As the concept of refugee is a relatively recent idea, elaborated as a consequence of the Second World War, each investigation about refugees in antiquity cannot ignore comparison with the modern notion of refugee. Nevertheless, some reconsiderations on the specific features of Greek politics and society are called for in relation to the ancient concept of refugee. We are chiefly interested in the protagonists and the contexts of the migration process, that is those who left their native land, those who received them, and the city-states involved as a starting point and final destination of migrants. We want to question the ancient sources about both the relations between refugees in the Greek world and the social, political and military contexts in which this phenomenon arose and the reception process of the host countries. Besides that, archaeological evidence will be considered. The proposal focuses on comparative analyses between ancient and modern refugees, from a political and social viewpoint. For the Roman Empire, overthrown leaders could often expect a sympathetic ear from the Romans. The expected payback would be pro-Roman policies if they did manage a return to power.
New discoveries at Hadrian's Wall beg the question of quite what Roman attitudes towards refugees actually were, and how far they correspond with modern sentiments towards displaced persons. Another interesting example is how Romans dealt with Goths massed on the far bank of the River Danube in 376 AD after their own kingdoms had been overrun by the fearsome Huns. In light of the recent upsurge in work on ancient Mediterranean migration and exile, this project raises the following questions: what value does the term 'refugee' have for our understanding of the ancient equivalent? How do we define refuge and refugees? Where do we look for the voices of refugees among the ancient evidence? What and where are the sites of 'refuge' attested across the ancient Mediterranean world?
The investigation of diaspora as a historical phenomenon in the ancient world continues to be sparse and especially related to critical periods such as the `Crisis Year' phase in the 12th cent. BC or the `Migration period' in the Late Antiquity. The project does not claim to remedy the deficiencies and oversights of the lack of a coherent research tradition in a single project, but we hope that working across disciplines related to the classical world will enrich the discussion. Indeed, there is little reason to privilege one source type over another on a priori grounds. Each type of source presents challenges of its own; none can be considered to provide `hard data' that speak for themselves. From representations of migrants and the notions of `migration' in the literary and epigraphic sources to their physical traces in the archaeological record, the project will discuss how ancient societies experienced and conceptualised the flight and plight of displaced people. In respect to the past, one of the greatest challenges of the project is thus to bring clusters of sources into contact with each other.
Even if ancient historians have long been interested in various types of movements (such as Greek colonisation or the Roman conquer of Italy), these types have been studied separately and few attempts have been made to achieve a general understanding of migration in any part of the Mediterranean. For a long time, migration has been implicitly equated with voluntary movement. The extent of such voluntary movement was believed to have been relatively limited and confined mainly to particular groups, most notably to the elite and traders. The state-organised or enforced movement of soldiers, colonists, and slaves were not studied under the heading of migration.
On the contrary, migration historians working on other periods have not only stressed that pre-modern levels of mobility could be high, but also that forced, state-organised and voluntary migration should be studied together, arguing that the differences between forms of movement are less clear than they may have seen. For analytical purposes, it certainly makes sense to keep state-organized, forced and voluntary migration separate. But progress can be achieved by juxtaposing them since sometimes they directly impinge on each other. In this perspective, migration will be studied in connection with the agency and legal status, in an innovative inclusive approach.
Archaeologists have been particularly preoccupied with the subject because migration was an early (and easy) explanation for the cultural change, then largely rejected in favour of endogenous processes of social evolution, and has in the last decades been gradually rehabilitated as a social phenomenon worth investigating in its own right. It may seem obvious that human mobility, often on an inter-continental scale, has made a major contribution to cultural development. However, despite this indisputable point, archaeologists (and especially classical archaeologists) downplayed the significance of migrations and invasions over a period of almost 30 years. In this sense, the project aims to re-open the question, re-studying old cases and topics in the light of the most recent research perspectives.
Present-day political debates over immigration illustrate the huge failures of understanding that result from not differentiating between varieties of human mobility. Characterised by urgency, unplanned departure, short-term duration and considerable risk, ancient migrations processes can illustrate the present-day refugee crisis. This crisis, although particularly heavy in its human toll, and inviting both the worst and best of human reactions, is, however, neither exceptional nor unique, only closer to home and better covered by the media than similar events in more distant parts of the world in the last decades. Ancient mobility may have been almost as various.
And, like the more measurable episodes of mass migration of the last five hundred years, ancient mobility also varied considerably from one period to another. However, it is not enough to declare ancient populations mobile and human mobility various: we need to consider in what ways people moved and how different kinds of mobility varied within ancient times. There is little point in attempting to find an essentialist characterization of migrations that would fit every historic or cultural context. On the contrary, it is important to stress that the range of models for ancient migrations and invasions is potentially vast. With this aim, we propose a new approach to the question, focusing on the personal experiences of migrants and refugees and analysing the migration processes and the variable mobility as a structuring force more than as a structural fact of Mediterranean history. The issue is to assess the scale, nature and significance of all this, stressing the similarities between globalised modernity and ancient world.