This dissertation examines the cultural, political, and artistic role of polychrome wall painting from funerary contexts in South Italy during the critical period that spans the crisis of Greek hegemony and the consolidation of Roman power. Numerous painted tombs were built between the late fifth and the early second centuries BCE for local as well as Greek elite groups across Southern Italy. I investigate the ways in which the wall paintings, with their colors, iconographies, and technical features were both the expression of indigenous cultures and local artistic trends, and a part of a wider and more complex phenomenon, that is the diffusion of funerary wall painting in the Mediterranean during the late Classical and Hellenistic period. Why did polychromy become a crucial component in articulating funerary space in South Italy towards the end of the fifth century BCE, and how did this experience develop in the regions of Campania, Lucania, and Apulia, respectively? Ever since the South Italian painted tombs were discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars have interpreted their decoration as ideal representations of the deceased, their funerary ceremony, or their journey to the Underworld. They have focused on the relationship between the images and the individual deceased buried in the tomb or the restricted group of their family/clan. In my study, I seek to restore the polysemic character of the wall paintings. Each chapter analyzes the paintings from a different perspective and with a particular methodological approach, combining archaeological, anthropological, topographic, historical, and artistic evidence. I argue that the tombs with their painted decoration served to build and articulate collective memory, elaborating a message which was supposed to address the local community. I propose that the figural scenes depicted on the tomb walls staged ritual activities and initiation ceremonies which marked the life of the whole community. I also reconsider the artistic development of funerary painting in Southern Italy, showing that this phenomenon did not derive from globalizing trends of "Hellenization" or "Romanization", as has often been suggested, but it was intimately connected to indigenous artistic traditions and local or regional socio-political dynamics. / The Classics

This doctoral thesis investigates dialect contact, identity and change in the ancient Greek colonies of Magna Graecia in the fourth and third centuries BC, as evidenced in the surviving epigraphic sources. South Italy is an area of the ancient Greek-speaking world in which a comprehensive investigation of the linguistic evidence has not previously been attempted. By considering linguistic questions within their broader socio-historical environment, I propose a radical redrawing of the dialect map of this area. I first present the historical context, the linguistic evidence and the methodological framework of my research in the introduction. In the first chapter I reject previous hypotheses about dialect contact in South Italy around 300 BC on the basis of both historical and linguistic arguments. I then propose a new and empirically better supported explanation for the development of the ‘severior’ long-vowel system in the dialect of the southern city of Locri, which previous studies have generally attributed to influence from the dialect of the important northern city of Taras and taken as evidence for Taras’ linguistic influence over the rest of Magna Graecia, and possibly also for the existence of a local Doric koina (i.e. a common dialect). In the second chapter I offer a new analysis of the inscriptional record from Locri and show that, in the absence of compelling evidence for influence from the dialect of Taras, a high level of prestige remained attributed to the traditional local dialect until at least the mid-third century. At the same time, the southern colonies in general, including Locri, can be shown to have been exposed to the koine before the northern ones, such as Taras, as a result of frequent contact with the Greeks of near Sicily in the fourth and early third centuries. In the third chapter I complete my investigation by assessing the use of dialectal features in literary texts produced in South Italy around the same period (both metrical inscriptions and literary works transmitted in manuscripts). The evidence of these texts, combined with that of documentary inscriptions, provides a deeper insight into matters of dialect identity and prestige in this area. After summarising the results of my research, I conclude my investigation with a brief discussion of the socio-historical reasons why a Doric koina did not develop in South Italy as in other areas.