Wandering Greeks

by Garland, Robert

  Mass Resettlement in the Peloponnese

  Mainland Greece also experienced mass resettlement in the fourth century. The decisive defeat of the Spartans by the Boeotians and their allies at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 resulted in the establishment of three cities in the Peloponnese. The initiative was aimed at containing Spartan influence and reducing its people to a second-rate power. The first of the three was Mantinea in eastern Arcadia (371/370), actually a refoundation. This was followed by Messene in the southwest Peloponnese (369) and Megalopolis in southwest Arcadia (368). I will reserve discussion of Messene for chapter 11, since it was promoted as the refoundation of a settlement whose people had continued to exist in exile for hundreds of years.

  MAP 3 The containment of Sparta.

  Mantinea. Largely at the prompting of the Argives, Mantinea had been refounded as a synoecism of four or five Arcadian villages some time between 464 and 459. In 385, however, the Spartans had carried out a dioikismos (the division of a polis into its original communities or villages) (D.S. 15.12; cf. Str. Geog. 8.3.2 C337). Very likely the villages out of which Mantinea had been constituted as a polis had never been completely abandoned. Though the wealthy seem to have been happy with this arrangement, since it enabled them to live closer to their estates, the majority of the population resented the Spartan move deeply. Their resentment rankled and, following Sparta’s defeat at Leuctra, they voted “to make Mantinea a single city and to surround it with a wall” (Xen. Hell. 6.5.3). They then proceeded to put the decision into effect, despite efforts from Sparta to dissuade them. A number of Arcadian towns participated in the building project, while the Eleans contributed three talents. The alliance between the Mantineans and the other Arcadians proved to be short-lived, however. At the Battle of Mantinea, fought less than a decade after the synoecism, the Mantineans betrayed the Arcadian cause and sided with the Spartans (Paus. 8.8.10).

  Megalopolis. The synoecism of Megalopolis in ca. 368/7 was on a much larger scale than that of Mantinea and involved at least twenty communities (D.S. 15.72.4). Though Pausanias was of the opinion that the Theban general Epaminondas “might with justification be regarded as its oikistês,” this claim remains unproven (8.27.2, cf. 9.14.4). The synoecism was not named “Big City” for nothing. Megalopolis’s fortification walls had a circumference of 5 miles, which means that the city could have accommodated a population of about 30,000. Scholars differ as to whether the enclosed area was fully inhabited, however. One attractive theory is that it was intended to provide shelter for the army, poised to attack the Spartans should they attempt to pass the road that ran close to the city. If that is the case, its population may have been no more than 10,000.

  Pausanias tells us that the Arcadians agreed to abandon their former homes and settle in Megalopolis “out of zeal and because of their fear of the Spartans” (8.27.3). From its inception, however, the synoecism ran into difficulties, no doubt because many of its inhabitants had been conscripted. We hear of three groups of peoples who “changed their minds and, being no longer willing to abandon their former cities, were forcibly brought to Megalopolis,” while a fourth group—namely, the inhabitants of Trapezous—left the Peloponnese for good in preference to being resettled (8.27.5). Then six years later a number of those who had been transplanted to Megalopolis, finding that they were unable to adjust to life in the new city, abandoned the new settlement and returned to their former homes. The rebellion, if that is the right word, was put down by the Thebans, who, in Diodorus’s words, “by sacking some of the cities and terrifying others, compelled their peoples to change their residence to Megalopolis.”Diodorus concludes his account of Megalopolis not without a pinch of irony: “So the sunoikismos of the cities, having reached such a pitch of disorder, was moderately successful in the end” (15.94.3).

  FIGURE 7 Silver triôbolon (three obols) from Megalopolis in Arcadia, ca. 175–68. The obverse depicts the laureate head of either Zeus Lykaios, tutelary deity of Megalopolis, or Zeus Amarios, principal deity of the Achaean League, to which Megalopolis belonged (Polyb. 5.93.10; see Malkin 1987, 132). The reverse depicts Pan seated on a rock, holding a staff in his left hand. An eagle is to his left. Arcadia was a favorite haunt of Pan and one of his principal centers of worship. Allegedly founded by Epaminondas in ca. 368/7, Megalopolis was sacked by the Spartans in 223 and refounded by Philopoemen a few years later. This coin dates to the period of its second foundation.

