Wandering Greeks

by Garland, Robert

  Lyric and Elegiac Poetry

  The Spartan elegiac poet Tyrtaeus (mid-seventh century), some of whose compositions are thought to have been recited during military campaigns, perhaps even in the immediate lead-up to a battle, contrasted the wretched condition of the man who has been driven from his homeland after his city has fallen with the valiant hoplite who sacrifices his life (fr. 10 IEG):

  It is good for a good man to fall and die fighting in the front ranks for his native land, whereas to leave one’s city-state and rich fields and be a beggar is the most wretched condition of all, being a wanderer with one’s dear mother and aged father and little children and wedded wife. For he is hateful to everyone whom he approaches, being bound to neediness and hateful poverty. He disgraces his lineage and betrays his good looks. Since there is no consideration, no honor, no respect, and no pity for a man who is a wanderer, let us fight with courage for our land and die for our children and never spare our lives.

  In other words, the exile is stripped of everything that makes life worthwhile. His disgrace is compounded by the fact that he is publicly deemed to be a coward. Here as elsewhere Tyrtaeus is exhorting the Spartans to risk their lives in battle, using as blackmail, so to speak, the wretchedness of a wanderer’s life, which includes destitution for all his dependents.

  Exile features in the work of the lyric poet Alcaeus of Mytilene, who was driven from his home on the island of Lesbos in ca. 600 as a result of political unrest. Alcaeus’s comments appear in poems that were intended for delivery at a symposium or drinking party, and as such may well have had a political and/or educational function. The relevant lines appear to be autobiographical, though we cannot dismiss the possibility that he has adopted an imaginary persona. In one of them Alcaeus appeals to the triad of Zeus, Hera, and Dionysus “to save us from these labors and painful exile” (fr. 129.11–12 Campbell). In another he articulates his despair to a friend as follows (fr. 130B 1–9 Campbell):

  I poor wretch live the lot of a rustic, longing to hear the assembly being summoned, Agesilaidas, and the council: the property in possession of which my father and my father’s father have grown old among these mutually destructive citizens, from it I have been driven, an exile at the back of beyond … (trans. Campbell).

  The corpus that is ascribed to the elegiac poet Theognis of Megara (ca. 640–540?) also includes references to an exile’s lot. Though it is possible that Theognis was forced from his homeland, the verses supporting this supposition, in which he claims that “other men possess my flourishing fields,” are corrupt (ll. 1197–1202 IEG). Earlier in the collection he speaks with feeling about the isolation that a homeless person faces (ll. 209–210 IEG):

  To be sure, no-one is a friend and trustworthy companion to one who is a pheugôn [exile]. This fact is more painful than phugê [exile] itself.

  Elsewhere, however, he warns his friend Cyrnus to steer clear of such people (ll. 333–34 IEG):

  Never be friends with a man in exile, Cyrnus, looking to the future. Once he returns home, he won’t be the same man at all.

  Tyrtaeus’s gripe is that exiles try to ingratiate themselves to advance their own interests. But once they no longer need your services, their promises will quickly be forgotten.

  Finally, these lines written by the Athenian elegiac poet and lawgiver Solon strike a decidedly and deliberately poignant note (fr. 36.8–12 IEG):

  I brought back many people to Athens, back to their homeland that was founded by the gods. Some of them had been sold legally, others illegally, still others had fled through compelling necessity. They no longer spoke the Attic tongue, as is the case when men wander in all directions.

  We should bear in mind that Solon composed these lines in order to depict himself as an enlightened reformer who did outstanding service on behalf of his compatriots. The suggestion that the returnees had forgotten their mother tongue can only have been true of those who were children at the time of their departure.

