Wandering Greeks

by Garland, Robert

  Many of the refugees must have slept rough on the shoreline, clutching a few valuables, before a berth on board ship could be assigned to them. Priority was presumably given to the women and children, though how some semblance of order was maintained among the mêlée is unclear. We know little of what became of the tens of thousands of slaves. Some must have been left behind, others fled of their own accord, while those who were able-bodied were conscripted into the navy. A minority, seen as essential to the welfare of their owners, may have been evacuated. Could an Athenian live without a slave?

  Plutarch evocatively describes the scene on the day of the departure to Salamis (Them. 10.5):

  As the polis set sail, the spectacle filled some with pity, others with admiration at the daring of the move, as the Athenians dispatched their dependents in one direction and themselves crossed over to Salamis, oblivious to the shrieks, tears, and embraces of their nearest and dearest. The many elderly, who had to be left behind, aroused compassion. Tame and domesticated animals added to the commotion by displaying heartrending affection for their owners, running along beside them and howling as they embarked.

  To add to the poignancy, Plutarch tells us that a dog belonging to Xanthippus, the father of Pericles, swam alongside the trireme that was transporting his master to Salamis, only to expire as soon as it reached dry land (10.6). A revered spot on the island known as the Dog’s Tomb allegedly marked the grave centuries after.

  No historian tells us how precisely the population was conveyed from Attica. A trireme’s complement consisted of about 200, of whom 170 were rowers, so there would have been hardly any room for passengers. Even if it had been possible to reduce the number of rowers, conveying passengers in a vessel of this sort would have been cumbersome and hazardous. As in a canoe, even a small movement could unbalance the ship and throw the rowers into confusion. Added to which, there was no deck rail. We hear of Darius ordering the manufacture of what are called “ships for transporting horses” in advance of his expedition to Greece in 490 (Hdt. 6.48 and 95). It is not improbable that the Athenians had ships of this sort at their disposal by 480 and that they used them for transporting people. Another possibility is that they commandeered merchant ships belonging to foreigners that were docking in the Piraeus or Phaleron Bay, as well as all those that belonged to Athenian traders.

  Plutarch (Them. 10.3) tells us that the women and children who were dispatched to Troezen were warmly welcomed by the inhabitants. The Troezenians had previously passed a law to the effect that they would “support them at public expense, give two obols to each family each day, permit the boys to pluck ripe fruit everywhere, and hire teachers to educate them.” These measures suggest that they expected the refugees to be with them for some considerable time. The warmth of the reception sounds almost too good to be true and perhaps we should take it with a pinch of salt, despite the fact that Plutarch supplies the name of the man who introduced the bill—an otherwise unknown Nicagoras.

  Hardly surprisingly there were a number of Athenians who were reluctant to abandon their homes, hearths, temples, and tombs, and who elected instead to wait upon events. When the threat of invasion became real following the breaking of the defense line at Artemisium-Thermopylae, however, panic probably set in, even among the most hardened. The only ones who were undeterred were those who chose to interpret the oracle urging the Athenians to “trust in the wooden wall” as a reference to the wooden palisade surrounding the Acropolis. They took refuge on that rock, determined to defend it to the last.

  At this point the Athenians may have appealed to the combined Greek fleet to put in at Salamis to assist them in a secondary, viz emergency, evacuation of those still remaining. It is probably this last-minute evacuation that Herodotus describes, having omitted to mention the more orderly withdrawal (8.40–41). The allies no doubt obliged, and the Athenian fleet, which now comprised and spoke for the dêmos, issued a proclamation to the effect that “every Athenian should do what he could to save his children and other family members”—a clear indication that the state had limited means to assist the remaining evacuees. Convinced that Athena had abandoned the Acropolis since her sacred snake was no longer taking food, “they now made haste to remove all they had.” Soon afterward, as we saw in chapter 4, Themistocles threatened to relocate the city permanently, should the Greek coalition decide to abandon Attica and retreat to the Isthmus of Corinth. No surviving source tells us anything about the evacuees after the Battle of Salamis, and we do not know when they actually returned to their homes.

