Wandering Greeks
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When Alexander died in 323, the Athenians promptly revolted from Macedonian rule. They did so largely because of their resentment at his interference in their internal affairs. Though the origins of the so-called Lamian War that gives its name to the revolt can be traced back to Alexander’s execution of his court historian Callisthenes of Olynthus in 327, it is fair to state that hostility toward the Exiles’ Decree played a major part. The Roman historian Curtius (first or second century CE) tells us that the Athenians claimed that Alexander’s objective had been to repatriate “a cesspool of social orders and people” and that they “preferred to tolerate anything rather than receive back what was once the filth of their own city, and was now the filth of their place of exile” (10.2.6).
Perdiccas, who succeeded to the throne on Alexander’s death, upheld the ruling in favor of the Samians. Athens was eventually defeated and the Samians returned home in 322/1, “after an exile that had lasted 43 years” (D.S. 18.18.9). It must have been a profoundly emotional occasion, especially if there was a handful of elderly survivors among the returnees. Given the lapse of time, however, most of those who repossessed the island would have been the sons, if not the grandsons, of the original exiles.1
Very likely the Athenian cleruchs living on Samos fought tooth and nail for what they, too, saw as their homeland (Shipley 1987, 168). After all, most of them had lived their entire lives on the island. We do not know what reception they received when they returned “home.” Habicht (1966, 401) estimated that the number of cleruchs who were displaced was equivalent to “almost a third of all adult male citizens of Athens.” For them, too, it was a humanitarian crisis—and for us one more whose details elude us.
1 One of the refugees was the philosopher Epicurus, who eventually founded the philosophical school known as “the Garden,” where he and his followers lived in seclusion. As Paul Cartledge has suggested to me, his desire for seclusion may have been a response to the violence that his parents had experienced as refugees.
CONCLUSIONS
Targeted by Death Squads, Raped by Soldiers, Tortured by the State; More Than 40 Million People around the World Have Been Forced out of Their Homes and into Exile.
—GUARDIAN WEEKLY (JANUARY 11, 2013)
Horrific events, comparable to the preceding, occurred repeatedly in the Greek world. Yet terrible though the sufferings of the Greeks were, the thesis of this investigation has been that migration, displacement, and relocation, both forced and voluntary, were central to the survival, viability, and (it necessarily follows) phenomenal success of Greek societies. Though population movements in antiquity were for the most part modest by modern standards, many were large in proportion to the total population. In fact they were a persistent feature of daily life, often with devastating consequences for those who were dislocated.
A major problem throughout this survey has been the imprecision of the Greek language, which in important ways fails to distinguish between different types of migrants. The wanderer was none the less central and integral to hellenic identity, witness Homer’s Odyssey and Xenophon’s Anabasis. For a variety of reasons, still keenly debated, from the second half of the eighth century to the end of the sixth the polis exported a sizable proportion of its population. The desire to extend the frontiers of trade, obtain resources or land, escape famine or destitution, or simply fulfill one’s human potential, were among the leading factors. When compelled to do so, moreover, the Greeks were fully capable of putting their roofs on their backs and moving an entire population elsewhere. Flexibility was a necessary part of the Greek, or rather Mediterranean, mentalité, though the Greeks were among the leaders in mobility. Both to head off civil strife and to safeguard their interests, political factions and tyrants regularly deported their opponents.
Of the many thousands who became homeless in the Greek world, a few could seek shelter, either temporarily or permanently, through asulia and xenia, though to what extent either institution did much to alleviate the hardship of the average refugee or migrant is questionable. In wartime those living in unprotected areas sought shelter inside a walled city, thereby engendering disease and fomenting social and political unrest. A number of individuals either went into enforced exile or took to their heels to escape vengeance-seekers or the law. Excepting those with powerful connections abroad, theirs was a daily battle for survival. Slaves, too, occasionally found freedom in flight, though with what frequency or success is impossible to determine. Itinerants and economic migrants were a prominent feature of the Greek landscape from the archaic period onward. They took to the footpaths (there were scarcely any roads to speak of) or to the high seas, motivated primarily by ambition or a taste for adventure. No itinerant was more ubiquitous than the mercenary, whose numbers proliferated in the fourth century.
