Carol Dougherty has pointed out that many Greek cities claimed to be founded by murderers, in an article amusingly entitled "It's Murder to Found a Colony". In this essay I want to extend her findings to the "barbarian" nations of Carthage, Rome, and Britain.
Dougherty's main examples were Syracuse and Kyrene. The Syracusians believed that they were ancestrally Heraclids from Corinth, and that Archias founded the town. But where Thucydides had a prosaic explusion-of-the-natives account, Plutarch went on and on about how Archias murdered another man he desired as a lover, and how the plague (from Apollo, traditionally) beset Corinth in retribution. Accordingly Archias consulted the Delphic Oracle (also Apollo) and left the city. Kyrene had a similar legend, as told by Callimachus: this time the god in charge was Phoibos. Phoibos is again Apollo, in a form usually invoked to purify against impurity.
Dougherty then proved her case for smaller towns: Tripodiskoi (Pausanias 1:43:7), Akarnania (Thucydides 2:102:5-6). As early as the Homeric tales, Rhodes was founded by a killer from Argos (Iliad 2:661-9), and later the Rhodians would add Delphic Apollo to that tale too (Pindar Olympian 7:27-33).
Dougherty was writing for a book about Archaic Greek cultural poetics, and therefore did not extend her theory into less-documented colonial cultures. Dougherty could just as easily have relayed the example of Rome: Romulus murdered Remus in a debate over the city walls.
It is also probable that Carthage followed suit. Timaios and Menander agreed (followed by Virgil) that King Pygmalion of Tyre killed his sister Elissa's husband. Elissa then fled the town and founded a city. ("Elishat" is the literal Carthaginian name; the Greeks and Romans preferred her surnane "Dido".) According to these Greek accounts, Dido is the victim rather than the villain, and as such does not follow the usual pattern. (This is probably why Dougherty did not use it as an example, despite that she employed African analogies elsewhere.) But if the Carthaginians were ancestral victims of Tyre, one wonders why they continued to pay tithes to the metropolis until the time of Alexander the Great. Interestingly, Eustathius, commenting on Homer, called Dido the "husband-murderer" (Lancel, p. 23), which implies that according to some accounts Elishat did follow the pattern after all. Again: a murderess goes into exile and founds a city.
A killer defiled the entire city, not just himself. Accordingly it was established practice in Greece to exile the killer: Drakon's code, Antiphon's Tetralogies, and (possibly based on Drakon) Plato's Laws 9. A similar theme is at work in the Bible: Cain must flee when he kills Abel, as must Moses when he slays the overseer. But impurity also marks them as chosen: Teiresias is blinded when he sees the holy Athena, but also becomes a seer. In the Bible, murder serves the same purpose: Cain's mark, and Moses's calling. In Moses's case, the homicide made Moses into an unconscious, undirected, and unformed executor of the divine will - fitting material for the instrument he was to become.
For the Greeks, colonisation was likewise a purifying enterprise, starting from the the metropolis ("mother city"): an overpopulated metropolis is an unhygienic place, and to Plato surplus population was akin to a "disease of the city" (Laws 735-6). Therefore when the Kyrenians failed and attempted to return to Thera, the Therans fought against their own colonists and forced them back out. The enterprise was very probably similar for Phoenicia.
I recognise two "blank pages" in Western history. The first ran from 1200 to about 900 BCE, affecting Palestine, Anatolia, and Greece; and the second from 500 to 800 CE, affecting Britain and the Balkans - arguably the Levant as well. All these lands were borderlands between warlike tribes and literate civilisation. The periods in question were "Dark Ages" for the whole region, featuring folk migrations and anarchy among the tribes, and poverty and decline in civilisation. The lands between succumbed to the former. They offer a rare glimpse on how a tradition may develop if cut off from literacy for a few centuries.
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote The History of the Kings of Britain in the 1100's CE, in Latin, mostly on the subject of the Celtic kingdoms.
Geoffrey claimed he used "a certain very ancient book written in the British
language
", 51. But Geoffrey was himself "British" -
specifically, Welsh - and shows a real penchant for nationalising world history (for example, the sack of Rome 390 BCE). Twentieth-century critics have doubted the very existence of this book.
But even if Monmouth didn't use a book, he probably did use Welsh sagas, and that will do for this project.
In one origin myth, 50 daughters of King Diocletian of Syria killed their husbands and then fled to Britain with the giant Albion. One hardly need mention that there never was a King Diocletian in Syria, and precious few ordinary Syrians of that name (the word is Latin). But there was a Roman Emperor Diocletian, who ruled at a time when most Syrians had already been enfranchised as citizens of Rome. And if they fought in Britain as citizens, they could be settled in Britain as loyal colonists.
The citizen-soldier traditionally earned a plot of land if he served the term of enlistment honourably. The Empire had an ingenious solution to its soldiers' land needs and its subjects' nativism: settling its soldiers in coloniae on occupied land. To be a citizen of a colonia was to be a citizen of Rome. Non-Romans - that is, natives - lived in municipia and civitates, chartered and unchartered towns, respectively. A native town might earn colonia status, particularly if enough veterans and Roman citizens moved there. In this wise the emperor Claudius quickly converted the ancient British town of Camulodunum into, variously, Colonia Claudia, Colonia Victricensis, and Colonia Claudia Victrix Camulodunum. Or, a local fort might attract settlement, as had happened to Eboracum; Caracalla declared it a colonia in 211 (Multangular Tower), just before making the distinction meaningless in the Constitutio Antoniniana de Civitate. A third colonia was Lincoln (Lindum); the fourth, and only other prior to 212, was Gloucester (Glevum).
Gloucester was like York: the fort came first (43-48 CE), then the
shanty-town, and lastly, when the frontier moved to Isca Silurium in
South Wales, the colonia (97-98 CE: Attractions Guitolion of Gloui. Bonus, Paul, Mauron, Guotelin, were
four brothers, who built Gloiuda, a great city upon the banks of the
river Severn, and in British is called Caer Gloui, in Saxon,
Gloucester
".(49) Another Nennius legend claims that "Guenet" -
which the translator thought was Gloucester - was founded by Vortigern
(40-42).
Nennius shows that the Celts had forgotten the origins of at least one former colony by 800 CE. Geoffrey wrote three centuries after that. Even then, the legend of Diocletian shows that some mediaeval Britons still remembered their Continental origins. The British also remembered they were not Frankish, Norman, nor Saxon. (It is likely they always will.) At that time, though, there were no longer any continental Celts in range, except in Britanny; and even Britanny was known to be settled by the Cornish. But instead of claiming they had always lived here, or that they were the last remnants of a nation which included Vercingetorix the Gaul, they chose to call themselves descendents of Syrian murderesses.
The legend of Diocletian looks most like an outgrowth of a Mediterranean colony myth. Syrians served on Hadrian's Wall, presumably in the Ninth or Sixth Legions (Cottrell). I think it likely that Diocletian moved some of these to western Britain. After centuries of remembering that they were Syrians sent there by Diocletian, in time the myth merged with standard Greek myth (like the Danaids) and stories of great Albion (or Dan, in the Mabinogi tales).
Greece was not alone in creating ignoble origins for her grandest cities. She was also not the first, nor the last, to do so. It was a common occurrence in the ancient Near East, and extended wherever Mediterranean peoples settled, as far as Britain and as late as the Middle Ages.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^) zimriel@sbcglobal.net
11 Feb 2001: started this project. 13 Feb, added in the Diocletian tale of Britain. 18 Feb: split off the controversial parts.
Thanks to Marcovic in soc.history.ancient for the Monmouth tip.