Thus the opening-up of the Aegean to the wider world was both an internal and external dynamic, a process in which the Greeks became far more active participants in Mediterranean life. The Aegean with its burgeoning population, growing surpluses in food and raw materials, and an expanding market potential for exotic luxury products, was ripe for exploitation by the enterprising merchant city-states of Phoenicia (modern coastal Syria and Lebanon), and to a far lesser extent the more introverted Egyptian state. Internally, the aristocratic society of the Aegean emulated the lifestyles of urban elites in these exotic regions and in the powerful native kingdom of Lydia in Western Anatolia, thereby enhancing Aegean-elite distinctiveness from local populations of lesser status, through acquiring and displaying in public their imported jewelry, clothes, tableware, and furniture. The close links between external trade and the upper class rests both on their control of wealth and also on the likelihood that most Aegean merchant ships venturing abroad were owned by the basileis class as a new form of wealth creation (Snodgrass 1980). This expanded on the elite’s traditional reliance on landed estates and the patronage of regional craft populations. Importantly, Aegean commercial sailing not only responded to the rise of Levantine merchant arrivals by heading also toward Eastern markets, but was already from the LG era exploring the Central and West Mediterranean and the Black Sea, where less developed markets than the Aegean were to be found.
In a core-periphery model (Sherratt and Sherratt 1993), if Greece remained a subsidiary partner during this era to more advanced economies in the Near East, it could form a secondary core for the exploitation of economies to the North and West ofthe Aegean which were far less developed than itself. This relationship between the complex poleis of the Southern Aegean and indigenous tribal societies in Southern Italy and the Black Sea, was a mirror to the internal coreperiphery relationships which the South Aegean states were establishing at the same period in the Mainland of Northern Greece (Bintliff 1997b). Generally, the core-periphery model sees core economies trading finished high-status goods, especially luxuries and military technology, for raw materials from the periphery (agricultural surpluses, metals, slaves).
At a certain point, successful commercial exchanges encouraged both Greek trading settlements at entrepot points and genuine colonies. Generally, the nature of such communities reflects the level of political complexity of the exotic society into which Greeks inserted themselves. Thus the Etruscan city-states of North-Central Italy possessed a culture as elaborate as the states ofthe Archaic Southern Aegean, so that only formal entrepots in delimited locations seem to have been permitted, in order to encourage Etruscan trade with both Greek and Phoenician merchants and craftspeople. In Egypt a similar formal arrangement was achieved at the Nile-Delta port of Naucratis under the final native Egyptian dynasties before that country became incorporated into the Persian Empire during the course of the sixth century BC.
Till relatively recently, the much more widespread creation of autonomous Greek colonies outside of the Southern Aegean, a key feature of the LG-Archaic era (ca. 800-500 BC) (Figure 9.6), was considered to be a comparable phenomenon to global colonial expansion emanating from Western Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries AD. In this Early Modern period the home state encouraged merchants and potential commercial estate-developers to settle “undeveloped” countries, supporting such settlements militarily and through formal treaties with native societies, with the prime aim of increasing the supply of raw materials and manpower for European states, whilst creating vastly increased markets for European manufactured goods. At the same time, agricultural settlers from these European homelands, in part due to population pressure, took over fertile areas of undeveloped countries through violence, treaty or purchase, both to support a new life abroad under the protective arm of the homeland, and to develop commercial exports.
One of the first recorded Greek colonies abroad, at Pithecoussai near Naples, seems to fit this recent colonial model: a small rocky island (Ischia) was settled by a large population of Greeks from various homeland states (and other ethnic groups, including Phoenicians), argued to be offshore traders negotiating for the metal ores and other products of the indigenous early state societies of Central Italy. Shortly afterwards this entrepot is replaced by a Greek colonial urban settlement at Cumae on the mainland, which, however, rapidly develops into a prosperous agricultural city on the model of Aegean poleis.