If anything, the situation may well have deteriorated in the period covered by this survey, with an increasing number of vagrants and out-of-work mercenaries threatening to destabilize the Greek world. To what extent Alexander the Great, who certainly added to the problem, was able to arrest it, is impossible to determine. Finally, as is true of émigrés in all periods of history, the yearning to return to one’s homeland remained a vivid and haunting dream. When realized, however, it would often produce serious tensions within the community that sometimes resulted in civil discord.
Unsurprisingly Athens presents a case study that is often exceptional and sometimes unique. The polis sent out few overseas settlements until it acquired its empire in the fifth century, when it employed cleruchies and the like partly as a way of exercising control over regions that were critical to its security. Athens also relocated its population from the countryside to the city during both the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars. The state accommodated a far larger population of immigrants than any other polis. It employed ostracism seemingly as a way to defuse stasis and thereby to eliminate the need for mass deportation. The amnesty that initiated the return of its exiles in 401/400, following the civil war that had seen the overthrow of the Thirty, was exemplary.
In conclusion, it is hardly any exaggeration to state that the brilliance of Greek civilization was predicated in part upon the shiftlessness of its population. Being Greek meant facing the prospect of being displaced at some point in one’s life without any certainty of return. Praxithea’s comment in Euripides’ lost play Erechtheus that the populations of all Greeks cities (with the exception of Athens) were “distributed in the same way as by the throw of the dice” is au point (50.7–10 Austin). It was also the case that the mobility of the Greeks, and the spirit of adaptability that this bred inside them, encouraged the construction of panhellenic institutions and fostered cultural homogeneity. Greece in sum was a civilization of displaced persons.1
1 All this said, we should not overlook the fact that the Greeks were merely “one of many actors playing a role within an extensive network of communications spanning the Mediterranean” (Hall 2002, 92). This is the underlying premise to Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000). It is also the case that the inbred nature of the polis hampered the Greeks from capitalizing on the full potential of their diaspora. As Purcell (1990, 58) eloquently puts it, “The success that came with the currents of Mediterranean mobility was reserved for the people whose first community of shepherds grew by the addition of vagabonds and runaways, which preyed on more stable and involuted neighbours for the procreative resource, and whose first leaders were reared on the milk of the roving wolf.”
—καὶ μακρὸς Ὄλυμπος.
—and lofty Olympus.
HOM. IL. 15.193
He rests. He has travelled.
—JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES
ENVOI
This investigation has raised numerous questions that I have been unable to answer adequately, owing to lack of evidence.1 The following are some of the most compelling.
1. How large an area would settlers take over when initially settling in a new land?
3. What percentage of the wives of first-generation settlers was non-Greek?
4. What percentage of second-generation settlers was bilingual?
5. When a political faction expelled its opponents, what percentage of that faction was typically expelled? Was it merely the most prominent representatives who were driven out, or was a majority of those who were known to be opposed to the interests of the winning faction expelled?
6. What strategies did a portable polis adopt to maintain its cultural identity abroad?
7. What was the fate of the relatives of exiles and fugitives who were not themselves expelled? Did they, for instance, face eviction?
8. Would a large group of refugees seek to maintain cohesion, or would it typically be forced to divide into small groups?
9. Given the fact that political exiles were not permitted to take weapons with them, what were their chances of survival once they had been deported?
10. Would sanctuaries sometimes be taken over by desperate refugees?
11. To what extent did the sanction of religion provide some protection for refugees?
12. What percentage of economic migrants left their homes to improve the quality of their lives and what percentage left as a result of extreme impoverishment?
13. What percentage of economic migrants settled abroad with their families?
14. What percentage of economic migrants returned to their original homeland at the end of their working lives?
15. What percentage of economic migrants in Athens and elsewhere did short-term residents comprise?
16. After a siege had led to the massacre of all the men of military age, what steps might be taken to protect captive women and children?
17. What was the fate of the sick and the elderly after a siege? Were they abandoned or slaughtered?
18. Did refugees occasionally establish camps in the Greek countryside? What were their chances of survival if they did? What percentage died from sickness or starvation?
19. To what extent were runaway slaves a significant concern to a polis? What percentage managed to evade capture and live out their lives in freedom?
20. What strategies did fugitives with no hope of finding permanent refuge abroad adopt in order to survive?
21. What percentage of the Greek population faced displacement as the result of political exile, war, famine, and other catastrophes at some point in their lives?
