Wandering Greeks

by Garland, Robert

  Though primarily attracted by the prospect of adventure and plunder, mercenaries sought to acquire some degree of social respectability as soldiers of fortune. After all, even a man of means could take pride in the fact that he had served with a distinguished mercenary general. The defendant in a speech by the Athenian metic Isaeus (2.6), who fought in Thrace under Iphicrates, saw fit to boast of this fact before an Athenian jury. Likewise Lycomedes of Mantinea took pride in the fact that no mercenaries were more sought after than the Arcadians, amongst whom he himself numbered (Xen. Hell. 7.1.23).

  Though mercenary generals amassed fortunes, this was hardly true of those who served in the ranks. Most signed up because they could not find better employment. Cyrus was unusual in having a reputation for being generous. The truth is that much about a mercenary’s job was lousy. The pay was often irregular, the conditions of service harsh in the extreme, and one’s paymaster a law unto himself. We know nothing about the fate of career mercenaries who sustained a serious, perhaps crippling injury. Was any provision made for them? Aeneas Tacticus, who was probably an Arcadian, recommended that before a campaign got under way the terms of their contract should be proclaimed, and if any mercenary found them unacceptable, he should be free to withdraw, whereas if he attempted to do so afterward he should be sold into slavery (10.18–19). We do not know whether this practice was ever adopted, though some basic contractual agreement advertising the rate of pay and outlining the campaign’s objective would surely have been essential.

  Some mercenaries, like modern professionals, had families awaiting them back home. This included many of the Ten Thousand, who, as Xenophon informs us, “longed to return safely to Greece” (Anab. 6.4.8), rather than establish a settlement on the southern shore of the Black Sea, as he had hoped. We can only speculate as to what might have been the domestic circumstances of those who chose not to return to Greece. Marriage to a local woman was obviously the best option, but we have no way of knowing how long a career mercenary might have remained in one place. It is a fair assumption that many of them would have served for a strictly limited period of time before being hired by a different employer and dispatched to another region—a situation hardly conducive to domesticity.

  Mercenary settlements were sometimes established in foreign territory, either to provide a base for support, to serve as a garrison, or to reward mercenaries who had reached the end of their careers. The first two factors were certainly to the fore when Dionysius I of Syracuse established his mercenary settlements at the beginning of the fourth century (see earlier, chapter 4). Alexander the Great, too, had similar objectives when he settled his mercenaries in the East. When a rumor broke out that he had died, 3,000 of them abandoned settlements in Bactria and Sogdiana and headed back to Greece, whether to be massacred by the Macedonians (D.S. 17.99.6) or to make good their escape (Curtius 9.7.11). Sometimes, however, mercenaries chose to settle abroad, like those of the Ten Thousand who were eager to establish a foundation at Calpe Harbor, midway between Heraclea Pontica and Byzantium (Xen. Anab. 6.4.1–7).

  Being temperamentally unfit for civic responsibility and inclined by training to impose their will by force, mercenaries posed a serious threat to settled urban life. Diodorus Siculus reports a particularly egregious example of bad behavior on the part of Dionysius I’s Campanian mercenaries that occurred at the end of his war against Carthage in 404. The mercenaries in question journeyed to Entella, where they “induced” the citizen body (“bullied” might be a better word) to admit them as sunoikoi (fellow citizens). Once inside, they “fell upon all the men of military age by night, married”—presumably by raping—“the wives of the men with whom they had broken faith, and took possession of the city” (14.9.8–9). This, however, is an extreme case, and though it remains questionable how effectively settlements occupied by mercenaries functioned overall, the desire for land and citizenship at the end of one’s working life was logical and understandable. Since, moreover, many thousands of them were non-Greek, their incorporation in the life of the polis contributed significantly to the hellenization of Sicily (Berger 1992, 91–92).

