An error in translation can lead to inaccurate historical reconstructions, which live on, and are sometimes elaborated, long after the initial error has been committed. A case in point is how earlier generations of scholars tended to equate the Greek cities founded outside Greece in the 8th to 6th centuries BC with modern European colonies. Valla translated Thucydides' Greek terms into their closest Latin equivalents. These Latin terms belonged to the language of Roman imperialism, whereas the Greek terms did not belong to a language of imperialism, and hence their original sense was lost. Valla essentially converted Greek apoikiai into Latin coloniae .
Roman colonies have much in common with modern European colonies.
While it would be wrong to say that no Greek apoikia may have ever resembled in any way a Roman colonia , Valla's choice of terms was indeed the initial act which set into motion the habit of discussing ancient Greek apoikiai in modern colonial terms. Thus, via Valla's mistranslation into Latin, ancient Greek apoikiai came to be mistakenly associated with modern colonies. The study of the ancient Greek city outside Greece has been undermined at its very roots by misleading terminology and analogy. The western Greeks . The reasons for discussing the problem in detail are twofold.