ABSTRACT
While the West had to decolonize Africa and Asia after the Second World War, one-sided representations of ancient colonial situations have persisted much longer. In the revised 1980 edition of his often-cited The Greeks Overseas, Boardman expressed his philhellenic and colonialist perception of the relationships between colonizing Greeks and colonized Italic peoples perhaps most clearly by concluding that "the natives weighted their new prosperity, brought by the Greeks, against the sites and land they had lost to them, and were generally satisfied" (Boardman 1980, 198). The kernel of this statement is the apparently unsurpassable value and desirable nature ascribed to the "new prosperity," which is the newly acquired colonial Greek culture; the implicit assumptions are that the colonized Italic peoples were uncivilized, or at least culturally inferior, and that they could only benefit from participating in the superior Greek civilization—which would eventually result in Western culture. The equation of "civilization" and "colonization" has even more explicitly been made by Morel, who defined the "two meanings of the word colonization ... [as] the subjection and the 'civilizing' of the natives as well as the act of founding colonies" (Morel 1984, 124). There evidently is not much difference between such a point of view and the mission civilisatrice of nineteenth-century Western colonizers and colonialist archaeologists alike, who attributed a similar attitude to their Roman and Greek predecessors (Sheldon 1982, 103).
