Wandering Greeks

by Garland, Robert

  In wartime all Greek travelers, itinerants included, would have been at grave risk. When at the outset of the Peloponnesian War some Peloponnesian ambassadors were passing through Thrace on their way to solicit help from the Persians, the Thracian king handed them over to some Athenians who happened to be at his court. The latter escorted them to Athens, where upon arrival they were summarily executed and their bodies cast into a pit (Thuc. 2.6).

  Itinerants in Classical Greece

  Dêmiourgoi remained a feature of the classical landscape. Given the increase in population from the archaic period, they would have become much more numerous. They are also the first celebrities whose reputations owed nothing to either birth or privilege.

  Homer’s classification of itinerants begins with manteis (seers) or charismatic religious specialists, as we might call them. Manteis comprised both women and men, traveled extensively, and sometimes received high honors. Teisamenus of Elis, for instance, was granted Spartan citizenship for his services as a military seer—virtually a unique privilege in that closed society (Hdt. 9.35.1). Though it no doubt helped to be able to trace one’s lineage back several generations to a legendary diviner, all one actually needed to set oneself up in business was a collection of prophecies. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some manteis abused their position of trust. One such was Thrasyllus of Siphnos, who, after being bequeathed a set of scrolls by a childless seer called Polemaenetus, “became an itinerant, passed his time in many cities, and had intimate relations with several women, some of whom gave birth to children he never recognized as legitimate.” Having acquired a fortune abroad, he returned home to Siphnos, where he became its wealthiest citizen (Isoc. 19.5–9). In the absence of what we would call today “quality control,” fraudulence must have been rife within the profession. Oedipus’s taunting of the blind seer Teiresias for having “eyes only for profit” no doubt drew appreciative nods from some members of Sophocles’ audience (OT 380–89; cf. Ant. 1033–47). Plato, too, was scathing toward the profession, castigating “agurtai [begging priests] and manteis who go to the houses of rich men and persuade them that they hold power from the gods by virtue of their sacrifices and spells” (Rep. 2.364b).

  Rhapsodes or song-stitchers, probably so-named because they provided extempore performances, were also perpetually on the move, competing for prizes at public festivals. Plato’s Ion is named for a famous rhapsode from Ephesus who tells Socrates at the beginning of the dialogue that he has just arrived in Athens from Epidaurus. Ion has won first prize in the quadrennial games held in honor of the healing god Asclepius and is confident that he will be equally successful in the forthcoming Panathenaic Games. The ubiquity of rhapsodes throughout the Greek world is indicated by the claim of one aficionado that he listened to their recitations “almost every day” (Xen. Symp. 3.6). From the fourth century onward, actors also traveled widely, often specializing in set-piece renditions, such as Timotheus of Zacynthus, who became famed for his memorable rendition of Ajax’s suicide (Sch. ad Soph. Ajax 864).

  A number of big-name sophists were itinerants, delivering public lectures and offering formal instruction to students, for which they were handsomely rewarded. They include Protagoras of Abdera, Gorgias of Leontini, Hippias of Elis, and Thrasymachus of Chalcedon. Though Athens was their primary venue, it was by no means their only destination. Hippias of Elis, for instance, claimed to have earned twenty minae—a very considerable sum of money—by lecturing to the inhabitants of a small Sicilian village (Pl. Hp. Ma. 282e). Sophists made appearances at the Panhellenic games, and it may well be that something akin to the modern lecture circuit was established by the middle of the fifth century. Though the length of their sojourn in any one place varied, it is likely that those at the top of their profession were constantly on the move. Philosophers were also in high demand. Diogenes the Cynic is known to have visited Megara, Myndus, Samothrace, Olympia, Sparta, Delphi, as well as Athens (D.L. 6.41, 57, 59–60). They were often accompanied by an admiring group of pupils, as we know from the fact that Aeneas Tacticus recommended keeping a register of foreigners who were resident “for education or any other purpose” (10.10).