22. What percentage of the Greek population did persons of no fixed abode constitute?
23. How did the plight of the refugee change over time?
24. Did the size of the refugee population increase over time?
1 These questions were provoked by colleagues and friends who attended a talk I gave at the University of Texas at Austin in October 2012. I am most grateful to my host, Lesley Dean-Jones, and to James Dee in particular.
FURTHER READING
Chapter 1. Prolegomena
Ancient and Modern Responses to Migration. See Dummett (2001, Ch. 1) for many of the issues discussed here. For Queen Elizabeth I’s views on immigration, see Bartels (2006, 305–22). For a brief history of American naturalization law, see López (2006, 30–34). For a summary of post–World War II migrations, see Goldin et al. (2011, 85–93). For the effects of 9/11 on refugee protection, see Newman (2003, 9–11). It is a truism that strong anti-immigration sentiment persists in most major developed countries today. The year 2012, the centenary of Enoch Powell’s birth, saw some attempt to rehabilitate his memory. On Margaret Thatcher’s appetite for the word “swamped,” see Dummett (2001, 14–17).
The Silence of the Sources. For acknowledgment of the scale of migration in antiquity, see D.S. 12.8.9, who states that in earlier times Sybaris had been so generous with grants of citizenship to foreigners that its population had swelled to 300,000. Its citizenry was able to implement this policy due to the fertility of its land. The commonly voiced claim today that the scale of the current refugee crisis “has never been witnessed before in history,” though true in terms of absolute numbers, is not necessarily true in terms of the proportion of settled to unsettled. Plu. Mor. 605c, citing several men of letters who wrote in exile, states: “The muses, it seems, co-opted exile as their fellow-worker in perfecting for the ancients the fairest and most esteemed of their accomplishments.” Syme (1962, 40), himself an immigrant to the UK from New Zealand, commented: “Exile may be the making of an historian.” The proposition is examined by Dillery (2007, 51–70).
Causes of Population Displacement. For a useful summary of the causes of relocation from the geometric to the classical period, see Demand (1990, 165–76).
The Carians are said to have abandoned the island of Syme in the Dodecanese after the Trojan War because of a drought (D.S. 5.53.2). It was drought, too, followed by famine, that allegedly induced the Therans to colonize Cyrene (see later, chapter 3). The Chalcidians are said to have abandoned Pithecusae, partly as a result of “earthquakes, eruptions of fire and sea, and hot water” (Str. Geog. 5.4.9 C248). In the hellenistic period the silting up of rivers caused the populations of Atarneus, Myous, and Priene to relocate, but there is no evidence for silting as a cause of displacement prior to this era.
Chapter 2. The Wanderer
The Centrality of Wandering to the Experience of Being Greek. A wandering existence would have been particularly terrifying for a single or divorced woman such as the non-Greek princess Medea, who, on learning that her husband has rejected her, must contemplate what life will be like, “exiled, tossed out of the land, bereft of my friends, with only my children, I and they alone” (Eur. Med. 513).
Lyric and Elegiac Poetry. See Bowie (2007, 28–49). The relative paucity of references to exile in sympotic poetry may, as Bowie (p. 21) suggests, be due to the fact that “pursuing the topic at length could well impair a singer’s status as a welcome symposiast.”
Tragedy. For the intimate association between wandering and wretchedness in Greek tragedy, see Montiglio (2005, 26–30).
Philosophy. For Diogenes the Cynic on the theme of homelessness, see Branham (2007, 71–86). For Teles and Plutarch, see Nesselrath (2007, 88–99).
