Refugees and asylum seekers are always with us. In the ancient world too, exiles, criminals, refugees, sometimes whole communities were on the move. There were three main conventions in place to help them.
For an individual there was the act of supplication. If you knelt before someone – no Greek would willingly wish to appear so helpless – perhaps touching their knees, you would expect to be offered hospitality. Likewise, if there was a shrine nearby, putting yourself in contact with that would make you inviolable under the gods’ protection. Finally, one could appeal for asylum, derived from the ancient Greek word meaning ‘freedom from seizure’. There were even bilateral asylum treaties covering individuals (e.g. diplomats and traders) as well as sanctuaries and territories (Delos was one vast sanctuary) where whole communities (plus cattle) could safely remain.
But then the problem began: making your case for permanent settlement. The people of Plataea, their city destroyed by the Thebans (c. 373 bc), successfully appealed to the Athenians for sanctuary as follows: they had long been loyal allies, they had intermarried in the past, they were no danger to Athens, and Athens’s reputation for hospitality would suffer, shaming the city if, ignoring its gods and heroes, it acted differently from its ancestors.
By contrast, the Romans, as incomers (from Troy, they claimed) and needing to grow numbers, took a liberal line. Cicero said that cruelty to humans was hateful, and to debar foreigners was inhumanum, although they could not at once ‘exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship’ (but that could come in time). That was a factor in the attraction, and so growth, of the Roman Empire.
Time, then, for an exciting new initiative. Scotland’s population is declining. It badly needs new blood.
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