  Celebrity dramatists became the equivalent of present-day artists-in-residence at prestigious universities. Aeschylus accepted an invitation from the tyrant Hieron I of Syracuse in ca. 476 to visit his court and write a play in celebration of the foundation of Aetna (see earlier, chapter 5; Vit. Aes. 8–11). Euripides’ Andromache (dated 425) received its first performance abroad, no doubt with the poet in attendance (Sch. ad l. 445). Later Euripides visited Magnesia in Thessaly, where he was treated as an honored guest. Toward the end of his life he accepted an invitation to reside at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, where he wrote a lost play called Archelaus, which sought to justify the king’s shaky dynastic claim to the throne. He remained in Macedon until his death two or three years later (Vit. Eur. 21–25).

  Last, sculptors and other kinds of artists were itinerants. The Athenian Phidias, who was the most celebrated sculptor of his generation, undertook important commissions both at Delphi and Olympia. And when a famous sculptor like Lysippus of Sicyon undertook one of his many commissions abroad it is natural to suppose that he was accompanied by a small army of apprentices. Noteworthy, too, is the ethnic diversity of the craftsmen who worked on the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus in the 370s. The chryselephantine statue was the product of ivory workers from Aegina, Ephesus, and Sicyon; of stonemasons from Athens and Corinth; of joiners from Corinth; and of a painter from Corinth. The workforce that constructed the temple consisted of Argives, Athenians, and Corinthians (Burford 1969, 199). And when the city of Thebes was rebuilt in 316 following its destruction by Alexander the Great some twenty years earlier, it was masons from Athens who constructed “the greater portion of its walls,” and Greeks from cities in Sicily and Italy who erected buildings “to the extent of their ability” (D.S. 19.54.2).

  Long-Distance Traders

  From the twelfth to the eighth centuries, trade in the Greek world had contracted sharply, almost to the point of extinction. It revived in the eighth century, as we learn both from Homer and archaeology. At the beginning of the Odyssey we encounter Mentes, the lord of the Taphians—actually the goddess Athena in disguise—who has disembarked on Ithaca in search of bronze while en route for Temese with a cargo of iron ingots (1.184). Neither Taphus nor Temese is mentioned elsewhere in Greek literature, so we do not know how far Mentes sailed with his cargo before landing on Ithaca nor how far away is his destination, but perhaps that is Homer’s point—these were places off the map.

  The Homeric poems lead us to suppose that most long-distance traders were Phoenicians. As Finley (2002, 67) noted, there is no word for “trader” in Homeric Greek. To be a Phoenician meant in effect being either a trader or a pirate. When Nestor greets Telemachus at Pylos, he says, “Strangers, who are you? Where do you come from along the sea lanes? Are you traveling for trade? Or are you roaming like pirates?” (Od. 3.71–74; cf. 9.252–55). It is, however, tendentious, to see these two “vocations,” as we might call them, as mutually exclusive. On the contrary, many traders would have engaged in piracy when the opportunity offered itself. As scholars have regularly noted, both trading and piracy are forms of redistribution. Given their close association with piracy, it is hardly surprising that the Phoenicians constituted a byword for greed (Od. 14.288–89; 15.415–16). The prejudice they experienced subsequently extended to merchants in general and to Greek merchants in particular. It was partly for this reason that wealth accruing from land ownership was judged superior to wealth that had been acquired from (dubious) commercial undertakings.

  The contribution that mercantile itinerants made to Greek civilization can hardly be overestimated, however. It was largely due to them that the overseas settlement movement was so successful, that the Greeks became literate, and that their culture became informed and enriched by other cultures. And if for no other reason merchants were to be admire
d for their enterprise. Herodotus clearly admired Sostratus of Aegina (ca. 600), whom he describes as the wealthiest trader of his day (4.152.3). Sostratus’s trading activities took him from the Aegean Sea to Etruria. His voyage may have been facilitated by the diolkos (stone slipway) that was used for dragging ships across the Isthmus of Corinth between the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs, though we do not know the exact date of its construction. His name (or that of his namesake) turns up in an inscription dated to the late sixth or early fifth century on a stone anchor that was dedicated to Apollo at Gravisca in Etruria (Demetriou 2012, 64 with fig. 4). Long-distance traders who transported their wares by sea would mostly have confined their activity to the period from late spring to early autumn. Presumably they remained at home in the winter months or in a port that passed for home.

