CHAPTER 5
GREAT GREEKS
THE GREEK SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST
By the entrance to the archaeological museum at Sparta when I worked there in the 1970s there stood an ancient stone carving of Heracles. The demi-god was easily recognizable by his attributes, a manly beard, a knotty wooden club and the skin of the lion that he killed as one of his Labours. Artistically the sculpture is nothing special. Still, it would have reminded ancient Spartans that their community had been founded in the remote past by wandering descendants of Heracles, the so-called Heraclidae.
Many Greek states told stories of origin about distant founders who had led migrant ancestors to settle their city. It was seen that prehistoric Greece was a land of migration, of groups coming and groups going. Greek migration was also a fixture of Archaic times. Later Greek tradition produced dates for some of the settlements far from home founded in this period, with 734 BC for the first. In this period Greek migrants settled around the Black Sea, on France’s Côte d’Azur, on Spain’s Costa Brava and in what is now Libya.
Of these frontier settlements, the most prosperous concentration, where early Greek civilization most obviously flourished, was in southern Italy and Sicily. The ancient Greeks thought of these two areas of Greek settlement, separated by the modern Strait of Messina, as related in kind. One Greek geographer from the time of Christ called the whole area ‘Great Hellas’, ‘Magna Graecia’ in Latin, in the sense of not ‘better than’, but an extension of, the original Greece.
3. Italy.
Trade was one reason why Greeks sailed west. Modern Ischia is an island in the Bay of Naples, about two-thirds the size of Guernsey. That same geographer calls the island by its ancient Greek name, Pithecusae. He adds that these Greek settlers were eventually driven away ‘by earthquakes, and by eruptions of fire, sea, and hot waters’. Today this volcanic island is full of thermal springs, and its fertile soils support lush gardens and tropical plants. Ancient settlers here could have been self-supporting in food while they got on with the main business of trade.
Archaeologists have used the finds dug up from nearly 500 ancient graves here to build a picture of a mongrel population that ran into the thousands in the 700s BC. There were Greeks from the island of Euboea and from Corinth, as well as people who placed Near Eastern inscriptions and religious symbols on their pottery, and yet others, mainlanders perhaps, who used Italian-style brooches. So Pithecusae, like Al-Mina, could also have hosted cultural exchanges between Greeks and non-Greeks.
One find, smashed into many pieces when discovered and now glued back together and displayed in the local museum, is a ceramic cup from around 720 BC. On one modern interpretation, the vessel calls itself ‘the delicious cup of Nestor’ in a poem scratched on the side, one of the oldest examples of the Greek alphabet. It seems to be making a knowing allusion to the gold cup belonging to King Nestor of Pylos which Homer’s Iliad describes.
Since its discovery in 1954, many scholars (not all) have come to see here a convivial joke of the kind that Greek revellers would later make as they lolled on cushioned beds in an Archaic drinking party. A bolder idea is that it was thanks to socializing between Greeks and easterners on eighth-century BC Pithecusae that Greeks first came across – and then adopted – the distinctive Near Eastern custom of reclining, not sitting, to eat and drink.
Between modern Catania and Syracuse in Sicily, the main road passes an industrial zone to the east. Beyond this is a little-visited archaeological site. It sits on a flat promontory looking out to sea and is flanked by the mouth of a river and a beach which would have been suitable for drawing up ancient ships. The excavations should not be visited before the spring flush of high grass has received its annual strimming. This verdancy is a corrective to the parched images of a Sicilian summer evoked by Sicily’s Giuseppe di Lampedusa (died 1957), author of The Leopard: ‘bare hillsides flaming yellow under the sun’ with ‘never a tree, never a drop of water’.
