The Classical World Read Online Free PDF Page A

adaptability of the Greek settlers. Unlike the impractical British ‘gentlemen’ who settled at Jamestown on the American coast or the bickering Spaniards left by Columbus on Hispaniola, all Greeks buckled down and made a practical success, commoners and aristocrats together, like Homer’s hero Odysseus and his crew. No settlement is known to have failed through incompetence.
    One obvious consequence of these settlements was the spread of the Greek language and Greek literacy. The Greek alphabet actually owed its origin to Greek travel overseas: it was derived from a Greek’s close study of the neighbouring Phoenicians’ script in the Near East, probably
c.
800–780 BC . Its inventor was one of the Euboean travellers to Cyprus, Crete or north Syria. This alphabet was then adapted by the non-Greek Phrygians in Asia and by Etruscans in Italy and used to write their own languages. As Greeks travelled with it, the result was a vastly increased spread of reading, writing and speaking Greek around the Mediterranean. Many centuries later, Hadrian was to be its beneficiary on his travels.
    There was also a marked increase in known luxuries. The new Greek settlements covered many new landscapes and micro-climates which had special natural assets, richer than those in Greece. Northern Italy’s plains and the steppe lands beyond the Black Sea were found to produce excellent breeds of horse. Beside the Bay of Naples, the wet land around Cumae grew superb flax which could be woven into linen and made into fine hunting-nets. 5 In Libya, at Cyrene, the settlers found an exceptionally good site for growing the saffron crocus, a most precious asset of their home island, Santorini, and one which was highly prized for dyes, scents and uses in cooking. 6 They also found a valuable plant called silphion which they traded heavily overseas. Silphion was surely related to the forms of fennel, but its exact identity continues to be disputed. 7 Conversely, there were local absentees, no silver-mines in Sicily, no olive trees in the northern Black Sea, no salt, either, in the water of the southern Black Sea’s coastline. Localspecialities and local deficiencies encouraged trade-links between settlements, not just with their mother-city but also in important networks between one another.
    Where there was a rich soil, watered with good rivers, several of the new settlements flourished famously. The luxury of Acragas (modern Agrigento) in south-eastern Sicily became famous and at its height (
c.
420 BC ) was said to be supported by nearly 200,000 immigrant non-citizens. 8 Its Greek residents became celebrated for their ‘luxurious’ fishponds, swans and pet songbirds. Most famous of all was the Greek settlement at Sybaris in southern Italy, founded
c.
720 BC and increasingly prosperous until its destruction
c.
510 BC . The word ‘Sybarite’ is still proverbial for a lover of luxury. Up to 500,000 people have been suggested as a possible population for Sybaris’ fertile site at its peak (
c.
550 BC ): if so, the place dwarfed Sparta or Attica on which most historians of archaic Greece now concentrate. 9 Wonderful stories were later told of its Greek citizens’ refinement, so as to explain their destruction. The Sybarites are said to have banned cockerels because they disturbed their sleep; they invented chamber pots and took them along to their drinking-parties; they gave prizes for cookery; they taught cavalry-horses to dance to the flute (a possible circus-trick); the Greek Sybarites are the people who invented what we call the Turkish bath.
    Seen from the locals’ side, the first Greeks had rather less that was novel and desirable to bring to their settlements, except for poetry, painted pottery, athletics and their convenient alphabet. Inevitably, they wanted olives for their diet and so very often they brought olive oil to a region for the first time. They also wanted wine, but quite often it had preceded them. Through the Etruscans’