Laüs

Laüs was an ancient Greek city on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy, near the mouth of the Lao River, which marked the boundary between Lucania and Bruttium. According to Herodotus, survivors from the destroyed city of Sybaris took refuge at Laüs after 510 BC, and the city struck its own silver coinage between roughly 500 and 440 BC bearing Sybarite-style symbols. The Lucanians captured Laüs around 390 BC, and the geographer Strabo still described the city as standing centuries later, though Pliny the Elder reported by the first century AD that it no longer existed. Excavations begun in 1929 uncovered a grid-planned settlement with defensive walls and a richly furnished tomb chamber, and the site is preserved today as the Laus Archaeological Park near Marcellina in Calabria.