Greek colonies around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea

From the 8th to the 6th century BC, groups of Greeks packed their things, climbed into ships, the πλοῖα, and sailed away from home. They were looking for a new place to live and to build a new city. Historians call this time the age of Greek colonisation.

Why did they leave? Greece has many mountains and only small plains, so there was not enough good farmland for everyone. The number of people was growing, and young families needed land. Greece also had few metals, such as tin and copper, so Greeks went overseas to find them and to trade. Sometimes people left because of fights inside their own city.

In the end, Greek cities stood along the coasts from Spain to the far end of the Black Sea. In a book by the philosopher Plato, Socrates says that the people who live between these two ends of the world live around the sea “like ants or frogs around a pond”.

A new city was called an ἀποικία (apoikia), “a home far away”. The city the settlers came from was its μητρόπολις (metropolis), the “mother city”. Usually the mother city decided to send people away and chose a leader, the οἰκιστής (oikistes), or founder. The settlers were called ἄποικοι. Not all of them went willingly.

Before the journey, the Greeks often asked the god Apollo for advice at his μαντεῖον, the oracle of Delphi. The historian Herodotus tells a funny story. The priestess at Delphi told the king of the island of Thera to found a city in Libya. But the people of Thera did not even know where Libya was! In the end, settlers from Thera founded Cyrene in North Africa.

At the new place, the settlers measured the land, laid out straight streets and gave each family a plot of land. The colony was a new, free polis with its own laws: the mother city did not rule it. But the two cities often kept close ties, with the same gods and festivals. Some colonies even put the same pictures on their coins as their mother city.

Some of the earliest settlers in the west came from the island of Euboea. They settled on Pithekoussai, today the island of Ischia near Naples. Many more cities followed in southern Italy and Sicily. The historian Thucydides writes that Corinthians led by Archias founded Syracuse in Sicily, after driving out the local Sicels.

Greeks from Phocaea, a city on the coast of today's Turkey, were bold sailors. Around 600 BC they founded Massalia, today Marseille in France. Later, people from Massalia founded a town in Spain called Emporion, “the trading post”. Its ruins are at Empúries in Catalonia.

In the east, Greeks sailed to the Black Sea, which they called the Εὔξεινος Πόντος, the “sea that is kind to strangers”. The city of Miletus was the champion: the Roman writer Pliny called it the mother of more than ninety cities. Its colonies included Istros near the mouth of the Danube and Apollonia on the coast of today's Bulgaria.

The newcomers met the local peoples. Sometimes they traded with them, and sometimes they fought them and took their land.

The colonies ended long ago, but their words are still alive in Modern Greek:

• αποικία still means “colony”: an ancient Greek colony, or a colony of a modern empire. Scientists also talk about a colony of corals or bacteria.
• μητρόπολη has three lives. In history lessons it is the mother city of a colony. It also means a big, important city, a “metropolis”. And in the Orthodox Church it is a large church district and its main church. The Greek dictionary gives this example: the official service for the national holiday takes place at the Μητρόπολη.
• εμπόριο means “trade”. It comes from the ancient ἐμπόριον, a trading post. Greece even has a Ministry of Trade.
• λιμάνι, “harbour”, made a long trip. The ancient word was λιμήν. Turkish took it as liman, and Greek borrowed it back as λιμάνι.

A Greek pupil who learns about the colonies in class hears these words again on the news.