Actually the Early Modern parallels are problematic in both political and economic terms (Antonaccio 2007, Tsetskhladze 2006). Colonial Greek cities usually did not recognize their dependence on their mother-city. Indeed it was customary for colonies to be made up of settlers from various states; examples show that colonies could go to war with their founder-city. Secondly, Greek colonies were almost all intended to function like autonomous Aegean city-states, whose
Figure 9.6 Greek colonization in Late Geometric-Archaic times.
A. A. M. van der Heyden, Atlas van de antieke wereld. Amsterdam 1958, Map 3.
Populations farmed and herded, for the most part to feed themselves and supply regional rather than interregional markets, with a minor role for merchants, manufacturers, and export-oriented production. Moreover, both in the Black Sea and in Southern Italy it is increasingly suggested that local populations formed a significant component in the demography of “colonial” settlements. Thirdly, the evidence indicates that state-organized directional trade was highly uncommon, with various shippers from many states allowed to circulate goods from or to the same polis or ethnos.
This deconstruction of a commercial impetus might turn our attention to a rival scholarly opinion, that Greek colonies arose from overpopulation within the flourishing Aegean Archaic city-states. The difficulty here is timescale. The peak colonial era is Late Geometric to Archaic: even in the precocious zone of rising population and town size in the Southeast Aegean (Figure 9.5), the population climaxes, from surface survey and historic population statistics, occur in the Classical fifth to fourth centuries BC. That is not to say that certain cities did not become, for a time, population machines, supplying one colony after another with the core of its adventurous citizens. Eretria on the island of Euboea, or Miletos on the west coast of Anatolia, are striking examples. Yet historic and archaeological sources indicate that the lead city relied usually on volunteer colonists from many other states, as well as from indigenous groups in the newly settled regions, to make up the necessary numbers for a viable farming community capable of defending itself from potentially hostile “natives” and (frequently) aggressive neighboring Greek (and Phoenician) colonies. Colonial cities in the Aegean, with a few exceptions (such as the small arid island of Thera), seem to have possessed underused homeland countryside in the LG-Archaic era.
So why then were so many colonies set up over an intense phase of such activity? According to Crielaard (1992—1993) the dominant aristocratic class of this era dwelt in a mental world of “heroic” dynastic achievements and the tales of earlier (Bronze Age) elite warriors immortalized in Homer’s epics. With food production ensured through a dependent peasantry, elite life was competitive and aggressive. Alongside clan and interstate warfare, an ambitious aristocrat could also consider leading part of the community abroad, where city foundation and the domination of much larger bodies of settlers was possible, all within a framework of a dangerous and heroic expedition into relatively unknown territory. Ancient sources also describe another fTequent reason: factional conflicts stimulating particular basileis to leave for a new settlement abroad. Often the founder elite, once deceased, were literally worshipped as demigods in a “heroon” or burial and cult place at a prominent location in the new city. Increased power and prestige may then have been a central element in the aristocratically-inspired founding of foreign colonies. For Greek cities on the west coast of Anatolia a third major reason for colonial expansion in Archaic times was oppression by foreign powers.
What, though, was the advantage for the majority, lesser-status colonists who accompanied the founding family or families? Contemporary elites depended on supportive manpower: were the aristocrats’ clients obliged to participate, or given encouragement through the promise of larger estates, or allowed the choice of remaining in the homeland? Clearly volunteers from other states were offered good conditions, perhaps without dues to the rich. In all cases, there should have been relatively free use of a town building-plot and a sizeable farm in the “chora” or hinterland of the new polis, for all willing to venture on a colonial project. We can suppose nonetheless that the elite would have required the labor or surplus of the peasantry, in some undetermined way, to ensure that their larger estates and more extravagant lifestyle were sustained in the “new world.”
The arrival of Near Eastern merchants in the Aegean, and the knowledge of colonial foundations by Phoenicians in the West and Central Mediterranean, had clearly opened up the conceptual horizons of the Aegean Greeks, both in terms of stimulating a Greek colonial movement, but also in terms of increasing the production and consumption of trade items (whether raw materials or artifacts). This rise of a commercial sector in the Aegean was soon to be associated with the adoption of coinage.
World History
