From the Gulf of Corinth to Cape Zephyrios: the Locrian’s voyage and the foundation of Epizephyrian Locris

Abstract

Although since the Bronze Age we have the evidence that the Aegean and the Mediterranean where crossed by Greek and Aegean people establishing different sailing routes, it will be during the Archaic Greek period that an intensification of the movements of Greeks towards the West in connection with trade and the foundation of colonies will take place. The objective of this paper is to reconstruct the Locrians’ journey towards the south of Italy to found a colony, Epizephyrian Locris and to find out the possible routes that they could had followed considering that in addition to coastal navigation they practiced the open-sea navigation with the aid of the latitude-sealing techniques and the stars observation.