Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 12, Straight Outta Greece: The Age of Expansion. I’m Scott Emmons.

What was ancient Greece? That may sound like a manufactured opening to kick off an episode, but it’s a legitimate question. Because to understand ancient Greece, we have to think away our modern habit of seeing the world in terms of nation states. For some reason, one moment I’ve always remembered from way back in my teaching days was when a student came up to me after class and asked, “Was Athens the capital of Greece?” It wasn’t a stupid question; it just showed that this student hadn’t yet acclimated to the idea of a system other than a nation state. Ancient Greece couldn’t have a capital. There was no central government. 

So what was Greece? To throw out a rough definition, I’d say it was a collection of communities that were culturally Greek, that identified as Greek and were generally accepted as such. One kind of validation of Greekness was eligibility to participate in the big panhellenic festivals. Only Greeks were allowed to compete in the Olympic Games, for example. So ancient Greece consisted of many Greek communities, wherever they were geographically located. We’ve seen that in the Early Iron Age, there were already Greek cities along the eastern shore of the Aegean, on what’s now the coast of Turkey. And from the early to mid 8th century BCE on, through the next 200 years or so, Greeks were busy sending out new settlements in all directions. 

Now, a lot of books, especially older ones, refer to these settlements as colonies and call this whole period the “age of colonization.” But that’s a misleading term, because it suggests that a state is capturing foreign territory and ruling it from a distance. That’s something that empires do. And in fact, the word “colony” comes from the Latin “colonia,” which originally meant a settlement of Roman citizens in a conquered territory to help secure it, to make it part of the expanding empire. That’s very different from what’s going on here. The Greek word for one of these new settlements was “apoikia” — “oikia” meaning “home,” and the prefix “apo” meaning “away.” So literally it was a “home away,” and that new home was an independent city-state, not a subservient “colony” of the city that sent it out. 

So why are eighth-century Greeks suddenly leaving home and founding new settlements abroad? We’ll get to the prevailing theories, but by way of backstory, in the 8th century BCE there’s already a lot of mobility. There’s a lot of trade going on, there’s a constant search for sources of raw materials, particularly metals, so a lot of people are on the move. And when Greeks sail to different parts of the Mediterranean, they naturally take note of places that would make good settlements. Robert Garland, in his book The Wandering Greeks, quotes the passage from Homer’s Odyssey where he describes the island inhabited by the Cyclopes. In the translation by Richmond Lattimore, quote: 

Not a bad place at all; it could bear all crops in season, and there are meadow lands near the shores of the gray sea, well-watered and soft; there could be grapes grown there endlessly, and there is smooth land for plowing; men reap a full harvest always in season, since there is very rich soil. Also there is an easy harbor. Unquote

 Garland observes that Homer is looking at this site through the eyes of a settler. As he puts it, quote: “It was evidently an instinctive habit of mind, and no doubt many of his contemporaries would have evaluated a site’s potential in similar terms.” Unquote.

 Still, it’s one thing to look at a place and think, “Seems like a great place to plant a town,” and it’s something else again to pick up and leave your homeland, say goodbye to your friends and family, face all the dangers of sea travel, probably run into opposition from inhabitants already living in the new place, and build a whole new city from scratch. It was a very difficult enterprise, and not one that most people would take lightly. So there must have been some compelling reasons for cities to found new settlements and for people to take part in them. 

 One of the main reasons that’s often been cited is population growth and a resulting shortage of land. There are hints in Greek authors like the historian Thucydides, also in Plato and Aristotle, that sending out settlements was a way to relieve population pressure. That explanation isn’t as universally accepted as it used to be, partly because archaeological surveys haven’t concluded that populations necessarily outgrew land resources. On the other hand, it probably was often a contributing factor. Remember that a family’s kleros, their ancestral plot of land, was divided equally among heirs as it was passed down through generations, so that that could certainly have caused a need for more land at a time of population growth.

