Mobility in the Ancient Greek World: Diversity of Causes, Variety of Vocabularies
Résumé
Historical studies only began to show interest in mobility in the ancient world in the 1990s. Earlier in this century, Claudia Moatti underlined how many different situations and realities hid behind the word “mobility.” To understand them, she emphasized the need to revisit the ancient lexicon. This chapter attempts to study the different categories of ancient mobility and divides them into two big groups: mass mobility and individual mobility. Within these two groups, different kinds of mobility are analyzed according to the lexicon used in ancient literary and epigraphic sources of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. While the ancient world was characterized by constant movement, the words used to describe and define it were limited.