What happened to the Greeks of Italy?

TL;DR

Greeks colonized southern Italy from the 8th century BC, building Magna Graecia, before Rome gradually absorbed their cities, though Greek culture and language survived into the modern era.

Key Points

• 1.Greek colonization of Italy began around the 8th century BC through separate ventures, not a single migration. The Euboeans from Chalcis and Eretria founded Pithekoussai on Ischia and then Cumae on the mainland, spreading a Euboean alphabet that influenced Etruscan writing and ultimately the Latin alphabet.
• 2.Magna Graecia cities like Sybaris and Croton became extraordinarily wealthy and influential. Sybaris reportedly had 300,000 inhabitants and allegedly built underground wine pipelines from vineyards to coastal cellars, while Croton hosted Pythagoras around 530 BC, becoming a center of mathematics, philosophy, and disciplined governance.
• 3.Croton destroyed Sybaris in 510 BC under Olympic champion Milo, marking the beginning of Magna Graecia's slow decline. The war was triggered by territorial disputes and a political crisis over exiled Sybarites, and the city's total destruction ended its role as the archaic world's wealthiest colony.
• 4.Sicily was contested for centuries between Greek cities and Carthage in the Greco-Punic Wars. Carthage sacked Selinus and Himera in 409 BC and Acragas in 406 BC, but failed to take Syracuse; a 306 BC peace left Carthage controlling the west and Syracuse the east.
• 5.Rome absorbed the Greek cities of southern Italy through a mix of diplomacy, garrison placements, and military conquest. Thurii invited Roman protection against Lucanian invasion in the 280s BC, effectively surrendering its foreign policy, while Tarentum resisted by hiring King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose costly victories at Heraclea (280 BC) and Asculum (279 BC) still ended in his withdrawal and Tarentum's fall in 272 BC.
• 6.The Second Punic War ended Magna Graecia's political independence definitively and brutally. Syracuse fell in 212 BC and was looted, with thousands enslaved; Tarentum was recaptured in 209 BC and tens of thousands sold into slavery, signaling Rome's zero-tolerance for Greek defection to Hannibal.
• 7.Greek language and culture survived in Italy for centuries after Roman conquest and even into the modern era. Naples hosted Greek-style Sebasta Games into the imperial period; Byzantine reconquests kept Greek alive in the south after Rome's fall; and today the Griko peoples of Calabria and the Salento Peninsula in Apulia are living descendants of ancient and medieval Greek communities.