 The other main cause that’s often cited is the expansion of trade. Now, to put that in perspective, any settlement, if it was going to succeed long-term, had to have good agricultural land to support it. So trade would normally not be the only thing that would make for a viable site. But a good harbor was always an attractive feature, and trade must have very often been an important consideration. Finally, in a lot of cases, there was probably a political element. A typical Greek city would have multiple noble families, and sometimes they wouldn’t get along. You might have an ambitious aristocrat who’s not in the inner circle of the most powerful, and someone like that could decide to lead an expedition to found a new city instead of starting a revolution or just accepting his lot. For those in power, it might be a convenient way of getting rid of a rival who would just cause trouble at home. There’s really no one-size-fits-all explanation. There must have been different combinations of factors at play in every decision to send out an apoikia.

 The same applies to how these settlements were founded. It must have varied widely from one to another. And keep in mind that no Greeks in the 8th century BCE were writing chronicles. But when they did start writing about such things, a kind of standard foundation story evolved. And that story generally goes like this. The city that sends out a settlement is called the “mother city,” the “metropolis.” There has to be a founder, a person to lead the expedition, and he’s called the oikistes. Such a person would have to have some standing in the community, so we can assume he’d be someone of noble birth. It’s also very important to get religious sanction for the settlement, so the oikistes has go and consult the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. There were other important oracles in Greece, but Delphi was centrally located and became the most prestigious. It seems to have had a special importance for founding settlements. So the oikistes consults the oracle, which gives its advice about where to go or how to make the settlement succeed. That’s how the story usually goes, anyway. In reality, with all the exploration that was going on for trade purposes, it’s likely that the site for a new settlement had usually been identified already. But Apollo still had to be consulted. 

 After getting the nod from Delphi, the oikistes recruits settlers, ideally from the mother city. But in some cases he can’t round up enough people there, so he ends up recruiting some from other places. A good opportunity for that might be one of the panhellenic festivals like the Olympic or Pythian games. Once he has all the settlers, they set off and plant an entirely new city, independent of the metropolis. Obviously, the settlers still have family connections back home, and there are religious ties too. But the mother city doesn’t rule it. The settlement is its own city.

 I think this is a good place for our first break. Epic Greek History is sponsored by… me! I do all the research, record all the episodes, make all the mistakes… and pay all the expenses. On that last note, I’d like to offer big thanks to my newest subscriber, Djelicka Pillot, for supporting the podcast. If you’d like to be like Djelicka and help defray the production costs, you can do so very easily by going to www.epicgreekhistory.com, clicking the “Support” button, and subscribing for as little as three dollars a month. But now, let’s break for…

 [SFX: A Moment of Greek]

 In an episode on settlements abroad, I can’t think of a better word to talk about than “diaspora.” That’s a word that English has taken directly from Greek. “Diaspora” in Greek means dispersion, or literally “scattering around.” In English, the word is technically value neutral, but it carries a kind of a heavy undertone, because a diaspora so often starts with a forced relocation. When I hear “diaspora,” I think first of the Jewish diaspora with its roots in pogroms, the holocaust, and so on. Then there’s the African diaspora indelibly linked with the transatlantic slave trade. There’s a Greek diaspora too, and it has its own links with past troubles, such as the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the 20th century forced deportations from Turkey. But even if the word carries some baggage, there’s a more positive side. People of diasporas often take pride in having survived hardships, preserved their identities, and spread their cultures to all parts of the world. Diasporas contribute to cultural diversity, and in today’s political climate, I think it’s important to acknowledge that diversity is a good thing. And that’s today’s moment of Greek.

 [SFX]

 In the last section I quoted Robert Garland’s book, Wandering Greeks, about the way Greek merchants or other travelers would keep an eye out for potential settlement sites. Garland estimates that there were a total of 279 Greek settlements — and that’s only counting the ones that succeeded. There must have been quite a few more that failed and that we don’t even know about. So where were the Greeks planting these new cities? The first great wave went into southern Italy and Sicily. And just a few city-states on the mainland were responsible for most of these western settlements. Now this is the part of the story where, if you’re reading a history book that tries to be comprehensive, it can get pretty dense. Because there are a lot of these settlements that are important in different ways, and after reading about four or five of them in a row, they start to blur together. I don’t think that would work at all in a podcast, so in this section I’m just going to give a sampling of the most important settlements and where they came from. 

