Wandering Greeks (2 page)

The principal questions that have fueled my inquiry are “What did it mean in the Greek world to be a migrant, a refugee, a settler, an evacuee, a deportee, an asylum-seeker, and so on? What physical and psychological challenges did such people face? What was the human cost of unsettlement? What kind of interactions did migrants have with those whom they encountered abroad? What were the consequences of dislocation for their sense of belonging and identity?”—even though, given the nature of the sources, I have rarely been able to answer them adequately (see later, “Envoi”). That is in part because there was no particular interest in what we would call the “human interest story”.

I have subtitled this book “The Ancient Greek Diaspora from the Age of Homer to the Death of Alexander the Great” because “diaspora” an ancient Greek word, best describes the multifarious types of movement
that I seek to investigate.
²
The term is not, however, unproblematic, and its meaning has generated much debate among anthropologists, sociologists, cultural critics, geographers, environmental psychologists, political scientists, and literary theorists, to name but a few, all of whom are engaged in the relatively new field of diaspora studies. Primarily “diaspora” has been used to describe the mass movements that took place in the second half of the twentieth century, “particularly in reference to independence movements in formerly colonized areas, waves of refugees fleeing war-torn states, and fluxes of economic migration in the post–World War II era” (Braziel and Mannur 2003, 4). More recently, however, its usage has been widened to include “any and every nameable population category that is to some extent dispersed in space” (Brubaker 2005, 3). It is thus “a universal nomenclature applicable to displaced peoples” (Barkan and Shelton 1998, 5). Another burgeoning field of multidisciplinary inquiry that has bearing on this investigation is border studies, which focuses on the importance of borders for social interaction, local identity, state sovereignty, and the exercise of power.

When I initially began my research, I intended to confine it to those who had been forcibly deprived of their homelands, their belongings, and their communities. It quickly became apparent, however, that the Greek refugee is not an isolatable category, since our sources often fail to give a precise explanation for population displacement. In addition, many of the individuals and groups who were exiled or who went into voluntary exile disappear from the record without trace, once mention has been made of their departure. There are other difficulties. We do not know what percentage of Athens's large metic—that is, long-term resident—population comprised economic migrants who were seeking
a better life, and what percentage was driven abroad by compulsion, though their circumstances and motivation would have been very different from one another. Last but by no means least, Greek uses the same word to describe both an exile and a refugee (see
appendix A
).

It follows that the subject of this inquiry,
tout court
, may be defined as the dispersal, removal, and relocation of the Greeks, whether in groups or singly, either by choice or by compulsion, in the period from ca. 800 to the death of Alexander the Great in 323. Because of the difficulty in drawing hard and fast distinctions within the Greek diaspora, my chapters cannot be self-contained. I have simply done the best I can to organize the testimonia comprehensibly. The fact is that it is often impossible to distinguish the asylum-seeker from the fugitive, the evacuee from the deportee, or the economic migrant from the itinerant. One might justifiably claim from this that it is impossible to have an encounter with the Greek migrant. While respecting that opinion, I have done my level best to force one.

This investigation has been a long time in the conception and gestation. About a decade ago Paul Cartledge suggested that I might write a book on refugees, and although the finished product is less circumscribed than I had originally intended, I owe the initial inspiration to him. Paul had traveled back and knew what I had overlooked. He also painstakingly read the manuscript and corrected countless inaccuracies and infelicities, though the book has gone some distance since then and all the remaining errors and imprecisions are mine. So I would like to take this opportunity yet again to express my deep and abiding gratitude for his unfailing encouragement and incomparable friendship.

I owe an equal debt of inspiration to Vergil. The
Aeneid
, through its empathetic depiction of a man who is
profugus fato
(a refugee by fate), has provided us with an unparalleled resource for exploring the mental world of those who experienced deracination and did their best to live out its consequences. No Greek text comes close in explicating and laying bare the barrage of fears and false hopes that a person seeking a new homeland experienced day after endless day. In short, the
Aeneid
helped
me to appreciate the predicament of those who lived in a world that was, almost by definition, perpetually
anastatos
.
³

I am most grateful to Rob Tempio and to all the editorial staff at Princeton University Press, and to the anonymous Press readers for their invaluable suggestions. My research was greatly facilitated by a stipend attached to the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster chair of the Classics. David Whitehead expertly read at short notice
chapters 9
and
10
. I should like to express my appreciation to the Research Council at Colgate University for covering the cost of the maps and illustrations. My thanks go to Michael Holobowsky for drawing the maps, and to Andy Daddio for photographing the coins. Mick Jagger and my son, Richard Garland, have been an invaluable strengthening presence throughout the long journey of this book. My friends Peter Balakian and John Naughton and my daughter, Ling Ling, have been constantly at my side.

¹
For the meaning of
anastatos
in a migratory context, see Hansen and Nielsen (2004, 123). The instability of medieval, as well as ancient, communities has been emphasized by Osborne (1991, 139–67), here in the context of village life. Walzer (1981, 1–35), though dated, provides an excellent introduction to many issues relating to migration, particularly the human toll on both migrants and receiving community.

²
The verb
diaspeirô
is first used in Pl.
Laws
3.699d. The earliest occurrence of the noun
diaspora
, “that which is sown or scattered across” occurs in the Book of Deuteronomy (Septuagint, third century BCE), where the Lord warns the Hebrews that if they do not hearken to him, they “will be a diaspora in all kingdoms of the earth” (28.25). “Diaspora” later came to refer specifically to the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple in 586 BCE. It first entered the English language in 1876. For a condensed history of human migration, see Goldin, Cameron, and Balarajan (2011, 11-38).

