ABSTRACT
Pithekoussai, I suggested in the last chapter, had by the end of the eighth century a population of between 5,000 and 10,000. How big it and other Greek settlements abroad were clearly matters: it matters for the question of whether all who settled at a particular place could have come from a single home city, it matters for the question of the number of ships that will have been required to get them there in the first place, it matters for the question of how much they needed to eat, and whether they could live off the amount of land available to them, it matters for what they could themselves do or produce. We simply cannot understand the position a settlement was in unless we have some idea of how big it was. But how can we tell?
