Region

Magna Graecia

The Greek-colonized coasts of southern Italy · c. 700 BCE – 300 CE complete

Also known as: Megálē Hellás, Magna Graecia

Magna Graecia was the name for the Greek-colonized south of Italy, the string of cities the Greeks planted along its coasts from the eighth century BCE onward, Taras, Sybaris, Croton, Metapontum, Rhegion, Neapolis, and the rest. So thickly settled and so wealthy were they that the region counted as a Greece outside Greece, a second Hellas in the west, where Greek philosophy and science flourished, Pythagoras taught at Croton, and the cities grew rich enough that “Sybarite” became a word for luxury. It remained densely Greek in speech and culture until Rome absorbed it, and pockets of Greek survived in the heel of Italy into modern times.

The name is unusual in this atlas for running the other way. Normally a Greek name passes into Latin and the Latin reaches the modern world; here the Latin Magna Graecia is a calque, a word-for-word translation, of the Greek Megálē Hellás, “Great Greece,” the phrase the Greeks themselves used for the spread of their colonies. Magna renders Megálē, Graecia renders Hellás, and it is this Latin translation, not the Greek original, that the modern world has kept. So the standard name for the Greek south of Italy is a Roman rendering of a Greek self-description, the Greeks’ own pride in the reach of their colonies preserved in the Latin that translated it.

Name families

Cognate names grouped by shared root. An indented name is borrowed from the form above it; names at the same level are parallel descendants.

The Magna Graecia family

The name of the Greek-colonized south of Italy, Greek Megálē Hellás, "Great Greece," and Latin Magna Graecia; unusually for this atlas the Latin is a calque of the Greek, not the other way round, the Greeks having named the density of their own colonies.

Transmission map

Each form at the homeland of its language; arcs follow asserted borrowing paths. Slide to a year to see which names were in use.

Ancient Greek · Megálē Hellás · Athens · c. 500 BCE – 200 CE Megálē Hellás Latin · Magna Graecia · Rome · c. 100 BCE – 500 CE Magna Graecia
500 BCE

in use at this year · formerly in use · not yet attested

Magna Graecia, the region

Attestation timeline

When each name is attested, earliest first. Dates bound the name's use, not the language's lifespan.

Ancient Greek Latin

Names across languages

Ancient Greek c. 500 BCE – 200 CE #

Μεγάλη Ἑλλάς

Transliteration
Megálē Hellás
IPA
/me.ˈɡa.lɛː hel.ˈlas/
Meaning
“Great Greece”
Confidence
attested

The Greek name of the region, Megálē Hellás, “Great Greece,” the Greeks’ own term for the dense and prosperous belt of their colonies in southern Italy. Polybius and Strabo use it, and Strabo notes that the name reflected the region’s wealth and the number of its cities; whether Megálē meant “greater in extent” than old Greece, or simply “Greater Greece” as a collective for the western colonies, was already discussed in antiquity.

Megálē Hellás is the original of which the familiar Latin is only a translation, and that reversal is its point. The Greeks of Italy were proud enough of their cities to call the whole region a second and greater Hellas, and it was this self-naming that Rome rendered literally into Magna Graecia. The name the modern world uses for Greek southern Italy is therefore a Latin echo of a Greek boast, the colonists’ own claim to be a Greece beyond Greece, surviving only because Latin copied it word for word.

Sources (2)
  1. Polybius, Histories 2.39; Strabo, Geography 6.1.2 (the name and its prosperity).
  2. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ). 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940, s.v. Ἑλλάς.
Cite this entry

Rajagopal, Shriram. "Megálē Hellás (Ancient Greek name for Magna Graecia)." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/magna-graecia#ancient-greek-megale-hellas.

Latin c. 100 BCE – 500 CE #

Magna Graecia

Transliteration
Magna Graecia
IPA
/ˈmaɡ.na ˈɡrae̯.ki.a/
Meaning
“Great Greece”
Derived from
Ancient Greek Megálē Hellás
Confidence
attested

The Latin name of the region, Magna Graecia, “Great Greece,” a calque of the Greek Megálē Hellás: Magna translates Megálē, Graecia translates Hellás, the phrase rendered into Latin word for word. Cicero uses it of the Greek south where Pythagoras had taught, and it became the standard Roman term for the Greek cities of Italy.

Magna Graecia is the form the modern world kept, and it is a translation, not a transmission. Almost everywhere else in this atlas a name travels by sound, worn and reshaped as it passes from tongue to tongue; here it traveled by sense, the Greek meaning carried into Latin words while the Greek sounds were dropped. That the standard name for Greek Italy is a Latin translation of a Greek phrase, rather than the Greek phrase itself, is the quiet exception this entry marks: a region named, in the end, by the Romans’ rendering of what the Greeks called it.

Sources (1)
  1. Cicero, De Oratore 2.154, Tusculan Disputations 1.16.38; Livy 31.7; Lewis, Charlton T., and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. Graecia (Magna Graecia).
Cite this entry

Rajagopal, Shriram. "Magna Graecia (Latin name for Magna Graecia)." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/magna-graecia#latin-magna-graecia.

Cite this page

Rajagopal, Shriram. "Magna Graecia." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/magna-graecia. 

@misc{onomastikon-magna-graecia,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Magna Graecia},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/magna-graecia}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}

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