Despite appearances, the word “nostalgia” was not invented by the Greeks. It is, instead, a neologism, formed from the Greek words nostos (“return home”) and algos (“pain”), that was coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer to describe a depressive condition among mercenary soldiers who had spent too long away from home. The concept of nostalgia, however, was all too familiar to the Greeks and features prominently in such well-known literary works as Homer’s Odyssey and Xenophon’s Anabasis. Its centrality within Greek consciousness arose from the recognition that mobility, dislocation, and migration - sometimes over very long distances - were basic and unavoidable facts of life.
It is common to draw a distinction between migration and what is conventionally, if somewhat misleadingly, termed colonization. The first, assigned to the troubled centuries that followed the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces, typically denotes the mass movements of loosely organized bands of people prior to the emergence of settled political communities. We have already discussed the literary accounts for the Dorian migration and mentioned the migration of Achaeans to the southern shore of the Corinthian Gulf and of lonians to the coast of Asia Minor (p. 44; see Map 3.1). Other population movements “remembered” in the Classical period include that of the Aeolians from central Greece to northwest Asia Minor, that of the Thessalians from Thesprotia to Thessaly - ousting the Kadmeians who fled south to Boeotia - and that of the Dryopes from the Parnassus region to the Eastern Argolid, Euboea, the Cyclades, and Cyprus. Historians have reached no agreement as to the historical
A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Credibility of these migration traditions. Some accept that they contain mythical elements - for instance, the descent from Heracles or from Agamemnon, supposedly claimed by the leaders of the Dorian and Aeolian migrations respectively - but maintain that the vague contours of real events can be glimpsed behind such accounts. That people were on the move at the end of the Mycenaean period is beyond doubt, though we have already had reason to comment upon the evidently contrived character of the developed migration traditions - at least as regards the Dorians and the lonians.
Colonization, instead, generally defines the more organized overseas expeditions, dispatched from city-states to locations around the Mediterranean and Black Sea from the last third of the eighth century onwards, for which the surviving literary accounts are deemed more trustworthy (Maps 5.1; 5.2). Yet this modern categorical distinction between migration and colonization was not one made by ancient authors. Thucydides (Document 5.1) uses the word apoikia (literally, “home from home”) to describe not only the “Peloponnesian” foundations in South Italy and Sicily (i. e. the colonies sent out by Corinth, Sparta, and Achaea) but also the Athenian settlement of Ionia (the Ionian migration), and he regards both as a general pattern of population instability after the Trojan War, to which the Boeotian and Dorian migrations also belong. In this chapter we will ask two questions. Firstly, are the literary traditions for colonization really so much more trustworthy than they are for the migrations? Secondly, can we discern any qualitative distinction between migrations and colonial ventures?
World History
