Greek Colonization

Cramped land and growing numbers push the Greeks overseas: a city fits out settlers, they consult the oracle at Delphi and found a new polis — independent, yet bound to the mother city by cults and memory. So arise Syracuse and Tarentum in the west, Massalia at the mouth of the Rhone, Byzantium on the strait, Olbia and Chersonesus on the Black Sea, Cyrene in Libya. With the settlers travel the alphabet, coinage, the olive and the vine; back come grain, metal and slaves. The Mediterranean ceases to be foreign space: the Greeks, in Plato's phrase, sit around it like frogs around a pond.