  The Synoecism of Halicarnassus

  At some point in the decade from 377 to 367 the Persian satrap of Caria named Mausolus began moving his capital from inland (Carian) Mylasa to coastal (Greek) Halicarnassus. He did so by relocating the inhabitants of six (less plausibly five) towns that were close to Halicarnassus (Callisthenes, FGrH 124 F 25 = Str. Geog. 13.1.59 C611; Pln. NH 5.107). As a result of this move, Halicarnassus became a predominantly Carian or, more specifically, Lelegian city. The Carian immigrants, dubbed, perhaps prejudicially, neopolitai (new citizens) by the existing citizens, eventually became at least partly hellenized, since they were required to participate in the Greek governmental system. Epigraphical evidence indicates that the ethnically mixed citizen body made decisions—no doubt of a somewhat routine nature—in the name of the dêmos and the boulê (council). This seems to have been in accordance with Mausolus’s own predilection, since he not only promoted the institutions of the Greek polis but also borrowed the language of Greek democracy (cf. Hornblower 1982, 105).

  Predilection apart, there was also a compelling strategic reason why Mausolus moved his capital to Halicarnassus—namely, to gain access to the sea. In 378 Athens had founded its second naval confederacy. Mausolus wanted to build up a navy to counter the threat from an increasingly belligerent Athens. A further motive lay in the fact that a populous center would enable him to strengthen his control over the region and, in so doing, weaken the power of the Carian League. He made this control palpable by undertaking an extremely ambitious building program in his capital. Its most enduring architectural legacy turned out to be the project undertaken by his sister-wife, Artemisia—namely, the famous Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which occupied pride of place and may have determined the overall layout. The city also acquired extensive new walls and an imposing mudbrick palace faced with marble.

  The synoecism of Halicarnassus represents a largely successful experiment in relocation, not least because there are few signs of destruction at the Lelegian towns whose populations were transferred. To judge from the Athenian tribute lists of the fifth century, moreover, some of these towns had been quite substantial in size. Indeed it has been suggested that the population of Halicarnassus now increased four or five times (Bean 1980, 81). Even so, archaeological evidence indicates that life went on amid the rubble of the towns whose populations were supposedly evacuated (Hornblower 1994, 225). By the hellenistic period the Carian element living in Halicarnassus seems to have become thoroughly assimilated, holding out the tantalizing possibility of interethnic integration.

  5

  THE DEPORTEE

  Political Stasis as a Cause of Deportation

  Deportation in the archaic and classical Greek world commonly took the form of the forced removal either of a large group by their political opponents or of the entirety of the population by a foreign enemy or tyrant—a phenomenon not unlike that of ethnic cleansing today (see appendix C). A frequent cause was factional squabbling between supporters of democracy and those of an oligarchic persuasion. Antagonism between the oligarchic “few” and the democratic “many” was never far beneath the political surface. This state of affairs, once it became acute, was described as stasis, a polysemous term that covered a multitude of political exigencies, including partisanship, sedition, and, at the extreme end of the spectrum, revolution and civil war. Typically when factionalism became rife, oligarchs sought to deprive democrats of their basic rights, including citizenship, and to establish a “moderate aristocracy,” while democrats sought to deprive oligarc
hs of their privileges, including land-ownership, and to establish isonomia (equality under the law). In the Peloponnesian War, as Thucydides states, oligarchs brought in the Spartans to strengthen their power base within the city, whereas the democrats brought in the Athenians (3.82.1). Stasis also occurred when different ethnic groups within the same city divided into factions.

