In-betweenness and loss of identity: Herodotus on the foundation of Cyrene

5I will start with a case taken from Herodotus’s Histories3, that of citizens leaving the island of Thera (Santorini) in the last third of the 6^th c. BC to settle down somewhere else. Such a migration is part of what is called the Archaic colonisation. This journey, that will end up in Libya and more precisely in the city of Cyrene (still to be), is probably the most complicated ever establishment of an apoikia, a colony4. The whole narrative tells us about the wandering of these people before they find a proper place where they finally settle in. There are two versions of the story (the Therean and the Cyrenean one5) sharing a lot of common points6: double consultation of the Delphic oracle who orders the foundation of a city in Libya, returns (nostoi) to Thera after an unsuccessful expedition, difficulties encountered in Thera for not having respected the injunctions of the Pythia, sending of two boats of 100 people (penteconters) under the direction of a certain Battos the future founder, wanderings on the Libyan coast. In the Therean version, men who must leave are chosen by lot under coercion, one brother out of two in the seven districts of the island7. In the Cyrenean version, the men coming back to Thera for the second time are lapidated by their fellow-citizens and, before they’re able to land, are forced to leave their metropolis again8. There are three points of interest in this story for our theme.

6Firstly, during this journey, the people who have left their homeland lose their identity and status. They aren’t recognised as Thereans anymore and they’re not Cyreneans yet, as they don’t even know where to go exactly. Also, the people they meet on their way, basically the mediators, all have names: they’re called Corobios the Cretan, Colaios the Samian etc9. The Thereans on the move have no personal names apart from the founder, the ktistès, called Battos. Yet, this name is considered by Herodotus to be not his real name, but the one he took when he got to Libya, as battos is supposed to mean “king” in Libyan language10. So, this name appears both as a generic and anticipated name, more than as a personal one for an identity still to be.

7Secondly, the founding of a colony, the act of apoikizein, even with a happy (reconstructed) ending, can and maybe often does start as an act of exile, the border between the two being pretty blurred in fact. Colonisation before landing somewhere includes a long in-between situation, which is not a happy one as perceived and expressly mentioned by the colons to the oracle: the ambassadors repeatedly say that their situation doesn’t get better, ameinon11. Here one cannot escape the biases that characterize what can be called the “colonial narrative”. The anguish of the process of colonization is a powerful spring in Herodotus’ mind in the 5^th century BC. Moreover, the teleological character of the narrative seems to be echoed in the Libyan episode of the Argonautics by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3^rd century BC12, when the poet evokes this land that was only waiting to be colonized13.

8But and thirdly, these people do learn from their mistakes, even if the process takes a good ten years including two spent on Platea, an islet next to the Libyan coast, and six more years in a place called Aziris, on the Libyan coast this time. The biggest problem is for them to identify where precisely they should go and settle down: the order received from the oracle is clear (“to found a city in Libya”), but not informative enough and they don’t know how to treat it. In terms of space, the island next to the continent (here Platea) appears as a place of in-between, a transitory location which cannot be the end of the journey. This Therean odyssey definitely includes the two stages identified in the introduction: the loss of identity followed by a restoration of it through the settling down.

In-betweenness as a modus vivendi: Xenophon’s Anabasis as a wandering city

9The second case is that of the long journey called the Anabasis (the expedition up from the coast), related and partly led by the Athenian Xenophon at the end of the 5^th c. BC. In 401, the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger hires nearly 13,000 Greek mercenaries (on top of Barbarian ones) to win over the power against his brother Artaxerxes II. These mercenaries are for some “self-decided” (they’re looking for money), but a lot of them are exiles. Cyrus dies at the battle of Counaxa, not far from Babylon, and the Greeks are therefore compelled to go backwards to the Black Sea to Trapezus, “a journey of some 1,900 miles”14, that lasts about five long months. It’s a classic story with many obstacles and mediators. But what happens to these mercenaries in terms of status, identity and citizenship during this very long entre-deux?

