This book follows a recent trend in German-speaking classical scholarship that has been examining ancient Greek migration through theoretically informed perspectives by moving beyond modernist paradigms. It is structured in four long sections each with multiple chapters, beginning with an extensive introduction that sets out its aims and presents the author’s theoretical and methodological toolkit. After a concise examination of the relevant terminology (‘apoikismos’, colonization, migration), the author selectively discusses previous explanatory models centering on overpopulation, shortage of resources, and trade, which dominated the German and English historical discourse from the 19th century onwards, as well as more recent perspectives focusing on identities, gender and political organization. This discussion overlooks, nevertheless, the colonialist legacy of the scholarship that began to be shaped in the English- and French-speaking world already from the 16th century onwards.[1]
What follows is a critical examination of the available historical evidence. Since almost all foundation narratives are later constructs, the book focuses primarily on Homeric epics and on Hesiodic and early lyric poetry, sources that date more or less to the period of Greek migration and provide information about the social context of migration. This evidence is then examined in a comparative manner with certain foundation narratives of later date. The author acknowledges the paucity of contemporary literature regarding Greek migration. Although he understands archaeology as a major contemporary source of information, he still chooses not to consider — with the exception of a few simplistic examples — any data deriving from recent archaeological work, after having downplayed its historical value. He takes poetry instead to be a more reliable source of information.
At the core of this study is the perception of migration as a condition between residency and mobility. This is exemplified through a thoughtful theoretical discussion of past understandings of migration that tended to rationalize this social phenomenon by recording ‘pull and push factors’ and considering residency and migration as normal and abnormal situations respectively. In this book, migration is presented instead as incorporating both mobility and residency, neither of them univocally representing (ir)regular human behaviors but trajectories of socialization and social group formation. The notion of ‘resource’ as a motor of social reproduction and as a means to exercise power is this study’s main conceptual tool. Anthony Giddens grouped under this term both allocative and authoritative resources that were taken as capabilities and capacities generating control over materials and people respectively.[2] Social ties and capital are taken as major resources of residency that constrain migration: risk of crisis is lessened through intra-communal relations that are sources of further (material) resources, reproducing socialization and maintaining residency.
On the one hand, in this first section of the book the author engages with certain methodological approaches such as network theory, which he however does not intend to apply in his study of Greek migration. On the other hand, he examines the perpetuation of migration that took place through the use of already beaten paths, i.e. a more cost-effective practice than setting new paths, but overlooks path dependency theory. At the same time, a detailed description of the factors that shaped migration is not among the objectives of this study. The plan is instead to treat migration as a normal condition through the examination of processes of social disintegration and with a focus on the accessibility and use of associated resources. Thus, the study overlooks the underlying social conflicts and economic relations, whose exploration would certainly require a material culture analysis. The latter is apparently beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, it still entails the risk of reducing migration from a dynamic social process to a structured and static condition.
Resources of residency and mobility, the two components of migration, are scrutinized in the next two sections of the book. Section 2 treats residency by examining several aspects of early Archaic Greek society and by deriving evidence mainly from contemporary literature and a few outdated archaeological studies. The ambitious endeavor begins with a description of settlement systems largely uninformed by archaeological evidence and a somewhat naïve approach to agricultural and industrial economy. This is followed by a more detailed study of oikos and intercommunity relations (‘geitonia’). Social bonds were enforced through socially embedded norms of exchange, while newly emerged groups of deviant behavior and identities were marginalized. The discussion of craft specialization here, although it lacks understanding of production organization in early Greece,[3] still provides a deep insight into the world of mobile craftsmen in juxtaposition to members of the elite (‘basileis’) who derived authority from landed property. ‘Dike’ (justice) is highlighted as a major resource of residency through an exhaustive analysis of textual evidence and comparison with modern case studies. Most of the evidence derives, however, from Hesiod and Solon, whose recorded social experience was shaped in Boeotia and Attica. Barely any communities from these regions participated in early Greek migration. But even if we assume that their experience can be taken as representative of social relations in other parts of the politically, culturally and socially fragmented Greek-speaking world, and despite all meticulous analysis of ancient notions relating to ‘dike’, ascribing ‘apoikismos’, i.e. expatriation, to matters of injustice is still far from straightforward. Justice and injustice are just appearances; they are notions of relative value that emerge through social contradictions and conflicts. Although they constitute some of the underlying reasons for resource inefficiencies, they still do not present any less superficial arguments than, e.g., hunger to explain why people used to leave their homeland either in the premodern or modern period. The conclusion that migration was driven by two kinds of agents, those who allegedly possessed all material and immaterial resources such as supplies for the travel, ships, navigation and geography knowledge, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds who instead had to follow a leader (‘oikistes’), is contradicted by several ethnographic and modern examples.
