On Fri, 26 Mar 2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> What did the Athenians do with the expropriated people and the land
> expropriated from them, however?
Killed or enslaved them. In the good cases, they were allowed to rule themselves but had to hand over tribute. In mixed cases, some Athenians mixed with some natives and stole some of their land. But all colonies either handed over tribute or were expropriated and repopulated. That's what made them a colony.
Often it is said that at least some Greek colonies were set up on empty land. But there is no such thing as empty good land. When people said in the past they found a land without people, they meant it was relatively sparsely occupied by nomads whom they expropriated w/out even noticing. And remember, even in an entirely "free" colony set up from scratch, the work on the big estates were done by slaves captured elsewhere.
The Melian Dialogue in Thucydides is one of the baldest and most eloquent statements of the "law" that "the strong take what they can, and the weak accept what they must." At the end, the Melians, who had previously been a colony of Sparta, decide not to pay tribute to Athens, and instead to fight even though the odds are hopelessly against them. After the Athenians win, they kill all the men and enslave all the women and children. Later, they send out a colony of 500 Athenians.
M.I. Finley, in the text you excerpt, seems mainly to be talking about the relations that would exist between Athens and those 500 Athenians. (And once again, that 500 only counted the citizens, not the women, tradesmen and slaves.)
PS -- I looked for the Melian Dialogue on the web, but only found the Crawley translation, which is kind of wooden. If you have a copy of the Penguin version of Thucydides, translated by Rex Warner (and with an introduction by M.I. Finley, btw), that's much more enjoyable. It's on page 400-408. Makes Col. Massu in _The Battle of Algiers_ look like Beatrice Webb.
Michael