Early Greek Colonization In Archaic Greece

Colonization in Archaic Greece
Robin Osborne’s paper Early Greek Colonization? attempts to examine the questions and circumstances surrounding colonization in archaic Greece, starting with the connotation surrounding the word colony. Osborne contends that using colony implies “strong ‘statist’ overtones”, proposing that the term suggests that all such settlements were in fact state sponsored ventures to advance political and cultural control. He goes further to emphasize that Greek terms such as apoikia were most likely not as nuanced as modern English words, implying that the Greek use of apoikia was most likely applied more broadly to non-state sponsored settlements as well. Osborne, at first, supports this claim by providing literary evidence of individuals “championing the initiative” of city-states to send settlers to specific locations, while later admitting that
people were routinely moving around “to achieve profit for themselves”. The archaeological evidence neither concretely proves nor disproves colonization due to a mixed record with no single Greek source or specific culture, which would have arisen either mostly from trade, suggesting state-sponsored apoikia, or a diverse initial population, implying a natural movement of people. Ultimately, however, Osborne concludes “that the ‘private enterprise’…should be envisaged as responsible also for the vast majority of eighth- and seventh-century settlements” due to the vast variety of pottery and grid layouts.
While I side with Osborne’s ultimate conclusion that individuals were the driving force behind Greek settlements, I offer a variation of the model he bases his argument on. Firstly, I will formally use the term colony and colonization with the following connotation: any group of individuals having similar interests, occupations, etc., usually living in a particular locality, community. Whereas Osborne argues “that the model of ‘colonization’ is unsuitable as a model for Greek settlements in the West in the eighth and seventh centuries”, I contend that colonization does not solely correspond to state-sponsored explorations and settlements but rather private expeditions and initiatives as well.
Taking a more modern example, South Africa first became a colony in 1652 under the rule of the Dutch East India company, a private corporation specializing in the spice trade. Even though the Dutch East India Company was a private enterprise, and no state was involved in the establishment of the colony, South Africa was a formal colony. Consequently, we can retroactively apply this standard to archaic Greek settlements in that these can still be colonies even if set up under private enterprises.
If we

This would imply that eighth- and seventh-century colonies were founded by private enterprises, albeit not corporations, with an economical motivation and as Osborne suggests “to achieve profit for themselves”.
Therefore, I assume that many of the Greek colonies were set up as trading nodes and to increase trade power in specific regions and could therefore initially be classified as emporion, or Greek trading colony. Corinth supports such a model. “’From an indefinite time’, writes Thucydides (i 13, 5), she had been a commercial emporium; even Homer…called her ‘rich’, and Herodotus observes that it was her citizens who ‘despised craftsmen least’ (ii 167, 2).” Furthermore, Corinth’s historical founders and ruling class at the time, the Bacchiadae, were traders as demonstrated by the mention in a fragment of Aristotle (fr. 611.19 Rose) that Bacchis, “founder” of the Bacchiadae, was lame. The term lame is significant in that Hephaestus, the god of circulating smiths, was lame and Hermes, the god of commerce, is titled kyllēnios, recalling the term kyllos “halting, lame,
clubfooted.”67