The longest surviving example in the genre is Plutarch’s treatise On Exile. We do not know the addressee’s identity for certain, but it is likely that his name was Menemachus, a native of Sardis in Lydia, who passed a portion of his exile in Athens at the end of the first century CE. Rather in the manner of a preacher delivering a sermon, Plutarch takes his cue from Euripides’s Phoenician Women (l. 388–89):
What’s it like to be deprived of one’s city? Is it a terrible misfortune? It’s the greatest misfortune—greater than can be put into words.
He then seeks to demonstrate that exile, far from being an unbearable condition, is actually superior to any other kind of existence (Mor. 599f– 600a):
Suppose we assume that exile is something terrible, as the hoi polloi claim both in their conversations and in their verses … it is still possible to blend misfortune with what is valuable and pleasant in your present circumstances, namely abundance, friends, freedom from politics, and the necessities of life…. I bet that there are many citizens of Sardis who would prefer your situation, and be happy to exist on these terms in a foreign land, rather than be like snails that are glued to their shells and have nothing else of value or pleasure except for a home.
Urging fortitude and good cheer, Plutarch puts forth the bold proposition that “There is no such thing as one’s native land by nature,” on the grounds that “we are merely the occupants and users” of wherever we happen to be currently residing. Quoting Socrates’ description of himself as a global citizen, Plutarch proclaims that the overarching sky, “within which no-one is an exile or an alien,” constitutes the boundaries of a philosopher’s real native land. He continues:
By nature we are free and unconstrained. It is we who tie ourselves down, constrain ourselves, confine ourselves, and herd ourselves into uncomfortable and unhealthy quarters. Wherever a man has moderate means to live well, he is neither without a city nor a hearth, nor is he a foreigner.
Plutarch quotes from a certain Stratonicus, who inquired of his host on the tiny island of Seriphus what crime was punished there with exile. On learning that those guilty of fraud were exiled, he quipped, “So why don’t you commit fraud and get out of this confinement.” He claims that it is the exile who is truly blessed by fortune, since “the man who has one city is a stranger and a foreigner to all the rest” (600e–602b).
He then goes on to extol the advantages of the life of withdrawal, which include walking, reading and—joy of joys!—uninterrupted sleep. Few men of good sense and wisdom have died in their native lands, he claims, whether voluntarily or under compulsion. Next he lists exiles from legend and myth, including Theseus, Cadmus, and Apollo (602c– 606d). Finally, moving to a higher philosophical plane, he glosses an observation by Empedocles of Acragas (ca. 492–32)—“I too am an exile from the gods and a wanderer” (31 B 115 DK)—as follows:
All of us … are metanastai [migrants] and xenoi [strangers] and phugades [exiles] here … and it is truest to say that the soul is in exile and wanders, driven by divine ordinances and decrees.
Plutarch’s treatise is a rhetorical tour de force, which seeks to prove what is counterintuitive in order to demonstrate the power invested in the human mind to shape its own destiny—or at least to shape its response to its own destiny. For all its speciousness it is not without the power to move by its eloquent and uplifting pleading. Dimly emerging from its paradoxical and contorted reasoning is the vision of a world stripped of boundaries that has a very modern ring to it, however far we may still be from achieving that ideal. That said, it is obvious that Plutarch, like so many others we have discussed, is analyzing exile from a position of privilege. His argument would have offered scant consolation to the vast majority of refugees, many of whom departed from their homelands with only enough food to keep them going for a few days. Even the well-heeled must have suffered some loss of status and income when they were deprived of their citizenship, as Polyneices had hinted at—a fact that Plutarch studiously ignores (Seibert 1979, 377).
Myth and Legend
From the fifth century BCE onward, and perhaps earlier, those Greeks who identified themselves as belonging to the Dorian ethnic group saw themselves as the product of a population movement that had taken place generations ago, and they fashioned a myth of exile and relocation to give that movement substance. As Herodotus wrote, “The Dorians were a people who wandered extensively” (1.56.2). He was referring to the notion that the Dorians were descended from the Heraclidae (or descendants of Heracles), whose ancestors had been driven into exile from the Peloponnese following the death of their founding father.