  If relations between the two factions broke down completely, those in the ascendant would deport their opponents, a practice attested by the middle of the sixth century. Though deportation may strike us as a radical solution to a political impasse, in the absence of a party political system that provided for the orderly transfer of power through the device of an election, it was often the only option available. It was certainly better than the executions that took place under Greece’s early tyrants (for example, Hdt. 5.92 epsilon 2). It was better than the massacre of their oligarchic opponents by the Corcyrean democrats, which the latter used to settle private scores, so that “practically nothing was left of the oligarchs” (Thuc. 3.81, 4.48). And it was better, too, than the slaughter of 1,000 to 1,200 oligarchs by democrats during a particularly vicious bout of stasis in Argos (D.S. 15.58; Gehrke 1985, 251). The city most subject to stasis was Syracuse, whereas Sparta was exemplary in not being subject to its attendant ills for centuries.

  Mass deportation, albeit cruel and inhuman, functioned as a valuable safety valve in that it relieved political pressure. Indeed it is hardly an exaggeration to state that the survival of the polis at times of crisis depended upon the expulsion of one of the two warring parties, since if conditions deteriorated further, it would become ungovernable and civil slaughter would result. But usual though the recourse to deportation was as a temporary expedient when stasis threatened to erupt in bloodshed, it was hardly a long-term solution. Indeed in many cases it merely prolonged the agony, since if the deportees gained the support of a neighboring community they would agitate to be reinstated and then almost certainly exact vengeance on their ousters. Diodorus Siculus (11.76.4), for instance, writes of the year 461, “The peoples who had been expelled from Himera, Gela, and Camarina … returned to their homelands and drove out those who had illegally seized the dwellings of others.” It follows from this that attachment to one’s social group often signified more than attachment to one’s polis (Hansen and Nielsen 2004, 125).

  Since the Greeks did not have a word for “deportation” and since, too, phugê, its nearest equivalent, can mean either “flight” or “exile,” we rarely know whether a group of people who abandoned their polis at a moment of crisis did so voluntarily or under compulsion. Whichever was the case, however, we need hardly doubt that their departure constituted in effect a deportation. We rarely hear how many were driven into exile. Those of a moderate persuasion would presumably have chosen to remain, even though they might have been subject to prejudice under the newly constituted governmental system.

  Though deportation may be viewed as a relatively mild expedient compared with the indiscriminate slaughter of one’s political opponents, it was hardly humane. Not for nothing the author of the Seventh Epistle that is attributed to Plato repudiated it as a way of resolving a constitutional crisis. Instead he recommended patience, prayer, and keeping a low profile (331d):

  The man of good sense … should not resort to violence to his fatherland to bring about a change in the constitution, whenever it is impossible to make it the best of its kind, by sentencing men either to exile or to death. Rather he should remain inactive and pray for what is good both for himself and for his city.

  Another type of deportation involved the transfer of an entire population either by a state that had recently conquered the region or by a tyrant who was seeking to expand his power. The purpose was to increase the military and political authority of those who were instrumental in effecting it. It was Sicily in the first half of the fifth century and again in the fourth century that experienced mass population transfer most often, due primarily to the policies of its so-called tyrants. As Rhodes and Osborne (2003, 377) have pointed out, however, the word “tyrant” in the fourth century may sometimes have been used in a pejorative sense to describe a factional leader to whom the user of the term was politically hostile.

  One of the most famous instances of deportation by a foreign power in antiquity involved the removal of the Jews to Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar following the destruction of Jerusalem in 597 BCE, though we have no way of knowing how many Jews were involved in the transfer. No comparable example is recorded in the Greek case, though Ptolemy I Soter, after his conquest of Palestine in ca. 320, is said to have deported many thousands of Jews and settled them in Egypt. Where deportation is mentioned in our sources, we rarely receive any indication of the numbers involved.

