A spatial approach to relationships between colony and metropolis

Abstract

Introduction The case-studies so far have focused on particular kinds of physical space (civic, sacred, funerary). This chapter, in contrast, outlines a significantly different conception of space as something both physical and perceptual. Its focus is on how we can understand the changing proximity or distance of the relationship (the perceptual ‘space’) between particular physical spaces. This is to be done by examining not only the way in which that perceptual space is constructed in the literary, epigraphic and material sources, but also how the nature and experience of each physical space themselves contribute to the texture of the spatial relationship between them. The case-study here will be one of the most often discussed relationships between poleis in the ancient world, that of metropolis and colony. Studies of colonisation have advanced dramatically in the last three decades. The traditional portrayal of colonisation (cf. Berard 1957; Mosse 1970) as a series of dramatic events occurring in the eighth to sixth centuries BC when mainland Greek cities, often pushed by land overcrowding or some kind of internal stasis, sought a solution (often in conjunction with a consultation of the oracle at Delphi) in the colonisation of a new settlement around the Mediterranean, has been severely criticised. In 1998, Osborne argued that the term colonisation should be abandoned (Osborne 1998), and in 2005 Purcell commented that ‘colonization was a category in crisis’ (Purcell 2005: 115). The resulting rethink has led to a much more dynamic interpretation of both the context and the process of founding colonial settlements (and subsequent further foundations made by the colonies themselves), as well as of the role that the concept of ‘colonisation’ played in literature and later Greek history.