Most classical authors and modern historians depict the ancient Greek
world as essentially stable and even static, once the so-called
colonization movement came to an end. But Robert Garland argues that the
Greeks were highly mobile, that their movement was essential to the
survival, success, and sheer sustainability of their society, and that
this wandering became a defining characteristic of their culture.
Addressing a neglected but essential subject, Wandering Greeks focuses
on the diaspora of tens of thousands of people between about 700 and 325
BCE, demonstrating the degree to which Greeks were liable to be forced
to leave their homes due to political upheaval, oppression, poverty,
warfare, or simply a desire to better themselves.
Attempting to enter into the mind-set of these wanderers, the book
provides an insightful and sympathetic account of what it meant for
ancient Greeks to part from everyone and everything they held dear, to
start a new life elsewhere--or even to become homeless, living on the
open road or on the high seas with no end to their journey in sight.
Each chapter identifies a specific kind of "wanderer," including the
overseas settler, the deportee, the evacuee, the asylum-seeker, the
fugitive, the economic migrant, and the itinerant, and the book also
addresses repatriation and the idea of the "portable polis." The result
is a vivid and unique portrait of ancient Greece as a culture of
displaced persons.
