MANDURIA
Ionio, Apulia, Italy.
A Messapic
city ca. 35 km SE of Tarentum. Its name first appears in
connection with the death, beneath its walls in 338 B.C.,
of king Archidamos of Sparta, who had been summoned
to help the Tarentines against the Messapians and the
Lucanians (Plut. Ages. 3.2). There is another mention
of the city. During the second Punic war, according to
Livy (
27.15), the city gave passage to Hannibal in 212
B.C. and in 209 B.C. Q. Fabius Maximus sacked it, taking
3000 prisoners and a great deal of loot. From that point
on, the city declined and never regained the status of a
Roman municipium. Pliny (
HN 3.11) in his listing of the
cities in this part of Italy, makes no specific mention of
it but elsewhere in another passage (2.106.226) concerning the existence of a celebrated lacus he calls Manduria
an oppidum. The name of the city appears in the
Peutinger Table, which places it 20 Roman miles from Tarentum, a distance shorter than the actual one.
The most ancient evidence of life in the city comes
from the necropolis, where some funerary objects were
uncovered along with Corinthian pottery of the first ten
years of the 6th c. B.C. and associated with local, Early
Geometric vase production. It is probable that the first
circuit walls of the city are to be dated to the beginning
of the 5th c. B.C. The walls are about 2 km long and
constructed of large, irregular blocks and fronted by a
ditch which had been filled even in antiquity and recently
have been revealed in the course of excavations. A second circuit wall, built outside the first, is well constructed
of regular blocks. Set partly over the ditch of the first
wall, it was constructed to enlarge and reinforce the wall.
It dates to the 4th c. B.C. and was probably connected
with the war against Tarentum and the death of Archidamos. The last and strongest circuit wall, with a perimeter
of more than 5 km and a breadth of 5.5 m, faced inside
and out with large blocks over a rubble core and fronted
by a large ditch, was constructed in the 3d c. B.C., perhaps
in the period of the Hannibalic war. The wall, in fact,
was set over tombs whose grave gifts date to the second
half of the 3d c. B.C. (pottery of Gnathia of the gadroon
type). Outside the walls and in particular relation to the
gates, often well preserved, and along the sides of the
streets that lead from the gates, numerous rock-carved
tombs have come to light. The richest of these (4th-3d c.
B.C.) testify to the prosperity enjoyed by the city in that
period. Numerous furnishings have been discovered comprising local geometric ware, among which the typically
Messapic “trozzella” predominates, Gnathian and black
glaze ware, and some bronze objects which are now preserved in the National Museum at Tarentum. Numerous
Messapic inscriptions survive. The so-called Fountain of
Pliny, is set in a large, natural grotto, was artificially adjusted and furnished with a stairway of 40 steps. The constant level of the water is unique and perhaps corresponds to the lacus mentioned above by Pliny.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
W. Smith,
Dictionary of Greek and
Roman Geography, II (1857) 259 (E. H. Bunbury); L.
Tarentini,
Cenni storici di Manduria antica (1901);
RE
14.1 (1928) 1046 (Philipp); K. Miller,
Itineraria Romana, 362; N. Degrassi, “La documentazione archeologica in Puglia,”
Atti del I Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia (1961) 235;
EAA 4 (1961) 815 (F. Coarelli); O. Parlangeli,
Studi Messapici (1960) 112.
F. G. LO PORTO
