's publication date, it also would appear that Alberti did not know of Galateo's writings on Puglia (though he was familiar with some of his other works).60 Arguably, these projects were all related; Alberti's success most probably inspired Barrio, as well as the publication of Galateo's manuscript decades after it was written. And even their differences over Magna Graecia stem,

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paradoxically, from what they held most in

common: the sense that the present was inextricable from the past, a notion crucial to humanist historical geography. Alberti, Barrio, and Galateo differ because they place Magna Graecia within different geographical frameworks. Whereas Alberti struggled to incorporate Magna Graecia within Italy, Barrio and Galateo labored to account for its Greek past in relation to the Italian regions they focused on: Calabria and Puglia respectively. Galateo seems to have completed his book on Iapygia by 1509.61 At that point he was firmly back in Puglia, having sojourned in Naples repeatedly since his youth. His final return to Puglia dates to 1494, the year of the French invasions that hastened the fall of the Aragonese dynasty in Naples and initiated the Italian Wars. But despite its Apulian origins and focus, Galateo's book reflects the strong influence of his experiences in Naples. Already during the first of his stints in the capital he had been exposed to the then flourishing Neapolitan Renaissance. By the second half of the fifteenth century, Naples, if never as central a Renaissance

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reference as Rome, had developed into a distinctive and influential humanist hub—both Biondo and Valla resided and produced some of their most innovative work there (before landing positions in Rome).62 Naples's fifteenth-century Renaissance was unique within Italy for its foundational royal sponsorship, as the Aragonese kings, Alfonso the Magnanimous (1442–1458) and Ferdinand, or Ferrante (1458– 1494), sought distinguished humanists for their secretarial and diplomatic services. The need to balance humanist values with royal sponsorship would reverberate in Galateo's work, just as his status as a provincial subject of the Kingdom would shape his life and intellectual trajectory.63 In the capital the young Galateo became involved in the prestigious Accademia Pontaniana, the major gathering of southern humanists. Through this affiliation, Galateo developed lifelong friendships with men such as the famous Giovanni Pontano (who gave the Neapolitan Accademia its name), as well as with major Italian humanists from farther afield, such as Ermolao Barbaro (whom he had met while completing his medical education in Ferrara). Galateo's dual dedication to the humanism he had imbibed in Naples and to his native region is reflected in his efforts to establish humanist culture back in Puglia. Indeed, he took his academic name from his birthplace, Galatone, and in the nearby city of Lecce he funded the Academia Lupiensis. Even the fact that De situ Iapygiae was first published in far-away Basel was due to a local connection: Giovan Bernardino Bonifacio, Marquis of Oria, an Apulian in exile on account of his pro-Reformation views, was the one who saw the manuscript through to publication forty-one years after the death of its author.64 The immediate occasion for Galateo's historical-geographical description of his native region was the new status of the Neapolitan Kingdom, reduced since 1503 to a vice-royalty ruled by Spain. The work had been commissioned by Giovan Battista Spinelli, Count of Cariati, a Neapolitan nobleman and royal

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counselor who, currying favor within the new

political scene, meant it to illustrate the remote province of Puglia for Ferdinand the Catholic, king of Spain. This aim seems to be reflected in the close attention the text pays to

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fortifications and natural defenses. Galateo's own background as a physician shows in his careful notes on fauna and in his precise description of the tarantula's bite. Noteworthy, as well, are the book's seemingly anticlerical and prorepublican passages. Whether the passages critical of Catholic hierarchies were in fact written by Galateo or added by the Marquis of Oria in Basel was long debated (and to be sure, the Neapolitan edition of 1624 expunged them). The royal servant Galateo's prorepublican passages, ranging from praise of the Venetian Republic to that of ancient Greek democracy in the example of Taranto, have also been much discussed.65 But to properly evaluate his overall sense of Greek South Italy, one must turn to Biondo's work for a frame of reference. Biondo's failure to cover the South in his Italia illustrata justified Galateo's project in the Liber de situ Iapygiae. But while Galateo's overall approach, the terseness of his style, and his preoccupation with Italian political decline all suggested similarities with Biondo, he differed sharply on the question of what kind of historical memory to recover for the benefit of the modern Italian states. Biondo had focused on Rome; Galateo, however, insisted on South Italy's Greek ancestry, which he believed had offered a superior culture and ethics to the region. There was a personal element in this departure, as well. Galateo had, after all, learned Greek well before reaching Naples in the local school of Nardò, which claimed direct descent from Greek culture, just as his ancestors included priests of Greek origins who had migrated to South Italy when it was under the Byzantine Empire's control. This distinctive focus on the Greek dimension required Galateo to more clearly demarcate differences between the Greek area of South Italy and mainland Greece, while attempting to give Magna Graecia a centrality within the history of the Italian peninsula that it had never before enjoyed. With a reference to Petrarch, who had written of Magna Graecia as “empty and deserted” and “not in Italy,” Galateo complained that Puglia had been “by some authors placed outside of Italy.”66 But Galateo himself imaginatively toyed with Italy's geographical boundaries, producing a sort of countergeography in order to emphasize South Italy's distinctive and superior qualities,

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based on the region's picturesque landscapes and natural resources. Puglia, he wrote, could “almost seem like a territory removed from the Peloponnesus or the Vale of Tempe and transplanted into Italy,”67 but in fact the region, “for its superiority over all other lands, mainland Greece included, in terms of the splendor of its cities and men, its climate and fertility, was called, with the consensus of all Greeks, ‘Magna Graecia.’ ”68 It was from the Greek cities of the South, Galateo claimed, that philosophy, science, law, and civilized customs spread to the rest of Italy. He even went so far as to suggest that if the men of other regions of the Neapolitan Kingdom had as much animus (spirit) as the men of the southernmost ones—where, in places like

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ancient Taranto, men first

learned to cultivate political justice and virtuous moderation— their modern woes would have been resolved long ago. Galateo's passionate investment in Greek identity and his concise style (in contrast to Alberti's unhurried storytelling), not to mention his chronological precedence over Alberti, have led some to consider his project the first modern work dedicated to Magna Graecia proper.69 Such a claim, however, overlooks the idiosyncratic way Galateo conceives of the region. Despite his precise definition of Magna Graecia as “the [Calabrian and Apulian] peninsula and the coastal area in between them,”70 Galateo's passionate appeal for a recovery of the Greek cultural model leads him to extend Magna Graecia's boundaries well beyond the coastal towns of Reggio and Taranto to include Brindisi, Otranto, Nardò, and Galatone in Puglia, as well as Messina and Syracuse in Sicily. His extension is also a chronological one: when Galateo refers to his own family's Greek ancestry and laments the disappearance of Greek culture from the area, he refers to the communities of Byzantine times. Indeed, the only site in Magna Graecia that Galateo treats in any detail is Taranto, and with the modest exception of a paragraph discussing this city's democratic regime, it is Taranto's history from the Middle Ages to the present, and not its ancient remains, that attract most of his attention. Gabriele Barrio has also gained favor in genealogies of modern studies of Greek South Italy, thanks to his extensive

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investigation of Calabria and his passionate evocation of its past.71 A native of the small town of Francica in Calabria, Barrio rose well above his humble background after having impressed Cardinal Sirleto, also Calabrese, with his intellectual distinction. The capillary spread of his knowledge of both modern and ancient sites in Calabria was certainly unprecedented. Yet the most striking aspect of his narrative is, perhaps, its discontinuity with later understandings of Magna Graecia. Barrio's vision was the distinctive product of his particular sensibility. Like Galateo, he offers praise of his native region, but he additionally evinces a certain defensiveness, as he writes in retort of pejorative descriptions of Calabrian brutishness that were increasingly common within the Renaissance historical and historical-geographical tradition. Barrio's regional allegiance, manifest in his firmly held belief that only natives with keen knowledge of their own regions should be entitled to describe them, was no doubt reinforced by material circumstances, such as the patronage of Cardinal Sirleto and his financial backing by Prince Niccolò Bernardino V Sanseverino of Bisignano near Cosenza. Alberti became a target of Barrio's complaints about how foreign writers had not done justice to his region. That much is clear when Barrio, who chose to write in Latin and dared anyone to ever translate his work into Italian, expressed harsh disapproval of the use of the vernacular, a distinct feature of Alberti, with whom the Calabrese engaged in sharp, if not always explicit, competition.72 But much of Barrio's defensiveness is better explained within the context of South Italian history and cultural politics. In the second half of the fifteenth

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century Calabria rebelled

strongly against the Aragonese kings in Naples. It was at this time that the adage “to rule Calabria is to rule the entire kingdom” took hold, and while these rebellions were eventually repressed, it was only at the cost of extreme violence, involving massacres of entire populations.73 Barrio wrote in the decadent aftermath of these calamities, at the dawn of what has been called “the long night of the vicekingdom”; his stance on the state of affairs emerges clearly in a section called Planctus Calabriae (The lament of Calabria).74 There, Barrio juxtaposes the by-then common image of the

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region's wondrous natural riches not with its uncivilized population but rather with an articulate and heartfelt criticism of the region's mismanagement under the Aragonese regime, and its further deterioration under the viceroys who followed. In Barrio's criticism of feudal abuses of power, scholars have detected a hint of his humble origins.75 This differentiated him from Neapolitan Renaissance writers who expressed little sympathy for the Calabrese rebels and depicted them as disloyal and difficult subjects. Works such as Giovanni Pontano's De bello Neapolitano (The wars of Naples, 1509) celebrated the victory over the rebels (in fact, the pro-feudal bias of this line of historiography has been studied as a distinct product of Neapolitan humanism.76) This contrast between Barrio and his Neapolitan counterparts in turn entailed a strikingly different take on Calabria's past. In dissecting and refusing the etymology that derived “Bruttii” (the name for the native population of Calabria) from Brutes, for instance, Barrio was not quarreling with Alberti (who had recounted multiple stories on the subject without committing to any single one) so much as he was taking issue with the apparent disparagement of Calabria by scholars such as Pontano or Collenuccio, who had presented the Calabrese as descendants of the rebel, savage native populations who were hostile to Roman rule.77 Barrio, in response, portrays the Bruttii as heroic proto-Christians, a view that governs most of his chapters on ancient Calabria. His unprecedented interest in Magna Graecia, in other words, is a means to a specific end: the praise of a Calabria that could boast both a Greco-Roman and a Christian past. This is not to deny Barrio's importance within the tradition of writing on Magna Graecia; indeed, in addition to an unprecedented amount of information, he introduced themes that have had long-lasting influence. Most significantly, he devoted a great deal of space to describing Pythagoras as “an Italian of Calabria, once called Magna Graecia.”78 This notion of an “Italian” Pythagoras originated in Roman times and persisted well beyond the Middle Ages. In his commentary on Aristotle, for example, Thomas Aquinas—himself a native of South Italy—had claimed Pythagoras as Calabrese by birth; but it was Barrio who most forcefully introduced these

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concerns into the Renaissance humanist antiquarian literature. Where Alberti had merely mentioned Pythagoras as an illustrious citizen of ancient Croton—devoting far less attention to him than, for example, to the Crotoniate athlete Milo—Barrio depicted Pythagoras as a

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crucial figure in

Calabria's ancient past. The very name “Magna Graecia” was inextricable, in Barrio's view, from the monumental figure of this ancient philosopher, a link that would gather great force in subsequent centuries.79 The Transformation of Humanist Magna Graecia

The lasting influence of so many of these early writings about Magna Graecia attests to the persistence of Biondo's historical geography. In fact both Galateo's and Barrio's works were reissued in the first half of the eighteenth century (Galateo in 1727 and Barrio in 1737). This detail in itself complicates the eighteenth-century sense of novelty of its own enterprise: later rediscoveries of Magna Graecia clearly took place not in absence of, but in dialogue with (and possibly while profiting from), this earlier tradition of work on Greek South Italy. Moreover, the Renaissance historical-geographical works were not just preserved in reprints but corrected and added to. It is in this interplay of continuity and transformation that one appreciates the emergence of features that would later appear as dramatically innovative approaches to the past. Much correction was the fate of Barrio's work: the 1737 edition was heavily edited by Tommaso Aceti, a man of the church and native of Calabria who had gained, during a stint in Rome as proofreader of the Vatican publishing house, access to Barrio's manuscripts.80 Meanwhile, other authors took an interest in Calabria as well. In 1596 the Franciscan friar Girolamo Marafioti (ca. 1567–ca.1626), a native of Polistena near Reggio, published Croniche et antichità di Calabria (Chronicles and antiquities of Calabria; a second edition came out in Padua in 1601), which was similar to Barrio's work in both structure and in its patriotic claims, but differed in its emphasis on close quotation of ancient and modern sources and in its use of the vernacular.81 Magna Graecia exercised a gravitational pull on local civic histories as well. Giovanni Salmeri has demonstrated how the

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new provincial status of Calabria as a region of the Spanish Empire sparked the writing of local histories, as glorifications of the past often accompanied requests of favors addressed to the new imperial center.82 Giovanni Battista di Nola Molisi's 1649 Cronica dell’antichissima e nobilissima città di Crotone (Chronicle of the most ancient and noble town of Croton) focused on the author's home town of Crotone in Calabria, but claimed that it could be understood only in the context of Magna Graecia. Much of his volume proceeded to reconstruct the history of Greek South Italy, focusing especially on the vicissitudes of Pythagoras's life. Like Barrio and Marafioti before him, di Nola Molisi believed Pythagoras to have been a native of the region, and in fact identified as his birthplace the little village of Samo (sometimes called Crepacuore). Giovanni Fiore (1622–1683), another Franciscan friar, who spent his life as guardian of various monasteries of Calabria, went back to a description of the region as a whole in Della Calabria illustrata (Of Calabria illustrated, 1691–1743). Fiore's title reveals the enduring

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power of the historical-geographical tradition

as it persisted into the eighteenth century, and once again it shows Magna Graecia being placed at the center of ancient Calabria's glory. Fiore's opus, often criticized for its poor organization (due, perhaps, to its posthumous publication), presented information about Magna Graecia that was carefully culled from earlier sources, with some of its author's own insights superadded. With rich illustrations depicting Magna Graecia's coins, Fiore's work became a favorite with eighteenth-century travelers.83 It might come as a surprise that Alberti's Magna Graecia proved no less enduring well into the eighteenth century. While the Descrittione remained a best-seller throughout the sixteenth century, it is usually assumed to have fallen from favor after its ninth reprint in 1596. But its pages on South Italy were included more or less unchanged in a number of books with the title Descrizioni del regno (Descriptions of the kingdom), which enjoyed tremendous success through the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century. These works served as introductions to the southern Italian kingdom, combining information on its history (especially of the various dynasties that had ruled in Naples) with explanations of its

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administrative and social organization and descriptions of its geography and monuments.84 The first of these books was published in 1586 by Scipione Mazzella, a Neapolitan antiquary who also wrote a guide to Pozzuoli, Baia, and Ischia and a history of Neapolitan kings; it was reprinted in 1601 and translated into English in 1654.85 Enrico Bacco, a bookshop apprentice turned bookshop owner and author, latched onto the genre's growing popularity by publishing his own Descrizione in 1605, a text that by 1671 had been reissued at least seventeen times in Naples.86 The frequent accusations of plagiarism that punctuate the prefaces to many of these works attest to how much their production relied on repeating and repackaging content from earlier ones. One reason why these texts from the long seventeenth century seem to plagiarize each other so much is that they all share a common source in Alberti; the entire tradition is deeply indebted to Alberti, whose writings these works freely drew upon in the process of narrowing his project to fit the Neapolitan Kingdom rather than the whole of Italy. Already in 1586 Mazzella directly copied Alberti's opening lines on Italy, that “more foreign people came to this land, than ever in any other country or kingdom, either to settle here, or to rob it and sack it,” applying them solely to the Kingdom of Naples.87 To be fair, some of the nuances of Mazzella's work reflect more than mere mindless copying, at least where he possessed knowledge of specific sites. For example, he copies Alberti's lines about Paestum (“now this city lies entirely in ruins and one sees in a part of it ancient remains of its buildings”) but specifies that “even from the sea one can see the temples.”88 But on the whole, Mazzella lifted the essentials from Alberti's work, even if he rearranged his text to suit the Neapolitan Kingdom's administrative division into twelve provinces rather (p.39)

than the eight that had composed Alberti's South Italy.

Mazzella's pages on the more distant regions of Calabria and Magna Graecia come straight from Alberti—a plagiarism that continued in many of these Descrizioni del regno well into the eighteenth century. Ironically, such plagiarisms ensured a broad and long-lasting diffusion of Alberti's Magna Graecia; its reach beyond Italy, for example, was assured when Bacco's

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1605 Descrizione was translated into German and, moreover, was inserted into the Thesaurus antiquitatum (1723). The works we have so far considered, for all their differences, shared an Italian horizon. Given the absence of any stable notion of Italy, whether political or even cultural, the meanings or implications of these similarities are in no way straightforward, as we have seen. But what about non-Italian representations of Magna Graecia? Though there was no settled tradition of foreign accounts, the few works treating Magna Graecia that were published outside of Italy during this period were distinguished by their avoidance of the tension between past and present so characteristic of the Italian accounts. These differences anticipate later developments in approaches to the past, foreshadowing what would become a major divide between Italian and non-Italian scholars of Greek South Italy. Perhaps it is not by chance that a 1576 work by the Dutchman Hubert Goltzius (1526–1583)—his Sicilia et Magna Graecia; sive, Historiae urbium et populorum Graeciae ex antiquis nomismatibus restitutae (Sicily and Magna Graecia; the history of the cities and people of Greece illustrated by ancient coins)—is the first book whose title actually contains the name Magna Graecia.89 This was the work of a numismatic collector and scholar, seeking to inventory his southern Italian coin collection. It is in this volume's numerous and beautifully engraved plates, depicting coins organized by city, that we find Magna Graecia evoked solely in terms of its past, eluding the tensions between past and present that so strongly characterize Italian humanists’ works on the region. Another Dutchman, Philip Clüver, challenged the historicalgeographical tradition in his 1624 book Italia antiqua. It is said that, in order to complete this work, the young man covered thirty-seven hundred kilometers of Italian roads by foot in just under nine months.90 Having been disowned by his father, Clüver at this time gained the admiration and support of scholars such as Scaliger, and was given the position of geographus academicus at the University of Leiden. Clüver's work, which has been hailed as the beginning of modern historical-geographical study, culminated in his lifelong

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project, the posthumously published Introductio in Universam Geographiam (in which the Italia antiqua, along with a description of contemporary Italy, was included). He definitively relegated earlier figures in the historicalgeographical tradition such as Alberti to the back shelf, training his attention on the description of places, with a new emphasis on their precise geographical location, which involved exact measures of distances and up-to-date maps. Clüver's innovative approach encompassed the entire world, enabling him to situate descriptions of countries and regions (p.40)

within a global vision. In contrast with earlier historical

geography's continuous dialogue between past and present, Clüver disentangled them, presenting them in separate accounts, descriptions, and maps, with Italy offering an exemplary case. While it is true that Clüver's pages on Magna Graecia in Italia antiqua read much like those of his predecessors (however spare he seems in comparison with the long-winded Alberti), his approach to studying the past separate from the present marks a significant, influential innovation. Clüver's new approach reflects expansionist developments in the modern world. Indeed, that his homeland was a nation deeply involved in this process is no coincidence. While this might seem far removed from the imagining of so remote a part of the ancient world as Magna Graecia, already in the sixteenth century expansionist ideologies had begun to engender changes in the ways authors approached this region. Conversations about the New World, for example, contributed to the evolving image of Calabria as a land of stark contrasts between its barbaric inhabitants and its natural beauty. Whereas letters written in the early sixteenth century by Jesuit priests stationed in the region claimed that primitive Calabria would make a useful training ground for young missionaries bound for the Americas, local scholars turned this association on its head by claiming Calabria's natural wonders as equal to those found in the fabulous New World.91 The novelty of eighteenth-century perspectives on the past, to which we are about to turn, owes much to the increasingly ubiquitous specter of the New World. The rhetoric of discovery tells us as much: eighteenth-century travelers set off on journeys of

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exploration, constructing the past as a foreign country and even, self-consciously, as a new world. Their focus on monuments and their insistence on taking exact measurements borrowed the prevailing language of scientific exploration, whose methods were eagerly applied to the seemingly new continent of Greek antiquity. Magna Graecia represented a first landfall on this momentous journey, as the rediscovery of Paestum powerfully demonstrates.

Greece and Italy in Eighteenth-Century Naples: A. S. Mazzocchi, J. J. Winckelmann, and Paestum That the temples of Paestum should have inspired comparisons with the “ruined cities overgrown by the forests of Yucatan,” recently uncovered by European explorers in Central America, is fitting, given the frequency of the analogy with the New World.92 The simile certainly conveys the excitement of discovery; it also, though, begs questions that are important for exposing the limitations of the usual accounts—those written at the time and since—of the rediscovery of Greek South Italy. For a start, how does this simile situate Paestum's eighteenth-century “discoverers” in relation to the region's inhabitants? Whether the rediscovery of Paestum was attributed to foreign architects

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and

travelers (French, British, or German) or local antiquarians (such as Baron Giuseppe Antonini, 1683–1765, from a nearby small town) was a major variant in the many accounts circulating. But then, what to make of Antonini's resistance to thinking of the ruins as temples, or for that matter of the many references to the Paestum ruins in writings that predate their rediscovery—some from as far back as the sixteenth century? Similarly, for the eighteenth-century engagement with Magna Graecia as a whole, what to make of the fact that Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi, the most illustrious antiquarian in Naples at the time, a member of the Reale Accademia Ercolanese and canon of the cathedral, has long been hailed as the founder of the modern study of Magna Graecia by Italian scholars, while basically being ignored or forgotten outside of Italy? The split between insider and outsider was prefigured in the sixteenth century in Barrio's claim that a region's proper description belongs only to those with roots there. Now,

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however, with the Neapolitan intellectual scene more cosmopolitan and crowded than ever, the debate over various scholars’ claims on the past intensified, even as it was complicated by the new relevance of ancient Greece. In this context, the difference between “Greek” and “Italian” views of South Italy's antiquities expanded even more, exacerbating the tensions between foreign and local scholars. To understand the shaping of these categories and their subsequent interactions is to grasp dynamics that would have a long-lasting impact on the historical conception of Magna Graecia. Novelty is a recurring motif of the eighteenth century, a time of discovery and new beginnings that saw the emergence of many features of Western modernity. Significantly, both modern history and archaeology have their origins in what Momigliano described as the new antiquarianism of this period. As he argues, this was a time when a revolution in taste was accompanied by one in methodology: traveling gentlemen replaced armchair scholars as the main figures of innovation.93 Momigliano's critical gesture has usefully redirected scholarly attention to a longer tradition of antiquarian thinking stretching back to classical times; but it also remains true that it was precisely in the midst of the eighteenth-century transformation that the term “antiquarian” began acquiring its lingering negative connotations. These changes, along with the unprecedented interest in Greek materials, were integral to the eighteenth-century conversation on Magna Graecia. This conversation, unlike the sparse discussion that had taken place in the Renaissance, was firmly centered in Naples. Here we find Mazzocchi, Antonini, and Winckelmann—the discoverer of Greece who never came closer to it than he did in Naples. The close proximity of these very different kinds of scholars made Naples an intellectual hub, but also explosive in terms of the heated debates that took place there about its ancient past. In addition to the rediscovery of Paestum, the stories of the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and of the new appreciation for ancient painted vases, tell us this much. The richness of this intellectual scene is well exemplified by the figure of Giambattista

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Vico, whose

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complex reception also reminds us of the care required in uncovering these stratified and layered narratives. The developments in the capital would spread south with further investigations of Magna Graecia, but it is in Naples that we should start. Neapolitan Scenes: Buried Cities, Painted Vases, and Vico

Naples's exotic location mitigated the effects of a gradual shift of power toward the north of Europe.94 If in retrospect this era was often judged as one in which the region's decline became irreversible, for contemporaries this decline was far from a foregone conclusion. One of the largest cities of its day, Naples was a dynamic modern metropolis. With its famous natural wonders, innovative music scene, and ancient allure, it attracted many young, wealthy Europeans, mostly men, who were on the “Grand Tour,” that educational rite of passage through which they gained exposure to the great works of Western culture as well as to the fashionable society of the continent.95 The city's fortune as one of the continent's mustsee destinations only increased as the eighteenth-century wore on; indeed, the saying vedi Napoli e muori (see Naples and die), often attributed to Goethe, dates to this period. Recent work on the Grand Tour, however, has taught us to reach beyond a view of Italy as a place that was merely, passively, “seen”.96 This holds true for the entire peninsula but all the more so for Naples, a destination that single-handedly was extending southward the boundaries of long-standing Grand Tour practices. In modern Naples, the idea of the past was itself in flux, due in large part to Paestum's introduction of the Greek Doric and to the unprecedented discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The modernity of Naples was closely related to the politics of the Enlightenment. In 1732, following the centuries-long succession of Spanish viceroys that had began in 1503, the Neapolitan Kingdom regained its independence. Carlo Sebastiano di Borbone Farnese, previously Duke of Parma and Piacenza, was the new king. His chosen title, King Carlo of Naples and Sicily, sans numeral, was meant to mark a new beginning.97 He had a lot to work with: through its long attachment to the Spanish crown, Naples had long held more than a passing connection to the world beyond the

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Mediterranean, and the many revolutions of power it underwent throughout the modern age made it an interesting place in which to think about politics. One of the texts considered foundational to the political Enlightenment was in fact written in Naples: Pietro Giannone's Storia civile del regno di Napoli (The civil history of the Kingdom of Naples, 1723).98 In the new independent kingdom, Giannone's existing tradition developed into a sophisticated and distinct current of Enlightenment thought—the so called riformatori Napoletani (Neapolitan reformers)99—which encouraged King Carlo and, after him, his son and successor, Ferdinand IV, to sponsor ambitious if not always successfully implemented reform policies. (p.43)

King Carlo's deep investment in his domain's cultural

identity led him to undertake projects that united Enlightenment thought with Neapolitan pride in its modernity. He requested, for instance, that the architects for the new Capodimonte royal residence plan galleries for the display of the Farnese collections, which consisted of paintings, coins, applied arts, and books that the king had inherited and transferred from Parma and Rome to the new capital. (Today this palace is the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte.).100 The protracted delays in the construction of the new palace caused no few minor conservational problems. Yet even the caustic French scholar Charles de Brosses, while criticizing the neglect and disorder suffered by the collection in transit, in 1738 described it as “one of the most beautiful and complete to be found in Europe.”101 The progressiveness of thought that characterized Neapolitan culture under King Carlo entailed a new emphasis on the past, even as this, like his policy reforms, turned out to be an ambitious and only partially realized program.102 The king's sponsorship of excavations at the site of ancient Herculaneum gave Naples's investment in the past a unique position in Europe.103 This venture, undertaken only six years after independence was regained, garnered even more prestige for the city while it also attracted harsh criticism. Already in 1709 construction work for a well had revealed remains belonging to the city of Herculaneum, known to have been buried by the

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Vesuvian eruptions. But only in 1738 did King Carlo sponsor a full-scale excavation, followed in 1749 by a similar effort at Pompeii. The finds were exceptional: ancient life seemed to emerge with a heightened reality, one that antiquarians had only dreamed of before. The discoveries entailed many innovations in the scholarly and institutional life of the city. In 1755 legislation designed to protect the cultural heritage was put into place (among the first of such endeavors), and a scholarly group was assigned to study and publish the results of the excavations: the Reale Accademia Ercolanense. Three years later the museum in Portici was inaugurated, having been built specifically to display these findings.104 Naples acquired an appealing new dimension, as ancient life seemed to emerge whole from the ground, drawing the attention of much of Europe. This gaze, however, was often critical and led to acrimonious debates about how to conduct the excavations and to treat the findings. Many visitors complained about how difficult it was to gain access to the sites, or even just to view what had been excavated. It is true that this unprecedented archaeological operation was not achieved without mistakes. The venture, in fact, did illuminate some of the limitations of King Carlo's ability to carry out his enlightened vision. The Accademia Ercolanese's publication of the findings took too long to come out, and even once they were finally ready they were not put up for sale, but rather disseminated as royal gifts. If the buried cities of Vesuvius offered the most spectacular example, there were at this time other Neapolitan engagements with the past that were every

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bit as

influential and complex. One that held far-reaching consequences was the new interest in ancient painted ceramics, which transformed these remains into highly soughtafter (and priced) works of art; still today rows of ancient painted vases constitute the heart of museums’ classical wings.105 It was in Naples that earthenware pots came to be thought of as elegant, with the crucial figure being Sir William Hamilton, whose character and activities exemplify the cosmopolitanism of the city at the time.106 Hamilton arrived in Naples in 1764 as British envoy.107 He soon became a fixture

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within the cultural and political life of the city. He had close ties to the king and cultivated interests in natural history, antiquity, and folklore. Hamilton's three Neapolitan residences were must-sees for visitors to the city. At his official residence at Palazzo Sessa, guests could enjoy not only his conversation and collections but also spend evenings taking pleasure in living tableaux inspired by ancient subjects and interpreted by his wife, Emma; at his Posillipo Villa, they took in the baths along with spectacles by local swimmers; and from the terrace of his Villa Angelica, at Portici, they could behold an active Vesuvius through a telescope trained on the volcano. In the late 1760s, Hamilton fervently threw himself into vase collecting, seeking to assemble a collection constituted solely of painted vases, most of which came from the tombs of the Campanian city of Nola. His newfound interest picked up on a wider trend, best symbolized by Pompeo Batoni's 1766 portrait of the Grand Tourist Prince Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, in which the prince's left arm is draped casually atop a classical vase. This portrait is one of the first in which a vase, and not a sculpture, appears as the conventional sign of classical antiquity, and it gives a clear indication of the growing appreciation for ancient vases among travelers.108 While such vases reached Rome—indeed, Batoni's portrait was painted there—Hamilton's Naples was the main center for their market, and he would later produce a lavishly illustrated catalogue of his collection, Antiquités étrusques, grecques, et romaines tirées du cabinet de M. Hamilton, published in four volumes between 1767 and 1776. The book introduced painted vases as artworks on the European stage, and in 1772 Hamilton managed to sell his collection to the trustees of the recently founded British Museum. Along with their grand entry into museums, ancient painted vases also became objects of serial reproduction. The British industrialist Josiah Wedgwood launched his factory-produced series of upscale housewares decorated with themes derived from Hamilton's catalogue.109 It was Hamilton's original enterprising that dramatically altered the fortunes of painted vases across Europe, but recent work has also endeavored to document how, in putting together his own collection, the British envoy had references

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for earlier models of vase collecting.110 In fact, Neapolitan antiquarian writings mention painted vases as far back as 1606. At the end of that same century, the Neapolitan jurist Giuseppe Valletta (1636–1714) compiled the first exclusive vase collection, displaying over a hundred vases in his own (p.45)

library (the largest in the city at that time, and a

crucial intellectual meeting place).111 Valletta's own collection was eventually dispersed in various sales, portending the fate of most of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan vase collections that were formed following his example. There were more than ten such collections by the 1740s, ranging from the private collections of the antiquarian, librarian, and diplomat Matteo Egizio (1674–1745) and the nobleman collector Felice Maria Mastrilli, to collective, ecclesiastical collections, such as those of the Girolamini, the Teatini or the Jesuits.112 Although the dispersal of the vases contributed to these collections having been forgotten until recent studies, it also attested to, and fed into, the creation of an increasingly specialized market that expanded from Naples to Rome and beyond (some vases in fact had reached England well before Hamilton's time). From the conversations surrounding these Italy-wide vase exchanges, the first divisive interpretative issue concerning the vases emerged: to which ancient people should they be attributed? When Hamilton entered the scene, the vases were widely considered to be Etruscan (after all, Etruria was the name given to his factory by Josiah Wedgwood in 1769).113 This idea is not surprising in the context of eighteenth-century etruscomania, the fascination with Etruscan antiquity that originated in Renaissance Florence, but was reinvigorated and expanded in the wake of the publication of Thomas Dempster's De Etruria Regali in 1723.114 In fact, Florentine antiquarians had been aggressively seeking painted vases and adamantly defended the Etruscan origin of the vases, even explaining away the Greek writing on many of them as modern forgery. Such was the tactic of Anton Francesco Gori (1691–1757), the major antiquarian in eighteenth-century Florence, who from his earlier interest in Roman sculptures increasingly turned his attention to painted vases. Gori's friend Giovan Battista Passeri (1694–1780) painstakingly gathered drawings of vases from his visits to various collections and from his extensive

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correspondence network. Passeri published a catalogue, significantly titled Picturae Etruscorum in vasculis (Etruscan Paintings on Vases 1765–1777), with three hundred engravings. (This catalogue was a contemporary and rival project to Hamilton's in that it focused solely on painted vases.115) But Neapolitan scholars had always thought of the vases found in South Italy as produced there; the controversy raged in private correspondence, public lectures, and publications from both Florentine and Neapolitan antiquarian circles.116 Mazzocchi was one of the Neapolitans involved, declaring, as early as 1754, the vases to be Greek on the grounds that they had Greek mythological themes and writing.117 The prestige of the Tuscan school, however, rendered the Etruscan interpretation a favorite one for a long time. Hamilton himself, while increasingly convinced the vases were not Etruscan, long hesitated to say so explicitly in his published work.118 Winckelmann, though, adopted Mazzocchi's arguments and favored the Neapolitan view in his art history of 1764.119 His statement is, in fact, often credited with resolving the question, and it did indeed carry a lot of weight with

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European connoisseurs. However, the

name Etruscan continued to be used by the general public, while the alternative name, Italo-Greek, which had its own ambiguities, took some time to spread. From the story of pots becoming vases, as well as from that of the excavation of the ancient cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, key features of the eighteenth-century engagement with the past emerge. We see the thirst for new ancient material, accompanied as it was by the mixing of issues of taste with those of scholarship; the emphasis on discovery, only heightened by the unprecedented velocity and volume in the spread of information; and, finally, the underlying uncertainties all along about methodology and interpretation (what to make of and how to study these newfound antiquities). We also encounter the centrality of Naples, whose significance rested on the fact that its past was seen to matter well beyond its own boundaries. However, this led to unprecedented debates on the ownership of the past, both in material and intellectual terms, as attested by the implementation of new heritage legislation and the

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controversies I have briefly delineated. The questions posed by the discoveries in Naples met with eager European-wide reception, but this success also meant that the city's centrality could be called into question. Much recent work has indeed focused on recovering a Neapolitan side of this story—be it the reevaluation of the Neapolitan-led Herculaneum and Pompeii excavations, or the reconstruction of Neapolitan collecting practices whose study has been long overshadowed by the work of Hamilton or the Tuscan scholars. This process itself shows the long-term influence of the dynamics set in place during this period, when Naples was a site of such intense and complex reflection on the past. It is not surprising, then, that the man who is now the most famous product of the city's vibrant intellectual scene, Giambattista Vico (1688–1744), is such a difficult figure to place: a founder of modernity recognized as such only belatedly, and a thinker deemed a precursor by scholars today in fields as varied as history, anthropology, and philosophy. A picture of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan engagement with the past would not be complete without Vico, who, in Anthony Grafton's words, first “argued systematically that the understanding of a past society—even of an earlier period in the history of one's own society—was a demanding, if rewarding, intellectual task.”120 But there is more at stake for a history of the study of Greek South Italy. It might seem counterintuitive to take as a guide a philosopher who was untouched, for example, by the discoveries at Herculaneum, and whose main interest was ancient Rome rather than the Greek (or Italian) past of South Italy.121 Yet Vico was chosen as royal historiographer to King Carlo in 1734. While his work, moreover, went on to gain worldwide recognition, its character gives particular insight into dynamics of local intellectual history and the difficulty inherent in tracing them, at the same time attesting once again to the intricate interplay of Greek and Italian pasts facing the scholars of the time as they attempted to make sense of the antiquities of the kingdom. (p.47)

By the end of the eighteenth century Vico was an

established hero in Naples and beginning to be seen as one of Western modernity's major thinkers.122 Famously, this

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recognition was almost entirely posthumous. His great achievement, the La Nuova Scienza (The New Science), which he endlessly revised from its first publication in 1725 until his death nineteen years later, was nearly unreadable to his contemporaries, in large part because he seemed so uninterested in the scholarship of his day. Instead he reached his original conclusions by thinking through problems that had preoccupied earlier generations of scholarship, rather than his own, leaning heavily on factual details that belonged to other times and places.123 Although a stereotype long associated with Vico is that “the man is out of place,”124 his writing and thinking were, in fact, very much of a place. His own children crowding his small quarters, the street he lived on (aptly named vicolo dei Giganti, or Giants Alley), and his fellow citizens all seem to have contributed to his inspired insights into the primitiveness of early human history and the brutality of the Roman past.125 However solitary and obscure his academic life, Vico counted as close friends men like the political and philosophical writer Paolo Mattia Doria (1662–1746) and the antiquarian, royal librarian, and holder of one of the early Neapolitan painted vase collections, Matteo Egizio, whose web of correspondence spread influentially from Naples to distant European capitals.126 While it is true that his career was repeatedly frustrated, Vico did belong to crucial networks of knowledge in Naples—from the informal group around Valletta's library to the intellectually ebullient Accademia Medinaceli, founded in his own name by viceroy Duke of Medinaceli in 1698. It has been argued that certain features and habits of these Neapolitan circles in fact go a long way toward explaining why Vico's work had such a hard time finding an audience.127 The multilayered quality of contemporary Neapolitan intellectual life, which has for a long time made it difficult to place Vico, also shaped much of his approach to the past, including what it can tell us about the study of Magna Graecia. Greek South Italy had a critical role to play in Vico's first major publication: De antiquissima sapientia italica ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin

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Language, 1710). It was in this often neglected text that Vico first articulated his principle of the verum factum, the notion that “one can well understand only what one has created.”128 This maxim would come to provide a crucial pillar in his subsequent claim for the indubitability of historical knowledge in The New Science. Vico argued that since understanding comes from making, man is much better placed to understand his own history, which he himself made, than the natural world. This assertion flew in the face of the Cartesian rationalists and scholars of natural sciences. In De antiquissima, however, the verum factum was embedded in a strange story: though he derived it from Latin, Vico claimed that the Romans themselves had inherited it from earlier inhabitants

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of Italy. The “superior learning” of these

peoples was clearly evidenced by Etruscan architecture, which, “simpler than that of any other people affords weighty proof that they had knowledge of geometry before the Greeks,” and the Ionian philosophy that “flourished in South Italy.”129 It was in this way that Vico evoked Greek South Italy. Yet these passages in De antiquissima sapientia, while more closely aligning Vico with long-term trends in South Italian scholarship, also encountered the harshest criticism in the only review granted to the book, published in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia in 1711.130 His claims concerning the “superior learning” of Italy's early inhabitants drew fire from reviewers who thought this most ancient philosophy of Italy deserved to be approached not through Latin vocabulary, but in a more thoroughgoing manner. Vico, it was said, should “hunt it out by unearthing and disinterring as far as possible the oldest monuments of ancient Etruria,” or “at least investigate what were the principles of the philosophy that Pythagoras brought from Ionia to Italy.”131 Vico's reply to this criticism was just as direct and escalated the debate. The approach suggested by the reviewers, he argued, would yield only a recent Greek philosophy, whereas what he was after originated not in Greece, but in Egypt, and thence was transmitted to the Etruscans and diffused, along with their empire, from Tuscany all the way down to Reggio. “As Plato went to Egypt,” Vico concluded, Pythagoras came to Italy, and

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“here he learned Italian philosophy and having become very expert in it, it pleased him to settle in Magna Graecia at Croton where he founded his school.”132 Here we encounter again the long tradition of Pythagorism, intertwined with a concern for Italian identity—a conjunction that, as we have seen, predated Vico and would persist well beyond his time.133 Vico took pains to underline how he had elaborated his response in conversation with his antiquarian friend Egizio, a recognized authority on ancient monuments, in order to assuage the reviewers's call for him to seek material evidence in support of his arguments. Yet the heated exchange concerning De antiquissima as it played out in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia was a pivotal moment: the version of the past Vico expressed there was one from which he later turned forcefully away, just as he rejected the antiquarian methods advocated by his reviewers. With the exception of a discussion of Homeric poetry, in The New Science Vico's main focus was the Roman past. He severed any link with the antiquarianism of his contemporaries; even Egizio is no longer explicitly mentioned. Vico's understanding of history in The New Science undermined the appropriative aspect of antiquarianism. He attacked what he called “conceits of nations” and “conceits of scholars” as great mistakes, by which nations overestimated their originality and antiquity—a criticism that could be aimed not only at the pursuit of a South Italian past by Vico's contemporaries but, ironically, even at his own earlier approach in De antiquissima. But to what extent could Vico, whose “eloquence and learning” shone “so gloriously in those parts where Pythagoras put down his roots,”134 fully escape

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the pull

of South Italy's ancient past, and the heated debate taking place about it in Naples? Some of The New Science's more surprising intuitions, such as the hypothesis that a Greek colony in Latium explained the presence of Greek cultural elements in early Rome, have been borne out just in the last century by the archaeological exploration of Cumae, the Greek site just south of Latium's borders.135 Similarly, the vision of the first Greek settlers as “driven by the ultimate necessity of survival” rather than as modern-day conquerors prefigured

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the late-twentieth-century appreciation and framing of this question.136 Might we imagine that such prescient insights came to Vico as he sat in the library of Valletta, where the ancient figured vases adorning the top shelves were known to have been made by Greeks rather than by Etruscans? Might his sensitivity to the various ways in which the past could be construed have originated amidst the intensity of Neapolitan discussions? However, lest we run the risk of reducing Vico to a prescient precursor, we might more profitably turn our attention away from his shedding of the old for the new, and toward the way he reveals the stratified and complex character of the Neapolitan intellectual sphere at the time. Certainly it is important to remember that, although his later insights seem to dismiss the notions and arguments that so absorbed many of his contemporaries, Vico had toyed with such thinking himself. It is suggestive, moreover, to imagine that the inflammatory debates on the past taking place in Naples would have inspired him, maybe more than has been acknowledged to date. But more pressingly here, Vico's own reception demonstrates the rich texture and contradictions of this world: the genealogies he exposed as mere conceits well survived his criticism, while the antiquarian approaches he disparaged produced historical practices that both undermined and served claims about mythical origins. This is well illustrated by the case of the scholar who is today most often credited as the founder of the modern study of Magna Graecia, Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi, who in the 1740s began reflecting on the Greek past of South Italy, adapting and transforming the tradition to which Vico's own De antiquissima belonged. Mazzocchi's Magna Graecia

By the time of his death in 1771 at the age of eighty-seven, Mazzocchi was the most illustrious antiquarian in Naples.137 But already in the 1730s he enjoyed wide renown, which makes him one of the puzzling silences in Vico's writings. If nothing else, we know that they knew each other from the fact that they competed in the same Latin poetry contests. It is all the more ironic then that, as we shall see, later Neapolitan scholars would long remember them jointly—il gran Mazzocchi

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e il divino Vico (the great Mazzocchi and the divine Vico). However, outside of Naples and Italy, Mazzocchi, who was celebrated at the end of his life as the “miracle of all literary Europe” (miraculum totius Europae literariae),138 has for the most part fallen into oblivion, remembered only for his opinion that

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painted vases found at South Italian sites were

Greek rather than Etruscan in origin.139 In Italy, however, scholars routinely invoke Mazzocchi as the pioneering scholar of Magna Graecia, with the Commentariorum in Regii herculanensis musei aeneas tabulas heracleenses pars I[-II] (Parts 1 and 2 of the commentaries on Heraclaea's tavole in the Royal Museum of Herculaneum, 1754–1755), his last major work (aside from biblical commentaries) and also the most lavish and ambitious.140 These scholars’ admiration for Mazzocchi's learned analysis enables them to look past his book's sprawling structure; yet their praise is accompanied by a certain uneasiness about Mazzocchi's etymologies, which assert the oriental origins of South Italy. Modern scholars typically gloss over them as mere peculiarities from his biblical scholarship.141 However, Mazzocchi's fixation on oriental origins may well hold the key to a richer understanding of the rediscovery of Magna Graecia, while allowing us to move beyond the usual admiration for Mazzocchi's innovativeness that tends to obscure, rather than to reveal, its complexity. Contradictions have long marked how Mazzocchi and his work have been remembered. Already in 1874, Felice Barnabei lamented that Mazzocchi was ignored by foreign scholars and embalmed by Italian ones who glorified him uncritically.142 Barnabei's point is only reinforced by the marble portrait of Mazzocchi, sculpted by the celebrated Giuseppe Sanmartino, which quite literally monumentalized him in the city's cathedral a mere five years after his death, and which soon became a required stop for tourists to Naples.143 The pride that many Neapolitans felt in Mazzocchi's brilliance is also evident in the careful handling of his senility; although he was in fact mostly ineffectual for many years, court appointments were continuously bestowed upon him until the end of his life. His decline seems to have been closely guarded information, and he remained a presence as celebrated as he was elusive

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on the city's intellectual scene. An anecdote from the Swedish scholar Jacob Jonas Björnsthäl's account of his visit to Naples in 1771—a few months before Mazzocchi's death—is revealing. When Björnsthäl expressed a wish to hear the famous librettist Luigi Serio improvise something, the topic chosen was that of the decline brought on by old age, and Mazzocchi was to be the example.144 Serio improvised, with piano accompaniment, for more than an hour. He declaimed in verse about physiology and the natural sciences, the decline of nerves, the weakening of memory, and the fading of ideas, before concluding with a comprehensive vision of Mazzocchi's work and how it had illustrated the history of his nation. This simultaneous anatomizing and poeticizing of Mazzocchi's illness also reminds us of how deeply intertwined the Neapolitan locale was with a wider Europe. Serio, after all, was performing for a foreign visitor. The dynamic interaction between insider and outside, so critical in this instance, was a crucial feature of much of Mazzocchi's own work. As early as 1727, in his first major publication, In mutilum Campani amphitheatri titulum aliasque nonnullas

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Campanas

inscriptiones commentarius (Commentary on the mutilated inscription of Capua's amphitheater and some other epigraphs), he expressed his preference for the local value of the past, claiming that he was “writing for [his] countrymen and not for the ultramontani [non-Italians].”145 The divergence between the Italian and foreign recollection of Mazzocchi, which has been real and enduring, has roots that go back to the interactions of Italians and foreigners, even during his lifetime. However characterized by contrasts and miscommunication, the relations that developed between Italians and foreign travelers and scholars crucially determined much eighteenth-century scholarship about Magna Graecia and its subsequent transmission. Even Mazzocchi's oriental etymologies—the uneasy legacy that Mazzocchi left to his successors—once properly contextualized, rather than simply blamed on biblical scholarship or on his senility, show how his effort to illustrate his “nation's past” was conducted in dialogue with the wider, and divided, conversation about the kingdom's past that

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developed well beyond its boundaries, in Italian and European contexts. Mazzocchi was born in Santa Maria di Capua, near Capua itself. Reportedly the last of twenty-one siblings, the young Mazzocchi quickly outdistanced his own teachers and at the age of fifteen moved to Naples to complete his education. There he developed a dual career as a university professor of sacred scripture and theology and as canon of the cathedral. It was, however, thanks to his antiquarian publications, rather than to those in ecclesiastical history and biblical scholarship, that Mazzocchi's reputation reached beyond Naples. His In mutilum Campani amphitheatri titulum, dedicated to his hometown, was admired as far as Vienna. In this work, based on a mutilated inscription found among the ruins of Capua's amphitheater, Mazzocchi moved deftly from the vicissitudes of this monument to a portrait of Capuan history stretching from antiquity well into the Middle Ages. Twelve years later Mazzocchi released his Epistula qua ad XXX virorum clarissimorum de dedicatione sub ascia commentationes integrae recensentur (A letter in which the commentaries of thirty illustrious authors on the dedication “Under the Axe” are reviewed, 1739), which centered on a commonplace inscription found in Roman burials. A short masterpiece, full of wit and critical verve, Mazzocchi's epistula took readers on a bird's-eye tour of the Republic of Letters, exposing the weaknesses of thirty earlier interpretations of the sub ascia inscription motif before putting forth his own. On the strength of these first two successful works, Mazzocchi entered into correspondence with Italian antiquarians of wide international renown, such as the Modenese Ludovico Muratori (1672– 1750), and garnered prestigious appointments to a number of Neapolitan academies and committees, from the Royal Academy of Herculaneum to the committee for exports of antiquities. These honors were matched abroad by his appointment to the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and outside of the kingdom to the Accademia Etrusca di Cortona. (p.52)

It was at this high point in Mazzocchi's career that the

nobleman Carlo Guevara commissioned him to compose the

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commentary on the recently discovered inscriptions of Heraclaea. This sensational discovery, which turned out to inspire Mazzocchi's foundational work on Magna Graecia, itself had a story of European-wide scope.146 The tavole were first retrieved in February 1733, after a flood, by a farmer busy plowing a field in the vicinity of the river Cavone, a few miles away from the site of ancient Heraclaea. What followed is most intriguing. Within three years, one of the smaller fragments turned up in England and became known as fragmentum Britannicum. It did so by a well-established route: passing through the hands of Francesco Ficoroni, an exemplary instance of a Roman antiquarian at the interface of scholarship and dealership.147 The piece had been acquired from him by Brian Fairfax, a London scholar and royal commissioner. At Fairfax's initiative, Michael Mattaire, well versed in Greek, promptly published an English edition of the fragmentum in 1736. Meanwhile, Carlo Guevara, scion of a powerful ducal family based in Puglia, bought the remaining sections, presenting them in 1748 to King Carlo on the condition that they be displayed in the new museum of Portici. He also asked Mazzocchi to compose the commentary. After reading this commentary, the fragment's British owner returned it to the Neapolitan royal collections, thus ensuring that the tavole di Heraclaea could once again be appreciated in its entirety (an early example of archaeological repatriation). Whatever the specific motives behind his gift to the king, Guevara clearly meant to stake a claim in the new cultural program promoted by Carlo. In asking that the inscriptions be displayed in the museum at Portici, which had been built expressly to house antiquities unearthed in the Vesuvian cities, Guevara seems to have wanted to bring attention to the kingdom's southernmost regions from which his own family originated. In the pages he wrote to preface Mazzocchi's volumes, he drew an explicit comparison between Heraclaea and Herculaneum, starting with the fact that both were named in Heracles's honor. The findings at Heraclaea, he claimed, showed that although “separated from the splendor of the royal Palace by a long series of provinces,”148 these southern regions could nevertheless offer treasures worthy of the royal

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collections. Even Guevara's description of the discovery at Heraclaea as a sort of miraculous birth—“the soil brought [the tavole] forward spontaneously, with no intervention from a human obstetrician”149—must be read in relation to the excavations at Herculaneum, which certainly yielded spectacular findings, but were notoriously labor-intensive and difficult to conduct. In keeping with the new sensibilities of the age and with Guevara's concerns, Mazzocchi himself, who had never before fixated on any archaeological backstory, here dwelt at length on the recovery and significance of the tavole di Heraclaea. The first page contains an engraving depicting the scene of discovery itself (see figure 1.2) and the volume opens with a detailed account of the farmer responsible for the finding. In elegant Latin phrasing, Mazzocchi

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seamlessly transforms an ordinary bucolic scene, Figure 1.2. The discovery of the tavole di “aratore per Heraclaea as depicted in a title vignette limum tunc in Mazzocchi's Commentariorum in regii molliorem Herculanensis musei Aeneas tabulas quem torrens Heracleenses pars I[-II], 1754–1755. reliquerat boves prae se (Research Library, Getty Research agente” (as the Institute, Los Angeles [89-B26203].) ploughman pushed the oxen ahead through the soil that the overflowing river had softened) into an archaeological one:

quadrupidis unius ungulae ad solidum nescio quid offenderint, ex eaque impactione tinnitus, cuiusmodi aera percussa reddunt, exauditus fuerit. Ergo ex eo sonoris inditio effossae in eo loco tabulae duae fuerunt (the hoof of one of the quadrupeds hit something solid, and from this impact this impact he heard a sound that indicated it was bronze. Therefore, with the clue of this noise, the two tabulae were dug up in that place).150

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Mazzocchi's book contained spectacular, virtually full-scale reproductions of the inscriptions. In and of themselves, these inscriptions, bearing Greek text on one side and Latin on the other, had little to do with an emerging, modern image of Magna Graecia; after all, as intense scholarly labor soon revealed, the inscriptions were concerned with municipal rights (in Latin) and with the misappropriation of land belonging to sanctuaries (in Greek).151 It was, rather, Mazzocchi's presentation of them that put the tavole di Heraclaea at the heart of the eighteenth-century rediscovery of Magna Graecia and made the claim for this particular South Italian past as crucial to the kingdom. Mazzocchi's massive scholarly ambition in this work, far exceeding that involved in any of his earlier undertakings, went a long way toward helping him make this claim. In the case of Capua, he had already taken a particular inscription as a point of departure to engage wider questions. Here, however, building from the inscriptions of Heraclaea, he aimed to embrace the entire region of Magna Graecia, with the bulk of the Commentarii, more than two-thirds of some five hundred pages, addressing various questions concerning South Italy's ancient history. The book also contains chapters on the name “Magna Graecia,” the particularities of the territory's ancient cities, the Doric dialect, and Roman law, among other topics. The result was a sprawling, digressive work. It is, for example, in the midst of this meandering that Mazzocchi strays into the long, tangential discussion— complete with beautiful engraved illustrations—of some painted vases from the Mastrilli collection, showing his conviction that they were Greek and not Etruscan. However idiosyncratic and loosely organized it might seem to us, Mazzocchi's work on the tavole di Heraclaea compared well with the work of contemporary antiquarians, and its novelty and ambitious scope was well recognized. Of the composite feat that was Mazzocchi's scholarship, Winckelmann in March 1757 wrote to his friend John Michael Francke: “[I]f you happen to see the commentary by Mazzocchi on the bronze inscriptions in Doric dialect, you will be surprised. There is only a single copy of it now in Rome … and I have been permitted to have it on my desk for a few days.”152 Admiring

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Mazzocchi's capacity to bring back to life an

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entire

region of Greek antiquity, Winckelmann hailed him as the greatest living Hellenist and developed an ardent longing to meet him. Yet it is in this same work that one finds Mazzocchi's insistence, by way of etymologies, on unvealing oriental origins in South Italian history. The first section in Mazzocchi's Commentarii on the name “Magna Graecia” is a good starting point for understanding these issues, for it exemplifies the foundational role of Mazzocchi's work while also demonstrating his reliance on etymologies and theories of oriental origins. The meaning of Magna Graecia had already troubled earlier Italian scholars: Alberti, Barrio, and di Nola Molisi had all stated their opinions on this topic while acknowledging how scant and contradictory the ancient sources were, while Clüver had dismissed attempts to even pursue the matter. Mazzocchi, in returning to the problem, and throughout his own explanation, continues the line initiated by Alberti, which sought to find in the name some meaning celebrating the greatness of South Italy. But modeling a systematic approach that still prevails today, he divides the question into focused, detail-oriented queries as to when, where, and why “Magna Graecia” came into use, developing his argument through an exhaustive review of the available ancient sources. As we have seen, Mazzocchi was the first to introduce Polybius into the debate, yet, he did so primarily in order to connect the name to Pythagoras and to date it back to the sixth century BCE. As to the “where,” or the geographic extent of Magna Graecia, Mazzocchi decisively dismisses Strabo's inclusion of Sicily, but otherwise proposes a reconciliation of all the other ancient sources, despite their mutual contradictions, by arguing that they refer to different periods: Initially Magna Graecia was nearly the whole of the coast in between Tarentum and Cumae, including part of Messapia (as Servius observed)…. But later on, both before and after the Social Wars, as everything was lost to the language and institutions of the neighboring

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populations, [Magna Graecia] was finally reduced to the limited extent attributed to it by Pliny and Ptolemy.153 In contrast to this open and conciliatory attitude toward the variations among ancient authors, it is all the more striking how forcefully Mazzocchi attacks the only modern interpretation under his consideration: that of Bruzen de la Martinière in the Grand dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique (1726–1739). Here Magna Graecia was understood in spatial terms and explained in relation to mainland Greece, which De La Martinière claimed was geographically smaller than South Italy.154 Mazzocchi does not even engage with De La Martinière's technical measurements. Instead, he speaks forthrightly against what he perceives as the underlying identification of Magna Graecia with the whole of South Italy— the modern Kingdom of Naples. He finds this “to be most false…. It is enough to know that Polybius, Strabo, Livy and all the other writers always distinguished the Italian Greeks from the Lucanians, the

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Samnites, the Campanians, the

Apulians and all the other peoples of this Kingdom.”155 This claim on behalf of the ancient Italian peoples whom he asserts predated the Italian Greeks is the first hint that Mazzocchi's conception of Magna Graecia went well beyond its storied Greek past. This pre-Greek past emerges all the more distinctively in Mazzocchi's discussion of the name's “why.” Like earlier Italian scholars beginning with Giovanni Antonio Flaminio as reported by Alberti, Mazzocchi thought the meaning to be celebratory of Italy's greatness. He quotes Pliny: “The Greeks themselves, a people most prone to gushing self-praise, have pronounced sentence on the land [Italy] by conferring on but a very small part of it the name of Great Greece!” (Naturalis Historia, 3. 5. 42). Mazzocchi explicates further: “Never would the Greeks, arrogantissimi mortalium, have called a small part of Italy ‘great’ (i.e. magna, a name which obscured the glory of Greece), if they did not understand that whatever related to Italy, however small it was, should be called great.”156 What at first seemed like Pythagoras lending luster to the territory's name in the end becomes Pythagoras being enlightened by what he finds in Italy.

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But what kind of enlightenment did Mazzocchi imagine Pythagoras finding in Italy? It is in considering this question that oriental etymologies come into play, not merely as part of a rich tradition of biblical scholarship but as they reflect Mazzocchi's very specific concerns with the ancient Italian past of the Neapolitan Kingdom. The native Italians, who predated Greek colonization and from whom Pythagoras (as in Vico's De antiquissima) learned much, turn out to be colonists themselves, brought to Italian shores by migrations described in the Bible. Thus Mazzocchi manages not only to recover the glory of the “original” Italians encountered by the Greek colonists but also to claim for them a direct link to the sacred peoples of the Bible. Etymologies are crucial to Mazzocchi's argument; through them he reclaims origins for immigrants from biblical lands that, he argues, the Greeks arrogantly appropriated as their own. When Mazzocchi's analysis of place-names on coins and inscriptions reveals a non-Greek foreign root, he takes it to indicate the oriental foundation of a city.157 For most southern Italian place-names, he thus reconstructs Hebrew, Chaldean, or Syriac roots. For example, while Locris's transparently Greek name indicates a Greek etymology, many of the place-names of the surrounding area, such as Cape Zephyrium, appeared to Mazzocchi to be of oriental origin. Croton, the lux of Magna Graecia, similarly emerges as oriental, when Mazzocchi claims that the Iapygians called it Korta, the Chaldean word for city.158 Mazzocchi demonstrates the great majority of Greek cities in South Italy—Thurii, Sybaris, Heraclea, Siris, Metapontum, Taras, Rhegion, Terina, Velia, and Paestum—to have oriental origins.159 “Oriental,” a cover term for Phoenicians, Etruscans, Thyrrenians, Iapygians, and many others, allows Mazzocchi to conclude that the ancient Italic peoples of the Neapolitan Kingdom ultimately derived from biblical migrations of populations from lands where a

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variety of non-Western

languages were spoken. In his interpretation, the Chones came to Iapygia at the time of Phaleg, while the Cerethei, identified with the Cretans mentioned by Herodotus, arrived in southern Italy from Canaan at a later date. Respected practices of scholarship and deeply ingrained visions of the past produced Mazzocchi's Magna Graecia,

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however bizarre it may seem today. The preference for coins and inscriptions over transmitted texts recalls the words of the German antiquarian Ezechiel Spanheim (1629–1710), written nearly a century before Mazzocchi: “There is no greater security for us than that to be found in coins or ancient marbles…. Whereas our remaining sources have the dubious reliability of texts continually retranscribed, only these [coins and marbles] have the initial authority of the original versions.”160 This credo was indeed the basis for the antiquarian tradition that played such a crucial role in the origins of modern historiography and archaeology, as argued by Momigliano. That these methods carried their own risks is well attested by the story of the French scholar Jean Hardouin (1646–1729), who, practicing these very principles, went from antiquarian prince to pariah when radical doubt finally led him to question the authenticity of all ancient literature besides Cicero, Virgil's Georgics, Horace's Satires and Epistles, and Pliny the Elder.161 Nor was the biblically oriented past envisioned by Mazzocchi novel—a reverie of alleged biblical origins had ensured the success of the forgeries of Giovanni Nanni, or Annius of Viterbo, (ca. 1432–1502), which were first publicized in 1498. Blending a cocktail of fragmentary ancient written sources, Annius set out to prove Viterbo's biblical origins, thus establishing the city as a center of cultural diffusion and influence throughout Europe.162 Annius's forgeries were eventually exposed, yet the theme of such colonizing migrations continued to resurface. The motive was always to link the history of various European peoples to the hallowed events described in the Bible, as in the French biblical scholar Samuel Bochart's 1652 Geographia sacra, which Mazzocchi repeatedly quoted, and which had in fact established the model for two of the biblical migrations: first of the Phalegians, and then of the Canaanites.163 Mazzocchi echoed Bochart in his theories about Magna Graecia's earlier inhabitants. Leaving for a moment this broader European cultural context, Mazzocchi's Magna Graecia resonated with Italian, and more specifically Neapolitan, concerns. Mazzocchi's passage claiming recognition for the other peoples of the Neapolitan Kingdom—the Samnites and so forth—has been compared with

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the contemporary Tuscan school's elaboration of an “Italic primacy.”164 This was the eighteenth-century blossoming of Italian studies that focused on retrieving regional identities beyond the Roman conquest. Momigliano ably describes this moment as a revitalization of antiquarian studies, in which local pride provoked new research and methodologies, since often the search for a local past entailed a focus on material evidence rather than ancient

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written sources.165 In

Tuscany, scholars insisted on the preeminence of the Etruscans over the Romans (just as they claimed ancient painted vases as Etruscan). This Tuscan school engaged, as Mazzocchi would, Bochart's biblical geography. Its influence spread far and wide within Italy: the Veronese scholar Francesco Scipione, Marquis of Maffei (1675–1755), for example, not only derived all Italian peoples from the Etruscans but derived the Etruscans themselves from the land of Canaan. Mazzocchi's work certainly suited this flowering of Italian studies. His dialogue with the Tuscan school is well attested by Sopra l’origine dei Tirreni (On the origins of the Thyrrennians, 1741), his only publication in Italian, composed for the Accademia Etrusca di Cortona, the institution that had been established in 1727 precisely in order to promote the study of Italic origins. Here Mazzocchi sought parallels between Etruscan and Near Eastern cultures, arguing that the names of the Italian rivers of the Padanian plain reflected those of Palestine, and highlighting similarities in the rites, institutions, and customs of the two peoples.166 However, Mazzocchi's work on Magna Graecia reveals a distinct version of the Italic primacy model. For Neapolitans, the question of a colonial Greek past (over and above the Roman and preRoman dichotomy that mattered further north) always loomed large. This Greek presence pressed Mazzocchi to stretch methodologically further than the scholars of the Tuscan school. Paolo Rossi's investigation of “reactionary literature” (writers such as Bochart who engaged in defending biblical migrations and their chronology) has shown that two strategies developed to rebuff the attacks brought with increasing intensity against sacred history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.167 The first was to assimilate

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various human histories into a single sacred one. This was the way of Bochart, who held that “the most ancient biblical wisdom lay hidden in the wisdom of the most ancient peoples.”168 This was also Maffei's approach, and Mazzocchi's too, both in his Tuscan work and in his oriental etymologies for Magna Graecia. The second strategy was to declare human histories that contradicted the biblical model as “imaginary” or “fabulous.”169 It was in this way that Mazzocchi dismissed the detailed ancient accounts of Greek foundations in South Italy as fictive and legendary: We would be gullible if we limited ourselves in exploring the most remote origins of peoples of such heroic times to the accounts of the Greeks, the vainest of mortals! And we should already have been cautioned by their manifest lies and never-ending quibbling. If we are wise, for that period of time which Varro calls history, we will accept the Greeks as guides. But in exploring the foggy mist of the heroic times we need much more reliable light.170 Not that Mazzocchi's approach to the Greek past was purely dismissive. His work bears traces of a complex South Italian intellectual tradition that

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had indeed long dealt with

Greek antiquity in coming to terms with its own cultural heritage and historical identity. As early as the seventeenth century, Naples had proudly staked a claim to Greek, republican origins, in opposition to Rome.171 Pythagoras had long been a focus of cultural pride in South Italy. But such acclaim for the mathematician and philosopher continually showcased how entwined the Greek past could be with a decidedly local, Italian pride. While some Renaissance writers, as we have seen, went so far as to claim Pythagoras as a native of Calabria,172 Vico had argued that Pythagoras owed his wisdom to the ancient Italians. Yet around the time of Vico's De sapientia antiquissima, the figure of Pythagoras was eliciting a certain anxiety because of the perceived atomism of his philosophy. Atomism was the focus of the influential Cambridge Platonist Henry More's (1614–1687) interpretation of the ancient philosopher, and in Naples in the 1720s, the Inquisition handled charges of atomism and freethinking

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involving Pythagorean references.173 Reacting to these tensions, Valletta, following the model of the Cambridge atomists, had transformed Pythagoras into a scholar of Moses.174 Mazzocchi took this approach one step further. His interpretation of Magna Graecia made Pythagoras not simply an importer into Italy of previously acquired Hebrew knowledge but someone who gained his wisdom once in Italy, and from a community of biblical migrants that had settled there before his arrival. Mazzocchi thereby introduced a reassuring turn that maintained the patriotic pride evident in Vico, but neutralized any charges of pagan impiety associated with Pythagoras. The success of Mazzocchi's interpretation of this Hebrew Naples is evidenced by its popularization in the vernacular by Giuseppe Martorelli's Delle antiche colonie venute in Napoli ed i primi furono i Fenici (Of the ancient colonies in Naples and the first were Phoenicians, 1764).175 Nowadays Mazzocchi's status as a founding father of studies of Magna Graecia rests on those features of his work that appear most modern, such as his systematic survey of ancient sources, or his framing of questions still debated today (the origins of the name Magna Graecia, or the duration and extent of the Greek language's presence in South Italy). His “multipolar vision” of South Italy's ancient past and his preoccupation with native Italians have indeed been proven to have had an enduring and distinctive influence.176 But to frame his influence in modern terms alone is to lose an essential aspect of Mazzocchi's approach, namely his argument that the Italic past came by way of what he termed oriental origins. His views exacerbated the already strained relationship between local and foreign scholarly perspectives, thus sharpening the division between those who sought Greece in South Italy and those who were more—or at least as much—interested in the Italian context. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the rediscovery of Paestum, on which the perspectives of Mazzocchi and Winckelmann, as well as their subsequent reception, are particularly illuminating.

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Mazzocchi and Winckelmann at Paestum

These two scholars’ reactions to the temples could hardly have been more different: Mazzocchi claimed them as oriental architecture, while for Winckelmann they constituted a deeply moving “Greek” experience, his only direct encounter with the ideal of Greece. But these two men's pages on Paestum have much in common as well. In both cases their pages strike a distinct tone within their writings, reflecting, however differently, how unusual it was for both of them to engage in the interpretation of ruined monumental architecture. Winckelmann's and Mazzocchi's writings on Paestum also share the promptness with which they were forgotten. Both men's accounts were eclipsed by the deluge of detailed architectural publications on the temples, which began in the 1760s. But it behooves us to recover the notes on Paestum by these two acknowledged founding figures in the modern study of the ancient world, for each in his own way neatly encapsulates the subsequent emergence of very different approaches to, and levels of scholarly investment in, Magna Graecia. It is indeed remarkable how early Winckelmann and Mazzocchi inserted themselves in the story of Paestum's rediscovery, which is as much about forgetting as it is about finding. As early as 1524, the historian of Naples Pietro Summonte had written: “in Pesto, that is to say Posidonia, a ruined city, the walls are preserved almost intact, by and large complete with their towers, and inside are three temples, of Doric style, built of hard Travertine rock.”177 Somehow, as we have seen, later historical geographers lost even this brief appreciation for the site: Alberti and those who followed in his footsteps certainly knew about the ruins, but if they mentioned the ruins at all, it was only in connection with Paestum's biferas rose, whose twice-yearly blooming they praised in imitation of Virgil. Clüver, writing in 1624, described with exemplary precision the location of Paestum, but did not even cite its ruins, and as late as 1775 the Encyclopédie entry on Paestum spoke only of the roses. By the early eighteenth century, local antiquarians revived interest in these monuments; yet court documents also register a 1740 proposal from the royal architect Ferdinando Sanfelice to use

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columns from Paestum to decorate the new royal palace of Capodimonte. The South Italian scholars who had a renewed interest in the ruins, moreover, were not even sure that they were temples: Costantino Gatta in 1732 thought that one of these “superb buildings” was a “gymnasium,” and Baron Giuseppe Antonini in the early 1750s was still convinced they were “porticos.”178 The rediscovery of Paestum—along with the emergence of a new appreciation for its Doric architecture, which at first seemed to many too unrefined— entailed deciding what the ruins actually were. Uncertainty persisted for a long time. The so-called Basilica—now known as the Temple of Neptune—was still thought to be a meeting hall by Piranesi, and other uses were hypothesized much later. Yet Mazzochi, like Summonte before

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him, considered

the buildings as temples, and so eventually did Winckelmann, despite his initial wavering. In a vignette from the pages of the antiquarian Antonini, we have a revealing account of the momentous change that made Paestum famous across Europe, as well as a hint of the division initiated by the site's renewed success. In his regional historical guide Lucania, composed between 1745 and 1756, Antonini writes that on his last visit to Paestum he had encountered French architects at the site, engaged in taking measurements and making sketches.179 He recounts how these foreigners tried unsuccessfully to persuade him that the Paestum ruins were temples; he remained convinced they were porticos. Most significantly, at the heart of Antonini's encounter with the French architects lay a conflict of interpretation and methodology deeply embedded in the difference between a foreign, professional perspective and a local, amateur one. Such tensions are too often elided in discussions of the celebrated eighteenth-century “discovery” of Paestum. Merely tracing the origins of the eighteenth-century interest in Paestum reveals competing lines between locals and outsiders. It was a British traveler, Robert Smith, who already in 1733 wrote to Matteo Egizio, urging him to sponsor, for the benefit of “the erudite world, the drawing and the copper-plate engraving … of these marvels … such as in very few places one

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can see.”180 Nothing came of this letter. But the French neoclassical architect Jacques Germain Soufflot (1713–1780), who would only five years later begin work on the Pantheon in Paris, traveled to Paestum in 1750. It seems that this trip, recorded by Antonini, inaugurated the worshipful, attentive approach to the temples that Robert Smith had envisioned. Soufflot's architectural expedition to Paestum did not take place in a vacuum. Just two years earlier James Stuart and Nicholas Revett had departed from Naples for Athens. It was there that they met James Woods returning from his architectural expedition at Palmyra, and there they were busy measuring monuments while Soufflot was at Paestum. Indeed, it would be Stuart and Revett's The Antiquities of Athens, the first volume of which came out in 1765 and the last in 1816, that would in the longer term prove the most influential architectural model and inspiration for the Greek revival.181 But even before its first volume appeared, Paestum became a crucial site for the emerging conversation on Greek architecture. Whereas at Athens or Palmyra, this conversation does not seem to have involved local interests in a significant way, in the case of Paestum there was a not-so-distant court eager to stake a claim. As the visits of architects increased and intensified, the court of Naples took notice, and Count Felice Gazzola (1698–1780), an engineer and commander of the royal artillery for King Carlo's army, ordered that the road to Paestum be made more accessible. A man with a passion for the arts (he founded an institute for the study of the arts in Piacenza, complete with scholarships for worthy and underprivileged youth, that is still operating today), Gazzola also sponsored the first official drawings

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of Paestum.

However, not much support materialized beyond Gazzola's initiative; after he left Naples (he died before he could see this project through), it took until 1774 for the illustrations of Paestum that he had commissioned to be published. By that time, eight illustrated books on Paestum had already been issued, mostly by non-Italians and many of them based on unauthorized reproductions of Gazzola's drawings. The number is a remarkable reflection of Paestum's heyday—at the time relatively few publications were available even for sites

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like Athens and Palmyra—and was instrumental in launching the fortunes of Paestum and its Doric aesthetic all across Europe.182 Even earlier, however, the writings of Mazzocchi and Winckelmann showed that the tensions between local and foreign ran deeper than the interpretation of the temples. Mazzocchi described the temples in his commentary on the inscriptions of Heraclaea in an extended appendix on the town of Paestum, much of which echoes the general excitement accompanying the site's rediscovery. Mazzocchi applauds Count Gazzola's effort to study and describe the ancient town, praising his plans to “excavate the scattered remains of Paestum that are still lying underneath the soil.”183 Yet in sharp contrast to the interest in Paestum's “Greekness,” Mazzocchi in his very first paragraph identifies the temples as being of Etruscan style: Neither the shafts of the columns [scapi] nor the other decorations can be related to any architectural style described by Vitruvius. Nevertheless, they are reminiscent of Etruscan culture [Tyrrhenicum ingenium], since they are bold [mascula] and solid [robusta]. In fact, they are not very different from the model of Etruscan style that Vitruvius describes…. The walls and the temples are not of any kind that Vitruvius writes about but rather reminiscent of Etruscan culture.184 This Etruscan style is, in Mazzocchi's view, easily connected with Phoenician origins, as he is apparently eager to fit the new excitement surrounding the temples into his hypothesis about the oriental origins of Paestum. Mazzocchi fancifully traces the etymology of Paestum to a Phoenician god of the sea supposedly called Pesitan. He presents it as an unambiguous case of an oriental origin, which he then proceeds to superimpose on the history of the site as told by Strabo: that Greeks from Sybaris drove out the previous inhabitants around 500 BCE, built walls, and called the city Poseidonia. Later Poseidonia was conquered by the Lucanians and ultimately occupied by the Romans, who gave the town the Italic name of Paestum. Mazzocchi's analysis agrees with the modern consensus that Poseidonia was the Greek name

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and Paestum the non-Greek, Italic one, but he substantially reverses the chronological relationship between the two names, making Paestum the original, oriental one. Mazzocchi is thus faced with the problem of explaining how these “oriental” temples survived the Greek occupation. At first he believed that the Greek

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colonists had simply

mixed with the local Paestani, but Strabo's line, “the Sybarites had erected fortifications on the sea, and the inhabitants moved further inland” (Geography 5.4.13), made him reconsider his position. Here, most unusually, we find him resorting to the survey of an ancient site. He gives the reader a bird's-eye view of the topography of greater Paestum: he identifies the Silarum River (modern Sele); Piesti (the contemporary village enclosed by the ancient walls, including the temples); the small river of Capo di Fiume; the site of Spinazzo, which Mazzocchi claimed was “widely scattered with remains of ancient buildings”; the backdrop of the Lucanian Mountains; and finally, the site of Agropoli.185 (The topography of Paestum shown in figure 1.3.—published in 1784 in Paolo Antonio Paoli's Le antichità di Pesto, ossia Poseidonia—gives a good sense of Mazzocchi's vision for the area.) Mazzocchi's narrative is set against this well-detailed landscape: the original inhabitants, the Paestani, unseated by the Sybarites’ invasion, built Paestum at a nearby remove, and those ruins have survived into modern times; this would explain its diminutive scale. The newly founded Poseidonia was a great and powerful city, while Paestum was comparatively meager, so much so that the Paestani were forced to hand over their land to the newcomers. The newly arrived Sybarites preferred that the Paestani remain close by, because they could be of use, and they chose to call their settlement by the same name as a sign of friendship and community. Two neighboring cities separated more by language and walls than by administration, Poseidonia lay on the western side and Paestum to the east. The Sybarites built Poseidonia in the space vacated by the Paestani, between Spinazzo and Agropoli: the plentiful remains found in the area of Spinazzo attest to the original settlement. Later, the

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Lucanians destroyed the Sybarites’ town completely, because of their arrogance, but left Paestum standing. For Mazzocchi, the ultimate proof of Poseidonia's location having been between Spinazzo and Agropoli is the name Agropoli itself, which he believed to be a reference to the acropolis of Poseidonia. Mazzocchi's insistence on oriental origins for ancient Italy led him to a very odd perception of Paestum, including his theory of the oriental character of the temples’ architecture and his unlikely suppositions about the size of ancient cities. One is reminded of Mazzocchi's work on Capua, in which he also dealt with the double foundation of a city. In that work he had carefully, and successfully, traced the destruction of ancient Capua in 843; the 856 founding of the new town—still called Capua in modern times; and the slow repopulation of the ancient site with the name Santa Maria in later years. But for Capua, his medieval sources, however scant, had been much more substantial, and he could also rely on his knowledge of his native town. In the case of Paestum, Mazzocchi's commingling of his usual philological and etymological approach with a survey and analysis of Paestum's material evidence marks these pages as unique in his work. While his interpretation of Paestan

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topography cannot but appear strange —a Figure 1.3. Topographia Paestana. Plate strangeness 6 in Paolo Antonio Paoli's Paesti, quod that suggests Posidoniam etiam dixere, rudera, 1784. that he himself (Research Library, Getty Research did not make Institute, Los Angeles [86-B11143].) the trip to Paestum—it nevertheless stands among the first studies in ancient Italian history to adopt such an integrated approach.

