Wandering Greeks (31 page)

After the defeat of the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 Epaminondas advocated that a
polis
should be established for the Messenians in the foothills of Mount Ithome. He evidently chose this site both because it was the strongest natural fortress in the region and because it was a site of great patriotic significance. He was hardly motivated by humanitarian concerns for a dispossessed people, any more than the Athenians had been in the 460s when they settled the Messenians at Naupactus. On the contrary he envisaged Messene, allied to Megalopolis, as a way of containing the Spartans in the southeast Peloponnese (see earlier,
chapter 4
). His plan succeeded brilliantly, and the Spartans were reduced to a power of minor military significance.

What percentage of those who settled in Messene claimed descent from those who had been exiled in 464 is unknown. Pausanias reports the tradition that when summoned back to their homeland the Messenians “collected together more quickly than anyone might have expected, due both to their longing for their homeland and to their hatred for the Spartans” (4.26.5). This seems highly dubious, to put it mildly. Recalling a people who had been dispersed over a wide geographical area would have been an arduous and time-consuming task. Nor is it by any means obvious that repatriation would have seemed a particularly attractive proposition, involving as it did living in close proximity to the hated Spartans. Many who lived abroad may well have been content to recount tales of Messenian prehistory and stay rootedly put. After all, very few—if any—had ever set foot in Messenia, and they can hardly have felt much attachment to its soil.

Most of the settlers probably came from the ranks of those who were already living in Laconia and Messenia, and from soldiers who were serving in Epaminondas's army. We know that some of those who took up the offer were of proven non-Messenian ethnicity because Diodorus Siculus, following the contemporary historian Ephorus, explicitly states that Epaminondas did not restrict citizenship to those claiming to be of Messenian stock but registered “all those who wished”—a further indication that the offer of resettlement may have had only limited appeal (15.66.1).

As ever in this study, many questions remain unanswered. How long did it take to build the wall and the houses, and to provide the new city with a proper water supply and other essential facilities? Who footed the bill? (Probably Epaminondas did, on behalf of the Boeotian Confederacy, but we do not know this for certain.) Assuming that the city was still being completed when the first settlers began to arrive, how were they domiciled? Was any upper limit put on the number that was permitted to relocate? How were they distributed inside the
polis?
Were social and/or ethnic distinctions observed in the allocation of allotments? (Presumably those claiming descent from the original exiles had first choice, though again we do not know this for certain.)

Mass Enforced Repatriation

The enforced repatriation of large groups of people was sometimes used by a besieging army as a weapon of war, in part because the swelling of the citizen body increases the number of mouths that need to be fed, thereby fomenting unrest, if not a complete breakdown of the social and political order. Xenophon, for instance, tells us that toward the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartan admiral Lysander, following his naval victory at Aegospotami in 405:

sent the Athenian garrisons [that is, the cleruchs] and every other Athenian whom he saw anywhere back to Athens, granting them safe conduct on condition that they sailed to that destination alone but not if they sailed anywhere else, in the conviction that the more people who gathered in the Piraeus and Athens, the sooner there would be a scarcity of food (
Hell
. 2.2.2).

The tactic was successful, and a few months later Athens was forced to surrender. Likewise, after the Thirty Tyrants had established their rule, the Spartans decreed that “Athenian exiles should be returned from everywhere and that those who prevented their return should be deemed enemies of Sparta” (Plu.
Lys
. 27.2). In this case enforced repatriation was intended to keep the city weak and divided by increasing the number of Spartan sympathizers.

Enforced repatriation inevitably causes massive legal and logistical problems. A case in point involves the repatriation of the oligarchs of Phlius, a town in the northwest Argolid, who had been driven out by their democratic opponents in 382. Eventually the democrats voted to reinstall the exiles because they feared that the Spartans, who sympathized with the oligarchs, would exact reprisals. So they agreed to restore their property and compensate those who had acquired it in the interim at public expense. Disputes between the current owners and the returning exiles were to be settled in a court of law (Xen.
Hell
. 5.2.10).

Once their fear of Spartan military intervention had receded, however, the democrats reneged on the deal (5.3.10). They refused to hear any complaints in an impartial court (viz one made up equally of democrats and oligarchs) as they had originally promised. Instead they made the exiles plead before a popular court. Since this was composed of the same people who had previously refused to hand over the confiscated property, it was unlikely to deliver a fair verdict. “What kind of justice is this,” the oligarchs indignantly demanded, “where the guilty are also the judges?” So saying, they went into exile a second time, this time voluntarily, accompanied by others who were sympathetic to their cause.

The oligarchs presented their case to the Spartans, who agreed to come to their rescue. When Phlius fell in 379 after an eighteen months' siege, the Spartan king Agesilaus proposed peace on the following terms (5.3.25):

Fifty men from the restored exiles and fifty men from those at home [that is, the democrats] should first determine who should be left alive and who should be condemned in accordance with due process, and secondly establish a constitution under which to run the state.