In light of what we have seen up to now about the status and condition of the wanderer, the belief that one’s ancestors had returned to a land from which they had once been exiled or fled might seem to amount to a humiliating admission of ethnic inferiority. To have been forced to leave one’s home for whatever reason conjures up notions of subservience, failure, and defeat—a hardly inspiring cultural inheritance to be burdened with. There was, however, a very different way of looking at it. From a propagandistic standpoint the claim that one’s ancestors had in the dim and distant past been driven from their homeland could be turned to considerable political and ideological advantage: first, it served to exemplify their resolve and capacity for endurance, in that they had proven, over the course of several generations, their ability to survive against great odds; and second, it constituted proof that the gods had looked favorably upon their enterprise. Not for nothing the semi-divine Heracles became a god. The fact, moreover, that the Dorian Greeks thought of the migratory movement as a “return,” was profoundly suggestive. It meant that their ancestors were not immigrants, far less invaders. These were exiles, returning to take possession of what was justly and indissolubly theirs.
No detailed account of the return of the Heraclidae has come down to us in literature. The legend is first alluded to by Homer, who makes an anachronistic reference to Dorians inhabiting Crete during the heroic age (Od. 19.177). The earliest author to make explicit reference to it is Tyrtaeus (fr. 2.14 IEG). Tyrtaeus is also the first to mention the three Dorian tribes—namely, the Dymanes, Hylleis, and Pamphyloi—into which those claiming descent from Heracles divided themselves (fr. 19.8 IEG). Two centuries later Herodotus briefly mentions the first unsuccessful assault of the Heraclidae on the Peloponnese following the death of Eurystheus, Heracles’s tormenter (9.26). Thucydides’ account, written perhaps a generation later, is more explicit (1.12.3): he claims that sixty years after the fall of Troy the Thessalians expelled the inhabitants of a town called Arne, who then migrated south and settled in Boeotia. Then, twenty years later, the Dorians and the Heraclidae (he treats them as two separate peoples) seized the Peloponnese. Thucydides traces the origins of the upheaval to factional squabbles that were generated by the delayed return of the Greek army from Troy. Irrespective of whether the Trojan War was a historical event or not, his awareness of the consequences of an extended war in terms of population movement is impressive. The earliest known account of the “return,” no longer extant in its original form, was written by Ephorus in the fourth century (FGrH 70 F 117).
It has been convincingly suggested that the legend of the return of the Heraclidae developed as a way of “providing the emergent states in the Peloponnese with a respectable pedigree” (Hooker 1979, 360). As such, it marks an important moment in the history of ideas, by illustrating how the experience of migration constitutes a way of affirming and consolidating a collective sense of national identity, since a belief in common descent contributes toward the development of group formation. Irrespective of the degree to which the myth of the return has any basis in fact—a subject that continues to be keenly debated by scholars—its contribution to a sense of common purpose can hardly be exaggerated. For the Dorians it was what Hall (1997, 185) has aptly dubbed “a social reality,” and that is what mattered in the end.
Claiming descent from a refugee movement was by no means exclusive to
the Dorians. According both to Genesis and to modern paleontologists, we are all descended from refugees. In fact the earliest human encounter with reality in Genesis is symbolized by exile. The Hebrews, too, claimed descent from wanderers, though in their case their wandering was prompted both by a yearning to escape servitude and by a desire to worship the Lord unimpeded. It is worth noting, however, that their “return” does not seem to have had the same emotional intensity for the Dorians as the Exodus event did (and does) for Jews today. The chief festival for those of Dorian identity was the Karneia, which was celebrated in honor of Apollo Karneios. Unlike the Jewish festival of Pesach, however, the Karneia seems not to have been a festival of liberation, though the ritual of carrying model boats that formed part of it may have commemorated the crossing into the Peloponnese from Antirhion to Rhion. The Romans, too, saw themselves as a people descended from refugees and deportees.