³
Livy, too, in his early books consistently emphasizes the fact that Rome's growth owed everything to transfers of peoples. The abduction of the Sabine women is merely the most celebrated instance of this phenomenon (1.9).

WANDERING GREEKS

1
PROLEGOMENA

Ancient and Modern Responses to Migration

“Millions of Migrants Flood in and There's Nothing We Can Do to Stop Them!” screamed the headline in a British tabloid newspaper recently. The metaphor of flooding, which is particularly favored by the popular press, evokes the image of Britannia sinking beneath the waves under the weight of a migrant stampede.

There is, however, nothing novel in the sentiment. In 1601 Queen Elizabeth I had called for the banishment of “the great numbers of negars and Blackamoores, most of them infidels, who are fostered and fed here to the great annoyance of [my] people.” Even so, it was not until 1905 that the British Parliament finally introduced legislation that gave the Home Secretary the power to restrict immigration. The so-called Aliens Act primarily targeted criminals and paupers; an attempt to incorporate a restriction on Jewish immigration under the same act was heavily defeated. This was also the first piece of legislation to provide asylum in Britain for those fleeing from religious or political persecution.

In the United States, too, racism has played its part in the legislative process. In 1790, a few months after the Constitution had been ratified, the Naturalization Act granted immigrant status to any “free white person” of “good moral character” who had been resident in the country for two years. How these persons of good character were to be identified was not spelled out, but they no doubt had to belong to the proper social class. The so-called white person prerequisite remained in force in every naturalization act passed by Congress until 1952. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating
to the United States, was repealed only in 1943. It had been fueled by the anxiety that the Chinese were taking jobs from Americans—the persistent fear in a host population toward an energetic immigrant group.

The twentieth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the numbers of refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants. This came about largely as a result of the rise of communism and fascism and the occurrence of two world wars. Around 1.5 million Anatolian Greeks and 500,000 Muslims became refugees in 1923 as a result of the “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations,” which the governments of Greece and Turkey cosigned. As many as 12.5 million people were displaced from their homes following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. It has recently been determined that at the end of World War II between 12 and 14 million residents of mainly Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland were expelled from their homelands to occupied Germany (Douglas 2012). Some 600,000 Jews fled to Israel from Arab states and from Iran in the late 1940s. Between 5.5 and 8.5 million migrants moved to Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Holland from their respective colonies in search of work in the period from 1945 to 1973. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Thailand and Vietnam when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975. About 4.6 million Palestinians currently fall under the protection of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. Some one and a half million Chinese have been relocated from the region in Hubei Province around the Three Gorges Dam, which was begun in 1993 to provide energy for the world's biggest hydroelectric power plant. At the time of writing more than two million refugees have fled from Syria as a result of the civil war that began in 2011, around half of them children, while another 4.5 million have been internally displaced inside the country according to estimates from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Not the least troubling consequence of the events of September 11, 2001, has been a global tightening of policies aimed at immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, who are seen as potential threats to national security and as a possible cause of armed terror.

Upheavals in early modern times include the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the Moors from Spain in 1609, the Huguenots from
France in 1685, the early settlers to America, the émigrés of the French Revolution, and the Loyalists who fled to Canada and the Caribbean at the time of the American War of Independence. In addition, more than half a million Portuguese and Spaniards settled in Central and South America, while about 700,000 British subjects immigrated to the American colonies. It is estimated that between eleven and twelve million Africans were shipped as slaves across the Atlantic from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Approximately 2.3 million Chinese and 1.3 million Indians traveled to Southeast Asia as contract workers between 1842 and 1900.

Large-scale displacement is by no means an exclusively modern phenomenon. I estimate that well over 100,000 men, women, and slaves were displaced as a result of the Peloponnesian War, half of that number being residents of Attica. Many cities ceased to exist in that period, including Histiaea, Plataea, Thyrea, Torone, Scione, Cyme, Melos, Hyccara, Iasus, and Cedreiae (see
appendix E
). Some of them were razed to the ground; others were resettled by immigrants. Abandoned settlements were in fact a feature of the Greek landscape at all periods of history. Overall, about seventy-five cities were destroyed in the period covered by this survey, some more than once (Hansen and Nielsen 2004, index 20 [pp. 1363–64]). Plataea held the record, being destroyed three times (in 480, 426, and 373). In forty-two cases the population was massacred and/or enslaved. In twenty-two, the
polis
underwent
dioikismos
—that is to say, the survivors were dispersed among the villages out of which the
polis
had originally been an amalgam.

In addition, many prominent individuals have undergone exile, both voluntary and enforced, including Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Napoleon Bonaparte, Marc Chagall, Albert Einstein, Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner, Frédéric Chopin, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Elie Wiesel. The list of those who went into exile in Greek antiquity was equally distinguished (see
appendix D
).

My own awareness of the issues posed by immigration dates precisely to April 20, 1968, when Enoch Powell, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South East, delivered his infamous “Rivers
of Blood” speech, coincidentally (or not) less than three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King. He intended it to be an attack on the Race Relations Act that had been introduced in the same year by the Labour Party. The act had outlawed discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins” in public places. In so doing, it had also made discrimiantion in housing illegal. Previously it had been commonplace to see advertisements for rented rooms in Britain include the words “No Coloureds” (or “No Irish”). Now such notices were banned.