The episode starkly reveals the problems that returning exiles sometimes caused, particularly when they were able to seek support from an outside power. Even without that complication, however, their attempt to repossess their property would have put enormous strains on the social fabric of the
polis
, as it does at the end of the
Odyssey
when Odysseus seeks to repossess his home.

The Exiles' Decree of Alexander the Great

The most comprehensive instance of mass enforced repatriation was that undertaken by Alexander the Great. At the beginning of his reign Alexander had taken steps not to aggravate the refugee crisis that he had inherited as the leader of the Greek world. So in 335 he summoned a convention at the Isthmus of Corinth and declared that there should be “no executions or
phugai
[banishments] contrary to the laws of the city-states, no seizing of property, no parceling out of land, no cancellation of debts, and no freeing of slaves for the purpose of bringing about a revolution” ([Dem.] 17.15). In the spring of 324, however, facing the threat of insurrection, he announced to his army at Opis in Mesopotamia that all his generals and satraps were to disband their mercenary armies. The consequences of this action were dire. The release of mercenaries always presented a threat, but Alexander's disbandment was on an unprecedented scale. As a result, as Diodorus Siculus reports, “mercenaries released from service were running wild throughout the whole of Asia, supporting themselves by plunder.” Many of them gathered at Taenarum, a major center for mercenary recruitment, where they placed themselves under the command of the Athenian general Leosthenes, Alexander's sworn enemy (17.111.1–4).

Had Alexander not foreseen the implications of his decision? Perhaps he determined that there was no alternative. At any rate he sought a public venue to make his ruling binding on all those Greek cities—how many we do not know—that now would have to deal with the consequences of exiles returning en masse. Accordingly at the commencement of the Olympic Games in late July 324 he promulgated
what is known as the Exiles' Decree. The decree established a panhellenic amnesty for all refugees by requiring them to return to their native cities and regain possession of their property. It took the form of an open letter that Nicanor of Stagira, Aristotle's adopted son and future son-in-law, handed to the winner of the heralds' competition to read to the assembled audience. Diodorus, who quotes a contemporary historian called Hieronymus of Cardia, has preserved the text of the letter, which was concise to the point of terseness (18.8.4):

Alexander the king to refugees from the Greek cities. We were not responsible for your exile but we shall be responsible for your return to your own homelands, with the exception of those who are under a curse. We have written to Antipater [Alexander's viceroy in Europe] about these matters so that if any of the cities are unwilling to receive you back he will compel them to do so.

”Those who are under a curse” included an unknown number of felons and other criminals, as well as others whom Alexander himself had
driven into exile. Of these the largest group comprised the Theban deportees whom he condemned to a life of wandering when he laid waste their city the previous year. Many of them had probably fought against Alexander as mercenaries in the Persian army.

The reaction of the crowd is said to have been ecstatic. Diodorus alleges that all the exiles had assembled in Olympia and that they numbered more than 20,000. But he can be thinking only of those who were within easy reach of Olympia (Badian 1971, 28). The total number is likely to have been considerably larger, especially if we include women and children, because only men were permitted to attend athletic contests. Alexander also took the opportunity to pension off 10,000 veterans who were serving in his army (D.S. 17.109.1–2).

The contents of the letter had no doubt been leaked well in advance to give time for a large and appreciative crowd to assemble. Alexander was nothing if not a consummate self-publicizer. In fact Diodorus claims that his purpose was “to enhance his fame and to win the support of many people through favors in the event of revolution and rebellion among the Greeks.” We should therefore perhaps see the Exiles' Decree as intended to win him partisan support throughout Greece. He had previously been solicited by exiles from Heraclea Pontica and Samos for permission to return to their homeland, so he would have been fully aware of the potential benefits of gratifying the returnees. He may even have hoped that their assimilation would prove a distraction.

Implementing the terms of the Exiles' Decree must have been a bureaucratic nightmare, however, involving as it did the return of landed property that had been appropriated by those who were politically at odds with the returnees. It has been suggested that the procedures governing the reinstatement of the exiles were set forth in a more extensive document than the proclamation itself (Poddighe 2011, 118). Even if this were the case, however, each city-state would have been left to its own devices to work out the messy details.

To comprehend the legal complications, let us turn to a decree that relates to the repatriation of exiles to Tegea in Arcadia. “The returning exiles are to be furnished with the paternal property away from which they went into exile, and women are to be furnished with their maternal
property in the case of unmarried women who owned property and did not have brothers,” it declares (ll 4–7, Heisserer 1980, 205–18 =
SIG
³
306 = Harding 122 = Rhodes and Osborne 101). It then goes on to state that each returning exile is to receive a house. If the house has no garden, the returnee is to be assigned one that is nearby. If there is no adjoining garden, she or he is to receive half a garden. The current resident, viz the person who had acquired ownership of the house, is to be paid two
minae
in compensation (ll. 10–21).