  The Athenians were not the only ones to evacuate their city in advance of the Persians. So, too, did the Plataeans and Thespians, who fled south en masse to the Peloponnese (D.S. 11.14.5). No doubt many other Greek peoples who inhabited cities in the direct line of fire, so to speak, between the Hellespont and Attica also took to their heels. Herodotus tells us that as the Persians advanced south they “destroyed everything,” sanctuaries included. They also gang-raped Phocian women, many of whom died as a result (8.33, 35, 50.2). It was these actions and others like them that earned them the name “barbarian.”

  The Evacuation of Attica at the Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War

  At the beginning of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, produced in 425, Dicaeopolis, the protagonist, is standing in the Assembly awaiting the arrival of the prytaneis (presidents), who will declare the meeting open. He characterizes himself as “looking away in the direction of my farm, longing for peace, hating the city, and longing for my village” (ll.32–33). In view of these sentiments, there is a strong likelihood that Dicaeopolis is one of the tens of thousands of Athenians residing in rural demes who evacuated the countryside when the Peloponnesians announced their intention to ravage Attica.

  Thucydides tells us that the country-dwellers were “dispirited and did not bear the change easily” (2.14; cf. 2.16.2). That is an understatement, if ever there was one, and one to which Dicaeopolis’s nostalgia for the countryside gives strident utterance. Indeed the Acharnians might plausibly be interpreted as a commentary on the nostalgic longings of evacuees for the rural life that they have had to renounce. Their unhappiness would have been all the more acute because, as Thucydides points out, many of them had only recently rebuilt their dwellings after the destruction caused by the Persians half a century earlier.

  The scale of the evacuation and the disruption it caused are scarcely imaginable. Since the majority of Athenians were living in the countryside at the time the war broke out, the population of the city would have virtually doubled overnight, increasing by between 50,000 and 100,000 (Thuc. 2.16.1).

  Pericles, who was the architect of the strategy that now converted Athens, the Long Walls, and the Piraeus to a fortified island enclave, probably envisaged that the war would be over in a few months and that the refugees would be able to return to their homes at the end of the first year’s fighting season. How wrong he was. They would remain cooped up for weeks on end for at least five years in the most insanitary conditions imaginable. The waste disposal system was nowhere near sufficient to deal with the huge influx of people and animals. A horrific plague soon broke out and morale was seriously undermined. Meanwhile the Peloponnesians destroyed their homes and ravaged their crops, completely unchecked and unimpeded.

  Thucydides provides few details about the evacuation. He simply notes that the refugees took from their homes not only their furniture but also whatever else was made of wood, including doors, frames, shutters, and the like, wood being in very short supply and therefore valuable (2.14). He also tells us that the Athenians “conveyed their flocks and beasts of burden to Euboea and other neighboring islands.” The fate of their pigs, goats, and chickens, as well as of their household pets, is not stated but many were presumably conveyed within the walls.

  We do not know how long the evacuation took to implement, though it seems that the exercise was still going on when the Peloponnesians first invaded Attica in late May or early June 431 (2.18). Families living in the
outlying demes probably had to spend at least two nights on the road, since some were located thirty miles or more from Athens. It is unclear how the flow of refugees was handled or what facilities were available either en route or on arrival. We should presumably imagine a long line queuing outside the city gates when the migration was at its height—assuming that the evacuees knew how to queue. And once inside the city, how and where were they fed? Who took responsibility for their welfare? How were they assigned a place to bed down? Many of the refugees must have arrived footsore, exhausted, and demoralized, particularly the pregnant women, the elderly, and the infirm.

  It is also unclear what percentage of country dwellers actually obeyed the summons that the dêmos had issued. After all, it would have been extremely difficult to enforce. Inevitably, some must have been too sick or too frail to make the journey, while others of an independent mindset may have calculated that their farms were so remote that they would be safe against depredation from the enemy. They were right. The Peloponnesians invaded Attica five times, but never ravaged Decelea, Marathon, or even the Academy just outside the city walls, destined to be the future site of Plato’s philosophical school (Hansen 2005, 54).

