Wandering Greeks (3 page)

Britain had experienced considerable immigration from the Commonwealth countries in the postwar years, and Powell saw himself addressing a ticking time bomb. Allegedly quoting what he called “a decent ordinary fellow-Englishman,” he claimed that “in fifteen or twenty years the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”—a highly insensitive and inflammatory phrase if ever there was one, particularly in light of King's recent assassination. He went on to predict that by the year 2000 there would be five to seven million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants living in Britain, representing approximately one-tenth of the total population. Powell was a brilliant classicist—he became professor of Greek at the University of Sydney at the age of 25—and he thought fit to end his speech with a Sibylline prophecy from Vergil's
Aeneid
(6.87), from which it derived its popular title:

As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” That tragic and intractable phenomenon, which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come.

Powell's answer to the “problem” of immigration was voluntary reemigration, which was to be facilitated by “generous grants and assistance.” Though many applauded his speech, he was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet and narrowly avoided prosecution for exacerbating racial tensions.
Margaret Thatcher, though certainly not in the same camp as Powell, nonetheless used the word “swamp” to describe an influx of immigrants, and the metaphor is commonplace in what passes for political discourse on the subject. It goes without saying that the scale of permitted immigration remains an extremely contentious issue to this day, both in the United States, the UK, and throughout the world.

There is nothing new in this circumstance. Appeals by asylum-seekers, as well as petitions from would be immigrants, were certainly debated in assemblies throughout the ancient Greek world, and it would be surprising indeed if those debates had not at times become acrimonious and heated. Plutarch in a throwaway line notes that the Athenian lawgiver Solon “observed that Athens was filled with people who were constantly streaming into Attica from elsewhere in order to find security” (
Sol.
22.1). Though Plutarch cannot have known what Solon took note of, it is entirely conceivable that some of Solon's contemporaries did indeed fear that they were being “swamped” by immigrants. It is important to note at the beginning of this survey, however, that to our best knowledge no Greek state ever settled an identifiably “foreign” ethnic minority within its territory. Only very occasionally do we hear of groups of Phoenicians and other non-Greeks residing in cosmopolitan cities such as the Piraeus, Athens's port, or Syracuse, and they did so in very small numbers. It follows that race would not have been an issue for the Greeks in any discussion about immigration in the same way that it has in the modern world, particularly with regard to those identified as “black.” Nor, so far as we know, did any Greek state implement a policy on immigration or seek to enforce a quota. It just so happened that some states, Athens
in primis
, were open to immigrants, whereas others, most conspicuously Sparta, were not.

Though the plight of migrants and refugees in the Greek-speaking world would have been similar to their plight today, absent the halting efforts of humanitarian agencies and the distracted gaze of the international community, there are some striking differences. Many people are at least somewhat sensitized to the predicament faced by displaced persons today, whereas the best minds of Greek antiquity show virtually no concern for their welfare. A rare instance of humanitarian concern for
refugees on the part of a large number of people is briefly recorded by Diodorus Siculus (19.54.2). When the Macedonian general Cassander, “in his desire for glory,” rebuilt Thebes in 316 following the destruction of that city some twenty years earlier by Alexander the Great, “many Greek cities participated in the
sunoikismos
[resettlement], both because of their pity for the unfortunate people and because of Thebes's renown.” We are left wondering to what extent these same cities would have come to the rescue of these unfortunates if they had belonged to a city of no particular consequence. Likewise when the Athenians expelled the Samians and sent their own settlers to the island, the Greek world sympathized with the Samians and provided them with asylum, though perhaps more out of enmity toward the Athenians than sympathy for the Samians (see later,
chapter 11
).

Another striking difference is that migration in the Greek-speaking world, whatever its cause, often represented a far more radical upheaval in people's lives than it does today. Describing the moment when her parents became refugees, Vijay Agnew (2005, 6) writes: “The hurried nature of my parents' departure from Quetta, now part of Pakistan, meant that they carried little with them that was not necessary for physical survival. No albums or pictures of the past survived.” Greek migrants invariably faced the prospect of total severance from the past, and in the absence of the practice of keeping diaries and journals, let alone photographs, the only way that memories could be kept alive was through recitation and story-telling.

The Silence of the Sources

Intensifying Peloponnesian War Sparks Refugee Crisis: Athenian Correspondent Reports That 250 Children Die of Hunger Each Day!

