Early Greek Colonization In Archaic Greece

Colonization in Archaic Greece
Robin Osborne’s paper Early Greek Colonization? attempts to examine the questions and circumstances surrounding colonization in archaic Greece, starting with the connotation surrounding the word colony. Osborne contends that using colony implies “strong ‘statist’ overtones”, proposing that the term suggests that all such settlements were in fact state sponsored ventures to advance political and cultural control. He goes further to emphasize that Greek terms such as apoikia were most likely not as nuanced as modern English words, implying that the Greek use of apoikia was most likely applied more broadly to non-state sponsored settlements as well. Osborne, at first, supports this claim by providing literary evidence of individuals “championing the initiative” of city-states to send settlers to specific locations, while later admitting that
Therefore, I assume that many of the Greek colonies were set up as trading nodes and to increase trade power in specific regions and could therefore initially be classified as emporion, or Greek trading colony. Corinth supports such a model. “’From an indefinite time’, writes Thucydides (i 13, 5), she had been a commercial emporium; even Homer…called her ‘rich’, and Herodotus observes that it was her citizens who ‘despised craftsmen least’ (ii 167, 2).” Furthermore, Corinth’s historical founders and ruling class at the time, the Bacchiadae, were traders as demonstrated by the mention in a fragment of Aristotle (fr. 611.19 Rose) that Bacchis, “founder” of the Bacchiadae, was lame. The term lame is significant in that Hephaestus, the god of circulating smiths, was lame and Hermes, the god of commerce, is titled kyllēnios, recalling the term kyllos “halting, lame,