Wandering Greeks by Garland Robert

Author:Garland, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Origins of Economic Migration

We have evidence that city-states were permitting economic migrants to settle permanently within their borders from the sixth century onward, though the legal status of these migrants in the archaic period is obscure. While some of the professional dêmiourgoi (literally “those who work for the people”) whom Homer identified as itinerants probably became permanent settlers abroad (see chapter 10), we do not know in what way that might have affected their legal status in their country of adoption—assuming they were accorded any status whatsoever. Most itinerants are likely to have settled abroad on a purely informal basis, perhaps at the invitation of an appreciative employer.

The first economic migrants of whom we have note are the aristocrats who left their homes to marry into wealthy foreign families of similar status. Dynastic marriage is already a feature of life in the Odyssey, as we see from the fact that the Phaeacian king Alcinoüs is eager for the stranger Odysseus to become his son-in-law (7.311-15). Whether dynastic marriage was as central to alliance-building in archaic Greece as it has been at other periods of history, is, however, impossible to determine. When suitors travel vast distances to compete for the hand of the daughter of Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, the latter goes out of his way to thank them “for their willingness to marry into my family and leave behind their own homes” (Hdt. 6.126.–130). His complimentary remark seems to suggest that a willingness to relocate was the exception rather than the rule among the élite.

Plutarch reports that it was Solon who first permitted skilled workers to settle in Attica and that he did so on condition that they brought their families with them (Sol. 24.2). Though he denies that Solon’s motivation was to drive undesirable foreigners away, he claims that he took note of the fact that Athens was “filled with people who were constantly flooding into Attica from elsewhere in order to find security” (22.1). In other words, it is unclear whether the lawgiver intended to implement a pro- or an anti-immigration policy (Whitehead 1977, 141–42). Plutarch, moreover, is writing hundreds of years after the event, and it would be naïve to assume that he had any insight as to what had prompted Solon’s legislation.

Though many scholars believe that it was the reforms of Cleisthenes that first granted official recognition to Athens’s immigrant population, the word metoikos, which most frequently describes an economic migrant to Athens, does not occur in a literary context until 472 (Aes. Pers. 319). Other data suggest that the terminus ante quem for the introduction of metic status was ca. 460.

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