10The first point to raise is their relation with the idea of nostos, return. Such a return seems to be a leitmotiv of the text and through the nostos theme it appears to be a new odyssey, which is again the permanently renewed narrative for the Greeks: Xenophon compares the Persians to the Lotophagoi15 and alludes to Odysseus himself, “arriving to Greece on his boat, lying on his back”16. After the arrest of their generals, the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus’ army are totally discouraged, just before Xenophon shows up on the scene as a saviour: “many did not come that night to their quarters, but lay down wherever they each chanced to be, unable to sleep for grief (lupè) and longing (pothos) for their native states and parents, their wives and children, whom they thought they should never see again”. But, as Philippe Gauthier has noticed a long time ago17, this nostalgia might not be a general feeling in the army, even if Greece seems a better place to be. This nostos to the patris might even be more of a literary motive and topos than anything else. Such people, as mercenaries, are looking for a pay and they were “not ready to give up their job”18, nor to settle anywhere: that’s why they refuse to found a new city on the Black Sea shore when Xenophon makes this suggestion19. They finally end up nearly where they started from (in Pergamum, not far from Sardis), to do again what they’ve just done, that is being enrolled for a new expedition. So, their proper mental, cognitive, horizon is rather this wandering itself: the in-between becomes the real modus vivendi and is progressively built as such. But how is it built?

11Hippolyte Taine, in 1856, gave a very interesting and famous description of this group of migrants: “There is nothing more curious than this Greek army, a république voyageuse which deliberates and acts, fights and votes, a sort of wandering Athens in the middle of Asia”20. Even if it takes some time before the army turns into a kind of moving city21, it definitely looks like one after the battle of Counaxa and mostly when the soldiers walk from Trapezus to Byzantium. First of all, the army starts acting as a polis, “city”, but an international polis which is more like a “federation”, koinon, or a panhellenic organisation, or even a gigantic colonial expedition22. This begins when they free themselves from Persian command. These men come from various cities and regions and motivations are diverse, but, at least for the leaders, they’re still identified through their own name and ethnic, that is their city-name. Therefore the story isn’t at first sight about a loss of identity and status. Yet, after a while, the group creates for itself a new identity through new practices of citizenship on the move. While wandering through a large space-time, these men organise assemblies and debates; they receive and send ambassadors23; they do sacrifices all along and, just after reaching Trapezus, they even set up an agôn gumnikos, a gymnic competition, and even a hippic one24. Then the city turns into a floating town with all its human components. An army always includes a “train”, the convoy that goes with it. But here the train is made not only of food supplies and tents for instance. It also consists of animals and people: the soldiers are followed by cattle, slaves, women and children, like a series of moving oikoi, “houses”25. Women are said to be hetairai, that is courtesans, prostitutes26. Some children take part in the games organised in the mountain, and these children are said to be mostly those of the captives, which means that some are the offspring of the soldiers themselves. But is this really a city? We will see it rather as a shifted city (or even a “counter-city”?), since the society is not the same as in a fixed city: there are men, but they are almost all soldiers, there are women, but they are prostitutes, there are children, but they were born of captives. Finally, this moving city never settles anywhere, even, as we’ve seen, when Xenophon offers it. Therefore, we can agree with John Ma that, in the Anabasis, “identities are on the move, but also being made on the move”27.

On the road again: [Demosthenes’] Neaira and the condition of uncertainty

12Space and mobility can be even more creative of identity and status than with the Ten-Thousand. Let’s change scale and shift from collective adventures to individual cases. The speech by [Demosthenes] Against Neaira is a lawsuit filed shortly before 340 BC28: its outcome is not known, but the argument of the speech itself stands in a few words. It is a graphe xenias, a “trial in foreignness”, that is to say that Neaira, a foreigner (xene) and (former) prostitute in addition, is accused of having married Stephanos, who allegedly passed her off as his lawful wife, against the Attic law: the latter prohibited marriages between Athenians and foreigners and stipulated that the guilty Athenian would have to pay a fine of 1,000 drachmas and that the foreign wife would be sold into slavery. Stephanos would have committed another fault as well, that of having recognized as his own legitimate daughter Phanô, Neaira’s offspring born of an affair of her mother, and of having given her in marriage to two Athenians successively: for such an act, Stephanos could be subject to atimia (loss of citizenship) and confiscation of his property.

