Archeologia e antropologia della prima ‘colonizzazione' greca in Italia (VIII sec. a.C.): memorie e tempi, territorialità e iniziazioni, marginalità e aggregazione

The traditions relating to the first Greek ‘colonization’ in Italy and their wider historical context deserve to be deepened not only from the usual historical and archaeological point of view but also from the anthropological one, through the symbolic mechanisms of the so-called passage rituals. The numerous links existing between initiation rituals and colonial traditions seem in fact less fortuitous if they are read through an anthropological filter and are brought back to the cumulative logic that is typical of the so-called ‘cultural memory’. The narration of the origins of a new community could in fact also serve to describe the characteristics that define it as such, also presenting them in a paradoxical form, as often happens when the aggregation/integration takes place through the provocative and only apparently deconstructive formula of the [provisional] inversion of reality. Even the ‘anomalies’ that characterized the oldest ‘founding heroes’ would seem to constitute an almost obligatory premise for the success of the ‘colonial’ enterprise and for the ‘transition’ towards the new order that it presupposed. This paper tries to offer new food for thought in this sense, trying to consider epochal events such as the Lelantine and Messenic wars from a new perspective. A better understanding of them is possible in our opinion if considered in the perspective of ‘traditional wars’ as they have been defined by Angelo Brelich. To this end, we will try to offer an updated framework of the debate on the different classes of ‘sources’ relating to the first ‘colonial’ experiences in Magna Graecia and Sicily during the eighth century BC. and their broader sociological and chronological context, without neglecting the contribution made to these processes by the indigenous world.