Sybaris

earlier Lupia, later Thurii, Thourioi (or more properly Thuria, the version given by Thucydides), and subsequently Copia (near the modern Sibari)

A Greek city in Bruttii (the modern Calabria), situated on the Gulf of Taras (Tarentum, Taranto), the `instep’ of Italy. Originally known as Lupia (according to Pausanias), Sybaris was perhaps founded c 720 BC (by Is of Helice, according to a doubtful reading of Strabo); its colonists came from Achaea in the northern Peloponnese, but Aristotle adds that settlers from Troezen, in the northeastern part of the same peninsula, also participated. The town occupied a large, flat, low-lying site extending over an area of four miles between the rivers Sybaris (Coscile) and Crathis (Cratis) and bordering the seacoast.

The Sybarites became very powerful—and notoriously luxurious—by expanding their territory throughout the adjoining fertile alluvial plain, a process that was assisted by a pact with the local native tribe of the Serdaioi. Local silver (incuse) coinage, which may have been issued as early as c 550, bore the type of a bull, which perhaps personified the Crathis, or, more generally, symbolized the wealth Sybaris derived from cattle. It dispatched colonists to the Tyrrhenian coast at Laus (Lao) and Scidrus, and a further settlement at Posidonia (Paestum) enabled its merchants to conduct profitable trading with the states of Etruria. In 510, however, internal dissensions enabled Croton (Crotone), a long-standing rival, to capture Sybaris and blot it out of existence by diverting the course of the Crathis to flow over the city, which has remained buried and unknown until prolonged searches resulted in the identification of the site in 1968. The use of pumps, magnetometers and drilling borings have disclosed the foundations of sixth-century buildings and have uncovered roof tiles, pottery and a pottery kiln of the same epoch. An area paved with large stones has been identified as a shipyard beside the ancient harbor (from which the sea has now receded two miles).

After the destruction of their dwellings the Sybarite refugees seem to have received asylum in their former city's colonies. But they returned home in 453, and with the help of the people of Posidonia built a new settlement near the former habitation center, celebrated by coins which celebrate both cities in conjunction. Five years later, however, the Crotoniates once again moved to the attack, and razed this revived Sybaris to the ground. Shortly afterward its the inhabitants, again expelled and in exile, prevailed on the Athenian leader Pericles to assist them in a further attempt to reestablish themselves, and this time the project resulted in the creation, on the ancient site, of the city of Thurii, as it soon came to be called (after a local spring named Thuria), following initial designation as Sybaris. The change of name came about because the Sybarites in the new colony, though greatly outnumbered by settlers from other Greek cities, made themselves so unpopular that they were obliged, it appears, to depart, retiring to a third site at the mouth of the river Teuthras or Traeis (Trionto). According to another view, however, the Teuthras settlement belongs to an earlier stage; in any case it never achieved any success.

Thurii, on the other hand, was an ambitious Pan-Hellenic foundation, reputedly joined by the historian Herodotus and the orator Lysias, a Syracusan who had settled at Athens. Designed on rectangular lines by the great Milesian townplanner Hippodamus, Thurii initiated the south Italian production of vases, directed by potters with Athenian training. Already in 426, during the Peloponnesian War between the Athenians and Spartans, the city's harbor was regarded as important; and the Thurians were beginning at this time to issue coins of outstanding artistic quality, depicting Athena (and later Hera) and the bull that had already been a feature of the earlier coinage of Sybaris (thourios means a butting bull, and that is how the animal is now represented).

Aristotle, who died in 322, refers in his Politics to an excessively limited and oppressive oligarchic government at Thurii, which provoked violent revolution. Its people were treated with hostility by its fellow Greeks at Syracuse and Taras (Tarentum, Taranto) and by the non-Greek peoples of Lucania and Bruttii. In 282 Thurii voluntarily received a Roman garrison, and opposed the invasions of Pyrrhus of Epirus (280–275) and the Carthaginian Hannibal (in the Second Punic War, 218–201). To revive the city after Hannibal's depredations (204), the Romans augmented its population by the establishment of a Latin colony, which they named Copia, in 193, just a quarter of a millennium after Thurii had been founded. Gaining Roman citizenship, like other Italian cities, c 90/89, it suffered occupation by Spartacus during his slave revolt (72) and was the place where Marcus Caelius Rufus, attempting an insurrection against Julius Caesar, was captured and executed (48). In 40 Thurii was besieged by Sextus Pompeius. Antony maintained, mockingly, that the great-grandfather of Octavian (the future Augustus) was an ex-slave and rope maker from the neighborhood and the emperor himself, according to Suetonius, was happy to admit that he had previously been known as Thurinus.

Soundings and excavations have brought to light various structures of the Roman colony, including a theater, the city wall (built over Hellenistic foundations), a road and a villa. In spite of its strategic importance, however, Thurii-Copia had become insignificant, according to Dio Chrysostom, in the second century AD, and there is evidence that at least parts of the site were abandoned before 400, although it still secured a mention from Proclus in the sixth century.