 It starts with the Euboean cities of Khalkis and Eretria — which, as we’ve seen in earlier episodes, were two of the most important in the early Archaic Period. They were leaders in overseas trade, and sometime around 770 BCE they founded the first western settlement we know of, a place called Pithecusae on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. Now, the Greek and Roman literary sources naturally give the impression that this was a purely Greek foundation, but archaeology shows that it had a mixed population including Phoenicians and probably Etruscans from mainland Italy. The thing that initially drew Greeks and others to the site was very likely the area’s mineral resources. It was close to Elba, which had rich iron deposits. It also had a good harbor and was well placed for trade with the Etruscans and others. For all those reasons, scholars in the past often portrayed Pithecusae as what the Greeks called an emporion, essentially a trading post, as opposed to an apoikia, which is supposedly more of a permanent settlement rooted in agriculture. But more recent studies have shown that there was extensive agriculture on Ischia, and Pithecusae grew to have a population of five to ten thousand, which would be very high for a simple trading post.

 Well, whatever we call it, Pithecusae served as a jumping-off point, and much of the population — the Chalcidian part of it according to some sources — soon moved over to the town of Cumae on the mainland of Italy. And from Cumae, the Greeks went on to found other cities on the Italian coast, including Neapolis, which is now better known to us as Naples. Meanwhile, the Chalcidians were also busy founding settlements in the south, primarily in Sicily. 

 So the Euboeans, and especially the Chalcidians, were the initial pioneers in western settlement activity, but others soon jumped on the trend. From the region of Achaia in the northern Peloponnese, settlers founded Croton and Sybaris down at the bottom of the so-called “boot” of Italy. This was a very fertile area that also had excellent harbors for maritime trade, so it’s no surprise that the cities there prospered. Sybaris became especially famous for its wealth and luxury. We still have the word “sybarite” to describe a person who indulges in a lot of sensual pleasures. I’m really showing my age here, but I remember at one point Time magazine dubbed Hugh Hefner “the dour sybarite.”

 What about other founders? Sparta, the most famous Dorian city, only sent out one settlement, Taras, at the heel of the Italian “boot.” But another Dorian city, Corinth, became one of the biggest players in Greek expansion. The Corinthians settled the island of Corcyra off the west coast of Greece on the route to Italy — there’ll be more to say about Corcyra later — and they went on to found Syracuse, which became the most important Greek settlement in Sicily. There are lots more I could mention, but you see the general pattern. In the course of the eighth century, Greek settlements pop up all over the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily. So much so that the Greeks themselves started calling this area “Great Greece,” and the Romans later jumped on that trend, calling it Magna Graecia in Latin.

 Of course, these Greek settlers weren’t just founding cities in empty territory. There were native people who had to be displaced, absorbed, or reckoned with in some way. For example, Thucydides tells us that when the Corinthians settled Syracuse in Sicily, they had to drive out the native Sicels there first. But it wasn’t always a matter of just muscling out whoever currently occupied the territory. These native peoples would often be fighting against each other, so a new Greek settlement might ally with one against another and gain support that way. Another important part of the process is intermarriage. An initial expedition to found a settlement would consist primarily of able-bodied young men. So if they’re going to start families, they’re often going to be with wives or concubines from the native peoples. That would have happened in different ways, from marriage alliances to outright abductions. The result, of course, is that a city would end up with an ethnically mixed population even if the dominant culture was Greek.

 Well, along about the early 7th century BCE, Greek expansion in Italy starts to slow down. There comes a point when most of the best sites have already been claimed. But the settlement movement doesn’t stop. In the Mediterranean, Greeks went on to found Cyrene in north Africa, which we’ll come back to later in this episode. A coalition of Greeks from various cities worked out a deal with the pharaoh Psammetichus I to found a trading settlement called Naucratis in Egypt. On the southern coast of France, Greeks from Phocaea founded Massalia, now known as Marseilles. But most of the settlement action in this period swings in the other direction, to the northeast.

