Some of the most popular sanctuaries for asylum-seekers were situated either on the coast or on an offshore island, no doubt because many of them arrived by boat, while others, using it as a way station, sought to escape by sea. They include the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus, the sanctuary of Hera at Perachora, and the sanctuaries of Poseidon at Geraestus (southernmost Euboea), Calauria (an island off the coast at Troezen), Sunium (on the south coast of Attica), and Taenarum (at the tip of the Mani peninsula).
Settling Asylum-Seekers Long-Term
Once asylum-seekers had successfully petitioned to become long-term residents within the state, what became of them? The only detailed discussion of this question occurs in Aeschylus’s Suppliants. Following the passing of the decree permitting him and his daughters to reside permanently in the land, Danaüs makes the following announcement (ll. 609–14):
We are to reside freely as permanent immigrants in the land. We cannot be seized as surety [?] and we are to enjoy asulia from all men. No resident or alien has the right to carry us off as slaves. If anyone uses force against us, any gamoros [landowner] who fails to render us assistance will be atimos [deprived of civic rights] and driven into exile by public decree.
Danaüs’s words are obviously intended to reproduce the phrasing of the decree. Indeed they may well be a paraphrase of an actual decree granting immigrant status to asylum-seekers. Later in the play the Argive king Pelasgus deals with the practical question of how to accommodate the new residents in his community. He suggests that they should take up residence in what he calls dômatia dêmia (public dwellings). This presumably means either public hostels or, more plausibly, privately owned houses belonging to wealthy individuals that are capable of accommodating a large number of guests for an extended period. The Danaids, it seems, will be allowed to either cohabit as a group or live in separate houses. Pelasgus does not indicate whether the separate houses would constitute a ghetto of sorts or be scattered throughout the city. He makes much of these seemingly trivial details, which are repeated about a hundred lines later in the play, where he states that the Danaids will not be charged rent (ll. 1009–1011). He ends by announcing that he and the citizen body will act as their official prostatês (legal representative), the title, incidentally, of an Athenian who represented the interests of a metic (see later, chapter 9).
Mistreating Asylum-Seekers
Despite the belief that the gods punished those who violated asulia with extreme severity, the plight of suppliants was uncertain at best. Trickery, deception, and other forms of entrapment were used to entice them away from their place of refuge. In fact the earliest instance of asylum-seeking in the historical record also happens to be the earliest instance when asylum was violated. In ca. 632 an Athenian named Cylon made an abortive attempt to establish a tyranny. When it failed, he and his supporters took refuge at an altar on the Acropolis. Just when they were on the point of starving to death, the suppliants were encouraged to leave the sanctuary under promise of safe conduct. But instead they were slaughtered. The instigator of these killings was Megacles, a member of the highly prestigious Athenian genos (noble kin group) known as the Alcmaeonids. As punishment for this sacrilege, the Athenians pronounced a curse on the genos and its descendants in perpetuity. In consequence, all its living members were driven into exile and the bones of their dead were disinterred and cast out of Attica, though the curse was later rescinded (Hdt. 5.71; Thuc. 1.126.3–12).
A similar instance occurred in Sparta in ca. 471 when the regent Pausanias took refuge in the sanctuary of Athena on the Spartan Acropolis to escape arrest by the ephors, who had charged him with offering citizenship to helot rebels. The ephors barricaded him inside the temple and when Pausanias was on the point of starvation they dragged him outside so that his corpse should not pollute the sanctuary (Thuc. 1.134). What made their action especially offensive was the fact that they had previously tricked him into making a confession by having a former servant of his pose as a suppliant. Again, when an unnamed Aeginetan, along with 700 others, was being led to his execution by the ruling oligarchical faction on Aegina, he managed to break his shackles and escape to the sanctuary of Demeter Thesmophorus. The Aeginetan grasped the door handles so tightly that his would be captors resorted to the desperate remedy of “chopping off his hands and leading him in that manner, with his hands still attached to the door handles” (Hdt. 6.91.2).
