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

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JONATHAN M. HALL. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: University 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 nothing that is not to be viewed through that frame. (There are quite a few classicists who might agree . . .) In Philostratus wonderful account, Apollonius was a marvelworking sage who did indeed travel throughout the known world, taking his Greek knowingness with him as a guide for all occasions and as a mastery of all situations. Although he learnt much from the mysterious wise men of the East, the Gymnosophists and the Brahmins, it should be no surprise that even these gurus quote Euripides as an authority. In the Roman Empire, Greek culture was at a premium (despite all the sniffy remarks of hard Roman traditionalists), but being Greek, hellenizein, was a quality that at rst sight has little to do with ethnicity. Apollonius, after all, is from Tyana. Although from Gaul, boasted Favorinus of Gaul, I became Greek. By this he means that through his rhetorical training, his language, and his whole style of being and thinking, he conforms to an ideal of Greekness. The fact that he sets this claim parallel to two further outrageous self-descriptionsalthough a eunuch, I was prosecuted for adultery, and although I argued with the Emperor, I lived to tell the taleshows that Favorinus is peddling cultural paradoxes rather than describing a norm. Hes making a case for his own outstanding nature. But Lucian, too, describes how as a Syrian innocent he learnt rhetoric and philosophy (before deserting them for satire) 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 citizens of the whole Empire and can be fought over, denied, and aspired to like any other grand idea of social normativity. Plutarch is clear (in the Lives in particular) that the attainment of Greek culturepaideiais an essential quality by which a man, evenespeciallya Roman man, can be judged. For all that Greekness may thus appear to be a cultural value, nonetheless promoting a genealogy can still be a strategy of self-authorization and an assertion of true breeding. So we are told that the Jews tried to nd an ancestral link with the Spartans (of all people). There is a letter of Apollonius of Tyana himself, transmitted with the manuscripts of Philostratus Life of Apollonius, which reviles Greeks for wanting to take Roman names and thus deny their pedigree; and in the Lives of the Sophists, also by Philostratus, Herodes Atticus nds the most perfect Attic Greek spoken by a pastoral gure from the deepest interior of
American Journal of Philology 124 (2003) 303320 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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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 and integrally tied to the Greek soil. Culture may be exportable, but there lingers the lure of the origin, the belief in a true bloodline, the homeland. In Greece, it always matters who your parents are and where you come from. Even when all can be Greek, some may be more Greek than others. The space between cultural value and the authority of ethnic descent is a prime matrix of social conictit is the arena from which the bloody history of nationalism arises and from which the daily crimes of racial prejudice, social exclusion, 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 what happens to people who are not . . . , down the line towards violence and the battlelines of hierarchy and power. In todays multicultural and conicted society, 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 one question that motivates the intensity of Halls subject. Halls rst book, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 1997), which won the prestigious Goodwin Award from the American Philological Association, was primarily concerned with what could be called intra-Hellenic identities. In this book he asks when, where, and how Ionian, Dorian, and other such terms for Greek groups could be seen to develop. It is a book focused on the earliest periods of cultural formation with a strong emphasis on archaeological material. But it is adept at looking forward to the bizarre inheritance of such ancient boundary disputes and in particular to the nineteenth-century German appropriation of the Dorians as their own ancestors. The Germans assertion 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 particular endpoint 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 a vacuum and that studying ancient politics can only be done from a political perspective. In many ways Hellenicity follows on from that rst project. By Hellenicity Hall means the recognition of a specic quality of Greekness based either on a blood/race/family tie (ethnicity) or one based on broader cultural values. When could anyone call oneself Greek (Helle\n) or be called Greek, and what would such a naming mean? Hall is primarily concerned with a subjective recognition of Greeknessa self-determination as Greek. The argument he makes is extremely simple and clear in bare outline. It has two main strands. First, a selfrecognition of Hellenic identitya collective term over, above, or in addition to local afliations to cities, regions, or smaller groupingsemerged late: toward the end of the seventh century B.C.E. Second, there was a denitional shift of Hellenic identity from an ethnic criterion to broader cultural concerns in the fth century 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 