Wandering Greeks (12 page)

Herodotus obviously admired the Phocaeans for their courage and tenacity—he explicitly states that they had refused the relatively generous offer of the Median commander Harpagus to accept submission because they wanted to remain free (1.164.2)—and the main point of his lengthy digression, which comes relatively early on in his narrative, seems to be that their hard efforts paid off in the end. Their story thus
celebrates the lengths to which the Greeks (or at least some Greeks) were prepared to go to maintain their Greekness rather than become the slaves of the Persians. Greekness, he suggests, had less to do with walls and houses than it did with a state of mind.

He ends his account by referring briefly to the evacuation of the inhabitants of the island of Teos, who, like the Phocaeans, managed to escape from Harpagus in the nick of time (1.168). The Teans sailed to Thrace, where they founded the city of Abdera, perhaps by purchasing land from the local inhabitants. Previously a certain Timesias of Clazomenae had acquired the site, but he had been driven out by the Thracians. As a result the site was unoccupied at the time of their arrival, just as Elea had been at the time of the arrival of the Phocaeans.

Plans to Relocate “All the ionians” in the West

The mass migration of the Phocaeans and the Teans before the Persian advance into Asia Minor in the 540s speaks eloquently of the fear and hatred that the Persians instilled in the Greeks. According to Herodotus there was more than one occasion when the Ionians en masse thought the unthinkable, viz the wholesale evacuation of their homeland. The sixth-century sage Bias of Priene, anticipating Persia's increasing domination in the region, had allegedly recommended that they should undertake a mass exodus to Sardinia and “found a single city of all the Ionians.”In this way, he declared, they would “free themselves from slavery, become prosperous by taking possession of the largest of all the islands, and rule over others” (1.170.2). Herodotus judged the plan to be “eminently practical” and observed that, if the Ionians had adopted it, they “would have prospered more than any other Greeks.” Bias, if we are to lend the story any credence, evidently understood what are referred to today as the human development gains that derive from relocation.

Following the failure of the Ionian Revolt five years later, the inhabitants of Zancle invited the Ionians to found a new city in northeast Sicily at a place called Kale Akte (Fair Promontory). The only Greeks to take up the offer, however, were the Milesians and the Samians, and
in both cases it was only a fraction of their populations that did so. The majority of the Milesians who had survived the fall of their city to the Persians in 494 had already been deported, while the only Samians who were attracted by the offer were the oligarchs who had been driven into exile as a result of civil strife, following their decision to abandon the Ionians in their revolt shortly before the Battle of Lade (Hdt. 6.13, 19.3, 22–23).

Their story has several twists. On its way to Sicily, the flotilla was intercepted by Anaxilaus, tyrant of Rhegium, who urged the Ionians to take possession of Zancle, which happened to be undefended at the time of their arrival. Before the Ionians could act upon this suggestion, however, the Zancleans learnt of Anaxilaus's plot and rushed home, having first elicited military support from Hippocrates, the tyrant of Gela. Hippocrates, however, proved to be duplicitous. He took possession of Zancle, imprisoned its king, and gave the city to the Ionians. He did so on condition that the Ionians hand over half of all the urban slaves who were living in the city and all the agricultural slaves. In addition, he enslaved and deported most of the citizen population. However, when he transferred 300 of the most prominent Zancleans to the Ionians and urged them to slit their throats, the latter refused to do so. Herodotus clearly admired the Samians both for their resourcefulness and their compassion—he fails to mention the Milesians for some reason—and he ends by saying, “So this is how the Samians, having escaped from the Persians, acquired Zancle, the most beautiful city of all” (6.24.2).

One other attempt at relocating all the Ionians occurred. After their victory over the Persians at the Battle of Mycale in 479 the Greeks held a conference to weigh the merits of permitting them to settle in the west. Evidently there was a strongly held opinion that it would be impossible to protect the Ionians in the long term and that one day the Persians would exact savage reprisals for their defeat. The Spartans and others recommended that the Ionians should be relocated in those port cities on the mainland that belonged to Greeks who had “medized,” viz sided with the Persians. The Athenians, however, vehemently opposed the plan on the grounds that the Peloponnesians had no right to determine the fate
of the Athenian settlers who resided in Ionia. One of the consequences of the debate was to strengthen Athens's hand by drawing attention to the Ionians' need for naval protection (Hdt. 9.106.2–4).

Themistocles' Threat to Relocate the Athenians

On the eve of the naval battle that was fought in the straits off Salamis in 480, the commanders of the Greek fleet heatedly debated whether to hold the line or withdraw south. When the Athenian general Themistocles strongly advocated holding the forward position, a Corinthian named Adeimantus taunted him with being “a man without a fatherland” and objected to any proposal being put forward “on the recommendation of a man who is a mere
apolis
[without a city]” (Hdt. 8.61). His point was that Athens, following the evacuation of its women and children, no longer enjoyed the status of an independent polity.

Themistocles angrily retorted that his city-state and its land were greater than that of the Corinthians, and that if the allies withdrew and made no attempt to defend the straits, the Athenians with their fleet of 200 triremes would set sail for Siris in southern Italy, “which has long been ours and which an oracle prophesied we would settle” (8.62.2). As the Athenians had already evacuated their civilian population to Salamis, Aegina, and Troezen in advance of the Persian invasion of Attica (see later,
chapter 6
), Themistocles' threat had to be taken seriously. His advice carried the day, and the Greeks won a spectacular victory.