The weakness of the institution of asulia is further illustrated by examples of suppliants who narrowly escaped massacre. In 427 the oligarchic party in Corcyra, fearing that the democrats were going to draft them as rowers in the fleet and ship them off to Athens, sought asylum in the sanctuary of the Dioscuri. The democrats were barely restrained by the Athenians from using violence against “any whom they encountered” (Thuc. 3.75.2–4). Left to their own devices, they would evidently have put their enemies to the sword, including those inside the sanctuary itself. Especially horrendous is what happened shortly afterward. Members of the oligarchic faction who had fled to the sanctuary of Hera, now realizing that they would be massacred by the democrats, “proceeded to slay one another within the sanctuary, while some hanged themselves on the trees and others took their own lives as best they were able” (3.81.3).
Whenever a city was taken by siege, it was common practice for noncombatants to seek refuge on sacred property in the hope that their lives would be spared. Rarely, however, do we hear of compassion being extended to them. On the contrary, both in literature and in vase paintings, it is the mistreatment of those seeking refuge at altars and other holy places that is insisted upon repeatedly. When, for instance, Alexander the Great took Thebes in 335, we are told that “women, children, and the elderly who had fled to the shrines were dragged off and subjected to the utmost outrage” (D.S. 17.13.6; cf. Arr. Anab. 1.8.8). Alexander’s treatment of Thebes was perhaps exceptional only in the sheer number of suppliants who were treated in this way.
To conclude, it seems doubtful whether asulia and the attendant and related institution of hikesia served the interests of migrants and refugees to any appreciable degree. It has been suggested that by the end of the fifth century “supplication … was becoming increasingly a ritual whose binding force was weakening in face of the counter-strain of political realities” (Gould 1973, 101). Overall the evidence tends to indicate that this was true.1 Then as now, those whose request for sanctuary had failed were either deported or simply disappeared into an underground world, subject to various forms of exploitation.
Athens’s Exceptionalism
When the Attic dramatists reshaped traditional Greek myths to foreground Athenian preoccupations and concerns, they created an idealized image of their city that embodied the civic virtues that their countrymen professed to espouse. It was Athens, their plays proclaimed, that practices justice, opposes tyranny, demonstrates compassion for the weak, and provides sanctuary for the oppressed, not least by offering asylum in courageous defiance of threats from those communities from which the suppliants have fled. Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and Euripides’ Madness of Heracles, Descendants of Heracles, Suppliants, and Medea all demonstrate (in varying nuanced ways) Athens standing up for the weak and oppressed.
The heated exchange between Demophon, king of Athens, and Copreus, herald of Eurystheus, king of Argos, in Euripides’ Descendants of Heracles (possibly dated 430) reveals the pride that the Athenians took in their reputation for resisting attempts by foreigners to secure the handover of asylum-seekers. The dialogue takes place inside the sanctuary of Zeus at Marathon, where the refugees are currently sheltering (ll. 252–66):
DEMOPHON: You will never take these men away with you.
HERALD: What if my cause is just and my argument prevails?
DEMOPHON: How can it be just to drag away a suppliant by force?
HERALD: What if it brought no shame to me and no harm to you?
DEMOPHON: But it would indeed harm me, if I let you drag them off.
HERALD: Just leave them outside your borders. We’ll handle them from that point.
DEMOPHON: You’re stupid if you think you can hoodwink the god.
HERALD: This is obviously the place where outlaws find refuge.
DEMOPHON: This holy spot affords protection to all …
HERALD: I wouldn’t like to see you having us as your enemy.
DEMOPHON: Nor would I. But I’m not going to hand these men over.
Brave words indeed, though we should note that Euripides never presents things in black and white terms. Eurystheus, the villain of the piece, when caught, admits that he has mistreated the refugees, but Alcmene, Heracles’ mother, is objectionable in the way that she bays for his blood. Demophon is not entirely principled either. He makes it clear that his primary motive for providing asylum is concern for his honor, “which I chiefly have to think about” (l. 242). He later tells the Chorus: “Some say that it is right to help strangers, others claim that I am acting like a fool” (ll. 416–18). Public opinion, in other words, is very much to the fore in his calculation.
