Wandering Greeks

by Garland, Robert

  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.

  Nowhere is the silence of our sources more deafening than with regard to women and slaves, both those who were ejected from their homes and those who remained behind, when their husbands, fathers, or owners were exiled. Any woman who took to the high seas or to the open road unaccompanied by a man would have had little chance of survival. A striking difference between then and now was the paucity of outlets abroad for women. It is estimated that in 2005 half the world’s migrants were women, many of them propelled to leave their homeland in the hope of achieving release from its restrictive traditions and social practices. By contrast, only a small number of Greek women would have been able to seek a livelihood abroad, due to the lack of career options. Virtually the only way for a woman to escape the confining lifestyle to which the vast majority conformed was by becoming a prostitute (see later, chapter 9), an anodyne term that hides the fact that many of the women who found themselves so identified would have been victims of sex trafficking. The fact, too, that women played only a minor role in overseas settlement leaves us wondering what would have been the fate of those who were left behind. Slaves disappear without trace.

  Causes of Population Displacement

  Modern theories of migration differentiate between a complex series of interconnecting factors on the micro-level, viz individuals and whole families who have personal reasons for wanting to migrate; meso-level, viz networks and systems that facilitate the process; and macro-level, viz demographic, political, and economic conditions that help determine the rate and size of a migration flow (Goldin et al. 2011, 97–120). Self-evidently we cannot apply this kind of sophisticated theorizing to the ancient evidence. At the macro-level, however, the Greeks certainly understood that war was a cause of population displacement. At the beginning of his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides identifies the characteristic features of a life that is unpredictable, unsettled, and subject to constant upheavals. It is what he imagines to have been the life of the primitive settlers who first inhabited the Greek mainland (1.2.1–2):

  It is clear that the land that is now called Hellas did not have a settled population in ancient times, and that formerly there were many metanastaseis [migrations] whenever individual tribes readily abandoned their land under constant pressure from people who were more numerous than they were. Lacking commerce, having no free communications with one another either by land or by sea, cultivating only as much land as was necessary to keep alive, having no reserves to fall back on, not growing crops on the land, since they never knew when an invader might deprive them of those crops, and not having walls, all because they thought that their daily necessities were all that they needed, it hardly mattered to them if they were uprooted, and for that reason they did not acquire powerful city-states nor have any other resources [that is, either military or naval].

  This is a striking passage for many reasons. Its underlying assumption is based partly on the memory of a dimly remembered past that has been passed down by oral tradition, and partly on speculative inference. Indeed by prefacing his remarks with the words “It is clear,” Thucydides admits that his analysis owes little to what we would call evidence, though this does not alter the fact that his inference is of high quality. Indeed this is the first attempt by a historian to describe the living conditions of those wretches for whom survival against the odds is the essential and primary goal.

  Thucydides paints a picture of backward and closed-off communities whose members lived a semi-nomadic existence, largely dependent for their survival on hunting and gathering, and incapable of consolidating and flourishing because of constant migratory movements. Though he leads us to believe that this was a lifestyle that had long ceased to be current in his day, I strongly suspect there were parts of Greece where it had not entirely been superseded. Backwardness, however, was not the only cause of migration, as he points out (1.12.2):

  The fact that the Greeks returned only after many years from Troy led to revolutions. Staseis [political upheavals] generally occurred in the city-states, and it was the people who were driven out who founded city-states.

  The example he cites in support of his important claim that war causes political upheaval, which in turn generates population displacement, is the ancestors of the Boeotians, who were allegedly driven out of Arne in Thessaly by the Thessalians sixty years after the fall of Troy and who subsequently settled in Boeotia as refugees. No doubt this was just one of many upheavals that were thought to have occurred around this time. He concludes (1.12.4):

  It was only long after the war had ended that Greece finally became stable, no longer prone to upheavals and able to send out apoikiai [settlements] abroad.

  Though Thucydides does not draw any analogy between the migratory movements that were occasioned by the Trojan War and the frequent unsettlements that were brought about by the Peloponnesian War, it is evident that he had this latter event in mind when he cast his imagination b
ack to the past.

  Stasis (political strife), as we shall see, was a routine feature of life in the Greek city-state, and it commonly resulted in the expulsion of one or other faction, either oligarchic or democratic, or, less commonly, one or other ethnic group. It was in fact one of the principal causes of mass displacement, just as it is in the modern world. Other stimuli in the modern world include demographic growth, religious conflict, environmental disaster, war, famine, and the desire for economic advantage. In ancient Greece a similar set of determinants operated, absent religious conflict, which for the most part counted for little.