  Tragedy

  The solitary wanderer features in tragedy. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus we are told, evocatively, that Zeus has “thrown” her wanderings at Io for having rejected his advances (l. 738). When Oedipus discovers the horrific nature of the crimes he has committed, he repeatedly asks Creon to grant his request to become apolis (without a city) (Soph. OT 1381–82, 1440–41, 1518). We never discover whether Creon agrees to this, notwithstanding the fact that Apollo’s oracle had previously ordered “the expulsion of the unholy one” (ll. 96–98). Euripides reverses the picture. The last scene of the Phoenician Women is devoted to Creon’s banishment of Oedipus, which he administers in accordance with the seer Teiresias’s pronouncement that the city will not prosper so long as he resides in it (ll. 1589–94). In response, Oedipus describes the awfulness of such a fate for someone like himself, who is blind, elderly, and without anyone to attend him. “If you expel me, you will kill me,” he states flatly (l. 1621). Even so, his dignity prevents him from supplicating Creon to reverse his decision. His daughter Antigone, who was betrothed to Creon’s son Haemon, condemns Creon for the hubris he has perpetrated against her father and then accompanies him into exile. “Banishment with a blind father is a disgrace,” Oedipus warns her (l. 1691). “Miserable sufferings await you far from your homeland and the prospect of death in exile,” Antigone responds, undeterred (ll. 1734–36). In Euripides’ Bacchae, whose ending is known only from a twelfth-century Medieval adaptation titled Christus Patiens, Dionysus banishes Agave and her sisters from Thebes on the grounds that they have become polluted murderers through the killing of Pentheus.

  Only once in tragedy does an exile describe his experiences abroad. This occurs in an exchange between Polyneices and his mother Jocasta in Euripides’ Phoenician Women. Polyneices has just returned to Thebes after having been exiled by his brother Eteocles. Eteocles had refused to give up the throne to him after a year as had been agreed, and Polyneices returns with the intention of wresting it from him. In the interim he had been living in Argos (ll. 387–406):

  JOCASTA: The first thing I want to know is what’s it like to be deprived of one’s city? Is it a terrible misfortune?

  POLYNEICES: It’s the greatest misfortune—greater than can be put into words.

  FIGURE 2 Silver statêr (the largest coin struck by a polis) from Thebes, ca. 480–56. The obverse depicts a Boeotian shield, a pun on the word bous (“ox”). Because Greek shields were covered with oxhide. The reverse depicts an amphora in an incuse (that is, recessed) square. Ill-advisedly, Thebes sided with the Persians when Xerxes invaded Greece in 480—an act of betrayal that the Greeks deeply resented. After the Battle of Plataea, the Greek coalition besieged Thebes and forced it to give up its Persian sympathizers. On the eve of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War several unfortified Boeotian towns sent their civilians to Thebes for protection, thereby doubling the size of Thebes’s population. Thebes was conquered by Philip II of Macedon in 338. In 335 it revolted unsuccessfully against Alexander the Great, who razed it to the ground. Some 30,000 men, women, and children were enslaved. The city was rebuilt in 316 but on a much smaller scale than its predecessor.

  JOCASTA: What’s its character? What hardship befalls exiles?

  POLYNEICES: The worst is that you no longer have freedom of speech.

  JOCASTA: You mean you’re a slave because you can’t say what you’re thinking?

  POLYNEICES: You have to endure the ignorance of those who have power over you.

  JOCASTA: This is indeed painful, to have to suffer in silence the stupidity of others.

  POLYNEICES: You have to act as a slave, against your nature, in order to make money….

  JOCASTA: Didn’t your father’s guest-friends give you assistance?

  POLYNEICES: They would if I’d have been wealthy. They don’t do anything for you if you’re not.

  JOCASTA: Your aristocratic birth didn’t advance you socially?

  POLYNEICES: Not having any resources was the evil. My birth did not fill my belly.


  JOCASTA: It seems that one’s fatherland is the dearest thing to mortal man.

  Polyneices’ remarks are an indictment of the evils of exile. As we shall see later, they were later used by philosophers, who refuted them point by point to demonstrate that exile was in fact a tolerable, even desirable condition for the man who is set on the path of enlightenment.