When the blind and elderly Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus appeals to the chorus to be allowed to reside within their territory, he commends Athens for being “the city that has more power than any other to give me, the wronged stranger, refuge, and more power than any other to come to my rescue” (ll. 261–62).
The literary topos of Athens offering a secure haven for the oppressed also occurs in oratory, as in the appeal by a Plataean representative discussed earlier (Isoc. 14.1):
Since we Plataeans are aware, Athenians, that you are accustomed eagerly to come to the help of those who have been wronged and since we know too that you most generously reward your benefactors, we come as hiketeusontes [suppliants] in the hope that you will not overlook the fact that we have been uprooted from our land in peacetime by the Thebans. And since many people have fled to you and have received all they required, we think that it is especially proper that you show consideration for our city.
Elsewhere Isocrates describes Athens as offering “the securest kataphugê [refuge]” to those who are oppressed, conclusive proof being that the city provided succor for the descendants of Heracles when they were returning to the Peloponnese after many generations (4.41, 54–56). It is perhaps telling that no more recent example of any note came to his mind.
The Athenians were clearly susceptible to the image of themselves as a humane society that was uniquely protective of the oppressed. No doubt it filled them with a sense of gratification and pride. We know, too, that they successfully promulgated it outside their borders and that it endured over time. Plutarch, writing in the late first century CE, states that Athens had already secured its reputation for hospitality to asylum-seekers by the time of Solon (that is, early sixth century BCE), when “the city was teeming with people constantly flooding into Attica from all over the Mediterranean seeking refuge” (Sol. 22.1).
Did the Athenian dêmos live up to this vision in reality? I strongly suspect that, like every other community, it was receptive to refugees only when it suited its purpose to be so and that there was no more compassion in the breast of an average Athenian than there was in that of any other ancient Greek. The sobering fact remains, moreover, that there are virtually no historical instances of foreign asylum-seekers being granted residency in Athens. The 212 pro-Athenian Plataeans who escaped from their besieged city and were permitted to settle in Athens in 428/7 were accorded this right because their city was a valued ally (Thuc. 3.20.2). And when in 421 the Athenians resettled these same refugees in Scione on the western headland of Chalcidice, hundreds of miles from their homeland, they did so only after they had slaughtered all the men and enslaved the women and children who were living there (5.32.1). Other instances of Athenian “exceptionalism” were strictly quid pro quo. The Samians were offered Athenian citizenship in 405 because Samos had served as Athens’s main naval base in the Aegean during the Peloponnesian War and had remained a loyal ally even after the crushing defeat at Aegospotami (ML 94.12–15 = Fornara 166). Similarly the exiled Acarnanians were permitted to reside indefinitely in Athens because they had fought alongside the Athenians against Philip II of Macedon at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 (IG II2 237 = SIG3 259 = Rhodes and Osborne 77). In sum, what chiefly differentiated Athens from other poleis was not its treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers per se, but the fact that it was bound by a more complicated set of alliances than any other city-state.
Xenia and Proxenia
“Stranger, it is not right that I should disrespect a stranger, not even one who comes here who is more wretched than you,” declares the swineherd Eumaeus to Odysseus, when the latter returns to Ithaca in disguise. He then adds, “All strangers and beggars are under the protection of Zeus” (Hom. Od. 14.56–58). Eumaeus is alluding to the religiously sanctioned institution known as xenia, a term loosely translated as “guest-friendship,” which placed both guest and host under the protection of Zeus Xenios, as well as under a reciprocal obligation to treat each other respectfully. I justify its inclusion in this chapter on the grounds that xenia is a species of asylum that may well have developed out of the same impulse to provide protection for those who were unprotected as that which promoted asulia.
