ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some merits and difficulties of using comparison with other periods of Mediterranean history to investigate episodes which ancient historians and archaeologists usually call ‘colonisation’. For all its popularity and importance, however, ‘colonisation’ is a category in crisis in the study of the ancient Mediterranean. Greek ‘colonisation’ is therefore the continuation of agrarian domination by elite groups in new environments whose accessibility is one of their enticements. Just as colonial landscapes may be ‘non-contiguous conquest lordships’ of aristocratic diasporas so the object of colonisation can be the web of connectivity itself rather than the productive terrains. ‘Colonisation’, in other words, was indeed practised by some Hellenes in south Italy. The colonisation and de-colonisation of Mediterranean islands is a particularly overheated case. City foundation in Antiquity, ktisis, is prominent in accounts of ‘colonisation’. The concept of Greek ‘colonisation’ itself is obsolete as a term of historical analysis.
