ABSTRACT
David Ridgway, in a recent book, asks whether Pithekoussai, an eighthcentury community on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, is best regarded as an emporion or an apoikia.2 He wonders whether such terms of analysis were at this stage too illdefined to make this a useful question. An apoikia was a creation of the polis in its own image; and yet, in the eighth century, the concept of the polis was itself in its infancy, not yet fully-formed, and certainly incapable of spawning a child of its own. Thus the relationship between Pithekoussai and the two Euboean cities of Eretria and Chalcis, to which tradition attributes its foundation,3 was rather that of siblings than that of child and parents. Indeed, Ridgway suggests that perhaps it was Pithekoussai that grew up the quicker; that the crystallization of the polis-concept was accelerated by its example.
