Wandering Greeks by Robert Garland Page B

Alexander,” resented having to settle so far away from their homelands (D.S. 18.7.1). So when Alexander died, they abandoned their settlement and headed back to Greece. We do not know how many remained, and we learn little about how they fared.
    1 I have taken to heart Robin Osborne’s observation (1998, 269): “A proper understanding of archaic Greek history can only come when chapters on ‘Colonization’ are eradicated from books on early Greece.” see too, Purcell (1990, 56), who complains of “the ethnic presumptuousness and false sense of purpose in the term” That had no bearing on the phenomenon. It was Finley (1976, 174), who first drew attention to the inappropriateness of the term “colony” as a description of early Greek settlements. I am grateful to one of the readers for Princeton University Press for directing me to the origins of the debate.
    2 My count is from Hansen and Nielsen (2004, index 27 [pp. 1390–96]). It includes both foundations and refoundations. The numbers are necessarily approximate.
    3 Recent bone analysis conducted by anthropologists at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History has revealed that the English settlers at Jamestown, Virginia, had to resort to cannibalism to survive the harsh winter of 1609–10, and we need hardly doubt that Greek settlers would have been equally hard pressed.

4
THE PORTABLE POLIS
    Uprooting the City
    An overseas settlement constituted a select number of pioneers who agreed to found a new polis in the hope of preserving or bettering their lives. In the face of an overwhelming threat to their livelihood, however, perhaps due to pressure from hostile neighbors or as the result of an environmental catastrophe, all the inhabitants of an existing polis might take the radical step of abandoning their homes and relocating elsewhere, a process that is generally known as metoikêsis or anachorêsis .
    It is easily overlooked that the polis was inherently portable, since our literary sources emphasize the predilection for permanence and continuity. As we shall see, however, permanence and stability were not invariably the norm. We know for a fact that the Phocaeans, the Teians, the Clazomenians, the Ephesians, the Milesians, the Samians, and the Athenians, as well as the inhabitants of many Sicilian cities, either underwent relocation or at least seriously considered the option, and that is aside from the various peoples who were deported, whom we shall discuss in the next chapter.
    The Greek polis did not relocate only as a single unit, reconstituting itself in a form similar to its previous instantiation. It did so also in association with other poleis by a process known as synoecism, though we should note that the word sunoikismos (literally “the joining together of households”) does not occur until the hellenistic period. A synoecism took place when two or more neighboring poleis or, alternatively, two or more neighboring villages consolidated their inhabitants in a single entity, either by incorporating them into an existing polis (or poleis ) orby combining to build an entirely new megalopolis (literally “big polis ”). Such a process had two quite separate aspects, one political, requiring the assimilation of citizens from different states into a single community, and the other physical, geographical, and architectural (Hornblower 1982, 83).
    There must have been many occasions, however, when vested interests prevented the inhabitants of a city-state that was facing assault and possible destruction from reaching an agreement about what course of action to adopt, with the result that a stand-off between two factions occurred. A case in point involves the Cimmerians, a people who originally lived to the north of the Caucasus. When the Scythians were about to invade their territory, the Cimmerians held a debate about what action to take. The dêmos advocated flight, whereas the aristocracy voted