  The best we can do in seeking to determine the cause of population movement in the Greek world is to make some crude generalizations. Though demographic growth, famine, and an eagerness to establish markets for the sale and purchase of goods are likely to have prompted a polis to dispatch a group of pioneers to found a settlement, we are hardly ever in a position to prioritize these (and other) factors. We know, too, that some settlements were founded by groups that were politically disaffected. The expansion of the Greek world consequent upon the conquests of Alexander the Great in the last decades of the fourth century, which resulted in mercenary soldiers settling as far east as the Hindu Kush and beyond, was fueled in part by demographic growth. Armed conflict was as much a source of dislocation then as it is now, especially when the Greek world was in turmoil, as during both the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. Human trafficking was extremely prevalent as a result of both piracy and warfare. Those most at risk were women, children, and young adults. Large numbers of people were displaced to serve the military and political ambitions of tyrants and states. Dionysius I, for instance, ruler of Syracuse (405–367), forced tens of thousands to relocate to his capital, not only to provide a counterweight to Carthage’s increasing domination of the western part of Sicily, but also to strengthen his hold over that city. In somewhat similar fashion the city of Megalopolis was established in 368 to reduce Sparta’s military domination of the Peloponnese. Environmental disasters probably caused displacement, too, though the evidence is inconclusive.

  As for individuals, aeiphugia (permanent exile) was a common punishment for those convicted of homicide and treason, since long-term imprisonment was not an option in the Greek world. We already hear of itinerants in the Odyssey, and they became numerous in the fifth and fourth centuries. The majority of metics who resided in Athens were probably motivated to leave their homes to improve their economic circumstances. At least some, however, must have been compelled by exigency. The topographical diversity of the Mediterranean landscape made it essential for the population of each micro-region to be highly mobile in order to capitalize on the full range of environmental opportunities (Horden and Purcell 2000, 385). An unknown number would have been either transhumance pastoralists, viz those who follow a fixed pattern of movement, or semi-nomadic, viz those who do not adhere to any fixed pattern. An example of a transhumance pastoralist is the herdsman in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, who spends his time “on Mount Cithaeron and places nearby” (l. 1127). A related phenomenon is that of internal migration, as for instance in the case of Athenians moving from one deme to another (Osborne 1991, 151–57).

  To conclude, we tend to think of migration in negative terms, focusing on the causes, frequently catastrophic, invariably pressing, that propel individuals to abandon their homes and seek a livelihood often thousands of miles away. Alternatively, following the lead of Queen Elizabeth I and Enoch Powell, we decry the tension and disruption that refugees create in the host community and the strains that they place upon the social fabric. But it is impossible to overestimate the enormous benefits that have accrued to human society, including ancient Greek societies, from the intermingling of peoples of dissimilar ethnic identities.

  2

  THE WANDERER

  The Centrality of Wandering to the Experience of Being Greek

  From earliest times the Greeks were in restless movement, propelled from their familiar habitat either by human force or by the exigencies of their environment. And so it remained throughout antiquity. The whole earth, as Aeschylus puts it, “is forever trodden upon by wanderers” (Eum. 76). The fact that the Greeks had the psychological wherewithal to uproot themselves and settle elsewhere was largely due to the strength of their traditions, their powerful sense of collective identity, and last but by no means least the persistence of their religious practices, though in this regard we should not, of course, assume that they were unique among Mediterranean peoples. Rather, it was a matter of degree than of kind. For many, especially exiles and fugitives of low social status, there was a real possibility that they would remain on the move for all time.

  Religion, I suspect, kept many of them from faltering. We have only to think of the central role that Apollo played in overseas settlement and of the importance of laying out sacred precincts whenever a new foundation was established to appreciate its stabilizing force. Migrants, exiles, fugitives, and their like would have continued to think of themselves as being placed under the protection of the same gods they had worshipped all their lives—gods, we should note, who, though local to their home and community, accompanied them as fellow wanderers —as they sought to settle elsewhere. The unforgettable picture of the elderly Anchises clutching images of his household gods when Aeneas and his family are escaping from the ruins of Troy in Vergil’s Aeneid book 2 would surely have resonated with the Greeks.

