Free Wandering Greeks by Robert Garland Page A

enterprise in sailing out into the unknown. But that is only half the story of any diaspora. We should not ignore those who were on the receiving end of their courage and enterprise. The subject is one that is fraught with complication. As Tsetskhladze (1998, 44) has said of the Black Sea region, “Not many things are clear in the study of Greco-native relations,” and the same can be said of Greek-native relations in general. What is axiomatic, however, is that in many cases the settlers would have had to displace the local population, and that to achieve this they resorted to violence.
    There are no accounts seen through the eyes of non-Greeks and only brief references to non-Greeks in Greek sources. Thucydides tells us that the Sicels, the native inhabitants of Sicily, were repeatedly driven out of their territory, first by the Corinthians who settled in Syracuse, then by the Chalcidians who settled in Leontini, and later by other Chalcidians who settled in Catania (6.3.2–3; cf. D.S. 11.76.3). Archaeology confirms Thucydides’ testimony at least in the case of Syracuse, where the neighboring Sicel site at Pantalica was abandoned shortly after the original Corinthian foundation was established (Vallet 1968, 110f.). It remains unclear, however, whether relations between Sicels and Greeks were antagonistic from the start or whether they became so only when the Greeks began to multiply and represented a threat to Sicel survival. There was a tradition that Androclus, a legendary king of Athens and one of the leaders of the Ionian migration, expelled the non-Greek inhabitants of Ephesus before establishing it as a Greek settlement (Str. Geog . 14.1.21 C640). There is also evidence that the indigenous population that occupied the territory around Sybaris and Taras in southern Italy fled as a result of Greek migration.
    Though violent encounters between indigenous peoples and Greeks are likely to have been commonplace, there were occasions, too, where the settlers and the local inhabitants lived amicably together. A case in point is Emporium, modern Ampurias, on the coast of northeast Spain, where the local people, known as the Indicetans, chose to share the same circuit wall with the Greeks in the interests of security and so cordoned off their residential area by a cross-wall. In time they created a unified state with combined Greek and non-Greek institutions (Str. Geog . 3.4.8 C160; cf. Demetriou 2012, 45–46). At Incoronata and Policoro (probable site of Siris), cities in the instep of Italy, burials dating to the seventh century suggest, too, that Greeks and natives coexisted peacefully. The Phocaeans, who began founding settlements in the western Mediterranean in the sixth century, seem to have made a point of cultivating close relations with the local inhabitants (Domínguez 2006, 448). We have already seen that the Iberian king Arganthonius invited Phocaeans to settle in his territory, and it may be that the Phocaeans circulated the story to demonstrate the high esteem in which local peoples held them. There is also evidence that, from the late-fifth century onward, indigenous Oscans living in Neapolis were granted citizenship and even allowed to hold magistracies (Lomas 2000, 177).
    We should also bear in mind that 129 of the 279 settlements were indigenous from the start and became hellenized only as the result of a long period of acculturation (Hansen and Nielsen 2004, index 27 [pp. 1390–96]). In such cases we should probably be thinking not of a sizable contingent arriving in one burst, so to speak, but of a steady but constant trickle of individuals over time.
    At times what had begun as a fruitful and symbiotic relationship eventually became hostile and exploitative. In some cases the settlers became reliant on local labor and enslaved the indigenous population. This is what happened at Syracuse, where the land that belonged to wealthy Greek aristocrats known as gamoroi came to be worked by