  Surviving as a Deportee

  Deportation is a severe test of endurance, both physical and psychological, aggravated by the fact that in many cases the deportees are forced to leave all their possessions behind them. When the Athenians took Potidaea in 429 after a three-year siege and expelled the entire population, they “permitted the men to leave with only one cloak, the women with two, and a fixed sum of money for the journey” (Thuc. 2.70.3). Likewise when Philip II of Macedon took Methone in Messenia a century later, he permitted the inhabitants of that city to depart with “only a single cloak” (D.S. 16.34.4–5). Deportees would rarely have been allowed to take their baggage animals and carts with them, so it is unclear how they would have been able to transport the elderly, the infirm, the sick, and the pregnant women. Many of those who were incapable of walking must have been left behind, to face either starvation or slaughter. In cases where the primary objective was to increase the population of a neighboring city, however, deportees are likely to have received better treatment. Even then, however, their plight would have been unenviable, for they had to abandon not only their homes, but also their household shrines and family tombs.

  Deportees often faced jeers and insults as they were hustled through the city gates into a frighteningly exposed world. Lacking weapons and armor, they were extremely vulnerable to predators. All too frequently they had to look on helplessly as the weakest fell by the wayside, from either exhaustion, exposure to the elements, or hostile attack. So if the trek was long and arduous, as would commonly have been the case, the column would have been constantly diminishing in length, as more and more stragglers fell by the wayside. Some deportees may in effect have undertaken a death march, with most if not all dying along the way—the fate of hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915. However, we never actually hear of this barbaric practice being enforced in the ancient world. Equal risks attended those who sought to escape by sea.

  Probably the best option for deportees was to find accommodation in the countryside surrounding the polis from which they had been evicted—in other words, to become what we would call today “internally displaced”—as many Athenians did to escape the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, though whether this was a common ploy at other times is impossible to gauge. The next best option was to seek refuge with others of the same political persuasion in a neighboring polis. This would have been feasible, however, only if their political allies were sufficiently powerful and secure to admit them. The decision to provide refuge to a group of exiles, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, would hardly have been uncontroversial, so the deportees needed to make a powerful appeal to the self-interest of their hosts. Aristocrats presumably had the best chance of finding refuge abroad by claiming guest-friendship, an institution that was still very much alive in the classical period (see later, chapter 7).

  How the deportees were accommodated inside the receiving polis is unclear. It might have been possible to distribute a small group of individuals in existing dwellings, but a large group would have had to live in tents or their equivalent, perhaps outside the city walls. If numerous, they posed a serious threat to the political and social stability of the polis, not least because they would have imposed a heavy burde
n on the city’s infrastructure. And the longer the deportees remained, the more likely they were to incur resentment—a phenomenon known today, somewhat euphemistically, as “compassion fatigue.”1

  Unless a preexisting tie existed or unless they could demonstrate their usefulness to the receiving community, their chances of survival were slim. When stasis broke out in Arcadia in 370/69, more than 1,400 fled, some to Pallantium, others to Sparta. Those who fled to Pallantium were slaughtered, whereas those who sought refuge in Sparta prevailed upon their hosts to come to their assistance (D.S. 15.59). Another striking example involves a Gallic tribe called the Mandubii, who, after being deported from Alesia, tearfully appealed to Julius Caesar to receive them inside his fortifications, even offering to become slaves in perpetuity in return for food (Gal. 7.78). Caesar responded by setting guards on the ramparts to prevent the Alesians from entering—an example of refoulement—namely, the expulsion of a refugee “to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened” (Article 33, paragraph 1, of the 1951 Refugee Convention). In consequence of their rejection, they probably starved to death, and the fact that Caesar does not refrain from mentioning the incident indicates that he expected his readers to accept it as routine.

  Whether or not deportees stayed together in one group depended on circumstances. A large group is more able to defend itself, but its size becomes a risk when food is in short supply. At times it would have been in the best interests of deportees to break up into small groups. When the Athenians deported the Samians in ca. 365, some settled on the mainland opposite, some took refuge in cities along the coast of Asia Minor, and others probably served as mercenaries under the Persian king, since Philip II of Macedon had recognized the Athenian claim to their island (D.S. 18.56.7). The few Samian deportees who survived—probably no more than a handful—returned to their homeland a generation later (see chapter 11).