 Now, I know most people aren’t going to have a map handy while listening to this, but the geography is important, so I’ll do my best to provide a verbal tour. On the northwest shore of the Aegean there’s the big peninsula known as the Chalcidice, which on a map looks like it has three long fingers pointing down southward into the sea. New Greek settlements pop up here and all along the coastline to the east, in the region the Greeks called Thrace. As we keep moving east, to what’s now northwest Turkey, we come to what amounts to a channel leading ultimately to the Black Sea. It starts with the long, narrow straits of the Dardanelles, which the Greeks called the Hellespont. Since ancient times, those straits have been considered the dividing line between Asia and Europe. As you follow the straits to the northeast, they widen into a larger body of water called the Propontis, which then narrows again at the other end and leads to another, much shorter strait called the Bosphorus. That strait then opens out into the vast expanse of the Black Sea. 

 For the Greeks, the Black Sea region was a very important source of natural resources like grain, fish, timber, and also of slaves. So you can imagine that the waterway I just described would be crucial for shipping and trade, and if you had a presence there, you’d be in a good position to exploit that. So Greeks planted settlements at strategic points on both sides of the Hellespont, the Propontis, and all around the Black Sea. The most active city in settling this region was the Ionian city of Miletus, which, according to some ancient sources, founded 70 settlements. That’s probably an exaggeration, but there’s no doubt that Miletus was a powerhouse when it came to planting new cities.

 On the other hand, it was Megara, a neighbor of Athens, that founded what became the most important of those eastern settlements. On either side of the Bosphorus, that short strait that leads to the Black Sea, Megara founded first Chalcedon and then Byzantium, which turned out to be a much more advantageous site. Right there on the Bosphorus, Byzantium could control shipping traffic in and out of the Black Sea and also traffic across the straits. So it’s no surprise that it grew to have tremendous wealth. Much later, Byzantium was renamed Constantinople when the Roman emperor Constantine made it his new imperial capital. So yes, Istanbul was once Byzantium, even if you don’t hear anyone singing songs about it.

 So that’s my brief sketch of settlements outside mainland Greece. The Aegean Sea has sometimes been referred to as a “Greek lake” because of all the Greek cities planted on its shores. To borrow an image that Plato uses in one of his dialogues, you can think of Greek cities in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea as like frogs sitting around a pond. I think it’s a nice image. Plato knew how to draw an analogy. 

 Now, as I said at the beginning, I’ve been careful to call these things settlements and avoid the old term “colonies.” The key point is that an apoikia, no matter who founds it, is a whole new state. But what kind of relations does it have with the mother city? In most cases, there would naturally be some sentimental ties to the old country. Many of the settlers would have family back there. They’d also bring the mother city’s gods, cult practices, and traditional festivals and transplant them to the new city. According to some sources, the oikist, the founder, would bring a flame from the sacred hearth of the mother city and keep it alive in the settlement. So it was normal for the mother city and the apoikia to have warm relations and to look out for each other whenever possible.

 But there were exceptions. I mentioned earlier that Corinth founded a settlement on the island of Corcyra. Corinth and Corcyra hated each other’s guts. The earliest recorded Greek naval battle was between those two cities. We don’t have any details about that conflict, but Thucydides gives us an account of their longstanding hostility. As translated by Richard Crawley, Thucydides says the Corinthians, quote:

 …hated the Corcyreans for their contempt of the mother country. Instead of meeting with the usual honors accorded to the parent city by every other colony at public assemblies, such as precedence at sacrifices, Corinth found herself treated with contempt… Unquote

 So relations between mother city and settlement weren’t guaranteed to be good. A lot of what I’ve said amounts to generalizations that may be true of most settlements, but each one is its own thing, and there are anomalies. For example, even though an apoikia was typically independent, another Corinthian settlement, Potidaea up in the north Aegean, received city officials every year from the mother city. Long story short, the establishment of an apoikia could play out in all kinds of ways.

