One of the main characteristics of Greek history in the eyes of the Greeks themselves, their intentional history, was the eminent role played by stories of migrations, colonization, expulsions, and remigrations. These narratives served as elements in order to structure the past, to constitute familiarity and difference, to explain relations of friendship or enmity. By using these stories and their inherent principles, the Greeks were also able to give foreign groups, the ‘barbaroi’, a place in their own horizon of the past. Since many of these groups (and most prominently the Romans) made these ‘histories’ part of their own tradition, these histories continued to exist as a model of explaining and historically ordering processes of change and development. Even modern historical research – albeit deconstructing many of these stories by means of Quellenkritik – is still very often influenced by these models and concepts.