Wandering Greeks (33 page)

1. How large an area would settlers take over when initially settling in a new land?

2. What percentage of overseas settlements ended in failure and with almost total loss of life?

3. What percentage of the wives of first-generation settlers was non-Greek?

4. What percentage of second-generation settlers was bilingual?

5. When a political faction expelled its opponents, what percentage of that faction was typically expelled? Was it merely the most prominent representatives who were driven out, or was a majority of those who were known to be opposed to the interests of the winning faction expelled?

6. What strategies did a portable
polis
adopt to maintain its cultural identity abroad?

7. What was the fate of the relatives of exiles and fugitives who were not themselves expelled? Did they, for instance, face eviction?

8. Would a large group of refugees seek to maintain cohesion, or would it typically be forced to divide into small groups?

9. Given the fact that political exiles were not permitted to take weapons with them, what were their chances of survival once they had been deported?

10. Would sanctuaries sometimes be taken over by desperate refugees?

11. To what extent did the sanction of religion provide some protection for refugees?

12. What percentage of economic migrants left their homes to improve the quality of their lives and what percentage left as a result of extreme impoverishment?

13. What percentage of economic migrants settled abroad with their families?

14. What percentage of economic migrants returned to their original homeland at the end of their working lives?

15. What percentage of economic migrants in Athens and elsewhere did short-term residents comprise?

16. After a siege had led to the massacre of all the men of military age, what steps might be taken to protect captive women and children?

17. What was the fate of the sick and the elderly after a siege? Were they abandoned or slaughtered?

18. Did refugees occasionally establish camps in the Greek countryside? What were their chances of survival if they did? What percentage died from sickness or starvation?

19. To what extent were runaway slaves a significant concern to a
polis
? What percentage managed to evade capture and live out their lives in freedom?

20. What strategies did fugitives with no hope of finding permanent refuge abroad adopt in order to survive?

21. What percentage of the Greek population faced displacement as the result of political exile, war, famine, and other catastrophes at some point in their lives?

22. What percentage of the Greek population did persons of no fixed abode constitute?

23. How did the plight of the refugee change over time?

24. Did the size of the refugee population increase over time?

¹
These questions were provoked by colleagues and friends who attended a talk I gave at the University of Texas at Austin in October 2012. I am most grateful to my host, Lesley Dean-Jones, and to James Dee in particular.

FURTHER READING

Chapter 1. Prolegomena

Ancient and Modern Responses to Migration.
See Dummett (2001, Ch. 1) for many of the issues discussed here. For Queen Elizabeth I's views on immigration, see Bartels (2006, 305–22). For a brief history of American naturalization law, see López (2006, 30–34). For a summary of post–World War II migrations, see Goldin et al. (2011, 85–93). For the effects of 9/11 on refugee protection, see Newman (2003, 9–11). It is a truism that strong anti-immigration sentiment persists in most major developed countries today. The year 2012, the centenary of Enoch Powell's birth, saw some attempt to rehabilitate his memory. On Margaret Thatcher's appetite for the word “swamped,” see Dummett (2001, 14–17).

The Silence of the Sources.
For acknowledgment of the scale of migration in antiquity, see D.S. 12.8.9, who states that in earlier times Sybaris had been so generous with grants of citizenship to foreigners that its population had swelled to 300,000. Its citizenry was able to implement this policy due to the fertility of its land. The commonly voiced claim today that the scale of the current refugee crisis “has never been witnessed before in history,” though true in terms of absolute numbers, is not necessarily true in terms of the proportion of settled to unsettled. Plu.
Mor
. 605c, citing several men of letters who wrote in exile, states: “The muses, it seems, co-opted exile as their fellow-worker in perfecting for the ancients the fairest and most esteemed of their accomplishments.” Syme (1962, 40), himself an immigrant to the UK from New Zealand, commented: “Exile may be the making of an historian.” The proposition is examined by Dillery (2007, 51–70).

Causes of Population Displacement.
For a useful summary of the causes of relocation from the geometric to the classical period, see Demand (1990, 165–76).