  Persons of No Fixed Abode

  Itinerants include those whose livelihood depends on begging and casual employment. Since, moreover, borders were highly porous, there must have been a large number of people who were in effect stateless. Both Hesiod (Op. 299–302, 395–400, 498–99) and Tyrtaeus (10 IEG) suggest that the prospect of becoming homeless in the archaic world was an ever-present reality, though what percentage of the population sunk to this level is impossible to determine. It is not improbable that the number increased dramatically in the fourth century, as a result of the political upheavals and economic problems that we discussed a moment ago. Vagrants not only faced hardship but also opprobrium. Plato, like many educated and wealthy Greeks, believed that beggary was the consequence of idleness, and he refused to admit such people into his ideal state on the grounds that “they make their livelihood by endless entreaties” (Pl. Rep. 552a–e). Significantly, ptôchos (beggar), derives from ptoôssô (shrink from, skulk, cringe). In other words, the very attitude and appearance of the beggar, quite apart from his or her circumstances, aroused both loathing and fear.

  Though a few persons of no fixed abode may have been able to attach themselves to a noble household, such as Irus, who has a regular position as beggar-in-residence in Odysseus’s palace, the majority would have been vagrants in the literal sense of the word. There is, of course, no knowing how many Greeks slept rough, but the number may well have been considerable. Though many who were infirm and elderly had no option but to eke out a slender living by begging on street corners, the able-bodied probably sought employment as casual laborers. As such, however, they would have been highly vulnerable to exploitation. The god Poseidon worked for a year under Laomedon, king of Troy, only to be sent packing without recompense when his period of service had come to an end (Hom. Il. 21.441–52). The suitor Eurymachus pretends to offer Odysseus employment as a casual laborer, building walls and planting trees in exchange for grain, clothes, and shoes, but he does so only to mock him (Hom. Od. 18.356–61). Both in wartime and in time of famine vagrants would have been particularly at risk, since they were perceived as a drain on the state’s (and family’s) limited food supply. For this reason Aeneas Tacticus recommended that such people, whom he typified as talapeirioi (the much-suffering), should be periodically “banished by proclamation” (10.10).

  11

  REPATRIATION

  L’Esprit de Retour

  Lesprit de retour consumes even those who have lived most of their lives abroad. Many people envisage returning to the place of their birth long before it is a distinct possibility. L’esprit de retour certainly consumed the Greeks, as numerous passages in their literature indicate, even though relatively few migrants would have returned to their place of birth, compared with the large number who return eventually today. It is hardly surprising that Alexander’s attempt to establish mercenary settlements in the East ran into such difficulties and that many of his veterans ultimately began the long trek home. There is hardly a more poignant picture than the one that Homer invokes in the first scene of the Odyssey, where Odysseus, detained on the island of Ogygia by the nymph Calypso, is described as “longing for his home and his wife” (1.13) and “yearning to see the smoke rising from his own land” (1.57–59). When we meet him later, still a prisoner of Calypso’s desire, we are told that he

  never stopped weeping so that his sweet life was draining from him, as he mourned for his return home…. Every day he sat on the rocks beside the sea, his heart bursting with tears and grief and sadness, as he looked over the barren deep, weeping (5.151–58).

  It is no consolation to him that he sleeps each night in the arms of a “queenly nymph who is bright among the goddesses” (1.14). Odysseus’s state of mind is one of nostalgia, a pathological sickness for one’s homeland, a word that is derived from but does not exist in ancient Greek (nostos = homecoming, al
gia = sickness). It is safe to assume that his yearning would hardly have been less intense if he happened to be an overseas settler sitting in a cave on some unfamiliar island or promontory, pining for his family. Homer’s image is, in other words, grounded in the experience of contemporary Greeks, for whom the feeling of acute loss was mediated neither by distance nor by time. L’esprit de retour also haunts Achilles when he recalls his father back in Phthia, whom he will never set eyes on again (Il. 24.507–11).

