Frontiers of the Greek World

The people we commonly call the Ancient Greeks were, in fact, not very Greek at all. Early modern romantic ideals and European imperialism and colonialism have heavily influenced popular and even many scholarly ideas about the Ancient Greek World. In reality, the boundaries of the Ancient Greek world stretched far beyond contemporary Greece and reached the Etruscans, Scythians and other native populations in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Moreover, rather than being a fixed physical boundary, “Greekness” in Antiquity was a changing and malleable concept. The Ancient Greek World was diverse and distinctly multi-cultural.