ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a description of the physical geography of ancient Lucania and discusses the debated historical phenomenon of the appearance of the Lucanian ethnos in the scenario of Magna Graecia toward the end of the fifth century BC. Lucania is bordered by the Ionian Sea on the southern side, where the Greek colonies of Metapontum and Heraclea are located, and by the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western side, where the Greek cities of Elea and Poseidonia are. In the social structure, the oikos was the core institution because it is within the oikos that Lucanian leading individuals defined their own public roles and functions, whose most important manifestation was the military hierarchy. M. Torelli argues that there is a sort of parallelism between the formation of the Brettian ethnos through the secession from the Lucanians and the emergence of the intermediate groups in Lucania, since they derived from the liberation of rural plebs from oligarchies' domain.
