ABSTRACT
The political systems of egalitarian citizen-states of the Classical period have received much attention since George Grote made Athens the benchmark of scholarly treatments of Ancient Greece. We have been accustomed to ponder the societal order of mainland Greece in the Archaic through the Classical periods as societies controlled by collective civic authority mainly exercised through political and socio-religious institutions.
Recent years have seen the growing impact of cultural geography and social anthropology on the cultural analysis of societies of the past. Especially the introduction of the ‘spatial turn’ has had considerable influence on strategies for cultural analysis of human societies, past and present. Basically, in this perspective, old and new religious and socio-political institutions of the polis (cult, precincts, religious innovation, political institutions, etc.) were supervised by the demos who, in effect, created an authorized event-scape of religious, social and political activities, which was carefully guarded against unauthorized intrusion. Thus, the power of the demos rested with its ability to ‘police’ the socio-religious institutions or places of the polis; concurrently, the civic community administered its own most important ideological framework for building of collective identities. In the language of cultural geography, these institutions constituted the key elements or places from which the citizen collective created its most important identities. Thus, adherence to sanctuaries with their specific identity-of-place gave impetus for the creation of individual and collective civic place-identities.
The question remains, however, to what extent this basic logic applied to the societal orders, which were created by the Greeks in the West. On the one hand, Greek communities in Sicily, Magna Grecia and notably the Massiliots of Southern France fell within the traditional definition of the Greek polis. On the other hand, it appears that the ‘Iberian’ Greeks displayed quite different approaches to society-building in the farthest west.
This chapter asks when and how ‘Iberia’ and Iberian cultural contexts were influenced and even transformed into identity-places, which again offered the possibility for the formation of Greek place-identities. Greek engagements with Emporion/Empúries constitute the primary case study but comparisons to the Massiliot point of departure as well as the more distant Greek communities of the central Mediterranean are considered as well.
