Foundations Beyond Doubt?

The Greek foundations of Marseilles? Photo (cc) amelaye.

Tim Jones at Remote Central discusses the latest post from Dennis Price’s Eternal Idol blog. Dennis Price thinks he can identify Stonehenge as the temple of Apollo of the Hyperboreans as mentioned by Pytheas of Massalia. The latest post compares the Tholos at Delphi with the circular design of Stonehenge. Personally I’m not convinced. Stonehenge could be the site descrfibed by Pytheas, but I don’t think the evidence survives to be sure of where the temple may be. Both posts are worth reading, but I think part of the problem is that Price is more willing to move from plausible to certain than I am. I wouldn’t dismiss his idea out of hand, but there are problems. One that there’s likely to be a big shift in what classicists think is certain about the foundations of sites like Massalia. At the moment many classicists would agree with the statement:

…[I]t is beyond doubt that settlers from Phocaea, the most northerly of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor, founded Massilia around 600 BC. By mere virtue of the fact that the Phocaeans successfully established a flourishing city at the opposite end of the Mediterranean in the seventh century BC, it is clear that they were outstanding mariners, while we also learn this from Herodotus, who wrote that the Phocaeans were the first of the ancient Greeks to embark on lengthy journeys by sea.

There are problems with this. The same tradition says that the settlement was founded when the native princess, Gyptis, married the leader of the Phocaean settlers, Protis. That sounds plausible until you realise that Protis means First. That sounds a bit odd to me. It’s possible Protis was an early victim of Nominative Determinism. Alternatively it could be made up. Can you test it? The archaeological find should be able to confirm the date of the site, and you often see them cited as doing this at all sorts of Greek colonies. For instance Syracuse is dated archaeologically to the late eighth century by finds of protocorinthian pottery at occupation levels just above a destruction layer. Protocorinthian pottery dates from the late eighth century, so this would appear to confirm the historical record that Corinthians invaded the island of Ortygia and founded what is now modern day Siracusa. This is sound until you start asking questions like “How do you know protocorinthian pottery dates from the late eighth century?” The answer is that it’s found in the layers above a destruction layer at Syracuse, and we know from the historical record that Syracuse was founded in the late eighth century. If the archaeological record is being calibrated against the historical record then it tells you a lot less than you thought. I don’t have excavation reports from Marseilles to hand, but questions I’d ask are: “How were the archaeological remains were dated?” and “Is there any evidence of pre-settlement trade?” If there is, then the follow up questions would be things like “How do you know that an increase in Greek pottery is settlement and dispersal of the natives rather than an increase in trade?” It’s not a question that gets asked often, because we have a surprisingly detailed history for the eighth and seventh centuries BC when many colonies were being founded.

I say surprisingly detailed because foundation dates are often quoted down to a year or two. These dates are based on the history recorded by Thucydides (and to a lesser extent Ephoros) on the foundation of Sicilian cities. Thucydides wrote about the Sicilian colonies in his History of the Peleponnesian War because a key point in the war was when Athens got greedy and launched an overseas mission to grab some resources on the pretext that the Sicilians were aiding the enemy. These sites were said to have been founded around the 730s BC. It’s thought Thucydides was still writing his book when he died, sometime after the end of the war in 404 BC. Ephoros wrote in the 300s BC. This means the dates, which many modern classicists trust are based on writings two, three or four centuries after the foundation of the cities. Some finds from Greek colonies in the Western Mediterranean show that they were founded before the Greeks had decided whether to write left-to-right or right-to-left. Thucydides may have accurately recorded what fifth-century Sicilians said about their past, but it’s far from certain that they got it right in sufficient detail to have much faith in the dates. If that’s the case when why are the recorded dates, like 600 BC for the foundation of Massalia, so specific?

Denis Feeney’s new book, Caesar’s Calendar, goes some of the way to answering that. He refers to a few examples of where histories were quite deliberately constructed. For instance the historian Timaios, a Sicilian, wrote a history which made Sicily and equal of Athens in importance in the Greek world. Authors in the homeland were not so keen on this. Polybios for example is scathing about Timaios’s work. In a way dating the foundation of colonies marks them as secondary to the homeland, which lack known foundations. There’s also the issue of which date to give a colony. With age comes prestige, so differences of a year or two do become important. In the case of Massalia its alloted foundation in 600 BC puts among the secondary colonies of Sicily being earlier than Agrigento (582 to 580 BC), and fractionally ahead of Camarina (founded 599 BC) but later than Selinunte (~625 BC). It’s not certain these dates were all fictitious, and it’s unlikely people consciously decided to award foundation dates a bit like scores based on prestige. Equally the mix of politics and poor records would suggest the dates are far from certain.

As to the argument over whether or not Greeks founded cities, or if they were hybrids of Greek and Native settlements with natives Hellenising – this is hotly debated at the moment. Going back over old excavation reports shows that it isn’t as easy to distinguish Native from Greek as people thought. Gillian Shepherd recently published a paper in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, Dead Men Tell No Tales (free at the time of linking), which discusses the problems of identifying natives in well-studied cemeteries. In somewhere where the archaeological research is through keyhole excavations like Massalia, which lies underneath modern Marseilles, the evidence is even more slender and it’s harder to say how Greek a city was when it was founded. The grapevine suggests that there will be a few more papers undermining past certainties when it comes to the history of Greek sites before the fifth century.

It means that while Price is happy to say “So, Pytheas of Massilia was descended from a long line of highly accomplished and adventurous seafarers, the Phocaeans…” I’m really not at all certain he was. The argument doesn’t stand or fall on this. I think it’s irrelevant whether or not Pytheas was descended from Greeks, Natives or both – he could only have spent one lifetime learning how to sail. It does however illustrate the main issue that I have with much of Price’s posts on Stonehenge. Where he sees certainty I see room for doubt. It’s not always large, but when you have a chain of probabilities the end result can at best only be as strong as the weakest link, and its often a lot weaker. It becomes a much bigger problem when things you thought were certain suddenly turn out to be extremely weak.