In Plato’s time the South of Italy was known as “Greater Greece”—the beautiful land settled in the centuries after 800 B.C.E. by colonists from the Greek mainland. Author Ross King examines how these settlers brought trade and prosperity as well as their religion, customs, alphabet, and language—in addition to the political, philosophical, and artistic foundations that would influence the world of the ancient Romans and, much later, that of the Italian Renaissance.