Laudator Temporis Acti

David Whitehead, "Immigrant Communities in the Classical Polis: Some Principles for a Synoptic Treatment," L'Antiquité Classique 53 (1984) 47-59 (at 50-51):

Clearly the first and most basic choice was whether to allow the xenoi to live, and go on living, within the confines of the polis at all, or whether to expel them; and here one can say unequivocally, I believe, that virtually all poleis allowed them to stay. This is clear positively, from general statements like Aristotle's (quoted above), and also negatively: expulsion of xenoi, xenelasia(i), is something which the ancients themselves associated with that least typical of poleis, Sparta¹⁰; and when we hear of the same thing happening in Apollonia, in North-West Greece, it is said to be a practice 'in the Spartan manner'¹¹. Cretan xenelasiai are an aberration of modern scholarship¹². So the norm in this was acceptance and tolerance — grounded, quite obviously, in self-interest. In every polis of which we know anything, the ownership of land was a citizen monopoly. This left immigrants obliged to make a living in occupations which did not entail landownership; and such occupations were often prey to contempt and discrimination, official or private; yet even the smallest, most isolated, most "backward", most agriculturally-oriented polis could not manage without them in some degree. Indeed the irony is that for the great urbanised, metropolitan cities like Corinth or Miletus, where on general grounds one would envisage immigrant communities of a size and importance most nearly commensurate with the Athenian metoikia, the hard evidence is almost entirely lacking, whereas we do discover them in some very much less likely places, on the face of it: in Tegea, for example¹³; in Chaleion and Oiantheia, two small poleis in Ozolian Locris¹⁴; or in Coresia, one of the four poleis on the island of Ceos — within spitting distance, virtually, of Athens and Piraeus¹⁵. Evidence such as this makes it difficult to follow Professor Andrewes in his claim that 'in many cities [the existence of a free immigrant population] must be unlikely'¹⁶.

¹⁰ E.g. THUC., I, 144, 2; II, 39, 1; ARISTOPH., Aves, 1012-4; PLATO, Prot., 342 C (cf. Leges, 950 A-B); XEN., Lac. Pol., 14, 4.

¹¹ AELIAN, Varia Historia, XIII, 16 (κατὰ τὸν Λακεδαιμόνιον νόμον).

¹² On the basis of ARISTOT., Pol., (II), 1272 b 17-8 (ξενηλασίας γὰρ τὸ πόρρω πεποίηκεν) H. SCHAEFER [in RE, IX A, 2 (1967), col. 1438] infers the existence of Cretan xenelasiai. This is wrong: throughout his discussion Aristotle is comparing Crete with Sparta, and his point here is that on Crete isolation (τὸ πόρρω) has the same effect as the Spartan expulsions.

¹³ Inschr.v.Olymp., 267 (fifth century); IG, V 2, 36 (third century).

¹⁴ TOD, GHI, 34 (mid fifth century).

¹⁵ IG, XII 5, 647 (mid fourth century or early third).

¹⁶ A. ANDREWS, Greek Society, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 145.