Winckelmann, on the other hand, traveled to Paestum in 1758, during a prolonged stay in Naples. He had then been in Rome for only a few years and was in the process of developing his

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famous interpretation of ancient Greek art, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of the Art of the Ancients, 1764).186 He had looked forward to the Neapolitan trip as a means to test further his evolving theory of the classical ideal, but the experience fell short of his expectations, marked as it was by his disappointment in the Neapolitans’ appearance, in how the Herculaneum excavations were conducted, and in the jealousy with which the findings were treated, which rendered them mostly inaccessible to visitors like him.187 In contrast, he had only good things to say about Paestum. In a gushing, awestruck letter inspired by the Paestum ruins, be they “temples or porticos,”188 Winckelmann describes his excited sense of “discovery,” imagining himself the first German ever to visit the ruins. In his 1762 work on ancient architecture, Winckelmann returned to Paestum's ruins—two of which he by now confidently considered temples, while terming the third a “portico” or “gymnasium”—and he made them the topic of his preface. The trope of discovery here was crucial for Winckelmann in advertising the timeliness of his work. Winckelmann comments on how strange it was that “these monuments have not [before] drawn the attention of those who were able to admire and describe them.”189 He dates this rediscovery to ten years earlier, around 1750, when the visit of some Englishmen initiated interest in, and discussion of, the temples. He then speaks of Gazzola's project in terms very reminiscent of Mazzocchi, writing that Neapolitan officials had responded to the renewed interest by clearing the road to Paestum and by sponsoring the project, still under way as he wrote, of producing copperplate engravings of the temples. Winckelmann's brief text is unillustrated, yet he seems to compensate for this lack of images by referring, with extraordinary frequency, to illustrations. Not only does he mention Gazzola's project, but he also qualifies his own writing on Paestum as “the first and most precise description of Paestum without using copperplates.”190 Winckelmann's self-consciousness about the absence of illustration in his book is revealing. His 1764 History of the Art of the Ancients—the work that established him as the founder of classical archaeology, art history, and philhellenism—contained a small handful of fairly basic illustrations. Crucial to this book's

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success were the lyrical prose descriptions of ancient masterpieces: the statues that had been long-standing staples of the Grand Tour, well known to the European reading public, for which images were superfluous, and in fact superseded by Winckelmann's ekphrastic exercises. Paestum, on the other hand, was different: it had just been “discovered” and few had yet to visit, although the numbers were growing. (p.66)

With no illustrations to invoke as evidence, one way in

which Winckelmann generated confidence in the accuracy of his own description was by self-consciously superseding an earlier one. While Mazzocchi's description goes unmentioned, Winckelmann draws an explicit and self-aggrandizing comparison between Antonini's work and his own more precise and informative writings. Winckelmann eagerly points out Antonini's mistakes, including his belief that the temples were mere porticos, and his misrepresentation of the shape of the walls: He [Antonini] had in mind to speak of the ruins of Paestum. To this end he visited … the ruins a few times, as he himself told me, since he owns lands in that region. But his observations are so badly digested and organized that the pages containing them had to be republished…. Nevertheless there still is a major mistake, as he makes the city of Paestum to have a circular shape, when on the contrary the enclosure of the walls forms a perfect square. Whoever wishes to compare what I say in the following observations with that statement will easily realize how lacking and incomplete that information is.191 In the pages that followed Winckelmann did indeed prove precise in regard to measurements, and he tried as hard as possible to give a good idea of what the temples must have looked like. Yet despite Winckelmann's claim that architecture was indeed more “ideal” than sculpture, his pages are dry and difficult to follow, often uninspiring, and the lack of images is very much felt. It is not difficult to understand why Mazzocchi's and Winckelmann's work was so soon superseded by the more substantial and, most importantly, illustrated publications on Paestum that began to appear in great number

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in subsequent years.192 Among the first was The Ruins of Paestum otherwise Posidonia in Magna Graecia (1768), by the British artist Thomas Major (1714–1799). He never set foot on the site but, having obtained some of the drawings originally commissioned by Gazzola and Soufflot, Major was able to combine them with a chapter on the history of the city—whose splendor he compared to that of Athens—and another on Paestum's numismatics. Major wrote in agreement with Winckelmann's thesis that the Greeks had invented art; he also took into account Mazzocchi's interpretation of the origins of Paestum. But both authors, however much praised as “ingenious,” appear only in the footnotes. The amnesia that followed Winckelmann's and Mazzocchi's work on Paestum is indeed telling. Mazzocchi's unprecedented and disorienting interpretation of Paestum's temples as Phoenician was at first jealously defended by Neapolitan antiquarians, who held onto it tenaciously for decades. The reaction to the one Neapolitan who opposed Mazzocchi was ferocious. This dissenter, Pasquale Magnoni, published a pamphlet in Latin attacking Mazzocchi and

(p.67)

claiming

that Paestum was a Greek city, with typically Greek architecture. Magnoni boldly asserted: Thus, oh learned young people, as I proceed in the study of the Paestan antiquities, my aim is to reclaim the first beginnings of that city, declaring that they do not belong to Mazzocchi's Phoenician people: I shall place the city back in its proper site and restore the name of Poseidonia to its original position, abolishing the Phoenician one of Paestum, which I think is more justly attributed to the authority of the Lucanians.193 Magnoni's Latin was less elegant and his publication much cheaper than Mazzocchi's, but his interpretation was ultimately more defensible. Yet when Francesco Mazzarella Farao, Antonini's nephew, edited a 1795 reissue of his uncle's guide, he deleted some paragraphs on Paestum and replaced them with passages by Mazzocchi. In the same breath, he roundly dismissed Magnoni's work and chided him for his lack of respect for Mazzocchi's erudition.194 This stubborn attachment to Mazzocchi, however, would render Neapolitan

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antiquarians irrelevant on the wider European scene. When in 1784 Paoli finally published all of Gazzola's drawings in Paesti, quod Posidoniam etiam dixere, rudera (Ruins of Paestum, also called Posidonia), the rest of Europe swiftly appreciated the images as the most accurate and precise available, while the baffling text, with its well-rehearsed claims of Paestum's Phoenician origins, could only be ignored.195 Forgotten along with much of his work on ancient architecture, Winckelmann's pages on Paestum have been referred to only sporadically, as anecdotal witness to his sole encounter with Greek material.196 Yet it was Winckelmann's History of the Art of the Ancients that created the frame of reference for Paestum's reception.197 For example, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recounted, some thirty years after the fact, his own 1787 visit to Paestum, he presented himself as one of those who was at first unsure what to make of the temples. He wrote that he found himself “in a completely alien world, because the eyes of our times are attracted to slender, delicate architectural forms,” and that the ruins, with their “blunt, squat, cramped and massive columns” seemed “oppressive and horrible.” But he added that Winckelmann's art history, which he always carried along with him, brought him back to his senses: “remembering the history of art, [he] thought of the times to whose spirit such a manner of building was congenial, recollected the austere style in statuary, and in less than an hour was in sympathy with the place.”198 Goethe's words bespeak a time when the fortunes of Paestum were already declining; by the early nineteenth century the interest of most travelers and scholars had turned to the Elgin marbles and to Athens, with its new examples of Doric architecture, which led to the judgment that Paestum was less refined. Winckelmann—for whom the Paestum visit was so important, and who was

(p.68)

still keen to claim his own

primacy in describing it in the History of the Art of the Ancients—unwittingly became the founder of a classical canon to which Paestum's architecture was quite alien. Winckelmann had expressed his awe for Paestum, mainly in terms of his sense that its temples must have been more ancient than

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anything found in Greece, so that subsequent clarifications in terms of chronology of ancient remains hurt rather than benefited his history. Once the apex of the classical ideal had been located in fifth-century Athenian art, Paestum was displaced, and few would continue to invoke Major's comparison between Athenian and Paestan splendor. Ironically, the enthusiasm surrounding its eighteenth-century rediscovery contained the seeds of Paestum's later demise. Somehow, distaste for the alien and supposedly primitive style associated with Paestum's architecture developed in parallel to the estrangement of Italian scholarship, loyal to Mazzocchi, from wider Hellenism. Indeed, for Italians, Paestum long remained, as we shall see, attached to the Italic vision captured in Piranesi. But even before the excitement about Paestum fully ran its course, the European travelers who set out to explore the regions south of Paestum encountered a confusion exacerbated by a “Greek” South Italy recently revealed to be something quite different from mainland Greece.

Notes (p.70)

(p.71)

(p.73)

(p.74)

(p.75)

(p.76)

Notes:

(1.) For the most recent account of this visit of Piranesi to Paestum and the resulting publication see Wilton-Ely 2002. (2.) For Piranesi's stance in the Graeco-Roman architectural controversy see Wilton-Ely 1978 and Middleton 2004: 78–82. (3.) As noted by Raspi Serra 1990: 84 and Wilton-Ely 2002: 20. All the more ironic it then is that in many ways it was for Piranesi's Paestum to open “the eyes of Europe to the true weight and splendor of Greek architecture” (Middleton 2004: 82). (4.) See Ampolo 1985, Galasso 1989, Vallet 1996 and Settis and Parra 2005. It should be acknowledged however that Salmeri 1996 gives unprecedented space to pre-eighteenthcentury moments of discovery of Magna Graecia.

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(5.) See Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 96. (6.) See Winckelmann 1762: [2–3]. (7.) For an overview of the Renaissance as a European-wide cultural movement, see Burke 1998. Alberti, De Ferrariis Galateo and Barrio do not feature in Burke's wide-ranging survey, but his emphasis on centers and peripheries is pertinent to the present discussion. (8.) In fact even the significant turns to Greece that scholars have uncovered, such as Erasmus's call to fellow scholars to learn Greek (for which see Goldhill 2002: 14–59), underscore the prominence of the Roman model: Erasmus wrote of Greek in Latin (for the crucial role of Latin in early modern European culture, see Waquet 1998). (9.) For an overview of Renaissance antiquarian humanism's investigation of ancient Roman material remains see Schnapp 1997: 121–177 and Weiss 1969. For a suggestive and innovative interpretation of the major consequences for Western historicity at large of this moment when ancient sculptural masterpieces were emerging from the ground in Rome, see Barkan 1999. (10.) Not that there was a definite name for such type of research: in today's scholarship definitions include ‘corography’ (for example Burke 1998: 39 and Defilippis 2005: xxi) in addition to ‘historical geography’ (for example Fubini 2003: 53), which is what I use in the present pages. (11.) Weiss 1969: 69. Besides Weiss 1969: 59–89 and Schnapp 1997: 121–177, on Biondo's methods, their origins, and influential afterlife see Clavuot 1990, Fubini 2003: 39–92, Pellegrino 2007 and Irace 2010. (12.) See Grafton 2000: 248–253 for a close reading of an episode in humanist scholarship which exemplifies Biondo's interactions with fellow curial humanists, attesting to the intensity and complexity, both intellectual and political, of such relationships.

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(13.) The interplay between art and politics has been a core issue in the interpretation of Renaissance papacy since the publication of volumes 5 and 6 of the monumental, multivolume Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (History of the Popes, published between 1886 and 1930, English translation in 1906) by Ludwig von Pastor, the first academic historian to make use of the Vatican Library's archives. For recent approaches to fifteenth-century Rome's cultural centrality and peculiarity as a humanist papal court see D’Amico 1983, especially 3–60, Burke 1998: 38–39, and Celenza 2006: 122–133. (14.) For an insightful discussion of the relationship between scholarship and religiosity in the case of Valla, see Celenza 2006: 89–100. (15.) See Rowland 1998: 7–17 for an informed and nuanced account of this episode. (16.) See Dionisotti 1967: 35–37. (17.) See Schnapp 1997: 139–166. (18.) On this irony, and its consequences for Renaissance scholarship, see Tateo 1996: 154 and Defilippis 2005: lxviii-lxx. (19.) For a succinct account see Bentley 1987: 34–39. (20.) See essays in Marino 2002a for fresh take on the history of this ‘diminished’ Italy. (21.) See Rowland 1998 for a multifaceted account of humanist culture and its cultivation of antiquity in early sixteenthcentury Rome. On Rome's persistent centrality, as well as the rise of alternative cultural centers, see Burke 1998: 48–52, 66– 78. (22.) This is also the case with Salmeri 1996 and Tateo 1996 despite their acknowledgment of Alberti's role. (23.) For this distinction see also Stagl 1995: 100–104. (24.) For example see Dionisotti 1973: 1386 and Cochrane 1981: 305–308. Page 71 of 82

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(25.) See Petrella 2004: 25–26. My understanding of Alberti is greatly indebted to the groundbreaking work of Petrella along with that of Donattini 2007a and Prosperi 2003 and 2007, which have done so much to reevaluate Alberti's Descrittione and to firmly, if subtly, place it within the context of a wider Italian intellectual history. Donattini 2007b insightfully explains this very moment of renewed appreciation of Alberti after a long neglect. (26.) Donattini 2007b: xiv–xvi. (27.) See Salmeri 1996: 35–37. (28.) On Pandolfo Collenuccio (1444–1504), a foreigner who had never visited Naples, see Masi 1999 and see Marino 2006: 147 (29.) For an overview of Alberti's life and work see Prosperi 2003 and 2007. (30.) See Alberti 2003: 2: 4; note that the 2003 anastatic edition from which I quote is based on the 1568 posthumous edition of Alberti's work, which was the first one to include geographical maps. (31.) Quoted in Prosperi 2003: 10. (32.) Pietro Ranzano's Descriptio totius Italiae has recently seen its way to print for the first time, edited in 2007 by Adele di Lorenzo within the project “Edizione nazionale dei testi della storiografia umanistica” for the publisher SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo in Florence. (33.) Alberti 2003: 1: 211b. (34.) See Scaramella 2007. (35.) Alberti 2003: 1: 202b. (36.) Alberti 2003: 1: 212b. (37.) Alberti 2003: 1: 209b. (38.) Alberti 2003: 1: 215b.

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(39.) Alberti 2003: 1: 3b. (40.) Alberti 2003: 1: 214b. (41.) On this feature of Alberti's work see also Tateo 1996: 160. (42.) Alberti 2003: 1: 215b. (43.) Alberti 2003: 1: 217a. (44.) Alberti 2003: 1: 178a–b. On these pages see Scaramella 2007. (45.) Alberti 2003: 1: 223a. (46.) Alberti 2003: 1: 220a. (47.) Alberti 2003: 1: 220b. (48.) Alberti 2003: 1: 220b. (49.) Alberti 2003: 1: 224. (50.) Alberti 2003: 1: 226. (51.) Alberti 2003: 1: 227b. (52.) Alberti 2003: 1: 215a. (53.) Alberti 2003: 1: 226a. (54.) Alberti 2003: 1: 219b. (55.) Alberti 2003: 1: 203a and 223b. (56.) See Morrissey 2008: 10: 41–45. (57.) See Placanica 1999: 279–310. (58.) See Cassiodorus, Variae, PL 69, Col. 0761 B–Col. 0762C. (59.) See for example Salmeri's opinion of Galateo in Salmeri 1996: 38. (60.) Petrella 2004: 146–150.

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(61.) On Galateo's book on Iapygia, see most recently Salmeri 1996: 37–44, Tateo 1996: 153–157, and Defilippis 2005. (62.) For the most extensive account and still standard interpretation of the Neapolitan Renaissance in English see Bentley 1987; note that here Valla is presented as an exemplary Neapolitan humanist (Bentley 1987: 108–122). (63.) Neapolitan humanism has often been perceived as conservative because of its monarchical association; yet, for this same reason, as its protagonists balanced humanist values and monarchical allegiances, it has also been seen as a forerunner of later developments, when humanism was reshaped to suit and enable intellectuals working within nascent modern European nation-states; for these alternative interpretations contrast Marino 2006: 148 and 156 with Bentley 1987: 196–222 and 297–299. For a placing of Galateo within the context of the Neapolitan Renaissance see Bentley 1987: 268–283. (64.) On these vicissitudes see Iurilli 2001: 1–10. (65.) See most recently Defilippis 2005: xxxv-lxii. (66.) Galateo 2005: 83. For Galateo's engagement with Petrarch see Defilippis 2005: xxxv–xxxvi. Petrarch's reference to Magna Graecia is in Epistolae familiares 1: 4. (67.) Galateo 2005: 39. (68.) Galateo 2005: 3. (69.) Salmeri 1996: 38. (70.) Galateo 2005: 3. (71.) On Barrio see Mancuso 1979 and Salmeri 1996: 44–47. (72.) Barrio 1979: 152. (73.) For an overview see Placanica 1999: 156–162.

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(74.) See Placanica 1999: 195. Placanica in fact opens this chapter of his history of Calabria with a quote from Barrio's Planctus Calabriae. (75.) See Placanica 1999: 285–286. (76.) See Marino 2006. (77.) See Salmeri 1996: 45 and Tateo 1996: 156–157. (78.) Barrio 1979: 474. (79.) See Casini 1998: 145–155 and Sassi 1995. (80.) See Piromalli 1996: 168. (81.) Placanica 1999: 287. (82.) See Salmeri 1996: 54. (83.) See Placanica 1999: 290 and Piromalli 1996: 168. (84.) For a general context on a number of these works, see Amirante 1995. (85.) See Marino 2006: 149–150 for a contextualization of Mazzella's work within contemporary Naples. (86.) On Bacco, see Amirante 1995: 45, 54–59, 67–69. (87.) Mazzella 1970: 4. (88.) Compare Alberti 2003: 198a and Mazzella 1970: 123. (89.) On Goltzius and Magna Graecia see Ampolo 1985: 53 and Salmeri 1996: 52. (90.) On Clüver's work and his role in the development of modern cartography see van der Heijden 2002; for his approach to Magna Graecia contrast Ampolo 1985: 54 and Salmeri 1996: 53. (91.) See Moe 2002: 50–52. (92.) Macaulay 1900: 30.

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(93.) See Momigliano 1955a; for an overview and rich assessments of Momigliano's work on this topic as well as of the abundant subsequent research it has inspired see, at least, Phillips 1996 and Miller 2007a. (94.) For an introduction to eighteenth-century Neapolitan cultural history see Imbruglia 2000 and Schnapp 2007. For a discussion of the evolving sense of the Italian South during this period see Moe 2002: 1–81. Waquet 1989 offered a pioneering discussion of the ‘imperfect’ dialogue between Italians and foreigners which lay at the core of perceptions of Italy's post-Renaissance cultural decadence; Marino 2002b readdresses ingrained views of the Italian seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as lost ones, and Marino 2002c offers a balanced account of the economic state of Italy at the time. (95.) Among studies of the Grand Tour of Italy see at least Black 1992, De Seta 1992, Chaney 1996 and 1998, Wilton and Bignamini 1996 and Chard 1999. (96.) An early call for such an approach in Bignamini 1996; see then Naddeo 2005 and Findlen, Wassyng Roworth, and Sama 2009; for Naples in particular see Calaresu 1999. (97.) He is often referred to as Carlo III because when he ascended to the Spanish throne in 1759 he became known as Carlos III. (98.) To place Giannone in a European-wide context, see, most recently, Pocock 2001: 29–71. (99.) First highlighted and investigated by Venturi 1962 and most recently by Robertson 2005. (100.) For a rich but succinct account see Fittipaldi 2007: 191– 194. (101.) Quoted in Fittipaldi 2007: 193. (102.) For the most recent and incisive account of this relationship between study of the past and reform of the present in Naples, see Rao 2007.

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(103.) See Zevi 1988 for an introduction to this topic. (104.) See D’Alconzo 1999 for the Neapolitan heritage laws and Fittipaldi 2007 for an overview of the museum history in eighteenth-century Naples. (105.) See Nørskov 2002 for a survey of this history and Vickers 1987 for a closer look at its eighteenth-century moment, as well as Ramage 1992 with a focus on Naples. (106.) On the beginnings of ceramic connoisseurship, see Whitley 2001: 23–25. For a rich portrait of Hamilton and his activities with further bibliography, see Jenkins and Sloan 1996 and Jenkins 1996 in particular, as well as Ramage 1990. (107.) See Sloan 1996. (108.) For this portrait by Pompeo Batoni, see Wilton and Bignamini 1996: 82. (109.) See Coltman 2006: 65–96 for the influence of Hamilton's collection on British neoclassicism. (110.) For this line of argument see Lyons 1992, 1997 and 2007 and Masci 2007 and 2008. (111.) Valletta's collection is reconstructed for the first time in Masci 1999; on Valletta's intellectual life see Comparato 1970. (112.) For an overview see Masci 2007, while Lyons's reconstruction of the Mastrilli collection (see Lyons 1992) pioneered this approach. (113.) On this controversy see Rouet 2001: 7–10 and Masci 2007 and 2008: 31–40 (114.) See Momigliano 1955a: 91–94 and Cristofani 1978. (115.) For a rich reconstruction of central figures in this Tuscan antiquarian world, including the editing and analysis of unpublished correspondence as well as reproduction of the plates and detailed captions from Passeri's catalogue, see the

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work of Maria Emilia Masci, especially Masci 2003 and the monumental Masci 2008. (116.) Masci 2003: 53–63. (117.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 137–139. (118.) Hamilton's stand on the question is delineated in Jenkins 1996: 51–58. (119.) See Winckelmann 2006: 175–176. (120.) Grafton 1999a: xi. (121.) As pointed out in Momigliano 1966: 14–15, 21. (122.) Of the immense bibliography on Vico, my account is most indebted to Manuel 1959: 149–167, Momigliano 1966, Rossi 1969: 15–80, Stone 1997 , and Grafton 1999a. (123.) See Momigliano 1966: 4. (124.) See Manuel 1959: 149. (125.) See Grafton 1999a: xxii. (126.) On Egizio see Ussia 1977. (127.) Stone 1997 and Grafton 1999a: xiv–xv. (128.) On the verum factum in De antiquissima, see Palmer 1988: 17–28. (129.) See Vico 1988: 39. (130.) For this text in translation see Vico 1988: 136–149. (131.) See Vico 1988: 149. (132.) From Vico's second response, which he published on his own in Naples in 1712, reproduced and translated in Vico 1988: 150–185. For the quote see page 155. (133.) See Casini 1998.

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(134.) From the second article on De Antiquissima published in 1711 in Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, reproduced in translation in Vico 1988: 136–149. For the quote see Vico 1988: 149. (135.) Vico 1999: 112–113, 344; on this, point see Momigliano 1966: 18. (136.) Vico 1999: 111. (137.) In addition to the Vita written by his pupil Niccolò Ignarra (1772), for Mazzocchi's biography and works see Barnabei 1874, Borraro 1979, Ampolo 1985: 56–62 and 2005: 88–90, and Salmeri 1996: 57–62. (138.) As pronounced in his obituary by the perpetual secretary at the French Académie: see Le Beau 1777: 283. (139.) See Cook 1997: 278 and Whitley 2001: 23. (140.) For example, see Ampolo 1985 and Salmeri 1996: 58– 59. (141.) See Ampolo 1985: 55. (142.) Barnabei 1874: 1–2. (143.) On this sculpture see Borraro 1979: 115–123. (144.) See Croce 1922: 246. (145.) Mazzocchi 1727: 7. (146.) For the most recent and informative account of this discovery, see Ampolo 2005: 88–89. (147.) On Ficoroni see Griggs 2008. (148.) Guevara in Mazzocchi 1754–1755: v. (149.) Guevara in Mazzocchi 1754–1755: vi. (150.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 2.

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(151.) On the Latin inscription see most recently Crawford 1996: 1: 24; for the Greek one see Barnabei 1874: 30–65, Lo Cascio 1979, and Lazzarini 2005. (152.) See Winckelmann 1952: 1: 275. (153.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 17. (154.) De La Martinière 1726–1739: 4 : 318–319. (155.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 23. (156.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 19. (157.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 23–26. (158.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 29–31. (159.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 33–34, 40–43, and 517–518. (160.) Spanheim 1664: 11. (161.) See Grafton 1999b. (162.) For Annio's forgeries and the long shadow of their influence in modern scholarship see Stephens 1989 and 2004, Grafton 1991: 76–103, Rowland 1998: 53–59, and Pedullà 2010. (163.) See Rossi 1984: 152–157, and on Bochart's cultural project, see also Sheehan 2005: 203–204. (164.) Giarrizzo 1981: 195–197. (165.) Momigliano 1955a: 304–307. (166.) Mazzocchi 1741. (167.) Rossi 1984: 164. (168.) Rossi 1984: 153. (169.) Rossi 1984: 152.

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(170.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 515. Varro's authority, and in particular his distinction between mythical and true history, had been invoked and appropriated by writers of the biblical school since the seventeenth century, see Rossi 1984: 149–50. (171.) See Giarrizzo 1991: 554 and Galasso 1989: 16. (172.) Casini 1998: 145–160 and 178–196 and Andreoni 2003. (173.) On Henry More, see Berryman 2005; on the Inquisition in Naples, see Stone 1997: 28–45. (174.) See Stone 1997: 262–263 for Valletta's handling of Pythagoras, and Rossi 1984: 80–82 for the Cambridge school's interpretation of the Greek philosopher. (175.) Stone 1997: 261–264. (176.) See Salmeri 1996: 59–61. (177.) Quoted in Vallet 1996: 14. (178.) See Gatta 1732: 267 and Antonini 1745: 229. (179.) For these architects, that is Soufflot and his team, see Vallet 1996: 9 and Raspi Serra 1990: 25–26. (180.) Quoted in Chiosi, Mascoli, and Vallet 1986: 41; see also Vallet 1996: 14–16. (181.) On Stuart and Revett's expedition and work, see, most recently, Redford 2008: 52–82. (182.) On the history of the publication of Paestum's temples, see Lang 1950, McCarthy 1986, and Raspi Serra 1990. (183.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 499. (184.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 498. (185.) Mazzocchi 1754–1755: 503. (186.) For Winckelmann's elaboration of ancient Greek art history and its significance, see Potts 2000 and 2006 and Marchand 1996: 7–16. Page 81 of 82

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(187.) On Winckelmann in Naples, see Leppmann 1970: 172– 185, and, in addition to his own letters, Winckelmann's criticism of the excavations at Herculaneum, published as Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Letter about the Discoveries at Herculaneum, 1762). (188.) Letter to Giovanni Ludovico Bianconi, dated May 13, 1758, in Winckelmann 1952: 1: 355. (189.) Winckelmann 1762: [2–3]. (190.) Winckelmann 1762: [7]. (191.) Winckelmann 1762: [3–4]. (192.) See Lang 1950, McCarthy 1986, and Raspi Serra 1990. (193.) Magnoni 1764: iv. Little is known of Magnoni; Angela Pontrandolfo dates the pamphlet to 1784 in Pontrandolfo 1986: 52, but 1764 is the pamphlet's date and 1774 that of Magnoni's death, according to Minieri Riccio 1844: 187. (194.) See Antonini 1795–1797: 309–310. (195.) Mertens 1986. (196.) For example, Constantine 1984: 114. (197.) See Winckelmann 2006: 82 and 228. (198.) Goethe 1962: 209–210.

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University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

Between Classical and Marginal Giovanna Ceserani

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores the differentiation and marginalization of Magna Graecia within an emerging Hellenism increasingly focused on classical, mainland Greece, by looking at late eighteenth-century travel narratives and historiographies. Disappointment at the paucity of classical monuments in Magna Graecia, as expressed by Winckelmann's German pupil Riedesel, is shown to give way to later French and British travelers’ interest in the region's exotic and antique quality. Magna Graecia's central role in the origins of modern narratives of ancient Greece is examined alongside the region's marginalization, in these same narratives, as a mere site of ancient Greek colonization, overlooking its place as a center of Greek culture. A distinctly different take is revealed in the historical works of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, which sought to harmonize Magna Graecia's past with the Italic past,

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a trend that signals a growing divide between Italian and nonItalian approaches to Magna Graecia.

Keywords: travel narratives, colonization, historiography, eighteenth century, Neapolitan enlightenment, Italic past, Hellenism

Such was Winckelmann's enthusiasm for Paestum that he soon turned his attention to the possibility of equally fantastic discoveries waiting to be made further south: “I have been assured that at Velia are to be found considerable pieces of ancient buildings and of half-preserved temples … and at Crotone large ruins still stand.”1 He did not seek these out for himself, instead sending in his place (as he did also for mainland Greece) his younger friend, the German baron Johann Hermann von Riedesel (1740–1785). The exploration of classical lands, as it turned out, proved unfulfilling: there were no more Paestums, nor enough written sources to compensate for that absence. The disappointment of these setbacks was a prelude to the region's eventual consignment to the margins of classical studies. The origins of this marginalization can be traced back to the late-eighteenth-century travel narratives dedicated to South Italy, as well as to the new historiography of ancient Greece that was evolving in the same period. Winckelmann had fashioned himself as a pioneer in a new and unknown continent, pushing beyond the conventions of the Grand Tour in his effort to establish a classical Greek ideal. Still the high expectations he had for Magna Graecia are in themselves somewhat surprising, given that, for Western Europeans, South Italy was already in many ways the best known of all the regions the Greeks had occupied in antiquity. We know that Johann Georg Graevius intended to include Galateo in his Thesaurus antiquitatum et historiarum Italiae (a wish fulfilled after his death by his pupil Peter Burmann with the publication of the Thesaurus's ninth volume in 1723), and Winckelmann himself professed admiration for Clüver's work.2 Moreover, Alberti's accounts had been integral in the development of the Grand Tour, (p.78) adapting and extending for a modern readership idealized images, dating to antiquity, of Italy's mild climate, rich produce and varied landscapes.3 Nevertheless Riedesel and the most prominent authors of

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Magna Graecia travelogues who followed him—the French Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non (1737–1791) and the British Henry Swinburne (1743–1803)—aside from a few references to Clüver pointedly fail to mention the work of earlier geographers and topographers who had written on Magna Graecia, presenting instead their trips to South Italy as novel explorations of unknown lands. Given that Riedesel, Saint-Non and Swinburne were foreigners and the earlier writers mostly Italians, the disconnect is noteworthy, as it indicates the widening gap between local and foreign approaches to the region. What was indeed novel in late eighteenth-century travel writing is immediately apparent in a comparison with its unacknowledged Renaissance forerunners. Everything from narrative style to publishing habits to a fixation on ruins distinguished the new travelogues, which really were, in some respects, entering uncharted territory. The wider cultural and political horizon in which the late eighteenth-century travelers moved helped to generate and determine these new interests and new ways of seeing. As economic and political might in Europe shifted northward, the status of Italy diminished; at the same time, while Italy was still not a unified country, the dream of its unification was about to revive. Meanwhile, Greece, a comparatively distant land that hardly figured for Renaissance writers, was commanding a new level of interest; while it remained an exotic region, a distant province of the Ottoman empire, renewed calls for its independence and the reassertion of its European ties emerged, intricately connected to the imagining of its ancient past. In this wider context, the new genre of travel writing was divisive almost by definition, as foreigners—whether British, French or German— claimed the right to treat South Italy as an unknown land, even summoning comparisons to the New World more than to a classical region. An analogous split between South Italian and foreign scholars is perceptible in historical writing, particularly in the contrast between the nascent genre of ancient Greek historiography and histories of the Neapolitan Kingdom produced by Neapolitans, to which I turn in the final section of this chapter. These were informed by a conjectural approach, which developed in close dialogue with local political interests (but also ensured the survival of Neapolitan

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antiquarian visions within a later distinctively Italian scholarly tradition). The image of Magna Graecia that emerged from travelogues and historical works, by locals and foreigners alike, would weigh substantially on the subsequent marginalization of the region in modern classical scholarship.

Beyond the Grand Tour Paestum's rediscovery came amidst a wider enthusiasm for exploration and travel writing. With the Grand Tour more commonly practiced and travelers

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already frequently

journeying beyond Europe, an increasingly abundant travel literature was feeding an ever-growing audience.4 Within Italy, travelers began venturing south of Paestum, most often directly by boat to Sicily, but a few reached Magna Graecia— and some of their accounts were soon making their way into print. In 1771 Riedesel published his Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland (Travels to Sicily and Magna Graecia). Two more travelogues followed in 1783: the first volume of Henry Swinburne's Travels in the Two Sicilies, and the Abbé de Saint-Non's Le voyage ou circuit de la partie méridionale de l’Italie, anciennement appellée Grande-Grèce (The voyage or circuit of South Italy, which in antiquity was called Magna Graecia).5 All three books were immediate successes, prompting later reissues and translations: Riedesel's Reise was published in French and English in 1773, Swinburne's Travels in French and German in 1785, and Saint-Non's Voyage in English and German in 1789. Together, these works emphatically established South Italy on the map of travel literature. Ironically, by the very manner in which they introduced the regions south of Naples to the rest of Europe, these works also shunted them to the sidelines. As Nelson Moe has argued, beginning with Riedesel, travel narratives played a significant role in shifting the focus of northern European disdain for modern Italy from the entire peninsula to the South alone.6 The South was depicted, and came to be perceived, as primitive and picturesque—positioned at the extreme edge of Europe and sharing many characteristics with the less civilized world. It was suspended between past historical

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grandeur and current decline; its pristine and awe-inspiring Nature was offset (or, as the case may be, heightened) by its barbaric inhabitants. A peculiar feature of this dynamic, however, is that the aura of past greatness that permeated the region was not accompanied by any familiar tropes of decadence—nothing like the decline of ancient Rome or Greece applied. In dealing with its past, eighteenth-century travelers to South Italy were left to imagine something quite different from either the marble wilderness of Italy that mesmerized Grand Tourists or the new marbles being sought in classical Greece. While perceptions of South Italy's contemporary condition certainly played a role in the distinctive imagining of its past, this is not sufficient to explain just how different a sense of history developed there. After all, mainland Greece seemed no less primitive—and in fact was decisively oriental, as it was then still a province of the Ottoman Empire. The disparity is all the more surprising given the self-conscious attempt on the part of travelers to these two regions to cultivate objectivity. They may have deployed worn stereotypes as they shaped their accounts, yet many sought nonetheless to generate new knowledge, often successfully. (Well into the nineteenth century travel literature accommodated both picturesque and scientific literary modes, juxtaposing impressionistic observations and survey-like documentation.7) Travelers whose explorations aimed at the discovery and scientific survey of ancient monuments had a passion for measurement that seems to have bordered on the obsessive.8 But there (p.80) was a key difference in the ways that travelers to Greece and travelers to South Italy processed their encounter with the unfamiliar. Travelers to Greece were often fired by a classical ideal that was being accorded ever-increasing importance, which they in turn projected in various ways onto the contemporary inhabitants of the country. (Such are the contradictions of modern Hellenism.)9 The reaction to South Italy was different, given that the scarcity of ruins and of textual information, either ancient or modern, made recovery of the past particularly elusive. Riedesel, seeking Winckelmann's classical ideal in Magna Graecia met with inevitable disappointment. Saint-Non and Swinburne,

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recounting journeys that took place over a decade later, filled the emptiness that Riedesel experienced by projecting onto Magna Graecia an attractive, even exotic quality—further diluting its cachet within any idealized vision of the classical world. Riedesel (and Winckelmann) South of Naples

The life of Riedesel was shaped by travel.10 From his home in Germany, he journeyed to Vienna and all through France, to northern Italy and down to Rome, as well as to England and Scotland, all on family money. Having proven to be physically unfit to serve in the military, he determined to pursue a career in civil service. Travel was appropriate preparation for diplomacy, and Riedesel made good on the family investment, when in 1772 he was appointed chamberlain to Frederick II, and a year later, the Prussian special envoy in Vienna. He apparently comported himself admirably in the latter position, as attested by a letter of praise sent by the king to Riedesel's widow upon his untimely death seven years later. Today Riedesel is best remembered for his passion for antiquity, nowhere more clearly manifested than in his writings about his journeys to the Italian South. The opening of Riedesel's book on Sicily and Magna Graecia shows how different this passion for antiquity was from that expressed in the conventional Grand Tour narrative. Rather than begin with a description of passing through the Alps, a common opening in accounts of the Grand Tour,11 Riedesel describes a journey by boat from Naples to Palermo, including details about the wind in the sails and seasickness, as well as anecdotes about life at sea. Crucial to this Mediterranean turn was Riedesel's encounter with Winckelmann. From this famous scholar, the young nobleman absorbed a particular aesthetic and a passion for Greek antiquity that set him apart from other Grand Tourists and convinced him to push south of Naples, toward Sicily and Magna Graecia. Ironically enough, Riedesel's wholehearted adoption of Winckelmann's classical ideal led him to find more of Greece in Sicily than on the Greek mainland itself.12 It also meant frustration in Magna Graecia, where material traces of ancient grandeur

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were scarce, and he found little in the way of source material to make sense of what he did see.

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Riedesel first met Winckelmann in Rome in 1762. The two became close; the younger visitor spent most of his time in the city with Winckelmann, and they corresponded intensively when apart. Riedesel's travels in South Italy owed much to his mentor, who provided a reading list as well as introductions to Sicilian hosts. The book that grew out of Riedesel's travels is composed of letters to Winckelmann, who insisted it be written in German rather than in French (the language in which Riedesel had been educated and in which he felt most comfortable), and who may even have edited it.13 It is not surprising, then, that most scholarly attention to Riedesel has in fact focused on his relationship with Winckelmann. In particular, commentators have questioned the extent and depth of the older man's influence on his pupil, noting that Riedesel's second book, on Greece, mostly abandoned any attempt to capture the country's classical past: instead, after its initial pages on Athens, Remarques d’un voyageur moderne au Levant (Remarks of a modern traveler in the Levant, 1773) focused on present-day Greece. Moreover, this book was written and published well after Winckelmann's death, and it was, contrary to what had been his dictates, in French rather than German. Was Winckelmann's teaching so superficial and short-lived?14 This is the question most commonly asked of Riedesel, but perhaps a better one concerns the ways in which he continued to put to use the conceptual tools of his teacher. Elisabeth Décultot has effectively likened Winckelmann's history of art to a travel narrative—an ideal tour of classical antiquity.15 Riedesel, though less memorable as a scholar or writer, actually produced such a narrative, but with a difference: he sought out classical antiquity in modern Mediterranean lands, encountering real-life situations that yielded a more varied picture of Greek culture than Winckelman produced. Riedesel is often hailed for his rediscovery of Sicily; Goethe and many others carried his book as guide when visiting the island.16 Riedesel's fast, slim narrative quickly overtook the richly illustrated 1764 folio by the Dutchman D’Orville, Sicula, quibus Siciliae veteris rudera, additis antiquitatum tabulis, illustrantur, which described, in Latin, the island's monuments, and it also held its own against Patrick Brydone's

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1773 A tour through Sicily and Malta. Yet Riedesel's rediscovery of Sicily overshadowed his experience of Magna Graecia. His title may have included both lands, but, in contrast to the rich and positive view he gives of Sicily, Riedesel's trip to Magna Graecia comes across as a voyage of disappointment, with its classical past somehow resistant to his ways of searching for it. Winckelmann's influence runs deep throughout. In Palermo, the Sicilian city where Riedesel begins his tour, he fashions himself as a Winckelmann newly arrived in Rome. The museum of the Jesuits is “a fine collection of antiquities, but they, like the Museum Kircherianum at Rome, are buried and lost among the number of trifles and baubles”17—a comparison that recalls

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Winckelmann in Rome,

extricating a vision of ancient Greece and its art from the abundant but confused antiquarian material before him. Though Riedesel was equally bent on finding Greek antiquities, the nature of his task was different. Exploring the landscapes of Sicily rather than Rome's enclosed galleries, he moved from one ancient Greek site to the next, and by and large he found ruins of ancient temples, theaters and other monumental buildings. Riedesel's focus on architecture, as well as his dry style, sit in stark contrast to Winckelmann's lyrical analyses of ancient statues.18 But one forgets too easily that these are Winckelmann's most memorable passages—that most of his work reads as didactic and descriptive, and, moreover, that architecture was one of his crucial interests. Riedesel knew well Winckelmann's 1759 article on the temples of Agrigentum, “Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der alten Tempel zu Girgenti in Sicilien” (Observations on the architecture of the ancient temple at Girgenti in Sicily), and his 1762 Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der Alten (Observations on ancient architecture). In both, besides extolling architecture as the purest art form, Winckelmann dealt extensively with technical matters, building materials, and architectural types. It is true, also, that Rome held more ancient statuary than the whole of Sicily, and that when Riedesel does encounter such statues, he elevates his tone in

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Winckelmann-like fashion. Inspired by one bas-relief, a famous sculpted early third-century Roman sarcophagus of Attic style in Agrigentum, he launches into three intense pages of rich description, which he claims surpass in accuracy the drawings by contemporary Italian antiquarians. In accordance with Winckelmann's teachings, Riedesel argues that the bas-relief depicted the myth of Phaedra (an interpretation still accepted today) rather than a historical event as previously thought.19 His closeness to Winckelmann also gave Riedesel a strong sense of difference from those who preceded him. On the small island of Motya, a Phoenician site near Trapani, Riedesel criticizes Clüver for reporting “a thousand quotations” to prove the site's location while saying “nothing of the ruins there.”20 By contrast, Riedesel scours closely the sites for fragments of antiquity, moving on quickly if a too-regular appearance, or the presence of bricks, leads him to dismiss them as Roman or later. He lavishes careful and extensive descriptions on the ruins of the temples at Segesta and Selinus, of the theaters of Syracuse and Taormina, and of the antiquities of Catania that he toured with the Prince of Biscari, his host, who had directed the excavations himself. Instead of learned quotations, Riedesel offers attentive measurements, reporting what is left of columns, steps, triglyphs, and guttae, which he verbally pieces together in order to give the reader a sense of the “architecture.” Such measuring was crucial for Riedesel. Variations of the word itself recur frequently in the text. Measurements provide a testament to his presence at the sites as well as a way to lead the reader around the remains in lieu of visual illustrations. Significantly, Riedesel's most lyrical passages, like the sections

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on Agrigentum and the coast near

Catania, occur in descriptions of those places where he performed the most measurements. Again, Winckelmann's presence can be felt: he had begun his article on the temples of Agrigentum with a criticism of recent measurements by the Italian antiquarian Giuseppe Maria Pancrazi and ended with a defense of the ones provided in antiquity by Diodorus Siculus. It was on the basis of these older measurements, along with what he had learned from the Scottish traveler Robert Mylne, that he reconstructed a powerful vision of what was possibly

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the least-preserved of the temples in Agrigentum—that of Zeus.21 Winckelmann also asked Riedesel to take additional measurements of the few surviving fragments for him. The latter complies, confirming Winckelmann's reconstruction of the colossal temple and making two observations of lasting consequence: that a man, even a large one, could fit in the flutes of the columns, and that the building had been larger than Saint Peter's in Rome.22 This focus on measurements allows us to appreciate what distinguished Winckelmann's (and Riedesel's) pursue of the Greek ideal from that of many of their contemporaries—and ultimately why Sicily could satisfy this search in ways that eluded Magna Graecia. The measuring of monuments was prominent in many texts from classical antiquity, but it enjoyed a resurgence in the eighteenth century. Concern about measurements had been at the center of one of the most heated controversies about classical monuments raging in the same years in which Winckelmann was writing on Agrigentum, Paestum and ancient architecture more in general, and when Riedesel was about to undertake his travel to Sicily and Magna Graecia.23 In 1758, when Stuart and Revett were still working on their illustrated volume on the monuments of Athens (based on their trip in the early 1750s), Julien-David Le Roy published Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (The ruins of the most beautiful monuments of Greece). Stuart and Revett attacked Le Roy's evocative but subjective etchings, and they did so by emphasizing in contrast their own precise and accurate measurements—the only valid way, they claimed, to appreciate classical antiquity. The title of their book, The Antiquities of Athens Measured and Delineated, would sharply contrast with Le Roy's, while betraying admiration for Antoine Desgodetz's Les edifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés tres exactement (Ancient buildings in Rome drawn and measured very precisely, 1682). Desgodetz, whose work has been described as the “architectural equivalent to a textbook of anatomy,”24 had been Stuart's and Revett's model. How he turns up in Winckelmann's writing offers insight into the latter's standing within this controversy about the most appropriate way to depict and understand ancient Greek monuments. In the

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conclusion to his 1759 article on the temples of Agrigentum, in which measuring plays such a big role, Winckelmann refers to Desgodetz, but aims to transcend him, claiming that the French scholar had limited himself to mere measuring and yet no one had achieved true understanding through “general observation and rules” of ancient

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architecture—the

task that Winckelmann set as his own goal.25 This was the task that Winckelmann pursued first in his 1762 Observations on the Architecture of the Ancients and, extended to the whole of art, again, and to great acclaim, in his 1764 History of the Art of the Ancients. Much of Riedesel's travel book is informed by Winckelmann's signature innovation, namely the blend of aesthetic appreciation for the classical ideal with explanations for its historical development, ranging from Greek climate and nature to the freedom offered by democracy. Riedesel takes care to name the many things that do not interest him in Sicily, from baroque and Gothic architecture to Catholic rituals and cults of saints. But there was much else that he looked for and included in his book beside antiquities, and here one recognizes clearly elements from Winckelmann's system. Take, for example, his recurrent observations on the modern women who live in the lands he travels through. In Grand Tourists’ accounts women often play an important role, standing in complex, metonymic relation with antiquity.26 But Riedesel looks at them specifically in terms of how much, or how little, they preserve the semblance of ancient Greek models. Riedesel also echoes Winckelmann's attention to natural contexts such as climate or the fertility of the soil, and sociocultural ones related to current government. These were areas of interest for many educated eighteenth-century travelers, and Riedesel was to address them throughout his career, independently of Winckelmann. But here, he uses them to establish a sense of the past in a way that clearly bears Winckelmann's mark. Riedesel's final, positive assessment of Sicily rests on how much of the ancient glory is preserved in the modern customs, art, and art's relation to climate and politics. It is this, along with the measuring of monuments, that allows him to recommend visiting this classical land.

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Sicily indeed turned out to be a good laboratory for testing Winckelmann's “system.” The same cannot be said of Magna Graecia. Riedesel writes of this region in his second letter, which constitutes the shorter half of the book. Crossing the Sicilian Strait by boat from Messina to Reggio (ancient Rhegium) he is immediately struck by the distinctiveness of the scene. In Reggio ancient remains are, Riedesel complains, “few or none”; there had been a temple but what remains is so “defaced that one cannot so much as discover whether the temple was round or square.” Several Greek and Roman inscriptions survive, but they are immured in modern houses and often placed upside down. Riedesel decides against transcribing them, as they are “half obliterated.”27 Antiquity continues to elude him throughout his journey in Magna Graecia: at Locri he finds only the “remains of some tombs” and “masses of stones”; at Sybaris there is “no more than its bare site”; at Heraclaea there are only “some remains of stone, which serve merely to point out the spot whereon the town was built.”28 Of some sites even the location is uncertain: there is a debate on the whereabouts of ancient Scyllacium, and further down the coast Riedesel happens upon the

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remains of an ancient town that he cannot name.

Only at Capo Colonne can he approach the site the way he had in Sicily. Here, near the site of ancient Croton, stood a lone column of the temple of Hera, yet Riedesel is able to measure the temple's perimeter, to discuss its architecture on the basis of Diodorus's account, and to draw comparisons to Paestum and Agrigentum. With this single exception, the only measurements that Riedesel is able to take in the whole of Magna Graecia are of a subterraneous aqueduct in the plain of Sybaris whose engineering intrigued him. Unlike Sicily, then, Magna Graecia left Riedesel with a sense of emptiness and disorientation. Fewer visible remains and the lack of ancient written sources created a further challenge. As Riedesel wrote to Winckelmann, “the opportunities of receiving information, so necessary to a traveller, are very rare in Calabria and Apulia.”29 Indeed, Riedesel seems to have had very little human interaction in Magna Graecia. In Sicily, he had been put up at inns or taken care of by local hosts; in

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Magna Graecia, on the other hand, there were neither hotels nor hosts, and Riedesel mostly slept on the same boat that took him from Messina all the way along the coast to Taranto. The only encounter Riedesel reports is with the Duke of Corigliano, whom he warmly describes as “loaded with civilities.” He admires Corigliano as a beautiful and rich interior town, but of Sybaris—the ancient site that sat on the duke's land—nothing was left. It is as if the lack of human contact ensured the paucity of antiquities in the land itself. In Catania, the prince of Biscari showed off his excavations of the ancient town, and when Riedesel visited Agrigentum it was “in company with a gentleman of Rome, and a lover of antiquities, Don Ettore, Barone di St. Anna, who had married, and was settled at Girgenti; he made the drawings and most of the explications in father Pancrazi's work.”30 Conversely, in the plain of Corigliano we find Riedesel leading the son of the duke on his first excavation of a tomb they uncover—empty. As the disappointment of his journey increased, Riedesel began to rush. He neglects Metaponto, the site that with the columns of the Tavole Palatine would have offered him the most to see and measure, briefly mentioning its “few wretched remains” that “stand only half above the ground,”31 a strange observation that suggests a refusal even to disembark to investigate them. The only place Riedesel took some time for was Taranto. Here he found surer footing: there was a solid historical narrative to be told based on ancient sources, and he visited the town's remains (however few) in the company of a nobleman “well acquainted with the antiquities of his native city.”32 But by then he felt the distance from antiquity to be considerable. Riedesel saw Greek beauty in the women, whom he describes as “really very handsome, and of Greek features,”33 but apparent continuities with the ancient Greeks elicit ambiguous responses. The Tarantines “spend most of their time in dancing and playing,” and Riedesel wonders: was it “antique indolence, or modern laziness?” The only people who work in the city, he reports, were Neapolitans or Calabresi who preserve the

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“laborious” character and

“unpolished manners of their ancestors, the Bruttii.”34 From this desolate land Riedesel hurriedly sets off for Naples.

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Riedesel's disappointing experience left Magna Graecia out of the philhellenic passion that was inspiring travels to mainland Greece or, for that matter, to Sicily. On the coastline from Reggio to Taranto there were not enough monuments for a “romance of architecture”—to use an expression coined to describe eighteenth-century Sicilian travel literature35—nor was there an established and readily identifiable classical topography based on ancient sources. Patrick Brydone, after visiting Sicily, skipped Magna Graecia entirely, limiting his impressions to the appearance of the Calabrian coast as seen from his boat on the way back to Naples. Goethe, with Riedesel's guide in hand, did the same. Yet, once dissociated from the classical ideal and the travel that went in search of it, the region became open to new types of exploration. The cursory nature of Riedesel's account left Magna Graecia largely a terra incognita, which in turn attracted a new type of traveler interested in the exotic. Riedesel's book, when it was translated into English by the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster (who was soon to join Captain Cook's second voyage around the world), was issued in tandem with a tour of Egypt. This exotic association extended to the travelers who chose not to limit their tour of the Italian South to Sicily but included the southernmost regions of the peninsula. When Saint-Non assembled a team of artists to collect images for his travelogue of the Neapolitan Kingdom, he entrusted leadership of the journey to Dominique Vivant Denon (1747–1825), later to become famous for his voyage to Egypt and his direction of the Louvre under Napoleon. Swinburne, too, evinced a fascination with the unfamiliar, the other travel narrative he published being dedicated to Spain and its Arab regions. Not that this exotic turn was a turn away from history. Despite the scarcity of Greek remains, Saint-Non and Swinburne still made Magna Graecia the focus of their writing, but for them the past was a different thing, more antique than classical, a place where Greek culture ran up against a primitive frontier. The ruinous 1783 earthquake, which occurred just as Saint-Non's and Swinburne's books were about to hit the press, only served to reinforce the image of Magna Graecia as a place of destruction, a site of a lost past.

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South Italy as an Antique Land

Saint-Non's and Swinburne's projects differed vastly in conception and outcome—the first a gloriously illustrated volume, a collaboration involving the work of numerous artists and engravers (in fact Saint-Non himself did not even venture further south than Paestum); the second a meticulous firstperson account of the author's travels through the region. Each had to come to terms, moreover, in his own way with how few vestiges of Magna Graecia remained. Saint-Non's lavish illustrations filled this void with picturesque landscapes enhancing the sense of longing that suffused Denon's accompanying

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text; Swinburne relied on detailed

descriptions and precise, up-to-date historical scholarship. Yet both works shared at least one essential feature: they found in South Italy, more than they did in Sicily, a subject that let them move beyond the beaten track of the Grand Tour, and it is with their Magna Graecia volumes, rather than those on Sicily, that they made their most original contribution. This explicit departure from the Grand Tour is clearly captured even in the mundane interests that determined the way in which Saint-Non's project evolved. Originally, he and his business partner, Benjamin de Laborde, had conceived a book that would treat Italy more generally, using a series of images Saint-Non had collected during travels as far south as Rome, Naples and Paestum. But the lukewarm response by subscribers to the proposed project's traditional scope, closely hewing to the Grand Tour, moved them to focus on the South of Italy as a seemingly more exciting area.36 How much, moreover, the journey to the antique lands of South Italy differed from the classical voyages to Sicily and Greece is marked by the route itself by which Saint-Non's team and Swinburne reached Magna Graecia. Unlike Riedesel, they traveled to the region by land—a fact that aligned these journeys more closely with contemporary exploration into “the interior” of foreign lands, just as did their portrayal of the region as shot through with an exoticism flavored by comparisons with colonial territories, both ancient and modern. Heading east from Naples across the Apennines and over to the Adriatic Coast, these travelers then descended south the full length of that coast, before turning north along

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the Gulf of Taranto and then proceeding up the Tyrrhenian Coast, back to where they had started. Roads not always being available, the modes of transport were many, including carriage, horse, human carriers, and boat. This was precisely the route on which Denon set off on April 8, 1778.37 He was then thirty-one years old, a brilliant young man who had already traveled extensively, as far afield as Sweden and Russia, and now lived in Naples, where he served under the French ambassador to the kingdom. An acquaintance of Laborde, Denon was hired after it became clear, given the altered scope of the Voyage pittoresque project to encompass the whole Neapolitan Kingdom, that images from South Italy and Sicily were needed. Working under Denon's supervision were the landscape painter ClaudeLouis Châtelet (1749/50–1795) and the architects Louis-Jean Desprez (1743–1804) and Jean-Augustin Renard (1744–1807), both of them recipients of the Prix de Rome at the French Academy.38 Being in charge, Denon was tasked with organizing the entire journey and keeping a journal that would supply the majority of the text for Saint-Non's finished book, accompanying the images. He prepared for this undertaking by augmenting his classical education with a range of specific readings, both ancient and modern; on the way to Magna Graecia, Denon commented knowledgeably on the sites of ancient battles between Romans and Samnites—the Forche Caudine and Canne. Once the group was in Taranto, Denon's account was very similar to that of Riedesel. Neither found much in

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the way of ruins, though Denon responded

with more aesthetic flair. He wrote of the sadness that overcame him upon finding nothing of the famous ancient sites whose remains he expected to see; but he also wrote of how he consoled himself by dining on exquisite seafood. Moreover, he described modern Taranto as “infinitely picturesque”;39 two views of the city by Châtelet are among the engravings in Saint-Non's volume.40 After leaving Taranto, Denon's team spent a month visiting the sites along Magna Graecia's coast up to Reggio. Here the scarcity of ruins oppressed them. Denon reports finding fragments of buildings and of vases—indeed he came back

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with a collection of eight hundred painted vases, suggesting that there might have been more material than he let on. But aside from small items, they did not find the substantial remains they expected. Denon's journal is marked by anxiety caused by vain searches: wandering in the scorching sun looking for elusive sites, and finding ancient material reused almost beyond recognition in the sparse modern towns. Like Riedesel, the French team struggled with a lack of information. Not only were ancient sources scarce, but, in Denon's account, the modern inhabitants of Magna Graecia were disconnected from their past. At Casal-Nuovo—a modern town near the location of ancient Sybaris that was “dirty, depopulated, as if devastated by earthquakes”—Denon inquired if any coin had been found that could attest to the site's antiquity.41 That evening he was presented with a papal coin and a jeton of Louis XIV. (It is not clear whom the joke was on.) At Gerace, Denon reported, the local antiquarians claimed their town as ancient Locris. But he then took pride in identifying the exact location of that ancient town nearby, given away by its many ruins; he also noted that these same ruins had been despoiled to build much of modern Gerace. Denon's compelling narrative richly conveys a sense of void and vain wandering enhanced by anecdotes about encounters with modern inhabitants. His reflections on past greatness and modern decadence are coupled with admiration for the overwhelming beauty of the natural surroundings. The text abounds with conventional praise: Puglia and Calabria resemble the “promised land after the crossing of the desert,” their valleys “suggest earthly paradise,” they offer “the most beautiful landscape that earth ever produced,” a sight similar to “an image of the golden age.”42 Denon, like other travelers, often compared the landscapes he encountered to French landscapes more familiar to his readers; “the Apennines,” he effused, “have the grand forms of the Alps.”43 But in Magna Graecia his comparisons went further afield (and even overseas). Viewing the plain of Sybaris from an interior mountain pass, he wrote that it was easy to imagine oneself “on the banks of the Loire or the Seine,” but also added that “only roads [were] needed to open the region to commerce and turn it into a Peru and into New Indies.”44

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The artists commissioned by Saint-Non also faced this lack of ruins. As a landscape painter, Châtelet eagerly engaged with the spectacular natural

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surroundings celebrated by

Denon. He turned the empty plain of Sybaris into a powerful view centered on a “rustic” bridge with the Apennine Mountains taking on dramatic Alpine features in the background.45 The same mix of picturesque and sublime is at play in his depictions of modern towns such as Corigliano, nestled against the Apennines.46 Saint-Non's other volumes, dedicated to Naples, its surroundings, and Sicily, had included a wealth of architectural details as well as plans and elevations of ancient buildings drawn by Renard. Magna Graecia did not suit Renard, however, and he contributed only a single engraving depicting the convent of the Celestini friars in Lecce.47 The other architect on the team, Desprez, apparently drew more than Renard, but many of his drawings were of modern architecture and at times he even turned to landscape painting. But Desprez also found original ways to engage visually with the lack of antiquity, in part by supplying imagination, in part by experimenting with stage settings, which indeed later became his career at the court of Sweden. A comparison of the preliminary sketches with the final engravings reveals how he would fill the void.48 On-site at Metaponto, for example, Desprez sketched just one row of the surviving columns of the Tavole Palatine, delineated in clean architectural lines. In the final engraving, he added vegetation growing out of them to enhance their ruinous look to picturesque effect. Most strikingly, he transformed the area enclosed by the two rows of standing columns into a stage with an “entire society of travelers and lovers of antiquity settled in the middle of the temple under a tent just when the attendants are preparing lunch while the architects and the designers work, taking measurements” (see figure 2.1).49 This image at once drew the readers further into the narrative—immersing them in the process of traveling and studying ruins—and filled the empty space as if it were a stage. Once he left Metaponto behind and there were not even ruins to depict, Desprez came up with other ways to suggest the ancient past. At Heraclaea, the site of which Denon wrote “undoubtedly the least vestiges are

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left,”50 Desprez sketched the profile of the landscape. The drawing centered on the empty plain, which reached to the sea at one end and to a grand valley leading into the Apennines on the other. But much was added to this silhouette in the final engraving. First Desprez inserted a grove of oaks at the center of the view, which rendered the scene more heroic and august. Then he added a group of figures that at a closer look—as the text explains—appear to be the ancient painter Zeusis teaching art to his students underneath some shady trees (see figure 2.2). In lieu of ancient ruins, Desprez's imagination offered a vivid scene from the past—one that involved his educated modern viewers in a kind of game. It was however for Saint-Non, back in Paris, to select the drawings to be engraved for the Voyage and piece together the accompanying text on the basis of Denon's journal. Five long years were required to produce this lavishly illustrated travel book. Not only did Saint-Non supervise up to sixty engravers, he

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Figure 2.1. A view of the ruins of the temple of Hera at Metaponto. Plate 37 in Saint-Non's Voyage Pittoresque, 1783. (Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles [88-B19555 v.3].)

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(p.92)

also

personally directed the layout of the volumes, including prefaces, historical introductions, frontispieces, and appendices. Thus did SaintNon, although he himself had

Figure 2.2. A view of the Apennines and the valley of Basilicata, where ancient Heraclaea is thought to have once stood. Plate 43 in Saint-Non's Voyage Pittoresque, 1783. (Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles [88-B19555 v.3].)

never traveled south of Paestum, give final shape to the Voyage's influential depiction of Magna Graecia. He commissioned an allegorical representation from J.-H. Fragonard to open the volume, in which Magna Graecia appears as a seated woman, surrounded by two funerary urns for Pythagoras and Architas, each of which is radiant with beams of light; the sea, which laps the woman's feet, only reaches that far because, as Saint-Non explains, the “Greeks settled their colonies only on the coastlines.”51 However, this image is soon contradicted by the historical introductory essay in which Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis tells a different story. While the allegory makes Magna Graecia into a coastal region, Cabanis's essay defines it as the whole south of the Italian peninsula. But the essay quickly deconstructs such unity by pointing out that its history could not be told in any continuous way since only shreds survived in ancient sources. Cabanis's narrative was indeed broken up by individual republics: in turn Taranto, Siris, Paestum, Sybaris, Croton, Scylaceum, Locris, and Reggio.

Fragmentation was, in fact, Saint-Non's underlying theme; it permeated the volume and communicated the disorientation and disappointment experienced by his team of artists. An allegory of time illustrates the frontispiece—a young winged man flying across space and spreading alternatively light and darkness with the torches he holds in his hands. Saint-Non thought this “appropriate for this region, once the site of light and philosophy, but now for long plunged in almost universal barbarism.”52 The decadence of ancient glory and the decline of civilization are familiar enough motifs in modern writing about antiquity. But Saint-Non's Voyage deployed these motifs without the redemptive sense that typically accompanied

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fascination with the classical past. The volume's epigraph is from Shakespeare—the famous verses from the Tempest prefiguring that palaces, temples, and the globe would dissolve “like the baseless fabrick of a vision / [and would] Leave not a wreck behind.” One cannot but recall that Stuart and Revett had invoked these same verses in their proposal—a parallel, however, that underlines yet again how different the two projects were: Stuart and Revett appealed to the drama of these verses to emphasize the need for speedy realization of their planned drawings in order to prevent the fall into oblivion of Athens's “beauteous Fabricks, her Temples, her Theatres, her Palaces,”53 a kind of documentation not even possible for Saint-Non in Magna Graecia. In February 1783, a few months before Saint-Non's volume on South Italy was published, an earthquake destroyed much of Reggio, Messina, and many other sites that Denon's team had visited five years earlier. Faced with an emergency that might be seen as making his own work obsolete, Saint-Non instead managed to exploit the tragedy by highlighting the new-found documentary value of his book.54 He tipped in about thirty pages between the

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chapters on Reggio and Cosenza

that gave four vivid accounts of the disaster, received in Paris, as Saint-Non wrote “by the most recent mail dispatch.”55 Moreover, at the close of this newly added section, he inserted a powerful metaimage; instead of Messina destroyed by the earthquake, he placed one of the views of Messina from his own collection, represented as an illustrated page torn down the middle to signal the earthquake's impact (figure 2.3). This addition answered the volume's frontispiece, as the representation of disaster fed into the general sense of decadence and destruction that the Voyage had already associated with Magna Graecia. Like Saint-Non's, Swinburne's book—a single narrative containing material from four separate trips through South Italy and Sicily—was also long in the making.56 Settled with his wife and children in Naples during this period, Swinburne undertook the journeys alone during the spring months each year from 1777 to 1780. Although on a far smaller scale than Saint-Non, Swinburne still endeavored to have engravings

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made from his own field sketches. The volume concerning Magna Graecia, the first of two, was eventually released in 1783, just a few months after the third volume of Saint-Non's Voyage. Both topic and timing elicited natural comparisons between the two works, but it was an acrimonious rivalry, originating from the complicated editorial history of SaintNon's own project, that brought this juxtaposition to the fore. The Voyage pittoresque had begun as a joint venture of SaintNon and Laborde, but the latter had withdrawn from the project at a certain juncture because of particularly intractable financial and practical difficulties. The separation left hard feelings on both sides that were only exacerbated when the volumes of the Voyage started appearing to great acclaim, redeeming in part the continuous financial distress that Saint-Non had suffered. The publication of Swinburne's work provided Laborde with the opportunity to attack his former collaborator. When Laborde took it upon himself to translate Swinburne immediately into French, he was seeking, according to his own words, “the pleasure of gathering the researches of more than twenty years on a country he passionately loved.”57 In fact, more than half the pages of this “translation” consisted of Laborde's own critiques of both Swinburne and Saint-Non, but especially the latter. Among the charges leveled at the Voyage, Laborde faulted Saint-Non for having heavily cut and edited Denon's journal, to its detriment, and having misunderstood Cabanis's introduction. Saint-Non ultimately retained—in court as well—the recognition he had garnered for his Voyage, while Laborde's juxtaposition of the works of Swinburne and Saint-Non only makes it all the more clear just how different the two projects were, despite their common itinerary, their many similar encounters, and their resort more than once to similar tropes. In many respects, Swinburne simply could not compete with Saint-Non. For example, while Saint-Non incorporated accounts of the 1783 earthquake—dramatically and

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effectively, if not wholly seamlessly— Swinburne's first-person Figure 2.3. “Cul-de-lampe” depicting the narrative destruction of Messina, Sicily. In Saintlimited his Non's Voyage Pittoresque, 1783. ability to talk (Research Library, Getty Research about this Institute, Los Angeles [88-B19555 v.3].) event and he mentions it only in footnotes. Even Swinburne's inclusion of images marks another distance between the two travelogues. In his earlier Travels through Spain Swinburne had made available for

(p.95)

the very first time to the European

public visual depictions of the Arabic architecture in the Alhambra; in contrast his illustrations of Magna Graecia seemed limited and rudimentary when compared with those of Saint-Non's lavish publication.58

Swinburne's distinctive contribution, however, was factual accuracy, as announced in his epigraph, a favorite motto of eighteenth-century British prose writers since Shaftesbury, originally taken from Horace: “quid verum atque decens curo” (I care for what is true and seemly). Swinburne promised his readers scrupulous attention, asking forgiveness for his renunciation of the frivolous and the fictitious while hewing to the “dull plain track of truth.”59 He argued that only in this way could he say something novel and useful about regions that had become by then a beaten track—“every school-boy can point out the ruins of Magna Graecia and Sicily.”60 Swinburne had defended the plain truth as his signature approach as far back as his Travels to Spain, but he seems to put new emphasis on it to differentiate himself from Saint-Non, whom he never names. He highlights the unique insight, for example, derived from his repeated visits to the regions south of Naples and his multiyear residence in the Kingdom's capital. Saint-Non himself had spent some time there, but well before Voyage pittoresque was even conceived. Swinburne, on the other hand, could underline how he used his time in Naples to plan travels south of the capital and to get feedback upon his return from those trips. As a result, Swinburne offers a multiplicity of voices and a wide range of

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political, naturalistic, and historical interests in his narrative, which gives it a composite character all its own. Swinburne openly acknowledged the assistance he received, both in Naples and farther south, from locals he encountered on the road, but also prominent figures in the Neapolitan Enlightenment such as the doctor and botanist Domenico Cirillo, the naturalist and Dominican friar Antonio Minasi, the economist Ferdinando Galiani, and Giuseppe Capecelatro, Archbishop of Taranto. To Swinburne's familiar appreciation of South Italy's natural riches, the conversations with these men added an awareness of the possibilities of social and economic reform as well as unprecedentedly detailed observations on the area's geology, flora, and fauna. In Taranto, like Denon, Swinburne dined on delicious seafood. But whereas Denon had elegantly and ironically contrasted this delight to the melancholy inspired by Taranto's current decadence and past grandeur, Swinburne elaborated in quite a different vein. After a dinner of “the most varied service of shell fish I ever set down,” which consisted of some fifteen different varieties yet caused “no difficulty in digestion,”61 he took a trip the next day with one of the city's oldest and most experienced fishermen. This man instructed him on each variety's habitat and the different strategies for fishing for them. Swinburne went on to include a list provided by Minasi of the ninety-three shellfish found in Taranto's waters, arranged according to a Linnaean classification scheme. (p.96)

Not that Swinburne's book consisted merely of such

practical information and scientific lists; nor was it utterly devoid of style. A man of sensibility, he joined empirical observations with extensive descriptions of his own personal experiences: the urge to communicate new knowledge was held in a fine balance with his subjective impressions. The interplay among concrete description, personal observation, and meditative reflection in fact did much to define Swinburne's response to the ancient past of South Italy, as his fifteen-mile journey from Francavilla to Taranto serves to demonstrate. Swinburne recounts that he sent ahead the “well-mounted and well-armed” guards assigned to him, precisely in order to savor the experience in solitude.62 The author proceeds slowly and alone on horseback, naming every

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shrub he passes and describing each variation in the soil's appearance. A discussion of the lack of white sheep in Taranto's countryside—a trope of long tradition—includes quotations from Latin texts and modern scientific observations; the topic is introduced, anecdotally, as Swinburne comes upon a local shepherd and the two strike up a conversation. Finally, he takes in the city from a hilltop, described as a locus amoenus, where he accounts in proper Linnaean terms for every tree that offers shade. He gazes upon a single boat on Taranto's sea, rippling the calm water, and envisions with sudden melancholy the entire Carthaginian fleet that once filled the same bay. “Combining the foregoing circumstances in mind,” Swinburne brings the reader into the scene with him, creating such a vivid experience of what he sees that the ghost of the past seems to arise from these images, as if lifted on currents of air or from the wanderings of his mind.63 One of the personal experiences related with particular interest by Swinburne concerned Doric architecture. His language here betrays an intimacy with Winckelmann's text that is internalized through travel experience. “The majesty of this ruin [Paestum],” writes Swinburne, “must excite admiration,” but, he also asserts, “an observer must have reflected seriously on the art, and weighed the purposes of each building with the intention of the architect, before he can bring himself to allow these noble remains of antiquity the praise they so richly deserve.”64 According to Swinburne, after his trip to Sicily and Paestum, “the best buildings of a different style and order” seem “pretty but delicate to excess.”65 It is for the Doric style, he claims, “to inspire [modern architects] with sublime ideas, and convince them how necessary to true grandeur in architecture are simplicity of plan, solidity of proportions and greatness of the component members.”66 As much as Swinburne seems to echo Winckelmann in his description of Paestum, he sounds a very different note on the prospects of further discoveries, dashing any hopes for the likelihood of similar discoveries in Calabria on the basis of his own “knowledge and the information of the natives who are well- (p.97) acquainted with the recess of their wilderness, and by no means inattentive to the remains of antiquity.”67

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Swinburne strikes a matter-of-fact tone when he is confronted with the poverty of finds in the ancient cities of Magna Graecia: from Taranto onward, the scarcity of ruins proved of little assistance for his researches, and he writes that “the hints given in the writings of ancient historians are too vague to lead us with any precision to the true topography” of the ancient sites.68 The void left by the lack of ruins is not dramatized by Swinburne as it had been in Saint-Non's volume. For one thing, he saw and represented in South Italy a livelier present than Saint-Non had—Taranto with its fishermen is an example. But Swinburne also hit upon a different means of filling this void, one that was not so much predicated on a sentimental break between past and present, but that drew instead on rich historical accounts. In place of Cabanis's disjointed narratives for each city of Magna Graecia, Swinburne crystallized a vision in which his sense of the region as a New Indies—an analogy drawn, however differently, since the Renaissance—acquired a distinctive character. Swinburne likened the ancient city founders to modern explorers, elaborating what would become a long-lived trope: “a situation blest with so delicious a climate and so fine a haven, must have attracted the early notice of the eastern navigators, who, like Columbus, Drake and Cook of modern times sailed from home in quest of new worlds, and unexplored coasts.” When speaking of Taranto's founder, Taras, Swinburne compares him to Cortes, but favorably: not the “captain of a troop of bigoted assassins,” but of “a set of civilized, humane men, desirous of procuring a good establishment in a strange country, but unwilling to cement the foundation of their state with the blood of the natives.” This was colonization idealized: “the wisdom and moderation of the adventurers gain the affection of the native savages, and a sense of mutual interest unites them both into one body.”69 From this conception followed a whole geographical simile: “the Mediterranean was an Ocean; Spain a Peru, Tyre and some other states on the coast, what Britain and Holland have since been, the great maritime powers, while Egypt and Persia were the type of the present formidable inland monarchies.”70 Taranto held center stage in this picture, but

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in a colonial rather than a classical history. Here, again, Swinburne shows himself a careful listener to conversations developing around him: colonial parallels in fact would soon take center stage in the writing of ancient history, affecting views of Magna Graecia. Both the emerging British tradition of writing ancient Greek history and the engagement of Neapolitan Enlightenment figures with ancient South Italian history would highlight this theme—for the former, Magna Graecia was imagined as a colonial territory of the ancient Greeks, for the latter it entailed reflection on a colonizing invasion in the ancient past of the southern Italian kingdom.