The third section of the book focuses on the resources of mobility. This is achieved through a detailed analysis of various issues relating to sea travel such as nautical technology and knowledge, along with an equally excellent treatment of Homeric society with a focus on the role of elites in the organization of seafaring. The concepts of hospitality, gift exchange and piracy that are associated in the Homeric epics with the authority and economic behavior of ‘basileis’ and ‘hetairoi’ are further placed under scrutiny. These long chapters, which are a pleasure to read, nevertheless do not always seem to provide information directly relating to migration. Regrettably, the author does not engage with the sociology of gift-giving and commodity exchange and leaves the reader wondering how the Homer-based narrative would work in non-Greek cultural contexts. Better argued is the following association of trade with migration through the emergence of certain resources that either reinforce residency or promote migration. Again, although poverty appears sporadically as a motivation for migration, the author is still unwilling to consider the whole range of economic relations (production, exchange and consumption) and resulting social antagonisms as components of migration. In his analysis of trade, he undertakes, nevertheless, a thorough approach to the establishment, function and perception of emporia through a historical perspective that also involves a short but quite balanced examination of archaeological evidence. A final aspect of mobility that comes under scrutiny is that of military campaigns. After a detailed overview of military ranks and technologies, the author concludes that lower ranking and poor people could not participate in overseas expeditions because they allegedly could not afford hoplite equipment, a view that once again oversimplifies past social relations based on evidence from ancient poetry.
The fourth section of the book is reserved for the examination of Greek migration from the perspective of migrants. Through an analysis of contemporary and later Greek literature, the author ascribes the role of leaders of migratory expeditions (‘oikistes’) to members of the elite. The motives of the latter are associated with antagonism in the political arena. Among their duties as founders of new settlements was the introduction of religious and political institutions from their homeland. Groups of socially deviant — predominantly adult male — members of the metropolitan communities that emerged through social disintegration — allegedly triggered by injustice — appear to cluster around the leaders who possessed the immaterial and material resources necessary to migrate.
A work that seeks to examine all aspects of Greek migration could not, of course, ignore the treatment of identities. In one of the last chapters of this section, the author critically discusses recent theoretical frameworks in the study of identities that have been applied to early Greek history. The major objective of this chapter is, however, the understanding of Greek and local relations in culturally mixed ‘colonial’ contexts. Through examination of textual evidence that mainly postdates the migratory event, the author considers all possible modes of encounter such as violence, expulsion, friendly reception and co-existence. Narratives about violent events may indeed represent constructs and projections of later collective memory onto the period of early encounters and settlement. The final chapter deals with a less frequently treated aspect of Greek migration: its perpetuation. The continuous emergence and formation of new settlements involved complex modes of mobility between origins and destinations of migration.
Finally, a relatively short, single-chapter section summarizes the conceptualization of Greek migration as a combination of residency and mobility and an interplay of several material and immaterial resources.
The book’s interpretative perspective is aligned with previous approaches ascribing migration either to the initiative of elite members or the expulsion of politically dissident and socially deviant groups that emerged through social disintegration or in contexts of ritual impurity. An abstract notion of injustice is understood in all cases as a major driving force. Such monocausal explanations, however, reduce the historicity of ancient Greek migration and hamper a holistic understanding of the social contradictions and economic transformations that underlie such (trans)formative social processes. They thus represent generalizing and normative approaches to the parallel migration of culturally and socially differentiated groups of people. They also fail to explain why such differentiated groups from the Aegean — not to mention the Phoenicians from the eastern Mediterranean — participated in some of the most massive migratory processes of the pre-modern period during more or less the same period of time and according to partly similar spatial patterns.
Despite some unnecessary repetitions and the burial of much useful information in long footnotes that could have usefully been incorporated into the main text, the book is well produced. The author makes an exceptional effort to provide a new reading of early Greek literature through thorough critical analysis supported by solid understanding of its historical contexts. Overall, this book presents an excellent historical overview of various aspects of social organization in early Greece that can be associated — in one way or another — with Greek migration.
Notes
[1] For a concise discussion of the early works on Greek ‘colonisation’, see Giovanna Ceserani, Italy’s Lost Greece. Magna Grecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 98–115.
[2] Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 15–16, 19, 33.
[3] See, e.g., Stefanos Gimatzidis, Marie-Henriette Gates and Gunnar Lehmann, “Aegean and Aegeanising Geometric pottery at Kinet Höyük: New Patterns of Greek Pottery Production, Exchange and Consumption in the Mediterranean”, AS 73 (2023): 25–68.