Free Wandering Greeks by Robert Garland Page B

anunderclass of locals who were “slaves called the Kullurioi ,” possibly a pejorative term meaning “donkey men” (Hdt. 7.155.2; cf. Arist. fr. 586 Rose). At Heraclea Pontica on the shores of the Black Sea a tribe called the Mariandynoi, nicknamed “the gift-bearers,” placed themselves under the control of Greek settlers, for whom they worked as laborers in return for military protection (Pl. Laws 6.776cd; Ath. Deipn . 6.263e). Last, the Byzantines are said to have treated the indigenous Bithynians as the Spartans did the helots (Phylarchus FGrH 81 F 8). As Fisher (1993, 33) put it, these three instances may be “only a few tips of a large number of nasty icebergs.”
    Conversely the Greeks themselves sometimes underwent subjugation. At Posidonia, for instance, according to the fourth-century historian and musical theorist Aristoxenus, the indigenous Lucanian population enslaved the Greeks and suppressed their culture. The immigrants were left with one festival “where they gather together and remember their old language and customs, and after weeping and wailing with one another, they depart” ( ap . Ath. Deipn . 14.632ab; see Lomas 2000, 178). Most striking is the case of Greeks inhabiting the Black Sea region and the western coast of Turkey, who from the late sixth century onward fell under the control of the Scythians, Lydians, and Persians, though as Graham (1982a, 156) notes this was not accompanied by barbarization of the Greek communtites.
    Women Settlers
    Though a few women from the mother-city probably joined a settlement once it had been securely established, it is by no means certain that they would have settled in sufficient numbers to enable it to reproduce itself. There would often, therefore, have been a compelling need to recruit local women. “Recruiting” could take various forms, viz intermarriage, abduction, rape, or any other type of carnal heterosexual union. The Greeks preserved the belief that they occasionally resorted to violence to resolve the shortage of women. Herodotus tells us thatthe Athenian settlers who participated in the foundation of Miletus abducted a number of Carian women (1.146.2–3). They later added to this outrage by massacring the women’s fathers, husbands, and sons. This incidentally had the consequence of depriving the women of any legal status, since without a male relative to give them away, they could not marry their abductors. The women thus took a solemn oath “neither to eat with the men [viz their abductors] nor to mention them by name.” Though Herodotus enjoyed cordial relations with the Athenians, he originated from Halicarnassus in Caria, and it is perhaps for this reason that he dwells on the plight of the indigenous population. The story is indicative of the tense (to say the least) domestic relations that abduction would have generated, though not surprisingly perhaps there is no record of a similar instance in our sources.
    The Greeks did not in principle disapprove of intermarriage, and it is likely to have occurred frequently when a settlement was in its infancy. Sicel names found on gravestones in Greek cemeteries at Syracuse have been plausibly interpreted as evidence of intermarriage. As the apoikia’s population stabilized, intermarriage may well have decreased. However, there is evidence that it was still being practiced in the late fifth century, notably between the Elymians, a local Sicilian people, and the Greeks who inhabited western Sicily (cf. Thuc. 6.6.2). Very occasionally, too, we hear of dynastic marriages between Greeks and neighboring non-Greeks, no doubt intended to cement good relations between the two (see Hall 2002, 102–3, for examples).
    Intermarriage has profound consequences both for the individuals concerned and for society as a whole. The offspring of such unions often experience cultural and social isolation, as well as political disenfranchisement. Was the