Foreign cults of that kind were not by any means brand-new in the late 5th century; if they seem so, it may be because that period is so much better documented than the early part of the century. But they may have increased in number in Greece as a result of the geographically extensive campaigning of the Peloponnesian War and even the period of the Athenian empire. The cult of Adonis is referred to in Plutarch’s “Life of Nicias,” which also mentions the Amon oracle. Thracian as well as Egyptian cults arrived in Greece in the late 5th century. The cult of the Thracian goddess Bendis at Piraeus features in the first page of Plato’s Republic; Bendis was perhaps a female counterpart to the Thracian Hero. Cults were both imported and exported: one of the vessels from Rogozen depicts the Greek myth of Heracles and Auge, labeled as such. This is a reminder that the old Olympian cults remained strong. In fact, some of the best evidence for traditional Greek religion comes from this period; it was the century of the highly informative and basically conservative Attic deme calendars (i.e., lists of festivals, chronologically arranged through the year) and the period when inscriptional information about the great Panhellenic sanctuaries entered its richest phase.
Mercenary service, as well as organized campaigning, must have helped to raise consciousness of such foreign cults as those of Isis or Bendis. Greeks often served in Thrace in the late 5th and the 4th centuries; Xenophon, for example, was there at the beginning of the 4th century and heard the so-called “Ballad of Sitalces” (a 5th-century Thracian ruler who is featured in Thucydides) sung at a banquet in Paphlagonia.
Mercenaries constituted one category of Greeks who strayed away from their cities; they were a potentially disruptive force, whether from the point of view of polis-minded Greeks or of autocrats like Artaxerxes III or Alexander the Great. Nobody, however, could dispense with them. The Persian kings used Greek mercenaries in their repeated attempts to recover Egypt in the 4th century—but so did the defending Egyptians.
How far inside the Persian empire these Greek mercenaries penetrated is an intriguing question. An inscription first published during World War II appeared to attest a group of Greek mercenaries on an island in the Persian Gulf in the period before Alexander, but it is possible that the text is actually early Hellenistic. Even Spartans like Agesilaus near the end of his life and Thebans like the general Pammenes in the 350s had to hire themselves out to Persian paymasters, whether loyalist or insurrectionist. (It would be better to speak, in this context, not of mercenaries but of “citizen-mercenaries” because these Thebans and Spartans did not cease to belong to their home cities.) The military monarchies of Dionysius and Philip were to some extent propped up by mercenary forces, whose loyalty was not subject to political but only to financial blandishments. That observation leads to the conclusion that the mercenary soldier valued his booty (aposkeue, literally “baggage”) more than he valued his commander. One of the early successors of Alexander the Great, the Greek Eumenes of Cardia, was in effect traded by his troops to a rival for gain. Already under Alexander the elite troops known as “Silver Shields,” or argyraspides, had taken their name from the conquered Persian treasure of precious metal. Organized settlements
Not all interchange between poleis, or all emigration from the polis into nonpolis areas of settlement, however, was of the haphazard kind caused by mercenary service or the peripatetic life-style of artists and craftsmen. Rather, the poleis themselves promoted much organized activity.
First, old ties might be strengthened by renegotiation, or more-explicit reaffirmation, of old colonial connections. Inscriptions survive from the 4th century that accord rights of citizenship on a footing of mutuality, for instance, between Miletus and Olbia and between Thera and Cyrene. Some old connections of alliance might be inflated into a pseudo-colonial link. Thus, Hellenistic Plataea, as noted earlier, called itself a “colony” of Athens, which strictly it was not. That claim may well go back to the 4th century, and there is good evidence for other such fabricated claims of kinship in the latter part of that century. An inscription, for example, asserts a colonial connection between Argos and Aspendus in Pamphylia. This is certainly unhistorical but can be explained from the greater prominence enjoyed, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, by Argos. The reason was that Argos could itself claim a connection with the Macedon of Alexander, and that kind of connection was desirable for obtaining privileges from him or from his successors.
The founding, building, or synoecizing of new cities was another way in which mobility of population was actually encouraged by the poleis themselves. The process is traditionally (and rightly) associated with Alexander the Great himself, but the emphasis is unjust to some innovatory activity in the later 5th and 4th centuries both by individuals (not least Philip) and by cities.
In the late 5th century Olynthus had been synoecized into existence by Perdiccas of Macedon, and the Rhodians had merged the three cities of their island into a new physical and political entity. The same was done in the 360s by the communities of the Dorian island of Cos. Mausolus’s new capital of Halicarnassus was the result of a synoecism in which Greeks and native Carians (“Lelegians”) were integrated into a new city, which was physically beautified with monumental buildings. Moreover, one can make a case for associating Mausolus with the various refoundations or moving of sites that different kinds of evidence suggest took place at Priene, Erythrae, and Heraclea. Epaminondas’s interventions in the Peloponnese led to major urbanization projects at Messene and Arcadian Megalopolis, where the Spartan defeat at Leuctra in 371 may have given an immediate impetus to the new foundation (the alternative date is about 368 and is less likely).
More-traditional methods of moving people, such as colonization, were also used; at the beginning of the 4th century, Xenophon includes a warm and lyrical description in the Anabasis of a site called Kalpe on the Black Sea, praising its situation, fertility, and relative remoteness from rival and established Greek cities in the vicinity. This gives substance to the suspicion that what Xenophon was really trying to do was found a colony of Archaic type—the Euboeans of the 8th century would have jumped at a site with Kalpe’s advantages of situation. In the 340s Timoleon of Corinth effected a kind of recolonization of Syracuse from the old mother city; he took with him many refugees and brought prosperity back to an island much battered by internal dissension and endless wars with the Carthaginians—against whom he himself scored some notable successes.
Athens sent a colony to the west in the time of Alexander and the wheat shortage; it was led with symbolic or sentimental appropriateness by a man called Miltiades (the name of the 6th-century founder and dynast ruling in the Chersonese), who went to the Adriatic region. The Adriatic seems to have been a favourite colonizing focus in this period: the scale and even reality of Dionysius’s interventions there are controversial, but an inscription gives evidence of a Greek colony on the island of Black Corcyra. The great colonizing surge of the 4th century came, however, in the wake of Alexander; once again, the Ionian Greeks took the lead, just as, on Thucydides’ evidence, they had colonized Ionia itself even before the organized phase of colonizing activity in the 8th century.