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case of Athenians moving from one deme to another (Osborne 1991, 151–57).
    To conclude, we tend to think of migration in negative terms, focusing on the causes, frequently catastrophic, invariably pressing, that propel individuals to abandon their homes and seek a livelihood often thousands of miles away. Alternatively, following the lead of Queen Elizabeth I and Enoch Powell, we decry the tension and disruption that refugees create in the host community and the strains that they place upon the social fabric. But it is impossible to overestimate the enormous benefits that have accrued to human society, including ancient Greek societies, from the intermingling of peoples of dissimilar ethnic identities.

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THE WANDERER
    The Centrality of Wandering to the Experience of Being Greek
    From earliest times the Greeks were in restless movement, propelled from their familiar habitat either by human force or by the exigencies of their environment. And so it remained throughout antiquity. The whole earth, as Aeschylus puts it, “is forever trodden upon by wanderers” ( Eum . 76). The fact that the Greeks had the psychological wherewithal to uproot themselves and settle elsewhere was largely due to the strength of their traditions, their powerful sense of collective identity, and last but by no means least the persistence of their religious practices, though in this regard we should not, of course, assume that they were unique among Mediterranean peoples. Rather, it was a matter of degree than of kind. For many, especially exiles and fugitives of low social status, there was a real possibility that they would remain on the move for all time.
    Religion, I suspect, kept many of them from faltering. We have only to think of the central role that Apollo played in overseas settlement and of the importance of laying out sacred precincts whenever a new foundation was established to appreciate its stabilizing force. Migrants, exiles, fugitives, and their like would have continued to think of themselves as being placed under the protection of the same gods they had worshipped all their lives—gods, we should note, who, though local to their home and community, accompanied them as fellow wanderers —as they sought to settle elsewhere. The unforgettable picture of the elderly Anchises clutching images of his household gods when Aeneas and his family are escaping from the ruins of Troy in Vergil’s Aeneid book 2 would surely have resonated with the Greeks.
    Even the stay-at-home Spartans gave importance to wandering and institutionalized it in the education of their citizens. As members of the krupteia , the secret commission that preceded their entry into the citizen body, at least some Spartan youths were required to live outside the polis for two years and “wander both day and night all over the country” (Pl. Laws 1.633c3–4). The experience of being a wanderer may therefore have been a precondition to becoming a Spartan citizen. As we shall note later in this chapter, moreover, the wanderer, at least from an ideological standpoint, was not seen in exclusively pejorative terms, despite the very real prejudice directed toward individuals who experienced this condition.
    I use the word “wanderer” to describe the tens of thousands of men, women, and children who left their homes without a settled route or fixed destination. A wanderer in this sense was not only apolis (without a city-state), but also aphrêtôr (without a phratry), and anestios (without a hearth). In other words, he or she was stripped not only of civic and political identity, but also, even more fundamentally, of social and familial identity. Without attachment to a phratry, a Greek was denied membership of one of the primary divisions of Greek society, and without attachment to a hearth, he or she was estranged from that most basic unit of Greek life, namely the oikos or oikia (home, household).
    In later chapters we will look