Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics

During the Greek Archaic Period, the Greek world saw rapid development in culture, economy and political organization.  These advancements led to increased prosperity and facilitated the formation of distinct political units.  However, these developments introduced new pressures on these nascent governments, which led to waves of Greek colonization across the Mediterranean world.  This introduced the new political relationship of ‘mother city’ and ‘colony’ into existing trans-Mediterranean networks, a complex structure that would play a large role in the politics of the Greek Classical Period.  This paper explores the colonial foundation narrative of Cyrene, one of the most well documented foundation myths surviving, by looking at the competing and contrasting claims put forward by Cyrene and Thera.  This paper examines the both the historical context and the geopolitical considerations at play behind the various components of the divergent traditions.  In the context of today’s increasingly fractious information space, this paper serves to show that manipulation and distortion of political narratives is not a new phenomenon, and that in the end, the victim is usually the historical truth.