Greek Colonisation: How New Settlements Connected Communities Across the Mediterranean

Greek foundations spread around the Mediterranean and Black Sea during the eighth to sixth centuries BC. Settlers established independent city-states, called poleis, and mixed trading communities. An oikistes led a foundation, and the new community organised agricultural land and civic institutions. Relations with existing inhabitants ranged from trade and agreement to displacement and subjection.

An apoikia, a settlement away from its founding city, usually governed itself. Religious ties and foundation traditions linked it to its metropolis, the founding or “mother” city. An emporion was a trading post where people from different communities exchanged goods; such posts had a different political setting from an apoikia.

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Why Greek communities founded settlements overseas

No single motive explains the expansion. Population pressure and disputes over agricultural land could encourage migration, particularly where growing communities had limited territory. Thucydides described early Greek communities fighting over good farmland, while the tradition about the Spartan foundation of Taras connected migration with a group that lacked full political rights and land.

Environmental hardship could also contribute. Herodotus connected the foundation of Cyrene in North Africa with unrest, overpopulation and prolonged drought on Thera. His account contains competing versions: one emphasises Apollo’s oracle and the founder Battus, while another presents the Theran king Grinus as directing the expedition. The disagreement shows that foundation stories explained relationships between the new city and its mother community as well as recalling events.

Settlers sought farmland and ports providing access to resources and inland routes. Merchants could establish trading communities before a larger settlement developed. Political disputes at home also encouraged some expeditions.

How a new settlement was organised

A foundation could draw settlers from more than one city under an oikistes. Access to water and usable land influenced the site, while coastal positions supplied routes for communication and cargo transport.

Once established, settlers divided land for farms and created the institutions of a new polis. Its political arrangements often resembled those of the metropolis, but the new city was not normally governed as a permanent province of its founder. The relationship was expressed through shared religious practices, language, customs and stories of origin. A colony could also found further settlements of its own. Syracuse, for example, founded Camarina, while Naxos and Gela became mother cities to later foundations in Sicily.

These ties did not necessarily mean political obedience. Many apoikiai became strong city-states in their own right and pursued interests that differed from those of the metropolis. Relations could include mutual support, religious connections and commercial exchange, but could also involve rivalry.

Southern Italy and Sicily

The earliest large wave of Archaic Greek settlement in the western Mediterranean concentrated on southern Italy and Sicily. Euboean communities established Pithecusae in the Bay of Naples and then founded Cumae on the mainland. They also participated in foundations around the Strait of Messina, including Zancle and Rhegium. Archaeological evidence for Euboean pottery shows that contact and exchange with the western Mediterranean began before the better-organised settlement movement of the mid-eighth century BCE.

Southern Italy and Sicily were already inhabited when Greek settlers arrived. Indigenous communities and established Phoenician and Etruscan networks shaped access to land, resources and routes. The identities and political groupings recorded in later sources also changed over time: the Bruttians, for example, should not be projected unchanged into the earliest Archaic foundations.

On Sicily’s eastern coast, Naxos was founded in 734 BCE by Euboeans from Chalcis and participants from Naxos. It later became the base for foundations such as Leontini and Catania. Corinthian settlers founded Syracuse in 733 BCE on Ortygia and then expanded into the fertile territory around the city. Megara founded Megara Hyblaea and later Selinous, while settlers from Rhodes and Crete founded Gela, which in turn founded Acragas. These cities combined farming, seaborne exchange and competition for territory.

Southern Italy developed several different patterns. Achaean settlers founded Sybaris and Kroton on the Ionian coast, where fertile land supported agricultural communities that later extended their influence inland. Sybaris founded Poseidonia and established other connections across the region. Spartans founded Taras, traditionally associated with a socially marginalised group from Laconia. The city possessed a strong harbour and productive surroundings, but its expansion was constrained by local peoples and by other Greek communities. Evidence from places such as Timpone della Motta shows that Greek styles were adopted in local contexts, demonstrating contact and cultural exchange rather than simple replacement.

