Between the fifth and the fourth centuries BC, Oscan-speaking populations from the area of Samnium, in Central Italy, spread into the south of the Italian peninsula; here they came into close contact with the Greeks of Magna Graecia. The Greek language with which Oscan speakers interacted in this area was by no means homogeneous. In fact, the Greeks who had founded colonies in South Italy had come from various areas of mainland Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, and, as a result, the forms of Greek across this region differed significantly: Ionic around the bay of Naples and in Rhegion, on the strait of Messina; Laconian Doric in Taras and its sub-colony Heraclea, both on the Gulf of Taranto; Achaean Doric in a number of colonies in south Campania, Lucania and Bruttium; Northwest Greek in Locri Epizephyrii, in the toe of the Italian peninsula; and possibly Attic-Ionic in Thurii, a Panhellenic colony founded in the fifth century under the leadership of Athens. Then, towards the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third century, the local forms of Greek became increasingly exposed to the influence of the koine, the new ‘standard’ variety of Greek based on the dialect of Athens and employed by the increasingly dominant Macedonians.

Recent studies have evaluated the patterns and extent of migration to Rome and highlighted the presence of groups with different, but intersecting, social, cultural and legal statuses. In the late Republic and Early Empire there was a continual influx of foreigners from Italy and further afield, both slaves and free, leading to ancient and modern characterisations of the city as a diverse and multicultural cosmopolis. In the late second or early third century AD, Athenaeus described Rome as ‘the epitome of the whole world’, the city that contained all others within it. Edwards’ and Woolf’s volume, Rome the Cosmopolis, opens with the spectacle of the games at the Colosseum, the spectators coming from right across the Roman Empire: ‘Marked out by their exotic clothing and hair arrangements, their incomprehensible speech, these people embodied the vastness and diversity of Roman territory, their presence in the heart of the city underlining Rome’s power to draw people to itself’. Language is here given as one of the markers of the city’s cosmopolitan character.

In the aftermath of Rome’s defeat of Macedonia at the Battle of Pydna, which established the Republic as a major power in the eastern Mediterranean, Hellenistic Delos lost its formal independence (it was under the patronage of the Antigonid monarchy) and was placed by Rome under the rule of Athens in 166 BC.

The landscapes of the Italian peninsula, no less than others in the ancient Mediterranean of the third and second centuries BC, hosted numerous intersections for the convergence of resources – people, objects, ideas and stories – recounted in multiple languages and mediums. Propelled by technology, trade, warfare and alliances, as well as love, curiosity and brigandage, the ensuing connectivities stimulated the emergence of new sociocultural trends and communities. Both material and literary endeavours attest to the dynamism of multiple movements within and through Italy in this period (Isayev 2017). Yet, tracking migrants who were part of these human flows, in terms of numbers, origins, destinations and the drivers of their mobility, proves difficult apart from a few exceptional episodes.