  Pirates and Brigands

  Pirates and brigands have been described as “a normal manifestation of Mediterranean production and redistribution” and “a systematic epiphenomenon of connectivity, suppressed by powerful states only for brief periods in Mediterranean history” (Horden and Purcell 2000, 387). Known as leïstai or leïsteres, they are prominent in the Homeric poems. They frequently traveled long distances in search of plunder, not only stealing movable property but also abducting women and children. Eumaeus, Odysseus’s faithful swineherd in the Odyssey, is himself a victim of human trafficking. Descended from royal stock, he was abducted by Phoenician raiders while still a child (15.403–484). Odysseus’s former nurse Eurycleia, who seems to have been of good birth, was presumably trafficked (1.429). So, too, going back one more generation, was Eumaeus’s former Sidonian nurse (15.42–29). In “real life” women and children who were trafficked would have been forced to provide sexual services.

  The Phoenicians, as we have just seen, had a reputation for raiding, but they certainly did not monopolize the profession. In fact they may well have been unfairly singled out as perpetrators. The “son of Castor,” one of the Cretan personae adopted by Odysseus when he returns incognito to Ithaca, boldly asserts that “much wealth came my way” from being a raider. He further states that he “went among the people of Crete as one who was feared and respected,” a claim that tells us much about the morally ambivalent value system that prevailed in Homeric Greece (Od. 14.234). Brigands and pirates operated more or less at will in the archaic and classical periods. Though pirates were kept in check in the fifth century, when Athenian naval power was at its height, they seem to have been particularly prevalent in the fourth century and proved largely immune to Alexander the Great’s efforts to control them (Str. Geog. 5.3.5 C232; McKechnie 1989, 122–26).

  Much about the lifestyle of such individuals is shrouded in mystery. We do not know what circumstances might have induced a man to choose such a career path. In some cases the career no doubt ran in the family; in others it was the result of exigency. Many able-bodied refugees must have turned their hand to raiding, whether on land or on the high seas. We tend to think of raiders as living wholly outside the law, but what constituted legality was not the same in antiquity as it is today. We should not rule out the possibility that they were able to retire in comfort and style, as “the son of Castor” claims to have done, particularly if they had enriched their local communities. If this is the case, they must have retained ties with their homeland. Indeed some at least may have led lives of partial domesticity.

  Mercenaries

  Mercenaries, known variously as misthophoroi (pay-earners), xenoi (foreigners), or stratiôtai (soldiers), comprised by far the largest number of itinerants. They are attested from the second half of the seventh century onward, though they almost certainly existed earlier. One such is Antimenidas, the brother of the lyric poet Alcaeus of Mytilene, who fought in the Babylonian army, possibly under Nebuchadnezzar when he campaigned in modern-day Israel and destroyed Ascalon in 604 (fr. 350 Campbell). From the seventh to the fifth centuries, however, the demand for mercenaries in the Greek world declined and was largely confined to tyrants such as Pisistratus of Athens, whose authority depended on private armies. However, those who practiced a specialized discipline, notably Cretan archers and Rhodian slingers, continued to be in demand. We also know that the Athenians employed mercenary rowers in their fleet, both in the fifth and fourth centuries (Thuc. 1.121.3; Dem. 50.14–18).

  Mercenaries, as we have seen, were numerous in Sicily, partly because the poleis did not have sufficient manpower to perform all their military duties, largely because of the threat from the Carthaginians from the beginning of the fifth century onward. It was the worsening economic conditions at the end of the Peloponnesian War and, later, in the fourth century that generated the rise of mercenaries on an unprecedented scale. This was aggravated by the frequency of stasis consequent upon the unstable conditions that resulted from the weakened condition of Athens and Sparta, since this drove large numbers of able-bodied men into exile. Yet another reason for the rise of mercenaries was the increased dependency upon light-armed troops known as “peltasts.” (Their name derived from the pelta, a crescent-shaped shield made of wicker.) Unlike the hoplite, whose equipment represented a substantial financial investment, a peltast could be armed with little financial outlay.

