The Tensions of Colonization
The case of the
foundation of a Greek colony in Cyrene1 (in what is now Libya in North
Africa) in about 630 B.C. reveals how full of tensions the process of colonization could
be. The people of the polis of Thera, on an island north of Crete,
apparently were unable to support their population. Sending some people out as colonists
to Cyrene therefore made sense as a solution to population pressures. A later
inscription purports to tells us what happened at the time of colonization and reveals
the urgency of the situation at the time: “One adult son [from each family] is
to be conscripted....If any man is unwilling to leave when the polis sends
him, he shall be subject to the death penalty and his property shall be
confiscated.” (M. Crawford and D. Whitehead,
Archaic and Classical
Greece: A Selection of Ancient Sources in Translation, Cambridge, 1983, no.
16B) Evidently the young men of Thera were reluctant to leave their home for the new
colony. This evidence shows, then, that colonization in response to population growth
was not always a matter of individual choice of the people feeling the pressure. The
possibility of acquiring land in a colony on which a man could perhaps grow wealthy
obviously had to be weighed against the terrors of being torn from family and friends to
voyage over treacherous seas to regions filled with unknown dangers. Greek colonists had
reason to be scared about their future. Moreover, in some cases, colonies were founded
to rid the metropolis of undesirables whose presence was causing social unrest. The
Spartans, for example, colonized
Taras2 (modern Taranto) in southern Italy in 706 B.C. with a group of
illegitimate sons whom they could not successfully integrate into their citizen body.
These unfortunate outcasts certainly did not go as colonists by their own choice.
