Access to real estate by foreigners : the first attestations (8th - 5th cent. BC)

The paper collects and discusses the literary and epigraphic evidence, from the archaic age to the beginning of the classical period, for the access in different degrees to real estate by foreign born population. The first part of the study deals with the honorific land grants to foreign individuals, already well attested in the Homeric Poems, tracing its evolution up to the formalization of the énktesis privilege. The second part focuses on the earliest cases of access to real estate by large groups of foreign population, which are usually explained by the granting community’s need of repopulation.