These sombre images became more frequent in the fourth century, as the Etruscans lost their material well-being, and night fell over Tuscany.
Ill Colonization by the Greeks
Greek expansion presents the same problems and ambiguities as Phoenician colonization or the history of the Etruscans. Our knowledge here is greater, but as to the chronology and motivation of the Greek colonizers there are many more grey areas than about the founding of Carthage, and our questions often remain unanswered. An excess of information means an excess of different opinions, and the early history of Greece is all too rich in both.
Not long ago this history seemed relatively simple. Cities in fairly close proximity to one another created a network of towns from the Crimea to Spain, all linked to their mother cities. Barring a few exceptions, each new foundation was the result of a deliberate voyage, generally undertaken on the advice of the Delphic oracle. The expedition was led by a founder, the oikistes, acting on the orders of the home city; with the protection of the gods he chose the site, supervised the work of the surveyors and the distribution of land and adapted the constitution of the homeland to fit the new city. Then he became the ruler, often the absolute ruler, and left behind him the memory of a hero; all of this took place in a far-off age when kings and demi-gods still lived amidst a colourful decor of myth and legend. And always, the emigrants took with them fire kindled at the hearth of the motherland.
The proper unfolding of this scenario also calls for another set of characters: the natives might oppose the invader in honourable combat, or be wise enough to submit, or become so dazzled that they offered their king’s daughter to the founder. Protis, one of the founders of Massalia (Marseille) in about 600, married Gyptis, daughter of the king of the Segobriges. The Spartan Phalanthos founded Tarentum against the barbarian tribe of the Iapyges (had not the Delphic oracle counselled him to be the ‘scourge of the Iapyges’?). Setting off from the island of Thera, and guided by Libyan nomads, Battos founded Cyrene in 631, on the harsh North African coast, but on a spot where, wonder of wonders, there was adequate rainfall, or ‘holes in the sky’. The natives also provide scope for the occasional spot of mockery: thus the Carians, in the hinterland of Miletus, are called ‘barbarians’ because of their way of mangling the Greek language – which does at least prove that they spoke it. Of course there are also ‘noble barbarians’ as there would later be ‘noble savages’, for instance on the north shores of the Black Sea where ‘the Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians are generally more welcoming to the lonians with their fine wines and beautiful vases’.
There are hundreds of such stories, each better than the last, in the writings of Herodotus, Pausanias and a few others. It would be unwise to take them at face value. True, the traditional chronology has often proved correct, but since archaeology has come on to the scene, its findings, and particularly the shards of pottery, have given the lie to certain foundation dates. And since these dates are all interconnected, every change affects the whole chain, so that no one can any longer be sure about the chronology. Of course the language of archaeology needs in its turn to be interpreted. Let us imagine archaeologists, one or two millennia hence, patiently reconstituting the lost past of French-colonized Algeria without any written documents to help them:the capture of Algiers would be as obscure as that of Knossos by the Mycenaeans or the foundation of Tarentum by the Dorians.
For ancient Greece, what was at stake was the initial emergence of civilization as it freed itself from the magma of its ‘Middle Ages’. As the Greeks saw it, everything depended on this moment of liberation.
The obscure days of pre-colonization
History has tended to distinguish between two periods of Greek colonization, the first, from 775 to 675, being agricultural, the second, from 675 to 600, essentially commercial. But this is rather too neat an account. In the first place, the Greek adventure did not begin promptly in 776 or 775, the year of the first Olympiad, and there was no sharp boundary between agricultural and commercial colonization. All the more reason for trying to see what happened in the obscure period before the first Olympiad. Such a quest is bound to lead us, by uncertain routes which may be long or very short, to the origins of the movements which impelled the Greeks to leave their various homelands.
In Italy (in the broad sense of the word), there is ample proof of a Mycenaean presence. But as far as we know at present, this took the form of colonization only in the city of Tarentum and its hinterland. In this privileged spot there was even a kind of continuity between Mycenae and the Greek colonial presence.13 Italy was thus not completely terra incognita to the Greeks in the eighth century. In the far west, long before the foundation of Marseille (600), ships from Rhodes had sailed as far as the coasts of Gaul and Spain. This was apparently the origin of Rhode (Rosas), Agathe (Agde) and Rhodanousia at the mouth of the Rhone.14 But we know little about these settlements.
There is a similar problem, though much more complex, for the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. There are traces of Mycenaean merchants and trading posts all along this coastline. Greek was no doubt spoken in Rhodes, Cos and the nearby islands, as well as in Cilicia and Caria; a Mycenaean settlement existed at Miletus at the end of the bronze age. Here, though, as elsewhere, everything clouds over in the twelfth century. Subsequently, Greek refugees reached the eastern shores of the Aegean. Towns grew up, though only small ones: Smyrna around the year 1000, Miletus probably a little earlier. The original Smyrna was surrounded by a wall which according to one expert was ‘massive and well built’, evidence that the city was under threat from without; inside the wall, however, there were only very primitive ‘curvilinear’ houses. It was only towards the middle of the seventh century that everything changed, and very quickly, at least in the ‘twelve cities’ of Ionia, the largest of which, Phocaea and Miletus, were to play a decisive part in colonization both near to home and far afield. In the space of a few decades, they became the most brilliant cities of the Greek world.