  A similarly moving image of homesickness is evoked by Herodotus’s story of the Paionians, a Thracian people who were deported from their homeland to Phrygia in 511 by Darius I, allegedly because the Persian king was so impressed by the industriousness of their women (5.12–15). Some twelve years later, Aristagoras, deputy tyrant of Miletus, offered to help repatriate them if they could make their way independently to the coast. Despite being pursued by the Persian cavalry, their courage and determination were such that they made it to the coast, whereupon the Chians graciously ferried them to Lesbos. The Lesbians in turn conveyed them by boat to Doriscus, from which they returned on foot to Paionia (5.98). Seemingly they were not subjected to abuse.

  In many cases, however, a returnee represented a serious threat to his or her city-state, since it was likely that his return would reignite the stasis that had initially provoked his expulsion. This in effect is the situation that prevails on Ithaca when Odysseus returns home after an absence of twenty years. Not for nothing the oath that each Athenian juror had to swear included the following statement: “I will not bring back either exiles or those under sentence of death” (Dem. 24.149). It was obviously intended to head off the political instability that would ensue in the event of an exile exacerbating the kind of factional squabbling that had led to his banishment in the first place.

  No less problematically, the return of exiles also created legal battles, notably when their property had been acquired by new owners—the situation that Odysseus manages to head off just in time. Not for nothing the amnesty between the opponents and former supporters of the Thirty Tyrants made in 403 specifically prohibited the remembering of past grievances, described in Greek by the verb mnêsikakein ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 39). Though the circumstances under which exiles returned to their former polis are rarely recounted, the state probably authorized a general distribution of all the land that was vacant (Lonis 1991, 103). It can hardly have been the case that all returnees were able to repossess their original homes, especially when large numbers of them returned. Whatever procedure was adopted, however, we may suspect that recriminations would have been commonplace, if not the norm.

  None of this diminishes the intensity of the homecoming itself. One of the most thrilling events in Athens’s history was the return of the exiles following the overthrow of the Thirty. The democrats staged a triumphal entry into Athens under arms that culminated in a sacrifice to Athena performed on the Acropolis. It was a highly charged and deeply moving spectacle that not only symbolized the restoration of unity throughout Attica but also acknowledged the contribution of “the men of the Piraeus” to the restoration of democracy.

  The Mentality of the émigré

  To understand the mentality of someone yearning passionately to return home we can do no better than consult the late-fifth-century Athenian orator Andocides. Andocides was implicated in the mutilation of the herms on the eve of the departure of the expedition to Sicily and he turned informer to avoid execution. He was subsequently deprived of civic rights and barred from entry to Athens’s sanctuaries. Though he was not formally banished, he felt obliged to go into voluntary exile in order to improve his finances, hoping that he would eventually be invited to return as the city’s benefactor. The speech titled “On His Return,” which he delivered to the Assembly in ca. 409 when he was petitioning to recover his civic rights, encapsulates with disarming frankness the mindset of someone who spends years waiting to return home:

  I realized it would be for the best if I lived in a place where I should be least noticed by you. In time, however, as was only natural, I was seized by a desire for my old way of life as an Athenian citizen—so much so that I thought that the best course of action was either to die or to perform such beneficial service to Athens that my rights as a citizen would be restored to me (2.10).

  Andocides could hardly express his yearning to return home more convincingly, and though hyperbole is the stuff of forensic oratory there is little reason to doubt his sincerity. He had previously attempted to gain the good graces of his fellow-citizens in 411 by providing the Athenian fleet at Samos with essential supplies, which he sold at cost price. An oligarchic coup occurred, however, and he narrowly escaped death by taking refuge at an altar. “On His Return” was his first formal request for the restoration of his civic rights. It failed.

  Andocides eventually returned to Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, when the dêmos passed a decree granting amnesty to political exiles. Then in 400 or 399 he successfully defended himself against an attempt to debar him from entering either a sanctuary or the Agora. A decade later in 392/1 he was again exiled, this time for being a member of a delegation to Sparta that had negotiated peace terms that were considered excessively favorable to the enemy. We do not know whether he went into exile alone or with his family. Nor do we know how closely he kept in contact with his compatriots while abroad, though he may well have ended his life embittered toward Athens.