easily agree to recognize the formative impact of the Persian wars in the fth century. Hall promises a more systematic and deeper analysis of the claimalthough he allows it only one of his six chapters. The rst claim is more immediately controversial. It is signicant that by late, Hall means after the eighth century. He argues against seeing any idea of a collective Hellenic identity in Homer and resists the argument that has been made on occasion that the development of a Hellenic identity should be seen in response to the expansion of colonies and the consequent contact with the peoples around the Mediterranean. Rather, he argues that the word Hellas itself was rst used to denote a collective of cities in Thessaly, then to denote central Greece more generally, tracking the expansion of the Pylaian-Delphic Amphiktyony in the archaic period, and nally to denote the whole of mainland Greece by the end of the seventh century, reecting hegemonic claims of central Greece. Perhaps more signicantly, he argues that the word Hellenes, which he sees as a shortened form of Panhellenes, was a term of ethnic identication that grew up around the institution of the Olympic games as the rst great site of Panhellenic celebration, with its exclusionary rules on ethnic grounds. The central four chapters of the book are taken up with detailed argumentation of the inevitably fragmentary evidence that Hall marshals for this case. Chapter 3 looks at the question of origins and argues against seeing any collective term for Greekness in the Bronze Age. This involves a series of negative arguments (against, e.g., Akhaioi playing such a role) and a set of critical discussions of those who have romantically sought for an essence of Greekness in this dim and distant past. The third chapter investigates blood and belonging in the early period (with strong reminiscences of Halls rst book) and nds the emergence of a Dorian identity as early as the eighth century but still no ethnic recognition of Greekness per se. Chapter 4, one of the most polemical and interesting, argues against seeing colonization as a major causal factor in the development of a collective Hellenic identity. Hall mixes detailed archaeological evidence well with his theoretical interests (though there is little explicit detailed discussion of Malkin or Dougherty, for example, which might have been expected). This is a chapter with which many historians of archaic Greece will want to engage passionately, not least because of Halls tough rejection of a simplistic core-periphery model that fails to take account of the fact that the nature, intensity and perceptions of encounters between Greek and indigenous populations varied signicantly from area to area (121). This is a section of the book where the negative arguments that dominate throughout really seem to make some progress. The fth chapter is the most evidently speculative. It argues that Hellas as an identication should be seen as spreading from Thessaly, following the expansion of the Amphiktyony centred on Delphi, but that Hellenes as an identication is best seen as growing around sites of communal celebration and 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 celebration and the pursuit of power seems a better starting point than most. The rst chapter, an introduction, has some brief but sensible methodological observations on ethnicity that are expanded throughout the book. The nal chapter moves to the fth-century shift from ethnicity to culture. This last chapter has some good things to say, certainly, but is less well developed. The sheer profusion of evidence here in contrast with the earlier period, and in particular the weight of written material (all of tragedy, Herodotus, comedy, and so on), not to mention the legal and political impact of a self-conscious debate about 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 that period cannot be done effectively, or with the detail lavished on the earlier archaeological evidence, in one brief chapter. The result of this truncation is that the contested boundaries between culture and ethnicity in the classical polis cannot emerge in their full complexity. In addition, insufcient attention is paid to the developing self-aware argument about such boundaries in Athenian culture (from where so much of the evidence comes). In Hellenicity, Hall is most interested in when a Hellenic identity emerges and in what arguments can be made concerning this early history. It is here that the book is most effective and will be most widely debated. It does not look towards Philostratus and the Second Sophistic except in the most cursory fashion, although there is in the Roman Empire, of course, a fascinating, continuing story of Hellenism in action. Nor does Hall (unlike in his rst book) stretch his account into the long history of Hellenism in the West where Hellenicity continues to be a major force in the cultural imagination. Hellenicity makes a ne contribution to an ongoing argument about archaic Greece, however, a contribution that is trenchant, detailed, assured, andall too raretruly interdisciplinary. S IMON G OLDHILL
K ING S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE e-mail: sdg1001@hermes.cam.ac.uk

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 in the study of Greek vase painting by focusing on a comparison of the work of Sir John D. Beazley with that of Edmond Pottier. Beazley, an English scholar, spent his scholarly life attributing vases to various formerly unnamed artists based on