Cumae is an ancient Greek settlement lying to the northwest of Naples in the Italian region of Campania.

Cumae is the first Greek colony on the mainland of Italy (Magna Graecia), and the seat of the Cumaean Sibyl.

It is the Cumaean alphabet that is adopted in Italy, first by the Etruscans (800 - 100 BCE) and then by the Romans (300 - 100 BCE), thus becoming the Latin alphabet, the world's most widely used phonemic script.

The Cumaean alphabet is also used throughout the Greek island of Euboea.The settlement, in a location that was already occupied, is believed to have been founded in the 8th century BCE by Euboean Greeks, originally from the cities of Eretria and Chalcis in Euboea, who are already established at Pithecusae (modern Ischia); they are led by the paired oecists (colonizers) Megasthenes of Chalcis and Hippocles of Cyme.The Greeks are planted upon the earlier dwellings of indigenous, Iron-Age peoples whom they supplant; a memory of them is preserved as cave-dwellers named Cimmerians, among whom there is already an oracular tradition.

Its name refers to the peninsula of Cyme in Euboea.

The colony is also the entry point in the Italian peninsula for the Euboean alphabet, the local variant of the Greek alphabet used by its colonists, a variant of which is adapted by the Romans and became the Latin alphabet still used worldwide today.Cumae is a direct offshoot of an earlier colony on the nearby island of Ischia, Pithecusae, founded by colonists from the Euboean cities of Eretria and of Chalcis, which is accounted its mother-city by agreement among the first settlers.

The colony thrives.

By the eighth century it is strong enough to send Perieres and a group with him, who are among the founders of Zancle in Sicily, and another band had returned to found Triteia in Achaea, Pausanias was told.

It spread its influence throughout the area over the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, gaining sway over Puteoli and Misenum and, thereafter, founding Neapolis in 470 BCE.

All these facts were recalled long afterwards; Cumae's first brief contemporary mention in written history is in Thucydides.