Lessons in Curriculum Patria Meridionale: Greeks come to Sicily – Causes and Consequences
Lessons in Curriculum Patria Meridionale: Greeks come to Sicily – Causes and Consequences
(March 24, 2011)
Greek Temple at Agrigento Sicily
Anthony a young American student, whose family left Sicily 100 years ago, stands at Taormina’s waters-edge conjuring images of ancient Sicilian Sikels viewing Greek colonial ships on the horizon. He thinks: Two great people, whose blood runs in his veins, met for the first time at this very spot. As the ancient waters lapped at his feet he experienced a primordial rush – “Sicilia, Sicilia, tu si la patria mia.” Returning to his student tour group; he knew he made the right decision choosing “Curriculum Patria Meridionale” for his college major, instead of the northern Renaissance “Italian Studies”, whose class trip would have taken him to the banks of the Arno – “A stranger in a strange land”.
Preface Curriculum Patria Meridionale
The history of the southern-Italian American people goes back much further than Ellis Island and has little if anything to do with the northern Italian Renaissance. In the American post-secondary education system, that history is non-existent; i.e. there is no Curriculum Patria Meridionale. Southern-Italian American students have a choice of studying either Italians in America or the Renaissance.
Curriculum Patria Meridionale denotes a series of lessons (in teacher talk - a curriculum consists of lessons) about the pre-Ellis Island history of the southern-Italian American people. This article is one such 'lesson'; a suggestion, if you will, of the type of instruction that might be included in the Curriculum. Secondly, Curriculum Patria Meridionale denotes a hope that someday at least one university will offer the southern-Italian American people a curriculum about THEIR history.
A Patria Meridionali curriculum would NOT be a collection of local color anecdotes and biographies of famous people. Both, of course would be included; however, they would not constitute the essence or the primary method or substance of instruction.
Rather, a Patria Meridionali curriculum would be:
- a social scientific historically rigorous complex curriculum in terms of the geography, economics, religion, political structures, languages, art, etc.
- demanding in terms of logical rigor, historiographic methods and statistics.
Anything less than a scholarly and intellectually rigorous curriculum would be insulting to the mighty history, culture and people of Patria Meridionali.
Introduction Why the Greeks came to Sicily?
Greek colonies - southeast Sicily circa 700B.C.
There are many very scholarly texts describing in great detail the ancient Greek migrations throughout the Mediterranean world. However, much less discussed are social-scientific causal theories of the migrations, which were of such magnitude and profound historic consequences for European and Middle Eastern cultures generally and Patria Meridionale in particular.
For example, the prodigious and prestigious nineteen-century classical scholar and historian E. A. Freeman, citing numerous ancient texts in their original language, describes with incredibly amazing details Greek colonization of Sicily. Nevertheless, he seems to be silent about why they came and even seems to accept ancient commentary about “chance” causes. He writes:
“The beginning of settlements in Sicily may likely enough have been the result of an accident...such a chance may have led to the settlement...The ship of one Theokles was driven by adverse winds to the shores of Sicily. He marked the goodness of the land, and found out that the barbarians were a folk whom it would be easy to subdue. He came back and told his tale in Greece, in the ears of the men of his own city...Chalkis.”
(The History of Sicily- From the Earliest Times 1891, v. 1 p. 314 emp.+)
Freeman does not tell us why the people of Chalkis were so willing to leave their city and go to a strange land (i.e. the cause of the colonization of Sicily).
Interestingly, he posited that the Greek word that is normally translated as colony, more accurately conveys the meaning of the English word ‘plantation.’ He writes:
“In truth much confusion has been caused by applying the name of the Roman colony to something so unlike it as the settlements of...the Greeks...
Modern languages have now no words in use to translate the Greek 'apoikia', except the derivatives of the Latin colonia...The good old word plantation – plantation of men, that is – seems quite forgotten.”
(History p.14)
Introducing the word plantation, he was on the cusp of an explanation for Greek migration, but he did not draw out the implications of the literal English meaning of “plantation”; instead resorted to a metaphor -“plantation of men”. It remained for a next generation scholar to deduce the cause and consequence implied by ‘plantations’.
An early twentieth-century classical scholar with a more social-scientific approach to writing history than Prof. Freeman, Arnold J. Toynbee posited a Malthusian population explosion hypothesis as the cause of the great migration and then proceeded to draw out the profound consequences ancient Greek demography had for Italian Americana’s Patria Meridionale.