Magna Graecia and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Greece (p.98)

In the 1780s, Greek South Italy not only figured centrally in the accounts of travelers but also emerged prominently in narrative historiography. The History of Greece (in five volumes, 1784–1818) by William Mitford and The History of ancient Greece, its colonies, and conquests from the earliest accounts till the division of the Macedonian Empire in the east (in two volumes, 1786) by John Gillies, now seen as crucial to the modern invention of “ancient Greek history,” both included significant chapters on Magna Graecia. By forcefully inserting Greek South Italy in their narratives of ancient Greece these histories broke new ground, but, at the same time, they also conceptualized Magna Graecia as a colonial outpost in ways that would eventually relegate it to the margins of the Greek world. This conceptualising bears similarities to that of the travelers who had depicted Magna Graecia as an exotic place, in many ways a less classical one than mainland Greece. Yet the historians faced a distinct challenge as they sought to include Magna Graecia in their histories of Greece, and they drew upon earlier scholarly traditions as well as that of travel writing. A mutual influence between historical and travel writing is not surprising in an age when travel across space became entwined with movement back in time. Narrative historiography indeed shared much with contemporary travel literature: historiographic works and travelogues enjoyed similar success with the reading public; reviewed in the same

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sections of contemporary magazines, both genres drew freely on the same literary modes. Thus, while the travel writing of Swinburne and Saint-Non, for instance, included significant historical passages, so Winckelmann's art-historical writing can be seen as containing a travel narrative (and has been plausibly interpreted as such).71 Momigliano, surveying the eighteenth-century rediscovery of Greek history and its narration, described “sheer travelling [as] one of the many factors in the redefinition of the dimensions of the Greek world.”72 Thus Momigliano could claim Greek Sicily as the most momentous discovery of Greek territory in the eighteenth century. Yet the relation between travel and history writing was not so direct in the case of Magna Graecia, where disappointment followed upon the paucity of archaeological finds. In fact in the The History of ancient Greece, Gillies introduced his innovative chapters on Greek South Italy by asserting that the region, “being the most accessible part of the Grecian dominions has been more fully described by moderns than any other.”73 But, as we shall see, his narrative of Magna Graecia did not rely on travelers’ accounts much at all. The prominence of Magna Graecia in the Greek histories of the 1780s needs to be explained by looking also elsewhere. Why was Magna Graecia absent from earlier histories of Greece? How did that change? In order to answer these questions, we must first turn to earlier models: both early eighteenth-century historical narratives concerning ancient Greece and a little-known scholarly tradition, beginning in the Renaissance, that explicitly raised

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the topic of Greek

colonization, however sporadically at first (and, yes, often tied to travel, but of early modern world exploration.) An analysis that engages with these often overlooked sources helps to explain the emerging character of modern historical reflection on ancient Greece and the marginal position to which Greek South Italy would be relegated. Narrative histories of ancient Greece were themselves a novelty. Not only had there had been no such works before the eighteenth century, but there were also no clear precedents from the ancient world—a difference that distinguished this

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enterprise from that of Roman history, a fact of which early writers of Greek histories were acutely aware. Momigliano has explained the eighteenth-century invention of the modern historiography of the ancient world as a synthesis of scholarship—rich knowledge in numismatics, epigraphy, palaeography and so on, elaborated by antiquarians and, eventually, travelers—and narrative.74 Yet the minor presence of Greek South Italy in ancient written sources posed a particular challenge. Understanding how narrative historiography came to account for Magna Graecia means putting to full use Momigliano's formula, with its emphasis on the interplay of the synchronic (antiquarian/scholarly) and the diachronic (narrative), and its elucidation of how the political dimensions of historiography were entwined with scholarly practices. With little help from either ancient sources or the writings of contemporary travelers, eighteenth-century historians describing Magna Graecia resorted to anachronistic terms, such as “colony,” which would not have figured for the ancient Greeks. These authors drew the vocabulary of colonial settlement from a wide range of earlier thinkers, ranging from humanist scholars and political writers to participants in the debates over American independence, whose interest in Magna Graecia stemmed from its purportedly colonial status. This tradition of writings represents a line of scholarship so far neglected; it also shows that imperialism was the flip side of the heightened interest in democracy usually associated with the eighteenth-century rediscovery of ancient Greece— issues at the heart of the emerging historical genre.75 Early Histories of Ancient Greece

The newness and difficulty of writing histories of ancient Greece in the eighteenth century is most apparent when one considers the minimal space allotted to the Greek past in earlier narrative accounts of antiquity.76 This was to a large extent determined by the ways in which antiquity had entered the most influential form of Christian historiography, that of universal history. The major frame of reference—one that accommodated both sacred and profane, earthly matters and the heavenly kingdom—was the succession of empires. With the easy authority of its sacred provenance, this lasting model traced its origins to the prophet Daniel's interpretation of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel had explained the king of Page 29 of 80

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Babylon's dream of a gigantic statue, composed of

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four

different metals that suddenly crumble when hit by a stone, as an illustration of four empires, those of the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and finally Alexander and his successors, and of how their succession would resolve itself in the reign of God.77 This image offered a Christian framework within which to reinterpret the ancients. Moreover, as with the passing of centuries the time of revelation progressively receded further, new empires were added to the initial four, starting with the Romans and ending with modern European dynasties. By 1774 visual representations of the statue depicted a Michelin-manlike giant, with concentric circles representing the numerous royal lines seeking legitimacy.78 Not surprisingly, this framework for the telling of the history of antiquity left little space for nonmonarchical regimes such as were the majority of Greek city-states. A clear example of this predicament is offered by one of the last Christian universal histories, one that granted considerable space to the ancient Greek states.79 This was the hugely influential Discours sur l’histoire universelle (Discourse on universal history) by the French theologian JacquesBénigne Bossuet (1627–1704)—bishop, brilliant orator, and inveterate polemicist on the side of royal and Catholic power. First published in 1681 but periodically reissued well into the nineteenth century, this work, whose influence has been traced in both Voltaire and Hegel, was deeply indebted to Christian universal and teleological tradition, and organized its historical narrative according to the model of the succession of empires.80 Originally written for the son of Louis XIV, the stated aim of Bossuet's Discourse was to show how the “long concatenation of particular causes which make and unmake empires depends on the secret decrees of Divine Providence.”81 In about eighty pages Bossuet treated the empires of the Scythians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, as well as those of Alexander the Great and the Romans. The Greeks, squeezed in succinctly between the Persians and Philip of Macedonia's conquest of Greece, were characterized by their love of liberty and country, and by skilled exercise of the body, which made them much stronger soldiers than the soft Persians. Bossuet barely touched on

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Greek governments—which would have seemed an oddity in a succession of empires—simply calling them “republics” that “conducted their affairs in common and in which anyone could reach the highest honors.”82 Emphasis was placed on the internal dissensions among Greeks that offered, moreover, the means to draw them back within the succession of empires. Bossuet applauded Philip of Macedonia—the ruler of a united and absolutist state—for absorbing the Greeks within the Macedonian Empire, thus finally providing them with unity and stability. The Greek past fit uneasily in this universalist, succession-ofempire, structure, but the difficulties did not immediately disappear when attempts were made to tell Greek history on its own terms. The unruliness of Greek history—the many internal wars that so troubled Bossuet, and a dispersed theater of action ranging from mainland Greece to overseas settlements such

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as Magna Graecia—presented a

distinct challenge. This is attested by two works from the early eighteenth century that sought new space for the Greek past, though in ways as distinctive as their respective authors. Charles Rollin (1661–1741), whose ancient history in twelve volumes was published between 1730 and 1738, was a French abbé, educationalist, and twice rector of the University of Paris, controversial for his Jansenist beliefs but firmly dedicated to a moralistic reading of the past.83 Temple Stanyan (1677–1752), an English clerk in the office of the secretary of state, published the first volume of his Grecian History in 1707 and the second in 1739.84 Together with his publisher Jacob Tonson, and with Joseph Addison and Lord (John) Somers, he belonged to the Kit-Kat Club, a literarypolitical Whig association also including Robert Walpole, actively engaged in supporting the constitution that resulted from the 1688 Glorious Revolution.85 In the preface to his second volume, Stanyan explicitly contrasted his investigation of the “Laws of History” to Rollin's moral didacticism, but both authors struggled to organize Greek history in a narrative form. The full title of Rollin's work—Histoire ancienne des Égyptiens, des Carthaginois, des Assyriens, des Babyloniens,

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des Mèdes et des Perses, des Macédoniens, des Grecs— reveals his dependence on universal histories. In fact Rollin also reproduced all of Bossuet's pages on the Greeks and resorted extensively to Daniel's prophecies to organize his narrative. Otherwise much was new in Rollin's treatment of ancient Greece, starting with his unabashed admiration—he wrote, for example, that in Greece: “be it the glory of the arms or the wisdom of the laws or the study of the sciences and the arts, everything … was elevated to a high degree of perfection, and one can say that under every regard Greece has become in some way the school of the human race.”86 The work's title notwithstanding, Rollin simply dispensed with other ancient peoples by halfway through the second volume. The remaining ten volumes were in fact a history of ancient Greece from the origins of the Greek states to their subjection by Rome.87 Rollin viewed this history principally as a parable of virtue's corruption by power; yet his moral concern often implied harsh criticism of authorities, including monarchs.88 Stanyan himself remarked on the spirit of liberty pervading Rollin's work, which for long remained a text favored by many republicans, including the American John Adams.89 Moreover, Rollin managed to carve out an unprecedented space for Greek antiquity. His extensive treatment of Socrates, for example, remained influential throughout the eighteenth century, and to him we owe one of the first modern discussions of the merits of the Spartan versus the Athenian constitutions—a long-lived topic of debate which in fact evaded the issues of princely conduct that dominated the moralistic preoccupations of Bossuet and of Rollin himself. Although closely following ancient sources, Rollin digressed often in his Histoire, and his difficulties in tying together loose ends are sometimes palpable. In the process, the number of his volumes swelled to twelve from an initial plan of five. Not only Rollin's

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moralizing but also his digressions would

later come in for criticism from Stanyan and many others. Stanyan's self-assured independence of universal histories shows in his title—the first modern “Greek history”—yet it is hard to discern from his scant narrative which “Laws of History” were supposed to emerge from his work. Stanyan dedicated his Greek history to Lord Somers as “the defender

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of modern Liberty” and liberty is a major theme in the work: how the Greeks united to defend it from the Persian invaders, but later lost it, torn apart by their own internal wars and failure to maintain a balance of power among different states. Published in 1707—the date of the Acts of Union—Stanyan's Grecian History appears to be both a cautionary tale for the new “British” Kingdom as well as a reflection on the delicate balance of power among various European powers. When Denis Diderot translated Stanyan into French in 1743, reviewers lauded its clear rendition of the political dynamics at work during the reversals of power experienced by the various Greek states.90 The biggest challenge in composing one of the first modern narratives of ancient Greece, Stanyan explicitly said, was weaving together the many threads of the ancient Greek world. He contrasted this difficulty to the linearity of Roman history, with a well-defined center from which one could trace its enlarging influence. In Greek history, on the other hand, Stanyan lamented a lack of models to follow, claiming that it was “no easy Task to marshal so many Events in due Order of Time, and Place, and out of them to collect an entire unbroken Body of History.”91 Stanyan and Rollin each provided what became long-lasting models: both men's histories were reissued many times, widely translated, and often plagiarized.92 Well into the nineteenth century they served as textbooks, as the numerous heavily annotated copies in college libraries suggest. In consequence of this, they are also often dismissed as books for schools, derivative of ancient sources and devoid of political interpretation. But this judgment retroactively applies the categories of later times. Stanyan's French reviewers and many of Rollin's eighteenth-century readers and critics attest that they were read and commented upon well beyond classrooms. They seem derivative and nonpolitical only in comparison to later developments in the long process of crafting a modern historiography of ancient Greece, which unfolded over the course of the long eighteenth century. Magna Graecia was conspicuously absent from the histories of Rollin and Stanyan. The ancient written sources on which they relied indeed offered little. Rollin's concern for the universal structure of his history drew him to a passage from Diodorus

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Siculus that connected the Greeks in Sicily with the Carthaginians. He was thus the first modern to report Diodorus's reference to an alliance that the Carthaginians supposedly struck with Xerxes agreeing they “would attack with all their forces the Greeks established in Sicily and in Italy, while Xerxes in person would march against Greece itself,” so that on the same day, supposedly, were fought the battles of Salamis and Himera.93 This tradition would later (p.103)

inspire much scholarly debate;94 in Rollin, however,

besides providing a chronological parallelism between the two battles, it did little for the Greeks of Sicily. Greek Sicily appeared only through a cursory account of the Sicilian tyrants in the first part of a chapter entitled “Transactions of the Greeks both in Sicily and Italy.” Magna Graecia fared even worse, with only a few pages of observations on “[s]ome famous persons and cities” of the region: Pythagoras, Charondas, Zaleucus, Milo the Athlete, Croton, Sybaris, and Thurii.95 Stanyan also ran into problems when attempting to bring the Greeks of South Italy into his account of Greece. In his introduction, he wrote of how the Greeks, “increasing in Power, and press’d with Numbers … threw themselves out in Colonies, and … got Possession … especially [of] the Sea-coasts of Macedonia, Thrace, Illyricum and Epirus; as also of Sicily, the largest island in Europe next our own, with the Southern Part of Italy; both which from the many Colonies planted there went under the name of Magna Graecia.”96 However, except for the Sicilian expedition during the Peloponnesian War, the only further mention of Greek settlements in Italy came as a passing reference to the wars between Croton and Locris— Stanyan's principal interest here is only in the role of Pythagoras. Hence the passage is found in a section on science and literature, yet another indication of the difficulty Stanyan had in placing Magna Graecia within the main narrative of a history of the Greeks. Such limited space for Greek Italy stands in a striking contrast to the dense and overflowing chapters dedicated by Mitford and Gillies to the Greeks of Sicily and Italy in their 1780s histories of Greece. Standing between the cursory accounts of

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Rollin and Stanyan and the close attention of Mitford and Gillies are a number of developments in historical writing. For Magna Graecia in particular, very modern concerns were at issue, as the territory became a focal point in debates about colonization. The very definition of what history should be developed further through these acrimonious debates about the political use of the past. The American Revolution—which prompted fresh debates about the status of metropolitan powers and the rights of their colonies—was a central English concern clearly relevant to historiographical developments in the 1780s. With its origins as far back as the late sixteenth century, this theme was nothing new, as it followed on a series of earlier discussions about parallels between ancient Greek colonies and ongoing European colonial expansion. Early Modern Discussions of Ancient Colonization

The first book with “Magna Graecia” in its title also introduced the connection between ancient and modern colonies, Sicilia et Magna Graecia; sive, Historiae urbium et populorum Graeciae ex antiquis nomismatibus restitutae (1576), written, as we have seen, by the Dutchman Hubert Goltzius. Originally from a family of engravers and painters, Goltzius caught the bug for collecting ancient coins. A wealthy patron—Marcus Laurinus, the Lord of Watervliet—allowed

(p.104)

him to

combine his passion and family know-how in a number of publications on ancient Greek and Roman numismatics. These books put the cutting-edge printing techniques of the day on display, with page after page of engravings of unprecedented precision and beauty. The accompanying text played a secondary role, limited by and large to drawing together available information on the provenance of the coins. It was precisely the scarcity of information on Magna Graecia, however, that spurred Goltzius to write more. In a special appendix, he raised the issue of how little was understood about the ancient establishment of Greek settlements in South Italy. While for the Romans he could easily list six different reasons that led to colonization, for the Greeks, he noted, there was no such clarity. As an alternative, Goltzius enumerated characteristics that distinguished the Greeks from other colonizing peoples. The Trojans, he wrote, “were forced to find new dwellings after being driven out by enemies”;

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others, like the Spaniards in the Americas, colonized “in order to propagate empire”; and the Greeks of Magna Graecia, he speculated, were compelled by a surplus of population “when good land was scarce or the weather proved inclement.”97 The juxtaposition of ancient and modern colonies initiated by Goltzius persisted for a long time. In fact, as European exploration and settlement of the globe intensified, reflections on modern and ancient colonization often intersected. Soon after modern elements had entered antiquarian works as in the case of Goltzius's, the ancients began to populate emerging contemporary debates on colonization. The work of another Dutch humanist—the jurist, historiographer of the Provinces of Holland, poet, and theologian Hugo Grotius (1583–1654)—is a case in point. His writings Mare Liberum (The Free Sea, 1609) and De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace: Three Books, 1625) are now placed at the origins of modern international law. But they were originally occasioned by specific events in the Dutch wars with Spain and Portugal in the context of these countries’ imperial expansion, with such issues, for example, as what should be done with the cargo of a Portuguese merchant ship captured by the Dutch East India Company in 1603. And, while Grotius's disquisitions on war and trade outlined modern principles of natural rights, his arguments, written in the humanist tradition, drew heavily on, and were sustained by, examples from antiquity.98 One of Grotius's most famous claims—that when a “nation sends out colonies,” “a new people as it were is formed, enjoying their own rights”99—was to be discussed over the next two centuries in relation to both modern and ancient times. Although Grotius had relied principally on Roman sources in making this claim, it was not long before the history of the ancient Greek colonies entered the conversation as well. This tradition of reflection in time expanded to writings in the vernacular and to new nations entering the European world-expansion contest—as when in 1699 the Cornish Whig politician Walter Moyle recommended that English trade be expanded on the

(p.105)

imperial model

of Roman colonies, with Greek colonization also mentioned as a vaguely defined earlier precedent.100

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By the eighteenth century Greek colonization evolved also into a distinct subject of scholarship, one, though, often in dialogue with the wider socio-political conversation. To 1745 dates what possibly was the first scholarly work to address Greek colonization extensively, when the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres set for its annual essay prize competition the theme of: “Which were the rights of the Greek metropoleis over their colonies; the duties of the colonies towards the metropoleis; and the reciprocal commitments of the ones towards the others” The winner was Jean-Pierre de Bougainville (1722–1763), a promising twenty-three-year-old who, that same year, became assistant to the famous antiquarian Nicolas Fréret and, upon Fréret's death in 1749, succeeded him as secretary of the Académie. This generational change significantly entailed the shift from a scholar of migrations to a scholar of colonization. Fréret, a specialist in chronology and mythology, is famous for his original claim that the ancient Franks were not wandering Trojan Greeks but instead a Germanic tribe (in fact, his interest in Magna Graecia was limited to seeing the Greeks as one of the early populations of Italy, along with, among others, the mythical Pelasgians). He also is remembered for showing how sensitive scholarly search for origins could be when he was charged with libel against the monarchy for his theory of the Franks and imprisoned at the Bastille. Bougainville would never end up jailed for opening up the study of ancient colonization to modern scholars—yet his work nonetheless reveals how cutting-edge scholarship carried out in the learned community of the Académie continued to resonate with concerns of the wider, contemporary world. Bougainville made colonization essential to understanding ancient Greece. Echoing Stanyan, he cited as the defining characteristic of ancient Greek history the fact that, while “much smaller than Germany, [Greece] hosted within itself just as many different states.” The crucial question therefore, Bougainville claimed, was that of how “a whole was maintained of so many separate parts,”101 and colonization was his answer. It was colonization, Bougainville argued, that by way of both the strong links and accepted patterns of superiority and dependence, which it created between farflung polities, held together the dispersed nation of the

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Greeks. Despite the ambitiously wide reach of Bougainville's argument, his fundamental reliance on well-known written sources diluted its effectiveness. Most of Bougainville's case studies were drawn from highly rhetorical debates such as those between Corinthians and Corcyrians, or Athenians and Delians, in Thucydides. Ultimately the primary evidence for his argument was etymological: the Greek word “metropolis” itself, which, Bougainville claimed, proved that the link was similar to the “inviolable loyalty that daughters feel for mothers.”102 Yet he himself exposed the inherent explanatory limits of this familial imagery when he conceded that “not all metropoleis were as attentive to their colonies … ; tenderness is a natural feeling to mothers but not

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as vivid a

sentiment in all of them, as it varies according to character and circumstances.”103 Bougainville put a great deal of effort into marking his history as modern and up-to-date. He claimed historical perspective: with colonization, after all, he had found an explanation for “the tight links among Greeks” that, he pointed out, had evaded even the ancient authors who presented Greek unity as based on shared language, religion, love of liberty, and hatred of barbarians.104 He transformed even the scarcity of his evidence into a question of historical distance: quoting Grotius, he argued that the laws ordering mother countries to care for their colonies were natural laws originating in primitive times, before the emergence of writing and social laws.105 He also took care to keep the main body of his text devoid of direct comparisons with modern times. This makes the single instance of a modern reference, which occurs early on in the preface, all the more striking, when Bougainville illustrates the similarity of customs among Greek cities of common origin by analogy with how “the laws, character and language of major European nations are replicated in the various settlements with which they have filled the world.”106 In fact, Bougainville's own family connection linked his work in some respects to modern colonial expansion. His younger brother, Louis-Antoine Bougainville, was the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the world (1766–1769) and first westerner to discover Tahiti. Louis-Antoine also gave the family name to the plant Bougainvillea and carried on board his vessel,

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unbeknownst to anyone until she was unmasked in Tahiti, the first known female circumnavigator of the world, who had boarded the ship in disguise as the botanist's valet. This global explorer who helped put France on the colonial map always claimed that it was his older brother Jean-Pierre's scholarly passion for explorers in the ancient world that set him on his own course. The next scholar to engage substantively with Greek colonization, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), was yet another figure bent on breaking new ground. His affiliation with German neohumanism, moreover, ensured that his work served as a longer-lasting model than Bougainville's. Roughly contemporary with Winckelmann, Heyne similarly came to his deep erudition and academic recognition from extremely humble beginnings—if anything, his career was possibly even more checkered than Winckelmann's. Only after years of poverty and failed attempts to gain patrons (some of whom became instead benefactors of Winckelmann), did he finally secure a university position at Göttingen. Heyne never wrote a book as epoch-making as Winckelmann's History of the Art of the Ancients, but through his seminar teaching and his direction of Göttingen's library and scholarly journal Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, he played a major role in shaping what would become the modern approach to the study of the ancient world.107 For all the ambiguities that its idealization of Greek antiquity introduced into modern historiography, this German neohumanism, employing the rigorous methodology of source

(p.107)

criticism and a novel

historical sensibility, made Bougainville's acts of historical distancing appear naïve by comparison. Heyne first took up the topic of the ancient colonies in a lecture delivered in 1766 to the Göttingen Academy. He characterized previous works like that of Bougainville as merely descriptive and having overlooked the crucial difference between modern and ancient colonies. As Bougainville had done, Heyne invoked the metaphor of the relation of limbs to the body, but argued that the image applied to modern and not to ancient colonies. He also referred to Grotius, but as support for the claim that colonies

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in the ancient world were “free and in no way subjected to their ancient mother cities.”108 Just short of twenty pages, Heyne's lecture powerfully redefined the topic, firmly distinguishing between ancient and modern colonies, between migration and colonization, and between historical times and earlier ones that he deemed inaccessible to modern knowledge. This methodical refinement essentially limited ancient colonies to the Greek settlements in Italy and Sicily. Moreover, Heyne claimed that colonial legislation was better understood by studying individual cases than by projecting grandiose generalizations. Indeed, over the following years, from 1767 to 1786, he set out to examine the legislation pertaining to various Greek cities of Magna Graecia and Sicily, and whether they were linked by rights to their mother countries. Published together in his collected works, these essays together ran to more than three hundred pages. Despite this feat of historical research in the new mold of German scholarship, events soon after Heyne's lecture were once again to throw a contemporary light on the question of Greek colonies, as the imagining of South Italy became influenced by—and helped to shape—the largest political development of the day: the American Revolution. For it was around the same time that Swinburne and SaintNon's team of artists were traveling through South Italy, that the British colonies in North America began their rebellion after years of intensifying disagreement about taxation rights. References to the Americas had long appeared in impressions of South Italy, but it was more likely, one can believe, an echo of these turbulent contemporary events that inspired a host of Swinburne's, a priest in the Calabrese town of Roseto, to “ply” him “with many questions concerning”—beside Naples and England—“America.”109 The debates on taxation in America triggered new interest in ancient colonization. Already in a 1774 manuscript, the British general James Abercromby made the case for British taxation through an “Inquiry into the rights of ancient and modern colonies.”110 Once the war started a year later, numerous pamphlets on the American controversy were hurriedly printed to keep pace with political decisions and events on the battlefield—among these, three delved deeply into the ancient past. Published in rapid

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succession between 1777 and 1779 and in response to each other, these works put forward claims about the American rebellion that were fueled by different visions of antiquity. Moreover, as they corrected each other's historical

(p.108)

accounts, these authors went a long way toward framing a modern narrative of ancient Greek colonization. The first two were by British authors—one by William Barron (d. 1803), a professor of logic and rhetoric at St. Andrews and an adamant anticolonialist, and the other by John Symonds (1729–1807), a professor of modern history at Cambridge, who favored the case of the colonists. Barron's extensive History of the colonization of the free states of antiquity, applied to the present contest between Great Britain and her American colonies was published in 1777. Here Barron conflates colonization and civilization in a vision that also granted continuity between past and present: “the progress of civilization” has its course “from east to west, from Asia, through Africa and Europe and from Europe to America” and, in parallel, “colonization follows the same line…. From Greece to Italy and Sicily; and, from Italy, it extended, under the Romans, to the Western boundaries of their empire.”111 But at the same time, he sought to maintain historical objectivity by keeping his account of the past by and large devoid of references to the present. This reconstructed past served however to argue a position on the present. In the first three chapters Barron claimed colonial taxation as a practice well established since antiquity among, respectively, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, and the Romans, while the final chapter explicitly argued in favor of taxation in the American case. The Greeks represented, as Barron admitted, the weak link in his account of the past, since at first the Greek metropoleis did not tax their colonies. But this was only because, Barron was quick to point out, they could afford to provide defense in return; for the Greeks, unlike the adventurous Carthaginians or the mighty Romans, he claimed, first embraced colonization out of poverty. It was, in fact, Barron argued, a sign of their progress and achievements that, at the height of their glory following the Persian Wars, taxation of colonies became established in Greece too—as

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attested by the history of Athens and its impressive surviving monuments. A year later Symonds fired back with his Remarks, consisting of some fifty pages of direct responses to Barron, with no attempt at a sustained narrative. Symonds opened by calling into question the assumption of continuity between ancients and moderns that lay at the foundation of Barron's argument: there were no “free states” in antiquity since legislative and executive powers had not been independent. Yet in order to dismantle the collapsing of past and present in Barron's history, Symonds was also drawn into taking issue with many features of his account of ancient colonization. He quickly brushed aside any claim concerning the Carthaginians— because of scarcity of evidence—or the Romans, whose colonies were, he argued, of such a distinct type. As for the Greeks, Symonds thought Barron's focus on Athens led to a confusion between what should remain different categories: colonists, allies, and subjects. But how the two authors’ different stances on the present shaped contrasting interpretations of the past is best exemplified by their handling of the debate

(p.109)

between the rebellious

Mytilenians and the Athenian emissary—authoritatively recounted by Thucydides and a fixture in studies of international politics since early modern times. The first outcome of the Mytilenian debate, the Athenian decision to sentence to death all inhabitants of the island and sell the women and children into slavery, has long been understood to mark the descent into darkness of Athenian imperialism. Yet Barron characterized Mytilene's rebellion as “unnatural and ungrateful.” Moreover, commenting that even “the most inattentive reader” could not “overlook the coincidence of sentiments adopted by the Lesbians with those lately maintained by the Americans,” Barron could not resist a uniquely presentist slip in the midst of narrating the past. In fact, relying on the idea of the progress of civilization, he pushed his past-present analogy still further, presenting modern Britain as a better colonizer than ancient Athens: “It is the praise of modern times, it is the felicity of these colonies, that the moderation and humanity of a British parliament will not permit them to punish similar crimes in a similar manner

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with the Republic of Athens.”112 Barron's take provoked Symond's most emotionally charged passage. This was an episode, Symonds wrote, that “no one, who has a tincture of humanity, can read without horror;” Barron's reading in fact provoked for him a salvo of rhetorical questions: “Doth our Author mean by such loose and general expressions to impose upon indolent and unwary readers? … Was not the insurrection founded on grievances, which they had a right to have redressed?”113 Rather than mere testaments of cultural progress, the splendid buildings of Athens were, according to Symonds, reminders of how they had been “erected on the ruins of liberty and an eternal reproach to the memory of Pericles.” Barron's other formidable critic was the French baron Guillaume de Sainte-Croix (1746–1809), who published in 1779, the year after France had signed an alliance with the American colonies, his De l’état et du sort des colonies, des anciens peuples … , avec des observations sur les colonies des nations modernes, et la conduiet des Anglois en Amerique. After an early successful military career, de Sainte-Croix had turned to scholarship and already in 1772 was awarded the Académie's annual prize, for his study of the ancient historical sources on Alexander the Great. Though he had come to scholarship by an unlikely route, he was far better versed in classical studies than either Barron or Symonds. On the other hand, de Sainte-Croix's work was just as deeply shaped by, and engaged directly with, the American controversy. The struggle of the colonies even colored his assessment of earlier scholarship. Not only did he attack Barron as “a zealous Tory” attempting to legitimize the present situation “by the acts of tyranny which stain the fasti of the ancient republics,” but de Sainte-Croix also distanced himself, albeit diplomatically, from the views of his countryman and fellow academic Bougainville, asserting that had “he lived long enough to see the conduct of England in Northern America, Bougainville himself would have rejected his own conclusions.”114 (p.110)

De Sainte-Croix's work was the most substantial of the

three, equaling Bougainville's in size, but also clearly responding to and shaped by the subsequent writings. Like Bougainville, he treated the relation of colonization to wider

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Greek political dynamics extensively, but he forcefully critiqued Bougainville's thesis of dependence with an array of evidence. He recapitulated the structure of Barron's History, which narrated the ancient past first and ended with a separate final chapter detailing the present situation in America. Like Barron, he started with the Phoenicians, but he marshalled evidence to argue that the Carthaginians themselves had an ambiguous colonial relationship to Tyre— no straightforward case of dependence or taxation. Like Symonds, and with echoes of Heyne, de Sainte-Croix eliminated the Romans from his schema and drew a sharp distinction between Athens during its imperial phase and earlier Greek colonial activities. In fact, the only moment when present considerations directly impinged upon the past— something which, like Barron, he was otherwise careful to avoid—concerned colonies in Magna Graecia and Asia Minor. It is in relation to these that he quotes Grotius's statement that colonies launched out of the colonists’ free will represent “the beginning of a new and independent people.”115 To exemplify this claim, de Sainte-Croix introduced a direct comparison with an America that “was peopled by nonconformists … like Greeks in Asia Minor and Italy. Once the Anglo-Americans became oppressed by their metropolis, the natural link that united the two was dissolved and they recovered their freedom.” De Sainte-Croix ended by actually quoting from the newly issued Declaration of Independence: “The moment has come when it is ‘necessary for a people to sever the political links that united it to another and to take, according to rights, the place that natural laws assign to it among the powers of the earth.’ ”116 Amidst the excitement of the American controversy, these writings captured a wide readership: Barron's work was reissued a few times—once with a letter on taxation by Benjamin Franklin included as a preface—and translated into French and German (1778), while de Sainte-Croix's study was even translated into Italian (1780). Besides introducing antiquity into the imperial crises of the 1770s, this debate resonated within the world of scholarship well beyond the moment when American independence settled the issue that had initiated the controversy itself. Although neither of them

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had quoted his own work, Heyne reviewed the histories of both Barron and Sainte-Croix. He was critical of Barron for a lack of scholarly rigor and for a politicized interpretation that distorted the past. Little that either managed to say about Magna Graecia was new—certainly Heyne said more in his own essays. Still, the politically inspired works of the 1770s cast a long shadow over subsequent histories of Greece, beginning with those of Gillies and Mitford. By making the dominant story of Magna Graecia one of colonization, these authors added a compelling contemporary narrative thread that had not been available to either Stanyan or Rollin. (p.111)

Gillies's and Mitford's Magna Graecia

Gillies and Mitford were the first to grant quarto treatment to ancient Greece, putting the subject on par with the famous histories of David Hume, William Robertson, and Edward Gibbon, who had transformed and defined narrative and philosophical historical writing in Britain in the previous generation.117 Indeed, they participated in some of the same circles: Mitford is said to have been encouraged by Gibbon to write his history, while Gillies took up the place of William Robertson as royal historiographer of Scotland after having spent time in Prussia. In their Greek histories, one can detect Momigliano's formula for modern historiography, as they incorporate political discussion into narrative history, even if they are “still far from the systematic use of erudition and philology.”118 They commanded the admiration of Heyne, who, for all his achievements as a historian, never translated his feats of scholarship into historical narratives. For narrative organization and scholarly apparatus, Gillies and Mitford far surpassed Rollin and Stanyan. They also advocated a stronger antirepublicanism than either Stanyan or Rollin, reflecting the political reality of the later eighteenth century. With the emergence of modern republics, the treatment of ancient democracy became more contentious—Gillies and Mitford stand out for their acrimoniously critical stance toward their own subject matter, Athens in particular. This modern “trial” of Athenian democracy (to use Jennifer Roberts’ words) has attracted much attention, but recent research has also highlighted the significance of imperialism within these debates—a frame of reference that suggests the important

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role Magna Graecia would come to play in late eighteenthcentury historiographical debates.119 For all that Gillies and Mitford shared, they also had differences. Gillies's more compact narrative, both volumes of which were published in 1786, won praise for its interpretative grasp of past events from scholars as diverse as Boeckh in the nineteenth century and Momigliano in the twentieth.120 The latter also admired the originality of Gillies's thinking on topics ranging from Aristotle and the Athenian orators to the Hellenistic age.121 Far richer in its details and with a more extensive narrative sweep, Mitford's five-volume history was the work of a lifetime, not completed until 1818, and the more widely read of the two well into the nineteenth century. The very fact that Mitford took so much longer to complete his work meant that the two historians labored on their histories in very different contexts. In the aftermath of the imperial crisis initiated by the “American rebels” (as he pejoratively referred to them in 1778), Gillies's antirepublicanism was deeply entwined with his emphasis on the need for, and advantages of, unity among colonials and metropolitans. The events set in motion by the French Revolution, on the other hand, exacerbated Mitford's existing antirepublicanism—this “sentiment,” he himself wrote, originally “deduced simply from Grecian history” deepened after revolutionary France “exhibit[ed] horrors beyond all recorded examples.”122 Moreover, as four

(p.112)

out five of

his volumes followed Gillies's work, Mitford, even if never making a single direct reference to the lhim, was clearly anxious to supersede his colleague's earlier achievements. Gillies had set out to write his history of Greece after the warm reception given to his “Discourse upon the history, manners and character of the Greeks,” written as a preface to his translation of Lysias and Isocrates. In the discourse, he had sketched the progress of historical events from the end of the Peloponnesian War to the battle of Cheronea, arguing that the fragile status of private property led to unhappiness among the Greeks, despite their success in the ornamental arts and the heroic achievements of a few outstanding individuals. Having greatly increased his scope in the History

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of Greece, Gillies highlighted the effort entailed in reducing the “scattered members of Grecian history into one perpetual unbroken narrative.”123 While this remark echoed Stanyan, Gillies's narration of Greek history far exceeded the scope of his British predecessor. Gillies's History extended from the emergence of civilization in Greece to the dissolution of the Macedonian Empire in the east, incorporating many more sources and smoothly integrating chapters on the arts and literature. Colonization was a major means by which Gillies held together the expanded scope of his history; he even associated Greek national character with the colonizing reach of the Greeks: “Wherever the spirit of enterprise diffused their settlements, they perceived, it is said on the slightest comparison, the superiority of their own religion, language, institutions, and manners.”124 This perspective is reflected in the book's full title— The history of ancient Greece, its colonies, and conquests from the earliest accounts till the division of the Macedonian Empire in the east—and indeed in the prominent role given to Magna Graecia. In familiar fashion, Gillies presented the early fifth century as “the most glorious era in the history of Greece.”125 However, by building on the chronological parallel introduced by Rollin between the battles of Salamis and Himera, he made colonial Greeks crucial to the glory of this period: “while the republics of Athens and Sparta humbled the pride of Asia, the flourishing settlements on the Hellespont and the Hadriatic overawed the fierce Barbarians of Europe.”126 The fact that he was writing in the aftermath of the traumatic breakup between Britain and its American colonies seems to have encouraged Gillies to make the unity of the Greek world— colonies and all—the basis of Greece's greatness, which he, accordingly, claimed had manifested itself equally in the Greek mainland and its colonial lands. As for the settlements in the west, he extended the name “Magna Graecia” beyond South Italy to include Sicily, and argued that the name itself proved that these “colonies equalled and exceeded the wealth and power of the mother-country.”127 Yet the sources that Gillies relied on—once again mostly ancient written ones—could do little to substantiate his claim.

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As Momigliano notes, the impact of travelers’ and antiquarian literature was “only very dimly perceived”

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by

128

Gillies; he never referred to Heyne or de Sainte-Croix, and mentions Swinburne merely in passing. His allusions to Paestum and Metaponto, for example, substantiate Magna Graecia's greatness only in the vaguest of terms: these sites’ “admired ruins,” he wrote, “attest the ancient wealth and grandeur of the Greek cities of Italy.”129 Gillies nevertheless adopted one trope from the travelers, that of the modern decadence of these regions: “Whoever has observed the desolate barbarity of Calabria, or reflected on the narrow extent, and present weakness of Sicily, cannot hear without a mixture of surprise and incredulity that five centuries before Christ it was so splendid.”130 This image came with a historiographical twist: “ignorants will reject the evidence of antiquity,” he wrote, and “the contemplative visionary will reflect gloomy thoughts on the decay of time[,] but the more practical philosopher will attempt to discover the causes of the ancient and actual state of Magna Graecia, in the history and in the institutions of that country during the respective periods of time which are the objects of his research.”131 For his part, Gillies—styling himself as a practical philosopher of history—sought an explanation in Pythagoreanism. Having absorbed Sicily into Magna Graecia, Gillies turned even Gelon of Syracuse into a Pythagorean to justify his explanation of the region's former greatness. He presented Pythagoreanism as the expression of a moderate aristocracy that, by avoiding the excesses of democratic turbulence and jealous tyranny, led Greek settlements in Italy to attain the most perfect state that political society could achieve. While Athens after the Persian wars threatened the liberty of Sicily and Greece, the rulers of Syracuse, Gillies claimed, contented themselves with the humbler glory of embellishing their capitals with barbaric spoils and wonders of art. The golden coins from Syracuse, minted a century earlier than anything similar from the Greek mainland, were for Gillies a proof of this view. It was ultimately the expulsion of the Pythagoreans and the abandonment of their institutions, Gillies argued, that initiated the decline of Magna Graecia.

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Magna Graecia figured quite differently in Mitford's account, which is more concerned with proving Gillies wrong than with projecting a unified vision of Greece and its colonies. In a long scholarly footnote, Mitford dismissed the tradition—central to Gillies's account—of the chronological parallel between the battles of Himera and Salamis, characterizing the alliance of the Persians with the Carthaginians as most unlikely and noting that Herodotus, a much more reliable source than Diodorus, had not even mentioned the treaty.132 Mitford devoted as much or more space to Greek South Italy than Gillies had. But the very lens of colonization that in Gillies supported a unified view led Mitford to subordinate Magna Graecia to the mainland. Like Gillies, Mitford included a long chapter on the “Grecian Settlements in Sicily and Italy”; again, like Gillies, he placed it just after the account of the Persian Wars. But he argued that the events he related in this chapter, undoubtedly “great and glorious” on their own terms, were “less important indeed for their consequences,

(p.114)

and

less intimately affecting the interest of the mother-country, less accurately also related to us.”133 Mitford also did away with Gillies's conflation of Sicily and South Italy. He devoted separate sections to the two regions, with the one about Magna Graecia considerably less developed. Mitford expressed admiration for Gelon's tyranny as he had for that of the Pisistratids at Athens, and thought that in Syracuse “probably the forms of a mixed republic were observed …. and an impartial administration of just laws assured property and civil liberty to all.”134 But his view of South Italy was quite different: “while therefore the Sicilian Greeks, by their success against the Carthaginians, earned a glory which we want means justly to estimate, their fellow countrymen in Italy, unassailed by any formidable power, had no opportunity to acquire any similar fame.”135 He also argued vigorously against Gillies's Pythagorean thesis: though, he wrote, Pythagoras was “eminent among the earliest fathers of Grecian philosophers, that he was a legislator, the silence of all the earlier writers, and especially of Aristotle, seems very strongly to confute.”136

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Summing up his view of Magna Graecia, Mitford concluded that, however wealthy and populous they might at some point have been, the settlements in Italy were only occasionally connected to the history of Greece and were “scarcely objects for history.”137 In addition to dismissing as dubious such ancient traditions as that of Pythagoras, to which Gillies had resorted, Mitford explicitly mentioned the lack of sources as an obstacle to narrating the history of the Greeks of Magna Graecia. Yet he subordinated this difficulty to the fact that in any case these colonial lands were of little relevance to the history of Greece. Mitford showed himself more aware of reports of travelers and studies by antiquarians than Gillies seems to have been, but in a way that, again, would ultimately marginalize Magna Graecia, in sharp contrast to Gillies's ambition to make it integral to the core course of Greek history. This attitude is made clear when Mitford deals with Paestum in pages that well reflect his knowledge of travelers’ descriptions of the site: the “magnificent remains of the public buildings,” he writes, “amid the desolation surrounding them, interest as they astonish the curious traveller, whether antient political history, or the history of the arts, or art itself, be his object; while the obscurity, and almost nullity, of tradition concerning them afford endless room for conjecture.”138 Mitford also shows himself aware of Italian scholarship and Winckelmann's contribution on Paestum. In a long footnote about the Doric architectural style, Mitford relates that the “greater massiveness” and “characteristical simplicity” of the temples of Paestum prompted some to consider them older than most known architecture from Greece, and to hypothesize that they had been built by Italian peoples before the arrival of the Greeks. Mitford countered this view, explaining that while the Sybarites who founded Paestum had built in the style of their forefathers, following the destruction of the acropolis by the Persians, the Athenians, did not limit themselves to restoration but

(p.115)

also set about making

improvements. The Athenian monuments, therefore, though erected just a few years after the buildings at Paestum, were in fact much more advanced—the zenith of classical art. Mitford thus puts the colonists in their place. As for the Italian

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scholars, he mentions their “visionary inquiries into antient history, in prosecution of which so much ingenuity hath of late been employed, to overthrow every traditionary testimony transmitted by the earliest writers.”139 In Mitford's polemic, even the modern Italians are relegated to a colonial periphery.

Italian Pasts Mitford's denial that the temples of Paestum could be the “native growth of Italy”140 calls to mind Mazzocchi, who had claimed their Italian origins so forcefully. It also underscores just how little Mitford's narrative contains about the Italian past that surrounded the Greek settlements of Magna Graecia. In late eighteenth-century histories of ancient Greece, the framing of Magna Graecia as a land of colonial outposts naturally raised the specter of what lay beyond the margins of the Greek colonies. But neither Gillies nor Mitford were much interested in this other history: in their descriptions, the original inhabitants are swiftly displaced by incoming Greeks only to return as the barbarians who later take over Magna Graecia's declining cities. Not surprisingly, however, scholars from the region concerned themselves more with these early Italians, whose history became an important leitmotif for thinkers of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. The foundational figure for the Neapolitan reformers, the university professor and political economist Antonio Genovesi (1712–1769), and, among the generation of his followers in the later eighteenth century, the lawyers and reformers Giuseppe Galanti (1743– 1806), Francescantonio Grimaldi (1741–1784), and Giandonato Rogadei (1718–1784) gave Mazzocchi's claim a life well beyond Mitford's ridicule. Important interlocutors of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, these men echoed Vico in their discussions of ancient Italian barbarism and feudalism, while at the same time partaking of and participating in European trends, just as had Mitford and Gillies.141 Their work also bore a relation to contemporary politics that was no less complex (feudalism was, after all, a most pressing current issue in their reflection on the contemporary state of the Neapolitan kingdom), as they struggled to endow ancient Italian peoples with a rich narrative history that included their interactions, or lack of interactions, with the Greek colonies.

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Intertwined as they were with reformist efforts at court, the political and historical concerns of the Neapolitan Enlightenment were brought to an abrupt end in 1799, when the revolution establishing the short-lived Neapolitan Republic deposed the Bourbon king, Ferdinando IV.142 By this time, most of the prominent historians just mentioned were already dead; the one still living,

(p.116)

Galanti, did not take part, but

stood aside critically. The revolution of 1799 found most of its protagonists and earnest adherents among the last generation to come of age during the Neapolitan Enlightenment. This cultural elite of Naples was decimated in the bloody aftermath that soon terminated the republic, putting a sharp ending to the Neapolitan reformist thought and the historiographical richness that had accompanied it. Yet, it was for a rare survivor of the repression, Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823), who composed the historical novel Platone in Italia (Plato in Italy, 1801–1806), in which the climactic scene is set against the backdrop of Paestum, to give an influential voice to the vigorous debates of the previous generation surrounding the Neapolitan Kingdom's ancient past and carry their legacy in to the nineteenth century. If with Platone in Italia, Cuoco, to an extent, left behind the sustained discussion about feudalism in the Neapolitan kingdom, he made a strong case for the relevance of the ancient past to emerging discussions of Italian national identity—indeed, the author would later become a founding figure of the Risorgimento. In the novel, he presented the ancient Italians as teachers of the classical Greeks, a bold reversal of Greek-centered history that underlined Cuoco's awareness of Hellenism's increasingly powerful hold on the European mind. To be sure, Cuoco would not resolve the contradictions that had thwarted efforts to incorporate Magna Graecia into the Italian past. Nonetheless, he did much to challenge the one-sided perspective that the emerging historiography of ancient Greece brought to South Italy, while drawing on a too-often neglected line of Neapolitan thinkers discussed here. It was their labor and imagination that transformed Mazzocchi's antiquarian take on the Italian past into something they considered more scientific, politicized, and modern. In the hands of Cuoco, this outspoken Neapolitan

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perspective would wield lasting influence on Italian conceptions of Greek South Italy. Neapolitan Late Enlightenment and Its Ancient Pasts

The late eighteenth-century shift away from Mazzocchi's construction of “the other ancient peoples of the kingdom,” through etymological speculation and biblical geography, displays the mix of continuity and discontinuity that elsewhere characterized the exchanges between antiquarianism and Enlightenment.143 By the 1760s, Mazzocchi's type of work was considered outmoded, a fact well registered by the Sicilian antiquarian Giovanni Evangelista Blasi writing to his brother Salvatore: “our knowledge of antiquity, of history, and of criticism, and especially of ecclesiastical sciences, and the way we write, smells of the sixteenth century and is not in the current taste.” That “current taste” was for “projects directed to private and public happiness, new plans for legislation, and attacks on feudal privileges.”144 In fact, to seem truly enlightened, Neapolitans often made a point of dismissing the passion for antiquities as being blind to the more urgent problems of the present. Not that they were

(p.117)

all

immune to the mania for collecting—witness Ferdinando Galiani's confession that he had fallen victim, in spite of himself, to the “accursed blight of buying coins and medals.”145 More consequentially, it was for Genovesi—the man most credited with shaping the onset of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, with its particular emphasis on political economy and policy reforms—to ensure that the Italian past to which Mazzocchi had called attention would not be neglected in the reform proposals that addressed the kingdom's present state. Thus, despite a perception of outmoded antiquarianism, Mazzocchi continued to be an important presence, while reflection on the ancient past of Greek South Italy remained persistently entwined with Neapolitan political vicissitudes— from the reform period of the last three decades of the eighteenth century through the 1799 revolution (and well beyond). Genovesi's influential incorporation of the ancient past into his political economy project occurred in the very first pages of the Lezioni di commercio (Lectures on commerce, 1765). In

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this popularizing work, intended to win over to political economy the students flocking from the provinces to Naples, Genovesi assumes a familiar stance: “The Neapolitan kingdom embraces the most beautiful, pleasant, and fertile regions of Italy, which were already famous for their schools of Greek wisdom, excellence of legislation, military force by land and sea, wars, arts, commerce.” But he added a new element to the picture. Responding to doubts that these regions could have been as populous as suggested by ancient sources, Genovesi highlighted their status as “independent republics, which cultivated a simple manner of living, and a wise and strong education.”146 It was not surprising, he argued, that, before the advent of feudalism and the loss of independence crippled their potential (as remained the case in his own days), the regions of South Italy had flourished. In the space of a few paragraphs, Genovesi's interlocking of past and present turned antiquity into a powerful tool that could address at once the two primary concerns of the reform movement: the abolition of feudalism and the redressing of an imbalance between capital and provinces. It was not long before Genovesi's take on the ancient communities of South Italy— the “Italic model” as scholars have come to call it—had inspired new works of history. In the early 1780s Galanti, Grimaldi, and Rogadei all surveyed the ancient past of South Italy, with a focus on feudalism, barbarian societies, and ancient government by council. Making use of both narrative and conjectural history, these authors intervened in contemporary European dialogues while also exploiting local scientific knowledge, as in the intensive Neapolitan debates about the new geological sciences. These works are structured around an opposition between a uniquely Neapolitan past and the Roman past, as scholars have fruitfully observed,147 but the relation of these same histories to the Greek past of South Italy remains to be explored. The key figure was Galanti.148 A student of Genovesi, he devoted much of his energy to thinking and writing about reforms and to creating the public sphere he thought necessary to sustain them. The biography he wrote of his (p.118)

own teacher modeled the active intellectual life;149 the

printing house he established introduced Neapolitans to the

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major works of eighteenth-century European philosophy and history in translation. His signature undertaking, however, was the genre of the regional survey. He dedicated the first of these, Descrizione dello Stato antico ed attuale del contado di Molise (Description of the ancient and present state of Molise, 1781), to his county of origin, Molise, while championing a proposal to build a road from Naples to that province. The work subsequently led to his royal appointment to complete a survey of the entire kingdom, a project rendered more urgent by the 1783 earthquake. As a result, Galanti would turn into a sort of travel writer (even if the resulting publication, the Nuova Descrizione storica e geografica delle Sicilie (New historical and geographical description of Sicilies, 1786–1790) has been hailed more for its statistics than for its landscape representations).150 Just as it had for the travelers, the role of history loomed large in Galanti's surveys, and so it is that he found himself elaborating further on Genovesi's Italic model. Galanti's work contained many elements familiar from the humanist tradition of descriptions of the kingdom: the first part of the Descrizione di Molise was a chorography consisting of 101 entries, listed alphabetically, one for each of the inhabited sites of the region, recording the notable monuments and events for each site. Yet much else was new in his regional survey. After each place-name, Galanti also provided a population size for the settlement and its distance from major urban centers of the kingdom. Galanti then commented on the social as well as commercial activities of each village and town, and in later chapters he attended to the customs of the region's inhabitants along with questions concerning economic resources. Most distinctively, Galanti offered detailed suggestions for specific reforms that, he claimed, would fulfill the potential of a given region and its people by eliminating constraints that feudalism imposed on its development. Galanti adduced further support for these reformist calls from his historical sketches of the region: in a number of these historical chapters he traced a narrative of decline, whose trajectory began with the idealized, heroic times of the Samnites—the region's first inhabitants—continued with the Roman conquest and the medieval imposition of feudalism,

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trailed off with that system's persistence under a series of foreign rulers in the early modern period, and finally ended with the contemporary situation in dire need of redress. Galanti's debt to Genovesi's Italic model is evident in his use of the past to “show what once this region was in order to show what it can become again.”151 But, unlike Genovesi, Galanti developed a substantial and elaborate narrative. Of the Roman conquest, for example, he claimed that the protracted efforts needed to defeat the Samnites could serve as evidence of their strength. The Romans only prevailed, according to Galanti, because they had cultivated a spirit of conquest that became pervasive in their society, and because of the control exercised by Roman generals over their troops

(p.119)

through

superstitions. Galanti also expanded on Genovesi's statement that the ancient Italian communities had been independent republics. Resorting to conjectural history, as well as comparisons with other ancient Italian peoples and the contemporary Swiss cantons, Galanti envisioned the Samnites as a cluster of independent communities held together by recurring concilii or ancient councils. In Galanti's view the Samnites enjoyed the physical force and moral strength characteristic of “barbarian” populations, made stronger by social equality and the practice of agriculture, and not yet corrupted by commerce. Galanti's idealized view led him to declare emphatically that the contest between the Samnites and the Romans would have been “a subject worthy of the sublime eloquence of Rousseau,” a better choice for him than “the comparison between Sparta's ferocity and Athens’ softness.”152 By the time Galanti's treatment of the Samnites in his survey of Molise was out, other Neapolitan writers had already begun or were about to begin to stretch Genovesi's Italic model into more extended historical narratives. Rogadei's Dell’antico stato de’ popoli dell’Italia cistiberina che ora formano il Regno di Napoli (Of the ancient state of the peoples of South Italy that now constitute the Kingdom of Naples, 1780) was succeeded closely by Grimaldi's Annali del regno di Napoli (Annals of the Kingdom of Naples, 1781–1786). Galanti's own first venture into narrative history—his Saggio sopra l’antica

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storia de’ primi abitatori dell’Italia (Essay on the ancient history of the first inhabitants of Italy, 1783)—followed shortly. Rogadei and Grimaldi were writing in the same Enlightenment tradition that Galanti had done so much to encourage in Naples, and they shared with him a commitment to researching the past in order to understand the present. All three authors took an interest in understanding the origins and workings of feudalism and dismissed the antiquarian pursuits of etymology and genealogy; all referred to Mazzocchi with reverence, but mined his work primarily for its insights into the ancient topography of South Italy. These panoptic histories of the kingdom's ancient past called for the positioning of Galanti's portrait of the Samnites within a wider historical framework. As in the historically minded chapters of Galanti's survey of Molise, the main structural opposition in these narratives tended to be the Samnite confrontation with, and eventual conquest by, the Romans. Still, by setting a wider scene and by explicitly admitting, as both Rogadei and Grimaldi do, that historical times in the kingdom began with Greek colonies and Greek sources, they also renewed a dialogue with the Greek history of South Italy already present in Mazzocchi. Rogadei had spent time in Malta working as a lawyer before he turned to writing in his retirement years.153 As Porcelli's preface put it, Rogadei was the first to “illustrate and organize according to historical period” the public law of the kingdom “in relation to sovereignty, political economy and civil institutions.”154 As he never completed more than the first volume, the main

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impact of his work was to establish

the importance of the pre-Roman foundations of civil society in Naples. Rogadei's central concern was to present a positive model of ancient unity for the kingdom. He accounted in detail for each of the many tribes that had traditionally inhabited the kingdom's regions, but emphasized their common origins and similarity of customs and government: for him, they represented a political entity sustained by the practice of council meetings—a single “nation although divided into many states.”155 This sense of unity, and the deep bond it entailed between those governing and those governed, was broken by the Romans: “it seems that these councils of the nations were

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stopped at a time when the people of Italy were subjugated by the Romans, and that when a people entered under this yoke, it lost this very ancient right.”156 As the Neapolitan tribes lost their regional autonomy, so too was their culture subsumed by a monolithic Rome. Rogadei even extended his case for ancient unity to include the Greeks of Magna Graecia; in fact, they became crucial to his core interpretation of who the ancient Italians were. He believed that the Greek and Italian populations principally differed in terms of the amount of information preserved about each group. On this basis, drawing on his knowledge of the Greek colonies—as well as comparisons with the barbarian tribes mentioned in the Scriptures, in Roman histories, and in antiquarian studies of Etruscans—he extrapolated the scarcely documented Italian communities to have been republics rather than monarchies: “the regions of South Italy under the Tiber were in ancient times governed as republics, both the Greek and barbarian ones.”157 Rogadei provided a point of departure for both Grimaldi and Galanti, but these two writers took very different positions. Like Rogadei, Galanti imputed later decadence to the Roman conquest, contrasting images of ancient Italian virtue with the destructive and depraved nature of their Roman conquerors— a contrast that also betrayed his critique of feudalism. As in his earlier work he continued to privilege the Samnites, thus drawing sharper distinctions between South Italian ancient peoples than had Rogadei. The Samnites, Galanti claimed, “did not have to put up with great proprietors of lands”; he insisted that their “territory was distributed proportionally between the citizens who formed the state, and the political laws were directed to impede the growth of inequality.” Equality, Galanti argued, “necessarily formed laudable customs and better citizens.”158 An egalitarian spirit also marked Samnite politics as distinct from the characteristically inequitable Greek republics of South Italy—which, unlike Rogadei, Galanti saw as a far cry from the Italian tribes. This idealized picture of the Samnites incorporated a small revision—that their practice of agriculture proved their passage from a barbarous to a civil stage. This downplaying of Samnite barbarism appears to have

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been a response to Grimaldi's much grimmer take on the primitive ways of ancient Italians. (p.121)

In Naples, Grimaldi was known as the more

philosophically inclined brother of Domenico, an active member of the government.159 Both men were close to Galanti and moved in the same circles; as Franco Venturi put it, the list of subscribers to Grimaldi's Annali reads like a guidebook to the world of Neapolitan politics and culture around 1782.160 Grimaldi's intellectual ambition is attested by the scope of his first major work—Riflessioni sull’ineguaglianza tra gli uomini (Reflections on inequality among men, 1779–1780)—which argued against Rousseau's depiction of the state of nature. Similar originality characterized his writing on ancient history. Like Galanti, Grimaldi interrogated the past in order to understand the nature of ancient governments and their relevance to contemporary problems in the Kingdom of Naples, yet he avoided idealizing the Samnites or any other ancient peoples. A closer reader of Vico than Galanti, he saw ancient peoples as brutes with human features. He did not doubt that the Samnites had formed a nation on the basis of their common origins and customs, yet he saw little equality among them, but instead a military oligarchy in which a few leaders drove “a troop of barbaric, ferocious, violent, and irrational men, guided only by their physical strength.”161 Far from adopting the idealizations of the Italic model, Grimaldi depicted the Samnites as essentially a feudalist, clientelistic society—as had Vico with Rome. In fact, in Grimaldi's history, Rome, as Melissa Calaresu put it, “did not play the role of the imperialist ogre which had deprived the freedom-loving Samnites of their ancient liberties,” but was instead credited with bringing—by overriding the inherent weakness of national councils—the Samnites out of their barbarism.162 Grimaldi also offered a clear-sighted and unidealized take on the Greeks of South Italy. He drew on the same analogy between modern and ancient colonialism that Gillies and Mitford had built upon, but his pessimism led to a very different view. Grimaldi considered the first Greek settlers themselves to have been barbarians, as these founders of the colonies emigrated from Greece during its early, still

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uncivilized period. He harbored few illusions about the later dealings of the Greek colonists, after they had displaced the original inhabitants. In Grimaldi's eyes, the Greeks accomplished in ancient Italy what “in our times the Europeans did in Oriental Indies and America; they swarmed in from various places of Greece, attracted by the abundant produce of these regions; they fought among themselves, as Europeans do in India, and they fought against the natives …  with no other design than that of profit from commerce with other Greeks and to protect themselves from the attacks of our [i.e., South Italian] barbarians.”163 These colonists could hardly be considered responsible for introducing to Italy councils that were known to all “nations in the first state of barbarism.”164 Undoubtedly the Greeks bequeathed their arts to the natives—their architecture, as seen in the Doric wonders of Paestum, attests to a more vivid imagination than could be found among “our natives.” Along with their art and their poetry, he admits that “the Greeks undoubtedly

(p.122)

facilitated commerce with the Orient and accelerated our cultural development”; however, “they poisoned this advantage with superstition and with the laxity of customs” spread by their oligarchies. Grimaldi had little time for those “partisans of Greekness” who attributed to them all virtues and no vices.165 Despite the pessimism of his outlook, Grimaldi belonged squarely within the same reform circles as Galanti—it is characteristic that, in between volumes of his Annali, he devoted his scrupulous attention to the disastrous 1783 earthquake in his Descrizione de’ tremuoti (1784). This intense, ongoing Neapolitan conversation on reform produced works that achieved European standing, such as what may have been the masterpiece of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, Mario Pagano's Saggi Politici (Political essays, 1783).166 Pagano's book treated human history in general, not that of the Neapolitan Kingdom in particular, but his characterization of the Greeks as barbarians highlights Pagano's participation in the same conversation as Grimaldi. This much-admired work was also politically extreme: it was a call for democracy, paradoxically dedicated to King Ferdinando IV. The fragile equilibrium of the reform period came to an end with the 1799

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revolution. Grimaldi had passed away a few years earlier, Galanti stepped aside disapprovingly, but Pagano located himself at the forefront: the constitution of the short-lived Neapolitan Republic was the work of his pen, and he was killed in its repression. It was for Cuoco, a younger Neapolitan who had apprenticed with Galanti and befriended Pagano, to bring back together the many disparate strands of Enlightenment work on the Neapolitan past—and in the process to reframe it as an Italian past, to remain a persistent feature in Risorgimento cultural debates for a long time to be. Cuoco on the Greek South and Italy's Many Pasts

Cuoco's life spanned many divides both geographic and generational.167 A Risorgimento writer who powerfully envisioned a unified Italy and has retrospectively been hailed as a founder of that movement, he personally experienced a deeply fragmented country, moving between the southern Kingdom of Naples and Milan in northern Italy, but also between Italy and the wider context of Europe, especially Paris. Against the background of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic invasions, of Italian revolutionary politics and the subsequent Restoration, Cuoco participated in a variety of intellectual circles, ranging from the Neapolitan Enlightenment to a Milanese literary scene under the influence of European Romanticism. The turning point in this complex life came with the 1799 Neapolitan revolution, although Cuoco's involvement in those events remains unclear. For a long time he was thought to have been only tangentially involved, implicated mainly by a laudatory reference by the author and revolutionary Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel that landed him first in prison for nine months and then in exile. More recently, it has become apparent that (p.123)

his role in the revolution was more active, and that he

may even have escaped a death sentence only through bribery.168 In any case, Cuoco survived; displaced from Naples but newly connected to wider European and Italian networks, he turned to writing. It was in exile, first in France and later in Milan, that Cuoco wrote his Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana (1801)—the “Historical essay on the Neapolitan revolution,” still discussed today—as well as Platone in Italia. Upon returning in 1806 to a Naples under Napoleonic rule,

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Cuoco continued the journalistic career he had launched in exile, assuming at the same time a distinguished position in the government of Joseph Bonaparte and then Joachim Murat. With the latter's ouster, and the (second) reinstatement of Ferdinando IV in 1815, Cuoco discreetly retired from public life, dying eight years later while beset by mental illness— although some have suspected that he acted the part, his madness a way to thwart any possible retaliation by the Bourbons.169 The Neapolitan revolution determined Cuoco's turn to the ancient past and the outlook he would form toward it.170 The main argument of his Saggio storico was that the Neapolitan revolutionaries had failed because their political and cultural project ultimately remained alien to the ordinary people of Naples: the elites were steeped in foreign culture, while the people remained largely uneducated.171 Cuoco's response to this social and intellectual divide—Platone in Italia—sought to familiarize Italians with the ancient, glorious past of their own country, and aimed to inspire them to create an independent and unified Italy.172 The Italic model was invoked here not so much in support of economic and social reform as to provide material to “make the Italians,” as Cuoco phrased it—to shape a new national identity. Cuoco's choice of genre—the historical novel—was simultaneously rooted in his Neapolitan background, while also a meaningful gesture on the wider stage of emerging European nationalist discourse. His mentor Galanti had already claimed in 1780 that the emotional power of modern novels made them invaluable in undertaking the reform of “the taste and the spirit of a nation.”173 Literary texts would indeed become crucial to the Risorgimento project: Alberto Banti has argued for their pivotal role in forging the emotional connection necessary to envision—and become ready to die for—the Italian nation. Benedict Anderson has famously shown how visions of an immemorial past were fundamental to the imagining of shared nationhood,174 and it was this impact that Cuoco's Platone in Italia drew upon in assuming its place in the Risorgimento canon. As a model for his Platone, Cuoco repeatedly and explicitly invoked Le voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, vers le

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milieu du quatrième siècle avant l’ère vulgaire (1788), by the Frenchman J. J. Barthélemy.175 This novel traced the voyage of a young Scythian, a descendant of the famous sage Anacharsis, and bearing the same name, through the ancient city-states of Greece. The narrative, which takes place between the battles of Leuctra (371) and Cheronaea (338), is built

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upon conversations on religion, philosophy, art,

and literature, freely interspersed with touristic and historical commentaries.176 Ironically, Barthelémy's vivid description of ancient Greece, saturated in a nostalgia that had originated in his scholarly passion for the past, was transformed into a political cry for democracy, as the Anacharsis became one of the inspirational texts behind the French Revolution. Its unexpected impact appealed to political writers, such as Sylvain Maréchal (who turned Pythagoreans into protocommunists in his 1799 Les voyages de Pythagoras [The travels of Pythagoras]) and Cuoco. Platone in Italia adopted various tropes from the Anacharsis, while significantly altering them. Though both works are organized around an obvious encounter between barbarian and civilized cultures, Cuoco turned Barthelémy's model on its head by imagining the Greek Plato as awestruck by the local Italians. Just so did Cuoco carve, within the imagining of Italy, a distinctive space for the past of the south of the peninsula that engaged both an earlier Italian scholarly tradition and an emerging European Hellenism. The very way in which Cuoco framed his novel is revealing. While Barthélemy's preface explicitly discussed his work as fiction, Cuoco addressed his readers in the voice of a fictitious “editor” presenting the book as the modern transcription of an ancient Greek manuscript. By means of this literary device, the preface immediately foregrounded several themes of Platone in Italia. The grandfather of our “editor,” we are told, discovered the manuscript in 1774, during foundational work for a country estate to be built in the area where once had stood Heraclaea. The grandfather, learned in Greek, translated the manuscript but left it unpublished, seeing little use in “reminding Italians that they once were virtuous, powerful, happy … the inventors of almost all knowledge that adorns human spirit,” when at present they consider it “glory

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to be the disciples of foreigners.”177 The question of whether even to publish the manuscript thus touches on the hot-button Risorgimento issues of the decadence of modern Italians as well as their cultural and political dependence on outsiders. Even the more prosaic elements of Cuoco's opening conceit illustrate the significance of the past for Italians. The choice of Heraclaea—the site of the 1732 discovery of famous bronze inscriptions—added weight to the claim that “every corner of South Italy guards immense treasures of antiquity.”178 It also brought to mind Mazzocchi, who had published the bronze inscriptions in the same volume in which he claimed the temples of Paestum to be “native growth of Italy” (to use Mitford's expression). Cuoco's “editor” indeed mentions Paestum itself in passing, deploring the lack of provision made there for the many tourists coming from all over Europe to visit its temples—a criticism, however, that again serves to highlight Italians’ special connection with antiquity. Like the grandfather of the “editor” in Platone in Italia, all Italians can dig and stumble upon a priceless past in their own backyards —a past rendered all the more valuable by the admiration it elicits from well beyond the country's borders. Cuoco's contribution was to add a strong historical perspective to the (p.125)

Risorgimento themes, presenting Italians’ connection

to their past as “roots” literally emerging from the soil. This inviolable sense of the past, almost a prefiguration of the concept of national heritage, contained an exquisite irony: it was largely predicated on the appreciation that foreigners showered on that same past. The fragmentary structure of Cuoco's supposed manuscript, said to include speeches as well as letters by a variety of figures, all found in total disarray, allowed for an unusual degree of narrative freedom. Although clearly related to the disjointed structure for which Platone in Italia itself has long been criticized, it also enabled Cuoco to depict a journey that was as much temporal as it was spatial. The novel's fragments take the reader well beyond fourth-century Magna Graecia, where Plato's boat first touches ground, back to the age of Pythagoras, and then by land to the idyllic and timeless region of native Samnium, and finally to Paestum, where one is left to

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ponder the primordial origins of Italy. The kaleidoscopic nature of the text, with its desultory action, well suited Cuoco's search for the immemorial origins of the Italian nation. The linchpin of the novel, holding all of its digressions together, is Cleobolus, a young man accompanying Plato on his trip who is presented as the typical protagonist of a bildungsroman. The story of his education about life, politics, and philosophy gives Cuoco's various fragments a sense of continuity. It is Cleobolus who records with enthusiasm the landscapes and personal interactions of the journey, but who also elicits and carefully reports the opinions of Plato and other great men encountered along the way. For a dash of sentimental education, Cleobolus is made to fall in love with Mnesilla, a young Pythagorean woman from Taranto, thus giving Plato the opportunity to compare favorably the position of women and their level of education in the Greek cities of Italy with their abject treatment in Athens. The climax of Cleobolus's stay in Taranto, however, consists of a dialogue on virtue among Plato, Architas, and Pontius the Samnite—a dialogue referred to in Cicero (De Senectute. 12: 41) and already mentioned by Galanti—which Pontius wins by claiming that “virtue is nothing more than moderation and love for work.”179 Following Plato through the Greek cities of South Italy—the main sites in Magna Graecia—and then leaving Plato to set sail on his own for Sicily, Cleobolus seeks both to further his own knowledge and to satisfy his beloved's request to put their bond to the test. In the novel's final pages, he travels to Samnium and finally Paestum to confront the ancient origins of Italy head-on. A rousing speech, delivered by the priest at Paestum, represents the climax of the novel's elaboration of ancient Italian greatness and its role in the Italian present. Opening with a critique of cultivating historical memory for its own sake, rather than as an inspiration for action, the priest faults his fellow countrymen, the inhabitants of Paestum, who, as famously reported by Athenaeus (The Deipnosophistae 14.632),180 would meet yearly to shed tears

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over their

former glory. The reference in Athaeneus described Greeks who, in Lucanian-conquered Paestum, longed for the halcyon

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days of Greek Poseidonia, but Cuoco has the priest eulogize a glorious past of Italian origins, far more ancient than classical civilization. In that period, the priest explains, when the Etruscan Empire covered the whole of Italy and beyond, expanding from the Alps to the Scamander, Italian culture had reached as far as Greece. As proof of this ancient Italian precedence over Greece, the priest invokes geological evidence, arguing that fossils—“fishes and shells changed into stones”—and the “strata” of Italian mountains constituted evidence of the country's remote antiquity.181 Platone in Italia is dedicated to building this Italian alternative to Hellenism, enlisting both ancient sources and modern scholarship, with arguments that work by underplaying, or appropriating, achievements of classical Greece. Cuoco lost no chance to show the Greeks of Italy in a more sympathetic light than those of the mainland. In addition to Plato's lecture on the better treatment of women in Magna Graecia, Zeuxis's painting and Hippodamus's town planning are further evidence, discussed in detail, and used to demonstrate the greater sophistication of the Greeks in Italy. It comes as no surprise that the novel extols the ancient populations of South Italy. With Galanti as his guide, Cuoco privileged the Samnites, first by showing Pontius carrying the day in his dialogue with Architas and Plato, and then in his idealized description of Samnium—many details of which, on topics ranging from its agrarian economy to its marriage ceremonies, were lifted directly from Galanti.182 Another tactic Cuoco uses to establish the primacy of Italy over Greece is to trace back to remote Italian origins certain major figures of Greek civilization, including Homer and Pythagoras, by projecting them back to the glorious epoch of Italian dominance. Indeed ever since the Renaissance, as we have seen, South Italian antiquarians had claimed Pythagoras as one of their own, even identifying the modern village of Samo in Calabria as his birthplace.183 In a certain sense, we can see Cuoco's claim for the Italianness of Pythagoras as a response to appropriations by authors such as Maréchal, and to the growing scholarly skepticism surrounding the Pythagorean tradition. A manylayered image of Pythagoras is developed in Platone in Italia: Cleinias, Cleobolus's teacher in Taranto, details Pythagorean

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philosophy and practices; Architas, the political leader of Taranto, presents him as a town legislator; while Plato in the end tells Cleobolus that probably there never was a Pythagoras, but that his name simply embodies Italian popular knowledge, personified to exert greater authority. By juxtaposing these different voices, Cuoco was able to maintain the two antithetical views of Pythagoras developed by Vico, who in Antiquissima sapientia Italica presented him as a Italic sage, but whose Scienza nuova emphasized the poetically remote origins of Pythagoras's wisdom, beyond the grasp of any scholar's overreaching claims.184 (p.127)

Cuoco's novel was an immediate success, and still

hailed in 1831 as “one of the two immortal Italian novels of our age” together with Manzoni's Promessi sposi (with which moreover it shared the narratological device of the rediscovered unpublished manuscript as its foundation).185 Apart from a brief revival associated with Fascist rule,186 however, the novel's fortunes soon ebbed. Explanations for its demise vary, with some citing its overall mediocre literary quality (which certainly does not compare to Manzoni), others deeming its scholarly framework obsolete upon publication, and still others questioning whether Cuoco's vision of the past was sufficiently complex or nuanced.187 The book's imaginative reach into history—which trumpeted an innate “Italian” national character while also touching on Greek, Samnite, and Etruscan identities—remained too vague and remote to achieve powerful popular resonance. Yet as we shall see, the past envisioned in Platone in Italia, or at least parts of it, would be repeatedly revived in the nineteenth century, on the one hand as part of an attack on Greek-centered histories, but on the other hand with the aim of installing Magna Graecia as a crucial, if somewhat ill-fitting, element in the past of Risorgimento Italy. Cuoco's role in communicating Vico's thought to figures in the northern Risorgimento has long been recognized, but equally significant was his transmission of a rich tradition of South Italian scholarship. His fiction entailed a great deal of careful research, and however outlandish some of his claims might seem today, they were based on a close study of a number of

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Neapolitan works. Cuoco's debts to the 1780s reformers are most evident in numerous footnotes referring to Galanti, Grimaldi, and Rogadei. Like these writers, Cuoco eagerly dismissed antiquarian etymological work, as his tongue-incheek discussion of the etymology of Cleobolus's name makes clear. Yet to an even greater extent than those writers, he maintained an abiding reverence for Mazzocchi; just as his interpretation of Pythagoras carried more than a hint of Vico, his presentation of Paestum and the theory of an earlier Etruscan Empire are underwritten by Mazzocchi. Platone in Italia has even become a guide to other, lesser known scholarly traditions: Cuoco's discussion of Homer, for example, has recently made possible the unearthing of an all but forgotten debate in 1780s and 1790s Naples, in which Homer was claimed as Italian on the basis of Alberto Fortis's geological evidence. In fact in his final years, the scholarnovelist worked on a never completed history of ancient Italy, meant to substantiate the claims put forth in Platone in Italia and to respond to criticism by foreign scholars—such as the dismantling of the Pythagorean tradition in Christoph Meiners's History of the sciences in Greece and Rome (1781– 1782). A sensitivity to the new, modern, and European dimensions of these historical questions was a distinctive feature of Cuoco's work. Platone in Italia makes for a fitting bookend to eighteenth-century writings about Magna Graecia, particularly in its incorporation of travel into an historical novel. Additionally, Cuoco was uniquely positioned to recognize the emergence of a

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new world of scholarship. He was

familiar with its nascent German face—as his response to Meiners shows. His concern to “make the Italians” shows how deeply he was involved in producing an Italian heritage. In addition to all of this, he was also actively engaged in the reform of cultural institutions in Murat's Naples. The absence of material culture in Platone in Italia is striking—even Paestum is not dealt with in any concrete detail. Yet Cuoco (who used the word “archaeology”) had, in many ways, a clearer sense than many of his contemporaries of the archaeological discipline that, as we shall see, soon became the primary means of approaching the ancient past.

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Notes (p.129)

(p.130)

(p.131)

(p.132)

(p.133)

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Notes:

(1.) Winckelmann 1762: [6–7]. (2.) See Winckelmann 1952: 3: 237. (3.) See for this point Chaney 1998: 63 and 137 and Petrella 2004: ix–x. (4.) On the Grand Tour of Italy see, again, De Seta 1992, Wilton and Bignamini 1996, Chaney 1998, Chard 1999, Black 1992 and 2003 , and Findlen, Roworth, and Sama 2009. (5.) Saint-Non's book on Magna Graecia was the third volume in his Voyage pittoresque ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile (Picturesque voyage or description of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily), counting six volumes, published between 1781–1786. This was the first illustrated folio travelogue, beating by one year the appearance of the first volumes of both Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier's Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782– 1822) and Jean Pierre Houel's Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari (1782–1787). (6.) Moe 2002: 1–12. (7.) See for this observation Leask 2002: 1–14. (8.) On measuring in eighteenth-century travels to classical lands see Redford 2002. (9.) See Constantine 1984, Herzfeld 1987, Augustinos 1994, Yakovaki 2006 and Güthenke 2008. (10.) On Riedesel's life and works, see Rehm 1951, Constantine 1984: 128–146, Morrison 1996: 69–168, Osterkamp 1987b , and Salmeri 2002a: 67–69. (11.) See Chard 1999: 124, 175–179.

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(12.) For eighteenth-century travels to Sicily—which resulted in a different tradition from that of travel to Magna Graecia, even if in some cases travelers visited both—see Tuzet 1955, Osterkamp 1987a, Cometa 1993 and 1999, and Salmeri 2002a. The topic of travel to South Italy is taken up by Mozzillo 1964 and 1992 and Moe 2002, with no specific focus on Magna Graecia, though. (13.) Constantine 1984: 130. (14.) Morrison makes this his central research question; see Morrison 1996: 69–168. (15.) Décultot 2000: 263–265. (16.) See Osterkamp 1987b. (17.) Riedesel 1773c: 6. (18.) Morrison 1996: 134–144. (19.) On Riedesel's pages on this sarcophagus see Osterkamp 1987b: 206, but also Salmeri 2002a: 67; for a recent scholarly assessment of this work see Ewald 2010. (20.) Riedesel 1773c: 17. (21.) For Winckelmann's writing on Agrigentum, its relation to Riedesel's work, and its influence on later views, see Cometa 1993. (22.) On this point see Cometa 1993: 10–12. (23.) For a succinct account of this controversy see Redford 2008: 53–59, focusing on Stuart and Revett's side, and Middleton 2004: 15–23, speaking from Le Roy's side. (24.) Redford 2002: 7. (25.) Winckelmann 1968: 185. (26.) Chard 1999: 126–156. (27.) Riedesel 1773c: 153–154.

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(28.) Riedesel 1773c: 157, 169, 172. (29.) Riedesel 1773c: 229. (30.) Riedesel 1773c: 32. (31.) Riedesel 1773c: 172. (32.) Riedesel 1773c: 174. (33.) Riedesel 1773c: 173. (34.) Riedesel 1773c: 173. (35.) See Cometa 1993. (36.) The complex story of the evolution of Saint-Non's project, extending over decades and involving numerous figures at different stages, has been masterfully reconstructed by Petra Lamers, see Lamers 1995, especially 9–63 and 96–102, which is also the main reference for Saint-Non's biography. (37.) Lamers 1995: 32. On Denon see, most recently, Claudon and Bailly 2003 and Summerfield 2008; more specifically on his time in Naples see Couty 2007 and Barbarin and Maisonneuve 2009. (38.) On these three artists see again Lamers 1995: 77–85. (39.) Denon 1997: 233. I quote from Denon's travel diary on which Sain-Non's published text was based; as we shall see, there were instances when Saint-Non edited Denon's text (by and large a matter of minor cutting it or adding to it); the quotes I excerpt here are lines which Saint-Non maintained unchanged when publishing his Voyage pittoresque. (40.) See plates 35 and 36 in Saint-Non 1783: 70. (41.) Denon 1997: 242. (42.) Denon 1997: 191, 221, 242. (43.) Denon 1997: 240–241. (44.) Denon 1997: 278–279.

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(45.) See Saint-Non 1783: 90, plate 46. (46.) See Saint-Non 1783: 92, plate 49. (47.) See Saint-Non 1783: 54, plate 29. (48.) We owe it to Lamers's admirable publication of sketches, preparatory drawings and final etchings of this Saint-Non's project that this comparison is possible. (49.) Saint-Non 1783: 77–78. (50.) Denon 1997: 239. (51.) Saint-Non 1783: 197. (52.) Saint-Non 1783: 197. (53.) See Redford 2002: 12. (54.) On this see Placanica 1981 and Zambrano 2009. (55.) Saint-Non 1783: 98. (56.) On Swinburne see Salmeri 2002a: 70 and Moore Heleniak 2005. (57.) Laborde in Swinburne 1785–1787: v. (58.) See Moore Heleniak 2005 for the influential impact of Swinburne's images of Alhambra. (59.) Swinburne 1783– 17 85: 1: vi. (60.) Swinburne 1783– 17 85: 1: iii. (61.) Swinburne 1783– 17 85: 1: 237. (62.) Swinburne 1783– 17 85: 1: 225. (63.) Swinburne 1783– 17 85: 1: 228. (64.) Swinburne 1783–1785: 2: 135. (65.) Swinburne 1783–1785: 2: 135n.

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(66.) Swinburne 1783–1785: 2: 136. (67.) Swinburne 1783–1785: 2: 138. (68.) Swinburne 1783–1785: 1: 238. (69.) Swinburne 1783–1785: 1: 255. (70.) Swinburne 1783–1785: 1: 258. (71.) See Décultot 2000: 263–265. Grafton 2007, especially 118–120 and 200–231, traces the early modern intersection of ars historica and travel writing. (72.) Momigliano 1984b: 141. (73.) Gillies 1786: 1: 386n. (74.) Momigliano 1955a. Momigliano returned to reflect on this topic many more times: for an informative summary and evaluation of his various contributions on the origins of modern historiography, see, again, Phillips 1996. (75.) A direction that Ataç 2006 already begins to explore; see also Vlassopoulos 2010a. (76.) For eighteenth-century narrative historiography of ancient Greece see Clarke 1945: 102–111, Momigliano 1955b: 214–217, 1984a, and 1984b, Roberts 1994: 154–207, Ampolo 1997: 23–78, Ceserani 2005 and 2011, Ataç 2006, Murray 2011; for these developments set in their wider cultural and political context see Vlassopoulos 2010b and 2011. (77.) Another reading made the four empires the Babylonians, the Medes and the Persians together, the Greeks, and finally the Romans. On Daniel's prophecy, see Momigliano 1984d; on its role in the development of modern historiography of the ancient world see Ampolo 1997: 8–12 and Ceserani 2011: 146– 147. (78.) See Ampolo 1997: 98 for one such image.

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(79.) Griggs 2007 offers an original and subtle analysis of how in the age of Enlightenment Christian universal histories underwent rich and complex transformations; she shows this to be a process of great consequence for later European historiography, rather than it being simply the end of the genre. (80.) See Griggs 2007 for the long-lasting, if not always acknowledged, influence of Bossuet's model. (81.) Bossuet 1976: 373. (82.) See Bossuet 1976: 331–332. (83.) On Rollin see Ferté 1902, Grell, Michel, and Vidal-Naquet 1988: 82–86, Grell 1993: 133–139 and 1995: 7–16 and 877– 888, Roberts 1994: 154–160, Ampolo 1997: 26, Cambiano 2000: 271–274, Ceserani 2005: 416–418 and Ceserani 2011: 145–148. (84.) On Stanyan see Momigliano 1955b: 215, Roberts 1994: 157–160, Ampolo 1997: 34, and Ceserani 2005: 418–419 and 2011: 148–151. (85.) On the Kit-Kat Club see now Field 2008. (86.) See Rollin 1730–1738: 2: 290. (87.) See Rollin, 1730–1738: 1: i–xliii; Rollin also summarizes Bossuet's work in 6: 722–773. (88.) An observation already made by the contemporary French scholar Claude Gros de Boze, as quoted in Grell 1995: 7. (89.) See Stanyan 1707–1739: 2: 6; for Rollin's reception in America, see Gribbin 1972, Richard 1994: 54–55 and 221, and Winterer 2002: 19. (90.) See Journal de Trévoux, June 1747, 1137, and Mercure de France, August 1743, 1803; on Diderot's translation of Stanyan, see Desnè 1975: 43–61. (91.) Stanyan 1707–1739: 1: [preface 11]. Page 74 of 80

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(92.) Rollin's work was translated into Italian (1733– 17 40), English (1738– 17 40), Greek (1750), Spanish (1755–1761), Portuguese (1773), German (1778), and Bengali (1847). British booksellers created new works reassembling at need Rollin's volumes: for example, in 1737 a History of the Arts and Sciences of the Ancients and in 1750 a History of Alexander. See Ceserani 2005: 419. (93.) See Rollin 1730–8: 1: 211–214. (94.) For a discussion of the parallel between the two battles found in Diodorus, Bibliotheca Historica 11: 1–4, see Gauthier 1966. (95.) See Rollin 1730– 1738: 2: 368–397. (96.) Stanyan 1707–1739: 1: 9. (97.) Goltzius 1576: 324. (98.) On Grotius's relationship with the ancients see now the masterful studies by Straumann, 2006 and 2007. (99.) See Grotius 1993 : 2 : 9.10. (100.) On Moyle see Robbins 1966. (101.) Bougainville 1745: v and vi. (102.) Bougainville 1745: 73. (103.) Bougainville 1745: 100. (104.) Bougainville 1745: viii. (105.) Bougainville 1745: 115. (106.) Bougainville 1745: xxx. (107.) See Sassi 1986 for a subtle analysis of Heyne's contribution to historical studies and his differences from Winckelmann's approach. (108.) Heyne 1767: 293.

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(109.) Swinburne 1783–1785: 1: 281. (110.) See Abercromby 1986: 171–300. (111.) Barron 1777: 1. (112.) See Barron 1777: 56. (113.) See Symonds 1778: 56 (114.) See Sainte-Croix 1779: ix–x. (115.) Sainte-Croix 1779:126. (116.) Sainte-Croix 1779: 128. (117.) On Gillies and Mitford, see Momigliano 1955b: 214–217, Roberts 1994: 200–207, Ampolo 1997: 57–61, Turner 1981: 189–203, and Ataç 2006. There is no space for them in the discussion by scholars of modern historiography, such as Eduard Fueter's Geschichte der neureren Historiographie (1914), Friedrich Meinecke's Die Entstehung des Historismus (1972), or Herbert Butterfield's Man on His Past: The Study of the History Of Historical Scholarship (1955). (118.) Ampolo 1997: 58. (119.) See, again, Ataç 2006 and Vlassopoulos 2010a. (120.) See Momigliano 1955b: 217. (121.) See Momigliano 1955b: 216–218. (122.) See Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 289 and 289n. (123.) Gillies 1786: 1: vi. (124.) Gillies 1786: 1: 212. (125.) Gillies 1786: 1: 378. (126.) Gillies 1786: 1: 378. (127.) Gillies 1786: 1: 386.

