migration and population movements: Greece Typically the oikistes was revered by future generations and received heroic honors (that is, he attained a semidivine status and was the object of civic worship) City foundation was steeped in ritual There was first of all the necessity of consulting the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, which might give advice on the proper location for the city (though many of the oracles that have come down to us in the literary sources are forgeries) Delphi was also charged with settling disputes that might have arisen, including deciding who the oikistes should be In many cases Apollo himself was considered an oikistes and was worshipped in the Sicilian colony of Naxos under the cult title Archegetes (city founder) According to Thucydides, this shrine was much revered by colonists of all cities There is perhaps a sense in which the colonization movement, by bringing the citizens of various Greek-speaking cities into proximity with other cultures (who were, not surprisingly, often hostile to new settlers), helped establish a sense of common Greek identity In addition, the age of colonization coincides with the development of the polis, and the foundation of colonies may be seen as a series of experiments in how to govern a state A colony was expected to maintain close relations with its metropolis (literally, “mother city”), symbolized in the first instance by the sending of the sacred hearth fire from the metropolis along on the founding expedition The foundation document of Cyrene specifies the oaths to be sworn by both sides, which oblige the settlers not to return home (this colony was founded because of population pressures) and which commit the metropolis, Thíra, to come to the aid of its colony Such obligations could be of extremely long duration: Thucydides shows the city of Epidamnus in 431 b.c.e appealing for help to its metropolis of Corcyra; when rebuffed, they carried the appeal to Corinth, which had founded Corcyra 300 years earlier Thucydides lists a number of instances where colonies fought against their metropoleis His point is that such instances were rare and noteworthy Syracuse thus found itself opposed to Athens in the Peloponnesian War because of its ancestral tie to Corinth, despite the fact that it shared with Athens a democratic constitution The colonial relation outweighed political ideology The motives for individuals to join colonial expeditions must have varied greatly In addition to the obvious financial and personal motives (grants of land, adventure, and the chance for a fresh start), in some cases political strife at home provided an impetus Colonies could be a place of refuge for those with political (or legal) difficulties, and in some cases daughter cities took in subsequent waves of exiles from their metropoleis (Modern parallels would include the colonization of Australia and much of the eastern United States.) In Xenophon’s Anabasis a group of Greek mercenaries, abandoned far from home by the death of their patron, seriously consider founding a colony (as did the Athenian army when stranded in Sicily, in Thucydides’ account) This shows that founding a city could be born of desperation and also raises indirectly the question of gender Presumably, city founda- 713 tions included both men and women but perhaps not in equal numbers, given the rigors of founding a city in hostile territory and the Greeks’ views that most such activities were better done by men In this case intermarriage with native peoples may have been common, yet the Greek sources are silent on this issue The narratives Greek cities developed about their own colonial enterprises are worth looking at There is a strong tendency to portray the foundation of a colony in what we would think of as mythic terms (For the Greeks myth and history were not always separate categories.) The impulse to found the city is expressed in terms of crisis, often of a personal nature: strife between brothers, exile as a result of a crime, the physical deformity of the future oikistes Even an impersonal force such as population pressure can be personalized: Thíra’s foundation of Cyrene (in a version reported by Herodotus) is said to be the result of a drought sent by Apollo when the Therans ignored his first command to found a colony The consultation at Delphi involves not merely approval for the colony but the granting of a sign (particularly a command to follow an animal guide to the site of the new city), and in some cases a riddle to be figured out by the oikistes (correctly interpreting, for example, “an attack of the earthborn” to refer to an infestation of mice) Further, colonization can be viewed through the metaphorical lens of marriage: Colonists establish a new city as a married couple establishes a new household It has been suggested that the metaphor expresses the Greeks’ ambivalence about their relations with native peoples Rather than being expelled, they and their land welcome the newcomers, perhaps with rights of intermarriage Whatever its origins, colonization in the Archaic Age had a tremendous impact on Greek civilization, particularly in regard to the settlements in the west Sicily and Magna Graecia were the Greek version of the New World The abundance of fertile land created prosperity, reflected in the region’s still magnificent architecture and other material remains, and the region served as a constant source of cultural innovation, giving birth to such important figures as Parmenides, Empedocles, and Archimedes THE SECOND PHASE OF COLONIZATION Colonization in the sixth and fift h centuries b.c.e tended to become more overtly imperial and designed to promote the overseas interests of the metropolis; this was especially true with the rise of the Athenian empire in the years after the Persian Wars Corinth was a pioneer in this regard even in the late seventh century b.c.e.: There it became common practice to choose as oikistai the sons of the city’s tyrant (sole ruler of a polis, who differed from a king chiefly in the lack of a hereditary claim to power), establishing an overseas dynastic link Similarly, the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus sent family members to be in charge of colonies at Sigeum and Lemnos In the fift h century b.c.e., after the tyrannies had died out, it was necessary to secure the interests of the metropolis by