Greek Colonization & the Colonies

A people who went to sea

Between roughly 750 and 550 BCE the Greek cities sent out a great wave of settlers who founded new, independent cities — apoikiai, 'homes away from home' — all around the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Land hunger, population growth, trade, and political strife all drove the movement. A colony was typically founded by a single mother-city and kept ties of sentiment and cult with it, but governed itself as a full polis.

From Spain to the Black Sea

The colonies reached astonishingly far: Massalia (modern Marseille) in Gaul; many cities along the Black Sea coast; Cyrene in North Africa; and Byzantion on the straits, the future Constantinople and heart of the Eastern Roman Empire. Two regions became especially Greek — Magna Graecia, the cities of southern Italy and Sicily, and the older Greek settlements of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor.

The colonies and philosophy

Strikingly, philosophy was born not in old Greece but in the colonies, at the prosperous edges of the Greek world. The first philosophers arose in Ionian Miletus; Pythagoras founded his brotherhood at Croton and Parmenides his school at Elea, both in Magna Graecia. The wealth, the contact with other cultures, and the intellectual freedom of the colonies made them the cradle of Greek thought.