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(128.) Momigliano 1984a: 140. (129.) Gillies 1786: 1: 386. (130.) Gillies 1786: 1: 384. (131.) Gillies 1786: 1: 384. (132.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 273n. (133.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 254. (134.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 272. (135.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 280. (136.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 286n. (137.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 297. (138.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 290. (139.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 290. (140.) Mitford 1784–1818: 2: 290. (141.) On the Neapolitan Enlightenment, foundational is Venturi 1962; most recently see Robertson 2005. For the narrative historiography that developed in this context, see Giarrizzo 1981: 175–240 and 1991: 569–599. (142.) See for brief but incisive accounts of these developments Rao 2002 and Symcox 2002. (143.) See Grell 1993 for an overview of this dynamic, and Rao 2007 for a specifically Neapolitan perspective. (144.) Quoted in Giarrizzo 1981: 208. (145.) Quoted in Giarrizzo 1981: 197 and Rao 2007: 167. (146.) See Genovesi 1769: 325 and 326. (147.) See Calaresu 1997.

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(148.) On Galanti see Venturi 1962: 941–983, Robertson 2005: 382–384, and Mafrici and Pelizzari 2006. (149.) See Calaresu 2001. (150.) See Patriarca 2003: 16. (151.) Galanti 1781: 110. (152.) Galanti 1781: 130. (153.) On Rogadei see Calaresu 1997: 645–649. (154.) See Rogadei 1780: i. (155.) Rogadei 1780: 396. (156.) Rogadei 1780 : 397. (157.) Rogadei 1780: 366. (158.) Galanti 1783: 219–220. (159.) On Francescantonio Grimaldi see Venturi 1962: 509– 524, Giarrizzo 1981: 210–217, Calaresu 1997: 655–660, and Robertson 2005: 397–401. (160.) See Venturi 1962: 587–588. (161.) Grimaldi 1781–1786: 1: 185. (162.) Calaresu 1997: 660. (163.) Grimaldi 1781–1786: 1: 317. (164.) Grimaldi 1781–1786: 1: 374. (165.) Grimaldi 1781–1786: 1: 373. (166.) On Pagano see Venturi 1962: 785–833, Giarrizzo 1981: 224–236, and Robertson 2005: 398–404. (167.) On Cuoco see De Francesco 1997, Tessitore 2002, and Biscardi and De Francesco 2002. (168.) See De Francesco 1997: 3–38. Page 78 of 80

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(169.) De Francesco 2006: xlvi–xvlii and Banti 2000: 28. (170.) De Francesco 2006: xix–xxii. (171.) Cuoco 1998: 326. (172.) On Platone in Italia see Sansone 1966, Bollati 1983, Cerasuolo 1987, Themelly 1990, Casini 1993, Banti 2000, Andreoni 2006, and De Francesco 2006. (173.) Galanti 1786: 15. (174.) Anderson 1991: 11. (175.) Cuoco 1924: 337, Cuoco 1999: 1: 166 and 2006: 187. (176.) On Anacharsis see Guerci 1979: 273–276, Vidal-Naquet 1995: 9–16, and Hartog 2001: 44–45. (177.) Cuoco 2006: 6. (178.) Cuoco 2006: 6. (179.) Cuoco 2006:155; on the tradition of Pontius the Samnite see most recently Horky 2011, discussing Cicero's dialogue at 120–121. (180.) See Wonder 2002 for a recent discussion of this passage with bibliography. (181.) Cuoco 2006: 483–484. (182.) Andreoni 2003: 234–244. (183.) Casini 1998: 145. (184.) Casini 1998: 254–255. (185.) A. Levati quoted in Andreoni 2003: 12. (186.) Galfré 2002. (187.) See respectively Casini 1998: 261 and Banti 2000: 114– 119. See also Andreoni 2006: cxxx–cxxxi for Melchiorre Cesarotti's negative judgments.

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University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

Individuals and Institutions Giovanna Ceserani

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords This chapter reinterprets the origins of modern classical archaeology by examining the founding of the first archaeological institute, the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica. Understanding the Instituto within its Italian contexts reveals the importance to this process of Magna Graecia its material culture and its scholars and simultaneously explains Magna Graecia's subsequent marginalization. The work and life of the institute's founder, the German Eduard Gerhard, are shown to be indebted to Neapolitan cultural institutions and antiquarianism, the richness of which is evinced through the scholarship of Andrea de Jorio. Analysis of the debate on the provenance of painted vases within the Instituto's community illuminates the emerging predilection of the new archaeological discipline for mainland Greece rather than Magna Graecia. The provincialization of South Italian scholarship accompanying

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this process of archaeological professionalization is explored through the relationship of the Calabrese scholar Vito Capialbi with the new archaeology promoted by the Instituto.

Keywords: Eduard Gerhard, Andrea de Jorio, Vito Capialbi, origins of modern archaeology, Neapolitan cultural institutions, nineteenth century, provenance of ancient painted vases, Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, professionalization, antiquarianism

On August 7, 1810, workers digging a new road alongside the Royal Library and Museum in Naples came upon the remains of a burial ground, originally dating to the city's Greek period and used well into Roman times (see figure 3.1). Local newspapers promptly reported the discovery, but for a full account of the excavation we are indebted to the royal librarian Lorenzo Giustiniani (1761–1824).1 In a marked departure from the subject matter of his bibliographic works, Giustiniani was moved to dedicate an entire book to what he called the sepolcreto di Santa Teresa (Saint Teresa's burial ground), explaining that “the learned, the mediocre and the vulgar were all talking and wanted to know more about it.”2 Giustiniani was prompted by the fact that two years after the first unearthing of the tombs, no Neapolitan historian or antiquarian had yet endeavored to preserve the memory of “such a venerable monument of patria antichità.”3 A textured, at times sentimental, image of the patria's past immediately becomes apparent from the book's initial pages. Giustiniani situates the new discovery in relation to the story of prior excavations and the history of the land itself, reminding us of the patriotic politics that, as we have seen, had permeated geological discourse in Naples since the 1780s. The deep sense of patria is made all the more concrete, moreover, as Giustiniani points to the continuities of Neapolitan daily life, recalling, for instance, that at home his own mother had used as water jugs ancient vases that her father, an architect, had come upon during his construction work in the city. Although he lamented the fact that no models of the site were made (and his own publication was devoid of any illustrations), Giustiniani's detailed descriptions of the site's overall layout, as well as of individual

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tombs

and objects found inside and outside them, paint a Figure 3.1. A view of the excavations of vivid picture. the Sepolcreto di Santa Teresa. Plate 4 in Elaborating on Andrea de Jorio's Metodo per rinvenire e these careful frugare i sepolcri degli antichi, Naples observations, 1824. (Research Library, Getty Research Giustiniani Institute, Los Angeles [2577–874].) discusses burial practices and related questions of social status and attempts to draw connections, in line with the long-standing discussion about Naples's Attic origins, to Athenian phatries. His arguments invoke long traditions of learned scholarship, both Neapolitan (Mazzocchi is typically singled out as “Gran” Mazzocchi) and pan-European, yet these references are always put in relation to specific evidence derived from the excavation at the Santa Teresa burial ground itself, of which he was a direct witness. In short, there is much of what we would expect from an excavation report in Giustiniani's work, with its attention to context, chemical analysis of soil and ceramics, and even the formulation and, to a certain extent, testing, of historical hypotheses.

The apparent modernity of Giustiniani's work is striking. The scholarly method and the disciplinary tools are all there, in however embryonic a form. Yet because he does not categorize the work as archaeological, the text has come down to us today as little more than a quaint tale on the margins of classical archaeology's history, less a precursor than a footnote to the naming of the modern discipline. That naming was delayed for nearly two more decades, until 1829, when the young German Eduard Gerhard (1795–1867) established in Rome a seminal archaeological institution—the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica—which first convened in April of that year. This moment is widely regarded as marking the invention of the modern discipline of classical archaeology. By naming the field within an institutional context, the Instituto broke with the earlier academies and the world of the Grand Tour and initiated a narrative of institutional progress within which individual Neapolitan scholars such as

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Giustiniani would have no place. The elevation of Greece as the primary subject of the new discipline envisioned by Gerhard's organization would ultimately relegate Magna Graecia, and the contributions of its native scholars, to a peripheral position in the archaeological imagination. The irony, however, is that the formation of the Instituto itself owed much to the practices of scholars like Giustiniani, wellversed in the study of South Italy's antiquities; from excavations to museums, Naples provided examples of approaches to ancient materials that were essential to the Instituto's success in modeling a new archaeological professionalism. The opposition between the categories of Greek and Italian, as with the contrast between the amateurish antiquarian and the professional archaeologist, evolved in the first half of the nineteenth century against a background of incipient nation-making. Italy, it should be remembered, was not yet unified (nor for that matter was Germany), and Neapolitan scholarship on the ancient past was not in as direct relation to political discourse as it had been during the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Yet during this period ‘patria’ would gain new political and cultural resonance. Gerhard, whose long life (strikingly longer in fact than those of most of his Italian

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counterparts) would allow him to

witness the unification of Italy as well as the rise of Prussia, was also to experience first-hand how growing nationalist tensions would undermine the cosmopolitan ideals of the Instituto—ultimately shaping our understanding of what classical archaeology is today. Gerhard's own story is a good place to start in order to understand how this dynamic was set in motion.

Origins of Modern Classical Archaeology For all the importance of recovering the eighteenth-century origins of many features of modern intellectual life—such as historicism, nationalism and professionalization—the profound influence of the “dramatic alterations in Europe's institutional landscapes” in the nineteenth century should not be underestimated, as Suzanne Marchand reminds us.4 Due appreciation for this “institutional” moment helps us to understand the difficulty of pinning down Gerhard's individual contribution, without lessening the urgency of doing precisely

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that. His uncompromising dedication to establishing an institution in which the work of individuals would be subsumed within wider scholarly networks is part of what makes Gerhard's own story elusive.5 To be sure, the story of such an institutional figure cannot be told with the same drama as the heroic tale of Gerhard's contemporary Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840), the wunderkind of German nineteenth-century classical scholarship, who died unexpectedly of sunstroke while copying inscriptions in Delphi, leaving behind seminal publications in Etruscology, Greek literature, archaeology, and history, and a great deal of unfulfilled promise. Gerhard never made the long voyage to Greece, the country on which he focused his vision of modern classical archaeology. Instead he shuttled constantly between Berlin and Rome, more a commuter than a traveler. His long and productive life was consumed by bureaucratic work, which proved crucial for the growth of the Instituto: editing its publications, networking and fund-raising on its behalf. Even in areas where Gerhard did make original scholarly contributions, these were overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries: Stephen Bleecker Luce, drawing attention to Gerhard's lifelong work on vases that resulted in Auserlesene griechische Vasenbilder (Select Greek Vase Paintings, 1840– 1858), still subordinated it to Otto Jahn's “epoch-making” Beschreibung der vasensammlung königs Ludwigs in der Pinakothek zu München (Description of the of the vase collection of King Ludwig in Munich's Pinacotech, 1854). Since Luce rendered his verdict in 1918, Gerhard has cut a small figure indeed in the history of the scholarship on vase painting, the subject about which he was most passionate.6 Although any history of archaeology must acknowledge Gerhard's crucial role as founder of the Instituto, attending to his scholarly work offers additional insight.7 Scholars, among them Marchand and Alain Schnapp, have focused on

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his 1850 “Archäologische Thesen” (“Archaeological Theses”) to shed crucial light on the key features, and limitations, of his disciplinary vision.8 But Gerhard's earlier work, undertaken around the time of the Instituto's founding, gives a clear sense of South Italy's importance in the shaping of classical archaeology. Here, a younger Gerhard finds himself in the

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company of Neapolitan antiquarians who succeeded Mazzocchi and continued to revere the Neapolitan master. By unearthing Gerhard's initial interactions with people and material from South Italy, we take the story of archaeology from Berlin to Rome and finally to Naples, eschewing the emphasis on German scholarship that has shaped so much of the discipline's modern history. Strictly speaking, no clearly marked academic discipline of classical archaeology existed when Gerhard arrived on the scene, and his role can only be described as groundbreaking. His own background, unsurprisingly, was in classical philology (disappointing his family's expectations that he study law, his father's profession, or theology, favored by his mother). Berlin University in 1814 was just the place to pursue a passion for philology. The school had been founded in 1810—the brainchild of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who put at its core Altertumwissenchaft, the study of the ancient world, as it was being shaped by scholars such as F. A. Wolf.9 The latter's 1795 Prolegomena ad Homerum, which ably combined the advances in emendation technique by biblical scholars with fresh insights into the historicity of the ancient world, had breathed new life into classical philology.10 With the new university rapidly establishing itself as a premier intellectual center, Wolf's philological seminars, together with those of his onetime pupil at Göttingen (later his Berlin colleague), August Böckh, set a scholarly standard that was crucial to establishing the long-lasting German dominance in the field of classical studies. Gerhard studied with these luminaries; indeed his first publication stemmed from a project Böckh had drawn him into, focused on the scholia relating to the Greek poet Pindar. Upon receiving his degree, Gerhard did what was expected of a young philologist: he published his thesis and took up a teaching position at a gymnasium (classical high school) in his hometown of Posen—a typical stepping-stone to an academic career. Only a year later, however, suffering from poor health, Gerhard left that position to embark on an Italian journey that took him to Florence, Naples, Sicily, and Rome. With this voyage, Gerhard the “classical philologist” began a transformation into Gerhard the pioneering “archaeologist.”11

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“Yet again it was in Rome that everything was to begin,” wrote Schnapp, enthusing about that city's formative role in Gerhard's establishment of modern classical archaeology.12 Like many before and after him, Gerhard planned a short visit to the Eternal City that soon turned into an extended stay. He would spend most of the next fifteen years there (1822–1826, 1828–1832, 1833–1837), seeking and eventually obtaining official sponsorship, and finally serving as the envoy to Rome of the newly established Altes Museum in Berlin.13 In Italy, (p.140) Gerhard experienced ancient objects in a new way; whether encountered in an existing collection or in the almostdaily yield of new excavations, they apparently overwhelmed him. As the story goes, Gerhard's revelatory experiences with the material remains of antiquity led him to adopt the motto qui unum vidi nullum, qui mille unum (“he who has seen one thing has seen nothing, and he who has seen a thousand has seen but one”). This cumulative approach in turn informed how Gerhard would conceive of the new institution he planned —he saw the importance of a scholarly body having its own built-in network for scholars to share and disseminate news and analyses of the ever-growing body of discoveries. The Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica of Rome became a famous success story, a model widely imitated and reproduced in many of the institutes of archaeology to come. For Gerhard himself, the Instituto's triumph lent him the cachet to return to Germany as that country's first-ever university professor of archaeology (1843). Indeed the establishment of this professorship marked a momentous shift—one that did not come smoothly, but was the result of much labor. Without doubt, Gerhard's professors had imparted to him their unusually expansive interests, including a concern for material objects, which they had in turn certainly developed under the influence of Heyne, their professor at Göttingen, who taught archaeological courses as early as 1767.14 After all, the faculty at Berlin University had largely sided with the partisans of material objects in the defining scholarly battle of the 1810s. In this early struggle within Altertumwissenchaft to define the proper objects of study and methodology, both Wolf and Böckh stood with Realphilologie (or Sachphilologie)—which aligned its text-

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centered studies with a “dedication to material and cultural aspects of antiquity”15—against the exclusive focus on language and grammar of Wortphilologie. Böckh's famous (and possibly apocryphal) dismissal of scholarly travel to Greece and Rome (he claimed that he could know better how those places looked from his knowledge of ancient writers) echoes similar pronouncements by his teacher Heyne, but, again, is belied by a keen interest in material objects, attested, for example, by his involvement with the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (Collection of Greek Inscriptions).16 Böckh indeed remained close to his pupil Gerhard and some of his own work (as we shall see) even appeared in the Instituto's publications. Of Gerhard's own generation, both Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868) and Müller also showed a significant interest in combining archaeology with philology (Welcker's chair at Giessen in 1809 was in Greek literature and archaeology; Müller even published a Handbook of the Archaeology of Art in 1830). Still, it remains Gerhard's achievement that, while the Berlin he left behind had no well-defined academic niche for archaeology, his personal efforts prompted the creation of one. Not for a moment should we assume that this was a natural development from within academic Altertumwissenschaft—it was rather the result of a long-term, multidimensional labor of love on the part of Gerhard. It was slow going: the

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new chair in archaeology was followed

by others, as philologists acceded to the new reality, but the process was a protracted one, and Gerhard's own professorship, it should be remembered, relied on an imperial decree for its establishment. This royal endorsement of Gerhard's vision for classical archaeology directs our attention to some of the contradictory tensions, present at the discipline's birth, that would have a lasting influence on its development. The excitement of expeditions and thrill of discovery that the archaeological enterprise could set in motion engaged the interest and emotions of nonspecialists in ways that were mostly unavailable to scholars working on texts. The new study of objects, moreover, aligned itself with recently established museums, bringing powerful institutional influences into play and fashioning a wider public for archaeology. Gerhard's

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story, however, reveals another dimension of this triumphal progress, one specific to the study of classical lands: he chose to channel this excitement into establishing a niche for archaeology within academic institutes of classical studies dominated by philologists. In transforming antiquarians and collectors into archaeologists, Gerhard's project set its sights on a success story with which he was intimately familiar, that of Altertumswissenchaft. His choice of name tells us as much: in lieu of a cognate of “antiquity” or “antiquarian,” Gerhard employed “archaeology,” a choice meant to place his work on par with that of philology. These subtle decisions on Gerhard's part would have farreaching consequences, which close reading of his writings has begun to reveal.17 The “Archaeological Theses,” composed as a preface to the inaugural issue of the German periodical Archäologische Zeitung, have been described by Schnapp as elaborating an identity for archaeology subordinated to philology, starting with the very definition of the field as the “philology of monuments.”18 Marchand, arguing that this subordinate relationship to texts was itself an inheritance from the antiquarian tradition, has shown how the new discipline came to be weighted down with philhellenic ideals. Her work demonstrates that Gerhard's archaeology was a site where the tensions between neohumanist and historicist models played themselves out at the expense of a genuinely historical vision for the field. Moreover, demarcating classical archaeology as a field in its own right, separate from other archaeologies, such as those dedicated to the study of prehistoric societies, meant disengagement from many of the methods and approaches developed by other practitioners: classical archaeologists’ delay in adopting stratigraphy is a case in point. By the end of the nineteenth century, Ian Morris argues, classical archaeology was severely limited by its inability to pose historical questions and was increasingly reduced to the sheer classification of objects, while it investigated the ancient past only “by banishing people from the archaeological discourse.”19 These are powerful and compelling interpretations of the history of classical archaeology, but there are alternative

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formulations, both inside German

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scholarship and

beyond, that demand further exploration. One important feature of archaeology's emergence was the extent to which this new creature of Gerhard's was indebted not just to Roman materials but to the entire Italian tradition. Institutions created to meet the demands of eighteenth-century discoveries in Italy fostered a South Italian scholarly tradition, as we have seen, with the life force to operate simultaneously on the periphery and at the center of the new archaeology. These Italian institutions were sufficiently developed to demand continuity and institutional memory from a specialist staff, something that contributed as much to Gerhard's Instituto as did the work sponsored by the new model institutions in Berlin. The story of how these Italian institutions contributed to Gerhard's revolution is crucial for understanding how Magna Graecia and its study would ultimately be affected by these new disciplinary arrangements. From Rome to Naples

Italy played a massive role in the evolution of the new discipline. In fact, of course, Gerhard's trip to Rome has never gone unmentioned. But many accounts fail to go beyond the old tropes of outsized remains and teeming travelers and omit discussing how the city presented a complex and articulate posture vis-à-vis the ancient past.20 Also unmentioned is the fact that, to Gerhard, Rome presented itself as a new site for cultivating the spirit of institutional innovation that he had already relished in Berlin. Diminished though it was during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the foreign presence in Rome, comprising both travelers and residents, rebounded significantly with the restoration of the old order: the ancient capital remained a cosmopolitan city, and new developments, such as the growing ambitions and power of Prussia, were already in evidence.21 More than ever in a world of increasing nationalist tensions, the Holy See provided a neutral zone for resident diplomats to gather in an atmosphere still free of the divisions among nation-states. Travel to Greece, although it had certainly increased while war had rendered Italy unsafe, remained a rarity—in any case, it usually entailed passing through Rome. Wealthy aristocrats who had taken up residence in Rome, along with those who

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held official diplomatic posts, together constituted an international community of students and lovers of antiquity.22 Although Gerhard was by his own account overwhelmed by the material presence of the past in Rome, it should be noted that many of the countless objects he encountered there had already been subject to processes of mediation. Only recently, the Napoleonic Wars had made their impact felt, not just disrupting the ritual of the Grand Tour but affecting contemporaries’ appreciation of the past. During their occupation of Rome, the French engaged in a number of new excavations, and selected for shipment to Paris many fine pieces from Rome's collections, including iconic ones such as the Laocoon and

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the Apollo Belvedere.23 (The fact that

in addition to Rome's masterpieces, Napoleon imported the Roman antiquarian Ennio Quirino Visconti—known as “the Italian Winckelmann”—to direct the new Napoleon Museum indicates just how sophisticated the Roman intellectual scene was at this time.)24 The transfer of Roman pieces to Paris drew attention to the idea of cultural patrimony and to the importance of art's context, as is made clear in the pronouncements of Quatremère de Quincy, and after Napoleon's fall, not only were many of these pieces returned to Rome, but new legislation was introduced to protect the city's antiquities.25 The Restoration Rome visited by Gerhard, and in which he became an archaeologist, thus carried a strong sense of the importance and the fragility of the city's link to a glorious past —a connection that was alternatively threatened and preserved through the interrelated workings of diplomacy, archaeology, and tourism. During Gerhard's second visit, in 1823, he assembled, out of the city's international scholarly community, a group devoted to the love of antiquity: the Gesellschaft Romische-Yperboreans (The Association of Roman-Hyperboreans, a name that echoed, but at the same time ennobled through mythological associations, the appellation long reserved by Italian scholars to their foreign counterparts, “ultramontani”). The other Hyperboreans were August Kester (1777–1853), Hanoverian ambassador to the Holy See, also famous for being the son of that Charlotte who inspired Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther; Otto Magnus von

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Stackelberg (1787–1837), who, having been present at significant discoveries at Aegina and Bassae, published important works on his Greek travels, enriched by his own illustrations; and Theodor Panofka (1800–1858), a Prussian and fellow graduate of Gerhard's from Berlin University.26 From the reading group gatherings of the Hyperboreans to the formal founding of the Instituto, Gerhard's engagement with Rome was manifestly deepening: he envisioned something more than a rotating cast of socializing art lovers. Both serendipity and single-minded determination played a role in Gerhard's work in Rome. Retrospectively, Gerhard has been called the first German “academic traveler,”27 but this persona had required deliberate and active cultivation on his part, as revealed by even a cursory comparison with Panofka. The latter, having arrived in Italy straight out of university, relied on private sponsors to sustain himself, while Gerhard worked to gain institutional backing from Berlin. Panofka became close to both the duc de Luynes and the duc de Blacas, who hired him as a personal secretary, connections that would prove useful to Gerhard's project: both de Blacas and de Luynes were co-opted into the Instituto, and the latter, we shall see, ended up playing a crucial role in keeping its publications afloat during periods of financial crisis. Panofka's favor was returned: in the end, it was Gerhard's lobbying back in Germany that obtained a chair of archaeology for his Prussian colleague. In addition to making simultaneous use of traditional connections and new forms of institutional

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backing, Gerhard's success owed much to plain good luck.28 For example, just when it seemed that diplomatic tensions would make it impossible to launch the Instituto, the crown prince of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm, visited Rome: with Gerhard serving as his guide, the prince declared himself a sponsor of the new institution by the end of his visit. This episode reminds us that the Instituto could hardly have taken root anywhere but Rome; despite a growing excitement surrounding Greece, it was above all in Rome that enthusiasts for classical antiquities gathered. Both literally and figuratively, the way to Greece passed through Rome. The drawings of the Parthenon by Stuart and Revett, for instance, were first publicized in Rome, during their trip back to

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England, and it was in Rome that Winckelmann, among others, saw them. And Rome remained the gateway to Greece well into the nineteenth century, as the case of Baron von Stackelberg shows (one among many, as we shall see, who traveled to Greece and published on it, but resided extensively in the Italian capital). Yet Rome's unmistakable preeminence ought not to overshadow unduly the importance of the city too often neglected in accounts of the rise of classical archaeology: Naples. For all of Rome's centrality, one element of its significance, to men such as Gerhard, was its position as a gateway to the Neapolitan South, an area particularly rich in the materials needed for a professionalized archaeological practice. It may be more than symbolic that Gerhard's first scholarly enterprise in Rome, a collaboration with Panofka, resulted in a book about Naples. The cataloguing of antiquities grouped in particular private collections was a centuries-old practice— Winckelmann's catalogue of the antique engraved gems collected by Baron Philip von Stosch can serve as one late eighteenth-century example. The duc de Blacas had employed Panofka precisely for the purpose of publishing his collection of painted vases; while busy with this in Paris, Panofka had also taken on the cataloguing of the cabinet of curiosities owned by the comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier. But the project jointly undertaken by Panofka and Gerhard in Naples was significantly different: it took as its organizing principle not an individual's collection, but a collection belonging to an entire city, as reflected in the title Neapels antike Bildwerke (Naples's ancient works of art, 1828). Detailing the holdings of the Royal Neapolitan Museum, the book was organized according to that museum's layout. Yet the authors took great pains to present their work not merely as a museum guide (Giustiniani had just published such a book in both English and Italian in 1824) but as an in-depth examination of all the ancient art that had been discovered in the kingdom. They outlined a systematic approach that they felt was lacking in the sporadic mentions of art that appeared in guides for visitors to Naples—books they deemed “incomplete and of no use for archaeological research.”29 Although finally the information supplied by Panofka and Gerhard differed only

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minimally from the contents of earlier books like Giustiniani's, their approach was distinctive and exemplified an increasing professionalization. They envisioned producing

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similar books on several major cities, but the breadth of this project was such that they only completed the book on Naples and—many years later—one on Berlin. Yet Neapels antike Bildwerke speaks to this role of the city in advancing the presentation and treatment of antiquities. Once again, we are struck not just by the richness of the material available in Naples, but by the city's complex and innovative engagement with the past. The completion of the guide necessitated more than a brief stint in Naples, where both Gerhard and Panofka had spent time before. It was there that Panofka had originally met both the duc de Luynes and the duc de Blacas, whom he later joined once again in order to supervise the excavations in nearby Nola. Gerhard also made important connections in the city: in fact the Instituto's thirteen inaugural “membri onorari della direzione” (honorary members of the directorship) would include the Neapolitans Michele Arditi (1746–1838), then director of the museum of Naples and superintendent of the kingdom's excavations, and Francesco Maria Avellino (1788– 1850), then professor of Greek and a member of the committee involved in the restoration of Pompeii. With the backing of such illustrious friends, Gerhard was elected to Naples's prestigious Accademia Ercolanense. Such academic appointments had long been markers of networks and prestige within the Republic of Letters, but it is worth looking deeper into the significance of this Neapolitan episode. For all the sense of decline from an earlier efflorescence, fascinating new developments mark the city's institutional landscape at the onset of the nineteenth century. Certainly it was a time of great political instability for the kingdom of Naples: Ferdinando IV, who had been reinstated by the British following the demise of the 1799 revolution, was ousted again in 1806 by French forces; Joseph, Napoleon's brother, ruled until 1808, when he was replaced by Napoleon's brother-inlaw, Joachim Murat, who was eventually executed by the Bourbons upon their second return to power in 1815.30 In

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addition to political upheaval, this was a period of ongoing and deepening social and economical crisis. Yet recent work has also highlighted the modernity of the crisis itself and the innovative quality of the solutions proposed in response. There also may have been more continuity than at first appears. John Davis has, for example, convincingly argued for the unprecedented ambition of the reform program enacted by the French government during its rule, and showed how indeed, upon their reinstatement in 1815, the Bourbons maintained many of the administrative and institutional innovations of their French predecessors.31 This continuity was all the more pronounced in the sphere of culture. In striking contrast with the kingdom's political instability, Neapolitan cultural institutions grew incrementally and with increasing vigor, giving the region a distinct role to play in the study of antiquity in the first half of the nineteenth century.32 Institutionally, this is most evident in the stories of individuals who, in contrast to the peregrinations of actively political agents such as Cuoco, managed to maintain stable careers amidst the upheavals that surrounded

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them.

Some of these scholars were politically conservative and in favor of the status quo; others chose scholarly life as a refuge following the disappointment of political engagement during the French period. But the significant fact is that the scholarly and institutional bodies that had been established to process and analyze the numerous eighteenth-century discoveries produced, and later required for their own maintenance, a self-perpetuating community of specialist staff. The example of Giustiniani is illuminating. He always made a point of highlighting how, during the 1799 revolution, he had stayed put at his desk, working on his compendia: a bibliographical overview of Neapolitan historical and geographical publications and a geographical dictionary of the kingdom. Nevertheless, even the life of this seemingly apolitical academic antiquarian evinces an approach to the past that overlapped with the concerns of the Neapolitan reformers. His passion for geology and his preoccupation with establishing a specifically Neapolitan tradition of scholarship aligned him with the patriotism of the revolutionary generation.33 Ironically, though, given his investment in this

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shared enterprise, Giustiniani himself seems to have been a difficult man who was never accepted into any of the local academies and who feuded repeatedly with other antiquarians.34 His career after the revolutionary period, however, indicates that gifted antiquarians could find an institutional home, despite curmudgeonly unsociability (Giustiniani still died unremembered by any obituary). After years of relying on his own publication ventures, Giustiniani gained employment in the Royal Library in 1802, where he worked until the end of his life. Loyal to King Ferdinando, he remained at the library through various political upheavals, as he said, simply because of his commitment to protecting the king's books. Continuity of staff also characterized other top positions in the kingdom's cultural institutions. This is illustrated by the cases of scholars of a much higher profile than Giustiniani, such as the cavalieri Arditi and Avellino, whom Gerhard would include in the founding directorship of his Instituto. Arditi, like Giustiniani, also kept his distance from revolution: during the period of greatest ferment, he went back to his hometown in Puglia, not to return to the capital until 1801.35 A student of Antonio Genovesi, Arditi was appointed director of the Royal Museum and supervisor of excavations in the kingdom by Murat in 1807, and was confirmed in both positions by Ferdinando in 1817. His successor in both posts, Avellino, was too young to be caught in the ideological cross-fire of the revolution.36 The avatar of a new generation, Avellino was better traveled and more cross-culturally aware than his predecessor, but even he embodied the survival of an eighteenth-century Neapolitan heritage in his continued interest in legal studies, which led him to take up a university chair in that field in addition to his engagement with antiquity. The experiences of the three—Giustiniani, Arditi, and Avellino —demonstrate how Neapolitan institutions, massive for their day, with museum holdings and excavation

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projects in

particular at least as sizeable as any in Europe, if not more extensive, had become machines that needed dedicated individuals in order to keep them running, and in turn rewarded the chosen few who did so. It is indicative of this growing sophistication that, after Italy's unification,

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Neapolitan staff would be imported, as we shall see, to take charge of the new cultural ministries in Rome. But already in the 1820s, Gerhard must have glimpsed and been impressed by what he called “the need to deal with antiquity beyond the individual,” which came to guide his conception of the Instituto.37 In fact, as we shall see, he enlisted in the enterprise of the Instituto the dense network of contacts Arditi and Avellino had developed throughout the kingdom to keep track of discoveries of antiquities—numerous scholars who, both in Naples and in the provinces, ensured that the institutional machinery of Neapolitan antiquarianism continued to turn smoothly. Gerhard's dealings with one such figure, the Neapolitan Museum curator Andrea de Jorio (1769– 1851), are particularly revealing of the Neapolitan scene during this period and of the German scholar's engagement with it—what he drew from it, and what he declined to draw from it—in developing a classical archaeology focused on Greece.38 Andrea de Jorio's Ancients and Moderns

That the Neapolitan museum and library produced two scholars in Giustiniani and de Jorio—relatively low-level figures in the institutional hierarchy—whose work would enjoy such a prominent afterlife is telling of the richness of the cultural institutions of the city. The extensive corpus of de Jorio's writings includes even one of the most famous works of early nineteenth-century Naples—La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (The gestural expression of the ancients seen in the light of Neapolitan gesturing, 1832).39 Gerhard was sufficiently impressed with de Jorio to translate into German excerpts of his earlier Metodo di rinvenire e frugare i sepolcri degli antichi (Method for finding and searching the tombs of the ancients, 1824). Combining the character of a cicerone with a keen scholarly attentiveness, de Jorio granted antiquity pride of place in his attempts to understand the Neapolitan character; writing with ease on subjects both ancient and contemporary, he embraced the long and distinguished Neapolitan tradition of guidebook writing (Galanti and Giustiniani had both authored their own), albeit within a new institutional framework and reflecting recent scholarly advances. De Jorio's life and work offer

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insight into the connections between an increasingly specialized world of Italian scholarship and the evolving field of archaeology. His interactions with visiting foreigners bear witness both to shared scholarly interests and to the barriers to mutual understanding that could crop up in such encounters. Most striking of all, his scholarly career demonstrates just how much the new discipline of archaeology owed to purveyors of local knowledge, not only in terms of factual information and practical expertise, but also in the use of conceptual

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tools, such as de Jorio's attribution of

material remains to different ancient peoples. Yet the interplay between ancients and moderns developed differently outside of Naples—in ways that, moreover, relegated the scholarship of modern South Italians and their native past even further to the periphery. Orphaned at an early age, de Jorio was launched by his uncle into a career in the church. He succeeded brilliantly, ultimately getting himself elected canon of the cathedral in 1805. Six years later, with the French government of Joachim Murat installed in Naples, his passion for antiquities earned him a position as curator of the vase room in the museum, a position he would hold through the Bourbon restoration and until the end of his life (Panofka would gain a similar position at the Altes Museum in Berlin only in 1856); in addition, his role included an assignment as ispettore degli scavi (inspector of excavations). Beloved alike by visiting royals and celebrity tourists such as Byron, de Jorio apparently made for a charming and witty cicerone on tours both of the museum and of various archaeological sites. In his writings, de Jorio proved to be a powerful stylist, moving deftly between the scholarly and the touristic. His nineteen publications run the gamut from popular guidebooks to antiquarian monographs, and cover such topics as ancient vases, Cumae, Pozzuoli, Pompeii and its papyri, Christian catacombs, and tomb excavations. On the scholarly end of the spectrum, his 1825 Officina dei Papiri (The laboratory of the papyri), dedicated to the papyrus rolls discovered at Herculaneum, remained a reference work for scholars until the last quarter of the nineteenth century and was reprinted as recently as 1998. De Jorio's writings were distinguished by their casual style and inventiveness. His 1823

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Viaggio di Enea all’Inferno ed agli Elisii secondo Virgilio (whose popularity ensured its translation into English by John Richard Beste as “Aeneas in the Infernal Regions”)40 explores the area surrounding ancient Cumae by seeking out sites mentioned in the sixth book of the Aeneid. The work's uniqueness is in inviting the reader to identify with Aeneas himself, thus setting up a complex fusion of ancient and modern topography—down to de Jorio's use of a translation of Virgil into Neapolitan dialect, which he deemed truer in spirit to the original than an Italian one. This sophisticated interplay between the modern and ancient worlds is also crucial to the book for which de Jorio is best known: La mimica. Here, the contrast between real and ideal, which would also lie at the heart of the new discipline of archaeology, is juxtaposed with the contrast between local and foreign. The flamboyant gestures of Neapolitans were already a well-established theme in foreigners’ descriptions of southern travel, even providing subject matter for the locally produced bambocciate, souvenir paintings of picturesque scenes sold to tourists. But de Jorio's La mimica sought in Neapolitan mannerisms an explanation for images on ancient Greek painted vases. In this book the ancients are thus made flesh and blood; the Neapolitans of yesterday are not so different from those of today, allowing de Jorio to claim for ordinary

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Neapolitans—contrary to foreign prejudices—

an aptitude for “natural philosophy, [a] talent and spirit” worthy of their ancestors.41 Consisting of more than a hundred alphabetically arranged entries, each carefully described and analyzed, de Jorio's La mimica excavates an entire grammar of gestures. The complexity of this system is exemplified by the two gestures for pregnancy: a pregnant woman's condition can be described by a “hand lifting slightly up the skirt in front of the belly”, or, alternatively, by the “arms extended forward, forming a circle, with the fingertips held together in the direction of the belly”.42 These are also cross-referenced with the entry “embrace” (abbracciare), of which “pregnancy” constitutes one of nine meanings including love, friendship, dominance, possession, superiority, and victory. The variations, de Jorio claims, depend on context, proxemics, and changes in the positioning of the hands and arms. (When the

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first gesture for pregnancy is directed toward the belly of a man rather than a woman, for example, it denotes excessive eating or corpulence instead of pregnancy.) Twelve plates of bambocciate accompany the text: these are not, de Jorio specifies, the stereotypical products sold to tourists on the streets of Naples, but real-life representations, whose gestures he analyzes in depth. De Jorio also applies the same meticulous approach to two plates featuring scenes from ancient vases and thereby shows once again his commitment to take seriously the complex mirroring between ancient and modern gestural grammars. The whole of de Jorio's text guides the reader through vividly rendered scenes, serving as a virtual museum of gestural communication. For this reason, the work has enjoyed something of a revival in modern academia: semioticians place de Jorio's La mimica among their founding texts. Meanwhile, his longstanding appeal to students of folklore has recently spilled over to a wider public (making the La mimica the only work considered in the present study that has recently been reviewed in the New York Review of Books).43 La mimica has also been compared to a museum, a move that deserves to be taken seriously if for no other reason than the fact of de Jorio's own employment in the Royal Museum. Indeed, in the very first pages of La mimica, de Jorio recounts that his project took shape as he realized, while guiding ultramontani visitors around the museum, the effectiveness of drawing on modern Neapolitan gestures as attested in everyday street scenes in order to elucidate depictions on ancient vases and Pompeian wall paintings. Semioticians or folklorists usually introduce de Jorio as a minor archaeologist of his time; indeed he does not even figure in standard and more recent histories of archaeology. Yet a compelling argument can still be made that de Jorio was a noteworthy presence at the birth of classical archaeology. While it is safe to say that La mimica had little direct influence on vase studies, Alain Schnapp, building on Francis Haskell's research on de Jorio, has argued that his work prefigured later, more sophisticated approaches to vase painting.44 Certainly, correspondence kept in the archives of the Instituto

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attests to the

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extent of Gerhard's reliance on de Jorio

for his own work on Greek vases. Still there is more to be said about the work of de Jorio's that particularly captured Gerhard's attention, his Metodo per rinvenire e frugare i sepolcri degli antichi, which is in fact as close to a handbook of techniques for archaeological excavation as one can find for the early nineteenth century. Gerhard's German translation of excerpts from the Metodo, published in the journal Kunstblatt in 1826, is in a sense his first publication dedicated purely to practices for the archaeological recovery of the material record as opposed to his catalogues and descriptions of material in existing collections. In fact, a closer look at the Metodo enhances our sense of the world from which the Instituto emerged. Once again, the word archaeology never appears as such, but de Jorio's Metodo will have a familiar sound to modern readers. De Jorio's stated aim was “to reduce the loss of ancient artifacts [monumenti] caused by widespread ignorance about ancient remains.” Most people fail to realize, he writes, that common-looking objects, such as vases and metal figurines, may be much more valuable than gold. Since “even wellintentioned people who set off looking for ancient artifacts fail to find any, or worse, even destroy them in their attempts, because they are ignorant of the principles of research,” de Jorio offers a practical guide to how to recognize tombs in the soil, how to identify them (according to Greek and Roman types), and how to retrieve the objects without damaging them.45 De Jorio's emphasis on the “practical” and his use of scientific language should not prevent us from noticing how literary and ironic his style often was. Of his book's usefulness, for example, he writes that “even the farmers will benefit from such knowledge. Instead of resenting the presence of ancient constructions in their fields, they would be able to search them properly, and double their profit, by selling their findings while at the same time having hoed their land.”46 In addition to the ironic suggestion about tilling (which turns on its head the bucolic trope of archaeological discovery, as deployed for example in Mazzocchi), this comment begs the question of

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readership. Farmers were generally illiterate, but they were common staples in de Jorio's narrative, effectively portrayed as rustic “discoverers” of tombs who, in his accounts, embody a certain spontaneity, in sharp contrast to the planned tomb openings conducted in front of, and usually in honor of, visiting royals (as had happened with many tombs in the burial ground of Santa Teresa). It was a farmer, for example, who had come upon the painted tomb in Cumae that inspired de Jorio's Scheletri Cumani: he had, “while leading his animals to pasture, smashed an ancient vault and penetrated the tomb with a leg.”47 The last lines of the Metodo instead leave us with the image of the entourage of the crown prince of Denmark, in 1821, entering a Cuman tomb opened just for them, in which they find the usual three beds with skeletons on them, but also numerous vases, some filled with “water pure and drinkable,” which “they were tempted to drink and in fact did.”48 (p.151)

For all of de Jorio's suggestive stylistic playfulness, his

writings also lay out, for the first time in print, instructions for a systematic “survey method,” clearly built upon years of observation and experience. Given de Jorio's interest in language, it comes as little surprise that his method involved a system of signs to be detected in the landscape itself (which, again, sounds eerily modern, in terms of recent archaeological theory).49 In the chapter entitled “Signs of the Presence of Sepulchers,” de Jorio explains how clues can be read in the soil and how one learns to recognize these signs through practice. In his own words: “Once one knows with some precision the location where a Greek city stood in antiquity, in order to find its cemetery, one should turn towards the north, and, walking the countryside, be it flat land or hilly, one comes across the most certain signs above the surface of the soil.”50 Regularly cut blocks of limestone, for example, whether in one piece or fragmented, should prompt one to search the surrounding area. Fragments of Greek vases are also “speaking signs,” likely to reveal a nearby burial ground. Their fragmentation is due to the farmers’ hoeing, writes de Jorio, but practical experience teaches one not to despair of finding other vases still intact: “One of the finest vases of all was found many years ago in Basilicata, in one piece at the feet of

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a skeleton, while the whole cover of the tomb had been destroyed to build a wall for a pig-fence.”51 Irregularities of the soil are yet another meaningful indicator: noticing a hollow in a plain, for example, an investigator should ask the resident farmer if a tree has recently been uprooted there; if the answer is no, most likely tomb blocks were removed. The record of tombs discovered in the past is also significant: one should always ask the farmers, especially older ones, if they have ever found any ancient tombs on their land.52 Finally, heavy rains or flooding can bring to the surface telling fragments of vases, plaster, and of regularly cut blocks, leads which should be followed to the water's source. Other kinds of signs lurk beneath the soil's surface as well. For example, it is always advisable to collect information about the quality of the soil, whether it is Cretaceous, lapillaceus, or simple earth. Any exotic matter discovered in the soil is significant and may reveal the presence of a man-made construction. One should also establish how deep the roots of trees stretch, and where the virgin soil begins—it is pointless to excavate further—but this rule does not hold for areas which lie at the bottom of hills or mountains. Here subsequent deposits of soil, flowing down from the heights, might have covered up lower strata, layering virgin soil lower on top of human structures. A change of tone comes with de Jorio's attempt to construct a typology of burials found in South Italy. For this broad and theoretical account, he relies necessarily on information conveyed to him by others in the kingdom, residents of Puglia, Calabria, or Basilicata, even at times by foreign travelers. Moreover, areas where he had firsthand experience, largely in the vicinity of Naples, inspired inventiveness on de Jorio's part, but there is something about the topic—de Jorio works to claim that the shapes of tombs varied by nation in

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antiquity—that conflicts with his more playful tendencies. He strikes as serious a tone as his contemporaries when discussing the various identities of ancient peoples (and modern ones), and he too seems particularly interested in pursuing Greek material. He distinguishes between burials of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, “mixed” Greco-Roman, late antique (bassi tempi), and Christian types. The first of these de Jorio presents as a tentative proof of Egyptian influence on

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South Italy, at some remote point in history—his evidence consisting of a tomb from Cumae which to him resembles an Egyptian hypogeum. This comment attests to a continuity with some of the eighteenth-century models of European origins we have seen, but the author's interest lies decidedly with Greek tombs, for they yield up Greek vases. The “Greek” type is divided by de Jorio into five subtypes. The first consists of tombs cut into natural limestone, primarily found in Basilicata and containing Greek vases of excellent manufacture. The second, the most common type in Magna Graecia, is tombs built in stone: either a perfectly rectangular chamber, or one with a triangular roof. De Jorio offers a detailed description of how many blocks of stone might be used and how they are joined, explaining the occasional presence of columns to support the roof and the different external coverings used (stones thrown at random, or else splintered and fragmented stones, or simply earth mixed with potsherds). The third type of Greek tomb was built with bricks: in fact, the discovery of brick tombs containing Greek vases had disproven de Jorio's earlier hypothesis that the Greeks never made use of bricks. The brick tombs uncovered in Cumae, de Jorio explains, are of late Greek origin, for they were found on the same level as Roman brick tombs, and above a limestone Greek tomb identified later on, during deeper excavations. The fourth burial type made use of simple earth, while the fifth type involved deposition in cinerary urns —de Jorio describes the type of vases used, and how they are to be found in the soil. The discrete categories drawn up by de Jorio for his hypothesis about ancient populations—of which I have enumerated only the Greek types—are in one particular case troubled by his own evidence. He notes that in Cumae some sepulchers are of a “mixed” type. He reminds the reader that in 1810 in Scheletri Cumani he had “called these sepulchres Cumaean-Greek,” but “long experience and assiduousness in researching this territory made me change my mind.”53 What he earlier considered to be particular to the Greeks of Cumae, he now concludes was the result of the commingling of the customs of two nations, the Greek and the Roman, and thus he resolves to call those tombs Greco-Roman. The tombs, he

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explained, display a mixture of structural elements: the walls of the chambers were constructed of limestone blocks without cement, in the Greek manner, and the quality, quantity, and disposition of the objects found within echo the Greek tradition, but there are also numerous Roman features, such as the two signature types of brickwork, opus latericium and reticulatum (brickwork and reticulated brickwork). De Jorio ventures a

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historical interpretation to explain this

peculiarity of the Cuman burial grounds: he hypothesizes that the political outlook of the Romans in Cumae led them to embrace Greek burial practices without completely abandoning their own. De Jorio's typological approach, then, centers on the identification of discrete “ancient nations.” His embryonic use of stratigraphy aims at differentiating among “peoples”: for instance, he argued that Greek tombs should typically be found at deeper levels than Roman ones. As at Cumae, a mixture of structural characteristics is to be understood in terms of a fusion involving the customs of two nations, explained by reference to historico-political motives. Paradoxically, this framework, in which the material remains of the Greek “nation” are valued above all others, leaves Greek identity seeming the most indistinct of all. The ultimate proof of a given tomb's “Greekness” is the presence of Greek vases. Thus to de Jorio, the most impressive Greek tombs are what we now know to have been Daunian and Peucetian hypogea of the fourth century BCE. As we shall see, this confusion about the provenance and chronology of figurepainted vases from South Italy, which de Jorio shared with most of his contemporaries, resulted in a highly indeterminate conceptualization of Magna Graecia. The category “Greek” in de Jorio is not qualitatively or historically opposed to mainland Greece, or to the native settlements of South Italy, which themselves also end up included under a “Greek” rubric. This representation of Magna Graecia appears in the work of many of de Jorio's contemporaries, including Gerhard, who eagerly learned from de Jorio and translated his instructions for the identification and typology of ancient tombs in South Italy. However, the continued pursuit of that “daring task” (de Luynes's expression)54—identifying the peoples and periods to Page 25 of 80

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which material remains, such as painted vases, belong— would, in the course of the nineteenth century, produce a very different model for understanding the Greeks of South Italy— with “Italo-Greek” becoming distinct from, and subordinated to, “Greek.” Gerhard's engagement with de Jorio's Metodo also adumbrates another evolving dynamic of the region's marginalization. The German scholar not only translated parts of the Metodo but included with their publication in Kunstblatt a great deal of praise for de Jorio's methods and the importance of his work; the notes he adds to the text, moreover, reveal that an exchange of letters between author and translator had taken place. Yet by highlighting “the compendious and practical, rather than historical character”55 of de Jorio's treatment of the ancient burials, Gerhard also puts some distance between himself and the Neapolitan scholar. This distancing from local scholars—a move that would only grow more common with subsequent definitions of the archaeological enterprise as elaborated by Gerhard— needs to be explored further, as it provides one of the keys to understanding the emergence of modern archaeology and the resulting marginalization of Italian scholarship. (p.154)

The Instituto's Archaeology

De Jorio's work was not the only vehicle through which Naples shaped Gerhard's ideas. In Kunstblatt the German scholar also expressed his enthusiasm for the discovery of ancient vases in the region and for the large number of painted vases that could be found among dealers in the city. “In Naples,” he wrote, “hardly even a month can pass without someone bringing to the fore important ancient monumenti.”56 The idea of archaeological exploration as continually adding to the body of ancient remains lies behind the conception of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica. For Gerhard's Roman Hyperboreans, antiquity in Italy was brought to life and constantly renewed by these additions; archaeology was modern precisely because of this continuous progress in knowledge. Gerhard furthered this idea of progress by conceiving the Instituto together with its publications—the biweekly Bullettino for brief but timely reports, and the Annali and Monumenti for yearly in-depth studies—as a “living encyclopedia of archaeology,” as Schnapp puts it.57

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In 1860, explaining Gerhard's achievement to a French readership, Ernst Vinet compared the German scholar's approach to that of Visconti in order to show how the former had succeeded in combining Italian practice and German science.58 This assessment—formulated toward the end of Gerhard's career, when he had already been working for decades to establish classical archaeology as an academic discipline—masks a deeper disarray in the neatness of its formulation. The Italian side, however necessary, appears as the passive element of the dyad—whether Italy is seen simply as the provider of materials, or its scholars, such as de Jorio, valued for their practical know-how rather than their robust historical understanding. It is precisely the lack of a distinct archaeological practice and method (what de Jorio was intent on crystallizing) that recent interpreters consider to be a major limitation of Gerhard's revolution. This view has so far been advanced mainly on the basis of Gerhard's “Archaeological Theses,” but the lack existed from the very period of the Instituto's founding and shaping. The drawing by de Luynes that served as the title page for early volumes of the Instituto's Annali is telling (figure 3.2). One debate running through the first year of the Instituto's publications centered on a piece in the Louvre. On the basis of iconography on a newly discovered Vulci vase, Panofka argued that the Louvre bas-relief depicted the birth of Ericthonius— where the earth mother Gaia lifts the newborn upward, handing him to Athena.59 Panofka's interpretation pointedly corrected an earlier one put forth by Ennio Quirino Visconti, and others soon joined in the effort to establish an authoritative new reading. One of the participants in this debate was the duc de Luynes, the Frenchman whom Panokfa had befriended in Naples and a crucial figure, as we shall see, in the scholarship on Magna Graecia in the early 1830s.60 It was for de Luynes to adapt the iconography of the bas-relief to symbolize the whole new enterprise of

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archaeological research, and thereby to produce an Figure 3.2. Title page of the 1832 Annali image that dell’Instituto, by the duc de Luynes. must have (Reprinted from Annali dell’Instituto, vol. resonated in 4 [Paris: Renouard, 1832].) the Instituto community, with its playful contrast between ancient and modern and its fashionable rendering of Athena's silhouette. This episode reminds us of the difficulty—in an age before photographic reproduction—of identifying images, and indeed the usefulness of the Instituto's publications for precisely such a purpose. Yet de Luynes's vignette is at the same time also revealing of the shape the new classical archaeology was to take. It depicts a mythological allegory for the new archaeology with Hephaestus the workman receiving the baby vase and Athena far removed from the child's birth—she stands as the modern archaeologist, imagined as taking notes and set apart from the dirt and the digging. An archaeology based on the model of philology is the dominant message of this scene, with objects seeming to spring magically from the soil, severed from their context.

Well before the 1850 “Archaeological Theses,” Gerhard had begun to address the shape that archaeology should take in the editorials he wrote for the initial issues of the two major Instituto publications: the Annali and the Bullettino. In these writings we can clearly see the influence of Neapolitan institutions, with their capillary networks of intendenti reporting discoveries back to scholars based in the capital. But just as evident is the way in which Gerhard, while envisioning a virtual network that could transcend national and regional differences, reinstated those very differences, while reserving a peculiar place for the Italian scholarly tradition. As a point of departure, Gerhard stated his view that archaeology is profoundly different from the study of ancient literature. While scholars of literature can make satisfactory progress with a good library, archaeology depends on the cooperation of more than one individual, both because of the varied provenance and nature of its materials and because of different methods of reasoning about them. Thus the Instituto had taken on a broader scope of activity than the academies established in

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the previous century—for instance, the Academy of Cortona, the Accademia Ercolanense in Naples, and the Pontificia in Rome. Moreover, the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica aimed to transcend regional boundaries and limitations by collecting, and promptly publishing, the notices of new discoveries of classical remains—wherever they might take place, in all the lands of classical antiquity, however remote. Gerhard argued that this sort of enterprise could never depend on a single individual, who would inevitably be limited to the boundaries of his own country and tend to privilege his own specialty within the field of art and archaeology. (In this context, Gerhard made explicit reference to the art journal Kunstblatt, edited single-handedly by the historian Ludwig Schorn in Munich from 1816 to 1849, the venue in which Gerhard had published his articles about Naples and his translation of de Jorio's Metodo.)61 Nothing short of an international approach would suffice. To this end, the Instituto established different sections in the major cities of different countries: in Rome, Naples, Bologna,

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Turin, Paris,

Berlin, and London. Secretaries of these sections had the task of organizing the information they received from correspondents, with the goal of gathering and presenting the material in a critical manner for the publications of the Instituto. French, Latin, and Italian were the languages deemed acceptable for publication to ensure circulation across national frontiers. All sorts of people from across a broad social and cultural spectrum affiliated themselves with the Instituto—including political figures, scholars, and artists (such as the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres). A number of different membership categories existed that required varying levels of support for the Instituto's work; in financial terms, the Instituto aimed to achieve self-sufficiency through the sale of its publications. Full members were obliged to contribute to the publications and to purchase them.62 The corresponding fellows (soci corrispondenti) were responsible only for contributing written communications; for example, Emile Wolff and Andrea Lombardi, whom we shall meet later, were in this category. Associated fellows (soci associati) were

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required only to buy the publications: most of the royal families of Europe were to be found at this level. This broadbased membership reflected Gerhard's success in satisfying diverse constituencies and achieving the international scope he had envisioned for the Instituto: Karl Stark aptly defined it as a “portofranco archeologico internazionale,” an international, archaeological free-trade zone.63 The subject matter of the publications of the Instituto centered on Greek and Italian antiquities.64 Greece, however, for all its elusiveness, retained pride of place: writing during the Greek War of Independence, Gerhard expressed regret that “the mother of beautiful arts will furnish for the time being only a few notices on antiquities despite our efforts.”65 On the other hand, he stressed the wide geographical span of the reports addressed to the Instituto, ranging from Italy—the single largest source of such notices—to southern France, northern Britain, parts of Germany, and even Russia. The subject matter was organized under the headings “excavations,” “monuments,” “travels,” “bibliography” (books received by the Instituto), “literature” (reviews of books), and “museography” (reviews of museums). Material culture still goes by the name “monumenti,” but this heading was expanded to include excavation reports and topographical essays in addition to listing of ancient buildings and objects. The topographical essays comprised historical and philological observations on classical lands: sites or regions are described and the relevant information is collected from the classical sources. The “letteratura archeologica” included reviews of books that illustrated monuments and discussed the history of art, as well as books situated in fields closely connected to the new archaeology, such as studies of private life in antiquity or ancient religious beliefs. Explaining the nature of the “letteratura archeologica,” Gerhard comments on the different traditions of scholarship that had developed in the countries participating in the Instituto. Not only had Italy, France, England,

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and

Germany each contributed a distinctive heritage of classical remains, they had also developed different scholarly tools with which to pursue the study of classical antiquity. The material side of archaeology, Gerhard writes, had been explored

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primarily by Italian, French, and English scholars. The Germans, for their part, had directed their efforts to those branches of antiquity in which they could advance the understanding of art. Especially important in this regard was a detailed understanding of private life in antiquity, and of the deities, the rituals, and religious ideas of different epochs of the pagan era. On the one hand, he argues, students of antiquity cannot claim to know the archaeological materials if they are ignorant of the Italian monuments. On the other hand, true understanding of the monuments would escape the Italians if they did not keep up with the scientific advances of the nineteenth century. It was precisely the task of the Instituto, by publishing reports of all the main German publications as well as accurate summaries of the most interesting archaeological treatises, to enable the international scholarly community to access this work easily— a need that, he claimed, was deeply felt by Italian scholars.66 In Gerhard's characterization of the diverse strands of Western European scholarship, the limits of the Instituto's internationalism and the seeds of nationalist tensions can be glimpsed. Gerhard's program was extremely successful at defining archaeology as a discipline within German Altertumswissenschaft, which through its institutionalization became a clearly identifiable model for other European countries, one in relation to which they would position themselves. The publications of the Instituto were one of the major vehicles for the diffusion of this new disciplinary approach. They also reveal, however, that this process had a more contested history than is usually assumed, with the Bullettino and the Annali becoming at times battlefields for different views and theories, some of which had a distinctly national character. It is in this emerging disciplinary context that we should place the archaeological writings on Magna Graecia that, in the early nineteenth century, began to take the place of travelers’ journals.

Magna Graecia and the New Archaeology What was the aftermath of the late eighteenth-century deluge of publications inspired by Paestum, and the contemporaneous narratives of disappointment that travelers to Magna Graecia

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produced? What was written about Greek South Italy in the early nineteenth century, at a time when classical archaeology was being shaped as an academic discipline with ancient Greece as its primary focus? What was the impact of the new archaeological finds in Greece as travel there expanded? Although material from South Italy was deeply involved in the process of defining archaeology as a discipline, an emphasis on Greek origins

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and on the inherent characters of

nationalities would ultimately push Magna Graecia back to the margins—in this case, of a new Greece. The first nineteenth-century publication about the region, the 1807 Antiquities of Magna Graecia by William Wilkins (1778– 1839), already speaks to the new centrality of mainland Greece, in that the work was modeled on Stuart and Revett's volumes about Athens. For all the relative novelty of this approach, Wilkins's Magna Graecia nonetheless remained a familiar scene, and the book is remarkable primarily for its elisions and omissions. Soon afterward, much-publicized discoveries in mainland Greece inspired the young duc de Luynes to explore South Italy with a fresh perspective. The duke originally met Gerhard in Naples, precisely as the former was making his first journey south in 1825; by the time he returned from his second visit in 1828, the Instituto—of which he would become a crucial, lifelong member—was on the verge of being inaugurated. The most substantial result of de Luynes's voyages was a grand folio on Metaponto, published in 1833. While this book added considerably to the existing body of knowledge on Magna Graecia, even here the image of a desolate region persisted. Although de Luynes turned this sense of desolation into a call for further excavations, which might identify more monumental remains, such projects would not come to pass for many more decades. What happened instead is that the Instituto's focus on ancient painted vases in Greece would come to invest South Italy, which had been for decades a primary source for this material, with a particular prominence. An important debate would ensue over the vases’ provenance: had they been made in South Italy, or were they exports from mainland Greece that happened to be excavated in South Italy? This controversy put on display the full powers of the Instituto's new network, with its ability to share and

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shape both information and knowledge. Yet the debate's conclusion—that the provenance of many of the vases excavated in South Italy had to be traced back to the Greek mainland—served to relegate Magna Graecia to a secondary role, as merely an importer rather a center of artistic production. The new archaeology that owed so much to Greek South Italy's materials and scholarship was marginalizing the region in yet another way. Searching  for Magna Graecia's Monumental Remains

Already in Wilkins's Antiquities of Magna Graecia, mainland Greece had become an overshadowing presence, taking on a numinous authority that inevitably colored the treatment of Greek South Italy. This was the first publication authored by Wilkins, a scholar-architect who would go on to design some of the most beloved examples of Greek Revival architecture in Britain, including the National Gallery, University College London, and the screen wall of King's College in Cambridge.67 Indeed, it was during the composition of his first book, while in Cambridge, that Wilkins landed the commission to

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design Downing College, one of the purest examples of modern Doric. He had himself attended Cambridge as a student (1796–1800), entering into a philhellenic culture that included the likes of Edward Dodwell (1767–1832)and William Gell (1777–1836).68 These were men who devoted themselves to travel and study in Greece, who never made it back to England and ended up in Rome. There they worked on publications of their travels and participated in those circles of “lovers of antiquity” of which the Instituto emerged—indeed both Gell and Dodwell became inaugural “membri ordinari” of the Instituto. Wilkins was of far more modest social origins than these two; the son of an ambitious craftsman, his attending Cambridge was in itself a conspicuous achievement, and his career as an architect completed the social advancement his father had envisioned for him. It was thanks to a Travelling Bachelorship awarded by Cambridge that he was able to visit the classical lands of the Mediterranean, a trip that cemented his professional career—it was from this period that Wilkins's contribution on Magna Graecia originated.

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The Cambridge fellowship allowed Wilkins to travel to Naples, Paestum, Sicily, Greece, and Asia Minor in 1801; he kept a diary and was required to update the university chancellor each month. For a young British traveler, with aspirations in the architectural profession, Athens—the climax of his Mediterranean voyage—was at once alluring and problematic. Like others of his generation, Wilkins followed a long tradition in feeling the need to confront his own belated arrival. What could one add, Wilkins and his contemporaries wondered, to the achievement of Stuart and Revett, the “great precision and accuracy” of whose work Wilkins would later praise to the Select Committee on the Elgin Marbles? Encountering Stuart and Revett's drawings in the presence of the Athenian originals, Wilkins was “amazingly struck” by them, especially by comparison with what he dismissed as “some drawings of [his] own.”69 Others would turn their attention to new explorations: Dodwell and Gell, for example, devoted themselves to Greek topography and pre-classical monuments, while another Cambridge man, C. R. Cockrell, involved himself (in an international group that also included Baron Stackelberg) in the momentous uncovering of the sculptures in Aegina (1811) and Bassae (1812). Wilkins, by contrast, determined to make his mark by emulating Stuart and Revett's achievement for the Greek monuments in South Italy. The resulting Antiquities of Magna Graecia—a beautifully illustrated folio, rich in architectural drawings, both plans and elevations—became the stepping-stone for an extraordinarily successful career. For precision and accuracy, moreover, this work superseded all earlier ones on Paestum. Yet despite its title, the book consisted primarily of chapters on Sicilian sites (Selinus, Agrigentum, Syracuse, and Segesta); the only site he described on the Italian peninsula was Paestum, the farthest point south to which Wilkins ventured. Once again, Magna Graecia was by and large left as a dark spot on the map. (p.161)

Yet the success of Wilkins's contemporaries in making

new discoveries on the Greek mainland would in fact provoke renewed exploration of Magna Graecia. The findings at Aegina and Bassae had a tremendous impact.70 The recounting of them added yet more drama: the adventure did not stop at the treasure hunt, but included tense dealings with the Turks in a

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time of impending war, and suspense concerning the final destination of the uncovered sculptures. While the discoveries resulted from cooperating international expeditions—Danes, Germans, and Britons were present at both sites—a series of auctions determined the fate of the sculpted marbles. The bidding wars among the representatives of the various emerging national museums were fevered—French, British, Prussian, and other national interests were felt to be at stake. Some began to wonder whether such exciting discoveries could perhaps take place in South Italy as well, especially given its relative safety, while the War of Independence raged on the Greek mainland. Then in 1823, two young Englishmen, Samuel Angell (1800– 1866) and William Harris (?-1823), succeeded at Selinus.71 Thanks to the hospitality of a local farmer, the two were able to perform an extensive examination of the site at their leisure, and were rewarded with the discovery of Selinus's archaic metopes from temples F and C. This wonderful find did not end up with the auctioneers, however, for Angell and Harris, who continued excavation even when asked to stop by the local mayor, were caught while attempting to return to England with the metopes, in contravention of local laws (in fact, it was this episode that led to the institution of a local commissione di antichità e belle arti in 1827).72 In the end, the two Englishmen were only permitted to make a cast to take home, while the originals were sent to the museum that was at the time being formed in Palermo (and in this city's Museo Archeologico one can still admire them today). Angell and Harris were nevertheless able to make their mark by speedily publishing their discoveries in an imposing folio volume, published in 1826, Sculptured Metopes Discovered amongst the Ruins of the Temples of the Ancient City of Selinus in Sicily by William Harris and Samuel Angell in the Year 1823— this seems to have provided the immediate inspiration that prompted the duc de Luynes to venture to South Italy in search of monumental remains.73 When he set out, the duke was only twenty-three years old, but he had been formed by a military education, a traditional Grand Tour, and a marriage cut tragically short, leaving him a widower.74 It was at this juncture in his life that the duke

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undertook a fundamental change of vocation, from military nobleman to scholar-aristocrat—a shift that he embraced while having at his disposal an immense capital to sustain his interests. Given his lack of background in architecture, de Luynes sponsored the young architect Joseph-Frédéric Debacq (1800–1892) to accompany him to South Italy. The move would become typical of de Luynes, who turned into a major scholarly figure, yet always carefully balanced the roles of scholar and sponsor. Throughout his life he preferred to (p.162)

sponsor institutions rather than to enmesh himself in

them. The Instituto's relatively loose organization and its cosmopolitan outlook well suited him (and he repeatedly played the role of the crucial life-saving benefactor during the Instituto's difficult financial times); but when he was appointed to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lêttres, he refused to take part actively, asserting that it was the preserve of scholars. The duke, who kept a diary entitled Les devoirs des riches (The duties of the wealthy), maintained the active political life granted to him by his class status. He consistently promoted social work and political causes, and serving as a patron to the enterprises of various scholarly and artistic projects was to him, it almost seems, a natural extension of his socio-political commitment. He used his money inventively, deliberately promoting the advancement of knowledge, by setting up a prize for new photographic techniques, for example. In a time of institution building, he acted on his own: at his country residence, the Château de Dampierre, he built up both a collection worthy of the new museums (and indeed donated the collection to the French state at the end of his life) and a research laboratory, where he investigated ancient metal and clay production, with a practical eye to designing affordable kitchenware for everyday use. The independence he jealously defended, together with his personal resources, allowed him to intervene in ways unavailable to most other scholars; for example, he financed papal troops in the battle for Rome in 1860. Yet this political position did not stop him from supporting the work of Michele Amari (1806–1889), a freethinker living as an exile in Paris because of his pro-Italian unification views. Amari was the “great Sicilian” who first

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came to terms with what was technically the most difficult and ideologically the most disturbing period of Sicilian history: Muslim rule.75 Indeed, later in life, de Luynes's interests expanded as far as the Dead Sea and Petra, and personal curiosity led him to study oriental languages and travel to these Levantine sites—yet it was the first voyage to South Italy that provided a focus for his lifelong dedication to antiquity. His deep, continuing links to the area were evident in his vase collection, in the scholars he patronized, in his ties to Gerhard and the Instituto, and also in his sustained interest in the region's medieval history. Ultimately, however, Magna Graecia proved elusive even for de Luynes, with his incessant initiative and extensive resources. His projected book on Magna Graecia remained only a desideratum. Out of his travels came three notices in the Instituto's Bullettino (on Locris, Pandosia, and Velia), but only one folio, coauthored with Debacq, focused on the single site of Metaponto. This splendid work was nevertheless slighter than what the duke had envisioned. And, for all its impressive novelty, it still expresses some of the imaginary desolate abandonment long associated with Magna Graecia. The 1825 survey of various sites in Magna Graecia had encouraged de Luynes and Debacq to return to Metaponto, and it was here, in 1828, that they undertook an excavation. The abundance of fragmented archaeological remains

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led them to excavate precisely where the Temple of Apollo once stood; their findings established the location of the site as we know it today. They began in earnest, with the willing assistance of the local landowner, until waters from a nearby riverbed, driven by a recent flood, infiltrated the soil and filled their trenches. Before de Luynes and Debacq had reached the bases of the temple's columns, they were forced to halt their research. Their hopes dashed, the excavators were thus limited to measuring, copying, and extracting only the “debris” that remained above the level of the river. Despite this inauspicious beginning, de Luynes succeeded in putting out his beautiful grand folio dedicated to Metaponto. As he had also done for Locris, he was responsible for the first accurate topographical map of the area. He also included a

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richer history of Metaponto than had ever before been produced, as well as information on the city's coins. Most of the volume, and its beautiful plates, was taken up with architectural studies of the ancient Temple of Apollo. De Luynes explained that the fragmentary nature of the evidence prevented him and Debacq from attempting a full restoration of what the temple had looked like in antiquity. They believed it to have been, though, of the same Doric type as that found at Paestum, but with smaller proportions; on this basis, they offered in their plates a reconstruction of parts of the Metaponto temple, especially the decorative sections, and did not hesitate to judge these fragments to be of the most beautiful execution and style. There is one plate in de Luynes's folio volume that depicts the remains of a standing temple—not that of Apollo, but the one surviving temple of Metaponto, the so called Tavole Palatine (but de Luynes's caption reads Tavola dei Paladini), which had been known, as we have seen, to travelers and locals alike for centuries (see figure 3.3). De Luynes did not produce new studies of this temple, but included the plate, he explained, on account of the precision of the image, in contrast to the one published by Saint-Non, the only one available at the time. According to de Luynes, Saint-Non had entirely destroyed the character of the place by adding great trees, vegetation overgrowing the columns, and various human figures. The more purely architectural view was what de Luynes set out to restore by publishing his new image. The work of de Luynes and Debacq has been most often cited for its compelling contribution to the debate on polychrome architecture that was then raging.76 In contrast to the white marbles described by Winckelmann, the excavation at Aegina had raised the possibility that parts of the Greek temples had been painted. Stuart and Revett had already noted traces of coloring on the Parthenon, but it was the emergence during excavations of unmistakably colored architectural elements that made the issue a pressing one. The debate found a ready audience, as polychromy came to symbolize the challenge posed by a new generation of architects to the aesthetic tenets of neo-classicism. A leitmotiv of early nineteenth-century excavations, from Aegina to Selinus, the polychromy

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controversy was made all the more frustrating and irresolvable (p.165)

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by the

elusive quality of its evidence: the color on the marbles Figure 3.3. Ruins of the Tavole Palatine, evaporated as the Temple of Hera, at Metaponto. Plate soon as it was 3 in the duc de Luynes and F.-J. Debacq, exposed to Métaponte, Paris 1833. (Research open air. Many Library, Getty Research Institute, Los architects Angeles [88-B3580].) wrote on the topic—most famously Jaques Ignace Hittorf (1792–1867), whose lecture at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1830 (“De l’architecture polychrôme chex les Grecs, ou restitution complete du temple d’Empédoclés, dans l’acropolis de Selinunte”) was swiftly published in the Annali of the Instituto, and Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) in an 1834 pamphlet (Vorläfige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten [Preliminary remarks on polychrome architecture and sculpture in antiquity]). However, the plates published by de Luynes on the remains of Metaponto had the biggest visual impact by representing the polychrome style with particular force and giving it the dignity of folio treatment for the first time (see figure 3.4).

De Luynes's volume also provided a more vivid image of ancient Metaponto than had existed previously. Yet, what is most striking today in this book is its precarious balance of promise and desolation. The duke held out hope that more excavations would follow his own—he expected in fact his work to be an inspiration for others to do just that. Further excavations would not take place for several decades—not until after Italy's unification—leaving de Luynes's enterprise as the mere memory of a partially failed expedition in a desolate land. The flooding that interrupted de Luynes's excavations, all the more so as it remained the final act on Metaponto's excavations for years to come, could not but conjure up images of an overpowering and destructive nature long associated with Magna Graecia. A persistent sense of distance characterizes de Luynes's folio. This is the case even with his new image of the Tavole Palatine, at once more Page 39 of 80

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precise in its rendering and also more haunting and nostalgic, as the picturesque visual language of Saint-Non gives way to shades of Romanticism. Portraying a skeletal temple under a sky shaded by clouds, with only an isolated human figure included for scale, de Luynes's image finally summoned la sentiment de ruines with a profundity unknown to Saint-Non. Surveying the Vases and Tombs of Magna Graecia

The tension between promise and abandonment exemplified in de Luynes's volume also characterized other writings on Magna Graecia produced around the time of the Instituto's founding. In the second year of its publication, the Bullettino carried an essay by a South Italian scholar, Andrea Lombardi (1785–1849), about the ancient remains of Basilicata, which also held out the hope of future discoveries awaiting a bold new era of archaeological work. Gerhard himself, both before and after de Luynes's expedition, repeatedly expressed his hopes for further discoveries in Magna Graecia. After all, he was coming to see ancient painted vases, of which there seemed to be no shortage in South Italy, as more and more crucial to the new archaeology. Gerhard had launched the first issue of the Bullettino by reporting a major coup—the discovery at Vulci of (p.167)

(p.166)

more

than three thousand vases during a single excavation— and he eagerly described vases from South Italy in two articles written for the new periodical during its first year of publication.

Figure 3.4. Fragments of temple decoration from Metaponto. Note that the lion figure and decorative motifs are brightly colored: the tongue red, the mane yellow, the nose and lips pink, and the repeating motifs alternating red and black. Plate 7 in the duc de Luynes and F.-J. Debacq, Métaponte, 1833. (Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles [88-B3580].)

As we shall see, Magna Graecia's perceived importance would, yet again, prove short-lived; a

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look at Lombardi's article can add texture to our understanding of this brief moment of renewed promise for the region, while at the same time revealing how differently such promise could be expressed in the writing of a local scholar. Based in Potenza, Lombardi was a consigliere d’intendenza (an office instituted during the French regime and maintained by the Bourbons after the restoration)—one of twenty council members tasked with advising on the civil and financial administration and the regulation of public order in Basilicata. He must have been keen on antiquities, for he also served as “intendente” for Avellino—another example of Gerhard's enlisting previous Neapolitan networks as soci corrispondenti for the Instituto. Lombardi has been mostly remembered for his later, more extended work on the preRoman past of Basilicata, in the tradition of the Italic model initiated by Vico.77 But his local background and in-depth knowledge of the region emerge powerfully in his first article produced for Gerhard's Bullettino, a review essay he wrote on ancient sites spread across a large swath of Greek South Italy. Titled “Saggio degli antichi avanzi della Basilicata” (Essay on the ancient remains of Basilicata), the article combined information from ancient sources and modern excavations. As a native of this region, which he proudly termed “almost the center of the Neapolitan Kingdom,” Lombardi adopted an approach that was fundamentally different from foreign authors such as de Luynes.78 Instead of fixing his attention on individual Greek sites, Lombardi took an integrated approach, revealing the local texture of archaeological knowledge. While unabashedly acknowledging the splendor of the region's Greek past, he took all extant remains into account—including those from sites of Italic settlement and those from the Roman period. This focus on specific local contexts is also manifest in how Lombardi recounted anecdotes of discovery—for him, objects did not just magically appear, but were embedded in individual stories of excavation. His account gives pride of place to “the most splendid cities of Metaponto and Heraclaea, not the least ornaments of Magna Graecia.” Once again, though, the Greek cities are most remarkable for how little remains of them. Of Metaponto, he describes the fifteen standing columns of the Tavole Palatine

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as “fluted, much mistreated by time, crumbling, and aligned in two rows”; in recent excavations, he adds,“clay lions’ heads” were found, among other remains.79 This, of course, was de Luynes's enterprise, but Lombardi instead locates it by reference to the local landowner, Egidio Assetta, who had remained unnamed in the Frenchman's account. Of Heraclaea, Lombardi writes that “no monuments survive,” describing the land as frugata e rifrugata (searched over and over again), yielding up in the end only fragments of sculpted marbles, some column drums, bricks, and a few Italo-Greek vases.80 A little inland from

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there, where Pandosia, so famous in

antiquity, once stood, repeated excavations had all proved unfruitful. On the coast three miles from Heraclaea, at the site of ancient Siris, we are told again that “no vestige remains”; the only find reported to date had come to light a few years earlier, when “a farmer discovered two beautiful lead foils inscribed with many Greek letters, but the person who obtained them decided to melt them down to make bullets for a gun firearm.”81 Lombardi has comparatively more to relate concerning Roman sites. Of Venosa, few monuments survive to indicate its ancient greatness, but ancient marble inscriptions, incorporated as spolia into the town's modern buildings, serve as persistent reminders of the past. Excavations in the surrounding territory had revealed only scattered inscriptions, small figurines, cameos, coins, and a few vases in clay, “coarse and insignificant.”82 In Potentia there remained walls, aqueducts, inscriptions, coins (mostly Roman), and a few fine Italo-Greek vases. Grumentum offered the most impressive remains, with the ruins of the amphitheatre still standing, as well as the theater, the baths, and a number of private and public buildings.83 In addition to describing these sites, whose reputed ancient grandeur did not seem to be matched by modern finds, what most baffled Lombardi, and figured prominently in his account, was the ubiquity of ancient wrecks and remains. Some of these places had come down as unremarkable in antiquity and were nearly bereft of inscriptions and ruins, though they had yielded vast treasures of Italo-Greek vases.

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Excavation in the vicinity of Anzi, for example, had produced more vases than anywhere else in the preceding fifteen years.84 Lombardi writes that “the most skilled excavators and restorers of vases come from Anzi, and all the excavations in the province are directed by Anzesi [citizens of Anzi]. This classical land has enriched with so-called Etruscan vases the museums of both the capital [Naples] and of foreign nations.”85 He goes on to remark that one can only imagine the ancient towns that must have existed on the sites of Anzi and Armento, which produced the golden garland,86 not to mention in many other areas where ancient, precious objects were found in such great quantities. In some ways, the gulf between past and present, as recorded by Lombardi, is reminiscent of Alberti's comments on the disconnect between the ancient and modern towns of South Italy. For Lombardi, however, the new enterprise of archaeology seemed to offer a resolution, a possible bridge between past and present: he envisioned the whole of Basilicata as “a vast and incredibly rich burial-ground,” in which excavations “would produce rich fruits.” This promise was also a dubious one, though Lombardi's concerns differed from those of his foreign correspondents. Along with his deeper sense of the territory went his preoccupation for its administration, and a fear that chicanery and incompetence would block such excavations, as expressed in his lament that “if only they were pursued by persons provided with intelligence, means and education,

(p.169)

and if [these

people] were not hindered in their noble enterprise by municipal deceits and rivalries and other unforeseen obstructions.”87 Such on-the-ground concerns were far removed from Gerhard's new archaeology, which increasingly focused on vases as the major tool in the search for classical Greece, but with an approach for which the local context where the vases were discovered was of less and less consequence. The making of this divide—Lombardi's concern for context versus Gerhard's focus on the objects themselves— is already evident in the early Bullettino writings the founder of the Instituto dedicated to South Italy.

