306 Philip Kaplan
aware—language, way of life, and religious practice—distinguished them from commu-
nities, near and far, that did not share those qualities.
The discourse of displacement, then, is a nearly ubiquitous means in Greek thought
of accounting for the relationships of communities and the lands they occupy. The topic
deserves a far more comprehensive treatment than can be afforded here (see Montiglio
2005 for an interesting treatment of the role of wandering in Greek culture; Gaertner’s
collection [2007] deploys the concept of the discourse of displacement narrowly in rela-
tion to exile). I will briefly sketch out the ways in which this discourse operated among
the Greeks, and proceed to consider its implications for understanding the relationship
between peoples and the lands they inhabited.
There is hardly a Greek myth of origin that does not involve a wandering immigrant,
either as an individual, or as the leader of a small band or an entire population. It is
virtually unknown for a land to be entirely immune from immigrants. Migration stories
account for the dispersion of Greek communities—in the form of the master narratives of
the movement of the Dorians, the Ionians—and for non-Greek peoples as well, such as
the Pelasgians, Tyrrhenians, Cimmerians, and others. Virtually every Greek community
located its origins in a story of immigration. To a certain extent, a meaningful distinc-
tion can be made between myths that bring a single hero, perhaps with a small band
of followers (e.g., Kadmos coming to Boeotia, as in Hdt. 2.49.3; 4.147.4; 5.57–9),
and those that bring entire populations. Functionally, however, this distinction is not
so significant: movements of small groups of people are often presented as the origins
of entire communities. Only in rare cases in Greek origin stories do large populations
entirely displace earlier inhabitants. Unlike the Biblical Exodus narrative, which cen-
ters on the wholesale movement of thebnei Yisrael—to Egypt, in the Exodus, in the
settlement of the land of Israel, and later in the Babylonian Exile and the Return—in
the narratives of the origins of Greek communities, movement of entire peoples are
not the norm.
Even with the growing rejection of myth, stories of migration and wandering do
not lose their explanatory power. Thucydides, who takes a rigorously demythologized
approach to the question of the origins of Greek communities, still keeps the trope of
widespread migrations in the distant past:
It is clear that the country now called Hellas was not in ancient times settled permanently,
but that migrations were frequent formerly, and that all communities easily abandoned their
homes, being constantly forced out by larger groups. For there was no trade and no ability
to contact each other either by land or by sea, so they each cultivated only as much of their
land as they needed to survive, without money, never planting orchards, since it was unclear
whether some invader might come and seize them. Believing that their daily needs could
be met anywhere, they thought little of changing their homes, and on this account had no
strength in regards to the size of their cities or any other resources. Thucydides 1.2 (author’s
translation)This general statement is prelude to his claim that, while fertile parts of Greece were
subject to frequent changes of population, Attica was left alone because of the poverty of
its soil, and so is the only state to claim autochthony. However, even here, Thucydides
does not fully endorse the Athenians’ assertion of autochthony: he does not use the term