 That’ll take us to break number two. When we pick up again, we’ll look at a case study of one apoikia that can tell us something about the challenges of establishing a settlement — and also the challenges of doing ancient history. But first…

 [SFX: Random Facts!]

 It’s well known that the south of Italy became so thick with Greek settlements that it was known as Magna Graecia, “Great Greece.” But it may come as a surprise that even today, some parts of southern Italy still have Greek communities. The Greeks living there are known as the Griko people, and they trace their ancestry all the way back to those early Greek settlements — although there was also a big influx of Greeks in the 15thcentury after the fall of Constantinople. Over the centuries, they developed their own distinctive dialect of Greek, which is now unfortunately dying out under the influence of mass media. From the little I’ve read, most younger Griko people now speak Italian as their first language. Still, the fact that these communities exist at all is a testament to the impressive staying power of Greek culture. And that’s today’s random fact!

 [SFX]

 When I was a student first learning about Greek civilization, it took me a long time to get over the prejudice that these settlements didn’t really count as part of Greece. If the reading material turned to the cities of Magna Graecia, my attitude was, “Yeah, okay, when can we get back to the real Greece?” As I said at the beginning, it can be hard to break out of our modern nation-state mindset. But the fact is, ancient Greece was not a place. It existed wherever there was a thriving Greek community, whether it was in mainland Greece, Sicily, north Africa, or on the shores of the Black Sea. 

 In this section I want to zoom in and take a closer look at one of those Greek settlements, the city of Cyrene on the coast of ancient Libya. And I chose Cyrene for several reasons. For one thing, we have a fuller account of its founding than we have for most settlements. It allows us to see a more fleshed-out version of a foundation story, with its own peculiar twists and turns. It’s also a great example of how these stories mix fact and legend, so it’s a challenge to figure out how much of it is historically true. But most of all, the example of Cyrene helps drive home the point I’ve been making, that a settlement far from the Greek mainland was still very much a part of Greece.

 Cyrene was founded from the island state of Thera — known today as Santorini. The founder, the oikist, was a man called Battos. Herodotus, the Father of History, gives us the foundation story in two versions. This is typical of Herodotus, who got most of his information not from earlier histories — because there were none — and only occasionally from records like inscriptions, but mostly from talking to people. And since different people are apt to tell the same story in different ways, he often provides more than one version. Sometimes he’ll weigh in and say which one he thinks is correct; other times he’ll just throw them both out and say, “You decide what to believe.” 

 The first story is the one Herodotus heard from the people of Thera, the founding island. According to them, they had a king named Grinnos. who went to the oracle at Delphi, accompanied by some other citizens, including Battos. He was there to consult the oracle on some other matter, but out of the blue, the oracle told him to go off and found a settlement in Libya. The king said, “Look, I’m too old for this. Founding settlements is a young man’s game, so why don’t you pick one of these younger guys instead?” And while he was talking, he was pointing right at Battos. We don’t hear how the oracle answered that, but the Therans didn’t even know where Libya was, so they blew it off. Well, it’s never a good idea to ignore a god’s command, so Thera then suffered a seven-year drought, and all but one of the trees on the island died. So the Therans went back to Delphi to find out how to deal with it, and again the Pythia said, “Found a settlement in Libya.” 

 Well, they still had no idea where they were going, so they sent messengers south to Crete in hopes of getting some information. And those messengers connected with a man named Korobios, who was either a fisherman or a merchant specializing in the shellfish that was used for producing purple dye. That dye was a prized commodity for elites all over the Mediterranean, so someone in that business would be well connected with the trading networks and would know his way around the Mediterranean. Anyway, this Korobios told the Theran messengers that a storm had once blown his boat off course to an island called Plateia just off the Libyan coast. So they hired him as a guide, and he led them on a scouting expedition to the island. It looked like a good spot, so they agreed that Korobios would stay and hold down the fort while they went back to Thera to get settlers. Herodotus goes off on a big digression involving Korobios, but to cut to the chase, the Therans drew lots to choose one out of every two brothers on the island to join the expedition. And they determined that Battos would be their leader. So they filled a couple of fifty-oared ships and sailed off to Plateia to get the settlement started.

