Settlers Vs Natives: How the Greek Poleis Were Built

A History of Mankind (57)

Facing Anatolian hostility, Greek communities in Asia Minor developed solid bonds between themselves. They may have used the common sanctuary of Panionium, on the north side of Mount Mycale – a steep promontory enclosed by the Aegean Sea, close to the polis of Priene – as a neutral gathering place with religious connotations, much like mainland Greeks used places like Delphi.

These colonists, almost all of whom identified as Ionians and thus related to the populations of Euboea and Attica[1], also resorted to well-organized violence and tried-and-tested caste arrangements to impose their views: the Greek settlers on Heraclea Pontica, on the south coast of the Black Sea, reduced the native Mariandyni population to the position of helot-like serfs cultivating the land for them[2], while the Greeks on the Bospurus did the same with the local Bithynian tribes.

In traditional accounts of the founding of Asia Minor cities, there’s a running thread of conflict between settlers and natives, and at Miletus the Greeks were said to have killed the local men and taken their women, perhaps roughly at the same time as the Romans took the Sabine women in Latium[3]. Sometimes, natives came together in specific locations to resist Greek encroachment: Side, a town at the mouth of the Manavgat river between Caria and Cilicia, maintained its own language and script well into the Hellenistic period, clearly proud of its un-Greek past, and even coined un-Greek currency from the 5^th century BC.

Non-Greek names often appear in the Greek cities during Classical times, indicating a degree of absorption of natives within the citizen body. But other natives remained second-class subjected peoples and, when Alexander the Great passed through the area, he came across Pedieis (“people of the land”) who lived in the territory of Priene and Magnesia, tilling the fields, forgotten by history. In western Caria, tribesmen known as Leleges may have been a lower native caste, and lived in very poor, primitive hilltop settlements with no Greek products.