The Great Greek Migrations

A History of Mankind (147)

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Greek Cynics lived in difficult times. Many, almost all, were born in formerly great Greek poleis that became mere appendages of larger Hellenic states after Alexander's empire was dismembered.

While emigration to relatively virgin lands west, such as Italy, Sicily and Spain, had been frequent during the Greek golden era, during the Hellenic era such Greek emigration became a flood. This was by and large directed East, towards emerging kingdoms in Anatolia such as Pergamum and Bithynia, and newly-conquered lands with brand new cities built on the grid plans devised by Hippodamus of Miletus, a Fifth Century BC architect and urban planner after whom the “Hippodamian plan” is named.

Ptolemy’s Egypt and, in particular, Alexandria on the Nile Delta, became a magnet. In the Levant, the able political operator Seleucus – first a supporter of Perdiccas, then rewarded by Antipater with the governorship of Babylon after he betrayed and killed his mentor, and finally triumphant as master of the East after he defeated Antipater with Ptolemy’s support – was an active founder of poleis he filled with both Greeks and Levantines.

These poleis, properly provided with Greek-style constitutions and locally-elected magistrates¹, included Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (which eventually depopulated nearby Babylon), Seleucia-on-the-Eulaeus on the ancient site of Susa, Dura Europos/Europus², Edessa³, Laodicea-on-the-Sea, Apamea – later one of the largest cities in the Roman empire – and the much celebrated Antioch-on-the Orontes near the site of Alexander’s victory at Issus, founded in 300 BC and soon turned into the Seleucid capital.

Those were exciting, rich new lands to settle for the Greeks. But, by contrast with western and southern Europe, these also were heavily populated lands with powerful pre-existing laws and traditions. In backward Gallia and Hispania, Greeks were seen as sometimes hostile bearers of great technologies and knowledge. In the East, Greeks became an elite, often city-based, which run the administration and armies of the Hellenic states, permanently surrounded by suspicious, somewhat unhappy locals who looked for any chance to dislodge the arrogant westerners.

Interestingly, the rise in commerce and travel between Hellenic kingdoms then controlling much of the civilized world also led to increased migration into Greece by subjects of the new Hellenic states, often not ethnically Greek. This is likely to have had significant effects, perhaps not so much on cosmopolitan places like Athens but certainly on formerly isolated areas, now touristic and travel centers, like Sparta and many of the Aegean islands, who were homogenized and globalized, losing their distinct characteristics in the process of becoming mere districts of larger entities.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES:

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It’s remarkable that the Greeks kept looking for new lands to explore and colonize in this era. Pytheas of Massalia appears to have circumnavigated Great Britain and Ireland, and visited parts of northern Europe around 325 BC, describing the Arctic, polar ice, lunar tides that are almost imperceptible in the Mediterranean – and also the warrior-like tribes living in those distant lands, likely to put up strong resistance to Greek colonization⁴. Not many years later, Megasthenes traveled through much of thickly-populated India, finding it unpromising as a receptacle for migrants.

Simply put, the Greeks became cynic when they ran out of lebensraum⁵. As it often happened later in history, the process was two-fold: since Greeks found no place for their extra population, cultural norms developed that argued against large families⁶; and Greece, once a bottomless pit of wanna-be colonizers, emptied out and became a draw for immigrants from Palestine, Syria and even Mesopotamia⁷.  

All across the Hellenistic world, the demographic expansion of the Greeks, faced with masses of hostile second-class non-Greeks, stopped there and then. As of the Twenty-First Century, there are as many Greeks alive in the world today as there were during Hellenic times, and 10-20 times more Persians and Jews, just to give some examples.

Greece, fed with the proceeds from trade and so many triumphal wars, was richer than ever⁸, but at a dead-end. This is how a new era of apparent triumph, in which the seeds of decline were already sprouting all over, became more amenable to defeatist doctrines prone to elevating self-doubt and unknowability to a higher rank. And this was also an era more open to foreign ideas, often found by Greek visitors to the East, that would contribute to this larger ideological picture.

In this context, Pyrrho of Elis (365-275 BC) founded a particular school of skepticism that tried to reconcile the traditional Atheism of Greek philosophy with a new Orientalizing deism based on the notion that God can be comprehended in the absence of supernatural manifestations and is simply the driving force of the universe.

Pyrrho, a Greek priest, traveled to India with Alexander the Great and from there he brought new arguments for the old Sophist idea that nothing can be known for certain. The senses are easily fooled, and reason follows too easily our desires. Pyrrhonism, as a specific views school of skepticism, was founded by his follower Aenesidemus in the First Century BC, but Pyrrho‘s views are evidently influential in the thought of post-Diogenes Cynics, all of whom have a softer, nicer view of deity and eschatology.

