Wandering Greeks

WANDERING GREEKS

WANDERING GREEKS

The Ancient Greek Diaspora from the Age of Homer to the Death of Alexander the Great

Robert Garland

Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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Coin photography © Andy Daddio. Jacket design by Karl Spurzem.

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Garland, Robert, 1947–

Wandering Greeks : the ancient Greek diaspora from the age of Homer to the death of Alexander the Great / Robert Garland.

pages cm

Summary: “Most classical authors and modern historians depict the ancient Greek world as essentially stable and even static, once the so-called colonization movement came to an end. But Robert Garland argues that the Greeks were highly mobile, that their movement was essential to the survival, success, and sheer sustainability of their society, and that this wandering became a defining characteristic of their culture. Addressing a neglected but essential subject, Wandering Greeks focuses on the diaspora of tens of thousands of people between about 700 and 325 BCE, demonstrating the degree to which Greeks were liable to be forced to leave their homes due to political upheaval, oppression, poverty, warfare, or simply a desire to better themselves. Attempting to enter into the mind-set of these wanderers, the book provides an insightful and sympathetic account of what it meant for ancient Greeks to part from everyone and everything they held dear, to start a new life elsewhere—or even to become homeless, living on the open road or on the high seas with no end to their journey in sight. Each chapter identifies a specific kind of “wanderer,” including the overseas settler, the deportee, the evacuee, the asylum-seeker, the fugitive, the economic migrant, and the itinerant, and the book also addresses repatriation and the idea of the “portable polis.” The result is a vivid and unique portrait of ancient Greece as a culture of displaced persons”—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-16105-1 (hardback)

1. Greeks—Migrations—History—To 1500. 2. Greece—Social conditions—To 146 B.C. 3. Greece—Civilization—To 146 B.C. I. Title.

DF222.2.G37 2014

938—dc23

2013034456

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT Pro and Ideal Sans

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Paul with lasting affection

γαῖα δ᾽ ἔτι ξυνὴ πάντων—
Earth is common to all—

—HOM.
IL
. 15.193

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xi

List of Maps xiii

Preface xv

1. Prolegomena 1

2. The Wanderer 15

3. The Settler 34

4. The Portable
Polis
57

5. The Deportee 79

6. The Evacuee 99

7. The Asylum-Seeker 114

8. The Fugitive 131

9. The Economic Migrant 150

10. The Itinerant 167

11. Repatriation 181

Conclusions 197

Envoi 205

Further Reading 207

A. The Terminology of Diaspora 239

B. Catalogue of Athenian Cleruchies and Colonies 244

C. Catalogue of Deportees 253

D. Catalogue of Exiles 264

E. Catalogue of the Enslaved 271

Chronology 279

Glossary 283

Bibliography 287

Index of Personal Names 301

Index of Place Names 305

Index of Sources 309

General Index 317

ILLUSTRATIONS

All coins are reproduced with kind permission of an anonymous collector.

MAPS

PREFACE

To put things in a modern perspective: there are 42.5 million displaced persons in the world today. More people were displaced in 2012 than at any other time during the past decade. There are 12 million refugees, 3.2 million of whom are living in Africa. According to the United Nations' estimate, “Every year, more than 5 million people cross international borders to go and live in a developed country,” while “the number of people who move to a developing nation or within their country is much greater” (
Human Development Report
2009, 9). Some 2.5 million people are being trafficked around the world. There are a million asylum-seekers, 80 percent of them housed in developing states. They comprise the tortured, political dissidents, the starving poor, and oppressed religious and ethic minorities. It has only been over the past century that the international community has attempted to regulate migration and to define those who should be accorded the special title of “refugees.” An important step was the establishment in 1951 of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, initially intended to address the refugee problems consequent upon World War II.

In the ancient world, by contrast, displaced persons weren't even a statistic. Though a few migrant groups caught the headlines, often due to the Odyssean circuitousness of their wanderings, the majority disappeared without trace once they had severed ties with their homeland. Citing the numerous accounts of Greek heroes being driven into exile as the result of murder, jealousy, and other exigencies, Gilbert Murray (1934, 207) perceptively observed, “All Hellas was
anastatos
, driven by [
sic
] its home [by the] constant war paths and uprootings of peoples.” This, as I shall seek to demonstrate, was no less true of Greece in
historical times.
¹
It is also the case that scholars have largely overlooked the scale of the humanitarian crises that regularly occurred consequent upon war, famine, and political upheaval—not that humanitarian crises that occurred thousands of years ago could be expected to stir much passion today. Many Greeks found themselves displaced and on the move, condemned to live out the rest of their lives in moldy shacks and frosty tents. This said, our sources tell us very little about refugees in particular and not much about migrants in general. Their existence, though widespread at all periods of history, receives but cursory mention and then only when it happens to alter the political landscape.