  Even the stay-at-home Spartans gave importance to wandering and institutionalized it in the education of their citizens. As members of the krupteia, the secret commission that preceded their entry into the citizen body, at least some Spartan youths were required to live outside the polis for two years and “wander both day and night all over the country” (Pl. Laws 1.633c3–4). The experience of being a wanderer may therefore have been a precondition to becoming a Spartan citizen. As we shall note later in this chapter, moreover, the wanderer, at least from an ideological standpoint, was not seen in exclusively pejorative terms, despite the very real prejudice directed toward individuals who experienced this condition.

  I use the word “wanderer” to describe the tens of thousands of men, women, and children who left their homes without a settled route or fixed destination. A wanderer in this sense was not only apolis (without a city-state), but also aphrêtôr (without a phratry), and anestios (without a hearth). In other words, he or she was stripped not only of civic and political identity, but also, even more fundamentally, of social and familial identity. Without attachment to a phratry, a Greek was denied membership of one of the primary divisions of Greek society, and without attachment to a hearth, he or she was estranged from that most basic unit of Greek life, namely the oikos or oikia (home, household).

  In later chapters we will look at wanderers, whether their condition was temporary or permanent, in their different capacities as asylum-seekers, evacuees, economic migrants, and the like. Here, however, I offer an overview of their state of being, both psychological and physical, as it is depicted in a variety of literary genres excluding the historical, which is the primary focus elsewhere. It is all we have to compensate for the absence of qualitative data.

  Homer

  In the Homeric poems we encounter a variety of wanderers, including captives who have been sold into slavery, traders and pirates who have ventured far from their homelands, fugitives who are seeking to escape retribution for their crimes, and ethnic groups such as the Phaeacians who have uprooted themselves to escape a predatory neighbor. It is a world that surely reflects the reality of the eighth century.

  In it the solitary wanderer was an object of suspicion and contempt. Smarting from the abusive and humiliating treatment he has received at the hands of Agamemnon, Achilles likens himself to “some kind of dishonored metanastês [wanderer]” (Il. 9.648). He does so in order to indicate that Agamemnon is treating him with the utmost scorn. He repeats the comparison when Patroclus requests that he be allowed to lead the Myrmidons into ba
ttle to halt Hector’s assault upon the Achaeans (16.59). The contempt in which the wanderer was held would have been all the more unbearable in a culture that placed such a high store on honor. It was, moreover, Zeus, the father of gods and men, who was held responsible for making men homeless. “When Zeus the thunderer bestows unmitigated grief upon a man, he makes him an object of contempt and drives him over the face of the earth so that he wanders, honored neither by men nor by the gods,” Achilles states at the end of the Iliad (24.531–33).

  To wander without end in sight was the fate of Leto, when, pregnant with Apollo and Artemis and pursued by Hera, she roamed the Mediterranean in the hope of finding somewhere to give birth, before eventually the island of Delos welcomed her (Hom. h. Ap. 30–50). The unburied Patroclus describes himself as having to “wander pointlessly around the wide gates of Hades”—an eschatological view that retained its force in classical times (Hom. Il. 23.74; cf. Eur. Suppl. 62).

  The world evoked by the Odyssey further testifies to the bleakness that beset persons of no fixed abode. Consider Odysseus’s expression of gratitude to the swineherd Eumaeus for granting him shelter under his roof (15.341–45):

  I wish, Eumaeus, that you could be as dear to Zeus the father as you are to me for having called a halt to my alê [wandering] and my dreadful sorrow. No life is worse for mortals than planktosunê [roaming]. Even so, because of crippling hunger men have to endure grievous hardship, when wandering and pain and sorrow come upon them.

  What further increased the misery of the vagrant was the fact that he aroused mistrust. In particular he was regarded as someone who was prepared to invent any rigmarole to earn a crust of bread. As Eumaeus had earlier pointed out, “Alêtai [wanderers] in need of provisions randomly tell lies and have no interest in telling the truth” (14.124–25). Odysseus’s yearning to return home should thus be seen against the background of his despised identity as a wanderer. He resembles Menelaus, who “returned from people he could not have expected to return from, after being driven off course to a place so far across the deep that not even birds return from it in the same year” (3.319–22). Not for nothing, therefore, when he is making his way to the palace of the Phaeacian king Alcinoüs, had Athena advised him, “Don’t look at anyone or ask anyone any questions. For they don’t easily put up with strangers” (7.31–32). The fact that Odysseus was hospitably received by the Phaeacians despite his unprepossessing appearance and abject neediness is one among many signs that he has ventured into fairyland. In short the Greeks of Homer’s age were in no doubt as to the dangers and discomforts of homelessness.1