That’s the story that Herodotus got from the Therans. The Cyrenian version is much more focused on the king, Battos, and it tells his story very differently. In the city of Axos on Crete, King Etearchos had a daughter named Phronime. The king remarried after his wife died, and the new queen hated her stepdaughter and did everything she could to make her life miserable. Through some nefarious scheming, she convinced the king that his daughter had been behaving scandalously and ought to be gotten rid of. Now, King Etearchos knew a prominent merchant from Thera, a man named Themison, and after establishing a close bond of friendship with him, got him to promise that he’d do anything the king requested. As soon as Themison had made the promise, the king said, “Take my daughter Phronime out to sea and throw her overboard.” Well, Themison wasn’t happy about being tricked, but he’d sworn an oath and had to honor it. So as soon as they were out at sea, he tied a rope around Phronime, tossed her overboard, hauled her back up, and took her with him back to Thera.

 On Thera, Phronime became the mistress of a leading citizen called Polymnestos, and they had a son, Battos. As Battos grew, he turned out to have a speech impediment. He stuttered and spoke with a lisp. So when he was grown, he went to Delphi to ask what he could do about his speech problem. And the oracle answered, “You’ve come for speech, but this is the speech of Apollo. Go out and found a colony in Libya.” The rest of the story is a lot like the Theran version. Battos ignored the command, the Therans fell on hard times, they consulted the oracle again, and the god told them things would get better if they’d found a settlement in Libya with Battos as their leader. An added detail, though, is that after the settlers sailed, they got cold feet and tried to return to Thera, but the Therans shot at them – presumably with arrows, slings, whatever missiles they had — and wouldn’t let them land. So they sailed back to Libya and settled on that island of Plateia.

 To wrap up the story, which Herodotus now says both sides agree on, the settlers were having a hard time on Plateia, so they went back yet again to Delphi, where the oracle told them essentially, “I told you settle in Libya, not on some island off the coast.” So they tried a couple of locations until some natives guided them to the right spot, and Cyrene was founded at last.

 Now, when you look at those two foundation stories, there’s obviously a lot that can’t be historical. They’re full of common folktale elements, especially in the Cyrenian story of Phronime, the mother of Battos. There’s the wicked stepmother, the character being tricked into promising something he regrets, and so on. Accounts of the early Archaic Period are often full of tropes like that, and that makes it all the more challenging to tease out historical facts.

 The historian Robin Osborne, in his book Greece in the Making, uses the foundation of Cyrene to demonstrate that what our literary sources offer for this period consists of orally transmitted stories. And that those stories are usually tailored to push a political agenda at the time they’re written down. So in Osborn’s analysis, the Theran version, which appears in Herodotus at least 150 years after the event, is meant to claim a strong, ongoing connection with a settlement that’s been wildly successful. Cyrene doesn’t really need Thera anymore, but Thera needs Cyrene. As for the Cyrenian story, Cyrene was one of the few Greek cities that continued to be ruled by a king well into the classical period. Battos founded the Battiad dynasty, which retained power for the next two centuries. So the Battiad rulers had a vested interest in glorifying their founder Battos with a quasi-epic history. 

 There’s still one other important source for the foundation story in the form of a fourth-century inscription from Cyrene. At this time, an embassy from Thera was lobbying for the right of any Theran to come to Cyrene and become a citizen there. They came with a document that was supposedly the text of the original resolution of the Theran assembly to send out the settlement. And that resolution included a clause stating that if the settlement succeeded, any Theran who wanted to could move to Cyrene and get citizenship along with an allotment of land. Well, the fourth-century Cyrenians approved the request, and they had that text of the Theran resolution inscribed on a stone and set up in their sanctuary of Pythian Apollo. There’s been a lot of debate about how much, if any, of that document is really the original text from Thera. Osborne poses the question, why would the people of Cyrene now accept this version of their past? The political situation at the time isn’t well understood, but Osborne points out that the Battiad rule ended sometime in the 430s BCE, and their old story glorifying Battos must have become an embarrassment to them after that.

