What are The Human Resources of Ancient Greece?

Answer 1

The Greek city-states had an overabundance of people. The people were more fertile than their land, and with no TV to watch, kept their populations growing rapidly. As most farms were about a hectare, on which to raise grain for their staple diet of bread, plus fruit, vegetables, and feed their ploughing ox, they could not be split up between several sons, so these sons had to either become landless labourers or seek land elsewhere - either capture it off a neighbouring city, which was equally eyeing their land, or migrate elsewhere to take land. Even the incessant wars between the Greek cities could not reduce this growing population surplus nearly enough.

So from the Ninth Century BCE onwards, the city-states of mainland Greece sent out ships with colonists to establish new cities in other areas around the Mediterranean - to Asia Minor and the Islands, the Black Sea, North Africa, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Southern France and Spain.

So Greece was not an entity - it was the Greek world - many hundreds of independent city-states scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Sea littorals. And many of these new cities themselves became over-populated and sent out colonies of their own, having to find space for these ever-expanding human resources.