building over 45 metres long, with an external wooden colonnade. This is a striking demonstration of Lefkandi's wealth and industry, and a surprising discovery for a period in which Greece offers no other
notable architecture. The burial, of the tenth century B.C., is truly heroic, and seems to suggest a rich, dynastic society, with overseas connections.
Greater cohesion here encourages belief in greater cohesion elsewhere and poses questions about the political unification of Attica under Athens, about the relationship between Sparta and other communities in
Laconia in the first two centuries or so after its Dorian foundation in the late ninth century, about the Theban expansion in Boeotia in the sixth century, and so on. Answers would be premature, but the questions
are there.
A Shipwreck. Drawing on a vase found on Ischia, near the Bay of Naples, site of the first Greek settlement in the west. It shows an upturned ship and men thrown into the sea-one being eaten by a fish; the
record, it may be, of a disaster in waters far from the homeland. The style is Euboean (Ischia was settled by Euboeans), but made locally in the later eighth century B.C.
More immediately relevant is the disintegration of the Euboean 'organization' in the late eighth century. By 800 some Greeks had begun to wander abroad, in the main, we suppose, in search of metal, and some
even settled where they could find it, on the north-Syrian coast (before 800); in Italy a little later; perhaps on the south coast of the Black Sea. The chief operators were the Euboeans, still acting in concert; one
of the chief profit-makers was Lefkandi. But about 730 Chalcis and Eretria quarreled and started the so-called Lelantine War which, Thucydides said, ranged 'the rest of the Greek world in alliance with either
side'. Historians have been puzzled. Why should old friends quarrel? Why should 'the rest' join in? What can be meant in such early times by 'alliance'? The puzzles remain real. But comparatively large-scale
associations lead more readily to contacts, to friendships and enmities at a distance than do little city-like units; international interests can more readily cement or break such friendships or enmities. In the world
sketched above, the hypothesis that some distant outbreak of trouble (say between Phrygia and Assyria, at war with each other about 720-710) raised tensions among interested Greeks, principally Euboeans;
that one city broke with existing friends but kept or found others elsewhere, so that the 'rest of the Greek world' became involved-that hypothesis begins to make sense. Be that as it may, the war ended in
Eretrian defeat, Lefkandi (which had probably been the site of early Eretria) was abandoned, the community had crumbled. The strains of war brought other readjustments elsewhere, and something more like
the city-state structure of later centuries began to appear.
It would not be absurd to see these same strains as in some measure an explanation of the other phenomenon of the late eighth century, a second and much greater wave of emigration, from the mainland, from
Ionia and the islands. The earlier adventurers will have brought home news of opportunities abroad that could tempt the less timid or the more desperate, in trade, in military service with foreign powers, above
all in agriculture. If the war did not wipe out timidity, it must at least have increased desperation among the defeated or disrupted.
Already, as the war was beginning, Corinth had established a settlement on Corcyra, on the route to the riches of the West, and, in the midst of those riches, Sicilian Syracuse (733 B.C.); somewhat earlier still
Euboeans were developing sites on the north-west coast of the Aegean. Thereafter, throughout the war and the century that followed, what we rather misleadingly call colonization went on in earnest-
misleadingly because a 'colony', though a state-organized enterprise, often sent in a direction that would further the state's interests, became an independent unit, normally keeping no more than sentimental and
religious ties with its mother city; colonists remembered more vividly and with more gratitude their founder, the man who had led them out, than their foundress city. Overpopulation, an occasional famine,
political trouble, any of these could persuade a government to unload some of its unwanted and send them off, with of course its religious blessing, into the known or the unknown. Just as mixed were the
motives for going; compulsion, desperation, ambition; to farm, to trade, to take a chance.
It is mistaken to draw too clear distinctions, between trade and agriculture for example. What part did trade play in Greek politics in general? With some few exceptions, the Greek trader was not a powerful