The Greek Overseas: Early Colonies and Trade
By John Boardman
Professor Boardman was born on August 20, 1927, in Ilford, England. He attended Chigwell School, a boarding school established in 1619, graduating in 1945. From 1945 to 1951 he attended Magdalene College in Cambridge, earning a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters of Art in Art History and Classical studies. He married his wife Shelia Stanford in 1952 and they would have two children together. After graduating he served two years of national service in the British Army Intelligence Corps (Having an art historian and classicist in this kind of position is not as strange as it sounds). Leaving the Army he served three years as an assistant director at the British School in Athens. In 1955, he returned to England and became assistant keeper at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, this led to him also becoming a Reader in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 1959, as well as being appointed a Fellow of Merton College in 1963. He remained there until he was appointed Lincoln Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology, as well as becoming a member of the Fellowship of Lincoln College in 1978. In 1994, he retired and became an emeritus professor, a position he still holds.
During all of this, he was also leading and attending archaeological digs across the Mediterranean world and produced numerous written volumes. For example, ten catalogs on ancient gems and rings, four handbooks on Greek Vase painting, three handbooks on Greek Sculpture, and an additional 6 books focused on archaeology. For his work he would be awarded, receiving a knighthood in 1989, the Kenyon Medal in 1995, and the Onassis Prize for Humanities in 2009. He has been declared Britain's most distinguished historian of Ancient Greek Art. Today we're going to look at one of his main works, The Greek Overseas.
Now I came to this book because I was interested in looking at Greek Colonization after doing some studying on various Greek myths linked to the Trojan War, this ended up being an entire continuing video series on youtube that I'll link to. However, I couldn't find much in the way of history books that focused on that. Plenty of books focused on the history of mainland Greece sure, but the colonies and the colonization process? Not much, at least nothing under 150 dollars. The Greek Overseas focuses relentlessly on that; it was however first written in 1964 and the last update was in 1999. So a good amount of the information is out of date. That's not great news honestly but sometimes you have to work with what you have (True, but pottery shards are forever.).
The Greek Overseas focuses on the colonization efforts of the Greeks before Alexander, mostly in Classical times, although there is some discussion of Mycenaean colonization in the Bronze Age (not that much survived the collapse…). This is focused on Greek efforts in the Eastern Med, with 119 pages out of 287 talking about Egyptian and Eastern Med settlements. To be fair, the oldest Greek colonies are on the coast of what is now modern-day Turkey. From there the book moves west, focusing a lot on Sicily and Magna Graecia on mainland Italy. Given that these were the larger and more successful colonies I can't blame him for this focus there either. Considerably less attention is given to Greek colonies in Libya, Southern France, and Spain, which is unfortunate because I know very little about these areas and I wanted to know more. From there he moves us back north and east to focus on colonies in the Po Valley, Thrace, Macedonia; and around the Black Sea but you can tell he's not especially interested in those colonies for reasons I'll get into later.
Professor Boardman goes to great lengths to map out the Greek trade relations with the eastern powers and Egypt and carefully denotes the influence these powers had on Greek art, architecture, and material culture. Just real quick when we say material culture, we mean the literal material goods that people were making at the time. To give a modern example, art posters, Tupperware, furniture, as well as books, and movies are all examples of material culture. Perhaps due to his art history background, Professor Boardman backs this with exhaustive lists and descriptions of artifacts found on various digs across the Greek world. Now I will say this if you're looking for extensive lists of things like pottery, art objects, belts, pins, and so on, this book is the mother-load for you. If you're an aspiring writer looking to fill out a hoard of a long-lost civilization or even just a GM looking for novel treasure, you could do worse than pulling open a book like this and taking a look at some of the lists. Unfortunately for me, one of the things I learned in college is I hate looking at or reading about pottery shards or comparing art on vases. So this book didn’t go well for me (95% of archaeology are coins, belt buckles, and pottery shards; because these can be used to trace time and place of construction, allowing you to do things like trace trade relations {Which means digging through trash heaps, which I didn’t care for}).
On top of that, if you're more interested in the description of the political, social, and economic life of the colonies or how they related to each other, the natives of the lands they were settling, and their mother cities…there's not as much to read. Now I'm not going to say there's nothing because Professor Boardman does take some time discussing these things but he does so in a very bare-bones fashion with none of the attention and detail that he lavishes on discussing the style of various pots and vases found in the various dig sites. Serious students of archaeology will likely enjoy or at least be interested in that. Because he takes a lot of care and effort giving intense details to various finds as well as carefully going over their context.
