I tend to rankle when people compare the colonialism of the last few centuries with the pre-capitalist expansion and settlement of ancient societies. It seems like there's a lot of daylight between the English founding Jamestown and ancient Ionians founding Massalia or w/e.
But what do Hexbear's historians think? Is it fundamentally the same social phenomenon across time or is capitalist settler-colonialism its own unique thing?
Didn't Hellenistic era Greeks have their own internal ethnic chauvanism going on though? Like Ionians didn't like Dorians who didn't like Magnetes or whatever?
i don't think they were very discrete groups with hard political affiliations, but there were regional dialects & religious groupings. the hellenistic era is actually when intra-greek differences in dialect are going away because of Koine & regionalism becomes less important under the big diadochi empires (Macedonians, Cretans, Rhodians, etc. are all just Greeks when you put them in Mesopotamia or Syria)
Very interesting. Are there any works you'd recommend that talk more about this? Besides the one @Wertheimer recommended, that is.
Peter Green's From Alexander to Actium is my main starting point for Hellenistic history. Of particular regional interest is Richard Stoneman's The Greek Experience of India.
The Greek version of the phrase "Don't bullshit a bullshittter" was "Don't try to out-Cretan a Cretan." There's an example of it in reference to siege-based treachery somewhere in Polybius.
Most of my other go-to examples are from the classical era. Abdera, despite multiple philosophical luminaries hailing from that town, was the place that generated the ancient Greek version of the Polish joke. Corinthians were notorious swindlers, Laconians were legendarily laconic, etc. Take a drink every time Thucydides introduces a speech (which he wrote, naturally) from a Spartan leader by saying something like "Brasidas, who was a good speaker, for a Spartan..."
"How may Boetians does it take to fill an amphora?"
https://web.archive.org/web/20190402114641/http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/quinn_jokes.shtml
Lots of :grillman: "Take my wife, please!" humor
Those are great recommendations. Thanks for sharing
:sadness: i got to read a ton of articles in school about the hellenistic period and poleis but since i dropped out & my school laptop killed itself i don't have them anymore.
you can hit up encyclopedia iranica though that place has tonnes on greek cities/settlement, religion, culture etc. as it interacted with west asia
Thanks, I had no idea that emcyclopedia iranica was even a thing! Condolences for your school laptop though, I'll light a candle tonight for it.
Check out this one, too: http://www.achemenet.com/
Were you the one I recommended the fiction book set in the ancient Greek period "Mediterranean Hegemon of Ancient Greece" by Chen Rui? If not I recommend it because it touches on the period of the March of the Ten Thousand and the rule of Dionysius the Elder in Sicily.
@Wertheimer and @Bluegrass_Buddhist you might like it too.
Bit of trivia about the dictator of Sicily:
Stolen from wikipedia
:miyazaki-laugh:
I have a vewy good fwiend in Athens named Megatestikles :biggus-dickus:
:owl-pissed: