Crotone

Crotone (/kroʊˈtoʊneɪ, krəˈ-/; Italian: [kroˈtoːne] ^ⓘ; Crotonese: Cutrone or Cutruni) is a city and comune in Calabria, Italy.

Founded c. 710 BC as the Achaean colony of Croton/Kroton (Ancient Greek: Κρότων or Ϙρότων; Latin: Crotona), it became a great Greek city, home of the renowned mathematician-philosopher Pythagoras amongst other famous citizens, and one of the most important centres of Magna Graecia.

It was known as Cotrone from the Middle Ages until 1928, when its name was changed to the current one. In 1992, it became the capital of the newly established Province of Crotone.

The promontory of Kroton was inhabited by indigenous populations, perhaps Oenotrians and Japigi, in the Bronze Age and early Iron Age.

Kroton's oikistes (founder) was Myscellus, from the city of Rhypes in Achaea in the northern Peloponnese, after consulting the Delphic Oracle who announced:

The Achaeans were motivated, like others of the Greek colonisation, by the lack of cultivatable land in their mountainous region and by population pressure.

Although the Greek foundation of Kroton was thought to be 710 BC, it is likely that Myscellus made three founding expeditions to Kroton, the first in ca. 733 in the company of Archias of Corinth at the head of an Achaean-Spartan venture (when they founded Syracuse), but which did not result in a stable urban settlement. The second was in 720-709 at the head of an Achaean colonial expedition, hoping to settle in the Sybaris area. The third time in ca. 708 when, at the head of a similar expedition, he founded Kroton.

Archaeology has shown that colonisation in the second half of the 8th century BC had an impact on the settlement organisation and on the economic and social structure of the indigenous communities: in the Kroton area most of the existing settlements disappeared, while grave goods from the Carrara necropolis highlight a widespread practice of mixed marriages between Greeks and indigenous women, since the first generation of settlers.