Migration in ancient Greece

The ancient Greek world stretches from Spain in the west to Cyprus in the east, and from the Crimea in the north to Cyrenaica in Libya in the south. It is truly a very expansive and geographically fragmented entity. When we look at this map, it is very clear that migration is a crucial part of what made the ancient Greek world. It must have been crucial in the way this world came together, but it also must have been crucial in keeping this world linked and connected. The ancient Greek world must, just from looking at its map, have been a place characterized by human migration, human mobility, throughout all of its history.

Five years ago, I started a new research project. It is called Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World, or MIGMAG for short. My aim in this project was to investigate the kinds of mobilities that created the ancient Greek world, that gave it the initial shape that we see on the map today.

I wanted to understand how the Greek world became so geographically expansive, to understand how Greeks got to these various far flung locations and then what held them together afterwards.

In this period, there is no clear idea of a center or periphery. There is no clear idea of people necessarily moving out in a diasporic sense. It is much more chaotic. We are much more thinking about people moving around in a Brownian motion, almost without clear directionality. What is interesting is that over the course of two or three centuries, a directionality emerges, and we start to find emerging centers and emerging peripheries.

What I think is particularly interesting are the processes through which the centers emerge as centers, and the peripheries emerge as peripheries.

Cyprus, because of its natural resources, then becomes an important node for Mediterranean communications, and it is incredible to see how these networks expand and get more intricate over the course of time.

Instead, what they seem to share are cultural commonalities, in terms of language, in terms of ritual, in terms of ways of life, ways of doing things, but also in terms of their idea of a shared history, the stories and the mythology that they shared, too. The ancient Greek world at this time is a world held together by shared culture rather than by any formal political structures.

What we now know as a result of my research and the research of others is that it is more complicated than that. Actually, the movements are not diasporic in nature. They do not start in the Aegean and then go outwards. The movements tend to be much more circular around regional areas, and then they almost tend to be drawn inwards at a later date.

What actually creates the ancient Greek world is not a diasporic expansion outwards but instead a cultural convergence, whereby interacting communities look inwards and then create this idea of a shared common Greekness.

What we see in the archaeological record are groups of people beginning to partake in and embrace Mediterranean style cultures and customs and ways of life. It is those ways of doing things, styles of eating, styles of drinking, ways of worshiping the gods, which are beginning to show cultural convergence first and then these more explicit statements of identity, origin and ethnicity; these are things which come later. What archaeology shows us is that culture comes first and identity follows after.

I think what we can learn is that whether you call something migration is just a label. At the point at which it is unusual enough to be labeled as migration rather than as mobility, this is something which very much changes over time. What we might call a migration movement might have been something quite normal and everyday for someone in antiquity, and vice versa.

The first lesson is that human mobility has always happened. It is always ongoing. It never stops. It is a normal condition of humanity. The second lesson is that how we understand those mobilities is quite culturally specific. The same movement might be understood as an unusual form of migration in one period of time, but it might just be a normal part of everyday life in another historical period.

If there is one misconception I would like to correct, I would like people to be aware that migration is not new, that people have always moved around, that mobility is a fundamental part of the human condition.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025