Greek settlement also changed the direction of regional exchange. Greek dialects, religious rites and institutions of the polis became part of western Mediterranean societies, while the Chalcidian and Cumaean form of the Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans. That script tradition later contributed to the development of the Old Italic and Latin alphabets.

At Empúries on the Iberian coast, the Greek Neapolis developed beside an older settlement and later a separate Roman city. A surviving commercial letter records an Ionic-speaking merchant’s order concerning purchases and transport.

The northern Aegean, Anatolia and the routes to the Black Sea

Foundations and migrations spread through Chalcidice, Thrace and the approaches to the Black Sea. Cities such as Potidaea, Acanthus and Abdera preserved traditions linking them with founding communities elsewhere in the Greek world. Other places had earlier local populations and more complicated histories of settlement.

The straits leading from the Aegean into the Black Sea were especially valuable because they controlled communication between different maritime and riverine systems. Megara founded Chalcedon and Byzantium on the approaches to the Bosporus, as well as Astacus and Selymbria. Miletus played the leading role in much of the Black Sea movement, establishing or sponsoring communities along its southern, western and northern shores. Sinope became an important base on the southern coast, while later foundations included Trebizond, Amisus and Heraclea Pontica. On the western shore, Miletus founded Histria, Apollonia and Odessos, among others.

Black Sea settlements connected Greek markets with local producers and inland routes. Grain, timber, metals and other raw materials moved through these networks, while Greek pottery and manufactured goods travelled in the opposite direction. The importance of these exchanges increased as Greek cities sought supplies and markets. Some communities were predominantly agricultural, while others developed substantial craft and commercial activity.

Local populations remained central to the region’s history. Greek settlements were often placed near existing communities, rivers or routes into the interior. At Heraclea Pontica, the Mariandyni resisted Greek settlement and were later subordinated by the Heracleans, paying tribute and remaining tied to the land they cultivated.

North Africa, Egypt and the wider Mediterranean

Cyrene in Libya was founded from Thera in the seventh century BCE, traditionally in 631 BCE, towards the end of that century. Its expansion took place in land inhabited by Libyan communities. Later foundations and arrivals changed the distribution of agricultural territory and could displace local people. The foundation traditions preserved by Herodotus explain both the settlers’ claims and the tensions surrounding access to land.

Naukratis was a multi-ethnic port within Egypt, rather than an independent Greek city ruling a surrounding territory. Greeks lived and traded alongside Egyptians and other Mediterranean communities. Sanctuaries connected traders with different Greek cities, while Egyptian institutions and royal authority shaped the town’s setting.

Greek pottery at Al Mina documents trading connections with the Levant. The settlement’s population and political character remain debated.

Phocaean foundations such as Massalia connected Greek merchants with southern Gaul and the western Mediterranean. Competition could become violent: at Alalia in Corsica in the sixth century BCE, Herodotus describes the Phocaeans winning a naval battle at such severe cost that they subsequently left the island.

Conflict, exchange and local participation

Local producers supplied goods to Greek ports and adopted some imported forms. Pottery moved into inland regions along routes connecting ports and their surrounding territories.

Other encounters involved conquest, expulsion or unequal labour obligations. The expansion of Syracuse into fertile Sicilian territory, the land redistribution around Cyrene and the subordination of the Mariandyni at Heraclea Pontica show different consequences of settlement. Competition also occurred between Greek cities themselves. Taras, Sybaris, Kroton and other communities contested territory and influence, while Greek cities in Sicily competed with Phoenician and Carthaginian interests and faced resistance from local populations.

Later foundations and the limits of comparison

A cleruchy was an Athenian settlement abroad whose settlers kept their citizenship in Athens and received allotments of land. This connected their landholding with Athenian power and military obligations, unlike an independent apoikia.

During the fourth century BCE, Syracuse established settlements in the Adriatic as part of a strategic programme, and the Parian foundation of Pharos was made in cooperation with Syracuse. In the Hellenistic period, Macedonian and other rulers founded new cities in settings shaped by royal power, armies and dynastic expansion.

These communities also shaped the regional distribution of Greek dialects. Later royal foundations belong to the political setting of the Hellenistic world, where monarchs and armies played a larger role than in many Archaic expeditions.