Myth and Legend. See Hall (2002, 9–19) for a vigorous defense of the importance of what he labels “fictive kinship” as a condition for forging a sense of ethnicity. There may well be some substance to the claim of a Dorian invasion, though the search for material evidence to back it up has so far proved inconclusive. In the nineteenth century archaeologists believed that the Dorian invasion caused the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces. They detected evidence for this in the introduction of iron working, the evolution of the protogeometric style of pottery, the change from cremation to inhumation, and the appearance of new types of weapons and jewelry, all of which they attributed to the arrival of a culturally and ethnically distinct group around the eleventh century. Refinement in dating techniques has, however, conclusively demonstrated that each of these innovations either predated the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces or made its first appearance only in regions that claimed to be of non-Dorian ancestry, notably Athens and Euboea. See Snodgrass (2000, 360–73) for the archaeological evidence relating to the twelfth to tenth centuries. Linguistic evidence pointing to a proto-Doric idiom that was spoken in central and northern Greece is also inconclusive. Even so, some scholars continue to put faith in the legend, on the grounds that it is supported by data principally of a ceramic nature, which point to the arrival of newcomers to Laconia some time around 950. The size of the migratory movement (assuming it occurred) cannot be estimated—Isocrates (Panathenaicus 255) claimed that 2,000 Dorians founded Sparta—but we should hardly be thinking in terms of “a single, massive influx” (Hall 1997, 184). For a succinct account of the modern debate, see Asheri (in Asheri et al. 2007, 116–17) and Hall (2007, 43–51). For the Romans as an upstart people, see Livy (1.8.6, 2.45.4, and so on).
L
oraux (1986, 148–50) describes the myth of Athenian autochthony as “the Athenian myth par excellence.” For the perceived benefits of autochthony in Athenian discourse, see Loraux (2000, 13–27). Montiglio (2005, 13) claims that the idea was based on the notion that migration is a sign either of weakness or of aggression. It was Rosivach (1987, 294–306) who first drew attention to the fact that it is largely a fifth-century invention. For the important part belief in autochthony played in the construction of Athenian ethnicity, see Cohen (2000, 79–103); Isaac (2004, 114–24); and Lape (2010, 17–19 and 99–101). Pl. Crit. 112c, speaking of the Athens of his imagination 9,000 years previously, adds an interesting “architectural” element to the myth of Athenian autochthony: “They constructed buildings in which they and the descendants of their descendants grew old and they handed them down unaltered to others like themselves.”
Chapter 3. The Settler
Why the Greeks Settled Abroad. For the Ionian migration, see Snodgrass (2000, 373–78), who aptly characterizes it as “a remarkable testimony to the vitality of the Greek communities in the eleventh century” (p. 373). As Lomas (2000, 171) writes of Italy, “The vast range of myths and historical traditions about founders and the processes of settlement and foundation is indicative of the similarly vast range of possible motivations for Greek migration and settlement.” See, too, the mix of motives discussed by Hall (2007, 114–17). Though Camp (1979, 397–411) suggested that drought was a major cause of the eighth-century migratory movement, the evidence is inconclusive (Jameson 1983, 14 n. 4). A major problem in our understanding of the archaic movement is that almost all our sources date to the classical period. See, however, Malkin (2009, 374–75), who argues for the reliability of many of the preserved details of these sources. There is further discussion in Hall (2007, 100–106). Murray (1993, 102–23) provides an excellent account of the major themes relating to settlement abroad. For what they are worth, we have a literary foundation date for 73 settlements (Graham 1982a, 160–62). Al-Mina at the mouth of the River Orontes on the Turkish/Syrian border, once thought to be an earlier foundation than Pithecusae, is now known to have been contemporary, though there is some doubt as to whether this was a Greek, as opposed to a mixed settlement (Hall 2007, 97). The Greeks were also visiting nearby Rasel Basit and Tell Sukas by the second half of the eighth century. See Boardman (1999, 38–54). For the causes of settlement in the eighth century, see Tsetskhladze (2006, xxviii–xxx). An interesting variant is the foundation of Tarentum by a group of Laconians known as the Partheniae, who had allegedly been deprived of their civic rights because they had been born when their fathers were away fighting the Messenians (Str. Geog. 6.3.2 C278 = Antiochus of Syracuse, FGrH 555 F 13). For a detailed discussion of the meaning of the word emporion, together with a list of all the communities that are classified as emporia, see Hansen (2006, 6–39). Naucratis in the Nile Delta, described by Herodotus (2.178–79) as both a polis and as an emporion, was a special case. See Bowden (1996, 28–31) and Demetriou (2012, 105–52). Murray (1993, 111) interestingly suggests that settlement abroad might actually have indirectly led to an increase in population in the mother-city, as attested by the fact that a number of them sent out several expeditions within the space of a single generation. With reference to Greek settlements in the west, Osborne (1998, 268) argues that private enterprise “should be envisaged as responsible … for the vast majority of eighth- and seventh-century settlements.”