Greek Colonization (c. 750 BC): Cities Around the Mediterranean

Greek colonization was the movement in which Greek cities founded hundreds of new settlements across the Mediterranean and Black Sea between about 750 and 550 BC. Settlers from cities such as Corinth, Chalcis, Miletus, Megara and Phocaea established new cities from Spain and southern France to Libya and Crimea, including Syracuse, Naples, Marseille and Byzantium. The result was a Greek world far larger than Greece itself.

Background: why the Greeks left home

Greece is mountainous, with limited good farmland. As populations grew in the 8th century BC, many communities faced land shortage, which the Greeks called stenochoria, “narrowness of land”. Trade also drew Greeks overseas, especially in search of metals, grain and timber, and to markets already opened by Phoenician merchants.

Politics played a role too. Defeated factions, exiles and younger sons without inheritance were natural candidates to lead a new foundation. According to Herodotus, the people of Thera chose settlers by lot during a seven-year drought and sent them to Libya, where they founded Cyrene around 631 BC.

How a colony was founded

A Greek colony was called an apoikia, “home away from home”. The mother city, or metropolis, appointed a founder, the oikistes, who often consulted the Oracle of Delphi before setting out. He led the expedition, chose the site, divided the land into plots and established the cults of the gods.

Once founded, a colony was an independent city-state, not a territory ruled from home. It usually kept close religious and sentimental ties with its metropolis, and the founder was buried in the market place and honoured as a hero. Some colonies later founded colonies of their own.

Expeditions were small by modern standards. Ancient accounts suggest that the first settlers might number from a few dozen to a few hundred men, travelling in a handful of ships. Many probably took local wives, and more colonists often followed once a foundation proved successful. Colonies laid out regular street grids and land plots, and some, such as Megara Hyblaea in Sicily, preserve traces of the earliest planned towns in Greek history.

The western Mediterranean

Euboeans from Chalcis and Eretria led the way. Around 770–750 BC they settled on Pithekoussai, the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, and soon afterwards founded Cumae on the mainland. Cumae later founded Parthenope, and around 470 BC Neapolis, the “new city”, modern Naples, was founded nearby.

Sicily was colonised rapidly. According to Thucydides, Chalcidians founded Naxos in 734 BC and Corinthians under Archias founded Syracuse a year later, as described in the article on the founding of Syracuse. Leontini, Catana, Megara Hyblaea, Gela (688 BC) and Selinus followed, and Gela in turn founded Akragas, modern Agrigento, around 580 BC.

In southern Italy, the region later called Magna Graecia, Achaeans founded Sybaris and Croton around 720–710 BC, and Spartans founded Taras, modern Taranto, around 706 BC. Further west, Phocaeans from Asia Minor founded Massalia, modern Marseille, around 600 BC, and from it Emporion in north-east Spain and Nikaia, modern Nice.

Libya, Egypt and the Black Sea

In North Africa, Cyrene grew into one of the richest Greek cities, exporting grain and the medicinal plant silphium. In Egypt, Greeks were allowed to trade through Naukratis in the Nile Delta from the late 7th century BC, a commercial port rather than a true colony.

To the north-east, Megarians founded Chalcedon around 685 BC and Byzantium, traditionally in the 660s BC, on either side of the Bosporus. Byzantium would become Constantinople and then Istanbul. Miletus was the greatest coloniser of the Black Sea; Pliny the Elder credited it with 90 foundations, an exaggeration but a sign of its reach. Milesian colonies included Sinope, Istros, Olbia and Panticapaeum in Crimea, which supplied Greece with grain and fish.

Relations with other peoples

Colonists rarely arrived in empty land. In Sicily the Greeks displaced or mixed with the Sicels and Sicans; in southern France they traded with Celto-Ligurian peoples; around the Black Sea they dealt with Scythians and Thracians. Intermarriage was common, and Greek pottery, wine and coins spread deep inland.

The Greeks also competed with the Phoenicians, whose own network of colonies and trading posts centred on Carthage, and with the Etruscans of central Italy. Around 540 BC the Phocaeans fought a combined Etruscan and Carthaginian fleet off Alalia in Corsica, a costly victory after which they abandoned the island.

Key people

• Archias of Corinth: by tradition the founder of Syracuse in 733 BC, said to be a member of the ruling Bacchiad family.
• Battus of Thera: founder of Cyrene around 631 BC and first of a royal dynasty that ruled there for about eight generations.
• Byzas of Megara: the legendary founder after whom Byzantium was said to be named; his historical existence is uncertain.
• Phalanthus: the legendary Spartan leader of the Partheniai, a group of men of disputed status who founded Taras.

Most other founders are known only by name, if at all. Founder stories were often retold and embellished centuries later, so historians use them with caution and test them against archaeology.

Myths and facts

Myth: colonies were ruled by their mother cities. Unlike modern colonies, Greek apoikiai were normally independent from the start. Corinth’s quarrel with its own colony Corcyra, a cause of the Peloponnesian War, shows how far relations could break down.

Myth: colonization was a planned state policy from the outset. The earliest settlements, such as Pithekoussai, look like mixed trading communities that included Phoenicians and local people. The idea of an orderly foundation led by an oikistes with an oracle may have become standard only later, and some founder stories were shaped to fit it.

Fact: the traditional dates mostly come from Thucydides. His list of Sicilian foundations, in Book 6 of his history, is the backbone of the chronology. Archaeologists have found that the earliest Greek pottery at these sites broadly agrees with his dates, give or take a generation.

Consequences and legacy

Colonization spread the Greek language, alphabet, religion, coinage and the model of the self-governing city across the Mediterranean. Colonies such as Syracuse, Akragas and Taras became as rich and powerful as any city in Greece, and their temples, at Agrigento, Selinunte and Paestum, are among the best preserved Greek buildings anywhere.

The colonies were also centres of thought. Pythagoras taught at Croton, the philosophers Parmenides and Zeno came from Elea in Italy, and Empedocles from Akragas. Through the Greeks of Italy, the Etruscans and Romans absorbed Greek culture, including the alphabet.

Plato later compared the Greeks living around the sea to frogs around a pond, an image that captures the coastal character of this world.

Timeline

• c. 770–750 BC: Euboeans settle at Pithekoussai on Ischia.
• 734 BC: traditional founding of Naxos, the first Greek colony in Sicily.
• 733 BC: traditional founding of Syracuse by Corinth.
• c. 706 BC: Spartans found Taras in southern Italy.
• 688 BC: Rhodians and Cretans found Gela in Sicily.
• 660s BC: traditional founding of Byzantium by Megara.
• c. 631 BC: Therans found Cyrene in Libya.
• c. 600 BC: Phocaeans found Massalia (Marseille).
• c. 580 BC: Gela founds Akragas (Agrigento).
• c. 540 BC: Battle of Alalia off Corsica.

Why it matters

Greek colonization turned the Greeks from the people of a small peninsula into a civilisation spread across two seas. Many of Europe’s oldest cities began as Greek colonies, and the cultural contacts they created carried Greek ideas to Rome and beyond.