308 Philip Kaplan
kai rhadias echouxi t ̄on polit ̄on tas metabolas kai epidochas, 6.17.2). Residents of these
cities are not committed to their survival, and will get what they can and leave when
there is trouble. Alcibiades in turn makes an implicit contrast with Athens, whose claim
to primeval autochthony supports the argument for its strength. Hermocrates is, how-
ever, not only successful in uniting the Sicilians, but he leads them to victory over the
divided (in leadership, at any rate) Athenians. Whether such a geographically fostered
sense of ethnic identity is truly durable is less clear: the notion of a “Sicilian Greek” iden-
tity can be applied to the fourth century, but it is really an extension of Syracusan identity
over a good part of the island.
If we accept, then, that the concept of coming from elsewhere was a fundamental com-
ponent of Greek identity, we must question the importance of an “ancestral homeland”
as a constitutive element of ethnicity among the Greeks. It is true that the Spartans traced
their Dorian heritage to Doris in central Greece, and this led it to take a special interest
in that region—as with their intervention there in the 450s, justified by their ancestral
tie (Thuc. 1.107). However, the question of the origins of the Dorians was a compli-
cated one that admitted of several traditions, of which the tie to an ancestral homeland
was only a minor component. Indeed, where ties to an ancestral land are stressed, there
is often an element of overt functionalism: the Athenians, having developed their claim
of autochthony, use their consequent claim to be the metropolis of the Ionian cities to
enforce obedience on their Ionian subjects.
Stories of migration and conquest can be reconciled with a conception of a close and
formative connection between people and land, by means of a “promised land” narrative,
as Smith has observed (2003: 137–61). Smith argues that most later nationalist-origin
narratives that deploy the “promised land”topospattern themselves, explicitly or implic-
itly, on the Biblical account of the Exodus, Wandering and Conquest of the Promised
Land; however, elements of thetoposcan be identified in some Greek origin stories. Even
the multivalent stories of the founding of Thebes contains elements of divine ordination:
Kadmos, wandering in search of his sister, is commanded by the Delphic oracle to follow
a cow, and where it stops to rest, to found a city; and Athena helps him to kill the dragon
and sow its teeth (Gantz 1993: 468). This is one of a number of stories that bring the
gods into the foundation of a community, and thus brings divine sanction to claims over
territory. Thetoposbecomes, if anything, more prevalent in the colonization narratives,
where the Delphic oracle sometimes plays a role in ordering, approving, and even direct-
ing colonial settlements (Forrest 1957; Londey 1990). At the same time, divine sanction
or direction is usually not a primary element in the selection of the territory for the set-
tlement. In the stories about the foundation of Cyrene, for example, although Apollo
orders the colony to be sent out, and stresses his knowledge of the land in which it is
to be established, Herodotus preserves a tradition that the exact siting of the city was
a result of deception by the local Libyans (4.150–158). Such contingent factors crop
up often enough to counterbalance thetoposof divine ordination for the association of
people with their land.
Fundamentally, Greeks recognized that communities and ethnic groups were not
permanent features of the landscape. Just as non-Greek groups could disappear or
move on—as had the Pelasgians—so too could Greek communities, and Greek identity
too, be eliminated or absorbed. The best examples of this are in the north, with the