Did Themistocles seriously contemplate the permanent resettlement of the entire citizen body? Was he in fact telling the truth about the oracle? Was Herodotus inventing? Scholars have generally been skeptical. True, months earlier Apollo had recommended that the Athenians should “flee to the ends of the earth.” Even so, the difficulties in implementing an operation of this magnitude on the eve of a battle are mind-boggling, particularly since the civilian population had already been dispersed to three separate locations. Only a fraction of the evacuees could have been transported to Italy, and many thousands would have
been abandoned to their fate. It is also uncertain what reception the Athenians could have expected from the people of Siris, particularly since the latter would have had little if any advance warning of their arrival. In light of the fact that the refugees would have been under armed escort, however, they would have had little option but to receive them. An alternative possibility is that Siris was unoccupied at the time, though the problem with that hypothesis is that it was certainly occupied by ca. 440 (Hansen and Nielsen 2004, 294).

Even if Themistocles' threat seems like a desperate stratagem and a not entirely plausible one at that, there were, as we have seen, precedents for an overnight evacuation. A naval victory in the straits off Salamis was, moreover, anything but a foregone conclusion, and, if the Greeks had lost, the Athenians would have had no alternative but to relocate instantly with what ships they had remaining. It is not unlikely, therefore, that Themistocles did have such a plan in mind, though there is no evidence that he ever put it to the Athenian Assembly. It might have seemed too defeatist.

The Synoecism of Olynthus

In 433/2 the people of Chalcis in Thracian Chalcidice, fearing that war with Athens was imminent, tore down the walls of their coastal towns and relocated to Olynthus “in order to form one strong city.” They did so with the help of Perdiccas, the local king of Macedon (Thuc. 1.58.2). Not all the people in the region participated, however. Resettlement almost invariably met with stout resistance among some of the population.

The Chalcidian settlers did not build an entirely new city. Instead they expanded an existing one. But though there is archaeological evidence for an increase in the population of Olynthus at this date, it is highly unlikely that everyone moved to the new city at once. It is interesting to note that the walls of the expanded city were made of mudbrick and erected with haste, which suggests that the settlers were eager
to preempt Athenian aggression. Those who joined in the merger now identified themselves as a new political unit known as the Chalcidian League.

The Athenian Fleet as the
Dêmos
in Exile

A particularly interesting instance of polis-relocation is recorded in the case of the Athenian fleet. When the oligarchy known as the Four Hundred seized power in Athens in 411, it “slew a handful of men whom it considered useful to get rid of, imprisoned others, and exiled others still” (Thu. 8.70.2). Learning of its actions, the sailors in the Athenian fleet that was stationed at the island of Samos revolted against the Four Hundred, claimed that it and it alone represented the
dêmos
, and formed itself into a self-determining political entity. It did so on the grounds that “the
polis
had revolted from them” (8.76.3). The sailors in the fleet thus came to resemble other
poleis
in exile. They held meetings of the Assembly, in which they voted to replace all the generals and trierarchs whom they suspected of treason by others who were favorable to their cause; heard an appeal from Alcibiades that led to his election as general; and received ambassadors from the Four Hundred and from Argos (Thuc. 8.76.2, 77, 81.2–82.1, 86). It was largely as a result of the opposition of the fleet that a more moderate form of government, known as the Five Thousand, ousted the Four Hundred, after the latter had ruled Athens for about four months. The Five Thousand were in turn replaced by a full democracy when the fleet won a significant naval battle over the Spartans at Cyzicus, an event that signaled the dissolution of the fleet's separatist status in exile.

Dionysius I of Syracuse's Program of Mass Resettlement

Nowhere was the
polis
more portable than in Sicily. In the debate that took place in the Athenian Assembly in 416 about whether to dispatch an expedition to conquer Sicily, Alcibiades contemptuously observed.
“Its cities are populated by mixed hordes of people and they have easy
metabolai
[transfers of people] and additions of citizens. No one feels he has his own homeland…. Everyone thinks that either by specious words or by party strife he can get hold of someone else's land and settle there, if things don't turn out for the best” (Thuc. 6.17.2).

Alcibiades' words must be taken with a grain of salt: he wanted to persuade the Athenians that the conquest of Sicily would not present them with a major challenge. Even so, his observation was not wide of the mark. Seven years previously the aristocracy of Leontini had deported the commoners and relocated them to Syracuse, where they were granted citizenship (Thuc. 5.4.2–3). And though the Greek cities of Sicily had been relatively stable over the past few decades, in the first half of the fifth century the Deinomenid tyrants had resettled the populations of Catania, Camarina, Euboea, Megara Hyblaea, and Naxos (see later,
chapter 5
). The earliest mass resettlement, though not in this case a deportation, had taken place in ca. 485 under Gelon, tyrant of Gela, who had permitted 10,000 mercenaries to settle in Syracuse. Not surprisingly the Syracusan citizens regarded the mercenaries as interlopers,
particularly those who were Sicels and Campanians, and for this reason they had denied them full political rights (D.S. 11.72.3).