  Though the extent to which individual city-states used mercenaries varied considerably, only the most backward and isolated parts of the Greek world were spared what many commentators, Isocrates most vociferously, saw as a menace to civilized society. From his privileged perspective and that of others like him, mercenaries were the dregs of society and they deserved nothing but contempt. In his Address to Philip (dated 346) he wrote (5.120–21):

  If we do not put a stop to those who wander about without the means to support themselves and who assault all those whom they encounter by providing them with an adequate livelihood, they are in danger of becoming so numerous without our realizing it that they will become as formidable as the barbarians.

  Although Isocrates was no doubt exaggerating, he obviously expected his scaremongering to work, which indicates that there was a genuine alarm at the prospect of a breakdown in the political and social order provoked by vagrants armed to the teeth and capable—in the hysterical hype of Athens’s equivalent of a tabloid journalist—of dealing the deathblow to civilization. There is, of course, at least a kernel of truth to what he says in that unemployed mercenaries—an unidentifiable percentage of their total—would have had little option but to turn their hands to extortion and intimidation. Mercenaries also contributed to political instability, notably in Syracuse, where 20 out of 27 outbreaks of stasis saw their involvement (Berger 1992, 90).

  It has been estimated that between 399 and 375 BCE, “there were never fewer than 25,000 mercenaries in service, and often more” (Davies 1993, 199). Faced with a severe demographic shortfall, even Sparta with its proud tradition of militarism came to rely on their services (Xen. Hell. 4.4.14). Aeneas Tacticus, who was writing in the middle of the fourth century, assumed that mercenaries would be in the employ of every Greek state (10.7, 12.2–5). His recommendation that they should never be more numerous than those who serve in the citizen militia is a clear indication of how much their services were in demand.

  Greek mercenaries served abroad as well as in their homeland, and it was in fact the hiring of the Ten Thousand—or to be more precise, the hiring of 10,400 hoplites and 2,500 peltasts—by the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger in 401 that thrust them into the limelight and demonstrated their unrivaled excellence as fighters. The band did not come exclusively from the most underdeveloped and impoverished parts of the Greek world, as had generally been the case up to now. This may have been in part due to the Peloponnesian War, which had thrown many parts of Greece into economic turmoil. Indeed many of those who signed up for service under Cyrus had probably fought in that war. Owing to its duration, they might in some cases have been ill-suited to any other career. They included Athenians, Boeotians, and Spartans, as well as Achaeans, Arcadians, and Thessalians. The peltasts comprised Cretan archer
s and Rhodian slingers. Few of the Ten Thousand came from East Greece. Their leadership was primarily in the hands of Athenians and Spartans.

  Cyrus’s objective was to seize the throne from his brother King Artaxerxes II, though he seems to have kept that fact secret as long as he could, so as not to discourage recruits from enlisting (Marinovic 1988, 27). His bid failed due to his death in battle, but this in no way tarnished the image of the Greek mercenary. Quite the contrary in fact, since the Ten Thousand—or more accurately about half that number—succeeded, despite hunger, exhaustion, and frostbite, in making their way through hostile territory to the port city of Trapezus on the shores of the Black Sea, while being buffeted by the snows of central Anatolia—a journey of some 1,900 miles—in effect “a polis on the move,” as they have been aptly described (Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977, 380).

  This event, which was immortalized in Xenophon’s Anabasis or March Up-Country, marks the beginning of an era in which the mercenary became central not only to Greek warfare but also to the political and social life of the city-state. Henceforth a floating population numbering in the tens of thousands was perpetually available for hire. Consequently, there were probably more Greeks in the fourth century on the move looking for employment, or, failing that, scouring the landscape for the means of survival, than there had been at any time previously.

  Some seventy years after Cyrus’s campaign, Greek mercenaries served in the army of Darius III, when he was defending his empire against Alexander the Great. Though Alexander vilified them as traitors, they saw themselves as patriots defending Greek freedom against Macedonian oppression. They had a point. When Darius was defeated, some of them were conveyed to the equivalent of labor camps in Macedon, others fled, and a number of them fought to the last. Still others switched their allegiance and enlisted in Alexander’s army.