Compared with much of Greece, Sicily looks rather fertile. Today the rich brown soils covering the rolling hills of the interior grow acre upon acre of grain. They support orchards, vineyards and olive groves. Ancient Greeks saw rural Sicily as much more productive than southern Greece. Athenians envied the fact that, unlike them, Sicilian Greeks were self-sufficient in grain and could breed many horses on their well-watered lands. Ownership of a horse for ancient Greeks had something of the cachet of driving a Rolls-Royce today.
On this particular promontory archaeologists found an ancient Greek settlement enclosed by a defensive wall. This was not a haphazard habitat of narrow winding streets like one of the modern island’s country towns. Here building plots and thoroughfares were laid out on a series of man-made grids in turn grouped around a central trapezoid of land reserved for use as a public plaza.
The date produced by the pottery finds for the creation of this planned community was somewhere in the late 700s BC. Later Greek writers mentioned this place. They knew it as Megara, the original expedition of founding fathers having named the outpost after the homeland they had set out from, an older Megara, a neighbour of Athens.
Ancient writers gave as triggers back home for this type of expedition strife within the community, resolved by the expulsion of troublemakers. They also mention natural causes, such as drought and hunger, and a surplus of people, forcing some to look for new lands. The targeting of Sicily’s landed potential fits well with these environmental and economic pressures. So does the likelihood that mainland Greece’s population rose rapidly, as was seen, in the 700s BC.
The people of mainland Megara in the later 700s BC were probably still in the formative stage of becoming a ‘city-state’: working out political institutions, building a corporate identity and so on. It cannot be said for sure, in fact, that at this date they would have been politically capable of organizing this kind of expedition. Would-be migrants could have taken the initiative themselves. Not much is known about the ancient mainland city of Megara buried beneath its modern namesake, but archaeologists believe that its neighbour to the west, Corinth, was still a collection of villages in the 700s BC. So the expedition from here probably arrived in Sicily not just without a blueprint for how to create a political community, but with no inherited knowledge of how to lay out a new settlement or divide up farmland among themselves.
The members of this expedition, it was said in antiquity, had set out under a leader. They met with various misadventures once the group arrived in Sicily before they found a suitable place to settle. At one point they joined an older community of Greek settlers further north, but relations broke down and the Megarans were thrown out. After further wanderings, eventually an indigenous ruler of those parts led the migrants to the promontory site and gave up some of his lands for them to live off.
Later Greeks created these written accounts generations after the event and we cannot assume their historical accuracy. Take the seemingly obliging local potentate: did the newcomers, presumably young, well-armed Greek males, perform some service for him, or rather the opposite – threaten him with force? Yet the details do hint credibly at the problems that these enterprising groups of migrants faced on arrival: identifying a suitable place to settle with little or nothing in the way of accurate local knowledge; cooperation with, and then hostility from, rival settler groups; and negotiation with indigenous landholders.
The archaeological museum in Syracuse now houses the most spectacular find from the excavations at Megara Hyblaea, as the Sicilian offshoot was called. This is a limestone statue of a seated female, which has lost its head. Through circular holes in her garment she breastfeeds two infants, whom she envelops with her arms and cloak. Conservators have reassembled the figure from hundreds of fragments found in one of Megara’s cemeteries, where it must have acted as the marker of a grave. As for date, it was commissioned some two centuries after the founding of the settlement, judging from the style of the carving. This relates it to Greek sculpture of the later 500s B
C.
This celebration of female fertility – smoothing over, perhaps, the challenges of suckling two babies at once – is rather unusual for Greek art. On the Greek mainland, sculptors generally preferred to depict females as young maids, warring Amazons, women under threat of rape, or goddesses in all their perfection. It is quite likely that this unusual choice of subject matter reflected the social values of the indigenous culture of Sicily, as well as the concerns for reproduction in this enclave of frontier Greekness. Based on the size of excavated houses and other factors, archaeologists estimate that in the hundred years or so after its foundation, the population might have risen from an initial group of two hundred or so to around two thousand or more.
