Goldhill - Hellenicity and Culture (2003)

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Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture

Goldhill, Simon.

American Journal of Philology, Volume 124, Number 2 (Whole

Number 494), Summer 2003, pp. 303-306 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/ajp.2003.0032

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by CNRS BiblioSHS at 05/07/11 8:09AM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ajp/summary/v124/124.2goldhill.html





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American Journal of Philology 124 (2003) 303–320 © 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

BOOK REVIEWS

JONATHAN M. HALL.Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 2002. xxii + 312 pp. Cloth, $50.

“To a wise man,” wrote Philostratus in the third century C.E. in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, “everything is Greece.” For a properly educated person,there is a frame of Greek knowledge for looking at anything, and there is nothingthat is not to be viewed through that frame. (There are quite a few classicists whomight agree . . .) In Philostratus’ wonderful account, Apollonius was a marvel-working sage who did indeed travel throughout the known world, taking hisGreek knowingness with him as a guide for all occasions and as a mastery of allsituations. Although he learnt much from the mysterious wise men of the East,the Gymnosophists and the Brahmins, it should be no surprise that even thesegurus quote Euripides as an authority. In the Roman Empire, Greek culture wasat a premium (despite all the sniffy remarks of hard Roman traditionalists), but“being Greek,” hellenizein, was a quality that at first sight has little to do with

ethnicity. Apollonius, after all, is from Tyana. “Although from Gaul,” boastedFavorinus of Gaul, “I became Greek.” By this he means that through his rhetori-cal training, his language, and his whole style of being and thinking, he conformsto an ideal of “Greekness.” The fact that he sets this claim parallel to two furtheroutrageous self-descriptions—“although a eunuch, I was prosecuted for adultery,and although I argued with the Emperor, I lived to tell the tale”—shows thatFavorinus is peddling cultural paradoxes rather than describing a norm. He’smaking a case for his own outstanding nature. But Lucian, too, describes how asa Syrian innocent he learnt rhetoric and philosophy (before deserting them forsatire) and thus learnt to talk Greek, walk Greek, dress Greek, and be Greek.

Greek sophistication, which comes from Greek paideia, is a value for the citizensof the whole Empire and can be fought over, denied, and aspired to like anyother grand idea of social normativity. Plutarch is clear (in the Lives in particu-lar) that the attainment of Greek culture— paideia—is an essential quality bywhich a man, even—especially—a Roman man, can be judged.

For all that Greekness may thus appear to be a cultural value, nonethelesspromoting a genealogy can still be a strategy of self-authorization and an asser-tion of true breeding. So we are told that the Jews tried to find an ancestral linkwith the Spartans (of all people). There is a letter of Apollonius of Tyana himself,

transmitted with the manuscripts of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, which re-viles Greeks for wanting to take Roman names and thus deny their pedigree; andin the Lives of the Sophists, also by Philostratus, Herodes Atticus finds the mostperfect Attic Greek spoken by a pastoral figure from the deepest interior of



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Attica, because “the interior is untainted by barbarians and its language is healthy,

its tongue rings pure Attic.” It would seem that the best Greek is naturally andintegrally tied to the Greek soil. Culture may be exportable, but there lingers thelure of the origin, the belief in a true bloodline, the homeland. In Greece, italways matters who your parents are and where you come from. Even when allcan be Greek, some may be more Greek than others.

The space between cultural value and the authority of ethnic descent is aprime matrix of social conflict—it is the arena from which the bloody history of nationalism arises and from which the daily crimes of racial prejudice, socialexclusion, and self-congratulation are fed. “This is what it means to be Greek/American/Black/ White/Female . . .” shifts towards “You do not understand what

it means to be . . . ,” to “You are not part of us who are . . . ,” to “This is whathappens to people who are not . . . ,’ down the line towards violence and thebattlelines of hierarchy and power. In today’s multicultural and conflicted soci-ety, there are few areas of debate that are in more pressing need of clear analysis.What George W. Bush means when he intones the word “American” is onequestion that motivates the intensity of Hall’s subject.

Hall’s first book, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 1997),which won the prestigious Goodwin Award from the American PhilologicalAssociation, was primarily concerned with what could be called “intra-Hellenic”

identities. In this book he asks when, where, and how “Ionian,” “Dorian,” andother such terms for Greek groups could be seen to develop. It is a book focusedon the earliest periods of cultural formation with a strong emphasis on archaeo-logical material. But it is adept at looking forward to the bizarre inheritance of such ancient boundary disputes and in particular to the nineteenth-century Ger-man appropriation of the Dorians as their own ancestors. The Germans’ asser-tion that they were racially the “New Dorians” drew on philology, ancient history,and the intense Philhellenism of German culture to foster a nascent nationalism,and Hall was keen that his early history of Dorianism should have this particularendpoint constantly in sight. This approach was not an opportunistic appeal to

“relevance” but rather a powerful argument that classics is not to be studied in avacuum and that studying ancient politics can only be done from a politicalperspective.

In many ways Hellenicity follows on from that first project. By “Hellenicity”Hall means the recognition of a specific quality of Greekness based either on ablood/race/family tie (ethnicity) or one based on broader cultural values. Whencould anyone call oneself “Greek” (Helle \n) or be called “Greek,” and whatwould such a naming mean? Hall is primarily concerned with a subjective recog-nition of Greekness—a self-determination as Greek. The argument he makes isextremely simple and clear in bare outline. It has two main strands. First, a self-recognition of Hellenic identity—a collective term over, above, or in addition tolocal af filiations to cities, regions, or smaller groupings—emerged late: towardthe end of the seventh century B.C.E. Second, there was a definitional shift of Hellenic identity from an ethnic criterion to broader cultural concerns in the fifthcentury B.C.E., particularly in response to the Persian wars.



