Demographic Motives for Colonization
Commercial interests perhaps first induced Greeks to emigrate, but greater numbers of
them began to move abroad permanently in the mid-eighth century B.C., probably because
the population explosion in the late Dark Age had caused a scarcity of land available
for farming. Because arable land represented the most desirable form of wealth for Greek
men, tensions caused by competition for good land arose in some city-states. Emigration
helped solve this problem by sending men without land to foreign regions, where they
could acquire their own fields in the territory of colonies founded as new city-states.
Since colonizing expeditions were apparently usually all male,
wives1 for the colonists had to be found among the locals, either through peaceful
negotiation or by violent kidnappings.