Taras, the Spartan colony in southern Italy, had two founders: one an eponymous mythical hero, the other a historical figure. The two, both individually and in their ’rivalry’, seem to express two challenges which are basic to the Greek colonial experience: the possession of territory and the focus of political and ’historical’ identity. Those challenges seem to have found an especially sharp focus at Taras. Its foundation oracle expressly commands the founder to make war on the natives, and the burial of its founder in the agora is supposed to signify territorial possession as against the claims of the natives. The alternative ’founder’ (the eponymous Taras), besides expressing the idea of territorial possession, reflects the challenge of acquiring ’an ancient history’. Here Taras is not unique; as we have seen, Sparta too searched for ancient roots. My focus in this chapter, therefore, will be the study of these three aspects at Taras: the divine sanction of war between colonists and natives, hero cult and ideas of territorial possession, and the question of national, ’historical’ identity.

Around 514 BC a Spartiate Herakleid of the royal house by the name of Dorieus asked the state for a group of colonists to take with him to Africa, where he established a colony on the estuary of the Kinyps. Two years later the colony was driven off by a coalition of Libyan tribes (the Makai and others) and Carthage. Dorieus returned home and departed again to colonize Eryx in western Sicily. Again he failed, this time dying in combat with Elymians and Phoenicians. The Herakleid charter myth for the land of Eryx is as explicit as one may expect in the world of Greek colonization, and it is particularly Spartan in that it employs the motif of the Return of the Herakleidai for the benefit of a Spartan Herakleid of the royal house. It also demonstrates the viability of the challenge theory of Spartan territorial charter myths. Kinyps was the last site in North Africa free of either Carthaginian or Greek colonization, and western Sicily was the last corner of the island not colonized by Greeks. Late sixth-century Sparta was a latecomer; the fewer the lands available for the taking, the more ambition burned and the more explicit the charter myths.

Fictive Spartan colonies were so numerous in antiquity that modern scholars rarely want to have anything to do with the question of their historicity. This approach may be safe but is not always wise. Whereas obvious inventions of Spartan kinship should be excluded, questions about the possibility of Spartan colonization are legitimate, at least for the Archaic and Classical periods. The fact, for example, that in the Hellenistic period the Jews claimed kinship with the Spartans or that cities in Asia Minor such as Selge, Alabanda, and Synnada considered themselves Spartan colonies, is an excellent topic for the study of late attitudes, but such patently fictive Spartan kinships teach us very little about the Archaic and Classical reputation of Sparta as the mother city of cities such as Melos or Thera. With the latter it is at least legitimate to examine the possible factual basis of this reputation. Whether such cities were once in fact Spartan colonies is irrelevant to the study of attitudes to Spartan colonization in the Archaic and Classical periods. If, however, there were a kernel of truth in a claim such as that of Melos that Sparta was its mother city, it might clarify how that claim came into being and especially how it was sustained.

What is surprising about a return to a book I wrote thirty years ago is how fresh it feels in my mind, as if I have kept writing it ever since. In my later studies, I have explored many of the same themes that I first discussed in this book, such as ethnicity, networks, and the ’small world’ effect on the rise of Greek civilization, some Mediterranean issues, the impact of myth and quasi-historical accounts on history, the validation and legitimization of conquest and settlement, the evidence of nomima and their usefulness for the ancient historian, the historical and archaeological evidence of settlement, and even the role of drawing lots in ancient Greece.

The founding of Sparta, Pindar’s ’colony of the Dorians’, and especially the legitimation of its presence in the Peloponnese are topics rich in mythological articulations. Sparta was believed to have been founded by Dorians who had no previous connection at all in the Peloponnese. Such a connection was articulated for them in terms of a historicizing genealogy of their leaders, the Herakleidai (descendants of Herakles). In marked contrast to the perception of the newly arrived Dorians, the arrival of these Herakleidai came to be viewed as a kathodos (a word signifying both ‘descent’ and ‘return from exile’). The Return of the Herakleidai – a return to a land which had once been theirs – implied a right of possession vindicated by the foundation of the Dorian cities of the Peloponnese under their leadership.

Territorial myths may ’open up’ the territory, articulating rights or telling how it became possible to inhabit it, or they may ’close’ it, delimiting it and explaining why it is ’full’. Opening myths function either through an expressly articulated charter or through the identification of certain mythic scenes and events with particular places. Such localizations, involving the concretization and remapping of mythic geography, are rather flexible and seem to have evolved as the Greek colonies expanded. ’Closing myths’, on the other hand, express the end of expansion by defining (and justifying) territorial limits. Both these types are classified as historical myths – myths that function in history, have a dynamic relation with it, and are subject to changes because of it.