The Carians are said to have abandoned the island of Syme in the Dodecanese after the Trojan War because of a drought (D.S. 5.53.2). It was drought, too, followed by famine, that allegedly induced the Therans to colonize Cyrene (see later,
chapter 3
). The Chalcidians are said to have abandoned Pithecusae, partly as a result of “earthquakes, eruptions of fire and sea, and hot water” (Str.
Geog
. 5.4.9 C248). In the hellenistic period the silting up of rivers caused the populations of Atarneus, Myous, and Priene to relocate, but there is no evidence for silting as a cause of displacement prior to this era.

Chapter 2. The Wanderer

The Centrality of Wandering to the Experience of Being Greek.
A wandering existence would have been particularly terrifying for a single or divorced woman such as the non-Greek princess Medea, who, on learning that her husband has rejected her, must contemplate what life will be like, “exiled, tossed out of the land, bereft of my friends, with only my children, I and they alone” (Eur.
Med
. 513).

Lyric and Elegiac Poetry.
See Bowie (2007, 28–49). The relative paucity of references to exile in sympotic poetry may, as Bowie (p. 21) suggests, be due to the fact that “pursuing the topic at length could well impair a singer's status as a welcome symposiast.”

Tragedy.
For the intimate association between wandering and wretchedness in Greek tragedy, see Montiglio (2005, 26–30).

Philosophy.
For Diogenes the Cynic on the theme of homelessness, see Branham (2007, 71–86). For Teles and Plutarch, see Nesselrath (2007, 88–99).

Myth and Legend.
See Hall (2002, 9–19) for a vigorous defense of the importance of what he labels “fictive kinship” as a condition for forging a sense of ethnicity. There may well be some substance to the claim of a Dorian invasion, though the search for material evidence to back it up has so far proved inconclusive. In the nineteenth century archaeologists believed that the Dorian invasion caused the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces. They detected evidence for this in the introduction of iron working, the evolution of the protogeometric style of pottery, the change from cremation to inhumation, and the appearance of new types of weapons and jewelry, all of which they attributed to the arrival of a culturally and ethnically distinct group around the eleventh century. Refinement in dating techniques has, however, conclusively demonstrated that each of these innovations either predated the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces or made its first appearance only in regions that claimed to be of non-Dorian ancestry, notably Athens and Euboea. See Snodgrass (2000, 360–73) for the archaeological evidence relating to the twelfth to tenth centuries. Linguistic evidence pointing to a proto-Doric idiom that was spoken in central and northern Greece is also inconclusive. Even so, some scholars continue to put faith in the legend, on the grounds that it is supported by data principally of a ceramic nature, which point to the arrival of newcomers to Laconia some time around 950. The size of the migratory movement (assuming it occurred) cannot be estimated—Isocrates (
Panathenaicus
255) claimed that 2,000 Dorians founded Sparta—but we should hardly be thinking in terms of “a single, massive influx” (Hall 1997, 184). For a succinct account of the modern debate, see Asheri (in Asheri et al. 2007, 116–17) and Hall (2007, 43–51). For the Romans as an upstart people, see Livy (1.8.6, 2.45.4, and so on).

Loraux (1986, 148–50) describes the myth of Athenian autochthony as “the Athenian myth par excellence.” For the perceived benefits of autochthony in Athenian discourse, see Loraux (2000, 13–27). Montiglio (2005, 13) claims that the idea was based on the notion that migration is a sign either of weakness or of aggression. It was Rosivach (1987, 294–306) who first drew attention to the fact that it is largely a fifth-century
invention. For the important part belief in autochthony played in the construction of Athenian ethnicity, see Cohen (2000, 79–103); Isaac (2004, 114–24); and Lape (2010, 17–19 and 99–101). Pl.
Crit
. 112c, speaking of the Athens of his imagination 9,000 years previously, adds an interesting “architectural” element to the myth of Athenian autochthony: “They constructed buildings in which they and the descendants of their descendants grew old and they handed them down unaltered to others like themselves.”