  And yet Polyneices’ fate is hardly that of the typical refugee, not least because he had the good fortune during his sojourn abroad to marry the daughter of Adrastus, the king of Argos. He thus speaks from a position of immense privilege, even though, being the citizen of a city-state that values freedom of speech, he bemoans the fact that he had to keep a close watch on his tongue. Having to work for his living was no less irksome to him. He says nothing, however, of the physical hardship endured by refugees, of which he presumably knows nothing. In short, Euripides presents Polyneices’ experience from a highly privileged, Athenian perspective. This, we may note, contrasts sharply with Sophocles’s portrayal of the elderly and blind exile Oedipus, who is almost pathologically fearful of being dishonored by anyone whom he encounters (OC 49–50). Polyneices’ most revealing statement is that his Argive guest-friends refused to lend him any assistance on account of his poverty—an interesting and no doubt realistic commentary on the limitations of charity in the Greek world even when the two parties were bound by ties of obligation.

  Oratory

  With good reason, given their personal agenda, defendants in Athenian lawsuits commonly described exile as a fate worse than death. “If I go into exile as a result of your verdict,” says a fictitious defendant, “I shall become a beggar in a foreign country, an old man who is apolis,” First Tetralogy 2.9). “No fate is worse than having nowhere to go, being without a city-state, enduring hardship every day, and being unable to look after one’s family,” says the representative of a group of Plataean exiles who are seeking to settle in Athens (Isoc. 14.55).

  The most detailed account of a refugee’s existence is found in Isocrates’s Aegineticus, so-named because it was written on behalf of an unnamed political exile from Siphnus, who had been granted permanent residence in Aegina. In it the speaker describes what happened to his family when they sought to settle at Troezen (19.22–23):

  As soon as we arrived we succumbed to such severe diseases that I myself only just survived, though within thirty days I buried my young sister who was just fourteen years old, and not five days later I buried my mother as well. Previously in my life I had not known suffering, but now I had experienced both exile and having to live among foreigners as an alien. I’d lost my fortune, and in addition I’d witnessed my mother and my sister being expelled from their homeland and ending their lives among strangers in a foreign land.

  Though the speaker has good reason to play on the sympathies of the jury, the tragedy he describes—that of the more vulnerable refugees, women especially, perishing from sickness or exhaustion soon after their departure—must have been all too familiar.

  When he was not earning money from fee-paying exiles by writing on their behalf, however, Isocrates was far from sympathetic to the plight of migrants. In a panegyric composed in ca. 370 he heaped praise on Evagoras, king of Salamis on Cyprus, who, after fleeing from the island to avoid being assassinated, “despised the wandering existence of exiles, the way they seek help from others in order to facilitate their return, and the manner in which they ingratiate themselves with those who are inferior” (9.28). To escape such a fate Evagoras took matters into his own hands and succeeded in returning to Cyprus with the aid of some fifty companions. Commendable though it no doubt was, Evagoras’s enterprise was hardly an example that the average exile could hope to emulate. In other political pamphlets Isocrates makes it clear that he has nothing but fear and loathing for the vast majority of refugees, on the grounds that they present a threat to the stability of civilized society.

  Philosophy

  The condition of the exile provided a fertile source of comment for philosophers of various persuasions. Democritus of Abdera (b. 460–57), who is jointly credited with Leucippus as the inventor of atomist philosophy, is said to have declared, evidently with pride, “I have wandered more extensively than anyone of my generation” (68 B 299.6–8 DK). Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus took this to mean that Democritus considered himself to be richer than Odysseus and Menelaus combined—the two most famous wanderers of legend—on the grounds that he had become a true philosopher because of his travels, whereas they had merely acquired a heap of treasure (68 A 16 DK = Ael. VH 4.20). Pythagoras was also “a great wanderer,” who visited Egypt, Babylon, Delos, and Crete, before finally establishing his philosophical school in Croton (Porph. Vit. Pythag. 6–21; D.L. 8.2–3).

