Ethnicity and Geography 307here, and further notes that the Athenian population was swollen by immigrants from
elsewhere, thereby casting doubt on the “purity” of the current population’s claim to
aboriginal status.
The discourse of displacement encompasses not just the origins of the Greeks of the
Aegean; it also includes the origin stories of Greek communities throughout the Mediter-
ranean and Black Seas. It is customary to think of these migrations, under the rubric of
colonization, as a substantially different phenomenon from the origin stories of the earlier
Greek communities—less couched in legend than the origin stories of the communities
of the Aegean, and better preserved in the historical record. Recent studies, however,
have emphasized that the distinction between the earlier migrations and later coloniza-
tion is not always clear, and that it might be better to think of the two processes as simply
different phases in a continuous process (see Tsetskhladze 2006). A striking instance of
the arbitrary nature of the distinction can be found in Herodotus’ account of the Theran
colonization of Cyrene. Herodotus’ story is inevitably taken into account, if not always
accepted in its entirety, in discussions of the founding of Cyrene, but very little atten-
tion is ever paid to the prequel, in which he describes the Lacedaemonian settlement of
Thera. This story, set in the distant past of the Dorian migrations, is generally ignored
in accounts of Spartan colonization (Malkin 1994: 67–114 is an important exception),
but for Herodotus there is no functional difference. In any event, it is undeniable that
the traditions of colonial foundation served the same functions for the Greek cities that
were so founded, as the migration stories served for the older cities. They served to
account for the differences between Greek communities and the non-Greek communities
around them, and they explained the ties of the Greekapoikiawith the rest of the Greek
world, in particular the cultural and religious ties with the metropolis (Graham 1983:
esp. 71–165). On the other hand, the ties with the metropolis could be disavowed, and
a distinct identity created by re-imagining an origin story, as the people of Amphipolis
did when they replaced the cult of theiroikistesHagnon with that of Brasidas (Thuc.
5.11.1).
At the same time, Greeks were able to conceive of ethnic identity as deriving from a
shared territory, even overriding claims to ties with previous ancestral lands. McInerney
argues that such a process occurred in Phokis, where the disparate communities of the
region seem, in the course of the Archaic period, to have forged a common identity:
“what the Phokians of Archaic and Classical times shared was not the tribal bond of
common blood, though they called themselves anethnos, but they shared a land already
identified as Phokis, and a mythology out of which they fashioned theirethnos” (1999:
148). This process is articulated explicitly in Thucydides in the case of Sicily. The island
was settled by Greeks who identified as Ionians and Dorians, and also tied their iden-
tity to their individual poleis, which were often in conflict with each other. Thucydides
attributes to Hermocrates of Syracuse an impassioned speech in which he asks his fellow
Sicilians to put aside their previous identifications, and to think of themselves asSikil-
iotai; Antonaccio (2001: 116–7) notes that the term is a new coinage of Thucydides’.
It is an identity founded simply on their residence on the island. The historian plays
out a debate about the durability of such a geographically based conception of identity:
Hermocrates is implicitly responding to Alcibiades’ claim, made to the Athenian assem-
bly, that the Sicilian Greeks live in “cities thronged with mixed mobs who change their
citizens easily and receive new ones” (oxlois te gar ksummeiktois polyandrousin hai poleis