Wandering Greeks by Robert Garland Page A

(see later, map 2). There they lived peaceably for 245 years until Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse, expelled their descendants. A face-saving device to explain the failure of a pioneering venture was to tell tall tales about encounters with monstrous races. Although Herodotus did not himself believe in the reports of a goat-footed people who lived in the mountains nor in men who sleep for six months at a stretch, as related by the bald-headed Argippaioi (4.25.1), even the ultra-rationalist Thucydides did not deny outright the existence of the Laestrygonians or Cyclopes. In fact he concludes his excursus on the peoples of Sicily with the comment, “We have to satisfy ourselves with what the poets said and with what anyone else knows” (66.2.1). Given their level of ignorance of the world around them, many Greeks probably set out from home with the fear of encountering monstrous races never wholly absent from their minds (Garland 2010, 162–66).
    The Athenian Postscriptum
    The great age of sending out settlers came to a close in the early sixth century. The movement did not, however, cease altogether. At least seventy-two settlements were founded in the fifth and fourth centuries. The most active city-state in the fifth century was Athens, which from 478–404 sent out some thirty bands of settlers, many to existing sites whose populations they had banished for this purpose (see appendix B ). We read of two types of Athenian settlements, apoikiai and klêrouchiai , though ancient authors do not invariably differentiate between the two. The number of settlers varied considerably—from as few as 250 at Andros to as many as 4,000 at Chalcis. Whereas membership of a cleruchy was restricted to Athenian citizens, noncitizens were also permitted to settle in apoikiai . In some apoikiai in fact the noncitizens greatly outnumbered the citizens. It goes without saying that the non-Athenian settlers would have been required to be supportive of Athens’s foreign policy and political system, since the institutions of the settlement would be modeled closely on those of Athens.
    Though some settlements had a clear military and strategic importance, notable examples being Amphipolis on the northern coast of Thrace and Thurii in Lucania, this was not true of all, so other motives for founding them must have been in play. One we can detect was to increase the number of hoplites in Athens’s army. The majority of cleruchs and colonists probably belonged to the lowest property-owning class—namely, the thêtes —though those in the next-to-lowest class, known as the zeugitae , also participated. Cleruchs received a klêros (allotment), from which their name klêrouchos (allotment holder), derives. As such they became automatically liable to military service as hoplites.
    The Alexandrian Post-Postscriptum
    At the end of the period covered by this survey Alexander the Great founded settlements in places as far away as eastern Iran, where urbanentities had previously been rare. Plutarch ( Mor . 328e) puts their total number at “over 70,” but this is greatly exaggerated, and the number of actual poleis may have been as few as six. They were founded for a variety of purposes. Though the majority was military, some were primarily commercial. This was certainly true of the greatest of them all, Alexandria on the Nile Delta, which was founded in the spring of 331.
    With the possible exception of Alexandria on the Nile Delta, the populations of most of the foundations comprised Greeks and Macedonians on the one hand and indigenous peoples from the surrounding neighborhood, especially nomads, on the other. Griffith (1935, 23) calculated that in total Alexander settled 36,000 Greeks and Macedonians abroad. Most were mercenaries, who would have had little say in the matter. Not surprisingly, some, “longing for Greek customs and the Greek way of life,” and “submitting only out of fear of