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The second of these claims is by far the less surprising. Although there

have been scholars over the years who have tried to make a case for a continuing,almost ahistorical ideal of Greekness, most scholars these days would easilyagree to recognize the formative impact of the Persian wars in the fifth century.Hall promises a more systematic and deeper analysis of the claim—although heallows it only one of his six chapters. The first claim is more immediately contro-versial. It is significant that by “late,” Hall means after the eighth century. Heargues against seeing any idea of a collective Hellenic identity in Homer andresists the argument that has been made on occasion that the development of aHellenic identity should be seen in response to the expansion of colonies and theconsequent contact with the peoples around the Mediterranean. Rather, he

argues that the word “Hellas” itself was first used to denote a collective of citiesin Thessaly, then to denote central Greece more generally, tracking the expan-sion of the Pylaian-Delphic Amphiktyony in the archaic period, and finally todenote the whole of mainland Greece by the end of the seventh century, reflect-ing hegemonic claims of central Greece. Perhaps more significantly, he arguesthat the word “Hellenes,” which he sees as a shortened form of “Panhellenes,”was a term of ethnic identification that grew up around the institution of theOlympic games as the first great site of Panhellenic celebration, with its exclu-sionary rules on ethnic grounds.

The central four chapters of the book are taken up with detailed argumen-tation of the inevitably fragmentary evidence that Hall marshals for this case.Chapter 3 looks at the “question of origins” and argues against seeing anycollective term for Greekness in the Bronze Age. This involves a series of nega-tive arguments (against, e.g., Akhaioi playing such a role) and a set of criticaldiscussions of those who have romantically sought for an essence of Greeknessin this dim and distant past. The third chapter investigates “blood and belonging”in the early period (with strong reminiscences of Hall’s first book) and finds theemergence of a Dorian identity as early as the eighth century but still no ethnicrecognition of Greekness per se. Chapter 4, one of the most polemical and

interesting, argues against seeing colonization as a major causal factor in thedevelopment of a collective Hellenic identity. Hall mixes detailed archaeologicalevidence well with his theoretical interests (though there is little explicit detaileddiscussion of Malkin or Dougherty, for example, which might have been ex-pected). This is a chapter with which many historians of archaic Greece will wantto engage passionately, not least because of Hall’s tough rejection of “a simplisticcore-periphery model that fails to take account of the fact that the nature,intensity and perceptions of encounters between Greek and indigenous popula-tions varied significantly from area to area (121).” This is a section of the bookwhere the negative arguments that dominate throughout really seem to makesome progress. The fifth chapter is the most evidently speculative. It argues that“Hellas” as an identification should be seen as spreading from Thessaly, follow-ing the expansion of the Amphiktyony centred on Delphi, but that “Hellenes” asan identification is best seen as growing around sites of communal celebrationand especially the Olympic games. This is a subject wherein the nature of the



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evidence means that it is unlikely that there could be a knockdown argument,

but linking the development of a communal identity to practices of celebrationand the pursuit of power seems a better starting point than most.

The first chapter, an introduction, has some brief but sensible method-ological observations on “ethnicity” that are expanded throughout the book. Thefinal chapter moves to the fifth-century shift from ethnicity to culture. This lastchapter has some good things to say, certainly, but is less well developed. Thesheer profusion of evidence here in contrast with the earlier period, and inparticular the weight of written material (all of tragedy, Herodotus, comedy, andso on), not to mention the legal and political impact of a self-conscious debateabout what Greekness can mean, together need more space and more extended

readings than Hall allows. To locate Airs, Waters, Places next to Herodotus’Histories, next to Aeschylus’ Persians, next to the material evidence from thatperiod cannot be done effectively, or with the detail lavished on the earlierarchaeological evidence, in one brief chapter. The result of this truncation is thatthe contested boundaries between culture and ethnicity in the classical poliscannot emerge in their full complexity. In addition, insuf ficient attention is paidto the developing self-aware argument about such boundaries in Athenian cul-ture (from where so much of the evidence comes).

InHellenicity, Hall is most interested in when a “Hellenic identity” emerges

and in what arguments can be made concerning this early history. It is here thatthe book is most effective and will be most widely debated. It does not looktowards Philostratus and the Second Sophistic except in the most cursory fash-ion, although there is in the Roman Empire, of course, a fascinating, continuingstory of Hellenism in action. Nor does Hall (unlike in his first book) stretch hisaccount into the long history of Hellenism in the West where Hellenicity contin-ues to be a major force in the cultural imagination. Hellenicity makes a finecontribution to an ongoing argument about archaic Greece, however, a contribu-tion that is trenchant, detailed, assured, and—all too rare—truly interdisciplinary.

SIMON GOLDHILL

KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

e-mail: [email protected]

PHILIPPE ROUET. Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases: Beazley and Pottier .Trans. Liz Nash. Oxford Monographs on Classical Archaeology. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2001. xiii + 167 pp. 21 black and white plates.Cloth, $74.

This monograph examines the development of two major approaches inthe study of Greek vase painting by focusing on a comparison of the work of SirJohn D. Beazley with that of Edmond Pottier. Beazley, an English scholar, spenthis scholarly life attributing vases to various formerly unnamed artists based on

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Goldhill - Hellenicity and Culture (2003)