Thomas Malthus and Greek migrations
In 1798 British economist Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, wherein he argued that human population increases geometrically (1, 2, 4, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc.) and food supply, at most, can only increase arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.). Therefore, population growth, if unchecked, would lead to food shortages and poverty. Further, he argued: though there are checks on population that slow its growth and keep the population from rising exponentially for too long, nevertheless as a result of population growth, food shortages and poverty are inescapable.
According to Toynbee, ancient Greece experienced this sort of Malthusian dilemma. He posited that by the middle of the eight-century B.C. the population of Greek city-states grew far beyond what Greece’s agriculture could support. Accordingly, either the Greeks would suffer the poverty consequences of food shortages or they had to find a solution to the problem. He writes:
“[In the eighty century B.C. Greece] was confronted with the problem of the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence – means which the Hellenic people [Greeks] at the time were obtaining almost entirely by raising a varied agricultural produce in their home territories for home consumption. When the crisis came, different states contended with it in different ways.” (A Study of History vol.1 p.24)
Toynbee cites three solutions that various city-states implemented:
1. Plantation - Colonies
In 735 B.C. Greeks from the city-state of Chalcis arrived in Sicily founding the colony of Naxos (modern Taormina). Five years later they founded a second at Leontini (modern Lentini) and at the same time Greeks from Corinth founded Sirako (modern Syracuse).
This was the first wave of a Greek colonizing tide that before ebbing would bring Greek colonies to foreign lands with rich agriculture potential and subduable populations from the Black Sea to Anatolia, Sicily, southern Italy, and many other places in the Mediterranean world. These colonies were agricultural communities, or to use Freeman’s descriptive “plantations”, which allowed the Greeks to shift their burgeoning populations away from the over populated and agriculturally stressed city-states. The colonies thrived and proved a successful solution to the Malthusian dilemma. Many city-states used this option to solve their population/food problem.
2. Sparta conquered neighbors
Instead of colonizing, Sparta dealt with the need for more agricultural production to sustain its ever increasing population by conquering its mainland neighbors in Messene. In the first Messeno-Spartan War (circa 736-720 B.C.), by defeating the Messenians the Spartans acquired more agricultural land to support their food needs.
Note the year the war started (736 B.C.) was within a year that Chalcis established the first colony in Sicily, and the sixteen war years were contemporaneous with the founding of Syracuse and other colonies in Sicily and on the Thracian coast. Implying that there was a common cause for the Spartan war and the founding of Sicilian and other colonies; supporting Toynbee’s hypothesis of a common population/food cause affecting all the city-states of Greece.
3. The Athenian Revolution
In another instance of Freeman being close to historic fact yet rejecting it, he notes:
“One version has it that Theokles was an Athenian, who turned to Chalkis only when he could not convince his own citizens of the advantages of a Sicilian settlement. This tale is clearly an invention of Athenian vanity in later times.”
(p. 315)
Actually, there may be some reason to think this “tale” is in fact true.
Athens like all the other city-states in Greece was suffering from overpopulation and shortage of cultivatable land. However, they did not solve the problem by colonizing foreign lands or conquering their neighbors. Rather, they came up with their own unique solution. Thus, it is not so far fetched a notion that Theokles, or someone such as him, would have presented Athenians with a colonization plan, which they ultimately rejected.
The Athenian’s response to the Malthusian dilemma was completely unique and revolutionary. Instead of seeking more agricultural land to grow more food for domestic consumption, as did all the other city-states; Athens, lead by the famous personage Solon, changed its whole political economy from an aristocratic subsistence-agriculture economy to a democratic merchant cash-crop import/export economy. These changes not only solved its food problem, it lead to Athens becoming phenomenally rich and a Mediterranean power.
Solon
Toynbee writes:
“Solon lived in an age when Attica [Athens], in common with the whole Hellenic World [Greece], was confronted with the problem of continuing to provide for a population which was not ceasing to increase, yet which could not any longer be provided for by the old method of geographical expansion [on the mainland]...Solon took to buying and selling, and exporting and importing...then he taught his countrymen these mercantile techniques...[i.e.] giving up ‘subsistence farming’ in favor of ‘cash-crop farming’ in specialized crops for export.” (Study v.3 p.273)
Specifically, what the Athens did was begin developing olives as a “cash-crop” for purposes of exporting oil in trade for grain from rich grain growing areas such as Scythia. To export oil they needed pottery, which lead to the development of a pottery manufacturing industry. Ships were needed to transport oil and grain. Accordingly a ship manufacturing industry developed. International trade requires currency; thus, Attica silver mines were developed.
Also, the change in economy brought into existence a powerful merchant class and trade guilds; both demanding a form of government that was responsive to their needs. In short, the decision not to find more agricultural land as the rest of the Greek city-states and develop a merchant import/export economy affected every aspect of the Athenian political economy.
