Oenotrians Erotic

The Oenotrians were an Iron Age people of southern Italy, known from Greek writers between roughly the eighth and fifth centuries BC, and they disappeared as a distinct group long before Rome ruled the peninsula: absorbed by the Greek colonies on the coast and by Oscan-speaking Lucanians pushing down from the mountains. What made them a people, at least in Greek eyes, was that they were the natives, already farming the river valleys and hill terraces of what is now Basilicata, Calabria and the Cilento when the first colonists from Achaea and Ionia beached their ships. The Greeks called the whole stretch Oenotria, and the name outlived the people. Virgil still used it as a poetic word for Italy, and one Greek tradition made Italus, a king of the Oenotrians, the source of the name Italy itself, first for the toe of the peninsula and then for everything above it.

Their homeland ran from the Sele plain near Paestum down through the Vallo di Diano and across the Pollino massif to the Gulf of Taranto and southern Calabria. Archaeologists identify them with a cluster of settlements and cemeteries: Sala Consilina, Francavilla Marittima, Torre del Mordillo, Amendolara, Incoronata near Metaponto. The pottery is the fingerprint, hand-built wares painted with dark geometric patterns on a pale matte ground, in styles that shift from valley to valley. Their language left no inscriptions. It is assumed to have been Italic, and some scholars tie it to the Sicels who crossed into Sicily, but nobody has read a word of it. Greek writers split them into branches, the Chones along the Ionian coast, the Itali in the far south, the Morgetes, and told a story that they came from Arcadia under a founder named Oenotrus, a claim that says more about Greek habits of adopting useful neighbors than about Oenotrian origins.

Religion shows mostly through what they buried and where they gathered. At Francavilla Marittima, on the hill of Timpone della Motta a few miles from the later Greek city of Sybaris, a native sanctuary with timber buildings was in use before the Greeks arrived, and it was gradually reworked into a temple of Athena, a local cult taken over rather than erased. Women went into the ground wearing extravagant bronze: fibulae by the dozen, spiral ornaments, belts of plates, amber and glass beads traded in from far away. Aristotle preserves a tradition that Italus turned the Oenotrians from herders into settled farmers and gave them common meals, a custom Greeks otherwise associated with Crete and Sparta. By the sixth century BC the coastal Oenotrians were becoming Greek, and within two centuries the interior had become Lucania. The people of Basilicata and Calabria carry them somewhere in their ancestry, unnamed.