13Neaira has started as a pais, a girl aged between 7 and 10, and was a little prostitute in Corinth. She is then a slave and has no other choice than to obey and follow her owner, Nikarétè, including when the latter moves from one city to another to sell the services of her girls. Constraint and violence are highly notable during a symposion in Athens where Neaira has to have sex with servants, although she’s already supposed to be a freedwoman at that period29. But, at the same time, she lives a life which is not accessible to Athenian wives: she’s on the move, on the roads, doing her job “everywhere in Greece” as said by the prosecutor. And the more she moves during a complex personal itinerary, the better her situation. She buys back her freedom in two or three steps. Her master changes, turns into a protector, prostates. And she ends up in Athens living the life of a citizen and being considered as such, because she lives as a citizen. She has a daughter, Phanô, who marries an Athenian, contrary to any law, and who attends cultic ceremonies totally forbidden to her. Therefore, both mother and daughter conform to the citizenship model of behaviour and of course are accused for that, because Neaira is a foreigner and a former slave. In her case, creation of identity and status is coextensive with mobility.

14The question to be asked is the following: is this mobility an in-between? The answer is not obvious. There is a departure point, Corinth, but her nostos is totally prohibited. There is no way she can come back home: two of her Corinthian lovers, Eukrates and Timanoridas, have given her some money to get free under the condition she would never come back to the city, because they’re both about to get married. Neaira is polluting the space by her presence, she has to be erased from the map of her childhood. So, this sounds more like an exile. But in her case, exile is a redemption, thanks to the resilience of the character. Every new space is like a white page where she can start a new story and be a new person, till the point of arrival in Athens. The narrative tells us how she re-appropriates her own body, and how that happens thanks to mediators (the different people who help her) and objects, especially the ones she takes with her during her journeys: we’re told that when she flies to Megara to escape from one of her companions, she takes with her two servants, her clothes and her jewels. That detail has got a social and economic significance, but also an anthropological one as she needs some transitional objects to go through this experience successfully. One thing is she always adjusts to the situations and that’s what I call resilience. In-betweenness stops for her when she meets her alleged husband, Stephanos, because the gap between what she wanted to be and what she has become has reduced enormously. In other terms, she now fits. On the other hand, troubles start again with the trial, and one could say that in her case in-betweenness never really ends: although she lives as an Athenian and is regarded as one probably by most people, her status remains fragile and if she’s proved wrong, she can go back to slavery, because of the crime she committed.

15Neaira is therefore a great case to show how mobility affects status and identity. But it also illustrates the cognitive processes leading to this permanent adjustment to difficulties. She finally encapsulates everything an Athenian is suspicious about: her status (slave-foreigner) is despicable and she’s accused of having cheated and lied about her identity.

“Esprit de retour”: Athens and the refugees from Acarnania in 338/337

16I’m reaching now my last section about civic practices and measures of control in Greek poleis of the Classical and Hellenistic periods, as revealed through epigraphic documents.

17The first case of a supervising behavior by a city is that of the metoikos personal status30. As L. Migeotte reminds us, “the general rule was to welcome xenoi without formalities: we have no trace of their identity being checked on arrival” in peacetime, because what prevailed was freedom of movement31. The two Classical testimonies we have for such a control thanks to marks of recognition concern a period of war. When a foreigner landed in Athens, for instance, he would be called a xenos and could meet his own city’s proxenos, the Athenian citizen chosen by his own city to protect him and his fellow-citizens when in Athens32. After a month, if the xenos meant to stay, he was compelled to get a prostates, a patron, to enter the metoikos (resident alien) category33. One can guess that not everyone would declare himself, which means that some foreigners would remain unidentified and therefore (probably) considered as illegally staying. Unfortunately, we don’t know, in this case, what would happen to them, although we can guess that they would probably be expelled when recognised. But being a metoikos was, in some respects, an advantageous status34 and it was probably not that easy to hide especially in small and very small cities, although we don’t always know what the status of foreign residents was in places other than Athens. Finally, even if the case is unfortunately not documented, probably not everyone could obtain the status of metoikos, as the city was entitled to expel any foreigner considered undesirable35.