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Gerhard himself tackled the subject of Greek South Italy twice during the Bullettino's first year of publication: the November issue carried his “Cenni topografici intorno i vasi italogreci” (Topographical remarks concerning Italo-Greek vases). The December issue immediately following carried another piece of his, entitled “Varietà sepolcrali della Magna Graecia” (Sepulcral varieties of Magna Graecia). Clearly, despite his involvement in the excavations at Vulci and his significant responsibilities as secretary of the Instituto (the penning of the editorials must in itself have been timeconsuming enough), Gerhard's immersion in Greek South Italy continued, in keeping with his previous interest in the Neapolitan museum's collection and in de Jorio's work. These 1829 articles also make it clear that vases were increasingly his major interest: even the second piece, ostensibly concerning tombs, revolved by and large around the topic of vases. This focus entailed a different view of ancient South Italy from the one entertained by Lombardi. The latter had of course included mention of “vasi italo-greci”; for each site, he specified clearly whether any had been found—recalling for instance “the very rare [ones], of terrible quality, found” at Metaponto and Heraclaea; “those beautiful ones, of a rare preciousness, from the nearby interior hills;” “the few good ones excavated in recent years in the vicinity of Potenza;” and so forth.88 On the other hand, for Gerhard, the vases became the primary focus, actually guiding his survey of Magna Graecia, which ends up consisting of the sites where vases had been found. In fact, as Gerhard became preoccupied with the burning question of how the painted vases of Nola related to similar ones found elsewhere, the German scholar would come to question the very notion of mapping a stable topography of Greek South Italy. What begins as a simple discussion of certain sites in Magna Graecia where the tombs had yielded painted vases becomes a good deal more complicated as Gerhard tries to analyze the wide diffusion of stylistically similar vases. At times the reader follows the narrative with difficulty, and a desultory style highlights the interlocking complexities of the vases’ provenance. The vases of Nola, well known since the eighteenth century, form the starting point: in Gerhard's eyes,

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these are the most beautiful and perfect of all, due to the brightness of their colors and the elegance of their design (today most of these vases are considered products of fifthcentury Attic workmanship).89 Yet Gerhard

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hardly

knew what to make of Greek vases from other places—from even as far off as Vulci, Anzi, and Locri—which proved to be strikingly similar to the Nolan style. He mentions a theory that explained the vases’ shared characteristics as a result of their being objects of commerce, only to argue against it. On the one hand, he claims that settlements near Nola, which should easily have had access to such beautiful pottery, have not yielded any vases of the Nolan style. The vases found in Avella, for instance, are characterized by “ordinary varnish and the very pale colour of the figures, together with a fine clay and rare design”;90 the ones from Paestum, however, are “remarkable in their design and more than remarkable in their subjects,” but still differ from those of Nola because of their “dull varnish, the pale colour of their figures, and the use of various other colors.”91 The vases from Sant’Agata dei Goti appear, on first glance, quite similar to the ones from Nola in the quality of their clay and paint. Nevertheless, their shapes are again quite distinct, including such rarities as the “belly.” Furthermore, they employ an exotic palette of colors—red and white—and their design betrays the hand of an experienced painter, who was nonetheless careless about the extremities of the figures, and too monotonous in treating facial features. On the other hand, vases of the Nolan style are found farther afield, for example in Anzi. Gerhard argues how unlikely it is that this might be an indication of commerce, since these were mountain sites difficult to access. Gerhard instead formulates the theory that a community of artists from Nola had settled in Sant’Agata dei Goti. The same theory, he added hopefully, will likely explain the vases from Vulci, which again display the same brightness of paint and elegance of design typical of Nola. In his treatment of Puglia, Gerhard can leave aside the issue of a relationship with the Nolan vases: Apulian pottery is strikingly homogeneous, and markedly different from that of Campania. Nonetheless, Gerhard's descriptions of Apulian pottery clearly benefit from the trained eye he had developed

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while working on the Nolan vases—Gerhard confidently asserts that, even to “a less learned observer,” Apulian vases could be easily identified by their “imposing proportions and the preciousness of their shapes, and the frequency of characters and mystery ceremonies either in isolation or encumbered by many other characters from the heroic fables.”92 Gerhard even attempts an ambitious historical reconstruction of the development of Apulian pottery. He claims that, because of their uniformity in depicting mystery scenes, these vases must predate the senatus consultum de bacchanalibus of 186 BCE. For the same reason, he conjectures that the period of production was short-lived and occurred later than the making of fine vases in Campania, to which he considered them inferior. Since the Nolan manner had left behind more evidence of its own decadence, he thought it likely that these vases were still being produced when the shorter period of Apulian vase-making had already ended. Painted vases are also the prevailing theme in Gerhard's second 1829 article. Despite its title, the piece does not construct a typology of burials, but

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rather sounds a

clarion call to others—especially those “who reside in the area and have consummate experience of it”93—to submit communications on this topic to the Instituto, in order to enable the collection and publication of all known information on the region's sites. Arguing for the urgent need for better communication, Gerhard mentions the discovery, already more than a year old but as yet unpublished, of an “intact Greek sepulcher” in Canosa. He takes it upon himself to describe the beautiful objects found in the chamber—painted “nasiterni,” figured bowls, clay figurines—which had been sent to the Bourbon Museum. He expresses his regret that the original disposition of the objects is not known: the tomb had been discovered flooded, preventing detailed observations. This episode gives Gerhard occasion to highlight the importance of recording carefully the disposition of any objects found in tombs. Weaponry, jewellery, and other body ornaments can be readily identified in and of themselves, but in particular the original location of statuettes within tombs and whether they are of clay, amber, or some other material, can crucially

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contribute to our understanding of them—shedding light, for instance, on whether they were tutelary deities, or simply objects beloved by the deceased in his or her lifetime. As a further example of the significance of such contextual information, Gerhard mentions the case of the thousands of clay statuettes of Ceres that had invaded Neapolitan antique shops just ten years beforehand. These were said to come from Paestum, but there was no information available about the precise site of discovery. Such a record, he claims, would have been valuable for the general understanding of Greek figurines, as well as for making an accurate identification of the large temple of Paestum, near which the discovery was said to have been made. The only indication Gerhard was able to gather relating to these clay figurines came on his visit to Paestum, where he learned that they were found in the ditch in front of the temple. Gerhard casts a skeptical light on this information, however, pointing out that the ditch had been dug only four years previously, while the statuettes had been unearthed long before. Yet even the embryonic concern for context Gerhard expresses in these passages is simply in service of his primary interest in the iconography and shapes of painted vases: “the most relevant observations concern the location of vases around the corpse, both in chamber tombs, and in the case of bodies buried in simple earth.”94 Maybe, he suggests, the position of the vases depended on their shape, or on the meaning of the images depicted on them? A record of their condition upon discovery would be of particular use for vases found on their own. Gerhard hypothesizes that the most beautiful vases found in isolation contained the ashes of the deceased. What emerges clearly from this discussion is that Gerhard valued the iconography of Greek vases largely in terms of the light they could shed on Greek religion and private life: for Gerhard, figure-painted vases, wherever they might be found, granted access to the Greek world. At this point in his career, Gerhard took the scope of

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Greek iconography to

include figure-painted vases from a variety of periods and places, such as fifth-century Attic vases found at Nola, fourthcentury Apulian, and others—all these he combined to form the category of “Greek.” To this extent, Gerhard's vague

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concept of “Greek” was compatible with Lombardi's territorial focus, as “Italo-Greek” remained an ill-defined variation on “Greek,” not yet with any clear distinction of style or value. Both Gerhard and Lombardi could refer to Canosa—which we now know as a Daunian site—as “Greek Canosa,” for example. Further progress in establishing the periodization and provenance of the artifacts extracted from the soil would change this situation. As the concept of “Greek” became more clearly defined and differentiated, mainland Greece became the standard from which “Italo-Greek” and “native Italian” were seen as distinct, and Lombardi's and Gerhard's approaches would begin to seem quite different. The Debate on Painted Vases’ Provenance

To appreciate the unfolding of this process, Gerhard's fixation on vases needs to be understood within a wider context. The fortuitous timing of the Vulci excavation had been crucial for him: the discovery of these vases was as appealing an item as one could wish for to place on the front page of the Bullettino's inaugural issue. The Instituto conceived of the new archaeology as a daily, ongoing process of discovery, which required regular dissemination throughout a wide scholarly community; Gerhard's firsthand account of the Vulci excavations showcased the role that a fortnightly organ such as the Bullettino could play in this process. Moreover, the findings at Vulci, numbering in the thousands, suited Gerhard's vision of archaeology as “the philology of monuments.” His motto—“if you see one, you have seen none; if you have seen thousands, you have seen one”—found here a concrete expression. In the work enabled and publicized by the Bullettino, we see how vase studies became part of the new discipline of archaeology. De Luynes's image on the title page of the Annali was indeed fitting: vase studies in this period seemed to have become part and parcel of the new discipline. The prominence of vases in classical archaeology has long been taken for granted, understood through a narrative of how vase scholarship became professionalized, with studies of iconography giving way to attribution studies and finally to twentieth-century work focusing on individual vase painters. Scholars have, however, recently nuanced this story, by

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calling into question the aesthetic status of Greek vases in the ancient world.95 It is common nowadays to think of these vases as cultural artifacts rather than as objets d’art. With this reevaluation has come a recognition that scholarship and collecting have for long existed in far more intimate relation to one another than the narrative of professionalization would suggest.96 The telling of this new story has primarily focused on two historical moments. The origins of modern interest in Greek painted pots

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lie in the eighteenth century, when

the vases were swiftly transformed into art objects, much sought after for major museum collections—a phenomenon in which Naples, as we have seen, played a central role. Researchers have rightly highlighted how experts of this early period appreciated vases mostly for their iconography, but also noted, more recently, the concern of collectors to define the quality of the vases, which in turn inspired a deeper analysis of their different styles of painting.97 Also much discussed in the history of vase studies is the development of academic attribution studies, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and retaining its dominance in much twentieth-century scholarship. It was in the later nineteenth century that scholars studying ancient vases embraced the techniques developed for art history by Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891), the so-called Morellian method, which bases attribution on the close analysis of an image's seemingly inessential details, which unfailing reveal, Morelli claimed, the artist's hand.98 The task of identifying the hallmarks of individual ancient potters was taken up eagerly by professors of classical archaeology and led to the canonization of many vase painters who were lauded as Athenian grand masters on par with Renaissance artists.99 Sandwiched between these two better-explored periods in vase studies, the first half of the nineteenth century has so far received little attention. Yet it was precisely then that classical archaeology first gained the status of academic discipline, with vase studies lodged at its core. This moment in time presents significant continuities with the eighteenth-century world of vase collecting. The sites that figure in Lombardi's and Gerhard's 1829 articles had been previously explored by Domenico Venuti, who was appointed intendente of the Real

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Fabbrica della Porcellana in 1779. Venuti had been charged with designing and producing a “Herculaneum service” and an “Etruscan service” (a project in the style of Wedgwood, but in this case for a royal entourage): it was while scouring South Italy for inspiration that Venuti identified Sant’Agata dei Goti, Taranto, Canosa, and Locri as major sources for vases to complement the well-known site of Nola.100 But a figure such as Gerhard—both a scholar and a collector, and an emissary of Berlin's Altes Museum—well exemplifies how closely connected scholarship and collecting were at the very origins of archaeology as a discipline in the early nineteenth century. At this time, the defining controversy of vase studies, which concerned the provenance of the vases recovered from tombs in Italy, was acted out amidst the new prominence of the institutional and professional features introduced by the Instituto. By the end of this early period, marked so decisively by the provenance debate, the production of most vases would be confidently traced back to Athens—a major conclusion reached at the cost of bitterly fought scholarly battles, for which the Bullettino provided one of the main venues.101 The establishment of a mainland Greek provenance for many of the vases excavated in Italy had significant consequences for the study of Magna Graecia. Gerhard couldn’t know, when he triumphantly inaugurated the Bullettino with his report on the Vulci discoveries, that it would set

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off the first

acrimonious controversy in the history of the Instituto. Nor could he have imagined that, once the seminal question became that of establishing where the vases had originated, the answer would help push Magna Graecia further toward the margins of the ancient Greek world. Ancient pottery was unusually, spectacularly mobile: vases moved about the ancient world as easily as they have in the modern one. This fact helped to ignite the controversy over the Vulci discoveries: were they Etruscan or Greek? An added dilemma soon complicated matters: if the vases were Greek, were they made by South Italian Greeks or mainland Greeks? The centrality of the Instituto meant that, for the first time, such a debate could play itself out internationally, with reports from Italian scholars, travelers to Greece, and university professors all contributing to the new discipline of

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archaeology. In this respect, the controversy over the provenance of the vases that began in 1829 inhabited a scholarly and political world very different from that of the eighteenth century. This first major controversy in the new science, originating in the Vulci discoveries, put to the test the passion for Greece and the philological models embraced by the recently-formed international archaeological community. Arguments for the mainland Greek origins of the vases found in central and South Italy hurt Italian scholarly pride (and economic investment), but also went against the received notions of some German professors. A report by Panofka, which followed the one Gerhard had published on the Vulci vases in the inaugural issue of the Bullettino, foreshadows some of the issues soon to emerge more explosively in the new controversy. The article consisted of a few pages reporting on excavations in the Kingdom of Naples at Nola, the site from which much of the Hamilton collection had come, and to which Panofka had returned in 1828 together with de Blacas. Panofka explicitly frames his report as a response to the exciting news from Vulci, as he expresses how the success of the Etruscan excavations had led him to fear that they might put at risk the digs at Nola, thereby endangering the latter city's previous monopoly on the vase trade. Yet he happily reports that this never came to pass, with the 1829 Nola excavations producing striking finds of unprecedented beauty. Panofka presents these finds as an unexpected success, given that, after a long series of rich seasons, one might well have feared that the land under Nola could not yield up any more good vases. He describes in detail two cups, the interiors of which had been painted a beautiful white, shining like the best china and decorated with black designs, while the exteriors were decorated with red figures on a black background. He also mentions a vase shaped like an Ethiopian trapped in the mouth of a crocodile. Finally, Panofka notes the discovery of a deep, stone-built tomb that had seemed to offer the possibility of important finds, but which turned out to be empty. He concludes: “Unfortunately, the Etruscans, or the Romans, must have already retrieved the vases that had been placed in it, perhaps even with the aim of adorning those same tombs recently discovered in Vulci.”102

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The closing note of Panofka's piece—the image of

ancient agents, whether Roman or Etruscan, retrieving vases from the tombs in Nola, in order to transfer them to Vulci's necropolis—prefigured elements of the ensuing controversy. Vulci's successful excavation rekindled the debate of the previous century as to the identity of the vases—who had made them?—but now the stakes were higher. To understand why the Vulci discoveries reopened this debate, it behooves us to turn back to Winckelmann's solution, when he declared that the painted vases had been produced by Campanian Greeks, rather than by Etruscans. Winckelmann's argument repeated Mazzocchi's observations on the inscriptions in Greek letters found on the vases, and on their iconography, clearly Greek. He also further developed the issue of provenance in order to reinforce his thesis. That the Campanian “nation executed …  the terra cotta vases that have been frequently disinterred in Campania, and especially in Nola,” wrote Winckelmann, is hardly surprising, since “the whole shore of the country was then inhabited by them [i.e. Greeks] … [and they] practiced their arts here at an early date, and at the same time, probably, taught their neighbors, the Campanians.” Winckelmann was happy to maintain Greek primacy: “if we are willing to relinquish to the Campanians the honor of many of these productions, it cannot be derogatory to them to regard them as scholars of the Greek artists.”103 Winckelmann also added an argument from silence when he allowed that “an account of vases of this kind, actually exhumed in Tuscany, would have been no weak ground on which to uphold the common opinion in favor of the Etruscans.”104 This proof is precisely what the excavations at Vulci would validate seventy years later, as painted vases were brought to light in unprecedented numbers in Etruria. Panofka's supposition that the vases had been transferred in ancient times from one graveyard to another, however bizarre it may seem to us, was a reasonable attempt to accommodate this new evidence within the still dominant idea of provenance, which assumed that the people in whose tombs the vases had been found were their creators. The debate became more complicated, however, after reports of vases excavated in Greece reached the Instituto in Rome, suggesting

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that mainland Greece was another possible place of origin for the vases. In fact, the original bulletin reporting that painted vases had been found in mainland Greece had not even been printed when a response to the news reached the Bullettino. The author was Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino (1775–1840), on whose land the Vulci discoveries were made. In 1804, this younger brother of Napoleon had moved from France to Italy, where—definitively leaving behind his revolutionary politics— he was made Prince of Canino by the pope and proceeded to dedicate himself exclusively to the arts.105 The prince had been the inspirational force behind Napoleon's reopening of the Académie française in 1802, and in later years he continued collecting pictures and developed a passion for antiquity. His first excavation took

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place in 1819 at

Tusculum, but the 1828 season at Vulci was his major coup, when a tremendous number of vases were discovered.106 These would see inclusion in a number of new catalogues, as the prince combined collecting and selling, and solicited Gerhard's involvement as both expert scholar and trader. The prince continued to maintain the Etruscan identity of the vases until his death in 1840—only the posthumous editions of his catalogues refer to the vases as “excavated in Etruria” rather than as “Etruscan.” The degree of investment he felt in identifying the vases as non-Greek is apparent in how he immediately wrote a letter to the Bullettino upon learning that the Prussian artist Emile Wolff had returned from Greece bearing various painted vases from Aegina. The title of the prince's letter is sufficiently telling—“Sur quelques vases prétendus grecs” (On some vases mistaken as Greek). There is also no doubt of the imperiousness of the letter's tone, and of the sense of entitlement about what had been uncovered on his own lands. This letter also set off a debate that makes plain what was at stake in the fashioning of archaeology into an academic discipline, as it raged openly among local scholars, travelers, collectors, nobles, and professors on the scholarly battlefield offered by the Bullettino. Addressing Gerhard as the secretary of the Instituto, the Prince of Canino spelled out the questions that he believed

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Wolff needed to answer. Where in Greece had Wolff retrieved the vases and on whose land? Who had undertaken the excavations, when had they begun, and were they ongoing? The prince also wished to be informed about the quantity, quality, and size of the vases found, and to be given the names of the vases’ current owners. To justify his skepticism, Bonaparte pointed out that Greek writers, who never missed a chance to boast of other things Greek, never mentioned the excellence of Greek vase painting. Bonaparte was gracious to Gerhard, to whose wisdom he put questions “of such great interest to the truth of history,” concerning “these vases [about which] there has been talk for some time, but no certainty is yet established by public and demonstrated details.” Bonaparte's graciousness to Wolff—of whose probity he had been reassured by others—is undermined by his suspicion that the young man's good faith might have been imposed upon “by some speculator who calculated the profit that he could make by placing the Greek mark on Etruscan vases discovered in our lands.” Bonaparte even claimed that “people who bought vases excavated on my land embarked from Ancona for Greece immediately after their purchase.” Did these gentlemen bring with them to Greece some of our Etruscan vases? Was perhaps the good faith of Mr. Wolff imposed upon? This is a question that I put to your [Gerhard's] wisdom. I appeal foremost to the good faith of Mr. Wolff. Mr. Wolff will enlighten us, but it is especially you who should dispel the doubts on the excavations of painted vases in Aegina.107 (p.177)

Gerhard, as editor of the Bullettino, commissioned a

detailed report from Wolff concerning the discoveries from Aegina, in order to understand the context in which the vases had been discovered and to assure readers that their provenance had not been fabricated. Wolff complied, well aware of “the present situation, in which the attention of scholars of ancient matters is entirely centered on the new discoveries in this branch of antiquity.”108 He even went far beyond the usual practice of merely describing the finds, as for example in Panofka's report—instead, he gave as full an account of the Aegina excavations as was to appear in the

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Bullettino for a long time. Gerhard introduced Wolff's report with the most complimentary and diplomatic words, directed to Bonaparte: The report by Mr. Wolff in reply to your questions will attest, I hope, to the respectful intention with which I always serve your orders. I also believe that it will clarify most of the antiquarian obscurities on this issue that have not escaped Your Excellency's discernment in investigating Etruscan antiquities. It is certainly surprising that after the excavation of so many thousands of painted vases from the tombs of Magna Graecia, little or nothing has been heard about similar monuments being found in Greece, in the literal sense of mainland Greece.109 Although very careful not to offend the owner of the vases that he planned to study, Gerhard nonetheless made comments in support of Wolff's claim that the painted vases he brought back had indeed been excavated in mainland Greece. Gerhard identified ancient passages mentioning Greek pottery, quoting Aristophanes (Ecclesiazusae 988) regarding vases in tombs, Pindar (Nemean 10: 36) regarding vases as athletic prizes, and Pliny (Naturalis Historia 7: 55) regarding the art of vases as invented by Athena herself. He corroborated the testimony of Wolff still further by referring to earlier travelers to Greece, such as Stackelberg and Edward Dodwell, whose reports had also mentioned painted vases. Bonaparte's polemic now seems antiquated, the talk and guesswork of a dealer rather than an archaeologist. It is obvious, moreover, that the prince had a considerable personal economic investment in the question, a conflict of interest that undercut his accusations that others had fabricated their discoveries. Yet it would be too easy to resolve the question simply by blaming Bonaparte's limited and biased knowledge. In fact, Bonaparte's letter appeared in the pages of the Bullettino alongside the writings of professional academics. The same problem of explaining the presence of Greek vases in Italy was now troubling the new professors of Altertumswissenshaft.

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Gerhard himself considered the vases from Vulci to be unequivocally Greek in style. He also considered them to be of better quality than those found in Magna Graecia, but could not bring himself to believe they had been

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brought to

Etruria from mainland Greece. In 1829, he put forth the hypothesis that Vulci had been a Greek colony. Two years later, he modified his explanation for a Greek presence in Etruria by positing an “isopolity”—a city shared by Greeks and Etruscans in Vulci.110 Gerhard formulated this second hypothesis in response to criticism by the philologist who had been his illustrious teacher in Berlin, August Böckh. While lecturing on a Panathenaic amphora from Vulci that had been donated to the Altes Museum in Berlin, Böckh had dismissed Gerhard's 1829 theory that Vulci was a Greek colony. Gerhard took care that the 1831 Bullettino published Böckh's lecture in full, along with his own revised theory. Böckh argued that the vases could not have come from Athens, since there was no record of any Etruscan ever winning in the Panathenaic Games; he also dismissed the idea that Etruscans could have produced such vases in order to celebrate Etruscan versions of the Athenian games, because, had this been the case, such amphorae would have borne different inscriptions. His close examination of the vase in the Altes Museum, moreover, led him to think that “no oil was ever put into it.” He concluded that “these vases were made by Nolan and Etruscan potters, not to be prizes at games, but for reasons of mere decoration.”111 In that same year 1831, Müller, another of Böckh's students, was the first to venture the argument that the vases had in fact come from Greece. Local production of such vases, he argued, presupposed the presence of Athenian metics in Etruria, but he thought it highly unlikely that a large number of Athenian potters and painters would have settled in a region never renowned for its commerce or industry. Müller concluded: “Importation of vases as trade-objects is much more probable and it is supported by the fact that all Etruscan sites rich in painted vases are located near the sea.”112 He claimed that ancient commerce could well explain the presence of thousands of vases excavated at Vulci, and that this hypothesis had much to recommend it. He argued that the

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fact that Keramos's invention was attributed to Athena was proof of the high status of pottery in Athens; additional support for his contention came from the well-attested practice that a painted amphora filled with oil was presented as the prize at the Panathenaic Games. The 1831 Bullettino also published Müller's piece next to Böckh's—just a few months later, however, Müller withdrew his theory of ancient Mediterranean commerce, in deference to his mentor's pronouncement, and he was content to maintain that the vases had originated in some Greek colony in South Italy. Here there were no direct monetary interests at stake, as there had been in the case of Bonaparte; however, clearly the new politics of academe could shape scholarly debate just as powerfully. Gerhard, practicing editorial diplomacy among the various reports in the Bullettino, had to employ just as much tact when dealing with Müller and Böckh as when mediating between the dealer Bonaparte and the artist Wolff. Gerhard delicately engaged Bonaparte's animated letter by repeatedly praising him—the “famous and ingenious discoverer of similar types of

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antiquities on Etruscan

soil”—for performing a good office for the Instituto, since the publication of his letter had provoked numerous notices.113 Gerhard similarly praised other new finds of vases in Greece, remarking also that more information regarding vases from Greece was needed, before one could definitively establish any difference between “Greek” and “Italic” vases.114 It indeed took some time for scholars to accept the idea that many of the vases found in Italy were of Greek provenance—this became common knowledge only well past the mid-nineteenth century. The case of the French archaeologist Desiré RaoulRochette is a telling example of this change. In 1833, writing just after the discoveries at Vulci, Raoul-Rochette claimed that ancient figure-painted vases were produced in Magna Graecia and Etruria. However, by 1845, as he noted in his Lettre à M. Schorn, supplément au catalogue des artistes de l’antiquité grecque et romaine (Letter to Mr. Schorn, supplement to the catalogue of the artists of Greek and Roman antiquity), he had formed the opinion that figure-painted vases found in Italy— namely the black-figure, the white-ground, and the red-figure pottery of the “beautiful style”—came primarily from Attica.

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Raoul-Rochette thought that “these precious products of attic industry, of every period and type, all manufactured in the Kerameikos [the Athenian potter's quarter] were spread by commerce throughout the domain of antiquity”, citing the Nolan amphorae as examples.115 It is hard for us today to imagine what made the idea of imported vases so difficult to accept, or, for that matter, what later rendered the notion acceptable. In the 1850s Gerhard was still speaking of Attic artisans wandering through Etruria; Müller's position seems braver and more correct, or perhaps he was just luckier, as Salvatore Settis put it.116 The debate is certainly revealing for what it says about the origins of the new field of archaeology, which were considerably more contested and varied than is generally assumed. As regards the making of the modern concept of “ancient Greece,” moreover, it allows us to see the story's subtext as the eventual dismissal of Magna Graecia. Provenance won out over context—the abstraction of ancient objects from the conditions of their production or their economic history in favor of aesthetic appreciation and purely iconographical readings meant in this case a loss of interest in the region where the vases were actually discovered. This dynamic would continue, and one of its consequences, already hinted at in Lombardi's writings, is that Magna Graecia—the region, the scholarship concerning it, and local scholars themselves— would become peripheral to the new archaeology.

Peripheries of Scholarship The debate on the vases’ provenance demonstrates how the Instituto's network enabled an unprecedented circulation of information and exchange of opinions, but also how this very openness led to bitterly fought public disagreements.

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Whereas Gerhard had optimistically envisioned the Instituto as a multinational network of scholars sharing a common pursuit, the lingering controversy over painted vases revealed the fissures in this idealized vision. The differences between various national traditions of scholarship arose not just around particular subjects (painted vases, in this case) but around questions of interpretation and methodology. One result was a hierarchical stratification within the emerging field of

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archaeology, undergirded by the sense that there were more and less advanced schools of thought and practice. As the systematic German model took its place at the center of the new archaeology, an increasingly visible tradition of Italian scholarship—once so crucial for the emergence of archaeology —was recast as a primitive phenomenon at the discipline's (as at the continent's) southern periphery. Thus, in spite of Gerhard's idealistic rhetoric, the Instituto became a site where the establishment and propagation of intellectual hierarchies were able to define the rising field. The debate over vases was only one of several in which national allegiances began to play a markedly problematic role in the emerging field of archaeology. By briefly considering a controversy surrounding Franco-German relations, we can begin to grasp both the wider interplay of nationalism and archaeology and the particularities of the Italian context in which the Instituto was, after all, embedded. The 1829 Annali carried the seeds of this controversy. The debate, primarily pitting German and French scholars against one other, concerned the material remains that came to be attributed to the so-called Pelasgians. These were the remains of buildings—principally ancient walls—formed of large polygonal rocks and found in both Italy and Greece. They came to exercise great appeal for early-nineteenth century traveler-scholars by offering a mysterious and engaging alternative to the standing classical monuments felt to have been thoroughly explored, measured, and drawn. In addition to the American John Middleton (1785–1849), figures from the same philhellenic circle in which Wilkins had moved in his Cambridge years, such as the British residents in Rome, Dodwell and Gell, also engaged these early pre-classical monuments.117 These scholars’ dedication to the study of these substantial ruins resulted in large and beautifully illustrated folios, praised for the precision of their depictions: Middleton's Grecian Remains in Italy: A Description of Cyclopian Walls and Roman Antiquities (1812) and Dodwell's Views of Cyclopean or Pelasgic Remains in Greece and Italy (1834). The monuments themselves, which are today dated to the sixth and fifth centuries BCE and considered to be megalithic defensive fortifications built prior to the Roman

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conquest, were long called Cyclopean, on Pausanias's authority.118 But the Frenchman Louis Charles François PetitRadel (1756–1836), eager to elaborate a complex interpretative system around these monuments in the early nineteenth century, attributed them to the so-called Pelasgians.119 Petit-Radel's authoritative multivolume work on the Pelasgians did not appear until 1841, but he had begun publishing papers on the topic in 1804—Middleton himself credited the Frenchman with inspiring his own

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research.120 It was around the Pelasgian theory of Petit-Radel that the controversy in the Instituto's publications would rage. An Instituto member, Petit-Radel had started sending letters concerning his theories to the organization from its earliest days.121 These provoked a long article from Gerhard who, skeptical of Petit-Radel's interpretation, actively solicited reports on Pelasgian antiquities.122 Gell and Dodwell joined the fray by contributing material, including wonderful images, but Gerhard nevertheless continued to doubt Petit-Radel, apparently believing that the French scholar was articulating a speculative theory without sufficient evidence.123 An article solicited from Bunsen pointed out the internal inconsistencies of Petit-Radel's system and suggested avoidance of the term “Pelasgian” or “Cyclopean” altogether, given the unreliability of the ancient sources on this topic.124 Petit-Radel responded that same year and invoked the support of de Luynes, the French representative at the Instituto, to set right the issue dividing him and Bunsen.125 While there could be little doubt about the outcome of the debate—the Instituto's structure meant that German skepticism would carry the day—what is striking about the episode is just how fluid, even confused, the ideas under discussion appear to have been. The first half of the Histoire critique de l’établissement des colonies grecques, authored by the well-respected Raoul-Rochette, drew heavily on Petit-Radel's Pelasgian theories.126 Even Müller, who was at first dismissive, later revised his views, and included a discussion of Pelasgian studies in his handbook.127 He also came to regret the harshness and rancor of the earlier disagreement.128

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The controversy over the Pelasgians, like that over the painted vases, exposed an emerging division between national scholarly traditions—in this case, between German and French approaches. Propelling the controversy was the Instituto's prevailing German scientism, with its characterization of alternative approaches, however useful they might be, as peripheral to the archaeological enterprise. Petit-Radel was seen after the controversy as an amateur, a less systematic and scientific scholar than his German counterparts; and this German superiority was implicitly recognized by the Frenchmen who continued their close involvement with the Instituto, such as de Luynes and Raoul-Rochette (in fact, one might see this episode as an early manifestation of what Claude Digeon called “the German crisis of French consciousness” for the post-1870 period).129 In the case of the German-Italian divide, however, there was an added dimension. Like their French counterparts, Italian scholars did not have the university training that was a marker of the new science of antiquity. But a distinctive feature of their situation was that they themselves had grown up and lived near their objects of study, a fact which potentially compromised their authority within the emerging institutional framework of the discipline. In the case of South Italy (and soon of Italy as a whole), scholars’ local affiliations were effectively seen to work against them, a reflection of a new definition of archaeology as a universal discipline predicated on scientific (p.182)

“disinterestedness,” in contrast to the localist practice

of antiquarianism. The ways in which South Italian scholars responded to this challenge are evident in their work, particularly in their interactions with foreign models. A primary example of this dynamic and its consequences is the Bullettino Archeologico Napolitano. One of the most innovative Neapolitan initiatives of the time, this periodical was founded by Avellino in 1842, upon succeeding Arditi as direttore generale of the Museo di Napoli and soprintendente degli scavi d’Antichità. The parallel with the Roman Instituto's Bullettino is clear enough, and indeed Avellino was proud to name Panofka and Welcker among the supporters of his enterprise, and even to enlist them as contributors.130 The time was ripe for such initiatives: a year later Gerhard would

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launch the German Archaeologische Zeitung in 1843 and the French Revue Archéologique would commence in 1846. All these projects were national versions of the Instituto's Bullettino, but Avellino's Neapolitan Bullettino was different in other significant ways. Avellino's new journal closely reproduced the organizational principle of Gerhard's Bullettino —for example, the subject matter was divided into monumenti and bibliografia—but with a specifically Neapolitan bent. Avellino's Bullettino would dedicate itself exclusively to monumenti patrii, among which, significantly, its founder counted not only monuments whose discovery had been reported to him by his various regional intendenti in the kingdom but also those objects which had been transferred, by whatever means, from the kingdom to foreign museums. The Bullettino Archeologico Napolitano consisted primarily of reports on the excavations at Pompeii and at other sites in the kingdom, contributions on Neapolitan monuments, and summaries of published works, insofar as they were relevant to the study of these monuments. Avellino's bibliografia section was thus made up largely of abstracts of those articles published in the Instituto's Bullettino that had as their particular focus the monuments of the Kingdom of Naples. Neapolitan scholarship, as showcased in the Bullettino Napolitano, ended up in a position that was doubly peripheral: not only was its dependence on the model of the Instituto's Bullettino quite explicit, but also, ironically, its deviations from that approach only served to mark the Neapolitan version's secondariness. This becomes readily apparent in the notices contributed to the Bullettino Archeologico Napolitano by Giulio Minervini, which, along with the summaries and the reports of the excavations at Pompeii, took up most of the monumenti section of the journal. Minervini (1819–1891) was a nephew of Avellino, who personally supervised his education.131 He typically wrote on painted vases for his uncle's journal, reporting findings from Anzi, Armento, Cuma, and Ruvo, among other places. Minervini's main focus was the iconography of the vases, but his approach has also been praised for its innovative concern with the vases’ context of discovery. In putting out as a single book a number of articles

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he had previously published in the Bullettino Archeologico Napolitano, Minervini advocated “the study of monuments in connection with

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the investigation of the places from

which they were recovered,” including “knowledge about the customs, religion, and even the connections among various places” in order to “better direct the archaeologist's understanding.”132 But Minervini's support for a contextual approach was the flip side of what could also be seen as localist allegiance—or, as expressed by one recent scholar, outbursts of “nationalism and colonial pride,” as the debate over the provenance of painted vases more and more favored an origin on the Greek mainland.133 This much is clear from Minervini's review of Raoul-Rochette's 1845 Lettre à messier Schorn, in which, as we have seen, the French scholar finally came to terms with the theory of Attic provenance for most of the vases in the “beautiful style,” by endorsing commerce as the medium of their diffusion throughout the ancient world and citing the Nolan amphorae as a prominent example. Minervini readily accepted the similarity between the Nolan and Attic vases, but just as promptly denied that this entailed that “the inhabitants of Nola were unable to produce similar vases.”134 He long remained resistant to the idea that the Nolan amphorae had been manufactured in Athens. The fact that Minervini held so tenaciously to this idea late into the nineteenth century indicates underlying faultlines even as the Instituto matured and Italy moved toward unification. For the generation following that of Gerhard and other early members of the Instituto, collaboration between Neapolitan scholars and their German visitors gave way in certain instances—as in the case of Minervini—to acrimony, which made all the more plain the existence of a scholarly power differential.135 (These lingering tensions frame the events of 1860, when Giuseppe Fiorelli, rather than Minervini, was chosen to succeed Avellino in his position. The aim was in part to break a scholarly lineage with strong Bourbon ties—Arditi-Avellino-Minervini—but the conflicts between Minervini and the international scholarly community also played a role. Minervini would die in poverty, and even Fiorelli's subsequent career in Rome, however stellar, would bear traces of these earlier tensions, and of the

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innate limitations of a “scientific” Italian school measured against a German model.) The Bullettino Napolitano, innovative as it was, demonstrated that even the most respected Neapolitan scholars, in their attempts to make distinctive contributions to the new archaeological enterprise framed by the Instituto, were inevitably limited by their ties to a specific region. However important their contributions were to the representation of classical antiquity, they would have difficulty laying claim to universality. A further illustration of these dynamics is offered by how the Instituto in its earliest years could affect the life and work of a scholar such as Vito Capialbi (1790–1853) of Monteleone in Calabria. Residing in a distant province of the kingdom, Capialbi was almost by definition a provincial, and this was an identity which he himself repeatedly invoked when referring to his sense of isolation. Yet it was most of all in his interactions with the Instituto, as attested by his correspondence and publications, that one grasps how his peripheral status as a scholar was reinforced by a deep contrast

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between Capialbi's career and the new ideals

and practices espoused by the “professional” archaeologists— but also how one man's marginalization and the professionalization of a discipline can be flip sides of the same process. Capialbi was born into a distinguished family in Monteleone, his own collecting activity foreshadowed by a sixteenthcentury ancestor known to have organized a lapidarium, that is, an epigraphic museum.136 Capialbi's formal entrance into the world of learning came in 1809 with his election to Monteleone's Accademia Florimontana. His twenties, however, were mostly given over to political pursuits in Monteleone, which had recently become capital of Calabria Ulterior, under French rule. The young Capialbi threw himself into the town's political life, even becoming mayor. The Bourbon restoration abruptly ended this period of civic activity, however, as Monteleone was stripped of its status as capital (a punishment for its active embrace of French rule, according to some). In a late, rare allusion to his political life, in an 1848 letter, Capialbi would refer to the French period as “the merry days

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of joy and hilarity.”137 Regarding his political sympathies, a passage from a letter of 1833 is telling, as Capialbi made a point of blaming Calabria's problems not on the laziness of its inhabitants, or on the limitations of its natural setting, but rather on “lack of instruction, methodical habits, and public virtue.”138 This echo of Cuoco's thesis dovetailed with another unusual political stance: Capialbi condemned the bloody repression of the Neapolitan revolution. With his withdrawal from the public political sphere in 1815, Capialbi turned dramatically and energetically to the “archaeology and ecclesiastical history” of his native territory. Capialbi began assembling a respectable library and an impressive collection of antiquities, which now forms the core of the museum of Vibo Valentia (as Monteleone was renamed after Italian unification). He also made a point of actively cultivating Monteleone's Accademia Florimontana, of which he became segretario perpetuo in 1827—positioning himself well to interact with many other local academies across Europe. Amid all this local activity, Gerhard's Instituto marked a powerful and inspiring departure for Capialbi. He appears to have been an eager and gracious host for those rare visitors, some referred by de Jorio, who made their way beyond Naples, down to Monteleone. It was in this capacity that in 1819 he had met Karl Witte, a Dante scholar teaching at Halle, with whom Capialbi began a long-lasting friendship and correspondence.139 Most importantly, Witte put Capialbi in contact with Gerhard, and the two of them began to exchange letters. When the project of the Instituto began to take shape, Gerhard invited the scholar from Monteleone to “add to the number of corresponding members [Soci Corrispondenti], and [to the Instituto] publications with the renown of your name and with the prestige of your archaeological articles.”140 “Sweetest friend,” Capialbi wrote to Gerhard, “how pleasant to me is this literary enterprise … embracing the news of all monuments of venerable antiquity that will be discovered in our regions.”141 Within hours of receiving them, Capialbi had read with “hungry desire” the first six issues of

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the

Bullettino, and he eagerly accepted Gerhard's invitation to contribute. Indeed, his enthusiasm extended so far that he volunteered to become a paying supporter (associato) and

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endeavored to sign up his own cousin, the Marquis of Sitignano, for the venture.142 This initial burst of enthusiasm led to a number of collaborations in the first years of the Instituto, but Capialbi's involvement waned soon after; this parting of ways between the scholar of Monteleone and the famous institute is instructive for us in understanding the evolving dynamics of the study of Greek South Italy. Capialbi had described his home country as the most remote of Italy's regions; to Gerhard he wrote of himself as confined to the “extreme tip of Italy,” and he used almost the same words in an 1848 letter to Avellino, thanking the Neapolitan scholar for remembering him, although he was “situated at the extreme tip of Italy, as if toto divisus orbe” (divided from the whole world).143 Indeed, this theme of isolation is one that emerges strongly from Capialbi's correspondence. References to his own remoteness from the scholarly community appear in almost every one of Capialbi's letters: repeatedly he notes the long periods it takes letters to reach him, he asks after other letters that seem to have been lost, and he wonders whether his own letters have reached their destinations. Even Gerhard's initial invitation for Capialbi to join the Instituto needed to be sent twice. Capialbi also frequently requested books and publications that were out of his reach in Monteleone, but of which he had heard either through the Bullettino or some other means. However extreme the isolation of Monteleone and its environs, the area nevertheless proved to be an intensive focus for the Instituto's undertakings. The premium placed on knowledge of South Italy lent its most learned inhabitants a certain cachet. When Capialbi received from Gerhard a copy of de Luynes's article on Locris, he responded authoritatively that he had recently been there himself and planned to return soon, in order to confirm the accuracy of de Luynes's map—which, however, seemed to him to be “very precise and worthy of making de Luynes a benefactor of Locrian antiquities.”144 Capialbi went on to commission an Italian translation of this article and its publication as a small pamphlet. Eager to demonstrate his local expertise, perhaps to the point of revealing a certain defensiveness, he made sure to mention

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that an inscription depicted on the left side of the map was one with which he was already familiar. Betraying even more anxiety, he claimed that a small bronze statue pictured at the right of the map bore a striking resemblance to one that had somehow gone missing from his own museum—and he went so far as to suggest that it “had taken flight into de Luynes’ hands.”145 Gerhard politely offered to take up the matter with de Luynes, but Capialbi declined, proposing to keep the matter among friends: “de Luynes should enjoy it,” he says, for the statue “might well be happier in his learned hands than in my own petty ones.”146 The exchange well encapsulates the underlying tensions: a stark contrast between locals and foreigners resulting from their shared interest in the

(p.186)

same objects. Undeniably, there was a power differential at work that shaped the scholarship on South Italy in important ways during this period. The enthusiasm with which Capialbi accepted the invitation to join the Instituto suggests the prestige such an affiliation could lend to his own undertakings in provincial Monteleone. Capialbi certainly sought entry into the institutional networks of the day; while nothing is known of his travels outside the kingdom, he visited Naples several times, where he became close to de Jorio and Avellino (to whom he also reported as a sovrintendente). He also cherished contacts with other academies and proudly advertised his election to many of them; his title pages list associations with institutions such as the Accademia Erculanese, the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Copenhagen, and even the Institute of Africa in Paris. Yet Gerhard's Instituto held out a deeper and more genuinely exciting potential. There is nothing formulaic about Capialbi's enthusiasm when he praises this institution's dynamism. It proved, moreover, to be an unusually effective network, with a more extensive reach than prior academies. Capialbi himself used the Instituto as a go-between for delivering “diplomas” between local academies; it was no doubt with some amusement that the Instituto's secretaries obliged Capialbi by sending on these remnants of an earlier “academic” world, which was trading on the Instituto's reputation in order to keep alive the connections vital to its functioning.147 There was clearly a performative aspect to Capialbi's nomination of

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friends from Monteleone for membership in the Instituto (often ignored by his Roman correspondents), or his letters of recommendation to the Instituto for young travelers from Monteleone visiting the capital.148 The ultimate irony, highlighting just how provincial Capialbi's world could be, was perhaps his request for the biographical details of his German correspondents (Panofka, Witte, Gerhard, among others), so that he could celebrate their elections, in absentia, to Monteleone's Accademia Florimontana.149 Thus the differences between the provincial and metropolitan scholarly spheres were pronounced and complicated by transactions involving prestige and access—but an equally significant split involved the various scholars’ approaches to the past. Capialbi happily complied with Gerhard's calls for materials to be published in the Bullettino and Annali; his report on the walls of ancient Monteleone (Greek Hipponion) marked his first publication. Their correspondence concerning revisions to this report, in preparation for its appearance in the Bullettino of the Instituto, reveals a peculiar dynamic. Capialbi's anxiety about the process is telling—he inquired multiple times about the progress of the editing and publication—for at the very moment when he is transferring his expertise and entrusting his knowledge to Gerhard, he is also seeking the latter's assistance. Although he knew Greek, Capialbi's library was limited, and so he explains that he does not have at hand the Greek originals for citing Diodorus and Strabo, and requests that Gerhard insert these passages, along with one from Arrian.150 (p.187)

Not all the materials sent by Capialbi in his initial

enthusiasm were received with the same welcome. Among the first papers was a report, complete with drawings, on a sarcophagus—an ancient Greek artifact that had been reused as tomb for Norman royalty during the Middle Ages.151 This material remained unpublished—whether because the drawings were considered lacking in some respect, or because Gerhard considered the monument of insufficient interest. The rejection illustrates a larger difference between the scholar from Monteleone and his metropolitan editor: in an epistolary exchange of 1829, Gerhard had explained that the Instituto's

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mission was limited to classical times. Capialbi had replied, with his usual courtesy, by expressing understanding of Gerhard's position with regard to the Bullettino, but also remarking that Gerhard must agree that a collection needs objects from all periods. Capialbi, moreover, continued to send to German friends in Rome his own publications concerning medieval topics, while acknowledging, as he wrote to thensecretary August Braun in 1846, that he well understood “that such things would not enter the Instituto's publications.”152 This approach guided Capialbi's own collecting and his understanding of the Calabrian past. Despite his enthusiasm for the Instituto's initiatives, and his willingness to collaborate and relinquish much of his laboriously gathered information, Capialbi's own scholarly practice and attention followed multiple threads within his declared focus on Calabria's archaeology and ecclesiastical history. The ancient sarcophagus reused in Norman times, which to Capialbi so poignantly expressed the continuity of the region's history, was of much less interest to Gerhard. Yet it was to such latterday topics that Capialbi increasingly devoted himself in later years—culminating in his final work, a treatise on the seventeenth-century philosopher Tommaso Campanella, which he presented at the 1845 Congresso degli Scienziati in Naples. Whatever the reasons behind Capialbi's evolution, it is clear that his personal project as a scholar came to differ substantially from the Instituto's mandate. Recent reevaluations of Capialbi as an exemplary “provincial archaeologist” crystallize a terminology that raises more questions than it answers.153 Capialbi thought of himself as an archaeologist—a word that had not been available to Giustiniani in 1812. It was, however, the definition of archaeology that was being elaborated in Capialbi's lifetime that was to magnify the “provincial” reputation of his work. While in Gerhard's 1829 “Preliminary Observations,” the terms “antiquarian” and “archaeologist” were still difficult to disentangle, by 1850 his “Archaeological Theses” had spelled out clearly that “archaeologists” were the philologists of monuments, while antiquarians merely provided the archaeologists with material to study. Translated into spatial terms, this relation implied the center-periphery dynamic

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exemplified by Capialbi, and undermined local scholars’ access to the status of “archaeologists.” This tension not only affected the academic landscape of the Neapolitan Kingdom but was carried over to the newly unified Italian nation. (p.188)

Notes (p.189)

(p.192)

Notes:

(1.) For an example of a Neapolitan newspaper's report on the discovery, see Corriere di Napoli number 497 August 1810. Giustiniani first published his book-length account, Memoria sullo scovrimento di un antico sepolcreto greco-romano (Memory of the discovery of an ancient Graeco-Roman burial site), in 1812; he reissued it with corrections and additions in 1815 (although the date on the title page reads 1814). This second edition is the one from which I quote. On Giustiniani's life and work see Fagioli Vercellone 2001. (2.) Giustiniani 1814: 4. (3.) Giustiniani 1814: 6. (4.) Marchand 1996: xxi. (5.) On Gerhard's life see Jahn 1868, de Witte 1871, Stark 1880: 300–314, Lullies and Schiering 1988: 20–22. Wrede 1997 , and Gran-Aymeric 2001: 294–296. (6.) See Luce 1918: 653–655. (7.) On Gerhard and the Instituto see Marchand 1996: 54–62, Schnapp 1997: 304–310 and 2004, and Dyson 2006: 31–36. (8.) See Schnapp 2004 and Marchand 1996: 56–58. (9.) For an incisive and brief account see Marchand 1996: 16– 35. (10.) See Grafton 1981 and Grafton, Most, and Zetzel 1985.

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(11.) Gran-Aymeric 2001: 295. (12.) Schnapp 1997: 305. (13.) See Marchand 1996: 96–98 for a brief history of the establishment of this museum. (14.) See Sassi 1986: 117. (15.) Marchand 1996: 43. (16.) For Heyne's statement, see Sassi 1986: 122; for Böckh's, see Marchand 1996: 52. (17.) See Marchand 1996: 56, Schnapp 1997: 304–310 and 2004; in general, on such predicament of classical archaeology, see Morris 1994 and 2000: 44–45. (18.) See Schnapp 2004. (19.) Morris 2000: 52. (20.) Exceptions include Schnapp 1997 and Dyson 2006. (21.) On the dramatic changes in volume and character of the Grand Tour in the nineteenth century see Buzard 1993, especially pages 18–79; for a survey of the history of Italy from the revolutions of 1796–1799 to those of 1848–1849, see Grab 2000 and Laven 2000. (22.) See Stark 1880: 280–284, Michaelis 1908: 61–62, Marchand 1996: 51–54, and Schnapp 1997: 304–310. (23.) See Ridley 1992 and Dyson 2006: 21. (24.) On Visconti's standing and reputation in France and Italy see Settis 1994 and Barbanera 1998. (25.) On this transfer to Paris and return to Rome of statues and other monuments see Gran-Aymeric 2001: 36, Dyson 2006: 26, Rossi Pinelli 1978–1979: 34, and Barbanera 1998: 7. The cultural and political resonance of this episode throughout Europe was profound; on the influence of Quatremère de Quincy's writings on British Romanticism, and its relation to

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the shaping of a modern social critical tradition of museums that continued with Adorno and beyond, see Rovee 2008, especially 997–999. (26.) On the Hyperboreans, see Marchand 1996: 52–54 and Dyson 2006: 30–31; on Kestner, see Jorns 1964; on Stackelberg and on Panofka, see Gran-Aymeric 2001: 506–507. (27.) Gran-Aymeric 2001: 294. (28.) See Dyson 2006: 31–34. (29.) Gerhard and Panofka 1828: iii. (30.) For a succinct account of these events see Grab 2000: 41–45 and 48–49. (31.) See Davis 2006: 1–12 for a concise statement of this powerful argument. (32.) On these institutions, see the essays collected in Ceserani and Milanese 2007, as well as Milanese 1998 and 2000, and D’Alconzo 1999 and 2002. (33.) On late eighteenth-century Neapolitan patriotism see Calaresu 1995. (34.) See Fagioli Vercellone 2001: 349–350. (35.) On Arditi see Scatozza Höricht 1987a: 820 and 1987d: 867. (36.) On Avellino see Scatozza Höricht 1987b. (37.) Gerhard 1829e: 5. (38.) For another case-study in the relationship between Neapolitan scholars and their German counterparts during this period, see the excellent study by Paola Ceccarelli of the philologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker's correspondence with the antiquarian Agostino Gervasio, in Ceccareli 2006: 11–41. (39.) On de Jorio see Cocchiara 1964, Haskell 1993: 155–157, Carabelli 1996: 95–103, Schnapp 2000: 164–166, Kendon 2000 and 2004: 45–50, and Acocella 2000. Page 72 of 80

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(40.) See Beste 1829: 203–261. (41.) See de Jorio 1964: xii. (42.) De Jorio 1964: 173–174. (43.) Acocella 2000. (44.) See Schnapp 2000: 164–166 and Haskell 1993: 155–158. (45.) De Jorio 1824: vii–viii. (46.) De Jorio 1824: viii. (47.) De Jorio 1810: 3. (48.) De Jorio 1824: 181. (49.) For a sophisticated reading of de Jorio's interpretation of the signs to be read in the soil, see Carabelli 1996: 95–103. (50.) De Jorio 1824: 71. (51.) De Jorio 1824: 75. (52.) De Jorio also anticipates terminological difficulties for his readership. For instance, he explains that in South Italy farmers call ancient coins either “ventene” or “sconsulti” (from the abbreviation SC, standing for Senatus Consulto, found on Roman coins as their minting had to be authorized by the senate). (53.) De Jorio 1824: 41. (54.) De Luynes 1832: 144. (55.) Gerhard 1826b: 181. (56.) Gerhard 1826a: 13. (57.) Schnapp 1997: 307. (58.) Vinet 1874: 70–71. (59.) See Panofka 1829b.

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(60.) See de Luynes 1829. (61.) Gerhard 1829e: 5. (62.) Gerhard 1829b: 43–44. In the letters from Müller to Gerhard one grasps how this structure was conceived and deployed. In February 1829 (the Instituto was officially established on April 29), replying to a letter by Gerhard, Müller promises his help to establishing the Instituto, offering an article on the Parthenon (which appeared in the first issue of the Annali) and one on the Etruscans; he also asks whether he can publish in Latin, rather than Italian or French, and suggests as possible members the Dutch-English archaeologist James Millingen (1774–1845) and the German diplomatscholar, secretary to Niebhur in Rome, Baron von Bunsen (1791–1860); see Müller 1950: 122–123. Following this exchange, the topic of contributions to the Annali and Bullettino remained a constant in the correspondence between the two scholars. (63.) Stark 1880: 286. (64.) So writes Gerhard in 1829e: 8. However, the Instituto ended up concerning itself with oriental antiquities as well, as noted by Marchand 1996: 55. The first “oriental” piece appears already in 1829, in the section “travels”: it is a letter by William Gell on his travels in Egypt; see Gell 1829. (65.) Gerhard 1829e: 8. (66.) Gerhard 1829e: 21–22. (67.) On Wilkins see most fundamentally Liscombe 1980. (68.) On Dodwell see Tregaskis 1979: 57–65, Stoneman 1987: 147–48, McNeal 1993: 84–87, Shanks 1996: 68–70, de Grummond 1996: 1: 365, Whitley 2001: 45–46, and Dyson 2006: 68–69. On Gell see Wroth 1921–22, Clay and Frederiksen 1976, de Grummond 1996: 1 : 483, Bennet, Davis and Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr 2000, and Gran-Aymeric 2001: 292–293. (69.) Quoted in Liscombe 1980: 31. Page 74 of 80

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(70.) See Michaelis 1908: 34–38, Watkin 1974: 3–52, and Bracken 1975: 106–38 and 139–158. Beard and Henderson 1995 take the story of discovery and influence of Bassae to modern times. (71.) Dyson 2006: 52. (72.) Marconi 2007: 133–135. (73.) Harris, who had decided to stay longer to study further Selinus's topography, died of malaria in the same year 1823; it was his brother-in-law, Thomas Evans, who assisted Angell in the publication of Harris's drawings of the metopes for the 1826 volume. (74.) On de Luynes see Huillard-Bréholles 1868, Aghion and Avisseu-Broustet 1994, Gran-Aymeric 2001: 426–428, and Shedd 1986. (75.) Momigliano 1984b: 153. (76.) For a brief introduction, see Mallgrave 2006: 347–348. (77.) For a recent reassessment of Lombardi's Italic studies see Torelli 1999: 1–2; Torelli convincingly presents Lombardi as a precursor to modern studies of the Romanization of Italy. (78.) Lombardi 1830: 17. (79.) Lombardi 1830: 17 and 18. (80.) Lombardi 1830: 18. (81.) Lombardi 1830: 19. (82.) Lombardi 1830: 21. (83.) The remains that Lombardi refers to are of the thirdcentury bce Roman colony. (84.) The only ancient reference to Anxia is to be found in the Tabula Peutingeriana. Twentieth-century archaeology has identified an Iron Age site in the hills surrounding modern

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Anzi, but most of the vases excavated date from the sixth and fifth centuries bce. (85.) Lombardi 1830: 26. (86.) There is no ancient literary, epigraphic, or numismatic evidence for this site. The necropoleis excavated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to which Lombardi was referring seem to be the ones located at the “Sierra Lustrante”—a site inhabited in the fourth century bce and abandoned in the following century, where the ceramic is mostly fourth-century Apulian. The famous “serto d’oro” from Armento is now in the Munich Museum. (87.) Lombardi 1830: 27–28. (88.) Lombardi 1830: 18 and 21. (89.) For the categories used by Gerhard see Cook 1997: 282. (90.) Gerhard 1829c: 163. (91.) Gerhard 1829c: 163. (92.) Gerhard 1829c: 173. (93.) Gerhard 1829d: 181. (94.) Gerhard 1829d: 184. (95.) See Vickers and Gill 1994 and the ensuing debate. (96.) See most recently Nørskov 2002. (97.) See Masci 2003: 61–63. (98.) On Morelli's method see Fernie 1995: 103–115. (99.) See Rouet 2001. (100.) On the sites from which Venuti sought models for his modern collections of ceramics, see Lista 1986; on Venuti's excavations at Sant’Agata dei Goti, see Carola-Perrotta 1984. (101.) Settis 1984 deals with Müller's role in the controversy.

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(102.) Panofka 1829: 20. (103.) Winckelmann 1969: 1: 155 (104.) Winckelmann1969: 1: 157. (105.) For this princely and scholarly turn in Lucien Bonaparte's exciting life see most recently Pietromarchi 1994: 182–185 and 256–265 and Cavoli 2007: 132–141. (106.) For an account of these excavations see also Michaelis 1908: 64–70. (107.) Bonaparte 1829: 115. (108.) Wolff 1829: 124. (109.) Wolff 1829: 122. (110.) For these two successive hypothesis see respectively Gerhard 1829a and 1831. (111.) Böckh 1832: 93. (112.) Müller 1832: 100. (113.) Gerhard 1830: 196. (114.) Gerhard, 1830: 196. (115.) See Raoul-Rochette 1845: 9–10. (116.) Settis 1984: 1079. (117.) On Middleton see Norton 1885, Mack and Robertson 1997 , and Stebbins 1999. (118.) See, briefly, Cornell 1995: 300. (119.) On Petit-Radel see Philbert 1854, and significant mentions in Norton 1885: 5 and Frothingham 1889: 340. (120.) See Stebbins 1999: 74–75 for Middleton's relationship with Gell, Dodwell and Petit-Radel; for his view of the Pelasgian remains see also Frothingham 1889.

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(121.) See Petit-Radel 1829. (122.) Gerhard 1829f: 37–38. (123.) Gerhard 1832 and Gerhaard, Gell, and Dodwell 1831. (124.) Bunsen 1834. (125.) Petit-Radel 1834: 354. (126.) See Raoul-Rochette 1815. (127.) See Müller and Welcker 1852: 20–24. (128.) See correspondence between Müller and RaoulRochette, especially Müller 1950: 127–199, 168–170. (129.) See Digeon 1959. (130.) Avellino 1842–1843: i. (131.) For an insightful study of Minervini's figure and work see Scatozza Höricht 1987c. (132.) Minervini 1846 quoted in Scatozza Höricht 1987c: 848. (133.) Taplin 1993: 53. (134.) Minervini 1845: 111. (135.) For these tensions, and particularly the case of Minervini, see Ceccarelli 2006: 29–41. (136.) On Capialbi see Settis 1987 and Paoletti 1989, 2003, and 2005a; note that Paoletti 2003 also reproduces most of the correspondence of Capialbi held in the Roman archives of Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI). (137.) Quoted in Paoletti 2003: xviii. (138.) Quoted in Settis 1987: 15. (139.) For Capialbi's meeting with Witte see Paoletti 2003: xxvii–xxviii (140.) Quoted in Paoletti 1989: 483. Page 78 of 80

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(141.) See, in DAI's archives, Capialbi's letter to Gerhard of August 13, 1829. (142.) In DAI's archives, Capialbi's letter to Gerhard of August 30, 1829. (143.) As quoted, and commented upon, in Paoletti 2003: xvii– xviii. (144.) In DAI's archives, Capialbi's letter to Gerhard of letter of September 23, 1830. (145.) In DAI's archives, Capialbi's letter to Gerhard of letter of September 23, 1830. (146.) In DAI's archives, Capialbi's letter to Gerhard of letter of October, 16 1830. (147.) In DAI's archives, Capialbi's letter to Wilhelm Ludwig Abeken of March 19, 1841. (148.) For example see in DAI's archives, Capialbi's letter to August Braun from Naples in 1847 and letter to Gerhard of June 18, 1830. (149.) See letters to Gerhard and that of August 6, 1832, to Olaus Kellermann, also discussed in Paoletti 2003: xxii n49. (150.) See in DAI's archives Capialbi's letter to Gerhard of July 11, 1830. (151.) See in DAI's archives Capialbi's letter to Gerhard of May 22, 1830; for a discussion of this sarcophagus, see Paoletti 2003: vii–xiii. (152.) See Paoletti 2003: xxv and, in DAI archives, Capialbi's letter to Braun from Naples of 1846. (153.) See Paoletti 2003: xvi–xvii.

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Of Nations and Scholars

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

Of Nations and Scholars Giovanna Ceserani

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords This chapter reconstructs the history of the study of Magna Graecia during the periods of heightened nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. An analysis of the establishment of national schools of archaeology in Greece and Italy reveals the crystallization of national scholarly traditions, with which Magna Graecia had an ambiguous relationship. Magna Graecia's comparative exoticism the flipside of its scholarly allure as an unexplored territory is evinced from the work of François Lenormant. The effects of Italian unification on Magna Graecia's studies are examined in the work and lives of the historian Ettore Pais, who first included the region within an Italian national historiography, and the archaeologist Paolo Orsi, who tirelessly championed the newly established national archaeological service in the South at a time when the Southern Question was emerging.

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Keywords: Francois Lenormant, Paolo Orsi, Ettore Pais, Italian unification, national archaeological service, nineteenth century, twentieth century, national historiography, Southern Question

In 1886, in the recently established American Journal of Archaeology, Arthur Frothingham Jr. (1859–1923) referred to Magna Graecia as a “most attractive,” “accessible,” and “as yet imperfectly explored region.” Its great ancient cities “require to be investigated with scientific thoroughness”: chance discoveries in the past “of great archaeological and artistic value attest the existence of an immense mine of antiquities of the best Greek periods.” The region was, in conclusion, “a good foundation for a museum.”1 Having spent several years in Italy and taken a PhD from Leipzig, Frothingham had returned to the United States to teach the first-ever graduate seminar in art history at Princeton. He was among the founders of classical archaeology in North America, and the driving force behind the journal in which these comments appeared. His assessment of Magna Graecia's archaeological promise came at a time when the American Institute of Archaeology, having realized the belatedness of its arrival on the scene (founded only in 1879), was mulling over the prospect of Mediterranean fieldwork in order to boost its profile and furnish material for the new American museums.2 Frothingham's praise of Magna Graecia's archaeological potential was part of a fund-raising appeal to enable the institute to send an archaeological expedition to South Italy. An American expedition to Magna Graecia indeed followed soon after, its destination the site of the Temple of Hera Lacinia at Croton. In June 1887 Frothingham broadcast the achievements of the initial excavations—results that revealed the architectural style and the date of the temple as well as of its decorations—and advertised the monograph meant to result from the dig.3 For all its early promise, however, the Croton expedition soon took on (to use Stephen Dyson's (p.194)

words) a “somewhat farcical” character.4 The two

American archaeologists in charge had obtained permission to dig from the baron who owned the land, but officials from the Italian central government expelled them only two months into their excavations, with the additional indignity that all the objects they had thus far discovered were “one fine day seized,

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thrown into the open trenches, and covered with earth.”5 Not surprisingly, Frothingham did not call attention to this turn of events, such a far cry from the archaeological glory he had envisioned just a year earlier. The expedition's inglorious end was mentioned only as a footnote to his report in the American Journal of Archaeology on the “proposed new law to regulate excavations over the entire kingdom of Italy.” The Croton debacle clearly fuelled Frothingham's frustration with Italian legislation, which he described as too restrictive and unenlightened, and secondly, each province has preserved its antiquated laws, so there is no uniformity throughout the land. Owing to the confusion and uncertainty reigning in this question, there are endless law-suits and violations of the laws: such an amount of red-tape officialism is required as effectually to discourage scientific work in many cases, and notwithstanding the most benevolent of intentions, the letter of the law is made to kill the spirit.6 Frothingham's words continued to resound more than twenty years later in the writing of another archaeologist, roughly his contemporary, but one whose life and work were shaped very differently, not least by being an Italian. This was Paolo Orsi (1859–1935), the heroic figure of a new age of statesponsored, scientific archaeological research in the Italian South, who reported on his own 1911 excavations at the Hera Lacinia temple in words that recollect the failed American expedition: I heard more than once foreign archaeologists from different countries reproach me that the Italian government had never found the strength and the will to explore the most famous sanctuary of Magna Graecia, that of Hera Lacinia, near the ancient city of Croton. Even worse: they complained that the Italian government intervened and forced the foreigners that had started the works to stop them without taking on the task of carrying them on. As soon as I was appointed to the Soprintendenza Archeologica of Calabria I took it as my duty to demonstrate that Italy too could rely on its own

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forces and to meet, even though with limited means, the just wishes of the scientific world.7 What Orsi failed to mention explicitly here is that he himself, a young Italian from the North—born in what was then the Austrian territory of Rovereto, annexed to Italy only after the First World War—was among the

(p.195)

officials who

expelled the Americans from Croton in 1887, during his first year posted with the national archaeological service in the deep South. By the time of his own excavations at the sanctuary of Hera Lacinia, Orsi, having advanced impressively in a career characterized by an unwavering commitment to his country (he added in 1908 the post of superintendente in Calabria to his long service in that same position in Sicily), had come full circle. If the story of the excavations at Croton suggests a certain naivete in the American attempt to establish a scholarly presence in the Mediterranean world, it also demonstrates the complexity of matters on the Italian side. A nation even younger than the United States in terms of independence and political unification, Italy could nonetheless point to a long tradition of heritage legislation, developed over a number of centuries, as the study, excavation, and collecting of antiquities evolved—in fact, in many respects Italy was at the forefront of these efforts.8 The confusion and ambiguity registered and criticized by Frothingham was the result of multiple, divergent traditions of regional legislation, designed to protect antiquities and regulate their conservation and export, and still not clearly reconciled in the aftermath of unification. Viewed in broader terms, the episode is a testament to the increasing influence of national interests in archaeological research in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to the founding cosmopolitan ideals of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, Western nation-states were busily institutionalizing educational and research programs along national lines—generally following the prestigious German model (Orsi, Frothingham, and many other scholars themselves traveled in order to earn their degrees in Germanspeaking countries). Along with these nationally oriented research programs came increasingly aggressive expeditionary efforts to secure antiquities for the various

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national museums.9 The archaeological institutions established by the new Italian state, molded in this competitive, nationalistic context, were part of a reformulation of the country's classical past as a national heritage. The Croton story shows how this process evolved in dialogue with other national traditions, which had their own, distinct sense of investment in the Italian past. A second source of conflict was present in the shaping of a distinctly “Italian” heritage and the problem of local identities. It was not only that local landowners rejected the state's intrusion on their private property, but a wider problem involving delicate negotiations between an “Italian” identity and a number of regional identities, which actively resisted assimilation into a national paradigm. Magna Graecia occupied a curious place in this struggle. As Frothingham pointed out, the region remained “unexplored” well into the later nineteenth century—partly, as we have seen earlier, as a result of long-standing processes of marginalization. Precisely because of this neglect, Magna Graecia still contained a vast, untapped potential for archaeological research, just when the era of big digs was beginning, with various Western powers competing for the (p.196)

most attractive excavation sites. Yet—and the Croton

story is indicative in this respect—ultimately there would be no significant foreign excavations in Magna Graecia until the second half of the twentieth century. Thus the complex questions presented by the region were long mostly left to Italians, who, armed with the new practices of philological criticism and prehistoric research but maintaining old tropes about the region's exoticism, continued to ask how classical, or indeed how Greek, was its past. Addressing such questions would prove to be no small task, considering the problematic ways in which Italian identity interacted with the region. The most prominent early responses were provided by an archaeologist, Orsi, and a historian, Ettore Pais (1856–1939). Each in his own way fundamentally reshaped the conception of Magna Graecia, while at the same time working in the new national institutions to which they brought the scientific legitimacy of their German academic degrees. Both Orsi and Pais, born in the heady years of the Italian Risorgimento and

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alive well into the Fascist period, achieved recognition as founding figures in their respective disciplines. Indeed, the Italian state accorded both men one of its highest honors by electing them senators of the kingdom, a lifetime office, in recognition of their intellectual service to the nation, which included the elevation of Magna Graecia to a central place in Italian culture. Before their impact was felt, however, it was an earlier scholar, a Frenchman, who would crystallize the strange fascination felt for Magna Graecia in the later nineteenth century. The work of François Lenormant (1837– 1883) depicted Magna Graecia in ways that made the region seem alluring to a man like Frothingham, but which at the same time encapsulate the issues it presented for scholars of the newly established Italian nation. A home-schooled child prodigy whose career benefited substantially from family connections, Lenormant was a prolific author—his scholarly output well exceeded in both quantity and style emerging disciplinary and institutional norms. Idiosyncratic as Lenormant was in bypassing national and institutional trends, his case only serves to remind us of how dominant such trends had rapidly become. A sense of this nationalist framework is aptly conveyed by a brief consideration of the history of the establishment of national schools of archaeology.

Interlude: From the Instituto to National Schools: Politics and Scholarship National differences—and national rivalries—were already apparent at the launch of the Instituto in 1829, as we have seen in Gerhard's characterization of various nations’ scholarly traditions. By the end of the nineteenth century, these tensions crystallized in the new national institutes of archaeology, which, modeled on Gerhard's Instituto, helped to consolidate distinct traditions of

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national

scholarship.10 Eventually they would spread as far abroad as Indonesia, China, the Arabian Peninsula, and South America, yet the earliest such overseas institutes were established by Western nations in the lands of classical antiquity. Rome, where in 1871 (a year after the city had became capital of a recently unified Italy) the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica was transformed into the Deutsches

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Archäologisches Institut, remained the undisputed center of this expatriate scholarly activity—which it had been at least since the Académie de France à Rome was founded in 1666. By considering this process of institution building in Rome and, more unexpectedly, in Naples, we may appreciate certain distinct features of the Italian case. Nevertheless, to understand the intensely nationalistic dynamics at work in all this institutional activity requires inclusion of the Greek side of the story as well. Nineteenth-century Athens, the recentlycrowned capital of a newly independent Greek nation, was the city most deeply transformed by the new scholarly institutes: as early as 1846, the École Française was set up in the Greek capital; in 1874 came the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, followed soon after by the American School in 1882 and the British School in 1884. (Numerous countries followed in their wake—today there are seventeen such organizations in Athens alone, the most recent being the Georgian Institute, founded in 1998.) At the founding of the Instituto, Gerhard had expressed regret that Greece itself, “the mother of beautiful arts, despite our efforts, for the time being will furnish only a few notices on antiquities.”11 It was, however, precisely the expansion of archaeological research into the Greek mainland that provoked the first open national competition and the proliferation of distinct, rival institutions. Ian Morris has described the founding of the French School at Athens as “a spin-off of the international but mainly Germansponsored Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica in Rome.”12 Yet the French School's particular trajectory reveals a more complex dynamic in its relation to the Instituto's model, highlighting the powerful if subtle interplay between nationalism and scholarship during the later nineteenth century. However much the Instituto was early on dominated by the Germans (and became a vehicle for the spreading of German influence), it was primarily conceived of as an international enterprise: its later shift from private international association to institute of the Prussian state is deeply significant. Historians of the Instituto tend to couch its story in terms of a crescendo of economic pressures.13 Although the Instituto was nominally under the patronage of a Prussian prince, as we have seen, it was required to fund its

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own operations through the sale of its publications. On paper, there appeared to be enough subscriptions to fund the budget, but subscribers were always late in making their payments. Already by 1833 Gerhard had started to write to the Prussian court to ask for money, a practice that soon became a recurring ritual. The sums of money donated by Prussia increased, a development that was not without consequences: starting in 1843, the Prussian

(p.198)

court gained the right to

approve the appointment of the presidents of the Instituto. Meanwhile, there was a steady decline in the number of subscriptions, which dropped from three hundred in 1834 to seventy in 1856. In 1857 Gerhard felt compelled to apply for the Instituto to become a state institution of Prussia, which would include gaining civil service status for its employees. The process of approval was drawn out at great length. At first, the minister of finance opposed the request, and it was only authorized by the parliament as a temporary arrangement. The Prussian king (and recently-crowned emperor), William I, was keen, however, and at temporary headquarters in Versailles, on March 2, 1871—only one day after the peace with France had been signed—he gave his final seal of approval. In the new statute, the main goal of the renamed Deutsches Archäologisches Institut was the classical education of teachers and professors for German schools. There were personal and individual costs to these institutional dynamics. This much can be glimpsed in the slightly embarrassed letter that Gerhard wrote to de Luynes in 1856, communicating his intention of applying for the Instituto to become a Prussian state institution. The letter also makes it clear that the Instituto did not become officially Prussian for economic reasons alone: There is another consideration, which besides the difficult financial position of the Inst. Arch, is no less awkward for its future. The Instituto was founded and directed, according to the words of its original manifesto, by a society of scholars from all Europe, and is, without the declared protection of a government, deprived of inviolable guarantees…. [The] knowledge that the Instituto arch., founded as a private society, will

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never benefit from the consideration available for the foundations properly declared as belonging to Prussia, forces me, in agreement with the other German members of the Dir. of the Inst. to look for a more solid basis for the existence of our Roman foundation, which we know we will find within the structures of the cultural establishments of Prussia.14 The fact that Gerhard and the other founders of the Instituto lived for so long was crucial to its solid establishment, assuring an unprecedented continuity of research effort and scholarly networks. It also meant that they lived through massive social and political transformations. The passing of their generation was also the passing of a certain kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism, capable of nurturing dialogues such as that between de Luynes and Gerhard. The next generation of scholars, for better or for worse, was brought up completely in the national tradition.15 A further perspective on the “nationalization” of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica as a process in which more than just money was at stake is gained by considering how the Instituto's path to Prussianization

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intersected with the

French story. A major loss of subscription for the Instituto was the withdrawal in 1846 by the French government of its ten subscriptions. This just happened to occur in the same year as the founding of the French School in Athens and the launch of the French periodical Revue Archéologique (the latter development itself related to the German initiative, under Gerhard, to start the Archäologische Zeitung in 1843). These episodes hint at still deeper tensions. One of the reasons given for the foundation of the French School at Athens was that the French presence in the Instituto, despite a record of good professional service, was not sufficiently prominent.16 The debate on “Pelasgian antiquities” in the early years of the Instituto had already put a strain on the relationship between German and French scholars; when, after the 1838 death of the duc de Blacas, who had been president of the Instituto, the German Prince of Metternich was elected to the post over the French duc de Luynes, more hard feeling developed within the French scholarly community (if not within de Luynes

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himself).17 In the history of the establishment of the French School at Athens, the commingling of political and scholarly preoccupations in the spirit of national competitiveness becomes all the more explicit. The major figure in the foundation of the French School at Athens was Theobald Piscatory (1800–1870), the French minister to Greece since 1843. A philhellene who had fought for the liberation of Greece during his youth, Piscatory deliberately planned the school as a cultural enterprise with a political role, aimed at winning the support of the Greek cultural elite, which had evinced pro-British inclinations up to that point. The royal edict of 1846 gave a double character to the new institution: authorizing a “French school for specialization in the study of the Greek language, history and antiquities,” but also decreeing that “the French School at Athens will be able to open, with the prior authorisation of the king of Greece, courses in French and Latin language and literature, which will be public and free of charge.”18 This was a clear nod to the philhellenic ideal, which had inspired European sympathy for Greek independence: Greece had originally given culture to Europe, a contribution that merited its liberation from the barbarians and restoration to European status; and Europe, for its part, should endow Greece with the European culture to which Greek civilization had itself given birth. But this Janus character of the new institution elicited criticism, especially once it became clear that the most successful activity of the school was in fact the courses it offered. This success irritated many French scholars, who complained that its members spent more time in instructing than learning anything from the “ignorant Greeks”; it irritated the Greeks as well, who were suspicious of the school's political motivation and resented the teaching services offered by the foreigners.19 Dissatisfaction with the organization of the French school and its character would persist. The first book dedicated to the history of the École, published in 1901, is largely taken up with detailing its continuous transformations in response to criticism during the second half of the nineteenth century. The (p.200)

Instituto does not seem to have been a ready-to-use

model. This history was the work of the French archaeologist

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and university professor Georges Radet (1859–1941), himself an alumnus of the École. Radet praised the ingeniousness of his fellow countrymen for having “the idea of bestowing on Athens, like Rome, a scientific establishment”—“no one else had it,” he asserted.20 At the same time, he expressed his regret that the school's founders had not borne in mind the model of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, thereby seconding the critique of his colleague Théophile Homolle, himself director of the French School at the time. The founding edict of the École, Homolle had complained, had been “prepared by diplomats and litterati, without the aid of academics, it has a purely political and literary character; it relegates archaeology to the background—in Greece!—and it excludes philology.”21 Responsive to such criticisms, the French School repeatedly attempted to reform itself along the lines of the “scientific model” presented by the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica in Rome. The first such attempt came in 1850, followed by similar efforts during Homolle's own tenure, all undertaken with the aim of transforming the French School from a pre-eminently diplomatic and literary enterprise to a properly specialized scholarly institute.22 The 1850 statute, for example, replaced the open-ended vagueness of the original founding edict with a precise research program covering archaeology, philology, and history, and placed it under the scientific supervision of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which selected the questions for the admissions examination and required that students provide an annual progress report on a topic of their choice. Together with Pausanias, the texts commended to the students included the work of scholars such as Gell, Dodwell, Müller, William Martin Leake and the richly illustrated report of the scientific team that had accompanied the French military expedition of Morea in 1828 (published three years later, in three volumes, by Abel Blouet and Amable Ravoisié as Expédition scientifique de Morée. Architecture, Sculptures, Inscriptions et Vues du Péloponèse, des Cyclades et de l’Attique).23 These reform measures were meant to enable the school to “offer serious and publicly recognized results to learning,”24 since “the more the State is inclined to make sacrifices in favor of learning, the more important it is to make sure that its fruits contribute to the advantage of the national

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glory.”25 In the immediate aftermath of the school's reformation, this preoccupation with national glory was duly satisfied with the discoveries made by the “Athénien” Ernest Beulé, who in 1852 excavated the entrance to the Athenian acropolis.26 Through this ongoing process of nationalist competition a new language of politics came increasingly to permeate the practices of archaeology. In the pivotal year of 1871—when the French sued for peace after a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Sedan—an ascendant and newly unified Germany expressed its self-confidence in the realm of scholarship, officially transforming the Instituto, as we have seen, into the German Institute. On the French side, the military

(p.201)

defeat carried debilitating (but, one has now come to see, also dynamizing) consequences for the country's intellectual sense of self. In Digeon's classic 1959 formulation, the Sedan defeat initiated the “German crisis of French thought,” inspiring in French intellectual life a tremendous soul-searching over what had gone wrong.27 Carlo Dionisotti has argued persuasively that the pressure from emerging German standards was already felt by the French earlier, yet its most concrete effects only made themselves apparent after 1870. But most importantly, he has shown that the crisis also inspired enormous efforts toward renewal.28 In fact, seeking to compensate for military defeat with scholarly success, the French archaeologist Albert Dumont (1842–1884) sketched out a proposal for an École de Rome that spoke clearly to the sense of crisis which followed the defeat at Sedan, when he submitted his plan to the minister of public instruction in 1872. He wrote that the mission of the Roman School would be to “accomplish a task, on Italian soil, which, if France didn’t do something about it, would after 1871 become the monopoly of German science.”29 The rivalry with Germany is alluded to in some detail: Dumont defines the proposed school as “the most practical means to stop the advance of German science in Italy and Greece, which is so active, so contemptuous, so ignorant of the qualities that we [the French] can oppose to it…. The people who are intimidated by German activity forget the qualities which belong to us. We can do as well as Germany, we can do better if we want.”30

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The rivalry between the French and the Germans is the most glaring case, with its parallel unfolding on both intellectual and military battlefields, and it offers a vivid illustration of the new forms of political and scholarly entanglement in the age of nations. But the nationalist ideology permeating scholarly institutions spread well beyond the French-German case. The American eagerness in the 1880s to put into place an American institute of archaeology, an archaeological journal, and a school in Athens—not to mention the failed American expedition at Croton—tell us as much. Within this picture, Italy offered its own particularities—many of these had their origins in earlier times, but all were accentuated by the new status of Italy as a unified country in 1860.31 For Italian classical scholars, too, Germany became the model to be imitated, as the new nation sought to organize its education and research institutions, with the twentiethcentury historian Santo Mazzarino even coining the expression “Germanesimo culturale” (Cultural Germanism) to describe the phenomenon.32 As Momigliano famously wrote, “the reputation of an Italian classical scholar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended to a great extent on his reputation of having had German teachers or at least of being approved by the Germans.”33 German scholars were appointed to Italian university chairs (for ancient history, Karl Julius Beloch in Rome and Adolf Holm in Palermo, Emanuel Löwy for archaeology in Rome) and many young Italian scholars spent time in Germany.34 (p.202)

There were complexities, however, in how Italian

scholars related to the German model. As we have seen, the development of modern German archaeological scholarship owed much to the Italian tradition. Theodor Mommsen (1817– 1903)—politician, literary figure, and, above all, a towering historian of ancient Rome—always recognized as his most influential teacher Bartolomeo Borghesi (1781–1860), an antiquarian student of inscriptions who spent most of his life within the borders of the Republic of San Marino. 35 Yet as the century wore on, the mutual (if not perfectly balanced) admiration between Italian and German scholars became occasionally fraught, as exemplified by cases such as that of

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Minervini. The Italian approach came to be seen as by and large an antiquated one, which, having passed its peak, now mostly served to inspire the forward-looking German science of the future. But for all the Italian diligence in following the new German model, there were issues that this model could not address, issues stemming from the fact that the Italian classical past had long exerted an attraction well beyond its own borders. Italy encountered specific challenges in organizing a service to manage this past, both in terms of research and of preservation, and this often resulted in conflicts with foreign as well as local scholars (the Croton story is again telling). The basic, but crucial, difficulty following Italian unification was that traditions of legislation and of institutions differed tremendously from one region to another. (One of the first tasks Giuseppe Fiorelli set himself in Rome was the collecting in a single publication of all the laws concerning antiquities that had existed in the many pre-unification Italian states).36 In Tuscany, for example, early eighteenth-century restrictions were overturned in 1780 when a decree by Pietro Leopoldo established the right to excavate with no permission request and granted ownership of the objects found; Lombardy, under Austrian dominion, instead benefited from the innovative, centralized imperial commission for antiquities established in 1850. Most advanced among Italian states in terms of legislation and institutions were, as we have already observed, Naples and Rome, while the Kingdom of Sardinia was among the least attentive to issues concerning antiquities. It was no help that unification of Italy was effected under this kingdom in 1860. Only after Rome became the capital in 1870 were more concrete initiatives taken. The Roman past, and the modern Roman tradition of caring for it, were compelling— even the then-minister of finances could declare in the new Senate, “We have to take into account the position we occupy in front of the civilized world since we now meet in Rome.”37 Yet the elaboration of a national tradition of archaeological heritage protection was to be a long process; still today, the fragility of its results serve to remind us of the tremendous difficulties involved.38

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Italy would eventually even join other countries in their archaeological efforts overseas, founding its Missione archeologica in Crete in 1884 and its own archaeological school in Athens in 1909.39 But most revealing of the tensions involved in Italian archaeology, with Italy in the unique position among

(p.203)

its counterparts as a country in which

foreigners established their own institutes of archaeology, is the case of the school that Giuseppe Fiorelli established at Pompeii in 1866. The history of this school has been recovered recently in great detail by Marcello Barbanera.40 Fiorelli, who had even spent time in prison for his Risorgimento leanings, emerged as the perfect candidate after unification and the end of the Kingdom of Naples to be awarded the directorship of excavation in Pompeii. It was then that he famously began having casts made of the hollows left by human figures who had perished in the lava and undertook excavations on a more systematic basis then before. He also taught archaeology at Naples's university. This multifaceted institutional experience led Fiorelli to conceive the project of the Scuola archeologica di Pompeii with the goal of training specialized staff for excavations, museum curatorship and university research and teaching. The royal decree sanctioning the foundation of the school called on Italy to be no less great than “other civilized nations,” such as Germany (with the Instituto in Rome), and France (with its Athenian School). Concerning archaeology, the decree proudly proclaimed: “it was born in our own land.”41 Its explicit goal was the study of monuments in order to derive from them “facts more or less certain or probable from which to redress history, throw light on mythology and other disciplines whose aims were to illustrate the public and private life of the ancients.”42 Residence in Pompeii, it was said, would expose students both to objects of art and to practical knowledge necessary to bring new life to “the study of archaeology, which, because of its difficulties and the deprivations it entails, requires of students that they remain almost solitary behind university walls.”43 But the aftermath proved less glorious than this promise, as the lack of funding and other practical problems plagued the newly established school from the start.