In 426, five years after the outbreak of its great war with Athens, Sparta founded a colony near Trachis, a short distance from Thermopylai – Herakleia Trachinia. By 394 decolonization had begun there, and by 370 nothing Spartan was left of it. The story of this colony is one of mismanagement, arbitrary rule, ethnic tension, and shifts in the control and composition of the citizenry. The foundation was marked by memories of Sparta’s Dorianism and Herakleid heritage. The myth of Herakles functioned in this colonization both through its geographical localization and through its content: Herakles spent his last days at Trachis as the guest of its king and died on the pyre on Mt Oita. In the more political versions of the myth Herakles becomes the original founder of Trachis, the conqueror and destroyer of the abhorrent brigands who infested the land. In slightly later versions which probably belong to the decolonization era, these same native ’brigands’ become Herakles’ friendly companions, the co-founders of Herakleia Trachinia.

Two horned gods, similar in their iconography yet different in their cultic significance, seem to have expressed notions of foundation and territoriality. The cult of Apollo Karneios forged a chain linking Sparta, Thera, and Cyrene and thus expressed, in Greek terms, what often eludes the observer: the Greek awareness of the ’world of Spartan colonization’. Zeus Ammon became the national god of Cyrene and his cult spread to Sparta and other Greek cities. The metaphorical perception of the ’precinct’ of this god and the locations of his cult-sites also delimited Cyrenaica, the Greek colonial territory in Libya. Libya belongs to the world of Spartan colonization in both reality and aspiration. As we have seen, in the Archaic period it was believed that Sparta had founded Thera and thus was grandmother city to Cyrene, Thera’s colony in Libya. The three cities were consistently regarded as a single chain of foundations. It has also been suggested that Sparta had an active role in the settlement of Cyrenaica, perhaps even by sending Chionis as a co-founder with Battos. Even if one rejects any real Spartan participation, Greek perceptions of Sparta’s role as a colonizer in North Africa will still seem coherent and long-lasting.

A verse of the Midrash, commenting on the quarrel of Cain and Abel, says that the sons of Adam inherited an equal division of the world: Cain the ownership of all land, Abel of all living creatures – whereupon Cain accused Abel of trespass.’ Bruce Chatwin filled his notebooks with references like this to illustrate the two alternatives of human social existence: nomadism and sedentary life. The connection of an organized, sedentary community with the land is never self-evident; images and metaphors are needed to invoke it. Abel roamed the land and struck no roots in it, while for Cain all land became his possession, his ’territory’. Whether one is perceived as autochthonous (’as old as the moon’ like the ancient Arkadians), or as a late-comer who ’strikes roots’ in a place, both images attempt to link two inherently distinct elements – man and the land he inhabits. Often, the connection is in need of further articulation, answering such basic questions as: Why here? Why us? Were we always here and, if not, when did we come, and why? Did our settlement involve conquest and displacement of others? And so on. The aim of this book is to discuss the way myth was used in the ancient Greek world to answer such questions, mediating between the Greek city-states and the territories they inhabited, colonized, or aspired to possess.

Menelaos, king of Homeric Sparta, was something the Dorian Spartans of the Archaic period could never hope to be: a Peloponnesian and a Spartan even before the Trojan War. He was believed to have descended, through his father, Atreus, from the eponymous Pelops and Hippodamia (and through his mother, Aerope, from either Minos or Lykaon). Thus he stood in sharp contrast to the ’real’ Spartans, who thought of their national history as having begun only with the Return of the Herakleidai. Reaching back to Menelaos through myth and cult was probably for the historical Spartans a response to the challenge both of their national youthfulness and of their relatively brief and recent possession of their country. Reaching back to mythic-historical times could, of course, only go so far. Greek tradition and the Homeric epic were too explicit and too widely disseminated to permit a direct linkage: Menelaos was clearly dissociated in time from the later Spartans. He was neither the founder of the Spartan state nor a progenitor of great Spartan families, nor even the mythical founder of any Spartan colony. Kleomenes’ exceptional contention that he was an Achaean, not a Dorian, was as far as one could possibly go. But Menelaos was no Herakleid either.