later, during the Bronze Age (ca. 4000–1100 b.c.e.), as part
of the great expansion of Indo-European language speakers
from their original homeland. Th e location of this homeland
has been the object of much speculation, but most linguists
would now locate it in central Asia, in the vicinity of the Cas-
pian Sea.
Th e process of migration and diff usion must have been
a gradual one, with the original Proto-Indo-European lan-
guage changing into its various daughter languages along the
way, so that the settlers arriving in Greece will have spoken
some early form of Greek. Th eir arrival came most probably
via Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), though it does not seem
to have had an immediate eff ect on the culture or political
organization of the region. Rather, the Minoan civilization
on Crete, which comprised non-Greek speakers, continued
to dominate the Aegean until the rise of the Mycenaean civi-
lization on the Greek mainland starting about 1600 b.c.e. Th e
downfall of Mycenaean civilization (ca. 1100 b.c.e.) was the
last in a series of Bronze Age dislocations, causing a cycle of
expansion and contraction of populations, with larger states
alternating with smaller village settlements and more primi-
tive economies. It was aft er the collapse of the Mycenaean
civilization that Greek speakers (evidently fl eeing chaos in
Attica on the mainland) fi rst settled Ionia, the region consist-
ing of the islands and coastal areas of the eastern Aegean.
Th e Greeks’ own views of this process were rather dif-
ferent; while they were historically inaccurate, they are well
worth examining for the light they shed on how they per-
ceived later population shift s in the historical period (partic-
ularly colonization). Th ucydides lays out a standard narrative
in the opening chapters of his History of the Peloponnesian
War: that the population of Achaeans (in the northwestern
part of the Peloponnese) were conquered by Dorian invaders
coming in from the north. Th is Dorian invasion was dated
to sometime shortly aft er the end of the Trojan War (ca.
1200 b.c.e.) and was said to be the origin of the dominance
of Doric-speaking Greeks (such as the Argives and Spartans)
in the Peloponnese. Th e invaders were said to be the sons of
the hero Hercules (Heracles), whose persecutor Eurystheus
kept t hem from returning; a ft er a failed attempt and a lapse of
a hundred years, their descendants succeeded. During their
time of exile they were given aid by the Athenians, which be-
came a commonplace in Athenian mythic propaganda dur-
ing the time of greatest hostility to Sparta in the fi ft h century
b.c.e. Th e archaeological record for the region does suggest a
shift in population but in about 900 b.c.e., considerably too
late to match the chronology handed down in the literary
sources.
A similar mythologizing of the historical record may be
found in the case of the Ionian migration. Th e settlement of
Ionia aft er the apparent chaos following the collapse of My-
cenaean power was also considered the result of the Dorian
invasion. Th e Athenians, however, claimed that they were the
ancestors of all Ionians, who were descended from an Athe-
nian named Ion. For modern historians there is clearly some
connection between Athens and the Ionians: Th eir dialects
are closely related, and they share certain social structures
and religious customs. Yet the story in fi ft h-century Athenian
sources is clearly designed to assert the primacy of Athens
over Ionian Greeks at a time when the Ionians were the allies
(or subject states) in the Athenian naval empire known as the
Delian League. Th e Athenians, by contrast, portrayed them-
selves as autochthonous: that is, as never having come from
anywhere else and in fact being literally sprung from the soil
of Athens. (Th e word autochthon means “of the land itself ”
and could literally refer to origin from the soil, or to a claim
to have been in a particular place since time immemorial.)
Migration was viewed as a strong negative in mythic terms:
To have always been in the same location not only gave a par-
ticular people an inalienable claim to their native land but
also allowed them to claim inherent superior to “latecomers.”
Th ere was a tendency for Greek cities to invent myths of ori-
gin tying them to the land: Th e name Pelasgian, used to refer
to the pre-Greek inhabitants of Greece, came in some places
to be synonymous with autochthon, and a hero Pelasgus was
invented accordingly.COLONIZATION IN THE ARCHAIC AGE
From approximately 734 to 580 b.c.e. the Greek world un-
derwent a tremendous expansion, with the foundation of
dozens of new Greek-speaking cities along the shores of the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In understanding this pro-
cess of colonization, the lens of modern colonialism and the
ideological biases of the ancient sources themselves must be
avoided. Greek colonization in the Archaic Age was not gen-
erally an attempt to expand political infl uence or a means of
conquering a distant territory with a view to exploiting its la-
bor and natural resources for the benefi t of the mother coun-
try. Rather, it consisted of a series of independently motivated
decisions to found cities elsewhere, caused by a desire for ad-
vantages in overseas trade, by the desire for more and better
land, or as the result of population pressures or political strife
at home. And just as “Greece” is largely an abstract concept, a
way of describing the cultural identity of a vast number of in-
dependent poleis (city-states), so, too, is “Greek colonization”
an abstraction, one which suggests unity in what was actually
a diverse set of phenomena.
Th ere were two basic types of Greek colony: the empo-
rion and the apoikia. Emporion is the Greek word for “mar-
ket,” and such colonies were in essence trading outposts, with
no claim to polis status and relatively loose ties to the cities
that founded them. Emporia were oft en jointly established by
more than one polis. By contrast, an apoikia was an entirely
new and independent polis, laid out according to certain spe-
cifi c rules. Settlers in emporia presumably remained citizens
of their home cities; in an apoikia the settlers became citizens
of the new settlement.
Greek long-distance trade throughout the Mediterra-
nean dates from the Mycenaean era, but the fi rst evidence
of trading outposts dates to about 800 b.c.e., on the island ofmigration and population movements: Greece 711