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policoro |
| There's a collection of antiquities at the Museo Nazionale della Siritide , 25km down the coast, just behind the village of POLICORO . The museum (daily 9am-6pm; L5000/2.58) contains clay figurines and jewel-bedecked skeletons among other material taken from the zone between the Sinni and Agri rivers, in its time one of the richest areas on this coast and site of the two Greek colonies of Siris and Heraclea . The first of these, after which the museum is named, reached such a position of wealth and eminence that the other colonies were persuaded to gang together in the middle of the sixth century BC to put an end to Sirian ambitions. Heraclea was founded on the same spot by Tarentines in 432 BC with the aim of driving a wedge between the Achaean cities of Metapontion and Sybaris to the north and south. It was here that Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, first introduced elephants to the Romans, and although winning the first of two battles in 280 BC, suffered such high losses that he declared another such victory would cost him the war - so bequeathing to posterity the term "Pyrrhic victory". |