So there is also an interesting question to ask about the part played by migrant Greek females on the one hand, and local women on the other, in ensuring the early settlement’s demographic future. There are various possibilities here, from family-based ‘chain’ migration to what in more recent times has been called ‘libidinous colonization’, when settlers would deliberately marry their offspring to indigenous partners, so that the newcomers would not be disadvantaged as foreigners. Experts weigh up the particular case of Greek migrants to Sicily and southern Italy. Biological mixing of the newer arrivals with the older population is likely. The extent to which this happened remains entirely up in the air.
The ancient Greek tradition about the helping hand offered to the newly arrived migrants by a local ruler – Hyblon was his name – has an analogue in the archaeology of this part of Sicily. The scenic hill country to the west of the Greek settlement is a haven today for walkers and lovers of fauna and flora. This last includes a plant known locally as ‘seddaredde’ with a powerful attraction for bees. It contributed, perhaps, to the area’s ancient reputation for the excellence of its honey.
Here – Pantalica as the place is called – archaeologists have found a vast area of limestone cliff-faces pitted with rock-cut chambers, some four thousand of them according to a survey in 2007 and 2008: a mixture of tombs and dwellings. They occupy an obviously defensive position on a plateau flanked by river valleys. The ancient Greeks called the pre-Greek people living up here ‘Sicels’. One tradition claimed that they were migrants themselves, arriving before the Greeks in rafts from Italy.
Morgantina is the ancient name for an inland settlement on the eastern side of Sicily, some 37 miles from the coast. The well-tended archaeological site is worth visiting, and not just for its spectacular view of Mount Etna. This was also the findspot for some objects of great interest now kept in the nearby hill town of Aidone. A highlight of a visit to the museum here are the marble heads, hands and feet of two seated statues of females, divinities in all likelihood from a local shrine, whose lost bodies would have been made from some less expensive material. These are works in the Greek sculptural style of the 500s BC as is clear from the faces, carved with the so-called Archaic smile, an enigmatic expression of seeming joy typical of statues from Athens at this time.
Sculptures such as these might seem to indicate that Morgantina was another settlement of migrant Greeks (despite being far from the coast, their preferred habitat). Another find hints at a more blurred reality. Archaeologists from the American excavations here have published four letters in the Greek alphabet reading ‘ΠΙΒΕ’, or ‘pibe’. They had been scratched on the foot of a clay drinking cup imported from Athens.
There is no such word in Ancient Greek. Experts think that the language must be that of the indigenous Sicels, written down in lettering borrowed from the Greeks. It is thought to give a command: ‘Drink!’ If this were the same word in Ancient Greek and painted, not incised, it would be just the sort of playful instruction that vase painters in Athens at this time put on pottery intended for the wine-drinking party. Whoever the local user of this cup might have been, the conclusion is well-nigh unavoidable that with its graffito it provides evidence for native Sicilians embracing for their own use the trappings of a foreign – Greek – form of sociability.
Other finds include an unplanned grouping of elongated huts or longhouses with wattle-and-daub walls and thatched roofs from the 900s and 800s BC. These confirm the origins of Morgantina as an indigenous settlement. Then, in the 500s BC, new cultural leanings came into play, including the examples just discussed. Inhabitants also started to use more sophisticated Greek-style building techniques, such as dried mud brick for walls, clay roof tiles and so on.
‘Hybridity’ is one of the words that academics use to describe when different ethnic groups interact to produce ‘transcultural’ forms. The reality at Morgantina underlying the cross-cultural contact is hard to grasp without historical documents. Even if there was peaceful interaction between non-Greek Sicilians and Greek newcomers, the experience could still have been disruptive for the older ethnic group. Not all its members would have had equal chances to display the ‘hybrid’ form of identity. Greek pottery, for instance, and any Greek wine drunk from it were imports that were not likely to be cheap.