  The fact that so many groups of refugees returned to their place of origin is testimony to the strength of the bonds that united them. These bonds were fostered in part by preserving the worship of the ancestral gods and retaining the sense of a religious community. Perhaps, too, there were traditions that kept communal bonds alive. There were other, more informal ways of preserving the sense of ethnic identity, as the speech that Lysias wrote for a litigant titled “Against Pancleon,” delivered shortly before 387, indicates. The plaintiff reveals that on the last day of each month all the Plataeans living in Athens gathered together in the Agora at the place where cheese was sold (23.6–7). It was here that they gossiped, exchanged news about events back home, did business deals, and generally hung out together. Doubtless every ethnic group living abroad collected regularly at a designated meeting place.

  The “Return” of the Messenians

  No people proved more resilient in exile or more determined to retain their ethnicity than the Messenians, for whom, at the instigation of the Theban commander Epaminondas, a polis was founded on the western slope of Mount Ithome in 369—no fewer than 287 years after their ancestors had first been driven from their homeland according to Pausanias’s calculation (4.27.9). They had been wanderers from their homeland far longer than any other Greek people. Their nearest rivals were the Plataeans, whose exile had lasted a mere two generations. Pausanias goes on to tell us that the Messenians “did not abandon the customs they brought from their homes in any way and did not lose their Doric accent” and that “even to this day [ca. CE 150] have kept the purest strain of Doric among the Peloponnesians” (4.27.11).

  Or so the legend went. But what truth is there in it? It has recently been characterized as “an impressive reshaping of the past if there ever was one” (Luraghi 2008, 3). Even Pausanias, who was clearly an ardent admirer of the Messenians’ tenacity, expressed doubts about the reliability of the stories they told about their past, as this passage indicates:

  The disasters which they suffered and the length of their exile have obliterated many of the events of their past even after their return, and since they are ignorant it is possible for anyone who wishes to dispute the facts with them (3.13.2).

  Evidently there were others besides Pausanias who were skeptical of Messenia’s claims. And what exactly were the “customs” that they supposedly preserved? We know of none of them. The only religious cult that we know was specific to the Messenians is the Andanian Mysteries. Thucydides, moreover, writing over half a millennium before Pausanias, tells us that the Messenians and Sp
artans were homophônoi (sharing the same dialect) (4.41.2). We will never learn to what extent the Messenians managed to preserve an accurate historical memory of their ancestors prior to the Spartan conquest of their land in the eighth to seventh centuries BCE and to what extent they dreamed it all up. There is, however, no evidence that the people had ever constituted themselves into a polis prior to 369, which was the year when the Theban general Epaminondas settled them.

  There is a strong likelihood that the helots, who comprised the greatest number of the exiles, created an imaginary Messenia only in ca. 464, when they revolted from their Spartan masters and took refuge on Mount Ithome, following an earthquake that had rocked Sparta, literally and metaphorically, to its foundations (Thuc. 1.101.2; D.S. 11.63.1–4, 65.4). The death toll was said to be 20,000. After a protracted siege, the helots finally surrendered on condition that they “be permitted to depart from the Peloponnese under a truce and never set foot in it again.” They also agreed that “if any of them was caught, he would become the slave of his captor.” The duration of the revolt, reputedly as long as ten years, may have enabled the establishment of “semi-permanent communal institutions” on Mount Ithome (Cartledge 1985, 46). Spending long nights huddled over their campfires would have provided the rebels with the ideal context for creating and strengthening Messenian ethnicity.

  Accompanied presumably by their families, the helots, after their surrender, trekked north to Athens. It must have been an extremely arduous and hazardous journey, like all such journeys undertaken by refugees. They were on the road for many days, as Athens is 150 miles from Mount Ithome. The Athenians agreed to receive the refugees because they were now on hostile terms with the Spartans, since the latter had refused their offer for help in suppressing the revolt. We may wonder how the Athenians accommodated the refugees, since they must have numbered in the hundreds, if not the thousands.