Michela Nocita, Italiotai e Italikoi. Testimonianze greche nel Mediterraneo Orientale, Roma, L'Erma di Breitschneider, 2012, eur 130

The main concern of this Ph. D. thesis is the resettlement for personal reasons of people from southern Italy (Italiotes and Italikoi) in the East, by which I mean the Balkans, Greece, the Aegean islands, Anatolic Ionia, and Egypt.

Most of the works on emigration from Southern Italy focus on the presence of Roman and Italic mercatores in the Aegean, especially on Delos, within a fairly short chronological range (III-I centuries B.C.); the main evidence for such studies are the gentilicia listed in Hatzfeld's indices ("Les Italiens résidants à Délos mentionnés dans les inscriptions de l'île", BCH 36, 1912; Les trafiquants italiens dans l'Orient hellénique, BEFAR 115, 1919).
Yet this approach is problematic, for the simple reason that gentilicia found in the East are often unreliable. An analysis solely based on them is unable to yield conclusive proof of where the Italic emigrants came from.

The present study therefore opts for a different approach. It aims to examine the provenance of settlers in light of the ethnic element that can be found in their onomastic formulas. This element is well attested in the literary and epigraphic evidence from the sixth to the first century B.C. It is only after 88 B.C., the year, that is, when the Rome's socii acquired Roman citizenship that the ethnic element in the Italic names attested in the East begins slowly to disappear.

The present work collects more than 360 literary and epigraphic records in which the Italic ethnics are preserved. A prosopographic index is also provided, which contains all the information on each Italiotes and Italikos recorded in the data.

The Greek inscriptions, which are far numerous, and the Greek literary material give us a good picture of the pattern of settlement: interesting details of the activities of settlers emerge, enabling us to follow the story of their relations with the native communities. This work also deals with the settlers' occupations, their provenance and social status, and their relationships with the Greeks. The literary evidence shows that the first Italiotai visitors of the eastern lands were for the most part artists and athlets as they appear in the victory lists of the Greek sanctuaries (VI-IV centuries B.C.). The inscriptions from the third to the first century record a large number of merchants and financiers specialized in one way of making money, such as banking or moneylending, trade, agriculture.

The novelty of this thesis resides in the use of literary as well as epigraphical sources (including tituli amphorarii and ostraka), the wide chronological and geographical range, and the up-to-date prosopographic index.