18The case I’m thinking of here is slightly different: it’s about a group of people from Acarnania in Western Greece coming to Athens in 338/337 (Text 1). These people, probably here some soldiers, had helped the Athenians against Philip II, the Macedonian king, and ended up as exiles from their own region36. Being a phugas (exile) was certainly a status from the point of view of the exiling polis, because there were pragmatic consequences for the banished people in relation to the territory of the city itself. But there was no such personal status as “exile” or “refugee” in the welcoming poleis, even if their situation was recognized as such historically speaking37. The legal agreements concluded between cities belong to two distinct categories: they are either asylia agreements, which ensured that the nationals of the two cities could appeal against seizures38, or judicial agreements called symbola, which allowed disputes between the same people to be settled and gave them access to the courts39. However, these conventions did not directly concern the fate of possible exiles. Therefore, it’s only their status as a foreigner that appears in the inscription: the question remains as to whether these Acarnanians can really be considered metoikoi, as they get a dispensation (ateleia, l. 26) from the tax paid precisely by metoikoi, the metoikion. According to D. Whitehead40, they gain the privilege to remain xenoi41. The two main characters of the decree, Phormio and Karphinas, probably brothers, also got the right to activate the Athenian citizenship once granted to their grand-father, a politeia which had remained silent till their time to say so. The rest of the group, anonymously, finally got a partial right of enktesis, the “right of acquisition of land and/or house”42. Here, they were allowed to buy houses only (and no land), under two conditions, as the decree stipulates: “up to the time they would go back home” and “as long as they would reside in Athens”. So, this in-between situation, created by war and run away of part of the belligerents, was viewed as temporary by the welcoming city. The privilege would obviously be removed after their going back home, which was not the case of the two characters named above obviously. This return was seen as the normal ending of things43, with no settling down forever of the exiles.

Reinstatement and resilience: the Samians en tè phugè in the 4^th c. BC

19Another notorious case of exiled people, who had to live in an entre-deux for 43 years between 365 and 322 is that of the Samians, the citizens of Samos on the eponymous island44. They were expelled from their island by the Athenians who installed there a sort of colony called a cleruchy. The Samian diaspora was quite extended in geographical terms. They ended up living mostly in Anaia, the nearest place located in the peiraia, that is the continental part of the island territory45, but also in very diverse cities (there is always a city where to land up in Greece, because there are so many of them): the people and communities who had helped the exiled Samians were thanked later on through more than 30 decrees called the “exile decrees”46.

20The interesting thing with this case is the name itself given to these people. Even if they don’t appear as benefiting from any official and international “refugee status”, they’re as closed to it as can be. They are labelled by the others and by themselves afterwards as “the Samians en tè phugè”, as the Greek say, “in exile”. The word phugè is a strong one and means the punishment inflicted on someone who disobeys a rule in a treaty for instance47. But it also refers to the specific situation which results from this banishment. Of course, they lost the possibility to exercise their citizenship in practice for 43 years, but they never lost their status as citizens of Samos in the eyes of the other Greeks apart from the Athenians48. They were welcomed in other poleis and got the name of katoikountes, “residents”, which must be the local equivalent of metoikos, “resident alien”49, even if that was only a temporary metoikia always conceived with an esprit de retour. That can be seen in the most telling of the “exile decrees”: it’s a decree for two citizens from Iasos in Asia Minor, Gorgos and Minnion (text 2), who have been very efficient in helping the Samians, and excellent mediators. Gorgos especially, a high-ranking character at the court of Alexander, has interceded for them with him, so that they could go back home as soon as possible. He also wrote from Alexander’s camp to the magistrates of his own city, Iasos, to ask some privileges for the returning Samians: they should be exempted from the import-export tax (ateleia) for the goods they had to carry away and should be given means of transportation (poreia) at the expense of the city. The mechanism here of both the in-between situation and the going back home is very accurately and pragmatically described. They could on top have been given the double privilege of asylia and asphaleia, that is security for their goods and their own person: asylia, which should not be translated as “asylum” although the modern word derives from the Greek one, means exactly “no plundering” for a territory or “no seizing” for goods50, while asphaleia refers to personal safety.