  Inevitably disaffection ran high among segments of the population once the Peloponnesians, some 30,000 in all, invaded Attica. We know this to have been the case at the outlying deme of Acharnae, whose inhabitants were among the first to see their farms being ravaged and who constituted a sizable percentage of Athens’s army. Later, exasperated, weakened, and demoralized, the citizen body as a whole took vengeance on Pericles for causing such hardship by ousting him from the board of ten generals, though it later relented and reinstated him.

  MAP 6 Athens, Piraeus, and the Long Walls.

  Though a handful of wealthy families owned a second home in the city while other Athenians had relatives or friends whose homes served as a kataphugê (place of refuge) (2.17.1), the vast majority had to settle either where they happened upon a vacant space or else where the authorities directed them—that is to say, in sanctuaries and hero shrines, beside the fortification walls, and on land that had previously been unoccupied (see map 6). Even land that lay under a curse was eventually settled, including an unidentified plot below the Acropolis called the Pelargicum. Only sanctuaries that could be locked up, notably the Acropolis and the temple of Eleusinian Demeter, remained out of bounds. At first all the refugees were crammed into Athens. As the pressure on space increased, however, they were permitted to settle along the unoccupied strips inside the Long Walls, as well as in the Piraeus (2.17.3). It was the dense concentration of evacuees in the Piraeus that was probably responsible for the outbreak of plague, since the port was largely dependent for its drinking water on cisterns that caught rainwater, and these quickly became polluted (Thuc. 2.48.2).

  Perhaps the wood that had been salvaged was used to fashion the temporary homes that Thucydides refers to as “stifling shacks” (2.52.2). Those who lacked this resource would have had to live in makeshift tents. The entire urban area now became the ancient equivalent of a modern day refugee camp, divided probably along demotic or tribal lines. Perhaps the Athenians derived some small comfort from the inspirational speech that Pericles gave in late September or early October over those who had fallen in the first year of the war (2.34–46). Conceivably the full horror of their circumstances had yet to sink in. It would do so a few months later, when the plague broke out.

  Thucydides says nothing further about the evacuees, other than to note that it was they who suffered most from the plague (2.52.1). Though he describes the symptoms of the disease in painstaking detail, he says nothing of the toll it took on family life, other than to deplore the lawlessness that it engendered. It is estimated that infant mortality commonly ran at least as high as 25 percent in the ancient world. Given the many debilitating diseases that would have afflicted the refugees, it may well have doubled in this period.

  The maximum number of days that the invasion lasted each year was forty (2.57.2), and after the Peloponnesians had departed, perhaps in June, the evacuees would have been free to return to their homes. Since the Peloponnesians presumably targeted a fresh area each year, as the war continued more and more Athenians would have returned to find their farms laid waste. The annual cycle was repeated until 425, when the Spartans who had been holed up on the island of Sphacteria surrendered to the Athenians. And yet this momentous event receives no mention in Thucydides. It is possible that some evacuees, out of either preference or inertia, may have chosen to remain in the city. If so, one of the most significant social consequences of the war was to cause a shift from the countryside to the city, though the evidence for such a migration is tantalizingly inconclusive.

  Several other cities had evacuated their rural populations on the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. When the Athenians invaded Boeotia, for instance, the inhabitants of several townships in Boeotia had migrated to Thebes, thereby doubling the size of its population (Hell. Oxy. 12.3). Likewise, before the Thebans began investing Plataea, the Athenians had escorted all the women, children, and other noncombatants to Athens, where they remained for the duration of the war (Thuc. 2.6.3; see earlier, chapter 5). Though these are the only examples that we hear of, other communities may well have responded similarly. One of the largest evacuations must have been that of the Syracusans in 414, in advance of the Athenian attempt to invest their city by land and by sea (cf. Thuc. 6.102).