However, their modest beginnings imply the existence of some activity in the intermediate area of the Aegean and its islands, all of which were in the hands of the Greeks, from Crete in the south to the Sporades in the north. And they soon settled on the still uncultivated north coast of the Aegean, from the Thermaic gulf to the Hellespont. Early Greek culture thus permeated the whole of the Aegean, not particularly strongly, but remaining unchallenged. The ‘geometric’ style of the new civilization emerging on the peninsula has left its mark in many places on the islands and the coasts of Asia Minor. The sanctuary of Apollo on Delos at the heart of the Cyclades, which later shone out like a beacon over the surrounding sea, was already in existence by the eighth century.
Greece and the Levant
Asiatic Greece was thus not really a colonial territory, since it was as old, or nearly as old, as Greece proper, which was coming back to life after the Dorian invasion. Its cities were not ‘founded’ by mother cities on the other side of the Aegean, but grew up independently, in parallel with the cities of the Greek peninsula and the islands. There were similarly mixed populations on either side of the Aegean, with groups of Dorians, lonians, Aeolians and a few Achaeans. Only gradually did the part of Asia Minor which kept the name of Ionia (Ionia of the twelve cities) come to diverge in its civilization, its way of life and its art from peninsular Greece. And it was later still that the ‘Ionic’ order was distinguished from the Doric order which came into existence on the other side of the Aegean.
In fact Asiatic Greece became prosperous in the course of time only because of its links with the rest of Asia. These links were slow toappear, and when they began to spread southwards in the direction of Syria, it was not so much the Greeks of Asia Minor as the lonians of Euboea and the islands of the Aegean who were responsible for the new settlements, notably at Al-Mina. Ionia itself probably took no part in this new trade and the orientalization of art and thought that resulted from it. Curiously, it was at Corinth, in about 725 BC, that this first bec
ame apparent in proto-Corinthian pottery. Asiatic Greece, on the other hand, freed itself from the geometric style only towards the middle of the seventh century BC.
From this point of view, if the historian were granted just one area for which he would be given the complete picture, he would perhaps do well to choose the south coast of Asia Minor as far as the Syrian frontier: it would include Rhodes and Cyprus, former bastions of the prosperity of Mycenae, now its last refuges; Tarsos, which had links with Rhodes and the Cyclades as early as the ninth century; and in particular Al-Mina, a trading post at the mouth of the Orontes, where neo-Hittite Syria reached the sea. This city was discovered by the archaeologists in 193 5, and we still do not know its precise foundation date – perhaps the beginning of the eighth century. It was to be a crucially important colony, representing as it did the first opening up of Greece to Syria, Palestine, the neo-Hittite and Aramaean states, Assyria, Urardhu and all the caravan routes of the continental Middle East. The city was moreover largely populated by Phoenicians. It is not therefore surprising that it is increasingly seen as the city where Greece met the east; it was here that the Greeks became acquainted with the Phoenician alphabet, here too that the orientalizing phase of Greek art originated, the first challenge to the geometric style.
More importantly, Al-Mina set an example for others to follow. The Mediterranean with its endless shores was bordered by countries which might be respectively backward, developed, or over-developed for their time; some stood high on the scale of civilization, some very low. But trade could only be really profitable if there was a vigorous and spontaneous electric current passing between high-voltage and low-voltage points. Al-Mina was clearly a high point, a commercial pinnacle, situated as it was on the line linking the still-backward Greece with countries of ancient civilization which had not lost their superiority, though they had lost some of their wealth. A similar high point later on was Naucratis, a Shanghai avant la lettre on the Nile Delta, which Psammetichus I ceded to Greek merchants, in particular Ionians. It was founded before 600, probably around 63 o. It was then that the network of Greek cities, both ancient and modern, really ‘went live’.
Land or trade?
Land was of course the basis of everything. At the time when its people began to spread far and wide, Greece was a rather poor agricultural country with an archaic economic system. There was little arable land, and even less of any real quality. As soon as the population grew, the need for internal colonization appeared, but there was little scope for expansion. The pick-axes of the pioneers had to cope with stony ground and knotty tree roots; it was hard to make much of a living out of this marginal land. Try as they might, ploughing the same land several times over, breaking up the clods with their primitive hoes, they could not coax the soil of Greece into feeding them adequately. In addition, the clearing of the land destabilized the soil, so that a storm was enough to wash it down to the bottom of the hill. The whole of Greece suffered, as it still suffers, from this endemic malady.
