Sybaris amassed great wealth thanks to its fertile land and busy port so that it was known as the wealthiest colony of the Greek Archaic world.

Sybaris also ruled over smaller colonies throughout the area, and had an acropolis at Timpone della Motta near Francavilla Marittima about 10 km distant.

The city of Sybaris was destroyed in about 510 BC by its neighbour Kroton[A] and its population driven out, but its colonies in the area continued to exist.

[7] The Achaean colonisation was the second great migratory wave from Greece towards the West after that of the Euboeans, concentrating instead on the Ionian coast (Metapontum, Poseidonia, Sibaris, Kroton).

[10] Sybaris amassed great wealth and a huge population as a result of its fertile farming land and its policy of admitting aliens to its citizenry.

[6] Sybaris extended its dominion across the peninsula to the Tyrrhenian Sea, where it is thought to have founded its colonies Poseidonia,[14] Laüs[15] and Scidrus.

He sailed from Sybaris to Sicyon in a ship of fifty oars manned by his own slaves and surpassed even Cleisthenes himself in luxury.

[29][30] Diodorus Siculus writes that the oligarchic government of the city was overthrown in 510/509 BC by a popular leader named Telys (Herodotus describes him as a tyrant[31]).

[6] The Crati transports coarse sand and pebbles in its channel and if Strabo's claim is true, that material would have been deposited as sediment above the city when the river submerged it.

An analysis of core samples taken from the site did not find such river deposits directly above the former city, and the burial of Sybaris more likely resulted from natural processes such as fluvial overbank alluviation.

A. J. Graham thinks it was plausible that the number of refugees was large enough for some kind of synoecism to have occurred between the Poseidonians and the Sybarites, possibly in the form of a sympolity.

However, according to Timaeus and two scholia Polyzelos was successful in relieving the siege of Sybaris and fled to Acragas later when he was accused of plotting revolution.

[45] Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus and earlier ancient Greek writers, later authors from the Roman period denounced the Sybarites.

Aelianus, Strabo and especially Athenaeus saw the destruction of Sybaris as divine vengeance upon the Sybarites for their pride, arrogance, and excessive luxury.

According to him they invented the chamber pot and pioneered the concept of intellectual property to ensure that cooks could exclusively profit from their signature dishes for a whole year.

[46] A fragment of the comedian Metagenes he quotes has a Sybarite boasting about literal rivers of food flowing through the city.

[47] Not only does Athenaeus provide a great deal of examples to show the decadence of Sybarites, but he also argues that their excessive luxury and sins led to their doom.

According to Athenaeus ambassadors of the Sybarites (one of whom was named Amyris) consulted the oracle of Delphi, who prophesied that war and internal conflict awaited them if they would honour man more than the gods.

[48] Later he cites Phylarchus, who would have written that the Sybarites invoked the anger of Hera when they murdered thirty ambassadors from Kroton and left them unburied.

[51] Vanessa Gorman gives no credence to these accounts because grave sins followed by divine retribution were stock elements of fiction at the time.

He altered details of the original accounts, disguised his own contributions as those of past historians and invented new information to fit his argument that luxury leads to catastrophe.

One story, mentioned in Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, alludes to Aelianus' anecdote about Smindyrides.

[55] The location of the city which had been buried over time by more than 6 m of alluvial sediment from the Crati river was found only after a massive core drilling project from the early 1960s.

[56] Due to these reasons only a few parts of the city have been excavated: the Stombi quarter and minor test pits in the Parco del Cavallo area.

Other evidence about the city comes indirectly via the discovery of a sanctuary on the Timpone della Motta in nearby Francavilla Marittima where the highland site dominates the Crati river plain below.