  Evacuations during the Punic Wars in Sicily

  A number of Greek cities in Sicily were forced to evacuate their populations during the First and Second Punic Wars that were fought between Dionysius I of Syracuse and the Carthaginians. In 406, the year of the outbreak of the first of these wars, the Carthaginians began besieging Acragas, whose people had refused their offer of an alliance. As the siege dragged on, the city began to run out of food. Eventually, when the Carthaginians intercepted a consignment of grain that the Syracusans had sent for their relief, their generals ordered an immediate evacuation (see map 2). So one night in mid-December the entire population departed under military escort for Gela, a coastal city that lay some 40 miles to the east. Diodorus graphically describes the scene as follows (13.89.1–3):

  Because there was such a mass of men, women and children leaving the city, a sudden outburst of tears and lamentation filled people’s homes. Fear of the enemy gripped them, while at the same time, because of the haste with which they had to act, they were compelled to abandon to the barbarians all the things that had given them so much joy…. It was not only the wealth of this great city that was being left behind but also a great multitude of human beings. For the sick were neglected by their relatives, since everyone looked after his own interests. Those, too, who were elderly, were abandoned because of their infirmity. Many who reckoned that separation from their homeland was equal to death laid violent hands upon themselves so that they might expire in the family home. The multitude that left the city, however, was at least under military escort as far as Gela. The highway and all the parts of the countryside leading to Gela was thronged with women, children, and young girls, who, exchanging the pampered lifestyle to which they had been accustomed for a strenuous march and extreme hardship, held out to the bitter end, their spirits toughened by fear.

  The Carthaginians took control of Acragas the next day. Almost all of those who had remained in the city were massacred. Acragas—a very rich city—was sacked and all its treasures were shipped to Carthage.

  There is no knowing how the evacuees survived the long march. Though it is inspiring to read of “spirits toughened by fear,” many surely collapsed along the way. A trek of 40 miles undertaken by night is a challenge even for the most vigorous spirits, as Diodorus concedes. He indicates that the evacuees did not walk in a column but spread themselves out over the countryside, which was inevitable given the fact that the “road” would have been little better than a dirt track, so they would also have been extremely vulnerable to predators. We learn noth
ing about their reception by the Geloans. How much advance warning had they received? In the event Gela proved to be only a temporary stop for the refugees, who “some time later” were permitted by the Syracusans to settle in Leontini (13.89.4).

  A year later they were uprooted again. Following his defeat at the Battle of Gela, Dionysius negotiated a temporary truce with the Carthaginians to recover his dead. Under cover of darkness he then evacuated the population of Gela (including presumably the Acragantine refugees), by leaving fires that burned all night to deceive the enemy. No doubt the mood of the evacuees would have been made more miserable by the fact that they had to leave their dead unburied.

  FIGURE 11 Bronze onkia (a coin used by the Sicilian Greeks equivalent to one-sixtieth of an Attic drachma) from Camarina, ca. 420–405. The obverse depicts the head of a gorgon. The reverse depicts an owl with a lizard in its left claw. The legend reads KAM(ARINAIÔN). According to tradition Camarina was founded in ca. 598 by settlers from Syracuse. It was destroyed by Gelon in 484 and its population transferred to Syracuse. It remained practically deserted until its refoundation by settlers from Gela in 461. In 405 Dionysius I forcibly evacuated the population to Syracuse, whereupon the Carthaginians destroyed the abandoned city. This coin is dated to the years shortly before that destruction. Not long afterward the refugees left Syracuse for Leontini. Camarina was repopulated by Timoleon (D.S. 16.82.7; cf. Talbert 1974, 149–50).

  A few days later, as Diodorus reports, Dionysius ordered the evacuation of Camarina, a coastal city that lay 20 miles to the east of Gela, calculating that it would have been unable to withstand a siege once winter advanced (13.111.3–6):

  Their fear did not permit the people of Camarina to delay. Some of them grabbed the silver and gold they possessed and anything else that they could easily transport. Others, however, fled only with their parents and infant children, paying no thought to their valuables. A number of elderly and sick people who had no friends or relatives were abandoned, since the Carthaginians were expected to arrive any minute…. Now that the inhabitants of two cities had been uprooted, the countryside was awash with women and children and every manner of riff-raff. When the troops saw this, they were incensed at Dionysius and pitied the lot of those who were his luckless victims. For they saw freeborn boys and young girls of marriageable age hurrying along the road in a manner that was quite indecent for persons of their years. In similar fashion they felt sympathy for the elderly, as they saw them being compelled beyond their natural resources to keep up with those still in the prime of life.