People who, like me, are more inclined toward the social anthropology aspect or the historical aspect won't be so thrilled, however. Now there is good information in this book, Professor Boardman does detail how the majority of Greek colonies in the East and Italy were established for trade reasons. In Egypt and the Eastern Med, colonies mainly started as trading posts or as treaty ports of sorts. These ports and trading posts gradually expanded over time as more and more people came east to seek their fortune or learn more of eastern arts and technology. In Egypt, we see the first settlement of Greek Mercenaries as later day Egyptian Pharaohs turned to Greek soldiers to wage wars both against rival claimants and invaders from the south and east. Before finally falling to Persians, who in turn relied on Greek mercenaries as well and allowed further settlement of Greek soldiers.
We also learn that the Mycenaean Greeks settled in the east as well, although not in the numbers or the extent that the Classical Greeks did. Many colonies seemed to have entirely failed and were abandoned during the Bronze Age Collapse, only for the Greeks of the Classical age to return and found new ones in the same location. This is mainly due to the fact that there are only so many places you can build a trading port if you want to be successful. Colonies in nearby Libya were driven more by a desire for good farmland and because of that, there are fewer material goods here so Professor Boardman isn't interested in them (At that point it might not even be “interest, so much as just being outside his wheelhouse, and the scope of the book.{Then he shouldn’t have written that the book was about Greek colonization! He should have said it was about Greek artifacts left in Greek colonies!}).
There's less to no evidence of Mycenaean colonization in the west from what I can find but it was trade that brought the Greeks to Italy and Sicily. It's in these chapters we get some brief discussion on Greek and Phoenicians interaction. The Phoenicians were the other group of expansive traders and colonizers in the Mediterranean Sea at this point in history and they're mainly remembered for founding Carthage. Carthage wasn't their only colony however and they had settlements in France, Spain, and Italy as well. Where they would have been competing with the Greeks pretty heavily I would think. Professor Boardman doesn't spend a lot of time here on these interactions although he does give a general outline. He also gives a general outline of Greek-Etruscan interactions. The book shows its age here by being rather dismissive of the Etruscans as a civilization. This is incredibly frustrating for me because all I know about the Etruscans is that they were conquered by the Romans and learning anything about their pre-Roman days would be fantastic!
Spain, France, and the Po Valley also get the short end of the stick in my opinion. Frustratingly so, as I don't actually know anything about Greeks in the Po Valley of northern Italy or Southern France. Professor Boardman spends some time implying that much of the Gauls' urbanization came from interaction with the Greeks, which honestly I'm a little doubtful of. That may be because everyone and his mother wants to take credit for the Gauls building walled towns and moving from semi-nomadic to settled farmers in the mid-Iron Age. While the Southern French settlements also seem built on trade, it seems the settlements in the Po Valley were farming sites.
Much like Libya and the Po Valley, little time is spent on the Black Sea colonies beyond really focusing on the Scythian trade interactions. Again we're treated to lavish details on archaeological artifacts but little discussion as to the societies at the time except for a rather badly dated comparison of the Scythians to Native Americans. It's in sections like this that the book shows its age and I think it's time for an update with a younger author.
I found the Greek Overseas to be informative in a limited fashion but really dry and somewhat of a slog to read. Maybe I've been spoiled since graduating college but I'm also going to say that college textbooks can be interesting and compelling to read! You don't need to make a textbook dull! I also think that Professor Boardman was overly dismissive of texts from the time frame and showed way too much favoritism to archaeological artifacts. Not that we should ever just take Herodotus' word without several grains of salt mind you but the belts of noble women buried in a burial mound can only tell us so much while the written works of Greeks who were alive at the time give us a much bigger window into their world view and what was going on around them
I'm afraid I have to give Greek Overseas a C-, partly because the last update was 23 years ago. A lifetime when it comes to archaeology and history. Unless you're really into tracing Athenian and Corinthian pottery this is likely not your book. Maybe we'll get lucky and someone will write something a bit more accessible when it comes to Greek colonization in the near future. That said I hope this review was more entertaining than the book. If you enjoyed it why not join us at the patron where you can vote on videos and book reviews? You can join us here at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for as little as a dollar a month. Speaking of patrons, a special thank you to Big Steve for his support. I hope y'all join us again soon for the upcoming review of Spacers Luck and a video on “romantic” or bridal kidnapping. Until then, stay safe and keep reading!
This week, I discuss Greek Colonization further in this video: https://youtu.be/dX4oVsiy4a4
Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders
