Free Wandering Greeks by Robert Garland

settlement and who conducted rites consecrating it to the gods. Over the course of time the mantis also had to help draw up nomima (regulations, customs, traditions) that would form the basis for the settlement’s social, political, and legal institutions. This included the division of the citizen body into tribes, the appointment of magistrates, the introduction of a lawcode, the establishment of a pantheon, the arrangement of the festival calendar, and much more besides. Overall nomima constituted “a powerful assimilative force when settlers of varied origins would join a nucleus of founders and coopt their identity by being absorbed in the social order” (Malkin 2012, 189–97).
    It would no doubt have taken many years, perhaps as much as a generation, before a settlement was fully up and running. It is unclear how long the oikist would have retained the status and powers of an autokratôr or by what process those powers would have been handed over to a properly constituted government. Once the apoikia had been established on a secure footing, however, its inhabitants would typically dispatch a pentecontor back to the mother-city to report on its progress and invite additional settlers to join them (Schaefer 1960, 87).
    Experiencing Nostalgia
    The burden of leaving one’s homeland was both physical and psychological, involving as it did separation from parents, siblings, grandparents, and friends, and in some cases from wives and children as well. The image of Odysseus “longing for his wife and his homecoming” at the beginning of the Odyssey no doubt captures perfectly the emotional state of many Greek settlers, since very few of them could expect to set eyes on their relatives again (1.13). In Aeneid book 3 Priam’s son Helenus has reproduced Troy in miniature, with all the features of the former city (ll. 349–51). Being reminded constantly of his former life, he is wedded to the past, incapable of embracing the present—unlike Aeneas, who looks forward, no matter how dimly, to what lies ahead. Though some mother-cities—most notably, Corinth, Miletus, Syracuse, and Sinope—retained close political links with their offshoots, sometimes keeping them in a state of dependence, there is no evidence that any of them sought to facilitate emotional ties. How could they, given the constraints of communication in the ancient world? Besides which, it would have been highly counterproductive. The new settlement had to assert its own independent identity and validity from the start or else it would calamitously fail.
    Leaving the Greek-inhabited world would have been like leaving planet earth. Even though in many cases there would have been presettlement trading contacts between the local people and the mother-city, there was no knowing what alien forms of life existed out there nor whether the group would survive its many ordeals. To comprehend the mindset required, we have only to reflect upon Homer’s portrait of Odysseus, regardless of the fact that Odysseus is seeking to return to his homeland rather than establish a new homeland elsewhere. He exhibits exactly the kind of craft, guile, and instinct for survival that would put him head and shoulders above his fellow-competitors in any reality TV show. They are, moreover, precisely the qualities that have distinguished anyone who sets out for an unknown destination in any period of history. His encounters with bizarre peoples evoke both the worst-case andbest-case scenarios of what lay beyond the edge of the Greek-inhabited world. It is no surprise that the Odyssey was composed at a time when the expanding and hard-pressed population was seeking a new homeland in Sicily and southern Italy—the region where Odysseus’s fanciful adventures are likely to be situated.
    Relations between Settlers and indigenous Populations
    Our focus up to now has been on those bands of plucky Greeks who demonstrated such courage and