21The Samians were not the only ones to be reinstated in their own city51. Lots of people had been banished during the second part of the 4^th century for whatever reason linked with the huge mobility process of the period. But Alexander, before dying in Babylon in 323, had recalled them in 324 through a famous diagramma, ordonnance, exactly as he had proclaimed that the Samians were allowed to go back home. When the letter of Alexander was read out loud during the Olympic games in July 324, 20,000 banished people attended this proclamation according to Diodorus52. At this time then, Aegean Greece appears as a region of the oikoumenè with people wandering from one place to another, trying to come back home with a lot of uncertainty. Another decree, from the city of Tegea, dated 324/323 or after 319 BC, gives the modalities of this return for this Peloponnesian city53. There had been obviously contestations about the diagramma and one of the biggest problems faced both by returning people and those who had stayed was that of houses and land-ownership. Just like Odysseus, exiled people, called here phugades (same stem as phuge), were never sure, when going back home, to recover their properties and therefore their social status even if they were reinstated as citizens.

Final remarks

22To conclude, I would like to underline three points:

23First, about the ways migrants can be categorized between “self-decided” and “compelled” to move away: the difference between the former and the latter is clearly perceptible, if we do a detour, through the treatment made to people who are simply “absentees”. These ones are absent for whatever reason (travel, embassy, residence in another deme or city, apart from banishment), and their home-city usually takes them into account as apodemountes, “those who are away”. Obviously, they are physically not in the city, but still present in memories, in the global conception of the civic body, and therefore in the actions taken by the polis. We have a very good example of it from the city of Cos around 180 BC. A decree from the tribes of the deme of Halasarna, a subdivision of the polis, makes a list of all the people who are able to participate in the cult of Apollo and Herakles (text 3). That list includes, second after the endamoi, “resident people”, the apodamoi (l. 26-27), who can be represented by an epitropos, a trustee, a person who will look after their interests54. These apodamoi obviously remain citizens and don’t lose their status, but if the epitropos cannot do his job and represent them, then they have three months to show up by themselves after their return. There are two points of interest in these dispositions. The first concerns the existence of an epitropos officially recognised by the deme, even if it is not mandatory, since provision is made for the case of citizens who are not represented (case n^o 3). The second concerns the fact that absentees are not necessarily wrong and do not incur any negative consequences provided that they present themselves on their return: the consequence is therefore simply deferred, but is applicable in the event of non-presentation. In this case, it is more a right to be exercised than a duty to be fulfilled, and those who do not present themselves at the census are the first victims of their own behaviour. Beyond the time limit after their return, they are likely to lose their rights, at least with regard to their fellow citizens of demes. Unfortunately, we do not know more about the loss of rights in other institutional contexts55. Yet, categories can be blurred between absentees and exiles, as we’ve seen with mercenaries and prostitutes: some migrants might escape their slave-status and become free to move; some apparently self-decided mercenaries might in fact be exiles; some exiles might be reintegrated after they come back; so that one should perhaps talk about a continuum between intentionality and pure coercion.

24Second, the definition of “in-betweenness” clearly depends on the category one belongs to: I suggest that in-betweenness should be defined, in cognitive terms, as a discrepancy, the feeling of those people who don’t belong home anymore, but don’t belong yet anywhere else, who see a huge gap between the identity they claim for themselves and the image reflected by people they meet on the way. In-betweenness is also made of precarity and uncertainty about the other end of the trajectory. Therefore, according to me, not everyone on the road can be said “in-between” even if he faces danger and is at risk, unless one prefers to say that there are several forms of in-betweenness!

25Third and finally, about status and identity. Migratory experience is of course necessarily disruptive, whatever the angle we take it from: self-perception (cognition), collective representation or practicality. But it can also be creative and the key-word here is resilience: Xenophon’ mercenaries, writes the author, want to go home, but none of them gets home in the end and they reembark for more adventures. Demosthenes’ Neaira starts very low, but slides into the gaps of Athenian life and law, and every step of her long trajectory makes the in-betweenness progressively fade away, as she ends up as a quasi-respectable politis, a woman-citizen. Resilience is certainly a key-concept to study migration and one obviously opposed to nostalgia which is such a leitmotiv in both Greek literature and inscriptions.