It has only been relatively recently that scholars have become interested in migrants, refugees,
Gastarbeiter
, asylum-seekers, and the urban homeless. Over the past twenty-five years, however, migration studies has become a burgeoning field of inquiry that incorporates a wide range of disciplines including demography, economics, geography, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies. Those who work in migration studies are concerned not only with process but also with the personal experiences of migrants and refugees. Much of its focus, as well as its theoretical underpinning, however, lies outside the scope of the present investigation. Questions such as, “What is the desired relationship between refugees and asylum-seekers on the one hand, and human rights and domestic law on the other? How should one weigh the right of the state unilaterally to prevent potential immigrants from crossing its borders against the right of individuals to freedom of international movement? Should the economic and cultural gains of migration to society be prioritized before the strains that migration imposes on its social fabric?” have little or no relevance to the ancient world. Likewise concepts such as multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, globalism, and so on, which feature so prominently in discussions of
contemporary diasporas, cannot usefully be applied to the ancient world. Even the notion of a border as a (semi-)permanent marker of territory has to be revised when we think of the ancient world. Arguably a more appropriate concept is that of a frontier consisting of neutral territory, which was available for livestock grazing but not for settlement or agriculture (Diener and Hagen 2012, 29–30).

Interest in exilic literature in classical antiquity has been growing over the past half-century, concentrating primarily on the three most famous exiled Roman authors, Cicero, Ovid, and Seneca the Younger. More recently it has expanded to include Greek literature, a notable example being Jan Felix Gaertner's edited volume
Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond
(2007b). By contrast the investigation of diaspora as a historical phenomenon in the Greek (and Roman for that matter) world continues to be sparse, other than in the case of overseas settlements, where the emphasis is primarily on this phenomenon as a galvanizing force in Greek history. One of the first works to spotlight the refugee was Elemer Balogh's
Political Refugees in Ancient Greece: From the Period of the Tyrants to Alexander the Great
(1943). Balogh was motivated to undertake his study by the refugee crisis occasioned by World War I. Paul McKechnie's
Outsiders in the Greek Cities in the Fourth Century BC
(1989) first alerted scholars to the fact that “the description and analysis of Greek life as the life of an aggregation of city-states is in essence and origin the Greeks' own”—and he went on to examine the many groupings to whom that narrow self-definition did not apply. His primary focus was on large-scale population movement, but he also examined the condition of mercenaries, brigands, pirates, itinerant workers, and traders. Other scholars have illuminated individual topics covered in the present survey. Silvia Montiglio's
Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture
(2005) demonstrates how wandering was conceptualized in literary and philosophical texts. “Colonization” in particular has generated intense interest. Recent pioneering work includes Robin Osborne's
Greece in the Making 1200–479 BC
(2nd ed., 2009) and Irad Malkin's
A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean
(2011). Nancy Demand's
Urban Relocation in
Archaic and Classical Greece: Flight and Consolidation
(1990) emphasized the degree to which the Greeks envisioned the city-state as a transportable entity. Hans-Joachim Gehrke's
Stasis: Untersuchungen zu den inneren Kriegen in den griechischen Staaten des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.
(1985) pioneered the investigation of the political squabbles that frequently led to mass expulsion. The asylum-seeker has generated considerable interest particularly among German scholars, including Lienhard Delekat (
Katoche, Hierodulie und Adoptionsfreilassung
, 1964); Martin Dreher (
Das Antike Asyl. Kultische Grundlagen, rechtliche Ausgestaltung und politische Funktion
, 2003); and Ulrich Sinn (1990, 1993, and
ThesCRA
III, pp. 217–32). The importance of the economic migrant in Athenian society, first highlighted by Michel Clerc in
Les métèques athéniens
(1893), was brought into sharper relief by David Whitehead's
The Ideology of the Athenian Metic
(1977) and Edward Cohen's
Athenian Nation
(2000). Sara Forsdyke's
Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy
(2005), though chiefly focused on Athenian democracy, demonstrates how political power in the Greek world was intimately connected with the power to drive one's opponents into exile. Finally, Mogens Hansen's and Thomas Nielsen's edited volume
An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis
(2004) has been invaluable, both for its comprehensiveness and for its discussions of cities that experienced civil war, underwent wholesale enslavement, formed a synoecism, and so on.