 I’ve been leaning heavily on Osborne for a very skeptical view of what the sources tell us. Referring to the two stories in Herodotus, he says, quote: “Once we appreciate the factors which shape these stories, we can see that it is vain to seek historical truth from either account.” Unquote. Of course, he’s right that very little in the accounts is 100% certain. Or even eighty to ninety percent. On the other hand, I think we can accept the broad outlines of the story unless there’s good evidence against them. Thera founded Cyrene, Battos was the oikist and the first king, Delphi was very much involved in the process, and there were significant difficulties in planting the settlement. And although I can’t prove it, my gut tells me that the story of the drought on Thera is historical. Those parts of the story just ring true to me. When the settlers try to return to Thera, their own families are out there shooting at them to keep them from landing. That inscription from Cyrene, supposedly quoting the original Theran resolution, includes a provision that any Theran who doesn’t sail when the city sends him will be subject to the death penalty and confiscation of his property. And anyone who harbors a relative who doesn’t want to go will face the same penalties. The tradition is so strong on this point, I get the sense that Thera was really on the brink of starvation, and they had to found a settlement out of desperation.

 Well, aside from the foundation story, Cyrene serves as a great example of how successful  an overseas Greek settlement could become. Soon after its founding, it became very wealthy, in large part because of the great expanse of excellent farmland. Its most important agricultural product was an herb called silphium, which was popular all over the Greek and then the Roman world as both a seasoning for food and as a medicine that was thought to cure all kinds of ailments. According to the Roman author Pliny the Elder, it became extinct during the reign of the emperor Nero in the middle of the first century CE. But in its day, it played a huge role in Cyrene’s economy. It was depicted on Cyrenian coins as an emblem of the city. There’s even a famous wine cup that shows a scene of the king Arcesilaus II overseeing the weighing of silphium for export. 

 Besides silphium, Cyrene could also make money from the bustling Mediterranean trade, being situated between Egypt and Carthage. It was also an important stopping-off point for Greeks who wanted to consult the very prestigious oracle of Amun at the oasis of Siwah. With all that wealth, it could afford an extravagant building program in the most lavish Greek style. I’ve never been there myself — Libya isn’t the easiest place for an American to visit — but one look at photos of the ancient monuments will show that Cyrene was unquestionably a Greek city. Its temple of Zeus is one of the largest Greek temples ever built, comparable to the Parthenon in Athens. In the 460s, the Cyrenian king Arcesilaus IV won the chariot races at both the Pythian and the Olympic games. The poet Pindar celebrated those victories in his Pythian Odes. None of that could have happened if there’d been any question that Cyrene was a part of Greece.

 And of course, Cyrene is just one example. Some of the most spectacular Greek temples are at Agrigento in Sicily and at Paestum on the Italian coast. The philosopher Pythagoras is said to have set up his school at Croton in southernmost Italy. And if you happen to be in Greece and visit the museum at Delphi, one of the most famous treasures you’ll see there is the statue known as the Bronze Charioteer. That statue was dedicated by Polyzalos of Gela in Sicily to commemorate his victory in the Pythian games. So when we think of ancient Greece, we need to forget our preconceived notions of what a country is. Ancient Greece was not a place. It was a culture, and wherever it took root, that was Greece.

 And that’s a wrap for Episode 12. If you’d like to learn more about the Greek age of expansion, there are a lot of good books on the subject. One of the classics is The Greeks Overseas by John Boardman, which has been through multiple editions. It’s very detailed and jam packed with great photos and illustrations. I’ve left other reading suggestions in the show notes and in the latest post on epicgreekhistory.substack.com. Meanwhile, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to comment, I’m always happy to hear from listeners at scott@epicgreekhistory or on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.