Sphinx

Accordingly Attica, from the poverty of its soil enjoying from a very remote period freedom from faction, never changed its inhabitants. And here is no inconsiderable exemplification of my assertion, that the migrations were the cause of there being no correspondent growth in other parts. The most powerful victims of war or faction from the rest of Hellas took refuge with the Athenians as a safe retreat; and at an early period, becoming naturalized, swelled the already large population of the city to such a height that Attica became at last too small to hold them, and they had to send out colonies to Ionia. (Thucydides 1.2.5-6)

There’s a low-level but persistent Twitter meme that Thucydides shows the dangers of immigration and failure to assimilate. I can imagine that it’s been reinforced by V.D. Hanson’s evocation of Thucydides’ Corcyrean stasis episode to attack the modern terminology of immigration (the account with which @Thucydiocy was engaging yesterday segued rapidly from “Thucydides tells us…”, offered (oh joy) as rhetorical ammunition to Jordan Peterson, who’s giving a talk on identity and immigration in the Netherlands, to citing Hanson’s piece), but it certainly predates it.

On the face of it, it’s one of the less entirely unreasonable appropriations of Thucydides; he does indeed blame the underdevelopment of early Greece on the constant migrations. But – leaving aside the question of whether it’s remotely plausible as a historical account – what Thucydides is describing is a constant churn of entire populations in the different regions of Greece, so that no one ever settles in one place long enough to start constructing a proper state structure. It isn’t remotely a denunciation of the effects of immigration into a existing settled society, as modern claims want it to be. Indeed, the second half of the passage quoted above could be taken to say the exact opposite: Athens was strengthened, despite its poor soil and lack of resources, by taking in refugees from political conflicts elsewhere in Greece, thus augmenting its population (and keep in mind we’re dealing with a period where a bigger population was invariably regarded as a good thing, rather than as threatening the reduction of entitlements for those who were There First).

But of course, the response comes, those were Good Refugees, in manageable numbers, who dutifully assimilated and were Racially Compatible – well, they don’t say that last bit, to be fair, but it’s difficult to avoid the impression that this is a significant undercurrent in these discussions. White Northern Europeans can migrate as much as they like because they’re spreading civilisation (cf. Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s excellent new discussion of the old portrayal of the Dorians as Aryans, that she really ought to have called something like ‘Black Achilles, White Greeks’); there’s a whole mythology also of the character-building effects of overcoming adversity, struggling with poor conditions, making do with little etc. in coming to a new world and/or pushing forward the frontier.

But as soon as we’re talking about dark-skinned migrants, the narrative shifts: the poverty of their conditions becomes not character-building but permanently degrading (the basic import of Trump’s recent “shithole” comments), and their overcoming of massive obstacles to make it to the West becomes a symptom of greed and low cunning not initiative or courage. It’s tricky, but not impossible, to make this fit the ancient Greek template: Thucydides’ comments about entire peoples moving from region to region and hence not establishing any substantial state becomes an analogy for migrants refusing to assimilate or identify with their new home, just pursuing material benefit, while oligarchic criticisms of the demos are taken as evidence of the corruption of Athens through its intake of migrants. Citing Xenophon’s project to encourage *more* migrants gets nowhere, if only because he lacks the name recognition factor…

Yes, I know it’s not about any serious study of migration or identity in antiquity, but the ideologically-driven search for evidence that Immigration Has Always Been Bad (Except When It’s People Like Us). It’s still depressing…