Relations between Greek settlers and the older population varied enormously. Greek writers record traditions of fighting between the two groups, although there is little sense that these struggles were great obstacles to the flourishing of the Greek settlements in Sicily. In Archaic times warfare with the non-Greek population was the experience of three of the richest Greek settlements in Sicily, strung out on the long south coast. Their ancient Greek names (working westwards) were Gela, Acragas and Selinus.
Today, the last two are big tourist attractions thanks mainly to eye-catching groups of Greek-style temples from the 500s and 400s BC. These ruins are the most obvious manifestation of great riches and large populations in Greek times, as well as the urge of the settlers to draw attention to themselves. Selinus commanded a coastal plain of well over 1,000 square miles according to one scholar’s estimate, about two times the area of modern Los Angeles. Neighbouring Acragas was the Argentine of Greek Sicily, its fertile lowlands famous for its rich horse-breeders, as well as supporting export trades in olive oil and wine.
The Lebensraum aggressively sought by Greek settlers in this part of Sicily seems to have been a factor in their armed clashes with the pre-Greek population. This much later story from a Greek writer of Roman times concerns the men of Acragas in the 500s BC, their tyrant leader at the time, Phalaris, and an indigenous people in this part of the island whom the Greeks called ‘Sicani’:
When the men of Acragas attacked the Sicanians, Phalaris found it impossible to capture their city by siege, because they had laid aside a great quantity of corn, and therefore he entered into a treaty of peace with them. He had in his camp some corn, which he agreed to leave for them, on condition that he received from them an equal quantity after their harvest. The Sicanians readily complied with these terms, and received the provisions. Phalaris then contrived to bribe the superintendents of the granaries secretly to remove their roofs in some places; as a result, the rain came in through the holes, and rotted the corn. As soon as the harvest was over, Phalaris received his quantity of new corn, according to their agreement; but when the old corn was found to be rotten, the Sicanians were reduced by hunger, and after giving up their provisions to him, were forced to surrender their liberty as well.
Some readers may puzzle over the obvious inconsistency of this ancient Greek tale, as I do. If the besieged Sicanians already had plentiful stores of corn, why should they have wanted yet more from the departing men of Acragas? This Phalaris attracted more than his share of what to modern readers seem rather tall stories. Of these the most notorious in ancient times concerned his bronze bull. This hollow animal was equipped with a door, as well as pipes in the nostrils to emit sound. With a fire lit beneath and a victim trapped inside, the bull became an instrument of punishment, and this was how Phalaris was said to employ it. Yet a credible witness, a Sicilian Greek, claimed that the very same bull could still be seen in Acragas in his own day, the 40s BC.
What both stories channe
l was a perception that Phalaris was both clever and cruel. He is the earliest example from Sicily (his rough dates were around 570–550 BC) of the type of Greek ruler met with in an earlier chapter, the tyrant. In Greek Sicily this kind of military dictator was a common phenomenon, not just in Archaic times, but right down to the Roman conquest in 211 BC.
Phalaris was said to have seized power in a coup by means of another ruse while serving as a local magistrate. He was able to capture the citadel of Acragas, arm a force of slaves and take advantage of a religious festival to massacre many of the free men and take women and children as hostages. He then seems to have embarked on warfare to enlarge the lands of Acragas, in part at the expense of indigenous neighbours in the interior.
It is a different matter to judge any local factors aiding his rise to power. The fact that he was a magistrate at the time of his coup suggests – at this early date – that Phalaris was an aristocrat. He was evidently ambitious. He could have found the chances for individuals from his class to rise to prominence in public office frustrated by the fact that they were relatively many in number, as follows from the likelihood that the population of Acragas was large by ancient Greek standards.
Some of these Greek settlements in Sicily came to harbour significant disparities in wealth and these gave rise to social tensions. Phalaris might have found political supporters among the poorer Greeks of settler stock who looked to him to take care of them – by conquering more land, for instance. As for terror as a weapon for holding on to power, today’s dictators have shown that this can work, at least for a time. The bronze monster might have been more than a load of bull.
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