Wandering Greeks by Robert Garland Page A

the plan on the grounds that the Peloponnesians had no right to determine the fateof the Athenian settlers who resided in Ionia. One of the consequences of the debate was to strengthen Athens’s hand by drawing attention to the Ionians’ need for naval protection (Hdt. 9.106.2–4).
    Themistocles’ Threat to Relocate the Athenians
    On the eve of the naval battle that was fought in the straits off Salamis in 480, the commanders of the Greek fleet heatedly debated whether to hold the line or withdraw south. When the Athenian general Themistocles strongly advocated holding the forward position, a Corinthian named Adeimantus taunted him with being “a man without a fatherland” and objected to any proposal being put forward “on the recommendation of a man who is a mere apolis [without a city]” (Hdt. 8.61). His point was that Athens, following the evacuation of its women and children, no longer enjoyed the status of an independent polity.
    Themistocles angrily retorted that his city-state and its land were greater than that of the Corinthians, and that if the allies withdrew and made no attempt to defend the straits, the Athenians with their fleet of 200 triremes would set sail for Siris in southern Italy, “which has long been ours and which an oracle prophesied we would settle” (8.62.2). As the Athenians had already evacuated their civilian population to Salamis, Aegina, and Troezen in advance of the Persian invasion of Attica (see later, chapter 6 ), Themistocles’ threat had to be taken seriously. His advice carried the day, and the Greeks won a spectacular victory.
    Did Themistocles seriously contemplate the permanent resettlement of the entire citizen body? Was he in fact telling the truth about the oracle? Was Herodotus inventing? Scholars have generally been skeptical. True, months earlier Apollo had recommended that the Athenians should “flee to the ends of the earth.” Even so, the difficulties in implementing an operation of this magnitude on the eve of a battle are mind-boggling, particularly since the civilian population had already been dispersed to three separate locations. Only a fraction of the evacuees could have been transported to Italy, and many thousands would havebeen abandoned to their fate. It is also uncertain what reception the Athenians could have expected from the people of Siris, particularly since the latter would have had little if any advance warning of their arrival. In light of the fact that the refugees would have been under armed escort, however, they would have had little option but to receive them. An alternative possibility is that Siris was unoccupied at the time, though the problem with that hypothesis is that it was certainly occupied by ca. 440 (Hansen and Nielsen 2004, 294).
    Even if Themistocles’ threat seems like a desperate stratagem and a not entirely plausible one at that, there were, as we have seen, precedents for an overnight evacuation. A naval victory in the straits off Salamis was, moreover, anything but a foregone conclusion, and, if the Greeks had lost, the Athenians would have had no alternative but to relocate instantly with what ships they had remaining. It is not unlikely, therefore, that Themistocles did have such a plan in mind, though there is no evidence that he ever put it to the Athenian Assembly. It might have seemed too defeatist.
    The Synoecism of Olynthus
    In 433/2 the people of Chalcis in Thracian Chalcidice, fearing that war with Athens was imminent, tore down the walls of their coastal towns and relocated to Olynthus “in order to form one strong city.” They did so with the help of Perdiccas, the local king of Macedon (Thuc. 1.58.2). Not all the people in the region participated, however. Resettlement almost invariably met with stout resistance among some of the population.
    The Chalcidian settlers did not build an entirely new city. Instead they expanded an existing one. But though there