The results of the Athenian change in its political economy was so impressive that the Greeks in Sicily “followed suit”. The profundity of the effects these changes had on Sicily, southern Italy and the Mediterranean world generally cannot be exaggerated.
Athens – “Educator of the Hellas”
The Greek historian Thucydides records a famous speech by the great Athenian statesmen Pericles who said two things, which are of significance to this presentation. First:
“Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own.”
“...fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us” and “... enjoy the goods of other countries” are characteristic of an import/export mercantile economy that Toynbee described.
Pericles also said:
“Our entire city [Athens] is the education of Hellas [Greece]”.
This, albeit a little exaggerated, is also true. As Athens’ wealth and power increased as a result of its ‘cash-crop’ mercantile economy, other Greek city-states began to copy the Athenian economic model. For example, the ‘Siceliots’ (i.e. Sicilian Greeks) learned from Athens about the profitability of the cash-crop system and embraced it with fervor and improved on it. However, the consequences of that fervorous embrace and improvement were not all positive.
Slavery comes to Sicily
Toynbee reports that after the success of the ‘cash-crop’ system in Athens, the next stage in Hellenic agriculture innovation took the form of “mass- production” in Sicily. Toynbee:
“The next stage of technical advance was an increase of scale in the operation of the new specialized agriculture through the organization of mass-production. This step appears to have been taken in...Sicily; for the Sicilian Greeks found an expanding market for their wine and oil...
Our first glimpse of this newfangled Attic agriculture on the new colonial scale [i.e. mass-production] is in the territory of the Sicilian Greek city-state of Agrigentum [circa 475 B.C. and it was] bound up with the employment of slave-labor.” (Study v.3. p 169)
For the description of ‘slave-labor’, Toynbee relies on the ancient Sicilian historian Diodorus of Agyrium (aka Diodorus Siculus):
“ ‘After the victory [of the allied Greek city-sates of Sicily over the Carthaginians in 480 B.C.], the prisoners of war were divided up among the Greeks...The Governments put the prisoners allotted them into fetter, and employed them on public works...[also] they planted the whole territory, which had a good soil, with vineyards and with orchards of all kind of fruit trees, which brought them in a great income from the land’ ” (Study v. 3. p.169)
Toynbee then points out that this ‘new plantation slavery’ was much different than the old ‘domestic slavery’. Toynbee:
“The new plantation-slavery, with which the new plantation-agriculture was bound up, was a far more serious social evil than the old domestic slavery which was the only form of the institution that had existed in Hellas before. The plantation-slavery was worse, both morally and statistically. It was impersonal and in human, and it was on the grand scale.” (Study v. 3. p.170)
Sicily - Educator of the Mediterranean
If Athens can be called the “Educator of the Hellas” for introducing the Greeks to the profitability of ‘cash-crop’ agriculture, Sicily may be called the ‘Educator of the Mediterranean’ for introducing the rest of the Mediterranean world to the exponentially more profitable ‘mass production/slave-plantation’ agriculture. Toynbee:
“This system of agricultural mass-production by slave-labour spread from the Greek communities in Sicily to adjoining regions in the Western Mediterranean Basin...first to the Carthaginians dominions in North-West Africa and then, on a larger scale, to the great area in Southern Italy... (Study v. 3. p.170)
As the cash-crop system lead to changes not only in the Athenian economy, but also in the form of government and class character of the society; similarly, the ‘plantation-system’ of agriculture affected the social structure of the societies that embraced it. Toynbee:
“The plantation-slave gang usurped the yeoman farmer’s place...the social consequences was the depopulation of the countryside and the creation a parasitic urban proletariat in the cities... The dispossessed peasantry of Italy tended to drift into Rome; and those who remained in the countryside sank to the status of a rural proletariat, who eked out a miserable existence by severing as casual labourers ...”
(Study v. 3. p.170-71)
Conclusion
The above narrative indicates the complexity of the history of the southern-Italian American people, and how challenging the scholarship would be to produce a full-blown history of their culture.
For example, if the above narrative were carried further, then the fact that Christianity took hold in the mentioned slave and proletariat populations of the ancient Patria Meridionale, and the obvious implications that had for European civilization and Italian Americana, would be developed.
However, that discussion will have to be taken up in another ‘lesson’ of the Patria Meridionale Curriculum.
DISCLAIMER: Posts published in i-Italy are intended to stimulate a debate in the Italian and Italian-American Community and sometimes deal with controversial issues. The Editors are not responsible for, nor necessarily in agreement with the views presented by individual contributors.
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