Plato had Socrates compare the Greeks to ants or frogs living around a pond. The pond was the Mediterranean, with the Black Sea tucked into one corner.
Between the mid-8th and mid-6th centuries BC, Greek cities founded roughly 500 colonies, from Spain to the Black Sea. Most became independent city-states, and by 500 BC the colonies were home to about 40% of all Greeks.
Key Takeaways
Greek colonization ran from about 750 to 550 BC and produced some 500 colonies.
Up to 60,000 original settlers left, yet colonies later held roughly 40% of the Greek world.
Trade usually came first. Merchants set up trading posts, and full cities followed once local people were pushed aside or absorbed. Crowded homelands and the pull of timber, metals and grain did the rest. Ancient writers make the process sound orderly, but modern historians suspect it was slower and messier.
Where did the Greeks settle?
Southern Italy and Sicily got the earliest wave. Cumae appeared around 740 BC and Syracuse in 733 BC, and the region earned its own name, Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece. The Black Sea came last. Miletus alone was credited with 70 colonies there, a figure that is probably inflated. Other settlers reached Egypt, Libya, southern France and Spain.
Who else wanted the same coastline?
Phoenicians and Etruscans founded colonies of their own, and wars followed. Carthage, traditionally founded from Tyre around 814 BC, and the Greek cities fought over Sicily from 580 to 376 BC.