Even if some enterprising Greek had invented the newspaper, I seriously doubt that refugees would have made the headlines. No one to our best knowledge, including Thucydides, who occasionally took note of population movements, ever concerned himself with what we
would call today the “global implications” of war, famine, and disease for the thousands of victims of such disasters. This is perhaps all the more surprising in light of the fact that Thucydides was himself exiled from Athens for many years and must have experienced some degree of discomfort, hardship, and prejudice, even though he would have continued to lead a charmed life, like most high-profile exiles. All that he tells us about his exile, however, is that it “gave him the leisure to get a better sense of events”—and thus in effect to become a better historian (5.26.5). Of course, being an exile like Thucydides with wealth and status is a very different experience from being a common refugee. From the perspective of a Greek and indeed Roman historian (a number of whom incidentally went into exile) refugees and other homeless individuals just didn't merit writing about; or to put it more accurately, they merited a brief mention at most. No historian was particularly interested in recording the sufferings of the undifferentiated masses, and none ever encouraged his readers to dwell on human suffering at length. Why would he? Greek history has provided us with a narrative that privileges the interests and concerns of intellectuals, the well-to-do, and, crucially for our focus here, the settled. It has little to tell us about the dispossessed. The historians belonged to the city élite and assumed that their readers did too. They therefore tell the story from the perspective of a small minority of politically powerful and largely stable cities, about twenty at most. To the extent that we can build up a picture of the dispossessed at all, the data must be culled primarily from the marginalia of history.

“The Athenians crossed over to Euboea again under the command of Pericles and conquered the whole island,” Thucydides reports of the year 446. “While they settled the rest of the island on agreed terms, they expelled the people of Histiaea and occupied their land themselves” (1.114.3; cf. D.S. 12.22.2). And that is that. No further reference to these exiles occurs in his work. They are just one more community consigned to the ash heap of history in a brief, inconsequential statement. Given the bias of our sources, literary as well as epigraphical, it is all too easy to picture the Greek-speaking world from the perspective of the prosperous citizen of a big and thriving city-state. And yet there is an urgent
story to be told, and one that has up to now received little attention from ancient historians. Indeed its omission has replicated the silence of our sources.

That said I do not mean to pass judgment on Thucydides and the other historians who failed to pay much attention to the struggles of refugees and other migratory peoples. They simply did not see it as their business to chronicle their sufferings. That does not, however, mean that they were indifferent to their plight or inherently lacking in compassion. It goes without saying that we know nothing about their capacity for compassion. What we can say with certainty is that life for the vast majority of people in ancient Greece was extremely tough, that many more people lived on the edge than do today in the West, and that compassion was a luxury that not everyone could afford. As Herbert Butterfield (1931, 16) stated, “The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history, starting with the simplest of them, anachronism.”

Even in the modern world it is virtually impossible to obtain accurate statistics about movements of peoples.
A fortiori
we cannot begin to estimate the proportion constituted by the migratory population in ancient Greece. Such data as we have are disjointed and piecemeal. To make matters worse, the figures in our sources are inherently unreliable, both because the Greeks could provide only rough estimates of population size and because numbers are frequently transmitted incorrectly in the manuscript tradition. It is clear, however, from what we know about overseas settlements and mercenary service that from the beginning of the historical era, and probably much earlier, Greece had what is called a large “exportable proletariat.” It may have been for this reason that both Plato (
Rep.
5.460a,
Laws
5.740b–d) and Aristotle (
Pol.
7.1335b 19–26) were concerned to restrict the size of the citizen body of individual
poleis
. It is not until the middle of the second century BCE that we have evidence to suggest that the prospect of a dwindling population was causing anxiety in Greece (Polyb. 36.17.5–10). The literary evidence suggests that migration reached its peak in the fourth century, when communal life itself threatened to be overwhelmed by the numbers of homeless persons. However, much of the evidence that supports this view is propagandist in nature. And though population movement is our concern, let us not forget the fact that in the seventh and sixth centuries many Greeks never traveled more than a few miles from their birthplace (Purcell 1990, 37).

“It is clear that the
polis
exists by nature and that by nature man is a being who lives in a
polis
” Aristotle famously declared (
Pol.
1.1253a 1–3). Neither he nor any other political theorist of whom we have record thought it worthwhile either to imagine a different state of being or to focus his attention on those Greeks who faced a very different reality. Yet even for Athenians the chance of being forced by circumstance from their homes represented a very real danger. Indeed it became a reality during the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. And once we turn our attention away from the major centers of power to the periphery, the picture darkens appreciably. Given the precariousness of life in the ancient world we can well suppose that at any period of history the
landscape would have provided the spectator with haunting images of refugees, forced from their homes by human conflict or natural disaster.