The Classical World Read Free Page B

western coast of Asia Minor. These east Greeks had become resident on sites which would later be world-famous
poleis
, such as Ephesus or Miletus. Archaeology shows that one such site, Smyrna, had walls and the signs of being a
polis
, in my view, by
c.
800 BC .
    The ‘Greek world’, therefore, had been changing in scope quite considerably, even before Homer’s lifetime. In the eighth century BC there was no country simply called ‘Greece’, let alone one with Greece’s modern national boundaries: in Homer, the modern name of Greece, ‘Hellas’, refers only to one area of Thessaly. However,there was a common widely spoken Greek language which divided into only a few dialects (three are the most significant: Aeolic, Ionic and Doric): communication between differing Greek dialect-speakers was not a significant problem. Underlying each Greek
polis
there were also similar groupings, the
phulai
, which we misleadingly translate as ‘tribes’. Again, their uniformity is more striking than their diversity: three particular ‘tribes’ existed in Doric Greek communities, four particular ones in Ionian ones. When Greeks emigrated across to settle on the coast of Asia from
c
. 1100 BC onwards it is striking that they took the precise dialect of Greek which prevailed in their former area of ‘Greece’ and also replicated the same ‘tribes’. Modern scholars, among the ethnic confusions of our age, like to pose the question of whether a ‘Greek identity’ existed, and if so, when. Back in the ‘dark ages’ before Homer, Greeks did share similar gods and goddesses and speak a broadly similar language. Faced with our modern post-nationalist question, ‘Are you Greek?’, they might have hesitated, because they had probably never formulated it in such sharp terms. But fundamentally, they would say that they were, because they were aware of such common cultural features as their language and religion. Back in the Mycenaean age, eastern kingdoms did already write about ‘Ahhijawa’ from across the seas, surely the ‘Achaeans’ of a Greek world. 3 In Homer’s epic, they are already ‘Pan-Achaeans’; ‘Greekness’ is not a late, post-Homeric invention.
    Between
c.
900 and 780 BC , however, actual settlement by Greeks overseas is no longer evident to us. What continued was travel by Greeks, exactly what Homer describes for his hero Odysseus and his companions. In their case, they are travelling home by sea from Troy, but it is striking that they never try to establish a settlement on their way (though many Greek
poleis
in the West later claimed, quite wrongly, to be the site of one or other ‘fairytale’ place on their journey). Odysseus’ voyage was ‘pre-colonial’. Thanks to archaeology, we now know more about the real ‘pre-colonial’ travellers who moved around in and before Homer’s lifetime. They came especially from Greek islands in the east Aegean which were temptingly close to the more civilized kingdoms of the Near East. In the ninth and eighth centuries BC , Crete, Rhodes and the Greek settlements on Cyprus were important starting points, but, to judge from the Greek potterywhich accompanied these travellers, the most prominent were settlements on the island of Euboea, just off the eastern coast of Greece. The range of these Euboeans’ Asian travels was forgotten by the Greeks’ own later historians, and archaeologists have only recovered much of it by brilliant studies in the past forty-five years. We can now trace these Euboeans to stopping-off points along the coast of Cyprus and on the coast of the Levant, including the great city of Tyre (already by
c.
920 BC ): a Euboean cup has even been found in Israel, near the Sea of Galilee, in a context which probably dates to
c.
900 BC .
    These travels led on, once again, to actual settlements. By
c.
780 BC , we can trace Euboean Greeks among the first occupants of a small seaside settlement, Al Mina in north Syria. Soon afterwards, Euboeans turn up