Economic Motives for Colonization
Like other peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, Greeks also established their own
trading posts abroad. Traders from Euboea, for instance, had already established
commercial contacts by 800 B.C. with a community located on the Syrian coast at a site
now called Al Mina. Men wealthy enough to finance risky expeditions by sea ranged far
from home in search of metals. Homeric poetry testifies to the basic strategy of this
entrepreneurial commodity trading. In the
Odyssey , the goddess Athena
once appears disguised as a metal trader to hide her identity from the son of the poem's
hero:
“I am here at present,” she says to him, “with
my ship and crew on our way across the wine-dark sea to foreign lands in search of
copper; I am carrying iron now.”1 By about 775 B.C., Euboeans, who seem to have been particularly active
explorers, had also established a settlement for purposes of trade on the island of
Ischia, in the bay of Naples off southern Italy. There they processed iron ore imported
from the Etruscans, who lived in central Italy. Archaeologists have documented the
expanding overseas communication of the eighth century by finding Greek pottery at more
than eighty sites outside the Greek homeland; for the tenth century, by contrast, only
two pots have been found that were carried abroad.
