Peter Jones

Start-up culture in Ancient Greece

Honduras is trying a new idea that worked very well 2,500 years ago

issue 02 May 2015

Honduras wants to establish start-up cities to experiment with alternative economic, regulatory, and legal systems. Could this concept help stop mass migration into Europe?

Ancient Greeks, living in a time and place when poverty was endemic, were adventurers and readily took to the seas to establish their start-ups abroad, all around the coasts of the Mediterranean. These apoikiai (‘homes from home’), far from being ‘colonies’, were in fact new, wholly independent Greek cities. They were variously motivated by e.g. the search for fertile farming land and profitable raw materials, trade in slaves, metals and luxury goods, proximity to and therefore business with non-Greeks, and so on. They spread around the Med ‘like frogs around a pond’ (Plato).

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