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Old City/New City  Livy tells us*
that Roman general
Quintus Publilius Philo, during the second Samnite
war in 326 b.c., put his army between the
cities of Paleopolis [old city], Parthenope,
and the “new city”, Neapolis [Naples], in order to
keep the Palaepolitans from linking up with the
Neapolitans and aiding the Samnites in the war with
Rome. The above graphic
is in the delightful mini-museum
of the metro stop below the large National Archaeological Museum.
Parthenope is on the hill on the right. That area
today corresponds to Mt.
Echia, also known as Pizzofalcone; it
overlooks the small island (or, possibly, peninsula,
depending on the date) of Megaride,
which is where the Castel
dell'Ovo now sits. New City is about a mile away
to the east at sea-level, although the graphic does
not make particularly evident that there was (and
still is) is a prominent height at the north-west
corner (lower left in the graphic) where the Greek
Neapolitans located their
own acropolis. Assuming the graphic
to be a reasonably accurate reconstruction, the main
harbor at Neapolis is now filled in and is roughly
where today's Piazza
Municipio is located. The space between the
two towns looks big enough to accommodate the
encampment of Roman soldiers that Livy speaks of;
thus, give or take some decades, this might be the
area in the year 300 b.c. When you try to
reconstruct the history of Greeks in the gulf of
Naples, you rely heavily on historians such as Livy
(mentioned above) and Strabo and his 17-volume
encyclopedia entitled Geographica, a compendium of the
peoples and places known in his age (he wrote at the
time of Augustus Caesar; Book V, chapter 4 of
the Geographica
is about the peoples and places of the Campanian
coast. Livy
wrote at about the same time). Putting those
histories together with others, you get a foundation
of Parthenope at about 750 b.c. by settlers from
nearby Cuma and of nearby
Neapolis (also by Cumans) at around 450 b.c. The
difference between the two became moot when the
Romans took over the area in the third century b.c.
by which time the two towns had grown together.
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