Xenia bound aristocrats and their direct descendants together in perpetuity. Just before the Greek Diomedes and the Trojan Glaucus are about to engage in single combat, they realize that their grandfathers were linked by xenia.” For this reason I am your xeinosphilos [friend and host] in the heart of Argos, and you are mine in Lycia, when I come to your land,” says Diomedes. They then exchange armor “so that others may know that we are guests and friends from the time of our fathers.” Glaucus, it turns out, comes off by far the worse, handing over his gold armor and receiving bronze in return (Il. 6.224–31).
But though xenia primarily served the needs of mobile aristocrats, Eumaeus’s suggestion that it was occasionally practiced by persons of no social distinction, though idealistic, may not be wholly fantastical. After all, any Greek who was on the road would have had to throw himself at times on the mercy of strangers. There were few if any wayside inns, and sleeping under the stars would have been extremely dangerous. In fact it is highly likely that xenia came into being as a response to widespread mobility. And as we have seen already, it bound together Greeks and non-Greeks, particularly at the high end of the social scale. Herodotus informs us that when Croesus, king of Lydia, sent a messenger with gifts and requested an alliance with the Spartans, the latter “rejoiced in the arrival of the Lydians and swore oaths regarding both guest-friendship and an alliance” (1.69.1–3).
By the first half of the fifth century many states, including Athens, had placed the care of their members when traveling abroad in the hands of local citizens known as proxenoi (literally “those who represent xenoi”). Proxenoi were expected to provide those whose state they represented with hospitality and other services, particularly if they were visiting dignitaries. They also represented them in court, when they fell foul of the law. For obvious reasons the ideal candidates for the position were wealthy aristocrats who had extensive connections abroad and were themselves well-traveled. A number of proxenoi were honored by the city they represented, at times by the grant of citizenship.
It is generally believed that proxenia had its origins in guest friendship, the plausible theory being that private ties of hospitality gradually evolved into public ones (Walbank 1978, 2–3). Like xenia, proxenia testifies to the prevalence of travel in the ancient world. From the archaic period onward there was an increasing flow of travelers moving throughout the Greek world, some to cities that were centers of trading activity, others to those that sponsored athletic games, and still others to cities that possessed a sanctuary of international repute. Proxenia offered those travelers who resided temporarily abroad some measure of protection and support.
1 Chaniotis (1996, 83) offers a slightly more nuanced assessment: “At the latest from th
e early fifth century asulia and supplication were increasingly becoming claims which ought not to be respected automatically, but only after a close examination of each individual case.”
8
THE FUGITIVE
Fugitives in Archaic Literature
Murderers and homicides, condemned to live either on the margins of society or completely outside it, are prevalent in Greek literature. We already encounter them in Homer, often in hauntingly abbreviated passages that leave us uncertain as to what has brought these individuals to such a pass. All that we know about Bellerophon, for instance, is that Proteus of Argos drove him into exile “because he was far stronger” (Il. 6.157–59), although a later version states that he was falsely accused of attempting to seduce Proteus’s wife. Having incurred the hatred of the gods, Bellerophon wandered along the Aleian or Wandering Plain, “eating his heart out, avoiding the path of men” (Il. 6.200–202). It sounds like a fate worse than death—solitary confinement in a boundless space where he and others of his kind traipse back and forth endlessly to no purpose and with no outcome. Was Bellerophon condemned to search out this path or did society’s rejection force it upon him? Elsewhere we learn that he is a homicide, but the details are not spelled out.
Bellerophon was, to his cost, a loner, but Tlepolemus, the son of Heracles, enjoyed divine support, and that made all the difference to a man on the run. Having murdered his father’s elderly uncle Licymnius, he assembled a small fleet, gathered a sizable company, and fled from his brothers and nephews. Eventually he arrived at Rhodes, “an alômenos [wanderer] and a man of sorrow”’ where his luck changed dramatically. He was able to establish a settlement on the island with three tribal groupings. It clearly helped that he was “beloved of Zeus,” epecially since Zeus turned a blind eye to his crime. In fact Tlepolemus prospered so much that he was able to contribute nine ships to the expedition to Troy, which indicates that he had managed to turn his life around (Il. 2.653–70).
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