Chapter 3. The Settler

Why the Greeks Settled Abroad.
For the Ionian migration, see Snodgrass (2000, 373–78), who aptly characterizes it as “a remarkable testimony to the vitality of the Greek communities in the eleventh century” (p. 373). As Lomas (2000, 171) writes of Italy, “The vast range of myths and historical traditions about founders and the processes of settlement and foundation is indicative of the similarly vast range of possible motivations for Greek migration and settlement.” See, too, the mix of motives discussed by Hall (2007, 114–17). Though Camp (1979, 397–411) suggested that drought was a major cause of the eighth-century migratory movement, the evidence is inconclusive (Jameson 1983, 14 n. 4). A major problem in our understanding of the archaic movement is that almost all our sources date to the classical period. See, however, Malkin (2009, 374–75), who argues for the reliability of many of the preserved details of these sources. There is further discussion in Hall (2007, 100–106). Murray (1993, 102–23) provides an excellent account of the major themes relating to settlement abroad. For what they are worth, we have a literary foundation date for 73 settlements (Graham 1982a, 160–62). Al-Mina at the mouth of the River Orontes on the Turkish/Syrian border, once thought to be an earlier foundation than Pithecusae, is now known to have been contemporary, though there is some doubt as to whether this was a Greek, as opposed to a mixed settlement (Hall 2007, 97). The Greeks were also visiting nearby Rasel Basit and Tell Sukas by the second half of the eighth century. See Boardman (1999, 38–54).
For the causes of settlement in the eighth century, see Tsetskhladze (2006, xxviii–xxx). An interesting variant is the foundation of Tarentum by a group of Laconians known as the Partheniae, who had allegedly been deprived of their civic rights because they had been born when their fathers were away fighting the Messenians (Str.
Geog
. 6.3.2 C278 = Antiochus of Syracuse,
FGrH
555 F 13). For a detailed discussion of the meaning of the word
emporion
, together with a list of all the communities that are classified as
emporia
, see Hansen (2006, 6–39). Naucratis in the Nile Delta, described by Herodotus (2.178–79) as both a
polis
and as an
emporion
, was a special case. See Bowden (1996, 28–31) and Demetriou (2012, 105–52). Murray (1993, 111) interestingly suggests that settlement abroad might actually have indirectly led to an increase in population in the mother-city, as attested by the fact that a number of them sent out several expeditions within the space of a single generation. With reference to Greek settlements in the west, Osborne (1998, 268) argues that private enterprise “should be envisaged as responsible … for the vast majority of eighth- and seventh-century settlements.”

The Role of Apollo.
For a skeptical view of Delphi's centrality, see Londy (1990, 122), who points out that “of colonies founded between 750 BCE and 500 BCE, scarcely one in ten can boast a Delphic response.” See further his table I (p. 119) for a list of the fifteen Delphic “colonization responses” dated ca. 750–500. As Malkin (1987, 17) notes, “not one foundation oracle with any claim to authenticity has come down to us from any other oracle.” Dougherty (1993, 178–98) suggests that Apollo's importance is due partly to his role as purifier, viz of the violence perpetrated by Greeks against the local population. She writes (p. 180), “The Greeks use Apollo and the purification process that murder demands as a conceptual analogy, a metaphor, to describe colonization.” For an interesting parallel in the Hebrew Bible, see the question that is put to a local priest by representatives of the Danites when they are seeking a land to inhabit, “Inquire of God that we may know whether our undertaking will succeed,” which receives the instant reply, “Go in peace. The mission you are on is under the eye of the Lord” (Judges 18.5–6).

The Size and Composition of a Settlement.
On the panhellenic nature of the movement in general, see Malkin (2011, 53–64). The pirates from Cumae who first settled Zancle (later called Messana) on the Strait of Messina were joined by “large numbers from Chalcis and the rest of Euboea” (Thuc. 6.4.5). The very large number of settlements founded by Miletus and Chalcis are difficult to explain unless we assume that the original nucleus of pioneers was supplemented by others from other city-states (Malkin, 2011, 54). An exception to the rule that most foundations comprised pioneers from a single
polis
in the first generation is Naucratis, which was jointly founded by nine cities (Hdt. 2.178).

Designating the Oikist.
For the role of the oikist, see Graham (1983, 29–39). For the connection with Delphi and the posthumous cult of the oikist, see Malkin (1987, 17–91, 190–203). It is indicative of the challenges that the oikist often faced that our first encounter with Aeneas shows him to be so dispirited that he wishes he had died fighting at Troy (
Aen
. 1.94–96). This, however, does not prevent him from delivering a rousing pep talk to his fellow-refugees in the midst of his travails, even though he scarcely believes it himself (1.198–209). For heroic honors being granted to the oikist, see Hall (2007, 104–5), who notes that the literary testimony for this practice is late.