In Greece, Pyrrho urged everyone who would listen to have no specific views on things, and to have no inclinations for or against any interpretations on ethical matters. By following this path, says his student Timon, we will eventually achieve apatheia, “passion-lessness,” and then ataraxia, one of the keywords of late Greek philosophy, meaning “undisturbedness, calm.”

Obviously, the concept that having no views leads to undisturbedness is a well-known early Buddhist idea, so in many senses Pyrrho was revolutionary, as the first bearer of (possibly) primitive notions of Buddhism into Western thought, centuries before Buddhism entered China.

Pyrrho appears to have practiced an early form of yoga that involved not moving for extended periods, and enduring pain. He introduced in Western thought the Problem of the Criterion – which can be boiled down to the idea that, as it’s impossible to know what we know with certainty, everything is unknowable and there’s no specific criterion for truth. His prize was to be quoted by endless generations of freshmen students who never even knew his name.

1. See Mikhail Rostovtzeff’s “The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World” (Clarendon Press, 1941).

2. Named after Seleucus’ birthplace. Dura, on the Euphrates and midway between Antioch-on-the-Orontes and Babylon, appears to have maintained priests in charge of a cult of the Seleucid Dynasty well into Roman times, and perhaps up to its destruction in the 3^rd century, as Rostovtzeff noted in “The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World.”

3. Modern Urfa, just 12 kilometers southeast of the site of Göbekli Tepe.

4. His works are lost.

5. In “The Shotgun Method. The demography of the Ancient Greek City-State Culture” (2006), Mogens Herman Hansen argued convincingly that, on the strength of the available evidence, including the shockingly large, fully-crewed fleets that even small Greek islands were able to field during the Classical era, ancient Greece was very heavily populated and Greeks were a large percentage of the whole human species around AD, with as many as 8-10 million ethnic Greeks alive during the Alexander era, just as the latest classical Greek migration (to the conquered lands of the Persian empire) was afoot. During Alexander's lifetime, Egypt’s population like wasn’t larger than four million, and the entire population of modern China was certainly bigger than that of ethnic Greeks, but only perhaps three or four times as large: that compares, as of the 21^st century, an Egyptian population that is ten times bigger than that of ethnic Greeks, and a Chinese population that is over 100 times bigger. Greeks, in summary, were a very large, cultivated and relatively high-IQ contingent during the golden era of Greek science, philosophy and arms, accounting for a not insignificant part of the overall human population; and they have been a declining minority ever since.

6. Writing in the second century BC, Polybius (XX 6.1-6) claimed that Greeks put off marriage and when they did marry they were “unwilling to bring up the children born to them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two, in order to leave them wealthy and to spoil them in their childhood.” In XXXVI, 17.5-7, he adds: “some cities have become deserted and agricultural production has declined, although neither wars nor epidemics were taking place continuously… This evil grew upon us rapidly and overtook us before we were aware of it, the simple reason being that men had fallen a prey to inflated ambitions, love of money, and indolence.”

7. References abound in the Hellenistic era to non-Greeks who moved to Greece. Because of the nature of this evidence, these are often prominent people, but there are enough offhand remarks about others to indicate that this was more than a trickle, if possibly not a torrent. Hellenistic-era gravestones of foreigners, for example, provide at least a trace element and reveal proportions: there certainly came to be a substantial colony of Syrians at Delos, and of Syrians and Egyptians at Demetrias in Thessaly. During the Second Punic War, Roman war captives (almost exclusively Italics) were sold as slaves in Greece in such amounts that, given the lack of the habit of castration, they must have had a demographic impact; these developments led to previously unheard-of-responses, including large-scale enfranchisements of non-citizens, for example in Miletus in the 3^rd century BC, and the sale of citizenship rights, even the concession of honorary citizenship to successful athletes and benefactors. In Macedon, Philip V in 217 BC and 215 BC urged the city of Larissa to enfranchise foreign residents (katoikoi) so “that the land will be more fully cultivated,” a measure that was resisted.

8. Morris Silver, in “Roman economic growth and living standards: perceptions versus evidence,” Ancient Society, Vol. 37 (2007), estimates that median Greek house sizes increased sharply — perhaps some five- or six-fold — between 800 and 300 BC: “This represents a dramatic improvement in the standard of living, particularly when we factor in improvements in construction, drainage, and illumination. Fourth-century Greek houses were large and quite comfortable, even by the standards of developed countries in the early twenty-first century. It is hard to say how well furnished they were, but the impression (presently it can be little more than that) is that classical household goods were far richer than those of archaic times.”