The difficulty can easily be restated in social terms. Excessive numbers of poor peasants competing for a meagre living made them easy prey for a few big landowners, turning them into hectemoroi – tenant farmers who had probably to hand over five-sixths of their crop every year – driving them into debt, and eventually making the whole territory ‘slave land’. Eighth-century Greece was already full of peasants on the run; Homer’s world is crowded with vagabonds. Hesiod, in Works and Days, tells of the endless toil of the peasant, chained to his small patch of land, worn down by bitter quarrels with his neighbours, his family, and the ‘kings’, i.e. the masters in the towns. He could be saved only by the justice of Zeus – or by running away. Otherwise he had to resign himself to being the ‘nightingale in the talons of the sparrowhawk’. Legislators might attempt to improve things; such was the achievement of Solon. But the process would begin again sooner or later, under one form or another.
It is obvious that this situation might give rise to colonial expansion. It gave rise to much else besides: the swollen cities, the hordes ofcraftsmen, and the wretched fate of the mercenaries, similar to that of the Swiss guards and German mercenaries of the Renaissance. Greek soldiers were selling themselves in Egypt in the sixth century and they were still doing so in the Persian Empire in the fifth century.
But flight could also take the form of a Phoenician-style adventure, and there is every reason to suppose that it did. In those days of rudimentary sailing skills, the peasant could easily become a sailor, and might well possess a boat. In winter, when ‘the blasts of every wind rage’, Hesiod advises his brother Perses, a peasant like him: ‘do not keep ships on the wine-faced sea, but work the earth assiduously, as I tell you. Pull the ship on to land and pack it with stones all round… taking out the plug so that heaven’s rains do not cause rot. Lay away all the tackle under lock in your own house, tidily stowing the wings of the seagoing vessel; hang the well-crafted steering-oar up in the smoke; and wait till the time for sailing comes.’
Everything thus conspired with the process of pauperization to drive men to distant shores. If Boeotia, Attica and Sparta (except atTarenturn) did not play a major part in the first wave of Greek colonization, it was perhaps because they had not yet exhausted the possibilities of internal colonization, because they still had virgin lands to clear and could live on the grain they produced, or in the case of Sparta on grain from nearby Messenia, which they had subdued after a hard struggle. If the cities of Asia Minor or Megara set about exploiting the Black Sea and establishing trading posts there in the sixth century, it was in order to get hold of the grain of the sparsely populated lands of southern Scythia. In the Middle Ages, Genoa applied the same reasoning and came in search of food to the same region.
This grain all had to be paid for, generally with wine and oil– luxury agricultural products – or with manufactured goods. But such exchanges of grain, pottery vases or metals, once they attained a certain volume, could not take place without professional merchants. Almost from the very first wave of emigration then, one must suppose the existence of merchants, commercial calculations, and even colonization motivated by commercial imperatives. Would the Greeks of Chalcis have been impelled in 770 BC to settle on the island of Ischia in the bay of Naples by purely agricultural considerations? Such a meagre reward would hardly have justified such a long voyage. It is, in fact, no coincidence that this first observation post (emporion) set up by the Greeks beyond the Straits of Messina in the eighth century was a vantage point on the Etruscan sea, within range of Etruscan metal. Metal was a constant concern of the Chalcidians. Similarly the gold of Lydia or Egypt, the silver of Spain and copper ingots had a part to play in the calculations of the first colonizers, whether the Greeks or anyone else.
The overall picture
Can we see Greek expansion from the eighth century to the sixth as a single story? No doubt the cities scattered along the endless sea-coasts did not form a single closed universe. The slow speed of communications and the strength of certain local networks might partially relegate this or that city to the margins of the mainstream circuits. Even so, these circuits existed, and they are the essential element in the ‘structure’ we are trying to reconstruct.
The reader can note the major departure points on the map in Appendix II. Chalcis, Eretria, Megara and Corinth (leaving aside for the moment Miletus and Phocaea) were the first centres of activity in ancient Greece. The central axis of activity in the country ran from the Euripus channel, where Chalcis is situated, to the Saronic Gulf and the isthmus of Corinth, a slim barrier which from the seventh century was crossed by a diolkos, a track with man-made grooves (concave rails) and wooden rollers which allowed ships to be hauled across from the Saronic to the Corinthian Gulf. With its two ports, Lechaeum and Cenchreae, Corinth was the end point of this axis towards the west. Athens and Attica were not closely concerned in this gradual colonization process carried out by small groups of explorers.
If one considers the result
s, one can quite easily distinguish between three zones or rather three types of venture:
i) Those which were very easy (though in the fullness of time neither unimportant nor unproductive) – acquiring lands deserted or only sparsely inhabited and poorly defended.
2) The essential ones – the colonies established in southern Italy (Magna Graecia) and Sicily.
3) The risky all-or-nothing expeditions far to the west. The most important of these was the remarkable creation of Marseille in about 600.
Cyrenaica and the Black Sea
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 31