  The Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (ca. 412/403–ca. 324/21), quoting from a lost tragedy, described himself as “a man who is apolis [without a city], a man who is aoikos [without a home], a man deprived of his fatherland, a beggar, a wanderer, a man who lives from day to day” (D.L. 6.38 = TGF, Adesp. 284). Since the Cynics believed in the principle of living according to nature, this state of being did not, as he saw it, constitute a handicap. On the contrary, he claimed to have benefited from the change of perspective that homelessness had bestowed upon him. When someone was abusing him for being an exile, Diogenes is said to have replied, “It was my exile that turned me into a philosopher, you jerk!” (D.L. 6.49). In other words, his period in exile had liberated him not only from the constraints of the polis but also from dependency on the civic order, thereby enabling him to achieve his anti-political goal of self-sufficiency. Even so, the benefit to the soul has to be weighed against the inevitable wear and tear on the body. Though the testimony is of dubious authenticity, the elderly Plato is said to have declined an invitation to leave Athens and give advice about founding a colony on the grounds that the frailty of his age prevented him from “wandering about and running the kinds of risks that one encounters both on land and at sea” (Ep.11.358e 6–8)

  Plato’s pupil Aristotle deemed the wanderer to be outside the human fold. He wrote (Pol. 1.1253a3–7):

  He who is without a city-state by nature and not by circumstance is either a rogue or greater than a human being. He resembles the man “without a phratry, without laws, and without a hearth” who is reviled by Homer (Il.9.63–64), for he is by nature without a city-state and he yearns for bloody war. He is analogous to an isolated counter in a game of draughts.

  Aristotle, it seems, was incapable of conceiving an acceptable alternative to a polis-centered life. And since the polis was a civilized and indeed civilizing force, the exile, having to fight for his survival on a daily basis, was in his view reduced to the condition of a brute animal. To make matters worse, such a person threatened the security of the polis to which he formerly belonged by yearning for “bloody civil war,” since only as the result of an overthrow of the governing faction could he eventually hope to return to his homeland.

  In his Encomium of Helen, probably dated 370, Isocrates chastised the sophists “for daring to assert that the life of beggars and refugees is more enviable than that of the rest of us.” He continued, “They use this as proof that if they can speak to good effect on a worthless subject, then they’ll have plenty to say about a subject which has real merit” (10.8). In other words, if sophists have the skill to refute what is blindingly obvious—that the life of the refugee is the most wretched condition imaginable—then there is no argument under the sun that they cannot prove or disprove. His comments make clear that the philosophical genre of consolation was already well-established by the first half of the fourth century, even though no extended example has survived from this period. It was to last for well over half a millennium.

  The lot of those Greeks who were driven into exile was compounded of uncertainty, danger, hardship, and privation. All this, however, was nothing to a man of solid moral fiber. “Cheer up and get a grip of yourself. It isn’t such a bad thing being an exile, especial
ly if you put on a brave face. You might even see it as a welcome challenge to the fortitude you’ve developed all your life.” That is because exile is primarily a state of mind, rather than a physical state of being. The evils that it visits upon an individual are therefore surmountable, partly by other attendant goods that one may possess to offset them and partly by a positive mental attitude. The first surviving treatise of this kind is by a Cynic philosopher called Teles, who flourished in ca. 235 BCE (pp. 21.2–30.1, Hense 1909). Though its composition lies outside the period covered by this survey, the arguments are likely to have been well-rehearsed, since, as we have just noted, the genre was already a century and a half old. Teles first sets up the proposition that exile, far from harming a man’s soul or his body or even his possessions, actually gives him the opportunity to improve his material circumstances, as the lives of the mythical Phoenix and the historical Themistocles demonstrate. He then refutes a number of objections that might be raised to his proposition. For instance, in response to the claim that exiles are deprived of freedom of speech, Teles argues that many of them do indeed enjoy influence with foreign potentates; to the objection that exiles are not permitted to return home, he replies that no one alive has complete freedom of movement; and to the argument that exiles must suffer the disgrace of being buried abroad, he points out that this is the fate of many of the best men. He then ridicules Polyneices’ request to be buried in his native Thebes, given the fact that his body will either rot or be scavenged wherever it lies (Eur. Phoen. 1447–50).