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The first competition for admission to the school attracted four candidates, who were called to be examined on translation of and commentary on Herodotus and Lucretius, the boundaries and inhabitants of ancient Asia Minor, the figures of “censor” and “arcont,” and the origins and developments of the myth of Apollo. None of the four was admitted. The second year admittance examination yielded better results: three students were admitted, but only one of them completed the full twoyear course (Edoardo Brizio, who went on to be a major archaeologist in Bologna). Because of this mixed success, together apparently with some hostility from the new minister, the project was called into question and an inspection ordered. The inspector dispatched, Ruggero Bonghi, was a classicist and a politician. Bonghi, exiled from his native Naples in 1848 and elected a deputy of the new Italian state in 1860, had since become a powerful presence in the new Italian national government; he gave a glowing report: “Pompeii is a place where young scholars gain constant and practical instruction in excavation. Residence here grants them, more than any lesson from a teacher ever will, the knowledge required to determine where to dig, and how to conduct a dig so that as little of the ancient remains as possible is

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lost, and the

majority of the remains is discovered and preserved intact.”44 Bonghi went so far as to recommend the school as compulsory to anyone aspiring to a position in museums and excavations. Not satisfied, the minister asked for the opinion of major scholars, including Theodor Mommsen. The latter was much less favorable to Fiorelli's school: he praised the idea but insisted that the time spent there should be limited and complemented by a university education, which was the necessary foundation for any real understanding of ancient art, something to be learned in front of masterpieces and in the company of expert professors. The Scuola di Pompeii folded after a few years. Fiorelli's career flourished well beyond the school's collapse; his own professional trajectory epitomizes the successes and shortcomings of the Italian situation as a whole. In 1875 Bonghi, now a minister, appointed Fiorelli, whom he had long admired, to the Direzione Centrale degli Scavi e dei Musei del Regno, and dispatched as his assistant another southerner, the

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archaeologist Felice Barnabei (1842–1922). A native of Abruzzi, Barnabei had received his degree from the Scuola Normale di Pisa and had spent ten years in Naples, teaching high school Latin and Greek, before being called to Rome.45 In organizing the newly established office, these men faced a truly daunting task, marked by the effort simultaneously to standardize various regional traditions and to maintain a dialogue with the German model that dominated classical scholarship. Their many achievements included initiating the systematization of sovrintendenze and museums on a national scale, drawing uniform rules for excavation, and putting into place in 1876 an Italian journal for swift publication of excavation results (Notizie degli Scavi di antichità) and in 1892 another journal for lengthier reports (Monumenti Antichi dell’accademia dei Lincei). They did not, however, bring all of their plans to completion. Fiorelli pressed on with his attempt to establish a Scuola di archeologia but repeatedly failed, thus finding himself forced to appoint as servants of the state local antiquarians of whom he remained suspicious.46 The situation of a “classical country” such as Italy was unique, with the repeated conflicts between public and private interests, while divisions among local, Italian, and foreign perspectives remained deep. Francesco De Angelis's lovely essay on Fiorelli captures the contrast between a local Italian scholar submerged in bureaucracy and tied to his desk, and the foreign scholars who visited Italy on pure research trips, able to plunge directly into field or library work.47 Magna Graecia was profoundly affected by the nationalistic transformations of this period. Ironically, although many of the most knowledgeable of the new state administrators for antiquities, men such as Fiorelli and Barnabei, came from the South, the region also presented some of the most substantial obstacles to their efforts: severely limited resources simply could not cover the enormous volume of work. Sicily fared somewhat better than the peninsular southern regions and continued its long-established tradition of distinguished (p.205) research and competent officials: in addition to Adolf Holm, the historian Micheli Amari and the archaeologist Antonino Salinas were called to Palermo as professors “straordinari.” Both Amari and Salinas were themselves of

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Sicilian origin and brought luster to late nineteenth-century research on the island.48 Meanwhile, in Calabria and southern Puglia, a university had yet to be established, and the establishment of national schools of archaeology in Greece intensified the transfer of the research on Greek archaeology to the mainland. After the unification of Italy, Magna Graecia itself became part of a new nation-state that faced the challenge of uniting a politically and culturally diverse and fractured country. If before the difficulty had been reconciling the Greek past with the history of the Neapolitan Kingdom, now it was reconciling it with the whole of Italy. The South, moreover, already difficult to assimilate, was on the way to becoming the Southern Question. But before that change could take place, Magna Graecia was once again put on the map, this time by Lenormant.

Lenormant's Greek South Italy: A Travelogue Perhaps it is not a surprise that Lenormant, having missed many of the national and institutional scholarly developments of the period, was to become the late nineteenth-century “discoverer” of Magna Graecia, a classical region overlooked by these very same developments.49 Lenormant's books—La Grande Grèce: Paysages et histoire (Magna Graecia: landscapes and history, with the first two volumes published in 1881 and the last one, posthumously, in 1884) and À travers l’Apulie et la Lucanie: Notes de voyage (Through Apulia and Lucania: travel notes, published in two volumes in 1883)— widely advertised, and capitalized on, Magna Graecia's unfulfilled potential as an alluring, little-known destination and subject of study. That Lenormant was able to capture Magna Graecia's overlooked appeal so successfully is fitting, given his own idiosyncratic path during a period when scholarly trajectories were being forcefully institutionalized. Even within French intellectual genealogies Lenormant has been difficult to accommodate. (Despite his engagement with Greece, he never appears in Radet's history of the French School at Athens.) Though he was dismissed as a dilettante by some contemporary and many later scholars, Lenormant's elusiveness is indicative of a specifically French conundrum at a historical moment when France's long-standing European

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cultural dominance was giving way to nationalized scholarship across Europe. France's main opponent was Germany, both militarily (culminating in 1870 with the French defeat at Sedan) and culturally (as the vicissitudes of the French School at Athens demonstrate). The charges levelled against Lenormant's scholarship both by his compatriots and by German scholars—that it was unscientific and insufficiently specialized—exposed a raw nerve: these were precisely the points around which a French intellectual

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inferiority

complex had developed vis à vis German “science.” Yet these very characteristics of Lenormant's work were in retrospect what led him to ignore mainstream approaches and discover Magna Graecia as a promising area of study. Magna Graecia's status as underexplored scholarly terrain allowed Lenormant to treat it on his own terms, but also, ironically, ultimately led to the official governmental sponsorship that had long eluded him. In Magna Graecia, Lenormant saw his last and possibly most significant muse. His immense productivity, in a career cut short by early death, has left him open to the criticism that his interests ranged too widely. Late in life, however, when he turned his attention to it, Magna Graecia became for Lenormant a passion as intense as any he had ever experienced—his last journey there, in fact, led to fatal illness. He had first passed through South Italy in 1866, directed to Greece by way of Taranto. It was not until thirteen years later, though, that a journey through the area would make a deep impression, prompting him to return for further travel in 1881 and in 1882, the last, ill-fated journey. From these travels resulted his La Grande-Grèce and À travers l’Apulie et la Lucanie, as well as numerous articles and essays—his very last works, some of them published only posthumously. The influential French numismatist Ernst Babelon (1854– 1924), a younger colleague and friend of Lenormant, penned an obituary in which he offered ambiguous praise for the scholar's prolific publishing habits, complimenting the “enormous mass” of Lenormant's writings, but comparing them to those “summae of scholars from the Middle Ages, the extent of which is frightful as much as it is surprising.”50

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Olivier Rayet spoke in a similar vein in his inaugural lecture upon succeeding Lenormant as professor at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1884. Rayet—a brilliant archaeologist who represented French hopes for scholarly innovation before his untimely death in 1887, at the age of forty—called on the new generation to narrow and deepen their research interests and hinted once again at French insecurity about the lack of scientific rigor.51 Thus do Lenormant's idiosyncrasies, and the way his colleagues reacted to them, relate to the wider anxieties of French intellectual life at the end of nineteenth century. Despite admiration for Lenormant's work, there existed during his lifetime, and there remains, a sense of unease as to how to gauge its significance. Not only did his research give the impression of being a mile wide and an inch deep, but it also attracted the charge of forgery from critics in both France and Germany. Indeed, the fact that Lenormant produced forgeries of ancient inscriptions continued to haunt the most prominent French scholars of epigraphy throughout the twentieth century. For example, Louis Robert (1904– 1985), citing a 1933 study of Lenormant as a savant mythomane (a compulsive liar of a scholar), left it to modern psychology to explain this “spoiled child.”52 At the very close of the twentieth century, Olivier Masson measured Lenormant's fame by the impressive number of notices that appeared upon his death, but pointedly remarked on the conspicuous absence from this outpouring

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of any

mention in the Comptes rendus de l’Academie des inscriptions et Belles Lettres; in any case Masson's own essay on Lenormant was entitled Un erudit déconcertant (A disconcerting man of learning).53 Lenormant's peculiarities, it should be noted, were rooted in his status as an insider of the French establishment, not an outsider. His father was the illustrious Charles Lenormant (1802–1859), who had been in Egypt with Champollion and in Greece with the Morea expedition, before becoming a professor of archaeology first at the Sorbonne and then at the Collège de France. His mother, Amélie Cyvoct (1810–1894), had been adopted by Madame Récamier, the famous beauty and renowned society hostess immortalized by the painter Jacques Louis David. As a result Amélie, who later edited her

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adoptive mother's correspondence and wrote under her own name as well, directly experienced the red-hot center of early nineteenth-century French political and literary life. In François's scholarly persona there was more than a touch of salon culture—he wrote prolifically with ease and could claim numerous friends in high places. Much else that would later seem “disconcerting” to his colleagues can also be traced to his father. For one thing, there is the wide range of interests: Charles himself lectured and published on the history of western Asia and on Egyptology, as well as on Greek numismatics, ceramics, and archaeology. It was Charles's desire, moreover, to provide his precocious son with a unique education that initiated unconventional relations with institutions: François was educated at home (his only formal degree was in law, which he took in 1857). This training seemed to work well for the young prodigy: at fifteen, he published his first two scholarly articles, one in the Revue Archéologique and the other in the Revue Numismatique. Within the familial sphere also originated the most controversial aspect of Lenormant's activities: his acts of forgery. At seventeen, while at the family's country estate, François apparently came upon a collection of medieval inscriptions (both Latin and runic) at the nearby Chapelle Saint-Eloi. Charles solemnly announced the discoveries at the Institut de France, inspiring many enthusiasts, including the German philologist and mythologist Jacob Grimm, with the news; soon after, however, the inscriptions were exposed as fakes. Yet all of the Lenormants maintained the authenticity of François's discoveries to the grave and indeed defended them aggressively—this would also prove to be François's stance in response to later accusations of forgery that punctuated his career (for example, his 1864 forgery of inscriptions from Antandros and subsequent ones in the years 1866 to 1868).54 François's education included trips with his father to Mediterranean lands, to Italy in 1858 and to Greece the following year. It was during this Greek voyage that Charles Lenormant died, depriving the young François of both a father and a mentor. Nonetheless, the father's ghostly presence continued to shape François's career, in ways that went well beyond the pursuit of his wide-ranging research interests.

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Correspondence preserved in the archives of the French (p.208)

Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the ministry responsible

for scientific expeditions abroad, including archaeological ones) shows that ministry bureaucrats believed something should be done for the orphan of Charles Lenormant, a scholar who had contributed so much to the cultural prestige of the French state. Thus the young man was solicited to present a proposal; he submitted two, one involving Egypt, the other Greece. Both were quite general and naïve.55 He was gently nudged toward undertaking work in Greece, with a focus on Eleusis, and so began his excavation at that site in 1860, which resulted in a number of publications. For his first desk job—assistant librarian at the Institut de France—Lenormant seems to have also been indebted to his parents’ connections. His father's close friend Baron de Witte (1808–1889), a Belgian archaeologist who lived in Paris and was a founding member of the Instituto in Rome, remained close to François Lenormant all his life; it was with him as coeditor that François launched the Gazette Archéologique in 1875—the year after he became professor of archaeology at the Bibliothèque Nationale.56 And Lenormant himself never shied away from advertising his famous father. His first article on Greek matters, “La Minerve du Parthenon,” published in the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1860, concerned a small statue in a corner of the Athenian Theseion (which in 1834 had been turned into a museum), which his father, during his last, fatal voyage to Greece, had identified as a reproduction of Phidias's Athena Parthenos. Lenormant accompanies this art historical piece with repeated references to his father, whose memory, he concludes, “he himself bewails together with all of learned Europe.”57 Years later, in 1875, Lenormant opened the inaugural issue of the Gazette Archéologique with an article on the western pediment of the Parthenon. Generally careful to provide rich, scholarly footnotes, Lenormant nonetheless also invokes the personal, writing on the very first page that it was his own father who “immediately communicated this find to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres.”58 For all the help that Lenormant received in launching his career, he was undoubtedly an extremely productive scholar. His curiosity and capacity for work seem to have been

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unbounded. He arrived at Eleusis for his first sponsored mission, accompanied by his mother, just as news was breaking of the massacres of Christians in Syria and Lebanon. The young Lenormant immediately departed for the Levant, writing accounts of the massacres that eventually filled two entire books. These were both in print by 1861, and within four years, having published his work at Eleusis, Lenormant was turning to oriental studies (true to the interest expressed in the proposal he had submitted to the Foreign Ministry a few years earlier). He rapidly produced handbooks of oriental history and monographs on Akkadian and on cuneiform writing—all topics that remained, at the time, outside of the academic mainstream—as well as many studies of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian civilization that ranged in tenor from the scholarly to the popularizing.59 His 1874 Les sciences occultes en Asie (The occult sciences in Asia), for instance, was swiftly translated into both

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German and English,

and Lenormant is today considered among the founders of oriental studies. All the while he had continued to write on numismatics and epigraphy for various European journals. This prodigious activity was finally enough to make Lenormant's fellow academics take notice and elect him professor at the prestigious and highly visible Bibliothèque Nationale in 1874, although he remained outside the university system proper.60  The launch the following year of the Gazette Archéologique was yet another act of intellectual defiance, as the new journal was pitted in open rivalry against the establishment's Revue Archéologique. The Lenormant who came to Magna Graecia in 1879 was a man who had definitely “arrived.” Despite lingering controversy over his forgeries and a persistent unease in his relations with the academic establishment's, he was self-assured as a scholar, and graced with charismatic and humane aristocratic savoir faire. (Even so, the limits of individual initiative in an age of institutions are only too well illustrated by the fate of his undertakings: the Gazette Archéologique, which Lenormant authored nearly in its entirety while using as many as nine pseudonyms in addition to his own name, survived the death of its founder by only a few years.)

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The inspiration for Lenormant's scholarly visits to Magna Graecia can apparently be traced to his meeting in Rome in 1876 with Felice Barnabei, who had been working for a year alongside Fiorelli at the newly established Direzione Centrale degli Scavi e dei Musei del Regno.61 Fiorelli and Barnabei must have involved Lenormant in their conversations about South Italian antiquities, which now fell within their purview at the Direzione Centrale, as we have seen—it seems that the idea of a collaboration among the three men was first aired around this time. In 1878, Lenormant was again in Italy, attending an international conference of orientalists in Florence; he later wrote that it was on this occasion that he became interested in the notable Jewish presence in South Italy.62 By the close of 1879 he would set his sights on a deeper exploration of Magna Graecia: this trip to the region began in Puglia at the end of September and concluded with a return to Naples on October 20. A month later, in writing to Wolfgang Helbig (then director of the Instituto in Rome), he repeated old arguments for parallels between objects from Palestrina and Assyrian finds, but offered additional evidence for Assyrian influences on South Italy in the form of some vases from Cerveteri.63 Lenormant's newfound focus on Magna Graecia would soon displace his orientalist obsessions. He gravitated almost as if naturally to this area beyond the reach of his countrymen's institutionalized research programs. There is little or no trace of his earlier search for oriental cultural parallels in his major publications on South Italy, yet an indirect echo of his earlier interests is still discernible. Magna Graecia was similarly unexplored but familiar, classical but marginal, a wide-open landscape ripe for the writing of travelogues and for the excavation of its deep history, a landscape replete with oriental images that could still be invoked to convey a sense of exoticism. (p.210)

The 1879 trip was brief in duration, just over twenty

days divided between Puglia and the Ionian coast, including visits to ancient sites from Taranto to Reggio. It was these sites Lenormant would cover in the first two volumes of La Grande Grèce. With no official French sponsorship to acknowledge, Lenormant dedicated the book to Fiorelli: it was thanks to the latter's “official facilities,” his “smoothing out of

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all obstacles,” and introductions “which everywhere entailed an attentive and cordial welcoming,” that the Frenchman had been able to see so much in such a short time—even the “new means of communication provided by the railway” would not have made such a whirlwind tour possible in and of itself.64 However oblique, this comment, on the very first page of La Grande Grèce, marks a crucial distinction from earlier travelers: Lenormant traveled by train. His arrival at Taranto inevitably calls to mind those of Vivant Denon and Swinburne—but where the latter made his solitary way on horseback, Lenormant conjures up one dramatic landscape after another, as seen from his train car, descending “rapidly” toward the Gulf of Taranto, passing by cliffs and gullies, and “picturesque villages hanging on steep slopes of calcaric rocks burnt by the sun and spiked with nopals.”65 Where Vivant Denon recounted a nocturnal carriage accident, Lenormant just as evocatively tells of having to change wagons in the middle of the night in consequence of a harrowing train crash. In Lenormant's descriptions, the railway seems to embody a promise of modernization for these southern regions, summoning them to a “brilliant future. But at the same time, the train reinforces many of the old tropes about a remote South, cut off from Europe, with Taranto appearing as a city that has “something oriental about it.”66 The steam engines run through fields where agriculture “has not made progress since antiquity”; ancient olive trees that have shaded “generations of Norman knights covered in metallic mesh and gambisons” are now perplexed witnesses to the speeding away of this “fantastic monster feeding on fire.” After an “eclipse twenty centuries long,” writes Lenormant, the miracle of the railway will bring life back to the Achaean city of Metaponto, “where the fertility of the soil asks only for a workforce in order to produce inexhaustible agricultural riches.” Nevertheless the city remains “a desert,” for the time being, “and one arrives there through the desert,” with the railway tracks “running along the seaside, in view of the waves breaking on the sand dunes with muffled murmurs.”67 Lenormant's Magna Graecia is, once again, a region of abandoned ancient cities and resonant emptiness. But rather than a disappointing destination encountered on the search

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for Greece, which the region had been for so many eighteenthcentury travelers, Magna Graecia is for Lenormant a place to rediscover the Greek past—despite (but in fact at times precisely because of its) being a place “infinitely less visited and known than mainland Greece or Asia Minor.”68 Here, one visits “sites rather than ruins”: even Heraclaea, whose precise location is “more certain than any other in Magna Graecia,” had “for a long

(p.211)

time returned to solitude.”69 Sybaris,

meanwhile, is a “plain covered in ruins of ancient constructions, multiplied enough to show clearly that one is on the site of a city which revolted and is buried under its own rubble.”70 Lenormant poignantly makes the case for the significance of visiting such desolate sites in historicist terms: “viewing these places, it is necessary to bring oneself completely with one's imagination into the midst of the men who lived there once and the events in which they were actors.”71 He is struck by how “the aspect of the country, the nature of the vegetation, the intensity of the light, all call to mind Greece,” and how the waters of the Gulf of Taranto display that “milky shade peculiar to Greek seas which the Hellenes have so well expressed by the word galene.”72 Moreover, what one experiences here, Lenormant claims, is Greek history of major significance. Putting to work the insights of a historicist imagination, he writes that “the first Greek colonists, upon arriving on these coasts, must have believed themselves to have been in their own country.”73 Lenormant's account of Magna Graecia brims with references to Greece. At Croton, he claims, one breathes the same air as in Greece. Lenormant stands at the foot of the one surviving column of the Hera Lacinia temple at Capo Colonne, and cannot help but recall (and quote in full) Lord Byron's verses on Attica's Cape Sounion. A reference to François-René Chateaubriand's passages on the distinctive character of Greek promontories follows, as Lenormant takes in a sweeping view of the South Italian Ionian Gulf. Presenting the region's history as one of uniquely successful Greek territorial expansion and cultural achievement, Lenormant calls for further research. A site like Sybaris, he argues, would “give sure and fundamental results,” since “the destruction of this town had been as sudden” as that of Pompeii. Lenormant, here

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joining the discourse of the German crisis of French thought, calls France to action, with Magna Graecia offering the opportunity to catch up with other great nations: “the number of places in the world where excavations might be truly rewarding is not unlimited,” and the French have to compete with the Germans, whose government has already generously supported, “without bargaining, excavations at Halicarnassus, Ephesus, Olympia and Pergamon.”74 Even with no such large-scale excavations underway, Magna Graecia offered Lenormant significant scope for scholarly exploits. In some instances, he simply had to remind his readership of local knowledge neglected outside the region. For example, he eagerly points out how, in the “excellent” Handbuch der alten Geographie (Handbook of ancient geography, 1877), Alfred Forbiger mistakenly presents Monteleone as a place of “no ancient ruins.” Forbiger had overlooked what “a mere reading of Vito Capialbi's dissertations would set straight”—an oversight that licenses Lenormant to linger for many pages on Monteleone.75 Moreover, he readily engages with many of the long-standing open questions surrounding Magna Graecia's topography, such as the location of ancient Terina, discussing previous opinions and putting forward his own.

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In his

discussion of Taranto's terracottas, Lenormant seizes the opportunity to be the first to study South Italian material on its own terms—a remarkable innovation, if one considers that at the time, as even Lenormant attests, these clay sculptures were sold in Rome under the pretense of being Greek, rather than being from Magna Graecia. During his 1879 short visit to Taranto, Lenormant left orders to excavate around the Church of San Francesco de Paola; as a result, he received numerous boxes containing thousands of finds, from which he made, on aesthetic grounds, a “careful choice” of seven hundred for the Louvre.76 In publishing about these terracottas, Lenormant was the first to identify and describe a chronology and a specific style for South Italian art, and to make a case for linking its iconography to the importance of the cults of Demeter and Bacchus in the South Italian religion (see figure 4.1). Official recognition of Lenormant's scholarly and aquisitional achievements in South Italy soon followed. In

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exchange for Taranto terracottas, the Louvre offered to reimburse his travel and shipping expenses, and his subsequent journey in 1882 received official government sponsorship. Beyond untapped research opportunities, Lenormant found something more profound in Magna Graecia. Not only could he range widely over the region's Greek past, but he could do it on his own terms—finding a suitable match for the tendency of his “intellectual curiosity” to stretch “over all subjects, time periods, and civilizations” (in Babelon's words).77 The virgin territory of Greek South Italy, seemingly undiscovered, invited the kinds of impressions (p.213)

and

anecdotes that extended beyond the conventions of Figure 4.1. Taranto's terracotta figures, scholarship; it from Lenormant, “Les terres cuites de was, in other Tarente,” 1882. (Courtesy of the Art and words, the Architecture Library, Stanford University ideal setting Libraries.) for a travelogue, in which Lenormant's literary abilities and inspiration revelled. Since, in his words, there was no “history of the Greek cities of South Italy represented from a complete point of view and sufficiently developed,”78 Lenormant joined description of places to personal archaeological observations interspersed with historical excursus—for which he could claim, however, a legitimate scholarly standing. He explains in the preface that though his aim is to popularize, his scholarly effort remains serious and conscientious. Scholars, he boldly declares, are “the only ones who will be able to appreciate the laborious research work demanded for his book, the trace of which he took care to efface” in the interest of non-specialized readership.79 Lenormant dispensed with footnotes but signaled to erudites the importance and novelty of his work, both methodologically and in terms of subject matter: his was an unprecedented use of numismatics for the ancient history of South Italy, and, with his attention to Byzantine traces, he claimed to have opened a new field of studies altogether. Indeed, his excursus takes the reader to the threshold of the present, with vivid accounts of the convulsions

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that had taken place during the process of Italy's national unification as it evolved in South Italy. La Grande Grèce remains a compelling read even today.

Lenormant's last trip, which resulted in the book À travers l’Apulie et la Lucanie, saw him delving even further into the various pasts of South Italy, while traveling to interior regions, many of which had never before seen foreign scholar-visitors. In his treatment of the only two Greek sites he discusses in this work, Velia and Paestum, his varied manner of appropriating Greek history becomes clear. The former city Lenormant can present as a “terre inconnue,”80 adding a compelling account of exploring the city's mostly unknown remains. The episodes he narrates range from the adventurous (Lenormant reaching a site on the back of a mule and on foot) to the idyllic (locals preparing a sumptuous picnic for the traveler) to the informative (a description of finds such as Velia's distinct bricks). Paestum, on the other hand, is presented as being on the “usual itinerary of the immense majority of tourists … full of bystanders just passing through.” Nonetheless, Lenormant offers his readers a vivid account of the “melancholic grandeur of the landscape and the pure beauty of the ruined buildings,” as he had appreciated them on a solitary out-of-season visit twenty-five years earlier, and gives advice on ways to approach and appreciate Paestum differently from the visiting masses.81 The remainder of the book is taken up with interior sites of Basilicata that allow Lenormant to study and admire the region's medieval period (not coincidentally, the Gazette Archéologique embraced contributions on medieval themes starting in that same year of 1883)—thus offering his revelation of the South Italian Romanesque. On the whole, Lenormant's Magna Graecia served him well, finally transforming him into a respected scholar of the classical world, but on his own

(p.214)

terms. In fact, the

publication in 1881 of the first two volumes of La Grande Grèce was followed shortly after by his appointment to the Acadèmie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and the Institut de France, honors that had previously eluded him. For a long time, his work was the standard source on Magna Graecia and La Grande Grèce remains much beloved (and reissued) today

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in South Italy itself. Here, not only did Lenormant win over many friends during his travels, but his writings have long been thought to express a sincere and passionate concern for, and deep understanding of, the place.82 Yet it is worth remembering that, for all of Lenormant's generosity toward the local scholars in his travelogues, he struck a more patronizing tone in the report read at the Acadèmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. On this occasion he lauded the local research efforts, but noted that the praiseworthy zeal of these initiatives was not matched by “sufficient competence, critical spirit and up-to-date knowledge,” a criticism mitigated only by the admission that this was, after all, the most underdeveloped region of Italy, sorely lacking the support of libraries and universities to which “we are accustomed.”83 In fact, while Lenormant's transhistorical approach to the region, stretching from its ancient history and archaeology to its current socioeconomic problems, enabled him to connect with local scholars, he was at the same time able to exploit his knowledge of the area and address a wider European audience in ways not accessible to them. The region's obscurity, which Lenormant bemoaned, was also a feature that he exploited in his work. As a scholar he was not nearly as isolated as he portrayed himself: there was already an ongoing tradition of local studies, as well as burgeoning state-sponsored research efforts in the South, as Lenormant's own experiences show—after all, the Frenchman had Barnabei himself as a travel companion in the interior of Lucania. It is however true that, although articles on Magna Graecia's archaeology were already appearing during those years in the Notizie degli Scavi, it would take some time before any figure with an impact comparable to Lenormant's emerged from these efforts—the pioneers would be Pais and Orsi. As Italian scholars of the new nation-state, they faced a double challenge: to accommodate their work to the developing scientific disciplines (in ways that Lenormant bypassed), and to incorporate Magna Graecia into a nationwide narrative, whether in terms of archaeological service and heritage or narrative ancient history (considerations that again Lenormant could ignore). To Pais's and Orsi's handling of these concerns we now turn.

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Histories of Magna Graecia: From Grote's Greece to Pais's Italy Lenormant lamented the lack of a comprehensive history for Magna Graecia and offered this lack as justification for the long historical digressions that punctuated his account of the region, made up of flashes of historical narrative

(p.215)

interspersed within his episodic and discontinuous travelogue. In these asides Lenormant pursued several overarching themes: in particular, the significance of Greek territorial expansion, which he envisioned as a peaceable colonization, and the deep, underlying affinities between the Greek colonists and the earlier inhabitants, which he assumed on the basis of the latter's Pelasgian descent. Yet undoubtedly these pages of Lenormant's still fell short of his own ideal of a sweeping and comprehensive account. The kind of historical plot Lenormant called for would have been familiar enough to his readers: such narratives were common in this era of nation-making—this was, after all, the century, as Carmine Ampolo put it, when “national roads” were established even in the field of Greek history.84 The German approach to classical scholarship remained the central model, either to be followed or to be challenged; George Grote pointedly somehow managed to do both in his History of Greece (1846–1856), which, combining philological precision with narrative sweep, decisively shaped the narrative of ancient Greek history for some time to come. In the process, the marginalization of Magna Graecia, already evident in Mitford's work, was fully consummated; at the same time, however, new possibilities were opening up for crafting modern narratives to understand the ancient past. An influential standard for the treatment of Italy's ancient past had already emerged with Giuseppe Micali's L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani (Italy before Roman rule). First published in 1810 and repeatedly edited and rereleased by Micali until his death in 1844, this work is acknowledged today as a foundational text both for Risorgimento studies and for research on Italian historiography of the peninsula's ancient past. Magna Graecia, however, resisted easy incorporation into constructs such as Micali's, while South Italian treatments

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of Magna Graecia (like Giuseppe Castaldi's La Magna Grecia brevemente descritta [Magna Graecia Briefly Described, 1842] and Nicola Leoni's Della Magna Grecia e delle tre Calabrie [Of Magna Graecia and the Three Calabrias, 1844–1846]), adopted contemporary Risorgimento imagery, but still conformed to a descriptive rather than narrative mode. The interplay of nationalism, ascendant German scholarship, and powerful narrative models from British sources would spur new developments. Tensions among these three forces lay behind what is now considered the first modern, scholarly historical narrative of Greek South Italy, Ettore Pais's 1894 Storia della Sicilia e della Magna Graecia (History of Sicily and Magna Graecia). In order to appreciate the developments that brought Pais's work to fruition, however, we need first to consider the achievement and influence of Grote. Grote and Magna Graecia

Widely considered the first modern history of ancient Greece, that of Grote (1794–1871) is a model within or against which scholars still work today.85 His History of Greece was published in twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856.

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Grote's narrative structure—including the place it granted to Greek South Italy—owes much to the eighteenth-century British narrative tradition initiated by Stanyan, but his work was also a departure in that he looked to the new German scholarship. Thus Grote, by profession a banker and a politician, managed to fulfill Momigliano's thesis that modern historiography originates from the synthesis of political narrative and antiquarian erudition to a degree that Gillies and Mitford had not achieved. Grote explicitly acknowledged the contribution of the German philological sciences to his methodology—it was due to German achievements “during the generation since Mitford's work,” he wrote, that “the stock of facts and documents handed down from the ancient world has been combined and illustrated in a thousand different ways: and if our witnesses cannot be multiplied, we at least have numerous interpreters to catch, repeat, amplify and explain their broken and half-inaudible depositions.” Grote's philological approach set out to authorize his interpretations through systematic source criticism, now that “the poets, historians, orators and philosophers of Greece have thus been

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all rendered both more intelligible and more instructive than they were to a student in the last century and the general picture of the Grecian world may now be conceived with a degree of fidelity, which, considering our imperfect materials it is curious to contemplate.”86 This, he claimed, made his history more modern: “the law respecting sufficiency of evidence ought to be the same for ancient times as for modern: and the reader will find in this history an application to the former, of criteria analogous to those which have been long recognised in the latter.”87 As had been the case with Gillies and Mitford, Grote's methodological innovation was linked to his novel interpretation of Greek history. While correcting the methodological deficiencies of Mitford, Grote also criticized his condemnation of Greek democracy. For example, Grote definitively divided Greek history into a mythic period and a historical period, which for him began with the Olympiads. He dedicated the whole of his first volume to legendary Greece, which he treated as a mythical tradition. This dismissal of the historicity of the Greek past entailed an original interpretation of the development of Greek political history: Grote dismantled Mitford's view that the peaceful age of Greek monarchies was followed by the disruptive turbulence of democratic times.88 Indeed, Grote's liberal political tone and his revaluation of the Greek experience have led the intellectual historian Frank Turner to define his work as “the apotheosis of Athenian democracy.”89 Recent work has revealed such an apotheosis to be quite nuanced; Giuseppe Cambiano has recovered a rich, if elusive, history of Europeanwide, varied and sustained reflection about democracy, ancient and modern, going back to the Renaissance.90 But it remains true that, in Grote's unprecedented extensive narrative interpretation of Greek history, Greek liberty was firmly rooted in democratic institutions, which were seen as fostering the constitutional morality of the fifth-century Greek polis. The history of Grote's History of Greece has already been told at

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great length and appropriately set in the

sociopolitical context that produced it—the historian's formative relationship with John Stuart Mill and the “philosophical Radicals,” as well as his own active political

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engagement in parliamentary reform.91 Nevertheless, focusing on the place of Magna Graecia in Grote's influential history of Greece yields new insights into some of the deeper tensions that underpinned his writings. Since Grote, scholars have approached the problem of understanding the history of Greece as the problem of understanding the history of the Greek nation. Ampolo asks why, when the German tradition elaborated the necessary methodologies for fulfilling such a goal, it did not produce a history of the whole of Greece before Grote. His answer is that German scholars, living in a modern country still not unified, met with specific problems in reconstructing “the unitary course of the highly divided Greek ‘people.’ ”92 This unfulfilled German aspiration to write a panoptic Greek history is exemplified in the project Müller did not complete before he died. He had conceived a history of Greece organized by race: Geschichte hellenischer Stämme und Städte; his 1820s studies of the Dorians, the Aeginetans, and the Minoans were meant to constitute a unified whole. Müller seems to have envisioned a patchwork of groups united by culture, rather than a tightly bound proto-nation-state, but scholars since have had difficulty imagining how the work itself could have been synthesized.93 It has been argued that once Germans did start to compose narrative histories of the Greeks following Grote's lead, they interpreted the history of Greece through the lens of their particular bias, as a failed attempt to achieve unity. Moses Finley, for example, wrote that “for Grote, a representative of the mid-nineteenth-century English liberal establishment, the Greek pattern was merely perplexing—he made no attempt to explain it, so far as I can discover—but on the continent, and particularly Germany, it had by then become an exemplary fault.”94 Yet Grote's outlook is far from being unproblematic in relation to the Greek nation. This is true in ways that show how deeply embedded Grote was in his own “national context,” and that, at the same time, have particular consequences for Magna Graecia. According to Grote's confident assessment, Greek history presented, from the time of Pisistratus to the death of Alexander the Great, “the acts of an historical drama capable of being recounted in perspicuous succession, and connected Page 34 of 81

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by a sensible thread of unity.”95 But along with this conviction —which was the backbone of his political interpretation— Grote also expressed awareness of a further complexity concerning the Greek world. He wrote that one of the limitations of the Greek sources was that “we are thus reduced to judge of the whole Hellenic world, eminently multiform as it was, from a few compositions: excellent indeed in themselves, but bearing too exclusively the stamp of Athens.”96 As a result of this imbalance, less well-attested historical periods and particular territories, such as Sicily and Magna Graecia, remained detached from the main historical drama and ended up playing a

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secondary role. Grote

wrote of this dilemma: “I shall interweave in their proper places the important but outlying adventures of the Sicilian and Italian Greeks.”97 The ways in which Grote “interwove” the history of Magna Graecia owe much to the previous work of Gillies and Mitford. Magna Graecia first received mention, together with Sicily, in a description of Greek colonization, as part of a general overview of Greek matters before the Persian Wars, and then in connection with Pythagoras, in an interlude on philosophy that followed the account of the Persian Wars. Grote attributed the richness and wealth of the western colonies during the course of the sixth century BCE to the fertility of the land and the abundance of cattle;98 and, again like Mitford, he dismissed the Pythagorean tradition: Pythagoras might have influenced politics, but he was not a legislator and had no specific political goals.99 The decline of Magna Graecia was caused, according to Grote, by the internecine wars that consumed it. The destruction of Sybaris weakened the western Greeks, who gradually became unable to resist the assaults of the native Italians. In fact, by the time of the Persian Wars, “Sparta and Athens sent to ask for aid both from Sicily and Korkyra—but not from Magna Graecia.”100 Grote does, however, set a new tone with his interest in the enterprise of Greek colonialism, and he differs markedly in this respect from Gillies and Mitford. From the very beginning of the book, Greek expansion is portrayed against the background of the “non-Hellenic world out there,” a historical

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blank slate that Grote filled in with the “early dialects and races” discussed in Müller's work.101 Grote's relatively novel emphasis on dealing with the native Italian population is also evinced in the type of references he makes to travel literature. Like Gillies and Mitford, he deploys travelogues in support of descriptive and economic claims, but in addition Grote cites a French military report claiming that the native Italians could have found shelter from the Greeks in the mountains of the Sila. The inaccessibility of those mountains to outsiders Grote establishes by noting that “even the French army with its excellent organisation in 1807 found … difficulty in reaching the bandit villagers.”102 Yet even those indigenous people who did not retire into the interior are accorded an important role in Grote's interpretation of Greek South Italy: he argues that the Greek encounter with native populations contributed significantly to the wealth of the colonies, which received native products as a form of tribute. Perhaps most significantly of all, Grote brought into focus an entirely different view of these Greek-speaking colonies by describing their population as a “fusion of the two races in the same community, though doubtless in the relation of superiors and subject, and not in that of equals.”103 He added that “the influence which the Greeks exercised, though in the first instance essentially compulsory, became also in part selfoperating—the ascendancy of a higher over a lower civilisation.”104 For Grote, this intermingling of colonizing Greeks and native Italians was thus part and parcel of the inferiority of the colonial

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Greeks in comparison with

the mainland Greeks: “we must call to mind that we are not dealing with pure Hellenism; and that the native element, though not unfavourable to activity or increase of wealth, prevented the Grecian colonist from partaking fully in that improved organisation which we so distinctly trace in Athens from Solon downwards.”105 Ultimately, Grote's interpretation only reinforced the idea that the colonists belonged at the margins of Greek history. This account of the outlying adventures of the Italian Greeks calls into question Ampolo's judgment that “Grote escaped the racial temptations and the historical interpretation based on

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ethnicity already presented by Müller.”106 Indeed it was from Müller that Grote derived his picture of the native Italian races, on the basis of which he elaborated a new rationale for positioning the western colonies at the margins of the history of the Greek nation. Moreover, the use to which he put Müller's scholarship on South Italy reveals how much Grote's historical interpretations were shaped by his own political and cultural context. Scholars have argued that his portrayal of fifth-century Athenian democracy, which lies at the heart of his history of Greece, was a version of the commercialdemocratic, bourgeoisie-based Victorian Britain for which he worked throughout his political career.107 On the margins, where Greek outposts dotted a non-Hellenic world, one can see Grote's colonial ideology at work, as the inevitable product of a commercial empire. Recent scholarship on the Victorian age has called into question the absence of “strong concepts of race and nation, formerly associated with contemporary thought in Germany, France and Italy, but not with England,” and has endeavored to make explicit the racial and national implications of socioevolutionary British thinking.108 Seeing how Grote approached Magna Graecia allows us to contextualize his frame of reference within the discourse of English nationalism of the period. We can also clearly see how Grote's work marks the beginning of a modern historiography of ancient Greece, which definitively placed Magna Graecia in the peripheral position it was to occupy from then on. As Frank Walbank perceptively wrote now sixty years ago, “those Greek cities in Crete and western Greece which failed to respond at this historic moment [i.e. the Greek joint resistance to the Persian invasion in 481 bce] forfeited their place in Greek history, and were henceforth fated to pursue a different path right down to the last days of Greek independence.”109 Risorgimento narratives of Greek South Italy

Left at the margins by nineteenth-century developments in the narrative historiography of ancient Greece, how did Magna Graecia fare in histories of ancient Italy during the same period? As part of a professional, academic discipline, the tradition of writing histories of “Italy” was long in gestating and took recognizable form only after Italian unification—with the South an

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component in this process (the historiographical thus mirroring here the political). Indeed, it can be argued that the establishment of a historiographic tradition for ancient Italy relied decisively on the incorporation of Magna Graecia and was principally the achievement of Pais. Yet as in Grote's case, the origins of Pais's accomplishment can be traced to much earlier efforts, to Micali's for sure, but also to those undertaken by scholars in the late eighteenth century, especially Galanti, Rogadei, Grimaldi, and others working within the Neapolitan Enlightenment tradition. Although primarily focused on Rome and the Italic peoples, these scholars had also looked at the Greek South through the prism of the Italic model. Just as he introduced Vico's writings to the Northern Italians whom he met during his years of exile, Cuoco placed this tradition of Neapolitan historiography on the wider Italian stage with his Platone in Italia. While his theorizing of the concern for “making Italians” (a direct result of his experience and interpretation of the 1799 Neapolitan revolution) deeply penetrated Risorgimento ideology, Cuoco's own efforts, embodied in Platone in Italia, ultimately failed: the past it presented was too vague, distant, and full of odd names to move the Italian people.110 (Recourse to the history of Italy during the Middle Ages proved more effective, inspiring many of the paintings and literary works of the Risorgimento period.) Nonetheless, the tensions highlighted by Cuoco's Platone in Italia, especially between the classical and nonclassical pasts, would remain fundamental in Italy throughout the century—and they reverberate as well in Micali's L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani, which Cuoco himself reviewed positively in his later years.111 Micali's title makes explicit the decidedly anti-Roman streak of the eighteenth-century Italic model, and he has indeed been identified as the link joining the “erudite tradition to the historiography of the nineteenth century and later.”112 Born in 1769, he remained in many respects a man of the eighteenth century. Hailing from Livorno, the son of a trader in alabaster, Micali had no formal academic training beyond the local college, but managed to turn his family profession and fortune into a means of further education, as his biographer tells it, by traveling for business all over Europe, and everywhere making

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a point of meeting the intellectual elite (from Mozart in Vienna to Carlo Denina in Berlin), and collecting antiquities and books along the way. Despite his unconventional training, Micali has been long appreciated as a precursor to modern academic and scientific studies of pre-Roman Italy, largely because he conducted his research without invoking or relying on supposed primordial Etruscan, Pythagorean, or Pelasgian grandeur. Yet it was precisely this significant silence that prompted Cuoco's lone criticism of L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani, namely that Micali should have “followed a bit more in Vico's footprints.”113 But in fact Micali's refusal to countenance what he dismisses as “migrationist fantasies” is all the more notable considering how many of his contemporaries, “through obscure

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interpretation of certain names,” imagined

Canaanites, Phoenicians, and others to have passed into Italy, “as if our earlier national patrimony should be reduced to mere barbarism.”114 Indeed, two of the most seminal Risorgimento texts would revive precisely such eighteenthcentury narratives in order to project idealized visions of the Italian nation from antiquity to modernity, installing the “ItaloPelasgians” as the originators of world culture tout court. These were Angelo Mazzoldi's Delle origini italiche e della diffusione dell’incivilimento italiano all’Egitto, alla Fenicia, alla Grecia e a tutte le nazioni asiatiche poste sul Mediterraneo (Of Italic origins and the diffusion of Italian civilization to Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece and all the Asian nations of the Mediterranean, 1840) and Vincenzo Gioberti's Il primato civile e morale degli Italiani (Italian civil and moral primacy, 1846).115 Both books have long been studied purely in the political context of Italian unification and excluded from the scholarly field of which Micali would come to be considered a founder. It was he who, after quickly dismissing the Pelasgians, first wove a narrative that swiftly and deftly covers the ancient Italian peoples, their customs, revolutions, and finally their doomed defense against Romans and ultimate defeat. Magna Graecia, though, is not comfortably accommodated by Micali's deep appreciation for pre-Roman Italy, with its

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inhabitants precariously maintaining their dual role as invaders and contributors to Italian glory. In a footnote to his chapter “Della venuta dei greci in Italia” (Of the coming of the Greeks to Italy), Micali refers any reader interested in the “brave expeditions” of the Greek leaders to Gillies's work, while he himself merely mentions them. What is most pressing to Micali is to correct and augment Greek accounts of the natives, about whom the colonists, “uniquely jealous of their own glory, have little instructed us.”116 The peoples whom the Greeks called barbarians were in fact in full possession of “useful arts, principles of morals, government, order,” and remained “numerous and unconquered,” a menacing presence surrounding precarious Greek settlements.117 Yet in Micali's narrative of pre-Roman Italy, Magna Graecia alone merits a full chapter devoted to the region's “philosophy, literature and arts.” As if the invaders had seamlessly been transformed into paragons of Italian glory, Micali is bent on praising the cultural achievements of Greek South Italy, comparing them favorably even to the achievements of mainland Greece: “notwithstanding the frequent upheavals, the Greeks of South Italy certainly had the glory of attending to philosophy well before this happened in Greece proper”; Sicilian coins showed that “figurative arts achieved an enviable perfection in Sicily at a time when in Greece they were barely beginning to be luminous through the work of Phidias.”118 Micali's somewhat schizophrenic take on Magna Graecia, as well as his dismissal of the Roman past—encapsulated in the concluding lines of his book, which cursed Roman expansion and rule over Italy for bringing to the “Italian peoples universal suffering of previously unknown evils”119—attest to the difficulties inherent in crafting a unified vision of ancient Italian history. (p.222)

Micali was not alone in his failure to achieve a

seamless historical interpretation of Magna Graecia. As the works of Giuseppe Castaldi and Nicola Leoni attest, the Neapolitan and South Italian scholarly milieu was equally incapable of producing novel historiographical solutions for understanding Magna Graecia. Castaldi in many ways continued the earlier Neapolitan tradition, although he appears to have remained trapped within it, rather than finding a way to innovate. Like many eighteenth-century

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scholars of the ancient world in the southern capital, he was also a man of law. A judge of the Civil Court of Naples, he composed the works that led to his election to the Real Accademia Ercolanense in the free time he managed to carve out from his legal profession. The writings that earned him this honor were an edition of the works of Niccolò Ignarra (who had been Mazzocchi's pupil and biographer) and, in 1812, a biography of Francesco Daniele, the distinguished scholar of epigraphy and numismatics who edited Vico's unpublished work and is most famous for his topographical study of the Caudine Forks battle.120 Given that both Ignarra and Daniele had been members of the Accademia, it is plain how insular this scholarly assembly had become. Although a piece of original archival research still valued today, Castaldi's Memorie storiche (Historical memoirs) of Afragola, the city in Campania from which he hailed, had a limited reach that marked it as provincial. The opening of Castaldi's La Magna Grecia brevemente descritta certainly resonates with nineteenth-century motifs. The crucial Risorgimento trope of rigenerazione comes immediately to the fore: Castaldi writes that the region's greatness must be kept alive forever, for the “memory, and the imagination of posterity, so that, like the phoenix which is resurrected more full of life from its pyre, it may begin to have a new, grander existence.”121 But apart from the Risorgimento imagery in the preface, Castaldi's pages are remarkable in that the references are by and large to eighteenth-century scholarship, with expansive quotations from Grimaldi, Rogadei, and most of all Mazzocchi, who is always referred to as “gran Mazzocchi.” Castaldi defines Mazzocchi as the one “who holds Ariadne's thread in the labyrinth” of Magna Graecia's difficulties, which he attributes to a poverty of sources and a lack of monuments, “consumed by time, or destroyed by foreign pride or ignorance.”122 Even on the rare occasions when Castaldi takes issue with Mazzocchi's views, he ends up reinforcing the latter's basic approach, revealing in his criticism the limitations of his own research. Faulting Mazzocchi for not having understood a city's numismatic tradition, Castaldi writes that “if it is true that numismatics has since made so much progress, it is still striking that the

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city of Oria or Uria could escape the researches of this illustrious archaeologist.” He uses the modern word “archaeologist,” while at the same time making clear that he restricts that profession to the study of numismatics and epigraphy. The only archaeological work (in the new nineteenth-century sense of the word) mentioned by Castaldi is that of his friend Lombardi at Metaponto;

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he ignores

de Luynes and indeed all other work undertaken by foreigners since the time of Riedesel. The first part of Leoni's work was published in 1844, two years after Castaldi's book. Leoni, a native of Morano in Calabria, presented himself as a learned cleric devoted to the past of his region. The expansiveness of his interests is on display in the encyclopedic promise of the title: Della Magna Grecia e delle tre Calabrie: Ricerche etnografiche, etimologiche, topografiche, politiche, morali, biografiche, letterarie, gnomologiche, numismatiche, statistiche, itinerarie (Of Magna Graecia and the three Calabrias: ethonographical, etymological, topographical, political, moral, biographical, literary, gnomological, numismatic, statistical, travels). In the tradition of local scholars, Leoni embraces past and present equally as he moves in space across the sites of ancient and modern Calabria. A sentimental stylist himself, Leoni cultivated a distinctive interest in literary history—he discovered and published various manuscripts of early modern Calabrese poetry and devoted much attention to ancient writers as well (for example, he devoted some pages to Herodotus as a citizen of Thurii). But Leoni's 1844–1846 work on Magna Graecia could hardly hold its own in comparison with contemporary historical narratives such as Grote's. Leoni's later writings, however, attest to his evolution as a scholar. He appears to have invested himself greatly in the Risorgimento cause and went so far as to author Istoria politica della unità nazionale d’Italia dalla sua origine fino a’ tempi nostri (Political history of Italian national unification from its origin to our own times, 1864). The reissuing of his work on Magna Graecia—once in 1862 and again in 1884— evinces Leoni's deliberate effort to modernize and discipline his approach. This much is clear from the sober new title he

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selected—Studii istorici sulla Magna Grecia e su la Brezia dalle origini italiche in fino a’ tempi nostri (Historical studies on Magna Graecia and Brezia: from Italic origins up to our own times). The revised Magna Graecia of Leoni's later work was up to date in another respect as well, for it deployed familiar Risorgimento tropes of lost greatness and heroic passing. “Magna Graecia and Brezia,” he wrote, “are now a mere tomb…. [O]f many cities the name alone is left, of others even the ruins are lost; a few miserable remains are found from time to time among the turned clods, from which the archaeologist can only draw conjectures … but in this tomb rest many generations which, with their deaths and with their hands, made the name of this land so famous that it will be envied as long as the sun shines.”123 These rhapsodies, however, could not save Leoni from the later judgment that he was “a historian of tall tales,” lacking in historical sense but rich in sentimental amor patrio (love of the homeland).124 Pais's Magna Graecia in post-unification Italy

In contrast to these efforts by South Italian scholars, the approach to Magna Graecia developed by Pais would prove more enduring and influential; it also

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shows how the

establishment of a “scientific” historiography in Italy was intimately connected to the building of the newly unified nation, with Greek South Italy an essential, if elusive, part of the process. A figure whose writings and scholarly persona both enjoyed European-wide academic respect, Pais offered convincing answers to some of the dilemmas faced by earlier historians of ancient South Italy.125 Although he too, like Leoni, was an unabashed patriot, whose narratives were clearly fired by Risorgimento ideology, Pais managed at the same time to couch his enthusiasm in the terms of modern scholarship and introduced Greek South Italy as a new field of study to the international academic community of classicists. Like Grote, Pais took German scholarship as the foundation of his own method and claims to authority, even if his appropriation of German science, well after its golden age, would incur the charge of hypercriticism. But Italian pride and national ideology, as Pais made explicit, were the inspirational impulses behind his work—the author was, after all, a product of Italian unification; in fact he can be counted among those

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whose intellectual trajectory followed a version of the nationalist ideology, which in its increasing extremism morphed from postunification liberalism to its Fascist incarnation. Undoubtedly, the breadth of Pais's vision led him to overreach, as happened with most of his like-minded contemporaries, and his turn to Fascism later in life did little to help his legacy. Yet Pais's achievement was nonetheless a significant one, and his novel framing of Magna Graecia's history played a crucial role. Pais is still widely recognized today as a crucial figure in the modern Italian historiography of the ancient world, notwithstanding the sometimes hostile responses he elicits. He was one of the six historians considered by Piero Treves in the landmark Lo studio dell’antichità classica nell’Ottocento (The study of classical antiquity in the nineteenth century, 1962), with Treves singling him out as “the best qualified, and most criticized, representative in Italy of the official academic German historiography, of the so-called German method.” In a damning conclusion, however, he describes Pais as “adulato, adulatore, piacentiere, potente, pavido” (“flattered, flattering, sycophantic, powerful, cowardly”), and dismisses the last three decades of his scholarship as the work of someone who was “barrenly surviving to himself.”126 Benedetto Croce used the word “disgust” in reference to Pais, adding in parentheses: “one does need the word here.”127 Such judgments owe much to Pais's unashamed alignment with the Fascist regime. His election as senator for life (for academic merit) in November 1922 coincided with the ascendancy of Mussolini. While it is true that he sometimes spoke critically of the regime (for example, concerning the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti by Mussolini's Fascists), and that he was a steadfast advocate for research and education (for example, favoring the cause of women in academia), this was overshadowed by his increasingly Fascist leanings. By 1926, smitten with Mussolini's colonial enterprises and aggressive foreign policies, Pais was dedicating books to the

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Duce,

enlisting Roman history in support of contemporary Italian imperialist ambitions, and, some have claimed, even ghostwriting speeches for Mussolini that involved references to the ancient world.128

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It has not been easy to distinguish Pais's achievement—even what he accomplished well before Mussolini's rule—from the negative light cast by his Fascist “abuses” of history. Treves identified the limitations of Pais's work—a lack of historical vision, a paralyzing deconstruction of ancient sources (socalled hypercriticism), and a preference for Roman over Greek history—and saw in these the same intellectual weaknesses that would draw him to Fascism. More recent evaluations of Pais's politics place his intensifying nationalism in the context of an entire generation's shift from Risorgimento ideals to what would become Fascist ideology, making him a typical representative of this trajectory and its influence on Italian intellectual history.129 Even in this larger context, though, Pais's peculiarities remain. Many of these relate in particular to his status as a scholar of the ancient classical world and as an Italian caught between his local context—a patria that was after all a classical land—and the imagined scholarly community of classicists that was simultaneously international and dominated by German science. From early on, he was accused by fellow Italians of being too German in his approach (his profound admiration for Mommsen remains the major constant in his work), even as he professed nationalist beliefs and attacked the German Julius Beloch, professor in Rome, on the grounds that a non-Latin could not understand ancient history.130 After the success of his lecture tour in the United States in 1904–1905, he apparently sought an academic chair across the Atlantic, with Berkeley as his ideal destination.131 Out of these contradictions, which in many ways defined the Italian fin de siècle more generally, originated Pais's influential work on Greek South Italy. Even the basic facts of Pais's biography—the different places where he lived and traveled—seem to embody the making of Italy and its postunification vicissitudes. The two sides of his family—his mother was Piedmontese, his father Sardinian— reflected the two territories of the Sabaudian monarchy under which Italy would unite: born in 1856 near Turin and raised on his father's native island, Pais became familiar with both regions. At the age of six he sat in Garibaldi's lap at Caprera, an oft-repeated anecdote. After a university degree in Florence, he returned to Sardinia to work as a schoolmaster

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and director of the museum in Sassari. In 1881, he traveled to Berlin to study with Mommsen for two years—one of the first Italians to do so. After another stint in Sardinia, he won a national concorso for a university post and was dispatched to Palermo in 1886 for two years, then to Pisa and Naples, and finally to Rome in 1906—this peripatetic career was crowned by his appointment to the chair of Roman history in 1923. Treves located Pais's intellectual roots in his Florentine philological training and his on-the-ground experience. In fact, he did museum work, not

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only in Sardinia immediately

following university, but also years later, from 1901 to 1904, when he held the prestigious directorship of the Archaeological Museum of Naples (however notoriously dysfunctional a tenure this turned out to be, full of bureaucratic infighting and culminating in an inglorious dismissal).132 Pais could also claim fieldwork experience: as a young man, he was commissioned by Mommsen with identifying, compiling, and transcribing the Latin inscriptions of the eastern Italian Alps region for the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.133 Still, according to Treves, the strongest influence on Pais, and the one that motivated fascinating work from a man otherwise lacking in profound historical vision, was a Micalian framework for imagining the ancient past, which Pais would have garnered from his Tuscan contacts during his time in Florence.134 The title of his first work, La Sardegna prima del dominio dei Romani (Sardinia before Roman rule, 1881) is indeed modeled on Micali, and the numerous histories of Italy that Pais published in the early 1900s continue to echo this influence. The imprint of the earlier scholar is also apparent in Pais's 1894 work on Greek South Italy, his Storia della Sicilia e della Magna Graecia, which he dedicated to his teachers in Florence and colleagues in Pisa, and in fact composed while residing in the latter city. Pais himself, however, pointed out on the very first page of this book, with which he made his mark on the study of Magna Graecia, that not only the solutions to “some particular historical question” but indeed the very development of his “own personal idea” about the history of ancient South Italy stemmed from the time he had spent in Sicily as professor in

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Palermo (1886–1888). He called particular attention to the “propitious opportunity which I had then of visiting the monuments of Sicily on repeated occasions, the reading and the study I pursued of the passages in the ancient authors who had narrated her [Sicily's] events, and finally the experience and familiarity which I was gradually acquiring with the customs of that people, to whom I am bound by the firmest affection.”135 It was important that Pais stressed “having been there” when two other books on Sicily had just been published by foreigners, who nevertheless also claimed special familiarity with the island: Geschichte Siciliens im Alterthum (History of Sicily in Antiquity, three volumes, 1869, 1874, and 1897) by the German Adolf Holm, professor in Palermo from 1876 to 1884, and History of Sicily from the Earliest Times (unfinished, with the first two volumes published in 1891 and the last two in 1894) by the Englishman E. A. Freeman, who considered much of Sicily “as familiar to me as my own home or my own university” on account of repeated visits.136 Pais sought to distinguish himself from these foreigners by claiming that he, uniquely, had brought together the history of Sicily with that of Magna Graecia. The two regions, he wrote, were settled by the same people, giving “life to a civilization which was, if not anywhere the same, in any case homogenous.” He went on: “It seemed to me that the historical events of Sicily could not entirely be explained without paying attention to the development of the

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Italiot cities, and those of Magna Graecia appeared to me to be incomprehensible unless illuminated by the history of the island.”137 It was in fulfilling his “personal idea” of the region's history that Pais extended the scope of his work well beyond earlier engagements with Greek South Italy. He pursued an ambitious historical vision on par with that of Freeman (1823–1892), Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, who became famous for his History of the Norman Conquest and for saying that “history is past politics, and politics is present history.”138 Freeman decided to make Sicily a test case for his belief in the unity of history over and above divisions between ancient and modern. His work on Sicily (which, though never completed, was declared monumental upon the appearance of the first

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two volumes) took as its point of departure the island's geographic centrality, which had ensured it an “illustrious place in the history of the world.”139 In Freeman's view, Sicily had twice affected the course of European history (and therefore, in his view, that of the whole world): first when Sicilian Greeks defeated the Carthaginians, and later when the Normans repelled the Arabs. “Gelon [tyrant of Syracuse],” wrote Freeman, “is champion of Hellas and Europe against Canaan and Africa.”140 Pais, too, aimed to place the history of Sicily, and indeed of Magna Graecia as well, on a wider stage —though in his case, an Italian one. The book's title page is already suggestive of this ambition. Pais's Storia della Sicilia e della Magna Graecia in fact forms part 1 of his Storia d’Italia dai tempi più antichi sino alle guerre puniche (History of Italy from the most ancient times up to the Punic Wars). According to an epiphany he recounts, Pais became increasingly persuaded by Freeman's insight during the course of his research that “the history of Sicily should not be treated as a narrative of important individual events, but rather as an important part of the general history of mankind.” Furthermore, he “discovered that an accurate knowledge of the history of Magna Graecia and, even more so, of Sicily, was indispensable for a proper correct evaluation of the origins and meaning of the most ancient activities of the Roman people.”141 Syracuse had been a model for Rome, Pais claimed, in its aspiration for hegemony over the whole of Italy, and in its waging war against Carthage. Together with Magna Graecia, it had also exercised considerable influence on the “language, customs, literature and even history and political constitution of Romans.” Pais boldly asserted: Between the battle of Himera, in the fifth century, and those of Cannae and Zama in the third, there is no break in the continuity of political history. The same, even if to a lesser degree, can be said about the history of the Italiots. To realize how much Rome owes to Taras, one need only recall Livius Andronicus, Pacuvius, and even more so Ennius; it is hardly necessary to call to mind how much Rome owes to Cumae and other Greek cities in Campania. In brief,

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Magna Graecia precedes that of Rome, not only in chronological sequence, but also in political and literary significance.142 Where Freeman had highlighted the Norman wars against the Arabs, Pais saw Rome's Punic Wars as having resolved the question of “whether the Aryan or the Semitic elements should prevail in the Mediterranean regions of Europe.”143 Even when Pais echoed Freeman's emphasis on the Normans, he did so within a strictly Italian context, highlighting how the revival of poetry at Palermo's Norman court preceded the reemergence of poetry in Tuscany, and how in the unique milieu of Norman Sicily the artistic motifs later found in Pisa's architecture were first elaborated. Pais's love for the patria, which infuses almost every aspect of his career, inspired him not only to recount its past but also to attempt to redress the fact that “in the field of ancient history, with few exceptions, our own [i.e. Italian] scientific production is held in little or no account.”144 With this in mind, Pais defends the scientific credentials of his work from the scorn of those who mock scholarship: “let them call pedantic one who dares affirm nothing which is not the fruit of meticulous research and who puts little faith in gut feelings, which many among us still today believe to be an indispensable key element in the Italian mind-set.” He praises the experimental scientific work of the bacteriologist as a model for the historical researcher: “just as the former, through the study of the smallest organisms, is able to understand in part the development of more complex biological events, so the historian, with a methodical examination of individual facts, may raise himself to the level of explaining more important political events.”145 Pais's dual concern for simultaneously narrating the Italian past and conducting precise historical research is reflected in the very structure of his history—yet in a way that points to an unbridgeable gap between these two concerns in the book itself. Storia della Sicilia e della Magna Graecia consists of four chapters: the first two on the native inhabitants of South Italy and Sicily, treated in turn, the third on the foundation of the colonies, and the last on the events that transpired from the end of the eighth century to the early fifth century. These four chapters compose only half of the Page 49 of 81

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book's length, however; the rest consists of nineteen appendices on various topics—ranging from the name Magna Graecia to the “supposed Semitic” elements of Sicily to various issues of topography, all approached in a strictly philological spirit. Here the reader can witness the hypercriticism that Pais is often faulted for—the volume even concludes with a long list of passages from various ancient authors “corrected” by Pais. For all the criticism of Pais's Storia della Sicilia e della Magna Graecia—and indeed of Pais's opus as a whole, to which time has not been kind—his work on Greek South Italy remains highly valued. It could be argued that Pais simply stated, rather than explained, how much Rome owed to Syracuse and Magna

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Graecia, and that his inability to produce

complex historical arguments about this resulted in his failure to see the project through beyond its second volume. (Even the vision of ancient Italian history he espoused in the 1920s and 1930s, while increasingly imbued with Fascist, nationalist language, remained a mosaic that reflected the histories of various peoples, and was not yet fully homogenized.) Yet it is generally conceded that Pais opened Magna Graecia to a new type of historical research. Perhaps it is ironic that Magna Graecia gained its place on the modern scholarly map as a region worthy of study thanks to an attempt to integrate it into a national history of Italy. But this is only fitting given the fault lines that characterized so many of the nineteenth-century dream-nations, Italy in particular, where a strong tradition of regionalism continues to the present day. The relative dearth of historical material for Greek South Italy certainly hindered Pais's attempt to remain simultaneously a narrator and a meticulous historian, as a quick comparison with Grote's project shows. Indeed subsequent archaeological research would add substantially to the record on Magna Graecia, lending unprecedented voices to what had seemed the almost silent past of the region. But the unearthing of material remains and the resulting analyses would prove to be no less enmeshed in the complex dynamics between the nation and its regions and between Italian and foreign scholarly traditions, as is well attested by the work of Orsi, to which I now turn.