From the period of the Persian Wars onward the Athenians, in contradistinction to the Dorians, maintained that they had always inhabited the same land. The earliest reference to this belief occurs in Pindar’s Second Isthmian Ode (dated ca. 470), in which the poet asserts that the Athenians were descended from an early king called Erechtheus, who was born from the earth (2.19). Herodotus recognized the force of the claim by having the Athenian envoy to the Sicilian tyrant Gelon boast (7.161.3; cf. 1.56.2): “We, the Athenians, are the most ancient ethnos [people, ethnic group] and the only Greeks who are not metanastai [refugees].” Thucydides, speaking in his own voice, declared that Attica “was occupied by its original inhabitants” (1.2.5). He went on to explain that this was due to the poverty of its soil, which had failed to attract migrants from abroad and thereby (blessedly) eliminated the possibility of internal strife. In the Funeral Speech, too, he has Pericles remind his audience that they were descended from ancestors “who always inhabited the land without interruption in a succession of generations” (2.36.1). The belief features in Euripidean tragedy. Praxithea in Euripides’ lost play Erechtheus proudly declares (fr. 50.7–10 Austin): “We are not a people brought together from elsewhere by the fall of dice like the inhabitants of all other cities, but we are autochthones [seeded or born from the ground].” Elsewhere, however, Euripides pointed out the absurdity of autochthony as literally understood, notably when he has Xuthus in the Ion assert categorically, “The earth does not bear children” (l. 542). Its absurdity notwithstanding, it became commonplace in the fourth century, notably in what Cohen (2000, 83) calls “the platitudinous banalities of encomia delivered at public funerals … [which] produced a genre that strung together formulaic tales to reify state ideology and mythological tradition.” The following is an example, written no doubt to order, by the metic Lysias (Epitaph. 17):
The origin of the Athenian way of life is lawful. Most people derive from a mixture of groups and have taken possession of foreign soil by expelling others, whereas the Athenians are autochthonous and their fatherland is their true mother.
To conclude, no people chooses a myth of origin in order to feel bad about themselves, though it may be that the Athenians had an ideological edge over the rest in boasting of autochthony. In so doing, as Lysias indicates, they were making a case for ethnic purity. In analyzing ancient beliefs about autochthony, Detienne (2001, 55) trenchantly observes, “We provide ourselves with the means of better understanding those murderous throbbings of identity which pulse in the human societies of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
1 Discussion of the fugitives Bellerophon, Tlepolemus, Phoenix, Patroclus, and Theoclymenus, all of whom appear in the Iliad, is reserved for chapter 8.
3
THE SETTLER
Why the Greeks Settled Abroad
The Greek diaspora is most conventionally understood primarily in terms of what I shall call settlement abroad.1 From the twelfth century BCE onward there is no evidence of any significant influx of population into mainland Greece. However, that period did witness a considerable migration from the mainland into areas previously uninhabited by Greeks. The details are hazy, but it seems that what scholars call the Ionian migration took place in the early Dark Age, around the eleventh and tenth centuries, and was in the nature of a mass exodus. It led principally to the settlement of the Aegean islands and the (now Turkish) Western Anatolian coastline in the region between Smyrna and Miletus. Some time later Aeolian Greeks living in Thessaly settled in the region north of Smyrna, while Dorians from the Peloponnese settled to the south of Miletus.
A second wave of settlement occurred in the archaic period and lasted from around the middle of the eighth century to the end of the sixth, though, as Hall (2002, 92) and others have noted, archaeology has now brought to light “a far more continuous sequence of contact and encounters between Greeks and non-Greeks.” To the extent that we can measure difference between the two “movements,” the one that began in the eighth century was more concentrated, at least in the number of settlements. First Sicily and southern Italy were settled, then the coast of Macedon and Thrace, followed by the Black Sea region, and then Cyrenaica in Libya, southern coastal France, and southeast Spain. The mêtropoleis (mother-cities) that sent out the largest number of pioneering ventures in the archaic period include Miletus (36 settlements), Corinth (13), Eretria (8), Chalcis (7), Megara (5), Thasos (5), Phocaea (4), Sybaris (4), and Syracuse (4).2
FIGURE 3 Silver drachma from Larissa, the chief city in Thessaly, ca. 365–44. The obverse depicts the head of the nymph Larissa, for whom the city was named. The reverse depicts a horse. An inland city surrounded by mountains and rich in pastureland, it was famous for its horses. The legend in the exergue reads (LARIS)AIÔN. Larissa was the first Thessalian city to strike coins. Polyperchon II, tagos (federal commander) of Thessaly, exiled many of its citizens in 370/69.