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Archaeology and the New Italy: Paolo Orsi in the Greek South Pais himself wrote of his desire to learn more about what he called “the numerous and remarkable monuments of Magna Graecia which had been recently explored and illustrated by the talented and indefatigable archaeologist Paolo Orsi”146— and in 1933, he asked the latter to contribute an appendix on the Siculi, the prehistoric inhabitants of South Italy, for his Storia dl’Italia. A number of parallels can be drawn between the two scholars: roughly contemporaries (Orsi, three years younger, died four years before Pais), both were born on the eve of Italian unification and remained lifelong, impassioned patriots; both men became so illustrious in their respective fields that they earned seats in the Italian senate (Pais in 1922 and Orsi in 1924); and finally, Orsi and Pais, although originally from the north of the peninsula, trained their focus on the South, bringing that region to the attention of modern scholarship and winning international reputations in the process. Yet deep differences have remained despite these parallels—not least in how the two men are remembered today: while Orsi is celebrated as a heroic figure, Pais's reputation still suffers from the taint of his association with the Fascists. By comparison with most present-day historians, Pais accumulated a significant amount of practical experience through his museum work and by

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collecting

inscriptions in the field, but this background is still dwarfed by the hands-on work undertaken during the same period by Orsi, serving as a state employee in the field.147 The fact that Orsi had professional responsibility for the material history of a particular territory—Sicily and (if later and for a shorter time) Calabria—had a deep impact on both his life and his work; his object of study became by default the longer extent of antiquity, from the earliest traces of human culture in the regions of his competence to its medieval remains (as had long been true of antiquarians). It also meant that, day in and day out, Orsi grappled in the capacity of a bureaucrat with illegal excavations, the recruitment of police protection for his own excavations, and the management of both his sites and his

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teams of workers, often in remote areas. All this work entailed incessant requests for funding, as Orsi paid his excavation workers, negotiated payments with landowners to secure use of their properties, and purchased excavated items that had already come into the possession of locals. Orsi's vision of archaeology as an ongoing process—in which the ideal synthesis always hinges on the next excavation project—owed much to this incessant, exhausting activity on behalf of the new nation. Never losing the inspiration he drew from his unwavering love of patria, Orsi nevertheless had to gird himself for daily battles with both locals and foreigners, as well as with the state itself, which he was constantly begging to augment its insufficient funding. In Magna Graecia the indefatigable Orsi met his match, for better or worse. Although more fleeting than his sojourn in Sicily, his term of duty in Calabria—to which Orsi may have been all the more attached from a sense of having left unfinished work there—still symbolizes today the immense archaeological potential of the region. Orsi's devotion to (and ability in) researching both the prehistoric and classical periods, moreover, all but seemed to embody, in a newly unified vision supported by new scientific practices, the resolution of the long standing divide between Italic and Greek pasts. A fellow native of Roreveto, the author and artist Carlo Belli (1903–1991), has sketched a haunting portrait of Orsi, wandering alone in the vast open spaces of Magna Graecia's landscape. Punning on the archaeologist's name (orso is Italian for bear), Belli imagines Orsi “looking like a sylvan creature, straight out of Homeric mythology.”148 As tempting as the image is of Orsi at one with Calabria's rugged nature, it should not obscure the fact that he clashed repeatedly with many of its modern inhabitants. For many of them, he remained a northern intruder, as is readily apparent from another anecdote of Belli's about how Orsi's “strange appearance in a solitary part of Calabria” in 1915, when war was fully under way, led to the scholar being taken for “an Austrian spy, followed, searched and arrested,” before the mistake was cleared up.149 Orsi himself celebrated Calabria's landscapes in the careful topographical descriptions that invariably opened his archaeological reports. These passages of Orsi's prose

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breathed new life into the trope of Calabria as a region characterized by natural beauty and present-day solitude, but also one that was

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unforgiving, as witnessed by the

implacable challenges Orsi's expeditions faced. In Sicily, Orsi had already waged a seemingly endless struggle to gain further state funding for the archaeology of the region; he committed himself to similar efforts all the more fervently in Calabria. Just as Orsi was putting Magna Graecia on the map for modern archaeology, the region again seemed in danger of being forgotten and left to its own remoteness—constrained by an age-old stereotype that now blended with the Southern Question, which had come to haunt the recently unified country. In Sicily, where from 1888 to 1934 he was affiliated with the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Syracuse, Orsi's heroic efforts are widely recognized as having marked a coming of age for archaeology. (Indeed, the museum was established by royal decree in 1878 and renamed Museo Archeologico “Paolo Orsi” when moved to its contemporary state-of-the-art facilities in 1988.) The same is true of his work in Calabria, where he was superintendente from 1908 to 1911. Strictly speaking, however, Orsi was not the state's first representative in the South. In Sicily, at least, there was a well-established tradition dating back to the eighteenth century, when the princes of Torremuzza and Biscari were the first superintendenti that we know of. Even in Calabria, it is important to note that Orsi had predecessors; by tracing their efforts, we are better able to appreciate the particular novelty of Orsi's position and work. We have already seen as much in the work of Lenormant, who for all his self-fashioning as the explorer of an unknown area reveals a good deal more about archaeological activity in the South than might be expected. Numerous references are made to locals engaged with the past; the fact that Lenormant is still well regarded in the region is a testament to the good relations he cultivated with the locals, and to the pages full of generous anecdotes he devoted to them. Lenormant also hints at the early efforts of the government—not necessarily in a positive light: while lauding the authorities’ “honorable concern” for protecting what remains of the Tavole Palatine,

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he decried its “unfortunate effect,” as the engineer charged with the task surrounded the ruins with a “hideous wall, as in a cemetery, two meters high,” impeding for the visitor any aesthetic appreciation or topographical understanding of the site.150 And we have seen how Lenormant, while expressing appreciation for the zeal of local scholars, also deemed their research not quite up to the standards of criticism and knowledge required by the new historical and archaeological disciplines. This had been the sentiment of Fiorelli and Barnabei as well— and we should remember that, while Lenormant inspired other foreigners to explore Magna Graecia, including Helbig in 1883 and the unfortunate American expedition mentioned earlier, it had been these two Italian men who actually spurred Lenormant to visit, and Barnabei himself then accompanied him for extensive stretches of his itinerary. Although they shared Lenormant's reservations about the quality of their staff, Fiorelli and Barnabei possessed few resources for making new hires and confirmed most of the ispettori in their (p.232)

positions, many of them holdovers from the former

Kingdom of Naples. The Notizie degli Scavi from the 1880s, for instance, brim with reports from the landowner Giovanni Jatta (1832–1895) on his hometown of Ruvo di Puglia, where he organized his family vase collections in the local museum.151 Similarly, Armando Lucifero (1855–1933), although politically more progressive, was another prominent landowner, who studied zoology and researched the local history of Croton as his personal interests. Fiorelli maintained a firm commitment to developing further archaeological research in the South: he sent Francesco Saverio Cavallari to work on Sybaris, and opened the report of this excavation in the Notizie degli Scavi with a proud declaration that it was “a prime concern of the Direzione Generale dei Musei e degli Scavi to provide for the institution of systematic researches in the region of the ancient cities of Magna Graecia.”152 After Lenormant's visit to Taranto made clear the rich archaeological prospects of that city, Fiorelli announced that he was dispatching Professor Luigi Viola there to commence work, proudly introducing him as “a pupil of the Scuola di Pompeii.”153 Yet the results were not as grand as had been hoped: Viola ended up beset by

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controversies over the establishment of the local museum, and Cavallari's engagement at Sybaris was sporadic and uneven, with the marshes of the Sybaris plain limiting his excavations primarily to burial sites on the surrounding hills.154 Orsi's dramatic impact was to overshadow these earlier efforts. He was the most professionalized scholar yet to work in the South—with a well-rounded education that encompassed German classical scholarship, Italian prehistory, and much else—and he possessed the skills to insert the region into the new international scholarly research arena with unprecedented ease and aplomb. The reports of Lucifero and Jatta, limited as they were to the sheer enumeration and description of their most impressive finds, were no match for Orsi's exhaustive discussions, which took in the topography of entire sites and included stunning images, detailed plans, and stratigraphical sections. The scope of Orsi's research interests soon also surpassed the efforts of Viola and Cavallari in breadth and ambition, both at the level of the individual site and in terms of the region overall. He uncovered both Greek and native Italian sites, explored in depth many sanctuaries previously known only from ancient literary sources, inaugurated the study and preservation of Calabria's monuments from the Byzantine period, and even succeeded in identifying, through archaeological methods, a few of the lost cities of Magna Graecia—all the while setting new research standards and formulating questions that are still being investigated today. Orsi's life began far away from the southern sites that would inspire his most probing investigations and lead to his greatest achievements. He was born in 1859 in the Trentino region at Rovereto—a city approximately seventy miles northwest of Venice and nestled at the foot of the Alps. Rovereto had changed hands between Venetian and Austrian rulers often since the sixteenth

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century—in fact, it would not

become part of the new Italian nation until after the First World War. Although of an ethnically Italian family, Orsi was born an Austrian citizen. His origins in this irridenta region have been invoked to explain Orsi's absolute, lifelong dedication to state service, which continued through the early years of Fascism, toward which Orsi, as “a right-wing

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Catholic,” held a “doubtful, but not hostile” attitude.155 It was, after all, in the Italian-speaking districts still subject to other countries that some of the deepest attachments to the new Italian nation developed after 1870, along with a spirit of irredentism. Orsi's background also meant that, in his case, “going to school with the Germans” was more of an organic process, part of a life that developed between two nations. With German as his second language, he graduated from the University of Padua in 1882, having spent his second year (1878–1879) in Vienna and the fourth (1880–1881) in Rome. In Vienna, he attended the seminar established by the epigrapher Otto Hirschfeld and the archaeologist Alexander Conze (the famous excavator of Ephesus) and Orsi's first publications, concerning the antiquities of Trentino, were published in the Viennese seminar journal Archaeologische-epigraphische Mitteilungen aus Osterreich-Ungarn. Orsi went to Rome to study with Luigi Pigorini, the first and, at the time, the only occupant of an academic chair of prehistory in Italy. Orsi's varied, multidisciplinary, and multinational education enriched and professionalized the archaeological passion he is said to have possessed since he was a boy wandering among the collections of the local museum in Rovereto and searching the surrounding valleys for archaeological traces. His arrival and subsequent long-term residence in Sicily and his brief but productive stint in Calabria are equally part of this intricate story. After obtaining his university degree, he applied for Italian citizenship so as to be eligible for Italian positions. He first held an appointment at the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione in Rome, and then became assistant librarian in Florence in 1886. It was around this time that another Roveretan, Federico Halbherr (1857–1930), who would go on to establish the Italian archaeological mission on Crete and become a professor of Greek epigraphy in Rome, contacted Orsi, given the latter's expertise on bronzes, in connection with his famous discovery of Cretan antiquities in the cave of Ida.156 In 1888 Orsi won the position of inspector of excavation at the museums and galleries in Syracuse, initiating a lifelong career on Sicilian soil. That he actually considered an alternative, academic trajectory is clear from his participation in the 1889

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concorso for the chair of the “archaeology of art” in Rome. The only other candidate was the Austrian Emanuel Löwy, who had also studied in Vienna at Conze's archaeological seminar and ultimately won the post. With his application, the thirty-twoyear-old Löwy submitted fifteen publications, all of which dealt with classical art and archaeology, ranging in subject matter from an article on the torso del belvedere to a collection of inscriptions on Greek artists, which the committee judged “of capital importance for Greek art history.”157

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Orsi, two

years younger, had nine publications to show, of which only one, on numismatics, undoubtedly dealt with a classical topic; the committee considered his study of Italic belts from the Iron Age to be “limited to the sculptures of these populations in terms of their costumes, without touching upon questions of art,” and said that the publication of the Cretan objects did not pertain to classical culture either.158 As Marcello Barbanera has pointed out, the result of this competition marked the course of academic classical archaeology in Italy for a long time to come.159 It certainly played a crucial part in deciding Orsi's career and his remaining in Sicily until retirement in 1834. Yet his very pursuit of the academic chair in Rome and his continued interest in teaching at the University of Catania —where he applied to be a visiting professor as soon as he arrived in Sicily—both show that Orsi's distaste for academia was not as absolute as is sometimes portrayed.160 It is true that he later declined prestigious chairs, such as that at Bologna, when it would have entailed leaving Sicily, but he stopped teaching at Catania only with great reluctance, because teaching was considered incompatible, bureaucratically, with his position as soprintendente. Yet, a distinctly unacademic flair became a recognized part of Orsi's persona. Both during his lifetime and since, he has been considered the ultimate representative of the archeologo militante, the militant archaeologist. He himself sought out and embraced this label, which field archaeologists in the later nineteenth century used to differentiate themselves from their philologically minded, armchair-bound counterparts. In the famous, vivid portraits his contemporaries have left us of Orsi, the archaeologist seems to embody the label quite literally. The French archaeologist Georges Perrot reported in 1897

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that Orsi was “thirty-six years old, and quite tall and well-built. His physique is not that of the desk-bound researcher, and at first sight you might mistake him for a cavalry officer, since his bearing and gestures have something military about them. And these first impressions are quite sound…. The clarity of his speech corresponds to a simplicity of spirit, and he has in him a powerful force of will, a natural endowment of fortitude.”161 In strikingly similar terms, more than ten years later, Umberto Zanotti Bianco (the young upper-class humanitarian activist turned archaeologist by Orsi's charisma, and about whom I shall speak more later), in recalling his first impressions upon meeting Orsi in 1911, wrote of “his high, thin stature, energetic, in a hunting costume with closed collar, his pockets bulging with notebooks and pencils, with his solid tied up boots, that is how he appeared to me the very first time, on board a steamship in the Strait of Messina.”162 Even the wholly different, ironic portrait we have of Orsi from Belli, mocking the sophisticated airs he brought back to Rovereto in his late years, recall the trope of the retired warrior unable to fit back into domestic life.163 The qualities for which Orsi is best remembered today are “the austerity of [his] conduct, the rigors he endured for the science of archaeology, and his respect for the state.”164 His

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discipline and zeal were also what brought him from his post in Sicily to Calabria—and to the study of Magna Graecia. Orsi's work has been described as the “marvellous activity of an explorer of prehistoric, Greek and Christian Sicily,” his uncompromising motivation almost mysterious (a man of whom “no one will ever discover the most intimate inspiration”).165 Through his dedication, Orsi achieved as much in a single career, it is often repeated, as anyone has since. The question of how he managed to accomplish so much is often asked, and his routine of nonstop work has become the stuff of legend. It is also said that “he never put down roots in Sicily”—but Orsi's own motto, “life is work,” is evidence that indeed he did.166 When he was forced, by law, to retire at age seventy-five, it was like being uprooted. Indeed, he was ultimately even forced to leave the island, for his imposing presence at Syracuse's Museo, which he continued to frequent every day, apparently made life impossible for the

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new soprintendente. Orsi's engagement in Calabria was in some ways less fraught: after years of undertaking ad hoc missions, he was appointed the first soprintendente for the region in 1908, even as he continued to hold his Sicilian appointment. Finally in 1926 an independent soprintendenza was established. On this occasion, Orsi's stepping down was celebrated in grand style, untarnished by the sense that he was being forced to abandon his professional life, which would sadly mark his departure from Sicily. Despite seeming to have more disagreements with locals, in Calabria he would be sorely missed and invoked as a figure who unveiled the boundless potential of Magna Graecia's archaeology, but left too early. Even with Orsi's indefatigable drive, Magna Graecia remained an elusive prize, a neglected place once again, where the promise of a new archaeology—undertaken by Orsi so successfully in Sicily—still remained unfulfilled. In the course of more than forty years in Sicily, Orsi established a tremendous body of new knowledge, in addition to solidifying novel archaeological methods and building up the necessary networks to continue these efforts after his departure. After his first excavations at the prehistoric burial ground at Stentinello, he elaborated, somewhat tentatively in 1892 but with great assurance by 1896, a chronology for the prehistoric culture of the Siculi keyed to specific cultural characteristics reflected in archaeological remains. This provided the first-ever comprehensive and detailed picture for prehistoric Sicily; it was, after all, primarily as a prehistorian that Orsi had arrived on the island—between Pigorini's encouragement and his own curiosity, he was soon considering how to incorporate this region into the prehistoric vision that was then developing for the Italian peninsula.167 Through the years, Orsi would continue to excavate many more of the ancient Siculi's burial grounds, but he worked on other types of sites as well. The fact that he was committed to that territory as the state's soprintendente meant that Orsi quite naturally engaged with excavations well beyond his initial area of interest, ranging widely from prehistoric Sicily well into

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Byzantine times. With this unique exposure

across eras, Orsi would become the first systematic archaeological explorer of Magna Graecia. In Sicily, the

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continuous habitation of most Greek cities well into modern times, with very few exceptions, made thorough investigation impossible (quite unlike many places in South Italy, where indeed Orsi focused primarily on Greek sites). Orsi's words concerning Gela are suggestive: “the streets of the poor quarters in the western part of town … all run above tombs of the richest contents”168 (in this case he did manage to excavate the tombs, as shown in figure 4.2). He did, however, do as much as he could with Catania's topography, based on the few and quite limited digs occasioned by discoveries uncovered by chance construction work. Orsi was able to explore Greek burial grounds with the same care and insight he had shown for the native ones, thereby revealing in the process a great deal about the chronology and styles of pottery. Orsi's work in Sicily also included the investigation of temples and sanctuaries, as well as early medieval churches. A recurring criticism of Orsi's work has been his apparent resistance to producing a historical synthesis based on his findings. Such an attempt can be glimpsed, however, in Syracuse's Museo itself (of which he had become director in 1895), where he personally inventoried thousands of objects during his years in Sicily. Visiting this collection decades later, Momigliano mused on what historians such as Grote or Müller would have made of it: “the monument,” he wrote, “to the genius and patience of Paolo Orsi … showing all the stages through which the Greeks passed in Sicily, from the first contacts with the natives to the not inglorious Byzantine end.”169 The museum was meant to be a vessel for the treasure-trove of objects Orsi had uncovered, a synthesis in its own right, but also a place in line with Orsi's sense that, in archaeology, new objects continually generate new knowledge, such that the “word ‘final’ is one difficult to pronounce for the archaeologist.” This comment, and this overall approach to the enterprise of archaeology, remind us of its antiquarian origins. (Indeed, the French scholar and Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon had expressed himself in very similar terms in the early eighteenth century in his L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (Antiquity explained and represented in sculptures, 1719.) What presentday archaeologists appreciate most, however, while still

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wondering at how a single man could have kept up such a level of productivity, is how promptly and extensively Orsi detailed his excavation results in publications, constantly filling the pages of Notizie degli Scavi, Monumenti dei Lincei, and, in time, of the Atti e Memorie della Società della Magna Graecia. One can complain today that the reports were still insufficiently exhaustive, since Orsi would give detailed information for only a handful of tombs from the hundreds excavated, and, even for those, not consistently of all remains found. However, it is also generally agreed that Orsi's reports, with their consistent structure organized around a discussion of topography, followed by descriptions of the finds

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themselves, and concluding with a historical Figure 4.2. Drawing by Rosario Carta for analysis, were Orsi's 1900–1905 excavations at Gela, better than any Borgo Scavi. (Courtesy of the Art and others Architecture Library, Stanford University produced Libraries.) during this period. Beautiful drawings by his longtime collaborator Rosario Carta are works of art in themselves, rendering the finds with an incomparable vividness (see figure 4.3). His embrace of the genre of the archaeological report rather than the grand work of historical synthesis seems parallel to Orsi's museum passion, and consonant with his conception of archaeology as an ongoing scholarly process.

Orsi's enthusiasm and innovation are most apparent in the unusually thorough and rich presentation of his findings. It is certainly the case that Orsi's development of excavation techniques is less impressive if compared, for example, with his contemporary Giacomo Boni, who established new standards for the use of stratigraphy in his excavation of the Roman Forum.170 But such a comparison should not discredit Orsi; rather it allows us to appreciate

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the

specific characteristics and challenges of his Figure 4.3. Drawing of a stratigraphical archaeological section by Rosario Carta, for Orsi's research. excavations at Caulonia. (Courtesy of the Without a Art and Architecture Library, Stanford doubt, Orsi's University Libraries.) primary aim was to uncover what needed to be uncovered, and with a great sense of urgency—as he often acted in response to clandestine activities, which he would promptly report. Indeed, it was the recurrence of such incidents that had led to the establishment of a soprintendenza for Calabria in the first place: the case of the American coin dealer and scholar Samuel Hudson Chapman, for instance, who in Calabria went by professor and carried off pinakes from Locris, returning with them to his hometown of Philadelphia; or the clandestine excavations at Medma by the German antiquarian Merz, who sold the terracottas he discovered in his Taormina shop, claiming they were from Naxos. Equally troubling, on an ongoing basis, was the fact that locals were amassing collections of antiquities found on their own lands.

Orsi's work required careful diplomacy and savoir faire, but these were often not enough. Orsi's letters and notebooks are full of the ups and downs of these interactions, from his numerous meetings to convince the landowners of Locris to allow him to excavate on their lands, to his last, failed attempt at persuading a Sybaris landowner to let him realize his longcherished hope of excavating there. But there were also fruitful interactions with locals: Orsi's surveys always included conversations with local farmers and landowners, whose precious information often indicated where excavation would be most promising. Once a decision was made to excavate, not only did Orsi have to arrange compensation for the owners, he also had to ensure that the land would be returned in good shape for agriculture. The only way to move soil was to use baskets (women were hired for this job; more mechanical methods, allowing the removal of a much greater quantity of soil more rapidly, would only become possible after World War II)—and in addition, the trenches had to be filled in again soon

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after.171 This complex of practices was Orsi's “method,” which he would soon take with him to Magna Graecia as well, even bringing along many of the same workers—which prompted Zanotti Bianco, in another nod to military imagery surrounding the figure of the archaeologo militante, to write: “among them are men who have been brought up in his trenches and who follow him everywhere. He pays them two and a half lira a day while local workers on the land earn no more than one; he looks after them when they are ill; and these men are devoted to him and would defend him to their utmost in case of attack.”172 Orsi first visited Calabria when he intervened, as the representative of the Italian state, to put a stop to the unauthorized excavation by the Americans at Capo Colonne. His second visit a year later, in 1889, was prompted, similarly, by concern for foreign interest in the region, but the outcome was quite different.173 The Germans Eugen Petersen (then director of the institute in Rome) and Wilhelm Dörpfeld (who had his fill of “big digs” at Olympia with Curtius, at Pergamon with Humann, and at Troy with Schliemann) asked Fiorelli's (p.240)

permission to excavate the sanctuary at Marasà in

Locri. Fiorelli solved the dilemma—not wanting such glorious prospects passed on exclusively to foreigners—by allowing the Germans to undertake a joint expedition together with the young Orsi; it was to be a full collaboration, but catalogued in separate publications (Notizie degli Scavi for the Italians and Römische Mitteilungen for the Germans). The project went smoothly—the late archaic plan of the temple was established, an earlier temple was discovered, and the famous marble sculpture of the Dioscuri was recovered; Orsi had acquitted himself well. After the Germans’ departure, he even expanded the scope of the research at Locris, identifying votive offerings, city fortifications, other sanctuaries, and both Greek and native necropolises in the course of many summer vacations devoted to this research. Orsi's role in these interventions, as well as others where pillaging was involved, led to his appointment in 1908 to the newly created soprintendenza of Calabria.

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Given that Orsi was then holding two soprintendenze simultaneously, he inevitably had less time to devote to Calabria than he had had in Sicily. Nevertheless, he introduced an archaeological approach that in many ways changed his contemporaries’ understanding and perception of Magna Graecia. Even for Reggio—from Riedesel onward, a city whose antiquity was thought to have been completely lost—he managed to establish a few topographical facts about the ancient town, based on an examination of occasional construction works. Moreover, he put his archaeological skills to work solving the mystery of some of Magna Graecia's lost cities, such as Caulonia and Medma, adding archaeological proof to earlier philological disquisitions. Already in 1900, Orsi was seeking out support for research at Medma, writing to Rome that the area's “archaeological strata, rich in superb terracottas, had awoken the cupidity of speculators … who, conducting large excavations, have obtained many boxes which they have sold.”174 Orsi's report on his own excavations there opens with a characteristic account of the landscape— but one soon realizes that he is deftly employing this description in order to identify the location of the ancient site. The area, wrote Orsi, is “one of the most beautiful plains not only of Calabria but of all Italy, level towards the sea and climbing up with the gentlest slope in its concavity…. This superb region—less in width than the valley of the Cratis but certainly not second to it in fertility—could not escape the keen and practical insight of the Greek colonists, who were competing for the most fruitful plans of Brettia”; within this area, Pian delle Vigne, the site where Orsi located the city, is described as one “of the most beautiful and propitious locations that I ever saw for the foundation of a Greek colony.”175 Orsi's report on his last large-scale excavation in Calabria—at the sanctuary of Apollo Aleo at Punta Alice, near Cirò—also opens with an accurate landscape description, a sweeping panoramic view of the entire Gulf of Taranto: (p.241) Starting from the wart-like prominence of Croton and the Lacinian cape, the Ionian seacoast of Brutius and Lucania spreads out flat and monotonous, forming a

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great arch that dies at Leuca and embraces what the ancients called the sinus Tarantinus. It is an open, bayless and harborless coast, flanked by a thin strip of flat land, not very deep, on which come to rest the gentle hills that, in their turn, form the escarpment of the Sila massif. A little further, the hills break and open up in the large valley of Cratis, followed by the high mountains that block the southern border of Lucania.176 The exact location of the Sanctuary of Apollo Aleo had long been a mystery.177 In vain, Orsi himself had spent three days in 1914 surveying the area of Punta Alice—a “flat coast with imperceptible dunes going down to the sea, either covered with bushes or bare”—and was unable, amid the sand and the marshland, to recover any sign of the temple.178 Once the state-sponsored reclamation of the marshlands got under way in 1923, however, archaeological traces began to emerge, leading the engineers involved to report to Orsi the discovery of “bricks of various forms and sizes, mixed to cut rocks and concrete made of sand and lime, a terracotta mask, a marble pedestal and bronze coins.” Within a year, following the discovery of “more bricks, column drums, capitals, marble fragments, and a marble male head, larger than human size …  with holes on the forehead to hold a diadem,” Orsi sent Rosario Carta to begin excavations.179 Upon reaching the site two months later, Orsi declared himself “struck, in a sinister fashion, by the pitiful state of the ruins,” when he realized that “the temple had been reduced to a marble mine.” Nevertheless, the basic floor plan of the ancient temple was exposed, and various votive offerings were recovered from the water drained out during the reclamation process: “the most beautiful one recovered from the digging up,” wrote Orsi, was a silver statue that only surfaced after a violent storm.180 Orsi's engagement with Magna Graecia fell short of his extensive and systematic involvement with eastern Sicily—he never managed to publish all of even the most complete of his researches, which covered sanctuaries, necropoleis, and city fortifications in the area of Locris; he did not even begin excavations of native cultures, such a key feature of his Sicilian work (only much later would such systematic exploration begin for Magna Graecia). Yet in his last printed

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contribution on the region, this restrained man unabashedly declared, “Io amo la Calabria” (I love Calabria).181 In his tangible discoveries, in the questions he opened up, and in his scholarly persona, he left an indelible mark. Orsi had many conflicts with the locals—for example in Reggio, where his plan for a national museum was opposed by locals, who proposed a civic museum instead, or in Monteleone, where the heirs of Capialbi never allowed him access to their collection. Yet even in the latter town, he inspired a young man, the Marquis Gagliardi, just as he had fired the imagination of Zanotti Bianco. Both men

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would end up friends and

supporters, even drawing on their own finances to sponsor Orsi's research.182 Just as contradictory is how Orsi, both in himself and as he has been understood, while bringing Magna Graecia into the modern scientific world, also reinforced a certain notion of the region as undeveloped and premodern. During his last survey in Calabria at Caulonia, in careful photographs Orsi recorded the living conditions of Calabrese farmers—i pagliari, who still lived in houses built of hay—seeing their “prehistoriccontemporary habitat” as a disappearing remnant of prehistory in modern times (see figure 4.4). But some features of Orsi's own work in Magna Graecia would be seen as a testament to the exotic nature of this land left behind by time. Already in 1897 Perrot had described the harsh working conditions of Orsi's archaeological campaigns as “revealing [in him] qualities of practicality and hardiness which are usually credited only to scholars who dig outside Europe, in more or less unstable localities such as Asia Minor, Syria, or North Africa.”183 Zanotti Bianco went further, claiming that Orsi faced conditions considerably more difficult than those experienced by excavators in Asia Minor. The latter mounted expeditions in which “shared and harmonious work was the lighter and less painful, and the organization of material life was easier.” As proof of his claim, Zanotti Bianco quoted a bit of doggerel supposedly left by an archaeologist on a column at Pergamon:

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In the

Figure 4.4. Pagliari photographed by Paolo Orsi at the time of the 1927 excavation in Medma. (Reprinted from Orsi, 1928. “Medma-Nicotera: Ricerche topografiche.” Atti e memorie della Società Magna Grecia: 1–61)

morning early, some nice discovery, And happy work in trusted company; In the evening some good wine And a guest most welcome to our assembly, And then a letter with some happy novelty: This is what keeps healthy body and mind.184

According to Zanotti Bianco at least, the conviviality of European archaeological expeditions in the eastern classical lands remained alien to Orsi. He “was always alone, alone with his loyal and courageous draftsman Rosario Carta and with his few workers: without modern comforts or the means to procure them for himself, often bedding down in haystacks, on leafy branches, huts, cabins, and caves, and sometimes surrounded by the voiceless danger of malaria.”185 The photograph that Orsi had taken of himself stricken by arthritis during one of his Locris campaigns offers an extravagant commentary on the hardships endured by the militant archaeologist (see figure 4.5). In the midst of these hardships, however, Orsi apparently held fast to his sense of a higher moral calling and discovered in himself the possibility of a heightened appreciation of beauty. Orsi recalled, for instance, a “typical afternoon at Locris, at Caulonia, at the time of day when ‘the heat takes the strength

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out of

you,’ when the trenches empty of workers and, on the Figure 4.5. Paolo Orsi struck by arthritis blinding fields, during the excavations in Locris. only the silver (Reprinted from G. Agnello, ed., Paolo scales on the Orsi [1859–1935], special issue of flowering Archivio storico per la Calabria e la thistles are Lucania, Rome, 1935.) shaking, along with the monotonous song of the cicadas, an image worthy of Sappho's verses.” He rhapsodized about “the grand lines and splendid colours of the valley of Crati, of its epic sunsets when the herds come to the river bronzed with a fiery red, and as in the description in the ancient poem: ‘Two, apart from the mass, are there on the lookout / Getting a view from afar of the sheep and bright cattle.’ ”186

Concluding his remembrances of Orsi, Zanotti Bianco wrote pointedly that “German, French, and British archaeological missions have been working in Greece, in cooperation with the Government, for half a century now, and to these have lately been added Danish and Italian groups; hundreds of volumes have been published, a few of them very thick, and this is only the beginning”—he added that “this is how it should be in Magna Graecia, in all the Italian South.”187 With this clarion call for further archaeological work in Magna Graecia, it becomes readily apparent that the region's coming of age, in terms of scientific work, did not arrive without contradictions in a period of such intense nationalism. The parallel with Greece invoked by Zanotti Bianco, however naturally it seems to flow from Orsi's epic and archaic lyric references to his experiences in Calabria, ends up treating Magna Graecia, once again, as the lesser term of the comparison. Envisioning collaborative, international work on a grand scale, Zanotti Bianco also undercut somehow his heroizing representation of Orsi as a solitary adventurer, committed despite a lack of outside support. Most striking of all is the way in which Zanotti Bianco sees Orsi's archaeological successes as indicating the promise of future international work in Magna Graecia, ignoring how Orsi's labors were embedded in a very

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different history of research in South Italy. After all, Orsi himself had presided over the 1887 ejection of American archaeologists from Croton. Despite its possibly innocent intentions, that American expedition was certainly a clandestine one, but even later, legitimate efforts by foreigners seeking permission to excavate in Calabria met with a certain unease on the Italian side, and, as we have seen, Orsi devoted considerable efforts to preventing the illegal pillaging of archaeological material by various foreigners. (Not for many decades to come did foreign archaeological teams work in Italy, be it on their own or in collaboration with Italians.) The significant scholarly advances achieved by Orsi and Pais, which resonated well beyond the Italian borders, came about in the midst of these complex national tensions. Lenormant succeeded in Magna Graecia precisely because of his own detachment from the more institutionalized national structures of research, while Pais, despite making Magna Graecia a topic of modern interest, secured it for Italian history, rather than championing it as part of a Greek world broadly defined. Beyond the scholarly realm, the tensions generated by nineteenth-century nationalism played themselves out all the more dramatically against the

(p.245)

backdrop of a wider

international scene, which was their inevitable (and constitutive) context. Two world wars gave tragic expression and finally brought an end to this period of heightened nationalism. Over the course of their lives, Pais and Orsi experienced the full sweep of Italian national history, from the hopeful days of the Risorgimento to the disaster of the First World War. They witnessed the dawn of Fascist rule, the ventennio fascista, and the deeds of a regime that envisioned Italy as a modern, self-sufficient country yet beholden to Fascist ideology. Magna Graecia played a pivotal role in this dark period of the country's history. The region was capable of eliciting a tremendous outpouring of national pride, yet its underdeveloped economy and its suspicious history of foreign influences would also prove unsettling to the Fascist fantasy of Italian autarchia.

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Notes (p.246)

(p.247)

(p.248)

(p.249)

(p.250)

Notes:

(1.) Frothingham 1886. On Frothingham see Dyson 1998: 46– 47, 99–100, and 163–165. (2.) On the foundation of the Archaeological Institute of America and that of its journal, The American Journal of Archaeology, see Dyson 1998: 28–49. (3.) See Frothingham 1887a. (4.) Dyson 1998: 174. (5.) Frothingham 1887b: 389. (6.) Frothingham 1887b: 388. (7.) Orsi 1911: 77. (8.) For developments and transformation in Italian heritage legislation over the eighteenth and nineteenth century (i.e., from the pre- to the post-unification period), see Bencivenni, Dalla Negra and Grifoni 1987, Troilo 2005, Balzani 2007 and Guzzo 2001. (9.) See Marchand 1996: 75–103 and 2009b (quoted by permission of the author), Dyson 2006: 65–132, and DíazAndreu 2007: 100–113. (10.) See Díaz-Andreu 2007: 99–110 for a succinct and compelling account of the development of this phenomenon; see Shanks 1996: 11–15 for a brief account of how this nineteenth-century institutional landscape still informs archaeologist's experiences today. (11.) Gerhard 1829e: 8; note that Gerhard was writing in the middle of the Greek War of Independence. (12.) Morris 1994: 25.

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(13.) See Deichmann 1986; for a subtle analysis of this transition see Blanck 2000. (14.) Excerpt from a letter of Gerhard to de Luynes, dated November 15, 1856, from the archive of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome, quoted in Deichmann 1986: 70. (15.) See Blanck 2008 and Jansen 2008 for an informed assessment of the Instituto and its history in the context of nineteenth-century European national politics. (16.) Goyau 1931: 9–10. (17.) Deichmann 1986: 4. (18.) From the Ordennance de fondation, quoted in Radet 1901: 422–423. (19.) For an overview of the debate, see Radet 1901: 58–63; for a study of the Greeks’ perception at the time of the role of archaeology, both as monuments and as a practice, in their newly independent country see Athanassopoulos 2002, especially 283–299, and Hamilakis 2007, especially 57–123. (20.) Radet 1901: 4. (21.) Homolle 1897: 1: 10. (22.) See Radet 1901: 95–124. (23.) On Leake and his work in Greece see Witmore and Bruttey 2008; on the scientific Morea expedition and the resulting publication see Briffaud 1998. (24.) From the “Arrêté ” of the Ministre de l’Instruction Publique, January 26, 1850, in Radet 1901: 425–426. (25.) From the Rapport de le Ministre de l’Instruction Publique à Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, August 7, 1850, in Radet 1901: 426–428. (26.) See Radet 1901: 116–120 for the clamor that the discovery raised in France.

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(27.) See Digeon 1959. (28.) See Dionisotti 1972. (29.) Goyau 1931: 15. (30.) Goyau 1931: 13. (31.) For the emergence of a distinct Italian tradition of classical archaeology against the background of nineteenthcentury nationalist tensions see, again, Settis 1989, 1993 and 1994, but also Brice 2001, Barbanera 2001. (32.) See Mazzarino 1972–1973. See essays in Polverini 1993 for the inferiority complex developed by Italian scholars in the course of the nineteeth century vis-a-vis their German counterparts. (33.) Momigliano 1987: 80. (34.) See Momigliano 1955c: 89. (35.) See most recently Giuliano 2004. (36.) See Fiorelli 1881a; on this process of making one legislation out of many pre-existing ones see Barbanera 1998: 3–19, Guzzo 2001 and Balzani 2007. (37.) Quoted in Barbanera 1998: 35. (38.) For the persistence of this long tradition of Italian debates on heritage legislation today see Settis 2002. (39.) See Barbanera 1998: 49–118 for an overview and Petricioli 1990 for Italian efforts abroad. (40.) See Barbanera 1998: 21–34; on Fiorelli see also Scatozza Höricht 1987d, De Angelis 1993 and De Caro and Guzzo 1999. (41.) Quoted in Barbanera 1998: 22. (42.) Quoted in Barbanera 1998: 23. (43.) Quoted in Barbanera 1998: 24.

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(44.) Quoted in Barbanera 1998: 27. (45.) For Barnabei, whom we have already encountered for his informed and extensive assessment of Mazzocchi's work (Barnabei 1874), see the recent publication of the autobiographical journals he had left in manuscript (Barnabei 1991) as well as Verrastro 2003. (46.) For an overview see Barbanera 1998: 39–72. (47.) De Angelis 1993. (48.) See Barbanera 1998: 16–19; De Vido 1997: 472–496 shows the solid continuity of a Sicilian scholarly tradition from the eighteenth century to well after unification period. (49.) On Lenormant's life and work see Babelon 1885, Belli 1974, Dotoli and Fiorino 1989a, Masson 1993, Morin 2000 , and Gran-Aymeric 2001: 406–407. (50.) Babelon 1885: 9. (51.) Transcribed in Le Journal des Debats, March 9, 1884, and discussed in Morin 2000: 26. (52.) See Robert 1959: 187n, referring to Regnault 1933. (53.) Masson 1993: 44. (54.) On the Chapelle Saint-Eloi episode, see Vayson de Pradenne 1932: 343–380 and Piétri 1970; for subsequent forgeries by Lenormant, see Masson 1993. (55.) See the file on Lenormant in the series F17 of the French National Archives. (56.) On de Witte see Gran-Aymeric 2001: 722–724. (57.) See Lenormant 1860: 294. (58.) Lenormant 1875: 1. (59.) For the status of oriental studies in this period, see Marchand 2009a: 196–202.

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(60.) On the development of archaeology and art history as disciplines with particular attention to their institutionalization within French university teaching and research system during the nineteenth century see Therrien 1998. (61.) The meeting with Barnabei is mentioned in a letter written by Lenormant to de Witte from Rome on October 24 1876; this letter is fully reproduced in Dotoli and Fiorino 1989a: 33–34. (62.) Quoted in Dotoli and Fiorino 1989a: 35. (63.) See in DAI's archives Lenormant's letter to Helbig of November 21, 1879. (64.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: i. (65.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 3. (66.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 7. (67.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 133. (68.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: ii. (69.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 164 and 169. (70.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 2: 317. (71.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 164. (72.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 2. (73.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 2. (74.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 328. (75.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 3: 193. (76.) Lenormant 1882: 204. (77.) Babelon 1885: 9. (78.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: iii.

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(79.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: vi. (80.) Lenormant 1883: 2: 361. (81.) Lenormant 1883: 2: 167, 168 and 170. (82.) See Dotoli and Fiorino 1989a: 118–124. (83.) Lenormant in Dotoli and Fiorino 1989b: 323–324. (84.) Ampolo 1997: 65. (85.) On George Grote see Momigliano 1955b, Clarke 1962, Calder and Trzaskoma 1996, Osborne 1998, Demetriou 1999, Cartledge 2001 , and Murray 2004. (86.) Grote 1846–1856: 1: vi–vii. (87.) Grote 1846–1856: 1: xi. On how revolutionary Grote was in the English academic world, see Stray 1997, which provides a reading of Grote in the context of Cambridge academic politics. (88.) On Grote's interpretation of the prehistoric period, see Morris 1997: 99–106. (89.) Turner 1981: 213. (90.) See Cambiano 2000. Moreover, Aleka Lianeri has been problematizing any simple understanding of the idealizing relationship of the nineteenth-century democratic tradition with its ancient antecedent since her insightful 2002 article on British translation of the Greek word democracy in Thucydides’ famous funerary oration (see Lianeri 2002). (91.) See especially Turner 1981: 213–233 and Chambers 1996. (92.) Ampolo 1997: 56–57. (93.) See Müller 1820 and 1824. For example, Giuseppe Cambiano has attempted to rationalize the project—on the basis of other works, such as Müller's commentary on the Eumenides—by hypothesizing that Müller believed in a Doric

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Athens and that everything followed from that. See Cambiano 1984. (94.) Finley 1975: 121. (95.) Grote 1846–1856: 1: xv. (96.) Grote 1846–1856: 1: ix. (97.) Grote 1846–1856: 1: xv. (98.) Grote 1846–1856: 3: 525. (99.) Here Grote takes issue, as it appears from the footnotes, with Müller's “Dorians,” where the Pythagorean teachings and way of life were associated with Sparta. Grote wrote that “the Dorism of Pythagoras appears to me a complete fancy. O. Müller even turns Kroton into a Dorian city, contrary to all evidence” (1846–1856: 4: 405n.). (100.) Grote 1846–1856: 4: 415. (101.) Grote 1846–1856: 3: 472 and 472n. In a long footnote, Grote transcribes a summary of the view expressed by Müller in his work on the Etruscans. (102.) Grote 1846–1856: 3: 526. (103.) Grote 1846–1856: 3: 494–495 and 496. (104.) Grote 1846–1856: 3: 496. (105.) Grote 1846–1856: 3: 498–499. (106.) Ampolo 1997: 63. But for a careful contextualization of Müller's own ideological tones, see Blok 1996. (107.) Turner 1981: 213–233 and Plácido 1994. (108.) Mandler 2000: 224. (109.) Walbank 1951: 49. Walbank here explicitly exempts Grote from holding what he perceives as the limiting view of Greek history as a strife for unity, a view developed by and large by German and Italian historians of the nineteenth and

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twentieth-century. Yet Grote's treatment of the Western Greeks raises the question anew, if in a colonial rather than merely a national framework. (110.) See again Casini 1998: 261 and Banti 2000: 114–119. (111.) On Micali see Pera 1867, Treves 1962: 293–312, Casini 1998: 262–272 and Desideri 2009. (112.) Treves 1962: 295. (113.) Cuoco 1999: 2: 365. (114.) Micali 1821: 1: 13. (115.) On these works see Casini 1998: 269–296 and Banti 2000: 79 and 43–44. (116.) Micali 1821: 1: 232. (117.) Micali 1821: 1: 226. (118.) Micali 1821: 3: 276. (119.) Micali 1821: 4: 350. (120.) On Francesco Daniele (1740–1812), see Tirelli 1987. (121.) Castaldi 1842: 5. For rigenerazione within Italian Risorgimento discourse, see Patriarca 2005. (122.) Castaldi 1842: 16. (123.) Leoni 1884: 2. See Banti 2000, especially 119–128, for heroic martyrdom as a crucial trope of Risorgimento's imagery. (124.) Piromalli 1996: 413. (125.) On Pais see Treves 1962: 1151–1213, Ridley 1975–1976, and essays collected in Polverini 2002b. (126.) Treves 1962: 1162. (127.) Croce quoted in Polverini 2002a: 11.

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(128.) See Cagnetta 2002 and Ruggeri 2002. (129.) Cagnetta 2002: 84–86. (130.) Pais 1922 quoted in Cagnetta 2002: 83. (131.) See Ridley 2002: 51. (132.) See Capasso 2002, especially 231–232. (133.) For an account of these events, see Bandelli 2002: 99– 103 and Buonocore 2002: 181–187. (134.) Treves 1962: 1153 and also Salmeri 2002b: 309–310. (135.) Pais 1894: vii. (136.) Freeman 1891–1894: 1: viii. (137.) Pais 1894: viii. (138.) On Freeman see Momigliano 1994. (139.) Freeman 1891–1894: 1: 3. (140.) Freeman 1891–1894: 1: 22. (141.) Pais 1894: viii. (142.) Pais 1894: ix–x. (143.) Pais 1894: ix. (144.) Pais 1894: ix. (145.) Pais 1894: xi–xii. (146.) Pais 1894: xv. (147.) On Orsi see Agnello 1935, Zanotti Bianco 1921 and 1935, Arias 1976 and 1991, Leighton 1986, Paolo Orsi e l’Archeologia 1991, and Paoletti 2005b. (148.) Belli 1985: 6. (149.) Belli: 1985: 6.

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(150.) Lenormant 1881–1884: 1: 156. (151.) On Jatta's work see Fiorilllo 2001. (152.) See Fiorelli 1879: 49. (153.) Fiorelli 1881b: 376. (154.) On Viola at Taranto see Barbanera 1998: 74 and 204. (155.) Arias quoted in Paoletti 2005b: 196. (156.) For late nineteenth-century Italian research in Crete see Creta Antica. Cento anni di archeologia italiana (1844– 1894) 1984. (157.) Quoted in Barbanera 1998: 73. (158.) Quoted in Barbanera 1998: 74. (159.) Barbanera 1998: 73. (160.) La Rosa 1978 details Orsi's academic history. (161.) Perrot 1897: 610. (162.) Zanotti Bianco 1935: 317. (163.) Quoted in Paoletti 1991: 135. (164.) Paoletti 2005b: 196. (165.) Momigliano 1984a: 131. (166.) See Momigliano 1984a and quote in Paoletti 2005b: 196. (167.) See La Rosa 1991. (168.) Quoted in Arias 1991: 20. (169.) Momigliano 1955b: 228. (170.) For this comparison between Boni and Orsi, see Paoletti 2005b: 196. On Boni's stratigraphic method, see his reports in

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the Notizie degli Scavi 1902–1906 and 1911, Holloway 1994: 23–25, and Manacorda 1982. (171.) Sabbione 2005: 199. (172.) Zanotti Bianco 1921: 913. I thank James Kierstead for translations of Zanotti Bianco's 1921 passages on Orsi quoted here. (173.) For an account see Spadea 2005b. (174.) Letter of November 12, 1900, from the archives of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Calabria, quoted in Ianelli 2005: 236. On Orsi at Medma, see Paoletti 1991: 136–148 and Ianelli 2005. (175.) Orsi 1913: 55. (176.) Orsi 1933: 7. (177.) For Orsi's research at Punta Alice see Spadea 2005a. (178.) Orsi 1933: 8. (179.) Orsi 1933: 12–13. (180.) Orsi 1933: 15 and 37. (181.) Orsi 1928: 57. (182.) For Gagliardi's friendship with Orsi see Spadea 1989: 526–527. (183.) Perrot 1897: 610. (184.) Zanotti Bianco 1921: 919. (185.) Zanotti Bianco 1921: 919. (186.) Zanotti Bianco 1921: 920. (187.) Zanotti Bianco 1921: 920–921.

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University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

Culture and Excavation Giovanna Ceserani

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords This chapter traces the study and imagining of Magna Graecia in the twentieth century, from its involvement in Italian Fascism to global developments in its post-war understanding, concluding with snapshots from the early twenty-first century. Magna Graecia under Fascism is examined by contrasting the lives and work of Emanuele Ciaceri, Fascist historian of Greek South Italy, and Umberto Zanotti Bianco, anti-Fascist, activist within the Southern Question's debates and for protection of Italian cultural and archaeological heritage, and discover (with Paola Zancani Montuoro) of the major archaic sanctuary of the Sele. Later developments, such as post-colonial studies’ relation to Magna Graecia, are briefly sketched, culminating with a consideration of the region's place in a less Hellenocentric, twenty-first century Humanist world.

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Keywords: Fascism, Emanuele Ciaceri, Umberto Zanotti Bianco, Southern Question, twentieth century, twenty-first century, cultural and archaeological heritage, post-colonial studies, Paola Zancani Montuoro

The militant archaeologist Orsi—first-rate field researcher, timely publisher of his famously numerous excavation campaigns, and devoted defender of the archaeological heritage—remains an iconic figure in Italian archaeology. Such is his reach that the story of his first meeting with Zanotti Bianco, on a ferry crossing the strait of Messina, is often cited in order to introduce the younger archaeologist's own scholarly persona.1 The enshrining of this moment in subsequent accounts shows the extent to which the shaping of a distinctly Italian academic tradition has depended on intergenerational dialogue—a cross-fertilization of ideas and visions between scholars of the immediate postunification period and those of the early twentieth century, and beyond. Indeed, the same is true of Italian culture more generally: up to the end of the twentieth century, the conversation about the nation's identity and trajectory has been couched in terms of Risorgimento imagery that once sparked nascent national aspirations and played a part in the eventual achievement of a unified nation-state. This interplay in fact is still the main focus of the early-twenty-first-century analyses of the Italian character and its imagining.2 But this discursive continuity, which all but enables our spanning in so brief a space so long an interval of time, should not obscure the discontinuity, often dramatic, that has defined Italian history in the years since unification. The arc of studies of Magna Graecia indeed powerfully captures some of these transformations: if postunification scholarly efforts were devoted to bringing Greek South Italy to fit within the new nation's past, in the recent decades that have

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witnessed the development of postcolonial studies and Mediterranean studies, the regional character of Magna Graecia, eluding the distinct boundaries and features of classical lands, has come to hold great interest, rather than being seen as a hindrance. The prevailing view of Magna Graecia evolved in tandem with certain developments in archaeological studies, but also with sociopolitical and cultural phenomena well beyond the scholarly sphere, during what

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were undoubtedly tumultuous times for Italy. The darkest years of the modern Italian nation, the time of its Fascist regime, provided the impetus for most subsequent studies of Magna Graecia, making it all the more pressing to attend to this period's intellectual history. Historical debate on Italian Fascism has often focused on the extent of its modernity, and on the relationship between the present and ancient past of Italy, and this was an especially vexed issue with regard to Magna Graecia, about which the scholarly dialogue explicitly involved pro- and anti-Fascist views. We shall consider this problematic in the works of two scholars of the first half of the twentieth century: Emanuele Ciaceri (1869–1944) and Umberto Zanotti Bianco (1889–1963). Ciaceri and Zanotti Bianco developed the work of their respective mentors, Pais and Orsi, initially by reproducing the disciplinary division between narrative historiography and archaeological fieldwork the latter had scientifically modeled. They also advanced their teachers’ visions of ancient Greek South Italy, elaborating approaches to Greek colonization and archaeological heritage that, if sourced from distinctively Italian cultural contexts, would bear influence well beyond the Mediterranean horizon.

Fascism and Magna Graecia through two scholarly lives If the two world wars left most European nations (and their imperial underpinnings) deeply shaken, Italian suffering took a particular form. These cataclysms represented the initial military tests of Italy as a unified state, tests that it ultimately failed. The first proved to be a victory followed by a rather rude diplomatic reminder that Italy was no great power; the second disaster took shape in 1922 with the advent of the Fascist regime, which undermined the political foundations of national unity at the very moment it was endorsing the nationalist rhetoric that originated in the Risorgimento.3 The conclusion of the Second World War and the downfall of the Fascist regime, in which both the Allies’ liberation and internal guerrilla resistance played a role, in fact produced conditions that have been likened to civil war. For a long time since, historical reflection has centered on the extent to which all of these disasters were the logical result of the history of Italian nationalism as a whole, with Fascism operating in

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continuity with earlier social and political dynamics, while also marking Italy's entrance into modernity (though with various shortcomings some of which remain unresolved). The South indeed has been central to

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these questions. This is not

surprising as it represents what is possibly the widest and, in many ways, the most persistent of the fissures in the Italian national texture. Fascist rhetoric sought to deny the existence of a Southern Question, but it nonetheless reinforced the special status of the South by choosing remote villages of the region as sites of confino (forced peripheral residence) to which to send the regime's political opponents, in order to remove them from social life. Carlo Levi's novel Christ Stopped at Eboli, which has framed the Southern Question in literary terms more powerfully than any other work of the postwar period, records the time he spent confined in Lucania, ca. forty miles inland from Metaponto, on account of his opposition to the Fascist regime. Magna Graecia's image, a symbol of the glorious South that encompassed a cross-section of the entire region, remained closely entwined with the South's modern history during this time. The Fascist rhetoric of modernity was predicated on a complex interaction between future and past, as it included appeals to Italy's ancient greatness. In turning to the ancients, Fascist ideology by and large concerned itself with and made use of the Roman past. This engagement was, moreover, most pervasive in popular culture—with such clear instances as the Roman salutation and the very name Fascismo, derived from the Roman fasci (even if recent research has more closely scrutinized its extension to academic work, as the case of Pais illustrates).4 The Fascist engagement with ancient Greek South Italy in popular culture was much sparser. Its few examples include a renewed interest in, and nationalistic appropriation of, Cuoco's Platone in Italia, which became popular in schools and in staged parades during the ventennio,5 and in the restoration of the Paestum temples (conducted alongside the reclamation of the surrounding wastelands), which were transformed into a performance site for shows organized by the Fascist National Institute for Ancient Drama.6 No doubt conditioned by the lingering problem of the Southern Question, the history of the study of

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Magna Graecia provides a striking case study of the interactions and conflicts between Fascist ideology and the scholarly world. Following the efforts of Pais and Orsi to incorporate the study of the ancient Greek South into the wider framework of ancient (and modern) Italy, the most pressing intellectual issue faced by the next generation was Fascist attitudes toward the past. The response to this challenge was sharply divided—a division that for the first time sidestepped and complicated the earlier split between local and nonlocal scholars. Emanule Ciaceri and Umberto Zanotti Bianco, the two most influential figures of Magna Graecia studies in the first half of the twentieth century, found themselves on opposite sides regarding Fascism, the former a firm supporter of the regime and the latter an irreducible opponent. Apparently removed from our contemporary context, the work of these scholars—whose careers unfolded by and large under Fascism and who are too often overlooked—nonetheless holds the key to our understanding of many concepts and institutions that originated in the early part of the

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twentieth century and continued into the postwar period. It is in these developments, which played out in response to Fascism, that we now seek a deeper understanding of the place of this region and its antiquities in the history and historiography of twentieth-century Italy. The university professor and historian Ciaceri and the archaeologist activist Zanotti Bianco were indeed at the opposite sides of the Italian spectrum, although both found themselves advancing the study of South Italy's ancient past. Ciaceri originated from Sicily, while Zanotti Bianco was from the North; Ciaceri, of lower middle-class origins, by winning an undergraduate position at the prestigious Scuola Normale, launched a successful (and peripatetic) academic career, while Zanotti Bianco, from a wealthy background, worked for Italy but never joined anyone's payroll, received no academic training in classics or archaeology, and spent most of his life in Calabria by choice. Ciaceri was a formal pupil of Pais, while Zanotti Bianco was a law student whom Orsi trained to become an archaeologist in the field. Most significantly, whereas Ciaceri turned Magna Graecia into the earliest

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moment of a glorified Italian history that culminated in the Fascist age, Zanotti Bianco saw in the region's fate the unresolved integration of the Italian nation, and in its ancient past a means of redressing the backwardness of the South and improving its present condition. The divide between Ciaceri and Zanotti Bianco reflects the charged and polarized political situation specific to their generation. Pais and Orsi, Ciaceri's and Zanotti Bianco's respective mentors, differed in their relation to the Fascist regime that shadowed their final decades: Pais, unlike Orsi, was a clearly active supporter, yet despite these political differences, the two men always saw one another as scholarly collaborators. Perhaps such differences were muted by the fact that both were elected senators during the early years of the regime, and both died before its oppressiveness reached its harshest extent. This harshness affected the following generation forcefully. Zanotti Bianco was prohibited from working in Calabria because of his opposition to Fascism. Ironically enough, though, it was thanks to this impediment, and being forced to move elsewhere, that he would go on to make the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century in South Italy: the Sanctuary of the Sele near Paestum. In Ciaceri's most famous work on Greek South Italy, Storia della Magna Grecia (History of Magna Graecia, 1924– 1932), while a highly nationalistic tone dominates, specific references to Fascism are hard to pin down, even though they do appear in lectures he delivered at the time. These tensions, however opaque to outsiders, were central to the brutal ideological and political battles of the time, which in fact ended up including even Arnaldo Momigliano. But despite how different Zanotti Bianco's and Ciaceri's life choices were, and how dissimilarly they approached the past, elements of the work accomplished by both scholars enjoyed success in the postwar period. Zanotti Bianco's heroic achievements and dedication in the field lived up to and refined the image of the (p.255) militant archaeologist, which he expanded to legislative efforts, still with us today, to defend the national patrimonio culturale (cultural heritage). Ciaceri's positive emphasis on the local populations has ensured his ongoing position as one of the founders of the study of Greek-Italic

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interactions, a field that developed by leaps and bounds later in the twentieth century. The academic historian

Ciaceri was born in Modica, Sicily, where he completed his education through high school.7 Admitted to the Scuola Normale in Pisa, he took his laurea there in 1894 with a thesis on cults and religion in ancient Sicily, before returning to the island to begin his career. Following what was by then a wellestablished trajectory, he began as an instructor in local high schools before advancing to university-level teaching in Catania and eventually winning a university chair in Padua in 1912. Eight years later he secured the chair in Naples, where he remained until the end of his career. He had already spent two years in that city, from 1902 to 1904, when he was charged with reorganizing the numismatic section of the Neapolitan Museum, then under the directorship of Pais. The latter knew Ciaceri well, having been his teacher in Pisa; in fact, Ciaceri is most often introduced as the best among Pais's pupils.8 He was also the one who took Pais's tendencies in the most radical directions, in terms of both historical interpretations and political positions. He joined the Fascist movement early and never wavered in his allegiance, not even in the aftermath of Matteotti's assassination. By the 1930s, he was writing not only for Pais's official journal Historia but also for Bibliographia Fascista. Ciaceri's Storia della Magna Grecia, which appeared in three volumes (1924, 1927, and 1932), was deeply indebted to Pais's work, but Ciaceri's achievement differed from the senior scholar's in significant ways. Unlike Pais, Ciaceri chose to focus on the Greek settlements in South Italy, to the exclusion of Sicily. This choice may have stemmed from Ciaceri's Neapolitan loyalties, or else simply reflected the fact that scholars of the new generation were carving out their own niches in the wake of Pais's towering and comprehensive treatment of the ancient history of the Italian peninsula. (During the same period, Biagio Pace was hard at work on his influential Arte e civiltà della Sicilia Antica [Art and civilization of ancient Sicily], which pursued, parallel to Ciaceri's project for Magna Graecia, a revaluation of the native Sicilian ethnic

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element in the island's ancient history.)9 Regardless of the motivation, Ciaceri's choice highlights the gulf that has separated the two regions in modern historiography, in contrast with Pais's attempt to unify them in his history of Italy. But the focus on South Italy to the exclusion of Sicily was not the only feature differentiating Ciaceri's work from that of Pais. In the journal of the American Historical Association, Allan Chester Johnson praised Ciaceri's “sane and judicious study of the cultural development of southern Italy and its influence on

(p.256)

Rome,” citing in particular his

demonstration of how “when the west was slowly emerging from barbarism, the Greek colonies acted as interpreters and disseminators of the culture of the east.”10 Yet, Chester Johnson's appreciation, which would fit Pais's accomplishment well, strangely seems to sidestep the most striking novelties of Ciaceri's work. Thirty-three years after Pais molded the various ancient pasts of Italy into a single whole in order to provide a foundation for the modern Italian nation, Ciaceri set out to produce a history of Magna Graecia in particular, claiming it as one of the great civilizations of the ancient past. He lamented that “it is common today to consider the history of Magna Graecia to be a product of Greek factors, almost unrelated to our land, and, as a result, not on its own terms but a simple derivation or branch of the history of Greece itself.” Ciaceri's aspiration entailed a new kind of nationalist emphasis. He wrote that the civilization of Magna Graecia had been “considered in relationship to the influence which it exercised on the literary, artistic and political culture of ancient Rome” (a clear reference to Pais), but that its “Italic character” had not yet “been assessed to a sufficient degree and in adequate measure.”11 Ciaceri's intent bespeaks renewed anxiety about the status granted to the native, supposedly quintessentially Italian past versus that of Greece in the interpretation of ancient southern Italian history. In his concern we can recognize elements of a long tradition, extending as far back as the sixteenth century, which claims Pythagoras as an Italian native, through to the eighteenth-century elaborations of an Italic model. But Ciaceri updated this tradition in adapting some of its tropes into twentieth-century language and into a

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forceful narrative encompassing the whole of Greek colonization in South Italy. In opening his Storia della Magna Grecia, Ciaceri quickly dismisses long-standing arguments about the causes of Greek colonization, deeming them all mere variations on the same theme and criticizing their exclusive focus on the Greek perspective on events. What deserves closer examination, he argues, is the fact that “the Greek colonies of Italy displayed a very rapid development, both commercially and politically, as well as from an artistic and intellectual point of view,” so that they soon became “a whole country which, in comparison to the mother-country, deserved the name of Magna Graecia.”12 The traditional explanations for this “well-known” phenomenon—the fertility of the soil and the advantageous topography of the relevant coastlines—Ciaceri dismisses as being insufficient. Instead, he hypothesizes that the contribution of the natives, usually written out of ancient and modern histories, explains the astonishing historical development of the civilization of Magna Graecia. Though lacking much evidence for his hypothesis, Ciaceri begins by playing down the differences between the Greek newcomers and the Italian natives: “These ancient inhabitants of our country whom, sometimes, erroneously, scholars indulged themselves in imagining as barbarians and ferocious in

(p.257)

opposition to the civilized Greeks, were in reality,

then as today, good people with strong feelings for the cult of gods and family, hospitable towards the foreigners and enthusiastic for novelties.”13 The shores of the Gulf of Taranto, he adds, were “nothing like the lands of the American Indians [‘redskins’ in his own words],” and the talents of the Greek newcomers had been grossly exaggerated: “the Greeks of the eighth century were far from being the Athenians of Pericles, or the Spartans of Lysander.”14 Ciaceri claims that there had been “a fusion between the two elements, the Greek and indigenous,” as evinced by the fact that “all the demonstrations of their civilization present a double character, revealing the Italic alongside the Greek element.”15 Ciaceri envisions this mixing of Greeks and Italics by resorting, again, to modern analogues, comparing the ancient

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Greeks to “our emigrants from the south of Italy that go to America, more men than women.” Like contemporary emigrants, the young ancient Greek men “for physiological and social reasons, obviously, needed to find their companions in the land where they disembarked.” These “first unions between native women and Greek colonists,” Ciaceri argues, “started a mixing of Greek-indigenous blood” and “came to constitute in the new city the type of southern family in which the woman, if she was not in a privileged position, had a very significant role.”16 Given the “cohabitation and the partial fusion between Italics and Greeks,” Ciaceri thought it necessary to explain the “numerous peculiarities that profoundly differentiated [Magna Graecia's civilization] from that of Greece proper.” Subsumed within this vision were certain older arguments that Ciaceri quietly recycled. Considering “some curious particularities that one observes in certain temples, for example the one said to be of Ceres in Paestum,” Ciaceri wonders whether these temples, rather than being “explained as a consequence of a Roman-period reworking or of anomalies of Ionic influence,” should not be “attributed to the original development of Italic architecture.” Seamlessly moving on to more general cultural phenomena, he then ponders whether “the same question is to be posed concerning the origin of plastic art in Rheggium in particular and in Italy generally,” and then concerning “everything that is an artistic or scientific manifestation, a manifestation of feeling and of thought.”17 It is in this way that Ciaceri construes the vision of a Magna Graecia where Italic influences predominate. Ciaceri's Magna Graecia—down to his suggestion of the Italic character of the architecture at Paestum—cannot help but call to mind features of the eighteenth-century Italic model, and it might, taken on its own, seem highly speculative and inspired primarily by nationalist ideology. Nonetheless, one should remember the wider scholarly context in which his analyses appeared. By this time, racial undertones regarding the native Italians (or Italian Greeks, for that matter), already present in the work of Grote, had only intensified in works by nonItalians. In 1927, William Dinsmoor had this to say about the (p.258)

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Greek temples in Italy: “as we proceed westwards

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among the colonies we find even more emphasis on the tendency towards ostentation, accompanied however by a certain amount of provincialism or ‘cultural lag’ and also, by barbaric distortions resulting from the intermixture not only of colonists of various origins but also of native taste.”18 Ciaceri's discussion of the name “Magna Graecia” is a useful point of departure for understanding the Italian context of some of these dynamics. Ciaceri confidently presents it as a “clear” fact that “by the sixth century BC the civilization of the Greek cities of South Italy had risen to such a high degree” that they “well deserved the name of Megale Hellas” in comparison with mainland Greece.19 He concedes, however, that “this cannot be stated without a thorough discussion” and enters the fray over the term “Magna Graecia,” by then already centuries old. The two well-established explanations for the name, he explains, attributed it either to the clemency of the weather and fertility of the soil, which brought the region its wealth, or to the philosophical school of Pythagoras (Ciaceri points out that Pais had been the most recent proponent of the latter position). Ciaceri characterizes these as the “materialistic” and “spiritual” explanations, respectively, and argues instead that “Magna Graecia” celebrated the splendor of life in the Italiot poleis. In addition, Ciaceri adduces what he terms a third “historical truth”: well before the times of Pythagoras, the Italiot poleis were renowned for their achievements, which were the unique result of the fusion of the two different elements, Greek and native Italian. Already by the sixth century BCE, he argues, these achievements had confirmed South Italy's cultural superiority to mainland Greece. If read against the grain of their bias for fifth-century classical Greece, Ciaceri claims, the ancient sources contain numerous references to Magna Graecia's greatness in the field of the law, in the treatment of disease, in the area of physiological research, and in the domain of religion. “A pleiad of effulgent stars,” Ciaceri writes, “names such as Zaleucus, Milon, Democedes, Alcmeon, Clearchus, Stesichorus, and Ibycus (not to mention the ones whose memory has been lost) had already shone their rays on the lands of the Italian Mezzogiorno before the Samian philosopher set foot there.”20

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The reception of Ciaceri's discussion of the term “Megale Hellas” discloses the contemporary Italian intellectual scene. In 1929 Arnaldo Momigliano, a mere twenty-one years old at the time, published a strictly philological discussion concerning the name, but his insistence on including Sicily within Magna Graecia soon reveals itself as a criticism of Ciaceri. Momigliano interprets “Megale Hellas” in terms of extension in space, an interpretation that made the inclusion of Sicily (however much this idea had already been discounted by most scholars) of paramount importance; it also flew in the face of the argument proposed by Ciaceri, who emphasized the superiority of Magna Graecia over the mother country.21 In his reply, the latter limited himself to repeating his argument and restating in his conclusion that “on this question one cannot

(p.259)

speak without having previously

conceded recognition of the unique importance of South Italy in the history of civilization since the sixth century BC.”22 Ciaceri's choice of publication venue was particularly eloquent: the periodical Historia, “pubblicazione del Popolo d’Italia,” directed by Pais, but founded by Mussolini's younger brother, Arnaldo. Circular, authoritarian arguments would indeed become Ciaceri's hallmark as he pressed his scholarship into service for the regime. Momigliano went back to the “Magna Graecia” debate once more, arguing that the celebratory meaning of the name must be understood to have developed in antiquity in the context of Greek-Roman interactions in South Italy—a thesis that, as we have seen, would enjoy some prominence among Italian scholars.23 Eight years later, in 1938, shortly after gaining the chair of Roman history in Turin, Momigliano himself, as a Jew, was forced to leave Italy. Years later, he ended up in the role of commentator on the episodes in which he was involved as a young man, drawing special attention to Ciaceri, while leaving unmentioned his own role. He wrote that while “contamination between Fascism and Roman history” permeated general culture, it remained more superficial at the scholarly level (the few university professors openly opposed to the regime were historians of ancient Rome). “Surprisingly,” he added, it remained for “a competent scholar such as Emanuele Ciaceri  … to discover ancient Fascism among the Pythagoreans in

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South Italy.”24 But an explicit association between Pythagoras and Fascism is not to be found in Ciaceri's Storia della Magna Grecia, so that Momigliano's comment has long been taken as a general reference to the deep ideological coloring and nationalistic tones of the work.25 Vittorio Amoretti, however, has uncovered archival material to link Momigliano's claim to a specific reference, that is Fascismo antico nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia (Pitagorismo) (Ancient Fascism in South Italy [Pythagorism]), a published lecture given by Ciaceri on May 28, 1933, for Salerno's Istituto Fascista di Cultura. The greatness of Greek South Italy is once again an axiom in this lecture: the “civilization of Magna Graecia constitutes in the ancient era the most glorious period of the history of our regions and the foremost in terms of chronology in the whole of Italy, preceding, that is, the full manifestation of the power of Rome.”26 As far as specifics go, Ciaceri cares only to “recall that it occurred on our land with its own character and independently of outside influences.” He goes on to say that he intends, while standing in a “land, in which the traces of that civilization are becoming ever more visible, and where today the sound structures of Fascist government have been established,” to “speak with a free heart about ancient Fascism in the South of Italy, that is, about Pythagoreanism in relation to Fascism.”27 Ciaceri admits the perils of mirroring past and present, asserting that his comparisons are “simple analogies.” Nevertheless, he writes that these parallels “have in them a deep significance, insofar as they remind us—as if that were necessary—how the vigor of the vital

(p.260)

spirit

within similar and extraordinary events is so great that it can withstand even the corrosive influence of time.”28 Amoretti has shown how, with the “materialistic organicism” of his language, Ciaceri conjures up an innate Italian character that he can then use to project Fascist ideology onto past centuries. Seamlessly joined to this style, Amoretti argues, is Ciaceri's “formally unexceptionable use of test-tubes and alembics in the austere laboratory of historical positivist science”—a method that led scholars like Momigliano to concede Ciaceri's “competence” as a historian, even if they disputed his overtly ideological interpretations of the ancient past.29

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Ciaceri categorically denounces democracy as “an empty conception of individual liberty, estranged from and opposed to the real interests of the state, which was to be the ruin first of Miletus itself and then of all the great cities of Greece, Athens included,” while praising ancient Pythagoreanism for its understanding of “the necessity of order, which had to be followed at all times and places, in family and public life, presupposing in all citizens, male and female, a spirit of iron discipline and absolute obedience.” Thus the parallel with modern Fascism reveals itself: Pythagoras, transformed into a proto-Duce, brings to fruition the innate tendency for order (and Fascism) of the Italian people. In ancient Magna Graecia, Ciaceri claims, “a hierarchy was formed, at the top of which was the Leader, who remained spiritually supreme even when he had not been alive for many years.” “autos epha” (he himself said it) was the motto, spoken by Pythagoras, that Ciaceri also applies to Mussolini: “one could not think or act differently from the doctrine of the Master.”30 Ciaceri concludes by arguing that the Fascist character of Magna Graecia only reinforces its historical importance “because we, far from any type of affected nationalism, want the national heritage of Italy to remain spiritually ours and not to become decimated or sullied by foreigners, we want the history of Magna Graecia to be placed in the position it deserves for the nobility of its offspring and for its great antiquity.”31 Ciaceri's lecture in Salerno coincided with the period during which Fascism became more aggressive and repressive of dissidents. That same year, shortly after correctly identifying through careful fieldwork the location of ancient Sybaris in the valley of the Cratis, Umberto Zanotti Bianco was prohibited from residing in Calabria, in an effort by the Fascist government to cut him off from the activist social (and archaeological) work he was doing in the region. Zanotti Bianco managed, however, to secure Paestum as the next place of his compulsory residence assigned by the regime. Here, in 1934, he began the fieldwork exploration that would lead to the greatest discovery of the century in the region, that of the Heraion sanctuary of the Sele. In a way, this discovery showed how the traces of Magna Graecia “[were] becoming ever more visible,” as Ciaceri had described in nearby Salerno a year earlier. Yet Zanotti Bianco's work could not have been

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further in its aims from the Fascist parallels between ancients and moderns sought by Ciaceri. (p.261)

The activist archaeologist

Zanotti Bianco was born in Crete to a diplomat father and an aristocratic mother of Scottish and Swedish descent.32 To this family he owed his “fascinating appearance,” recalled years after Umberto's death by the Neapolitan historian Ernesto Pontieri: “more than a son of Piedmont, he seemed a native of England, with his tall and slender height, his face rather emaciated and prone to pallor, the most vivid pale blue eyes and blond hair.”33 Thanks to his family, Zanotti Bianco enjoyed not only wealth (he lived on an allowance from his father until the age of forty, and after that on his inheritance) but also high-placed connections both in Italy and internationally, which he maintained throughout his life and which enabled his social work, as well as helped his resistance to the Fascist regime. Zanotti Bianco's path in life was shaped by his youth in Turin, where he was raised with strong Risorgimento ideals, along with a deep sense of religion. His Bernabite teacher, Father Sameria, and the writer he most admired, Antonio Fogazzaro, introduced him to an inspiring but controversial form of Christian religiosity that emphasized action in the world, arguing for “a direct, personal effort in the redemption of the dispossessed rather than a traditional view of charity though prayer and obolus.”34 The French Christian philosopher Maurice Blondel's L’Action (1893) was crucial reading for the young Zanotti Bianco in forming his worldview, with its thesis that it is action that gives meaning to life. While he was still a law student in Turin, the tragic 1908 earthquake struck the area surrounding the Strait of Messina. The disaster represented a call to action for Zanotti Bianco, who went south along with other volunteers of his “Fogazzaro circle,” a choice supported by his mentors. Once he returned north, as Zanotti Bianco would recount, Father Semeria told him: “You have to act. Do not stop your efforts with some nicely written article, there is a need for action, serious action if you want to attain something in that unfortunate region.”35 In addition to the devastation wrought by the earthquake, what struck Zanotti Bianco most in

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Calabria was the region's “aching from ancient ills and recent wounds”36—its shocking lack of hygiene, its poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, and widespread ignorance. Within a year, Bianco collaborated in the founding of ANIMI— Associazione Nazionale per gli Interessi del Mezzogiorno d’Italia (National Association for the Interests of South Italy)— and by 1912 he had moved to Reggio Calabria to open the Calabrese office of the association. This became an intensive lifelong labor of love, and the young Zanotti Bianco proved exceptionally capable at raising funds and organizing the association to pursue its stated goals: the establishment of day nurseries, schools, libraries, and medical clinics in the most deprived areas of Calabria. Bianco's 1926 survey of Africo, a small village in the province of Reggio Calabria devastated by malnutrition and infant mortality, was epoch making. Zanotti Bianco here demonstrated his knack for sensitizing northerners to the plight of the South: he sent a sample of pane d’Africo to

(p.262)

various prominent persons as a

symbolic call to action. This so-called bread was made of vegetable plant flour and hay; although it assuaged the sensation of hunger, pane d’Africo provided extremely limited nutrition. This inchiesta Africo did not please the Fascist authorities, wary as they were of publicizing Italy's backwardness in any sense; the regime perceived such actions as “anti-national denigration.” Zanotti Bianco had already manifested his dissent by sending back his military decorations after Matteotti's assassination and eloquently terming Fascism the “anti-Risorgimento” in a 1924 issue of the Contemporary Review;37 but it was after 1926 that he began to be kept under special surveillance. From early on, Zanotti Bianco considered culture to be crucial to the redemption of the South. In the library of Reggio Calabria, he organized a school, free and open to all, in which a series of lectures was devoted not only to hygiene and natural history but also to the Risorgimento and Calabrian history. Given the widespread illiteracy in the region, frequent use of slides was essential. It is in this context that one has to appreciate the significance of the 1911 meeting between Umberto Zanotti Bianco and Paolo Orsi. Zanotti Bianco's portrait of Orsi (which I have already mentioned) gives a sense

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of how deeply the older archaeologist's charisma affected him; this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and collaboration. Zanotti Bianco came to share—and absorb into his vision for Calabria—Orsi's commitment to the recovery and safeguarding of the region's ancient monuments. His endorsement of this vision led him to support Orsi's efforts where state funds were unavailable, and there was no lack of such occasions. In 1913, Zanotti Bianco's friend Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, a cofounder of ANIMI, expressed his disagreement: “I do not understand you,” he wrote, “We hardly have the money to survive as an association and you ask me to look for 5000 lire for excavations!”38 But Zanotti Bianco came to see the investigation of Calabria's past—not only Magna Graecia, but also the Byzantine period—as crucial to the creation of a modern, positive identity for the region. Among other projects, he raised money for Orsi's excavations at Rosarno (which formed part of Orsi's quest to locate ancient Medma), and in 1920 the two men established the Società Magna Graecia with the express mission of supporting research in the South. The organization would come to raise the funds necessary for archaeological projects and publish its own periodical: the Atti e Memorie della Società Magna Graecia. In 1931, Zanotti was also the primary figure in founding the still-extant Archivio Storico per la Calabria e la Lucania. Not that the connection between past and present in the South was lost on the Fascists, as Ciaceri's lecture shows; in fact, it was precisely because of this shared interest that much of what Zanotti Bianco pursued could appear as rival to the Fascist government's enterprise, and that Zanotti Bianco himself was such an unwelcome presence in Calabria. Certainly the Fascist reference to the past was articulated in a very different way: where Zanotti Bianco's concern

(p.263)

centered on the redemption of a presently suffering region, the regime's propaganda focused on claims of continuity between ancient grandeur and a present Fascist incarnation. When Lenormant's La Grande Gréce: Paysages et histoire was translated into Italian as La Magna Grecia: Paesaggio e storia in 1931, Fascist censorship ensured that all passages describing the South's social and economic backwardness

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were expunged. In his lecture on a proto-Fascist Pythagoras, Ciaceri even claimed that malaria had been present in antiquity, but was then “defeated vigorously by way of the healthy energy of farmers and the wisdom of men of government.”39 This assertion mirrored the official opinion that it was “materialistic” (Ciaceri employs this particular word) to consider malaria to have been a factor in the region's later decline, given that, according to Fascist doctrine, all obstacles could be overcome by the right government and obedient citizens. It was in this constructive aspect of the Fascist project that one can see how Zanotti Bianco and the Fascists did share some similar objectives, especially regarding the improvement of the South. In fact, the Fascists made numerous attempts to absorb ANIMI, due to its successful record, into their own associations meant to organize and educate Italian youth: the Balilla initiatives. Zanotti Bianco even stepped down from the directorship of ANIMI in 1930 to salvage the independence of his organization. It was at this point, also, that Zanotti Bianco turned increasingly to the activities of the Società della Magna Grecia, having determined that the realm of scholarly research would attract less Fascist attention. Yet as Nathalie de Haan has ably demonstrated, a similar dynamic of rivalry and repression would eventually affect Zanotti Bianco's archaeological activities just as it had his more socially oriented projects.40 Zanotti Bianco had his first hands-on experience of archaeology in 1929, the year in which he joined an excavation directed by Pirro Marconi in Sicily. In 1931 and 1932, he worked with Orsi on campaigns to uncover prehistoric necropoleis, also in Sicily. The following year he embarked on an ambitious solo project to identify the exact location of Sybaris in the valley of the Cratis.41 The progress of both Cavallari and Viola in the area had been hindered by marshes, but reclamation work on the land allowed Zanotti Bianco to tackle the problem anew. A column he uncovered at the site of Parco del Cavallo offered him the key: at the lower levels were archaic fragments mixed with Roman ones, attesting to overlapping periods of occupation from Sybaris to Thurii to the Roman colony Copia. This pattern of overlapping

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settlement was in agreement with the textual evidence and allowed Zanotti Bianco to ascertain the precise location of ancient Sybaris. He had no sooner accomplished this than he received the order to leave Calabria, and the superintendente Ettore Galli published the discovery without acknowledging the scholar-activist. In spite of this disappointment, Zanotti Bianco would make his most significant archaeological contribution at Paestum, his next assigned compulsory residence, in collaboration with Paola Zancani Montuoro (1901–1987).42

(p.264)

The latter

came from an upper-class family in Naples and was one of the first women to play an important, visible role in Italian archaeology. She had studied archaeology in Rome and at the new Italian school in Athens, where she had arrived as the wife of a fellow student. Orsi had entrusted Montuoro's husband, Domenico Zancani, with the publication of the Locris pinakes, but when he died of typhus in Greece, Orsi passed on the task to his widow. Paola Zancani Montuoro (who never officially entered academia, despite her lifelong dedication to scholarship) eventually became the representative of the Società Magna Graecia in Naples, where she devised the project of locating the Sanctuary of Hera at the Sele. This Heraion, although a famous site in antiquity, had never been identified. Müller, Lenormant, and Pais had all limited themselves to suppositions, but Zancani Montuoro decided on a new reading of the contradictory ancient sources, drew Zanotti Bianco into her plans, and obtained funding from the Società to test her hypothesis on the ground. On April 9, 1934, Zancani Montuoro and Zanotti Bianco began their survey.43 By the end of the day they had found significant rocks; on April 11 they opened trenches with workers(see figures 5.1 and 5.2). From May to July of that year they uncovered the temples, various votive offerings, and a few of the famous archaic metopes. These sensational discoveries took place under the close scrutiny of the Fascist officials, who shadowed Zanotti Bianco and hindered his work in every possible way. Zanotti Bianco and Zancani Montuoro were permitted to excavate only for as long as their original funds would permit, which led them to begin falsifying reports and spending unrecorded sums out of their private pockets in

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order to continue working longer. News of their discoveries appeared in the Journal of Hellenic Studies and in the 1937 volume of the Notizie degli Scavi.44 The latter was an extended report that included a criticism of Ciaceri: “not a single find supports Ciaceri's theory that the Greek religious center overlapped with an earlier indigenous one, determining its location—a good example of Ciaceri's method, which put forward such a hypothesis even before the sanctuary had been located.”45 The Fascist regime had recently taken to appropriating the discoveries of the Società della Magna Grecia, but after this publication it dissolved the society. This bald-faced move, along with the imprisonment of Zanotti Bianco in 1940 and the call to arms, which left no workers available for digging, brought the excavation to an end. When in 1949 Zanotti Bianco and Zancani Montuoro were able to resume their work at the Heraion of the Sele it was in a very different situation, in a post-Fascist Italy in which Zanotti Bianco, an anti-Fascist hero, was able to further expand the scope of his ideals and projects. The brilliant discovery of the sanctuary of the Sele represented an archaeological success that further empowered the influence of Zanotti Bianco's vision. The excavation continued until 1962, but its achievements were already being publicly celebrated by the early 1950s. Zanotti Bianco and Zancani Montuoro published their findings in two beautifully illustrated volumes (1951 and 1954), describing the sanctuary, (p.266)

(p.265)

its

architectural decorations, and hypothetical

Figure 5.1. and 5.2. Paola Zancani Montuoro and Umberto Zanotti Bianco during their excavations of the Sanctuary of the Sele. (Reprinted, by permission, from S. Settis and M. C. Parra, eds., Magna Graecia: Archeologia di un sapere [Milan: Electa, 2005], p. 326 and 330.)

reconstructions. In 1952, the discoveries at the sanctuary of the

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Sele also took center stage at the opening of the new Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Paestum. The museum hosted a fullscale reproduction of one of the sanctuary's buildings, the Thesauros, the presumed site of what the archaeologists considered one of their most spectacular discoveries: a magnificent frieze of thirty-six archaic metopes. Thus, museum visitors were immediately able to perceive how the decorative bas-reliefs fit into their original, ancient architectural context. The subsequent discovery in 1958 of another three metopes belonging to the same frieze called the 1952 reconstruction into question, and to this day there is no consensus as to which of the sanctuary's buildings originally housed the metopes. These doubts, however, do nothing to detract from the compelling 1952 Thesauros exhibition, one of the most forward-looking displays of its time.46 There had been previous efforts to make Paestum more accessible and attractive to tourists. The official 1936 visit made by Mussolini and the king had coincided with the inauguration of a new train station and a restaurant. The initiatives inspired by Zanotti Bianco, however, were distinctive in linking the wide dissemination of knowledge of the past with an intensive concern for the remains themselves—a cultural heritage to be shared, but at the same time carefully preserved.

Such initiatives would distinguish Zanotti Bianco's efforts in the postwar period. In his life and work, as Salvatore Settis put it, the militant archaeologist's fieldwork and the meridionalista's concerns for the socioeconomic problems of the South were “two faces, two aspects of the same battle.”47 Zanotti Bianco's fight against inequality in South Italy had been complex: he aimed at “redeeming from their marginalized and forgotten state not only Calabrese farmers, but also the historical monuments and memories of that and other regions of the South.”48 Redemption of the past highlighted the task of preservation: the concept of national heritage demanded resources to maintain that heritage, and legislation to ensure its continued care. The Società Magna Graecia had already provided money for the restoration of Byzantine churches in disrepair in the 1930s. The ANIMI and Società Magna Graecia reemerged after their suppression under Fascism and resumed their work in the South, but the postwar efforts of Zanotti Bianco would have a much broader and more ambitious reach.

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Along with the postwar rehabilitation came special recognition for Zanotti Bianco, allowing him to follow in the footsteps of his mentor, Orsi. Zanotti Bianco was appointed senator for life in 1952, although by a president rather than by a king. As a senator, Zanotti Bianco designed and supported the law that, after approval in 1957, prohibited any construction work within a thousand meters of the ancient walls of Paestum. He also expanded the scope of his concern beyond the South. In 1955, he helped found (and would preside over until his death) Italia Nostra, a private volunteer organization officially (p.267)

recognized as a socially useful nonprofit association by

the Italian state, which was devoted to preserving Italian monuments and landscapes. Thus, one can glimpse a strong continuity in the life and work of Zanotti Bianco, as he seamlessly combined the Risorgimento ideals of his youth with a later dedication to heritage concerns that seem decidedly contemporary in flavor, and are as pressing today as they ever have been.49 Zanotti Bianco's steadfastness of ideals is all the more impressive, poignant even, considering the periods of massive upheaval—social, cultural, political, and economic—that he lived through. These transformations were not only essential to his personal and professional development, they became constitutive of the current predicament of Magna Graecia more generally. The evolution of the Southern Question during and after Fascism is inseparable from the course of Magna Graecia studies. The South was a crucial subject of reflection, for example, for Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), one of the most influential Italian thinkers of the twentieth century.50 Founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921, Gramsci was imprisoned by the Fascist regime in 1926; he labored in jail until the end of his life on what would become his major work, Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks, first published in 1948). His thinking about the questione meridionale, which he phrased in terms of the exploitation of the backward South by the capitalist North, was essential to the development of his unique brand of Marxism, involving concepts such as cultural hegemony, the organic intellectual, and the subaltern. As Gramsci's thought has, since the 1970s, inspired developments in critical theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies, it

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has also, by way of these theories, come full circle to influence recent approaches to Magna Graecia. Within Italy itself, however, Gramsci's influence began much earlier—indeed as soon as Quaderni del carcere, smuggled as notes out of his jail cell, appeared in print just after the war. One of Gramsci's early Italian readers was the Neapolitan anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto De Martino (1908–1965), who already, in 1949, published the essay “Intorno una storia del mondo popolare subalterno” (Concerning a history of the popular subaltern world).51 Gramsci was crucial in helping De Martino to define his originality vis-à-vis the towering presence of his mentor Benedetto Croce, whose historical idealism made him Italy's foremost twenty-century philosopher. De Martino's intellectual project emerged from combining ethnographic fieldwork and political activism in the southern regions of Puglia and Basilicata in the late 1940s and early 1950s.52 The resulting writings on popular magic, funerary rituals, death, and the crisis of presence, with their emphasis on self-reflexivity, are now appreciated as forerunners of the most theoretically sophisticated recent trends in critical cultural anthropology. De Martino came to these results by way of wide interests and complex experiences; he had been a student of classical studies and counted

(p.268)

among his teachers Vittorio

Macchioro, a Neapolitan archaeologist and museum curator, and a passionate investigator of ancient mysticism.53 The deep south of Italy, with its layered past and its “Greci selvaggi” (“savage Greeks,” to use Riccardo Di Donato's words),54 offered him a fitting challenge: Greek mythology, ethnomusicology, psychology, and anthropology all come together in his 1976 study of the ritual ecstatic dancing by which Apulian farmers healed the devastating effects supposedly derived from a supernaturally charged tarantula bite (La Terra del rimorso [The Land of Remorse], with a play on words, as it could also be translated as “the land of the rebite”). The figure and work of De Martino bring us back to familiar themes in the long history of the mingling of past and present in the southernmost Italian region, and remind us once more of the vibrancy of Neapolitan intellectual life, always turning on its head any assumption of its provincialism.