In the course of the archaic and classical periods, 279 settlements known commonly as apoikiai (literally “homes away from home”) were founded in what today are Albania, Bulgaria, Egypt, France, Georgia, Italy, Libya, Romania, Russia, Sicily, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine. Some 88 of them were secondary foundations—that is, founded by a mother-city that had itself been settled by a mother-city—notably those in Sicily and southern Italy. The movement took the form it did because the Mediterranean constituted “a milieu of interlocking routes onto which the coastlands and harbours faced” (Horden and Purcell 2000, 11). Though most settlements were founded overseas, some were established in adjoining territory, such as Acrae, Camarina, Casmenae, and Tyndaris, which Syracuse founded. The scale of migration to southern Italy was such that later historians referred to the region as Megalê Hellas (Magna Graecia in Latin), meaning Great Greece.
The later movement came to an end only when all the best coastal sites had been occupied. It would hardly have succeeded were it not for the fact that Greek traders were on the lookout for mercantile profit. This in itself, however, hardly explains why so many Greeks came to settle permanently abroad. One theory, less popular than it used to be, is that many settlements were founded in response to overpopulation and land hunger. This, too, is what some later Greeks believed. Plato spoke of “the masses having grown too numerous for the country’s food supply” in relation to Crete (Laws 4.707e), and of “an excessive abundance of population” in general, viz a population that exceeded his recommended maximum of 5,040 citizens—that is, some 20,000 persons in all (5.740de). Archaeological evidence indicates that a handful of settlements, including Pithecusae and Syracuse, expanded very rapidly, partly perhaps in response to a demographic crisis. Paradoxically, however, there is no conclusive evidence of overpopulation in those parts of Greece that dispatched settlements in greatest numbers, viz the Megarid, Corinthia, Achaea, and Euboea, whereas those regions where it is inferred that substantial demographic growth did occur, notably Attica and the Argolid, did not send out any colonies (Whitley 2001, 125–26). Another explanation is resource fluctuations. The crisis on Thera that led to the settlement of Cyrene, for instance, was prompted by seven years of drought
(see later). Political motives should not be ruled out either, notably in the case of settlements sponsored by tyrants. Nicolaus of Damascus (fl. first century BCE) claims that Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth, dispatched his political enemies as settlers to Leucas and Anactorium in ca. 630, “so that he could rule those who remained more easily” (FGrH 90 F 57.7). In conclusion, though overpopulation and land hunger may have been prominent factors, each community had its own specific mix of reasons for sending pioneers abroad.
FIGURE 4 Silver statêr from Anactorium, a coastal city in Acarnania, ca. 300–250. The obverse depicts the winged horse Pegasus, which was caught by Bellerophon while it was drinking at the fountain of Peirene in Corinth. The reverse depicts the head of Athena (or less likely Aphrodite) wearing a Corinthian helmet, probably because it was Athena who gave Bellerophon the magic bridle used to capture the winged horse Pegasus. Anactorium was founded by settlers from Corinth in ca. 630, and the coin type imitates that minted by Corinth. The Corinthians captured the city in 432 and sent out new settlers. In 425 the Athenians and their Acarnanian allies seized Anactorium after it had been betrayed from within (Thuc. 4.49). The site has yet to be excavated.
It is commonly alleged that a specific group of settlements was established primarily as trading posts or, to define this group in a more limited sense, as ports-of-trade. A settlement of this sort is generally referred to as an emporion, viz “an ad hoc community [comprising] a mixed and possibly shifting population of traders” (OCD4 s.v.). The earliest and most northerly Greek settlement in the west, Pithecusae, modern-day Ischia in the Bay of Naples, is generally assigned to this category, though the exact nature and purpose of this foundation are still contested and there is evidence at the site for mixed marriages in the later period (Hansen and Nielsen 2004, 285–87). A major problem is that the word emporion is rarely used in ancient sources and it remains unclear whether the Greeks themselves actually employed it in the sense in which modern historians have interpreted it. We should be wary, therefore, of making a neat distinction between an apoikia, the usual word to describe a settlement, and an emporion. It is also important to take into account that an apoikia, like an emporion, would have had a number of temporary inhabitants, especially in its early days before its population became settled.
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