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The day-to-day practice of the study of South Italy's past at the dawn of the new Italian Republic was a subtle negotiation of the old and the new. It laid the groundwork for the less wellknown (but no less complex) developments in the study of ancient Greek South Italy in the postwar period. Zanotti Bianco's vocal opposition to the regime was a rare instance— most academics and state officials complied with the required adherence to Mussolini's party. Although these scholars did not receive honors like Zanotti Bianco, they by and large retained their places, while just a handful identified as having actively engaged Fascism were expunged from the profession.55 Even many of those who went on to become vocal Marxists after the war stood among the passive majority in their younger years (a significant fact in the history of modern Italy that has yet to receive sufficient attention). Certainly, there was an institutional need to maintain a continuity of staff; in the field of archaeology in particular, the relevant institutions could not afford to lose staff and would even soon require an influx of new personnel. The story of Dinu Adamesteanu (1913–2004) is illustrative. A Romanian who came to Italy as a fellow of the Romanian Academy in Rome in 1939, Adamesteanu stayed on after the war with a semiclandestine status.56 His skill at combining archaeological research and aerial photography earned him Italian citizenship for scientific merit in 1954. He then established and directed the Aerofototeca of the Ministry of Public Instruction, a unique institution that gathered photographic documentation of the Italian peninsula produced during the war by the British, American, Italian, and German air forces. In 1964, he became sovrintendente of Basilicata, where he continued a distinguished and prolific career. As Adamesteanu's story reminds us, many of the changes that followed the war involved technology; modernity had finally come knocking at the South's door. The economic boom that reached its apex in the 1960s brought a rash of new construction, impacting ancient monuments and landscapes in unforeseen ways and fully confirming Zanotti Bianco's early efforts to protect Italian heritage.57 At the same time, new, more efficient agricultural practices

(p.269)

became,

potentially, much more destructive of that heritage's material

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remains, as mechanized plowing, with a much deeper reach than manual techniques, imperiled anew the archaeological record deposited in the soil. For this reason, surveying became a matter of the utmost urgency, with the aim of preserving as much archaeological evidence as possible. This is not to say, of course, that technological innovation did not also enable archaeological research in novel ways. The removal of soil was accomplished by new machines with an effectiveness that would have been unfathomable in Orsi's time. Mechanical techniques have enabled extensive excavations at sites like Sybaris, where a twenty-four-hour pumping system continually drains the area (which lies below a riverbed). Scientific tools have also brought a new precision to archaeological research, ranging from aerial photography to DNA analysis, which has provided answers to old questions about the actual interactions between local populations and the Greek newcomers. In tandem with these economic and technological developments, a new political order helped shape the questions scholars began to ask about Magna Graecia. In Italy, the first generation to come of age after the end of the war still upheld the figure of the militant archaeologist, but with a commitment to ethical and social responsibility that was often joined with a Marxist affiliation, rather than a product of the love of the nation. Increasingly, academic archaeologists collaborated with the soprintendenti, so that innovative archaeological scholarship went hand-in-hand with the preservation of the archaeological heritage. The journal Dialoghi di Archeologia (1967–1992), an innovative undertaking that was admired and imitated abroad, embodied this spirit of cooperation with its interdisciplinarity; it put archaeology in dialogue with other historical and humanist disciplines, and encouraged contributions on the archaeology of different periods and regions.58 This approach, emerging as it did from intellectual circles close to the Istituto Gramsci, suited the long Italian tradition of studying the past, stretching all the way back to its antiquarian origins—and in fact, many contributions focused on Etruscan and early Roman culture. Given these scholarly trends, the study of Magna Graecia was ripe for renewed international dialogue.

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Already before the war, a fresh interest in the Greek overseas settlements had taken hold beyond Italy's borders. This was especially true in British circles, as a rising concern with the modern British Empire, along with a newfound appreciation for archaic rather than classical Greek culture, provided inspiration. Alan Blakeway, director of the British School at Rome in 1936, transparently drew on the imperial British model of “trade before the flag” to investigate the role of trade in the Greeks’ westward expansion. Similarly, the perspective of Thomas Dunbabin (1911–1955) on the Western Greeks betrayed his own roots—he was a native of Australia but educated at Oxford—and informed the thesis that the ancient Greek colonials were tied by culture to their metropoleis yet remained politically independent of them. This argument (p.270)

lies at the core of his 1948 book The Western Greeks:

The History of Sicily and South Italy from the Foundation of the Greek Colonies to 480 bc.59 Dunbabin is also remembered for achieving in this narrative work “the union of historical and archaeological evidence” that still eluded Ciaceri60—a merit which he shares with the French scholar Jean Bérard (1908–1957), who, at around the same time, focused his interest on the sources for the earliest settling of ancient Greeks in Italy.61 Fascism and World War II affected deeply the lives of these two men, who did most of their ground work in Italy at the close of the ventennio: Dunbabin is also famous as a British officer who aided the resistance in Crete, and Bérard became close to anti-fascists such as Zanotti Bianco and under a pseudonym wrote a critical history of Italian Fascism.62 Their scholarship on Magna Graecia was also affected: as innovative as Dunbabin and Bérard were in combining archaeological with historical evidence in their works, the hiatus of the war years had in many instances left them unable to take account of the most recent findings. In the postwar world order, as European imperialism began to crumble, the problem of the western Greeks developed a novel resonance and attracted fresh investigation. The rise of postcolonial studies stimulated insights and frameworks that soon infiltrated scholarship on the Greeks in Italy—including new emphases on the native populations implicated in the colonial situation and on the dynamics of acculturation (and,

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more recently, cultural hybridization.)63 Though Ciaceri died before the war was over, his nationalist focus on South Italian culture met with a warm reception in the prevailing academic environment. In this same period, moreover, Italy opened up to foreign archaeological research, prompting the launch of a number of international expeditions and collaborations, many of which have trained their focus on Greek South Italy.64 To mention only two of these: at Pythecussai, the site on Ischia now known to be the most ancient Greek settlement in Italy, the Italo-German Giorgio Buchner was joined and later succeeded by David Ridgeway from the University of Edinburgh; and at Metaponto and in its surrounding area, John Carter of the University of Texas at Austin maintains an ongoing collaboration with the local soprintendenza that commenced under the tenure of Adamesteneu. The French even fund a Naples-based research center, loosely affiliated with the École in Rome, complete with its own library, dedicated solely to supporting French and Italian scholars working on the study of Greek settlements in South Italy: the Centre Jean Bérard, established in 1966 and named in memory of the scholar who died prematurely in 1957. What then can one say of the recurring contemporary lament, with its echoes of Zanotti Bianco eighty years ago, that more should be done in Magna Graecia, that too many foreigners consistently snub it in favor of mainland Greece? (Paradoxically, such a statement can sound optimistic to some, when contrasted with anxiety about the “finitude” of classical archaeology in Greece.)65 Does this signal a lingering belief that Magna Graecia remains at the margins?

(p.271)

Does it

betray a habit of thought? How, exactly, does Magna Graecia fit into today's prevailing (but possibly already waning), universalist NATO-humanism, as Vassilis Lambropoulos has described the postwar, Eurocentric—but not Hellenocentric— vision of dominant Western thought?66 For all the influence that postcolonial scholarship has had on our understanding of Greek South Italy, the extent to which it fundamentally altered the long-standing divide between the local and the foreign in the scholarship on the region remains unclear. The Southern Question continues to make news in

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Italy; and the annual Magna Graecia conference held at Taranto since 1961, though an apt expression of postwar humanism for its collaborative character, still manages to underscore the region's marginality. Still, there are new forces at work. In recent years, the most notable economic support for research in Magna Graecia has come from the European Union, in particular from its program for the development of troubled regions. While the European Union itself now appears somewhat troubled, its investments in South Italy have often left more durable traces than many previous Italian initiatives, as attested by a number of Magna Graecia's recently renovated museums (in large part, it should be noted, because of effective local community engagement). Moreover, while even the NATO-humanism of the late twentieth century is beginning to seem quaint in the face of a new millennium's emergent uncertain world order, the ancient Mediterranean world remains vitally relevant—sometimes in unforeseen ways, as in the nascent cultural dialogues between European and Asian countries which have spurred, among other things, new research in comparative history of ancient Mediterranean and Chinese empires. The corrupting sea of Mediterranean studies, meanwhile, is drawing new attention in the midst of startling recent geopolitical upheavals; the basin characterized as a “bitter puddle of humanity” persistently refuses any easy dismissal of its relevance.67 Within the borders of the Italian state, difficult and divisive choices remain. As issues of cultural heritage have come to the fore, Italy (with its long history as victim of antiquities looting) has been a central focus. This has forcefully impacted the traditional basis of museums, resulting, already, in the repatriation of more than a few objects, and in a profound rethinking of the concept of provenance. These issues touch even on Italy's own complex situation, with the Greek South a persistent place of innovation and tension. In 1972, an amateur scuba-diver fishing off the coast of Reggio Calabria sighted two bronze statues, limbs of which were protruding out of the sand at the bottom of the sea.68 Promptly recovered, these two male nudes, standing nearly two meters tall, are among the very few surviving fifth-century bronze statues. Attribution and interpretation still vary greatly, and there is

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little evidence that might resolve these questions any time soon; Greek and South Italian origins have both been postulated, with Phidias, Policletus, and Pythagoras of Rheggium all suggested as possible sculptors.69 The initial restoration of the statues took place in Reggio Calabria, but a (p.272)

few years later they were moved to Florence, where

more established expertise was at hand. Once restorative work was concluded in 1980, the statues were exhibited in Rome, drawing throngs of visitors. Ultimately, Reggio Calabria won back the “bronzi di Riace,” and they were returned and housed in its own museum. In November 2009, the mere suggestion that the statues would travel back to Rome for a checkup while the museum was to be closed for renovation was met with such strong resistance (for fear that they would never come back) that the plan was quickly abandoned. Nevertheless, some people continue to wonder whether the statues might reach a wider audience in Rome. The Grecocentric humanism on which Classics and Classical Archaeology were founded in the nineteenth century, both in ideals and institutions, has long been in demise. This is a phenomenon as consequential as it is hard to pin down.70 The landscape we have entered is one unfamiliar to us, but possibly it hearkens back to the 1600s. What does a visit to Paestum mean to an Italian today—or for that matter, to a nonItalian? The opening scene of the Italian film Bread and Tulips (2000), Silvio Soldini's award-winning romantic comedy, takes place at Paestum, in front of the temple Athena, with a local cicerone lecturing to a bored, overheated group of Italian tourists. He tells them that it was there, in 273 BCE, that “the Romans … for the first time encountered the Greeks,” perfectly blending to create “a new culture that is without doubt the fundamental basis of our western civilization, of which we [the Italians], the greatest people on earth, should be proud heirs.” The film, however, remains alert to the pitfalls of any such essentialist view of Italian identity, as it tracks the adventures of one woman in the group, a discontented southern housewife named Rosalba Barletta. Left behind at Paestum by mistake, Rosalba hitchhikes to Venice, where she finds work and falls in love, not with a native but with an Icelandic immigrant. Despite the irony of opening this tale of personal renewal in

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Paestum, one can still hope that in a world focused less on Athenian classicism than on Mediterranean connectivity, a world in which archaeological training might as easily concern the western as the mainland Greeks, Paestum would indeed be an ideal place from which to launch an examination of the ancient pasts of Italy, Europe, and beyond. Allowing Paestum to once again stand for Greek South Italy, we might see Magna Graecia as continuing to pose the question of the local, and of how to define that concept within national and supranational contexts. It is a question that is all the more pressing on account of the region's long and complicated relationship with classical antiquity, which for centuries now has helped to make, to assert, and to interrogate the identity of the modern West.

Notes (p.274)

(p.275)

(p.276)

Notes:

(1.) See for example de Haan 2008: 233–234. (2.) See Bollati 1972 and 1983, for the original discussion of Italian character in discursive terms; since, most significantly, Banti 2000 and 2011, Ascoli and von Henneberg 2001, much of Banti and Ginsborg 2007 and Patriarca 2005 and 2010; a powerful analysis of how to relate these discursive interpretations to the historical unfolding of Risorgimento political events and their historiography in Riall 2009: 37–52. (3.) See briefly on the first disaster Row 2002, while on the second Ginsborg 1990: 8–71. For an overview of Liberal and Fascist Italy the essays collected in Lyttelton 2002 remain most illustrative. (4.) See Canfora 1980: 76–103 and 1989: 253–277, Cagnetta 1979, Visser 1992 Perry 2001–2002, Giardina 2008, for the ongoing discussion about Fascist ideological engagement with the Roman past; see Manacorda 1982b, Manacorda and Tamassia 1985 and Altekamp 2004 for Italian archaeology under Fascism.

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(5.) See Galfré 2002. (6.) See Schnapp 1996: 23–26. (7.) On Ciaceri, see Pugliese Carratelli 1981, Amoretti 1989 , and Salmeri 1996. (8.) See for example Amoretti 1989: 214. (9.) On Pace see Settis 1994: 877–880. (10.) Chester Johnson 1933: 308. (11.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 2: 3. (12.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 1: x. (13.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 1: xii. (14.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 1: xi. (15.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 2: 16–17. (16.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 2: 8–9. (17.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 2: 22–23. (18.) Dinsmoor 1927: 75. (19.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 1: 184. (20.) Ciaceri 1927–1932: 1: 189. (21.) See Momigliano 1975. (22.) Ciaceri 1930: 197. (23.) See Momigliano 1992. (24.) Momigliano 1969: 46. (25.) Amoretti 1989: 200. (26.) Ciaceri 1933: 5. (27.) Ciaceri 1933: 6.

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(28.) Ciaceri 1933: 8. (29.) Amoretti 1989: 206. (30.) Ciaceri 1933: 9. (31.) Ciaceri 1933: 22. (32.) On Zanotti Bianco most recently, see Settis 2005 and de Haan 2008. (33.) Pontieri 1969–1970: xxxvii. (34.) Settis 2005: 323. (35.) Quoted in de Haan 2008: 235. (36.) Quoted in de Haan 2008: 235. (37.) See Zanotti Bianco 1924. (38.) Quoted in de Haan 2008: 236. (39.) Ciaceri 1933: 13. (40.) See de Haan 2008. (41.) See Guzzo 2005. (42.) On this remarkable archaeologist see Vlad Borrelli 2007 and in English Vlad Borrelli 2010. (43.) See Tocco Sciarelli 2005 for a careful and richly contextualized account of the discovery of the Heraion of the Sele. (44.) See “Meetings of the session” in Journal of Hellenic Studies 54 (1934) xiii and Zancani Montuoro and Zanotti Bianco 1937. (45.) See Zancani Montuoro and Zanotti Bianco 1937: 225. (46.) On this see Tocco Sciarelli 2005: 332–334. (47.) Settis 2005: 322.

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(48.) Settis 2005: 324. (49.) It is no coincidence that Salvatore Settis, possibly the most active scholar in Italy today in articulating and promoting the country's commitment to its cultural heritage, is also one of the most authoritative voices on the figure of Zanotti Bianco (see Settis 2002 and 2005). (50.) For an extremely succinct but poignant example of the connection between Gramsci and the Italian South, see Davis 2006: 5–6; for a more extended discussion in English see Urbinati 1998. (51.) Bibliography on De Martino is growing in recent years beyond Italy: on De Martino in English, see Saunders 1993, Di Nola 1998, Berrocal 2009, Charuty 2009; note also the translation of La terra del rimorso into English in 2005. A rich edited volume on De Martino is Gallini and Massenzio 1997. (52.) For a succinct discussion of De Martino and the South, see Salvemini 2006: 216–217 and, more extensive, Di Nola 1998. (53.) See Di Donato 1989. (54.) See Di Donato 1997 and 1999. (55.) Dyson 2006: 216–218. (56.) Dyson 2006: 233–234. (57.) Settis 2005: 327. (58.) Barbanera 1998: 164–169. The journal Archaeological Dialogues, founded in 1994, based in the Netherlands but of distinctively international and interdisciplinary character, pays homage with its name to the Italian Dialoghi di Archeologia. (59.) On Dunbabin see De Angelis 1998 and Dyson 2006: 195– 196. (60.) Ridgway 1992: 146.

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(61.) On Bérard see essays collected in Brun and Gras 2010; for Bérard's approach combining history and archaeology see Villard 2010 and Greco 2010. (62.) See Gras 2010 for this revelatory investigation in Bérard's life. (63.) Debates on these issues were opened by Py 1968 and Gruzinski and Rouveret 1976; for some of the most recent results, see van Dommelen 1998 and Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002. (64.) Dyson 2006: 228–232. (65.) See Dyson 2006: 254. (66.) See Lambropoulos 1993 and Marchand 1996: 354–375. (67.) Zucconi 2011. (68.) For an account of the discovery in a popular magazine attesting to the excitement it generated see Alsop 1983. (69.) See the essays collected in Vlad Borelli and Pelagatti 1984 for the first scholarly assessments of these bronze statues; for a more recent perspective in English see Ridgway 2005: 66–67. (70.) This historiographical problem is well delineated in the case of England and Germany, by Stray 1998: 235–297 and Marchand 1996: 354–375, respectively, both accounts that carefully trace the disentangling of classical studies’ tight grip on elite education.

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Bibliography

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

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Bibliography references: Abercromby, James. 1986. Magna Charta for America: James Abercromby's “an Examination of the Acts of Parliament Relative to the Trade and the Government of Our American Colonies” (1752) and “de Jure Et Gubernatione Coloniarum, Or An Inquiry Into the Nature, and the Rights of Colonies, Ancient, and Modern” (1774). Ed. Jack P. Green, Charles F. Mullett, and Edward C. Papenfuse, Jr. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Acocella, Joan. 2000. “The Neapolitan Finger.” New York Review of Books. Reprint, 2002. Sign Language Studies 2.2: 197–211. Aghion, Irène, and Mathilde Avisseau-Broustet. 1994. “Le duc de Luynes, archéologue, historien, homme de sciences et collectionneur.” Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France 3: 12–19. Agnello, Giuseppe, ed. 1935. Paolo Orsi (1859–1935). Special issue of Archivio storico per la Calabria e la Lucania.

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Index

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology Giovanna Ceserani

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199744275 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744275.001.0001

(p.313)

Index

Abercromby, General James, 107 Academia Lupiensis (Lecce), 33 Académie de France à Rome, 197 Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris), 51, 105, 200, 214 Académie française (Paris), 175 Accademia Ercolanense (Naples), 43, 51, 143, 145, 156, 222 Accademia Etrusca di Cortona, 51, 58, 156 Accademia Florimontana (Monteleone), 184, 186 Accademia Medinaceli (Naples), 47 Accademia Pontaniana (Naples), 33 Aceti, Tommaso, 37 Adamesteanu, Dinu, 268, 270 Adams, John, 101 Addison, Joseph, 101 Aegina (Greece), 160, 176 excavations at, 160–61, 177 Aerofototeca, of Ministry of Public Instruction, 268 Africo, 261–62 Agrigentum, 82, 83, 85, 160 Agropoli, 63 Alberti, Leandro, 55–56, 60, 69 n25, 77, 168 Descrittione di tutta Italia, 7, 20–21, 24–32, 38–40 De viris illustribus ordinis Praedicatorum, 26

Page 1 of 34

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Historie di Bologna, 26 Alesso, River, 29 Alfonso the Magnanimous, King, 33 Altertumswissenschaft, 139–40, 158 Altes Museum (Berlin), 139, 148, 173, 178 Amari, Michele, 162, 205 Amendolara, 30 American archaeologists: excavation at Capo Colonne, 239 expedition to Magna Graecia, 193–96, 231, 244 excavation at Metaponto, 270 American Historical Association, 255 American Institute of Archaeology, 193 American Journal of Archaeology, 193–94 American Revolution, 103, 107–10 American School in Athens, 197 Amoretti, Vittorio, 259–60 Ampolo, Carmine, 215, 217, 219 Anderson, Benedict, 123 Angell, Samuel, Sculpted Metopes Discovered amongst the Ruins of the Temples of the Ancient City of Selinus in Sicily (with Harris), 161 ANIMI (Associazione Nazionale per gli Interessi del Mezzogiorno d’Italia), 261, 263, 266 Annali dell’Instituto, 154, 155 (fig. 3.2), 156, 158, 165, 179, 186 Annio da Viterbo/Annius of Viterbo/Giovanni Nanni, 25, 57 (p.314)

anti-classical, use of term, 3

antiquarian, use of term, 41 antiquarianism: eighteenth-century transformation of, 41, 43, 82, 99, 105, 112, 116–17 Gerhard and, 137, 139, 141 and history of archaeology, 5–6, 137, 141, 181–82 and local knowledge, 83, 88, 181–82 Mazzocchi's on Magna Graecia, 49–68 Neapolitan, 49–61, 66–67, 78, 127, 135, 139, 146–47 Renaissance scholarship and, 21–25, 104, 126 Vico's rejection of, 48 Antonini, Baron Giuseppe, 41, 60, 66 Lucania, 61 Anxia, 190 n84 Anzi, 168, 170 Apulia, 24, 85, 205. See also Puglia Apulian, 33, 35, 56, 170, 172, 268 Aquinas, Thomas, 36 Page 2 of 34

(p.313)

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Archaeological Dialogues, 274 n58 archaeological excavations: foreign, in Magna Graecia, 193–96, 231, 239, 244, 270 and landowners, 167, 195, 239 Lombardi on, 167–69 methodology of, 150–53 role in discipline of archaeology, 230, 236. See also burials; institutions, cultural; Orsi, Paolo; Zanotti Bianco, Umberto; names of sites archaeological heritage: auctions of newly discovered antiquities from Aegina and Bassae, 161 clandestine activities, 239, 244 cultural patrimony, 142–43 legislation concerning, in Naples, 43, 46 legislation concerning, in Rome, 143 legislation concerning, in unified Italy, 194–95, 204–5n8, 266 monumenti patrii, 182 pre-Italian unification idea of national heritage, 125 repatriation of artifacts, 271 reuse of ancient material in postclassical times, 84, 88, 187 archaeological methods: and changing agricultural practices, 268– 69 development of techniques, 238–39 and introduction of technology, 268–69 landscape, descriptions of, in archaeological reports, 240–41 reading of in archaeological research, 15 and soil studies, 151 stratigraphy in, 153 and survey, 151, 269. See also archaeological excavations illustrations; vases, painted Archaeological Museum of Naples, 226 archaeologist, use of term, 187, 222 archaeologist, militant, 255, 269 Orsi as, 234–35 archaeology, classical: allegorical representation of, 154–56, 155 (fig. 3.2) Athens as locus of, 68 as bridge between past and present, 168–69 center-periphery dynamic in, 179–87 and classical ideal (Winckelmann), 80, 84 de Jorio and, 149–53 focus on painted vases, 172–79 and Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, 154–58

Page 3 of 34

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internationalism in idea of universal, “disinterested” scholarly archaeology, 12–13, 154–58, 174, 179–87, 244–45, 270 invention of, 2, 137–58 and local knowledge, 147–53, 167, 171–87, 211 and medieval themes, 213 national trends in, 211 as new archaeology of Magna Graecia, 158–79 in North America, 193 as ongoing process, 230, 236 as philology of monuments, 141, 172 publications in, 154–58 professionalization of, 184–89 use of term, 137, 141 archaeology, history of: center-periphery dynamic, in classical archaeology, 179–87 (p.315)

as focus of book, 5–6

other scholarly interpretations of origins of classical archaeology, 141–42 Archäologische-epigraphische Mitteilungun aus Osterreich-Ungarn, 233 Archäologische Zeitung, 141, 182, 199 Architas, 92 architecture, architects and rediscovery of Paestum, 17–19, 61 Doric, 60, 67, 96, 114 Etruscan, 48 Greek, 61 Italic, 257–58 polychrome, 163–65, 166 (fig. 3.4) Riedesel and Winckelmann's focus on, 82. See also Greek Revival movement Archivio Storico per la Calabria e la Lucania, 262 Arditi, Michele, 145–47, 182, 183 Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae 988, 177 Armento, 168, 191 n86 Assetta, Egidio, 167 Athenaeus, Deiphosophistae 14.632, 125 Athens: as center of “ancient Greece,” 6, 66, 217, 219 and cultural institution building, 197–200 as locus of classical ideal, 67 as locus of production of painted vases, 173, 178, 183 in modern historiography of ancient Greek world, 108–9, 100, 111, 112, 114, 119, 125 and Stuart and Revett, 83, 92, 159

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travel to, 61, 62, 81, 208 Wilkins and, 160 Atti e Memorie della Società della Magna Graecia, 236, 262 Aulenti, Gae, 12 Avella, 170 Avellino, Francesco Maria, 145–47, 167, 182, 183, 185–86 Babelon, Ernst, 206, 212 Bacchus, South Italian cult of, 212 Bacco, Enrico, Descrizione, 38–39 bambocciate, 148–49 Banti, Alberto, 123 Barbanera, Marcello, 203, 234 barbarism and barbarians. See Calabria; historiography, of ancient Greece; historiography, eighteenth-century Neapolitan; historiography, Italian (post-unification); Magna Graecia; South Italy Barbaro, Ermolao, 22, 33 Barnabei, Felice, 50, 204, 209, 214, 231 Barrio, Gabriele, 35–37, 41, 55 De antiquitate et situ Calabriae, 20–21, 24–25, 32 Barron, William, 108–10 History of the colonization of the free states of antiquity…, 108 Barthélemy, J. J., Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce … , 123–24 Basilicata, 24, 28, 91, 151, 152, 165–69, 213, 267, 268 Bassae (Greece), 160 excavations at, 160–61 Batoni, Pompeo, 44 Belli, Carlo, 230, 234 Beloch, Karl Julius, 201, 225 Bérard, Jean, 270 Berlin: cultural institution building in, 139–42 Gerhard and, 139, 140, 143, 145, 173, 178 Micali in 220 Pais in, 225 Berlin University, 139–40 Bernal, Martin, 12 Beste, John Richard, 148 Beulé, Ernest, 200 biblical scholarship: and pre-Greek origins of Magna Graecia, 56 reactionary literature in, 58 Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), 206, 208–9 Biondo, Flavio, and historical geography, 21, 24–25, 27, 37 and Renaissance antiquarianism, 22–23

Page 5 of 34

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Index

Roma instaurata, 22 Roma triumphans, 23 vision of Italy in Italia illustrata, 22–24, 34 Biscari, Prince of, 82, 85, 231 Björnsthäl, Jacob Jonas, 50 Blacas, duc de, 143–45, 174, 199 Blakeway, Alan, 269 (p.316)

Blasi, Giovanni Evangelista, 116

Blondel, Maurice, L’Action, 261 Blouet, Abel, Expédition scientifique de Morée (with Ravoisié), 200 Bochart, Samuel, 58 Geographia sacra, 57–58 Böckh, August, 139–40, 178 Bologna, 21, 26, 156, 203, 256 Bonaparte, Joseph, 123, 145 Bonaparte, Lucien, Prince of Canino, 175–79 Bonghi, Ruggero, 203–4 Boni, Giacomo, 238 Bonifacio, Giovan Bernardino, Marquis of Oria, 33 Borghesi, Bartolomeo, 202 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, 100– 101 Bougainville, Jean-Pierre de, 105–7, 109–10 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine, 106 Bourbon Museum (Naples), 171 Bracciolini, Poggio, 22 Braun, August, 187 Bread and Tulips (film), 272 British Museum (London), 44 British School in Athens, 197 British School in Rome, 269 Brizio, Edoardo, 203 Brosses, Charles de, 43 Bruttii: as ancient people, 36, 86 as ancient region, 24, 28, 29, 32 Brydone, Patrick, 86 Tour through Sicily and Malta, 81 Buchner, Giorgio, 270 Bullettino dell’Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, 156, 158, 162, 165, 169, 172–77, 185–87 Bullettino Archeologico Napolitano, 182–83 Bunsen, Baron von, 181, 190 n62 burials: excavation of, 135–38, 168, 235–36 Page 6 of 34

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Index

typology of, in South Italy, 151–53. See also tombs, ancient Burmann, Peter, 77 Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges, 92, 93, 97 Calabria, 21, 24, 37–39, 85–86, 96, 113, 205, 223 Alberti and, 26–32 barbarism of, 40, 113 Barrio and, 35–37 disappointment for lack of monuments in, 85–86 divisions of, 28–29 exotic as the New World, 40, 88 experience of isolation in, 84–86, 185 natural beauty of, 27, 31–32, 40, 88–89 Orsi and, 230–31, 235, 239–44 and Pythagoras, 8, 36–37, 59, 126 Zanotti Bianco and, 242–44, 251–54, 260–63 Calaresu, Melissa, 121 Cambiano, Giuseppe, 216, 248 n93 Campanella, Tommaso, 187 Canosa, 171–73 Capecelatro, Giuseppe, 95 Cape Zephyrium, 56 Capialbi, Vito, 183–87, 211, 241 Capo Colonne, 30, 85, 211 excavation at, 239 Capriolo, Elia, 28 Capua, 51, 54, 63 and Santa Maria di Capua, 51, 63 Carlo, King, 42–43, 52 and rediscovery of Paestum, 61–62 Carta, Rosario, 237 (fig. 4.2), 238, 238 (fig. 4.3), 241 Carter, John, 270 Carthaginians, 101–2, 113–14, 108–10, 227 Casal-Nuovo, 88 Casaubon, Isaac, 8 Cassiodorus, 32 Castaldi, Giuseppe, 222 Magna Grecia brevemente descritta, 215, 222–23 Memorie storiche, 222 Catania, 82, 83, 85, 234, 236, 255 Caulonia, Orsi's research in, 238 (fig. 4.3), 240, 242, 243 Cavallari, Francesco Saverio, 232, 263 Centre Jean Bérard (Naples), 270 Ceres, clay statuettes of, 171 Page 7 of 34

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Index

Chapman, Samuel Hudson, 239 Chateaubriand, François-René, 211 Châtelet, Claude-Louis, 87–88 Ciaceri, Emanuele, 252–60 (p.317)

and Fascism, 255–60

on name ‘Magna Graecia’, 9, 258–59 Storia della Magna Grecia, 9, 254–60 Cicero: De amicitia 13, 1 De senectute 12:41, 125 Cirillo, Domenico, 95 cities, ancient, of Magna Graecia: identification of, 210–11, 240 lost/ruined, 23, 30, 84, 88, 97 size of, 63 Cleveland Art Museum, 14 Clüver, Philip, 55, 60, 77–78, 82 Introductio in Universam Geographiam, 39 Italia antiqua, 7–8, 39–40 Cockrell, C. R., 160 collecting: and antiquarian/philosophe divide, 117 of antiquities by locals, 239 Capialbi and, 184 cataloguing of, 144 duc de Luynes and, 162 and scholarship, 172–79. See also archaeological heritage Collenuccio, Pandolfo, 26, 28, 36 Compendio de le istorie del Regno di Napoli, 25 colonization, ancient, 112, 121–22, 215 British model of “trade before the flag,” 269 Ciaceri on, 256–57 early modern discussions of, 103–10 Grote on, 218 idealized, 97 idea of an isopolity, 178 and modern, 104 and taxation, 108. See also historiography, of ancient Greece; historiography, eighteenth-century Neapolitan; historiography, Italian (post-unification) Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 207 confino (forced peripheral residency under Fascism), 253 and Zanotti Bianco, 263–64 Congresso degli Scienziati (Naples, 1845), 187 Contemporary Review, 262 Page 8 of 34

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Index

Conze, Alexander, 233 Corigliano, 30, 85 Corigliano, Duke of, 85 corography, use of term, 69 n10 Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, 140 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 226 Crete, 219, 233, 261, 270 Italy's Missione Archeologica in, 202 Croce, Benedetto, 224, 267 Croton, 36, 37, 48, 56, 77, 85, 92, 103, 211, 232, 241, 244 excavation of Temple of Hera Lacinia at, 193–96, 201–2 Cumae, 49, 55, 148, 150, 152–53, 227 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 116, 122–28, 145, 184 Platone in Italia, 116, 123, 220, 253 Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana, 123 Cyclopean, monuments, 180 use of the term Cyclopean 180–81 Cyvoct, Amélie, 207 Dainotto, Roberto, 4–5 Daniel (biblical prophet), 99–100 Daniele, Francesco, 222 David, Jacques Louis, 207 Davis, John, 145 De Angelis, Francesco, 204 Debacq, Joseph-Frédéric, 161–62 Métaponte (with duc de Luynes), 162–65, 164 (fig. 3.3), 166 (fig. 3.4) decadence, theme of: modern, 113, 124 post–Roman conquest, 120. See also decline, narrative of decline, narrative of, 118 as Risorgimento theme, 223 Décultot, Elisabeth, 81 degli Uberti, Fazio, 29 Dittamondo, 28 de Jorio, Andrea, 136 (Fig. 3.1), 147–54, 156, 169, 184, 186 Metodo di rinvenire e frugare i sepolcri degli antichi, 147, 150 Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, La, 147–48 Officina dei Papiri, 148 Scheletri Cumani, 150, 152 Viaggio di Enea all’Inferno ed agli Elisii secondo Virgilio, 148 de la Martinière, Bruzen, Grand dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique, 55

Page 9 of 34

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(p.318)

De Martino, Ernesto: “Intorno una storia del mondo

popolare subalterno,” 267–68 Terra del rimorso, La, 268 Demeter, South Italian cult of, 212 democracy, ancient, 34–35, 84, 99, 111, 113, 122, 124, 216–17, 219 Ciaceri's rejection of, 260 Dempster, Thomas, De Etruria Regali, 45 Denon, Dominique Vivant, 86–89, 92–93, 95, 210 Descrizioni del regno, 38–39 Desgodetz, Antoine, Édifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés tres exactement, 83 Desprez, Louis-Jean, 87, 89 Deutsches Archäologisches Institut: in Rome, 209, 239 Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica transformed into, 197–98 in Athens, 197 de Witte, Baron, 208 Dialoghi di Archeologia, 269 Diderot, Denis, 102 Di Donato, Riccardo, 268 Digeon, Claude, 181, 201 di Nola Molisi, Giovanni Battista, 55 Cronica dell’antichissima e nobilissima città di Crotone, 37 Dinsmoor, William, 257–58 Diodorus Siculus, 30, 83, 85, 102, 113, 186 Dionisotti, Carlo, 201 Dioscuri, marble sculpture of, 240 Direzione Centrale degli Scavi e dei Musei del Regno, 204, 209, 232 discovery: archaeological, 150 eighteenth-century emphasis on, 2, 12, 17–19, 46 of Paestum, 2, 12, 17–19, 40–41, 46, 61–62 rhetoric of, 40 of tavole of Heraclaea, 52–54, 53 (fig. 1.2) of vases at Vulci, 165–67, 172, 174–79 “discovery,” of Magna Graecia: eighteenth-century scholars/ travelers and, 2, 12, 17–19 humanists and, 19–40 Lenormant and, 205–14 Dodwell, Edward, 160, 177, 180–81 Views of Cyclopean or Pelasgic Remains in Greece and Italy, 180 Dominican College (Bologna), 7, 26 Dominicans (religious order), 21, 26, 95

Page 10 of 34

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Doria, Paolo Mattia, 47 Dörpfeld, Wilhelm, 239–40 D’Orville, Sicula, quibus Siciliae veteris rudera … , 81 Dumont, Albert, 201 Dunbabin, Thomas, 11, 13, 269–70 Western Greeks, 270 Dyson, Stephen, 193–94 earthquake: of 1783, 86, 92–94, 118, 122 of 1908, 261 Egizio, Matteo, 45, 47–48, 61 Egypt, influence on South Italy: in de Jorio, 152 Italic influence on, 221 Lenormants’ interest in, 207–8 in Vico, 48 Eleusis, Lenormant's excavation at, 208 Encyclopédie (Diderot): entry on manna, 31 entry on Paestum, 60 Enlightenment, 42, 43: Neapolitan, 4, 42–43, 95, 97, 115–22, 137, 220 Ericthonius, birth of, iconography, 154 Etruscan antiquity: and Cuoco, 126–28 eighteenth-century fascination with, 45 and Mazzocchi, 54, 56, 62 renewed postwar studies of, 269 supposed for painted vases, 45, 49, 173–79 Tuscan school and, 58 and Vico, 48 etymology: Bougainville's use of, 105 dismissal of, 9, 116, 119, 127 Mazzocchi's use of, 8–9, 50–51, 55, 55–57, 62 in Renaissance scholarship, 36 European Union, investment in South Italy, 13, 271 Fabius Pictor, 28 Farao, Francesco Mazzarella, 67 (p.319)

farmers: as archaeological “discoverers,” 53–54, 150–51

and archaeological excavations, 239 Calabrese, “prehistoric-contemporary habitat” of, 242, 242 (fig. 4.4) Farnese, Carlo Sebastiano di Borbone. See Carlo, King Fascism, 127, 245, 252, 268, 270 attitudes toward the past, 253–55 Balilla initiatives, 263 censorship and, 263 Page 11 of 34

(p.313)

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Ciaceri and, 255–60 land reclamation and, 253, 263 modernity of, 252–53 Orsi and, 233 Pais and, 224–25, 229 Ferdinand (Ferrante), King, 33 Ferdinando IV, King, 42, 115, 122–23, 145–46 feudalism, in eighteenth-century Neapolitan historiography, 115– 17, 119–20 Ficoroni, Francesco, 52 fieldwork, archaeological: Orsi and, 230–45 Pais and, 226 fieldwork, ethnographic, of De Martino, 268 Finley, Moses, 217 Fiore, Giovanni, Della Calabria illustrata, 37–38 Fiorelli, Giuseppe, 183, 202–4, 209–10, 231–32, 239–40 Flaminio, Giovanni Antonio, 7, 26, 28, 56 Florence: antiquarian passion for Etruscans in, 45 Lenormant in, 209 Orsi in, 233 Pais's training in, 225–26 restoration of Riace bronzes in, 272 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 261 folklore studies, de Jorio and, 149 Forbiger, Alfred, Handbuch der alten Geographie, 211 foreign/local interactions. See local/foreign (nonlocal) scholarly interactions forgery, 25, 57 of inscriptions by Lenormant, 206–9 Forster, Johann Reinhold, 86 Fortis, Alberto, 127 fragmentum Britannicum (tavole of Heraclaea), 52 Fragonard, J.-H., 92 Francke, John Michael, 54 Franklin, Benjamin, 110 Freeman, E. A.: History of Sicily from the Earliest Times, 226 History of the Norman Conquest, 227–28 French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 208 French Revolution, 111, 122, 124 French School at Athens, 197, 199–201, 205, 270 Fréret, Nicolas, 105 Friedrich Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Prussia, 144 Frothingham, Arthur, Jr., 193–96

Page 12 of 34

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Gagliardi, Marquis, 241–42 Galanti, Giuseppe, 115–20, 122–23, 125, 127, 147, 220 Descrizione dello Stato antico … , 118 Nuova Descrizione storica e geografica delle Sicilie, 118 Saggio sopra l’antica storia d’ primi abitatori dell’Italia, 119 Galateo, Antonio De Ferrariis, 32–35 Liber de situ Iapygiae, 20–21, 32–35 Galiani, Ferdinando, 95, 117 Gallarati Scoti, Tommaso, 262 Galli, Ettore, 263 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 225 Gatta, Costantino, 60 Gazette archéologique, 208–9, 213 Gazette des beaux-arts, 208 Gazzola, Count Felice, 61–62, 65–67 Gela, 236 excavation at, 237 (fig. 4.2) Gell, William, 160, 180–81 Gelon of Syracuse, 113–14, 267 Genovesi, Antonio, 115, 117, 119, 146 Lezioni di commercio, 117 Georgian Institute (Athens), 197 Gerace, 88 Gerhard, Eduard, 137–43, 162, 180–83, 196 and antiquarianism, 139 “Archaeological Theses,” 139, 141, 154, 187 (p.320)

and Capialbi, 184–89

“Cenni topografici intorno i vasi italo-greci,” 169 and de Jorio, 147, 150, 153 on Greek South Italy, 169–72 and Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, 154–58, 197–99 Neapels antike Bildwerke (with Panofka), 144–45 and painted vases, 165–67, 169–79 and Pelasgian antiquities, 181 “Preliminary Observations,” 187 “Varietà sepolcrali della Magna Graecia,” 169 German scholarship, neohumanist, 9, 106–7, 128 and archaeology 138–39, 142–43, 147, 154–58, 180–81 Grote and, 216 and historiography of ancient Greece, 217 as model, 195–204, 215 Orsi and, 232–33 Pais and, 224–25 Page 13 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Realphilologie (Sachphilologie), 140. See also Gerhard, Eduard “Germanesimo culturale” (cultural Germanism), 201 Gesellschaft Romische-Yperboreans, 143, 154 Giannone, Pietro, Storia civile del regno di Napoli, 42 Gibbon, Edward, 111 Gillies, John, 103, 110, 111–15, 121, 216, 218, 221 “Discourse upon the history, manners and character of the Greeks,” 112 History of ancient Greece … , 98, 111–15 Gioberti, Vincenzo, Primato civile e morale degli Italiani, Il, 221 Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, 48 Giustiniani, Lorenzo, 135–37, 144, 146–47, 187 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 42, 67, 81, 86, 143 Goltzius, Hubert, Sicilia et Magna Graecia, 39, 103–4 Gori, Anton Francesco, 45 Göttingen, 106–7, 139, 140 Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 106 Graevius, Johann Georg, Thesaurus antiquitatum et historiarum Italiae, 77 Grafton, Anthony, 15 n20, 46, 69 n12, 130 n71 Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, 267 Grand Tour, 2, 42, 65, 77–80, 84, 87, 137, 142, 161 and celebrity tourists, 148 and royal visitors, 148, 150 Greece: eighteenth-century passion for, 17–19, 60–61, 77–80, 122, 124 as focus of classical archaeology, 159, 160–61, 169, 171–77, 244, 272 and Magna Graecia, 2, 3, 80–81, 172, 210, 256–58 in Renaissance scholarship, 20–21, 34–35 travel to, 20, 80–81, 142, 177, 208 Greek and Italo-Greek, use of terms, 153, 172 Greek-Italic interactions, study of, 97, 119–21, 125–28, 178, 183, 218–19, 230, 255–58, 269–70 Greek Revival movement, 2, 17, 159–60 Greek War of Independence, 157, 161 Griffin, Jasper, 12 Grimaldi, Francescantonio, 115, 117, 127, 220, 222 Annali del regno di Napoli, 119 Descrizione de’ tremuoti, 122 Riflessioni sull’ineguaglianza tra gli uomini, 121–22 Grimm, Jacob, 207 Gros de Boze, Claude, 131 n88

Page 14 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Grote, George, History of Greece, 215–19, 220, 223, 224, 229, 236, 257 Grotius, Hugo, 104, 106, 107, 110 De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 104 Mare Liberum, 104 Grumentum, 168 Guevara, Carlo, 52 guidebook writing, in Naples, 38, 147, 147 Haan, Nathalie de, 263 Halbherr, Federico, 233 Hamilton, Sir William, 44–45, 46, 174 Antiquités étrusques, grecques, et romaines tirées du cabinet de M. Hamilton, 44 (p.321)

Hardouin, Jean, 57

Harris, William, 161, 190 n73 Sculptured Metopes Discovered amongst the Ruins of the Temples of the Ancient City of Selinus in Sicily (with Angell), 161 Haskell, Francis, 149 Helbig, Wolfgang, 209, 231 Hellenism: ancient, 219 Magna Graecia and modern, 1, 2, 6, 68, 116, 122, 126 modern, 1, 2, 6, 15 n20, 80, 80, 199 philhellenic ideal, 199 Winckelmann and modern, 19, 65 Heraclaea, 29, 84, 89, 91 (fig. 2.2), 124, 167–69, 210–11 tavole of, 8, 50, 52–54, 62 Herculaneum, 148, 173 excavation of, 41–43, 46, 65 and Heraclaea, 8, 50, 52. See also Accademia Ercolanense Herodotus, 7, 9–10, 57, 113, 203, 223 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 106–7, 110–11, 113, 140 Hirschfeld, Otto, 233 Historia, 259 historical geography, 69 n10 Clüver and, 39–40 humanist, and Magna Graecia, 20–40 historical novel, 123–28 historicism: and bacteriology as model for historical research, 228 Bougainville and, 106 Grote and, 215–16 Heyne and, 106–7, 110–11 Lenormant and, 210–11

Page 15 of 34

(p.313)

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and Pais's hypercriticism, 225, 228 historiography, of ancient Greece, in eighteenth century: 99–103, 111–15 ancient colonization and, 103–10 Greeks vs. barbarians in, 106, 112–15, 124, 199 Magna Graecia in, 102–3, 112–16 modern antirepublicanism in, 111–15 relation to antiquarianism, 99 succession of empire in, 99 and travel writing, 98 historiography, of ancient Greece, in nineteenth century, 215–17 (Grote), 227 (Freeman) historiography, eighteenth-century Neapolitan: 115–22 ancient barbarism in, 115, 117, 119–22, 124 historiography, Italian (post-unification), of Magna Graecia: in nineteenth century, 217–29 in twentieth century, 16 n38, 255–60, 269–70. See also Pais, Emanuele; Ciaceri, Emanuele Hittorf, Jacques Ignace, 165 Holm, Adolf, 201, 205 Geschichte Siciliens im Alterthum, 226 Homer: associated with Magna Graecia, 126–27 Orsi as Homeric mythology character, 230 in Vico, 48 Wolf and scholarship of, 139 Homolle, Théophile, 200 humanism, 2 NATO-humanism, 271 in Neapolitan Renaissance, 33, 36 neohumanism, German, 106–7, 141, 272 in Renaissance, 21–24, 104 Renaissance humanism and Magna Graecia, 19–40 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 139 Hume, David, 111 identity, European, 4 Greek in Galateo, 34–35 Italian, 116, 251, 272 and local/regional identities, 57, 195–96 Neapolitan Kingdom/South Italian, 43, 48, 59, 183, 262 Ignarra, Niccolò, 222 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 157 Inquisition, in Naples, 59

Page 16 of 34

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Index

illustrations: of archaeological discovery/monuments, 53, 83 (Fig. 1.2), 136 (Fig. 3.1) of Magna Graecia's coins, 38–39 of Paestum, 12, 17–19, 62, 66 lack of, 65–66, 81, 135 of travels to and sites of Magna Graecia, 86–95, 160, 163–65, 238, 264 of vases, 44, 54 (p.322)

inscriptions: forgery of, 206–7

of Heraclaea, 52–54 Mazzocchi's study of, 51–54 Institut de France, 207–8, 214 institutions, cultural: building of, in Berlin, 139–40 and classical archaeology, 138–44, 154–58 “institutional moment,” 138–47 and Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, 154–58 and intellectual networks, 167, 175, 179–87 in Naples, 43, 144–47 and national traditions, 195–205 and scholarly professionalization, 145–46 Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, 137–40, 143–47, 149–50, 159–60, 162, 165, 167, 169, 171–76, 190 n62, 208, 209, 239 becomes Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, 197–98 Capialbi and, 184–89 and classical archaeology, 154–58 and national institution building in archaeology, 195–200, 203 and national trends in archaeology, 179–87 Istituto Fascista di Cultura (Salerno), 259 Istituto Gramsci, 269 Italian Communist Party, 267 Italia Nostra, 266–67 Italian scholarship: and classical archaeology, 154–58 and debate over name of Magna Graecia, 7–9 marginalization of, 179–87 Italian Wars, 23, 25, 33 Italic model, 117–19, 121, 123, 220 and anti-Rome sentiment 220–21 Ciaceri and, 257 Mazzocchi and, 57–58 Italiots, 3 Italy: ancient names for, 28 as “classical country,” 204 and heritage legislation, 195, 202 Page 17 of 34

(p.313)

Index

perceptions of Magna Graecia, 2–3 post-unification, 195, 201–5 pre-Roman, 219–23 regional divisions, 23 and regionalism, 229 and Southern Question, 3–4 unification, 3, 78, 137, 147, 213, 219–21, 224–25, 229. See also nationalism, Italian; South Italy Jahn, Otto, Beschreibung der vasensammlung königs Ludwigs… , 138 Jatta, Giovanni, 232 Jaucourt, Chevalier Louis de, 31 Jesuit order, 40, 45, 81 Johnson, Allan Chester, 255–56 Journal of Hellenic Studies, 264 journals: of Denon, 87, 89 of duc de Luynes, 162 of Orsi, 239 of Wilkins, 160 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Prince, 44 Kester, August, 143 Kit-Kat Club, 101 Kunstblatt, 150, 153–54, 156 Laborde, Benjamin de, 87, 93 Lambropoulos, Vassilis, 271 language, of publications: in Bullettino, 157 German vs. French, 81 Italian vs. Latin, 35 Laurinus, Marcus, Lord of Watervliet, 103–4 Leask, Nigel, 3 Lecce, 33, 89 Lenormant, Charles, 207–8 Lenormant, François, 196, 205–15, 231–32, 244, 264 À travers l’Apulie et la Lucanie … , 205–6, 213 as forger, 206–7 Grande Grèce, La, 205–6, 210, 213, 263 “Minerve du Parthenon, La,” 208 Sciences occultes en Asie, Les, 208–9 “Terres cuites de Tarente, Les,” 212 (fig. 4.1) Leoni, Nicola, 222, 224 Della Magna Grecia e delle tre Calabrie, 215, 223 Istoria politica della unità nazionale d’Italia … , 223 Studii istorici sulla Magna Grecia, 223

Page 18 of 34

(p.313)

Index

(p.323)

Leopoldo, Pietro, 202

Le Roy, Julien-David, Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce, 83 Leto, Pomponio, 22, 30 Levi, Carlo, 1, 4 Christ Stopped at Eboli, 253 Lianeri, Aleka, 248 n90 local scholars: and classical archaeology, 5–6, 147–53, 167, 171, 211 expertise of, 25–27, 60, 147, 185, 214 interaction/contrast with nonlocal scholars, 40, 41, 59, 61–62, 78, 88, 95, 117, 148, 167, 176, 202, 204, 214, 239, 253, 271 Lenormant and, 214, 231 Leoni as, 223 linked to antiquarianism, 181–82, 187 Lombardi as, 167 marginalization of, 153, 157, 179, 181, 185 provincialism of, 184–89 local/foreign (nonlocal) scholarly interactions, 5–7, 11, 20–31, 40– 41, 50–51, 59–62, 78, 88, 95, 117–27, 143, 147–51, 167, 176, 179, 182–85, 194, 202–4, 214, 226, 229–30, 235, 239–41, 253, 271 Locri/Locris, 56, 84, 88, 92, 103, 162, 163, 170, 173, 185, 264 Alberti and, 29 Orsi's excavation at, 239–40, 241, 243 sanctuary at Marasà, 240 Lombardi, Andrea, 157, 165–69, 172–73, 179, 190 n77, 222 “Saggio degli antichi avanzi della Basilicata,” 167 Lombardy, 26, 202 Louvre (Paris), 86, 154, 212 as Napoleon Museum, 143 Löwy, Emanuel, 201, 233 Lucanians, 55, 62, 63, 67, 126 Luce, Stephen Bleecker, 138 Lucifero, Armando, 232 Luynes, duc de, 143, 145, 153–56, 155 (fig. 3.2), 159, 161–65, 167, 172, 181, 185, 198–99, 223 Métaponte (with Debacq), 162–65, 164 (fig. 3.3), 166 (fig. 3.4) Macchioro, Vittorio, 268 Magna Graecia: allegorical representation of, 92 ancient references to, 1 barbarism of, 92 as classical vs. antique, 3 as colonial periphery, 2–3, 5–6 Page 19 of 34

(p.313)

Index

“discovery” of, 19–20, 40–41, 50, 54 exhibitions on, 11–14 exoticism associated with, 86–87, 196, 209, 242 as focus of book, 1–2 as great civilization, 256–60 Italian origins, 115–28 natural beauty of, 31, 79, 211 oriental origins, 55–56, 59 potential of, for archaeological research, 195–96 regional boundaries, 28–31 as site of first encounter of Greece and Rome, 3, 272 and Southern Question, 3–5, 205, 231, 253, 267, 271 Taranto conferences on, 13, 271 use of and debate over name, 6–11, 27–28, 39, 55–56, 103, 112, 258–60 wild nature in, 27, 165, 230. See also archaeology, classical; Greece; historical geography; historiography, of ancient Greece; humanism; travel “Magna Grecia” (Italian term), use of, 10 Magnoni, Pasquale, 66–67 Major, Thomas, Ruins of Paestum otherwise Posidonia in Magna Graecia, 66, 68 manna, Calabrese, 31–32 Marafioti, Girolamo, Croniche e antichità di Calabria, 37 Marchand, Suzanne, 5, 15 n20, 138, 141 Marconi, Pirro, 15 n4, 263 Maréchal, Sylvain, Voyages de Pythagoras, 124, 126 marginalization: of Italian scholarship, 153, 179–87 of local scholars, 153, 184 of Magna Graecia, 1, 5, 77–78, 99, 114, 153, 159, 179, 195, 209, 215, 271 of South Italy, 4, 42, 78, 266 Martorano, GiovanBattista, 26, 29 (p.324)

Martorelli, Giuseppe, Delle antiche colonie venute in

Napoli … , 59 Marxism, 267, 268, 269 Masson, Olivier, 206 Érudit déconcertant, Un, 207 Mastrilli, Felice Maria, 45, 54 Mattaire, Michael, 52 Mazzarino, Santo, 201 Mazzella, Scipione, 38–39 Mazzocchi, Alessio Simmaco, 41, 49–68, 115, 124, 150 Page 20 of 34

(p.313)

Index

as antiquarian, 51–59 Commentarii in regii Herculanensis Musei aeneas tabulas Heracleenses, 8–10, 50, 52–57, 53 (fig. 1.2) Epistula qua ad XXX virorum clarissimorum de dedicatione sub ascia commentationes integrae recensentur, 51 and Greek origin of painted vases, 45, 49–50, 175 influence, 116–17, 119, 127, 137, 139, 222 In mutilum Campani amphitheatri titulum, 50–51 and Paestum ruins, 60–68 Sopra l’origine dei Tirreni, 58 and Tuscan school, 57–59 Mazzoldi, Angelo, Delle origini italiche e della diffusione dell’incivilimento italiano all’Egitto … , 221 measurement, of ancient monuments, 79–80, 82–84 medieval themes: Magna Graecia and, 162, 187, 213, 230, 236 and Risorgimento, 220 Mediterranean studies, 11, 252, 271 Medma, 239–40, 242 (fig. 4.4), 262 Megale Hellas, name of, 258–59 Meiners, Christoph, History of ancient philosophy, 127–28 Metaponto, 28, 29, 30, 56, 85, 89, 90 (fig. 2.1), 113, 159, 162–65, 164 (fig. 3.3), 166 (fig. 3.4), 167, 169, 210, 222, 253, 270 Temple of Apollo, 163 Metternich, Prince of, 199 Micali, Giuseppe, L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani, 215, 220– 21, 226 Middleton, John, 180 Grecian Remains in Italy, 180 Mill, John Stuart, 217 Millingen, James, 190 n62 Minasi, Antonio, 95 Minervini, Giulio, 182–83, 202 Mitford, William, 103, 110–15, 121, 214, 215–16, 218 History of Greece, 98 Moe, Nelson, 4–5, 79 Momigliano, Arnaldo: on antiquarian scholarship: 5–6, 15 n17, 41, 57, 71 and debate over name of Magna Graecia, 9, 258–59 on development of modern historiography of ancient world, 93, 98–99, 111–12, 130 n77, 216 on Italian scholars and German model, 201 on Italian scholars and Fascism, 254, 259, 260 on Orsi, 236

Page 21 of 34

(p.313)

Index

on Paestum, 2 on Vico, 73 n121, 74n122, 135 Mommsen, Theodor, 202, 204, 225–26 Monteleone, 183–87, 211, 241 Montfaucon, Bernard de, L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, 236 Monumenti Antichi dell’accademia dei Lincei, 204, 236 Morano, 223 More, Henry, 59 Morelli, Giovanni, and Morellian method, 173 Morris, Ian, 15 n15, 141, 188 n17, 197 Motya, 82 Moyle, Walter, 104 Müller, Karl Otfried, 138, 140, 178–79, 181, 189 n62, 200, 217–19, 236, 264 Murat, Joachim, 123, 128, 145–46, 148 Muratori, Ludovico, 51 Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Syracuse), 231, 236, 266 Museo Archeologico “Paolo Orsi” (Syracuse), 231 Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte (Naples), 43 (p.325)

museums: and acquisition of antiquities, 143, 161, 193, 195

in Naples, 43, 52, 144–45, 148, 171, 226, 255 and origins of classical archaeology, 141 and scholarly professionalization in Naples, 146–48. See also names of museums Mussolini, Benito, 224–25, 259, 260, 266, 268 Musti, Domenico, 10, 16 n38 Mylne, Robert, 83 Naples, 225, 255 Alberti's description of, 26–27 in eighteenth century, 41–44, 46 and European context, 50–51 Galateo and, 33 as gateway to South, 144–47 Gerhard in, 145–47 as humanist center, 33, 36, 71 n63 and intellectual life of, 47, 49 as marketplace for painted vases, 2, 44–45 and origins of classical archaeology, 136–37, 144–54 revolution of 1799, 116, 122–23, 146, 184, 220 Vico and, 46–49 Naples, Kingdom of, 4, 8, 145–47, 232 in eighteenth century, 42–44 Page 22 of 34

(p.313)

Index

and Italian Wars, 23 local histories, 38–39, 78 Naples, republic of, 115, 122 Napoleonic Wars, 2, 122, 142 Napoleon Museum (the Louvre, 1802–1815), 143 National Institute for Ancient Drama (Fascist), 253 nationalism, 123, 138, 180, 215, 244–45 English, 219 and Franco-German relations, 179–87, 197–201, 205–6 Italian, 3, 5, 9, 196–205, 224–25, 229, 244, 250–60, 270 national schools of archaeology, establishment of, 196–205 Neapolitan Museum, 255 Neapolitan Renaissance, 21, 25, 33, 35–36, 70 n62, 70 n63 Nebuchadnezzar, biblical dream of, 99–100 neo-classicism, 163 New Indies, Magna Graecia as, 88, 97 New World, Magna Graecia and, 40, 79, 97, 121 immigrants, Italian, to America, 257 New York Review of Books, 149 Nola, vases from, 44, 145, 169–70, 172–73, 179, 183 excavations at, 174–75 nostalgia: for past, 124 for ruins, 1 Notizie degli Scavi di antichità, 204, 214, 232, 236, 240, 264 numismatics, 39, 66, 99, 103–4, 113, 189 n52, 213, 222, 255 oriental: de Luynes's oriental interests, 162 Instituto's oriental interests, 190 n64 Lenormant's oriental studies, 209 Magna Graecia's oriental character, 210 Mazzocchi's orientalism, 50–51, 55–63 use of term, 56–57 Orsi, Paolo, 194–96, 214, 229–45, 264 and archaeological reports, 230, 232, 236–38, 240 and Fascism, 233, 254–55 and fieldwork, 230–45 influence of, 251 and Zanotti Bianco, 234, 251, 262 Pace, Biagio, Arte e civiltà della Sicilia Antica, 255 Padua, 37, 233, 255 Paestum, 1, 6, 13, 23, 38, 77, 78, 85–87, 92, 113, 116, 121, 124–28, 158, 160, 163, 170, 257 Fascist restoration of, 253 as film setting, 272 Page 23 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Lenormant on, 213 Mazzocchi on, 56, 60, 62–68 Mitford on, 114–15 Phoenician origin, 62–66 Piranesi and, 17–19, 18 (fig. 1.1) (p.326)

rediscovery of, in eighteenth century, 2, 12, 17–20, 40–

42, 46, 61–68 Sanctuary of the Sele, 254, 260, 264–66, 265 (fig. 5.1)–265 (fig. 5.2) as source of Ceres statuettes, 171 Swinburne and, 96 temple of Hera (Basilica), 18 (fig. 1.1) topography of, 63–65, 64 (fig. 1.3) Winckelmann on, 2, 19, 60–62, 65–68, 83, 96 Pagano, Mario, Saggi Politici, 122 painted vases. See vases, painted Pais, Ettore, 196, 214, 220, 244–45, 252, 256, 258, 264 and Fascism, 224–25, 253–55, 259 and Orsi, 229 Sardegna prima del dominio dei Romani, La, 226 Storia della Sicilia e della Magna Grecia, 9, 215, 223–29 Storia d’Italia dai tempi più antichi sino alle guerre puniche, 227 Palazzo Grassi (Venice), as site of I Greci in Occidente exhibition, 11–13 Palazzo Sessa (Naples), 44 Palermo, 26, 161, 201, 205, 225–26, 228 Riedesel in, 81 Pancrazi, Giuseppe Maria, 83, 85 Pandosia, 162, 168 pane d’Africo, 261–62 Panofka, Theodor, 143–45, 148, 154, 174–75, 177, 182, 186 Neapels antike Bildwerke (with Gerhard), 144–45 Paoli, Paolo Antonio: Antichità di Pesto, ossia Poseidonia, 63, 67, 64 (fig. 1.3) Paesti, quod Posidoniam etiam dixere, rudera, 67 papacy, 69 n13 and diplomatic neutral zone, 142 and humanism, 22 and link to Roman antiquity, 22 Parthenon (Athens), 20, 144, 163, 190 n62, 208 Passeri, Giovan Battista, Picturae Etruscorum in vasculis, 45 patria, Giustiniani and, 135–38

Page 24 of 34

(p.313)

Index

patrimonio culturale (cultural heritage), 255, 271 Pelasgian, use of term, 180–81 Pelasgians, 105, 215, 220, 221 controversy over, 180–81, 199 Perrot, Georges, 234, 242 Petelia, 31 Petersen, Eugen, 239–40 Petit-Radel, Louis Charles François, 180–81 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 34 philology: Grote and, 215–16 and Italian scholarship, 8–10, 196, 258 as model for classical archaeology, 141, 154, 156, 174, 187 nineteenth-century German philology, 9, 139–40 Renaissance philology, 22, 25 photographic reproduction, and identification of images, 156 Piacenza, 22, 61 Pian delle Vigne, 240 Pigorini, Luigi, 233, 235 Pimentel, Eleonora Fonseca, 122 Pindar, Nemean 10:36, 177 Piranesi, G. B., 2 and Paestum ruins, 17–19, 18 (fig. 1.1), 60, 68 Pisa, 204, 225–26, 228, 255 Piscatory, Theobald, 199 Pliny: Naturalis Historia 3.5.42, 56 Naturalis Historia 7:55, 177 Poe, Edgar Allan, 3 Polybius, 55 Histories 2:39.1, 7–8 polychromy controversy, 163–65, 166 (fig. 3.4) Pompeii, 145, 148, 211, excavation of, 41–43, 46, 182 Pompeii, Scuola archaeologica di, 203–4, 232 Pontano, Giovanni, 33 De bello Neapolitano, 36 Pontificia, academy in Rome, 156 Portici, Hamilton's Villa Angelica at, 44 museum of, 43, 52 Poseidonia, 62–65, 67, 126. See also Paestum (p.327)

Posillipo Villa (Naples), 44

postcolonial studies, 14, 252, 270–71 Potentia (Potenza), 167–69 Pourtalès-Gorgier, comte de, 144 Page 25 of 34

(p.313)

Index

professorship, of classical archaeology, 140 provenance: concept of, 271 vs. context, 179 provincialism, of local scholarship, 184–89 Prussian state, and Instituto, 197–99 publishing history: of Barrio, 37 of Galateo, 33–34, 37 Riedesel, Reise, 79 Saint-Non, Voyage, 79, 89–93 Swinburne, Travels, 79 Puglia, 21, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 52, 88, 146, 151, 170, 205, 209, 210, 267 Galateo and, 33–35. See also Apulia Punta Alice, sanctuary of Apollo Aleo, 240–41 Pythagoras, 92, 114, 124 assimilated into sacred history, 59 associated with Magna Graecia, 1, 8, 10, 36–37, 48, 55–56, 103, 125–27, 218, 256, 258 atomism of, 59 claimed as native of South Italy, 36–37, 59 and Fascism, 259–60, 263 Pythecussai, 270 Quatremère de Quincy, 143 race, in discussion of native Italians, 257–58 Radet, Georges, 200, 205 Ranzano, Pietro, 26, 27, 70 n32 Raoul-Rochette, Desiré: Histoire critique de l’établissement des colonies grecques, 181 Lettre à M. Schorn, 179, 183 Ravoisié, Amable, Expédition scientifique de Morée (with Blouet), 200 Rayet, Olivier, 206 Real Fabbrica della Porcellana, (Naples) 173 Récamier, Madame, 207 reformers, Neapolitan, 42, 115–22 Reggio (Calabria), 35, 37, 48, 84–86, 88, 92, 210, 240–41, 257, 271– 72 Zanotti Bianco and, 261–63 Renaissance scholars: and Romanocentrism, 20–21 and study of Magna Graecia, 6, 19–40 Renard, Jean-Augustin, 87, 89 Revett, Nicholas, 61, 92, 144, 159–60, 163 Antiquities of Athens (with Stuart), 61, 83

Page 26 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Revue archéologique, 182, 199, 207, 209 Revue numismatique, 207 Riall, Lucy, 4 Ridgeway, David, 270 Riedesel, Baron Johann Hermann von, 77–88, 240 in Magna Graecia, 84–86 Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland, 79 Remarques d’un voyageur moderne au Levant, 81 Winckelmann and, 81–84 rigenerazione, Risorgimento notion of, 222 Risorgimento, 4, 116, 122–28, 196, 203, 252, 261–63 and historiography of Magna Graecia, 219–23 imagery of, 215, 222, 251 studies of, 215 Robert, Louis, 206 Roberts, Jennifer, 111 Robertson, William, 111 Rogadei, Giandonato, 115, 117, 127, 220, 222 Dell’antico stato de’ popoli dell’Italia cistiberina … , 119–20 Rollin, Charles, 110, 111, 112 Histoire ancienne … , 101–3 Roman conquest of South Italy, 118–19 Romanesque, South Italian, 213 Romanian Academy in Rome, 268 Romanocentrism: Alberti and, 28 of Italian Renaissance, 20–21 of Vico, 47–48 Romanticism, 122, 165 (p.328)

Rome, modern: as capital of Italy, 202

and eighteenth-century intellectual life, 54, 65, 80–82, 87 as gateway to Greece, 144 and nineteenth-century intellectual life, 142–43, 160, 180, 197, 201, 204, 209 nineteenth-century invention of modern archaeology in, 137– 44 and Renaissance humanism, 21–24, 33, 34, 37 and twentieth-century intellectual life, 233, 264, 268, 269, 270, 272 and vase collecting, 44, 45 Rome, ancient, 59, 79, 101, 220 Ciaceri on, 255–56 Pais's views of 227–29 Poe's verses on, 3 Page 27 of 34

(p.313)

Index

rejection of, in Neapolitan historiography, 120–21 Vico's focus on, 44–49 Römische Mitteilungen, 240 Rossi, Paolo, 58 Rovee, Christopher, 188 n25 Rovereto, 194, 232–34 Royal Library (Naples), 146 Royal Museum (Naples), 144 vase room, 148 ruins: 1, 27, 78, 180 Roman, 168 in Magna Graecia, 31, 37, 77, 113, 168, 211, 231 scarcity of, 80, 84–86, 88–89, 97, 159, 165, 168, 210, 211, 223, 241. See also Paestum names of locations Ruvo di Puglia, 182, 232 Sainte-Croix, Baron Guillaume de, De l’état et du sort des colonies  … , 109–10, 113 Saint-Non, Jean-Claude Richard de, 78, 80, 86, 95, 97, 98, 107, 163, 165 Voyage ou circuit de la partie méridionale de l’Italie … , 79, 86– 93, 90 (fig. 2.1), 91 (fig. 2.2), 93, 94 (fig. 2.3) Salinas, Antonino, 205 Sameria, Father, 261 Samnites, 56–57, 87, 118–21, 126 Samnium, 125, 126 Samo (Crepacuore), as birthplace of Pythagoras, 8, 37, 126 Sanfelice, Ferdinando, 60 Sanmartino, Giuseppe, 50 Sanseverino, Prince Niccolò Bernardino V, 35 Sant’Agata dei Goti, 170, 173 Sardinia, 25, 202, 225–26 Sassari, museum at, 225 Schnapp, Alain, 138–39, 141, 149, 154 scholarship: biblical, 56 and collecting, 172–79 German, 139–42, 201–2, 215–17, 224–25 Italian, 7–9, 154–58, 179–87 local, 184–89, 204–5 of Mazzocchi, 54–59 and nationalism, 196–205 Neapolitan, marginalization of, 182–87 Schorn, Ludwig, 156 Scipione, Francesco, Marquis of Maffei, 58

Page 28 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Scuola Normale (Pisa), 204, 254 Scyllatium, 32 Sedan, French defeat at, 201, 205 Segesta, 82, 160 Selinus, 82, 160, 161, 163 semiotics: de Jorio and 149 vases as speaking signs and, 151 Semper, Gottfried, Vorläfige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten, 165 sepolcreto di Santa Teresa, excavation of, 135–38, 136 (fig. 3.1), 150 Serio, Luigi, 50 Settis, Salvatore, 14, 179, 266, 274 n49 Sicily: 25, 26, 79, 87 89, 93, 95, 96, 98, 102, 103, 107, 108, 125, 139, 160, 217–18, 221, 263 excluded from Magna Graecia, 10–11, 55, 114, 255 included in Magna Graecia, 9, 35, 11–14, 226–28, 258 and local scholarship, 204–5 Orsi and, 195, 230–31, 233–36, 240–41 Pais and, 226–28 Riedesel and, 80–86 Siculi, 229 chronology of, 235 (p.329)

Silvestri, Francesco, 26

Siris, 29, 56, 92, 168 Sirleto, Cardinal, 21, 35 Sitignano, Marquis of, 185 Smith, Robert, 61 Società della Magna Graecia, 262–64, 266 Soldini, Silvio, 272 Somers, Lord (John), 101–2 Soufflot, Jacques Germain, 61 Southern Question, 3–5, 31, 205, 231, 271 Fascism and, 253 Zanotti Bianco and, 266–67 South Italy: as antique land, 86–97 backwardness of, 261–62 barbarism of, 79 claim on Pythagoras, 59 in eighteenth-century travel writing, 78–97 isolation, experience of, in 84–86, 185 marginalization of, 4 natural beauty of, 79 Page 29 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Roman conquest of, 118–19 stereotyped perceptions of, 79. See also Magna Graecia, and Southern Question Spanheim, Ezechiel, 57 Spinelli, Giovan Battista, Count of Cariati, 33–34 sponsorship: private, of cultural events, 11–13 private, of scholarly endeavors, 143, 161–62, 242 royal (Naples), 21, 33, 144 royal (Naples), of excavations, 43 state, of academic travels, 139, 206, 212 state, of excavations, 5, 194, 214 Stackelberg, Otto Magnus von, 143–44, 160, 177 Stanyan, Temple, Grecian History, 101–3, 105, 110, 111, 112, 216 Stark, Karl, 157 state, role in archaeological excavations, 230–45. See also Direzione Centrale degli Scavi e dei Musei del Regno; sponsorship statues: Alberti and, 29–30 in biblical dream of Nebuchadnezzar, 99–100 recovered from sea floor, 271–72 Riedesel and, 82 Taranto terracottas, 212 transferred from Rome to Paris, 142–43 Stentinello, 235 Stosch, Baron Philip von, 144 Strabo, 29, 31, 62, 186 Geography 5.4.13, 62–63 Geography 6.1.2, 9–10, 23, 55 Stuart, James, 61, 92, 144, 159, 160, 163 Antiquities of Athens (with Revett), 61, 83 Summonte, Pietro, 60 Swinburne, Henry, 78, 80, 86–87, 98, 107, 113, 210 Travels in the Two Sicilies, 79, 93–97 Sybaris, 13, 29, 56, 62, 84–85, 88–89, 92, 103, 211, 218, 232, 239, 260, 269 location of, 263 Sybarites, 63, 114 Symonds, John, Remarks, 108–9 Syracuse, 35, 82, 113–14, 160, 236 as model for Rome, 227–28 Orsi and, 231, 233, 235 Tabula Peutingeriana, 190 n84 Tampa Art Museum, 14

Page 30 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Taranto, 7, 13, 28, 30, 31, 34–35, 85, 86, 87–88, 92, 95, 96, 97, 125, 126, 173, 206, 210, 212, 232 Magna Graecia conferences in, 13, 271 terracottas from, 212, 212 (fig. 4.1) Taranto, Gulf of, 28, 30, 87, 210, 211, 240, 257 Tavole Palatine (Metaponto), 30, 85, 89, 163, 164 (fig. 3.3), 167, 231 Terina, 56, 211 Thesauros exhibition, at Paestum (1952), 266 Thesaurus antiquitatum, 39, 77 Thucydides, 7, 9–10, 105, 109 tombs, ancient: 84 excavation of, 44, 135, 137, 147, 150–53, 169–71, 173–75, 177, 236 Tonson, Jacob, 101 (p.330)

topographical mapping, 22, 23, 26, 78, 86, 97, 119, 148,

157, 160, 163, 169, 211, 222, 228, 230–32, 236, 240, 256 topography, of Paestum, 63–65, 64 (fig. 1.3) Torremuzza, Prince of, 231 trade: ancient, 178 modern, in antiquities, 44–45, 52, 161 modern, in painted vases, 176–77 translation, 93, 102, 110, 131 n92, 147–48, 150, 153, 185, 208–9, 263 travel: academic, 195, 225 and antiquarian humanism, 23–24 dismissal of scholarly travel, 140 Gerhard and, 138, 143 to Greece, 86, 142, 160, 143, 144, 158, 160, 177 scholarly travel, 40–41, 160, 180, 212 to South Italy and Magna Graecia, 2, 20, 38, 61, 24–27, 84–97, 148, 160, 162, 206 by train, 210 Winckelmann and, 65. See also Grand Tour travel writing, and Alberti's historical geography of Magna Graecia, 25–32 in eighteenth century about Sicily, 80–84 Grote's use of, 218 and historiography, 98–99, 112–14 Lenormant's on Magna Graecia, 205–14 about Magna Graecia, 77–97 picturesque and scientific modes in, 79–80 practical information and, 95 subjective impressions in, 96

Page 31 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Trentino, 232–33 Treves, Piero, 225, 226 Studio dell’antichità classica nell’Ottocento, Lo, 224 Turin, 157, 225, 259, 261 Turner, Frank, 216 Tuscan school, eighteenth-century scholarship, 57–58 Mazzocchi and, 57–59 Tuscany, 48, 58, 175, 202, 228 Tusculum, 176 unification of Italy, 3, 4, 6, 78, 137, 138, 147, 165, 183, 184, 187, 195, 197, 201, 202, 205, 213, 219–21, 223–25, 229, 231, 251 idea of, 22, 23, 78, 122, 123 Università della Magna Graecia, Catanzaro, 14 University of Catania, 234 University of Leiden, 39 University of Padua, 233, 255 Valla, Lorenza, 22, 33, 70 n62 Valletta, Giuseppe, 44–45, 47, 49, 59 vases, painted, 88 as athletic prizes, 178 collecting of, 88, 173, 176, 232 as cultural artifacts vs. art objects, 172–73 debate over provenance, 172–79 de Jorio and, 148–50 demand for, in eighteenth century, 2, 41 discovery of, 151, 154 early Neapolitan collecting of, 44–45 as focus of classical archaeology, 172–79 found in tombs, 152 Gerhard on, 169–72 Greek origin, 45, 49–50, 54 history of their study, 172–79 iconography of, 171–72 Italian vs. Greek origins, 159 “Italo-Greek,” 46 as “speaking signs,” 151 supposed Etruscan origin, 45–46, 175–76 trade in, 176–78 Velia, 56, 77, 162, 213 Venosa, 168 Venturi, Franco, 121 Venuti, Domenico, 173, 191 n100 verum factum (Vico), 47 Page 32 of 34

(p.313)

Index

Vibo Valentia, museum of, 184 Vico, Giambattista, 8, 41–42, 46–49, 56, 59, 115, 121, 127, 167, 220, 222 De antiquissima sapientia Italica … , 47–48, 126 Scienza nuova, 47, 49, 126 Vienna, 51, 80, 220, 233 Vinet, Ernst, 154 Viola, Luigi, 232, 263 Virgil, Aeneid, 148 (p.331)

Visconti, Ennio Quirino, 143, 154

Vulci, vase discovery at, 154, 165–67, 169–70, 172–79 Walbank, Frank, 219, 248 n109 Walpole, Robert, 101 Wedgwood, Josiah, 44–45, 173 Weiss, Roberto, 22 Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb, 140, 182 Western Greeks, use of term, 11–13 Whitley, James, 2 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 19 Wilkins, William, Antiquities of Magna Graecia, 159–61, 180 Winckelmann, J. J., 2, 19, 41, 96, 98, 106, 114, 143, 144, 163 “Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der alten Tempel zu Girgenti in Sicilien,” 82 and Greek origin of painted vases, 45–46, 175 History of the Art of the Ancients, 65, 67, 84 and Mazzocchi, 54–55 Observations on the Architecture of the Ancients, 82, 84 and Paestum ruins, 19, 59–68, 77 and Riedesel, 80–86 Witte, Karl, 184, 186 Wolf, F. A., Prolegomena ad Homerum, 139–40 Wolff, Emile, 157, 176–78 women, modern: in eighteenth-century travelogues, 84–85 working in Italian archaeology, 264 Woods, James, 61 World War I, 252 World War II, 252, 270 Wortphilologie, 140 Zancani, Domenico, 264 Zancani Montuoro, Paola, 263–66, 265 (figs. 5.1 and 5.2) Zanotti Bianco, Umberto, 239, 242–44, 251–54, 260–67, 265 (fig. 5.1 and 5.2) imprisonment, 264

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(p.313)

Index

and Orsi, 234, 251, 262 rejection of Fascism, 262–67

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