Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization Irad Malkin
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iscussions of orientalism and colonialism sometimes reach back to Classical Greece, reputed reputed to be the originator of Western binary binar y attitudes to the other, the subaltern, or the colonized. 1 Historians are usually wary of such claims, especially when faced with anachronisms (projecting onto antiquity alien concepts, categories, and prisms of observation) or with disregard for processes of change and continuity. continuity. In my own work on ancient Greek religion, myth, and colonization, I have used postcolonial notions such as charter myths, ethnicity ethnicity,, binary binar y thinking, hybridity, hybridity, temporal relativism, middle ground, and networks and found them to be meaningful tools of analysis (although some of them may be less familiar to postcolonial thinkers who have come to the field from literary studies). In turn, postcolonial theory might benefit from a closer study of ancient Greek civilization. Perhaps a reverse anachronism may be useful: sometimes projecting onto modern theory theor y concepts, categories, categories, and prisms of observation obser vation borrowed from the his-
For example, “In Classical Greece and Rome geographers, historians, public figures like Caesar, orators, and poets added to the fund of taxonomic lore separating races, regions, nations, and minds from each other; much of that was self-serving, and existed to prove that Romans and Greeks were superior to other kinds of people” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995], 57). Cf. D. Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems,” in The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), 179–93. See also Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolo Postcolonial nial Theory: Theor y: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 40–53. 1
Modern Language Quarterly 65:3 Quarterly 65:3 (September 2004): 341–64. © 2004 University of Washington.
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tor y of Greek antiquity, tory antiquity, as well as applying some general concepts from Mediterranean studies, might prove helpful for postcolonial thinkers. We need also to tread t read carefull c arefullyy because bec ause of o f the th e tendency tend ency of discid isciplines to extend themselves. In general, applying postcolonial concepts concept s and terms such as colonizer and colonized to antiquity implies a wider scope for postcolonial study. But it must be asked whether we project such terms onto the past in order that ancient examples might subsequently provide historical “depth” to the modern postcolonial phenomenon and afford “universal” validity to observations of postcolonial thinkers. I can see why ancient Greece would be attractive: drawing dra wing parallels and continuities from ancient Greek views of “barbarians,” or ancient Greek practices of colonization, could provide historical depth to postcolonial critique, which could then contextualize itself not as an ad hoc field of study, bounded by the history of the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, centuries, but as firmly relevant to past millennia and with universal implications for future history. In the same vein, students of antiquity might find postcolonial angles attractive, since these might make the “classics” appear more widely relevant to the humanities. 2 The ancient Mediterranean and postcolonial theory have a lot to tell each other if we bear such parameters in mind. In this essay I discuss a cluster of issues pertinent to the nexus of ancient and modern colonial thought and practice. I address anachronism and binary approaches; compare certain characteristics of Greek colonization to modern colonialism; examine the implications of ancient religious polytheism for modern binary, Christian-conditioned interpretations; suggest the usefulness of concepts developed by Mediterranean studies historians, especially the réseau (network); and consider the uses of See John E. Coleman and Clark A. Walz, eds., Greeks and Barbarians: Essays on the Interactions between Greeks and Non-Greeks in Antiquity and the Consequences for Euro- centrism (Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1997); and François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History , trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). The latter book, dealing with binary ethnographic approaches to the Scythians in Herodotus, is mainly historiographical in purpose and should not be taken as a “reflection” of general Greek views. See also Peter van Dommelen, “Colonial Constructs: Colonialism and Archaeology in the Mediterranean,” World Archaeology 28 28 (1997): 305–23; and Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos, eds., The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002). 2
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the notion of the “Middle Ground,” developed by a modern historian of colonialism. I end with a historical illustration of the variabilities of the colonial experience in the Middle Ground, where cults and myths could be used as charters for the conquest of or, conversely, for mediation among colonizing peoples (Greeks, Phoenicians) and indigenous populations. Binary Thinking, Ancient Political Culture, and the Notion of “Place”
Too often, ancient Greeks are treated as though they were both “white” and “European,” the people who both put together and kept rocking the cradle of Western civilization. The fact that Europe defines itself in terms of the ancient Greek world does not, of course, mean that the ancient Greeks owed their self-definition, in terms of either racial prejudices or national units, to categories important to modern Europe. To illustrate with a lesser-known example: Emil Ludwig, one of the proponents both of Mediterranean studies and of a naive kind of “hybridity,” was keenly aware of anachronism. His beautifully written book of 1942, The Mediterranean: Saga of the Sea , carried such a powerful and liberal message of hope that it was translated from German into English, and published that year in London, in the midst of the Second World War. It is curious to find in Ludwig’s book the outline of a “liberalracist” historical geography of the Mediterranean, which warns of a “European” anachronism in relation to the ethnicity of ancient Greece. Ludwig’s own solution was remarkable: he proclaimed that the Greeks belonged to a special, biological “Mediterranean Race,” whose amazing achievements and civilization depended not on ethnic purity but on racial hybridity.3 Postcolonial critique is sometimes preoccupied with binary distinctions of self and other, European and barbarian, West and “the rest.” Sometimes the order is reversed, the self becomes the other, but the critical mind-set is generally the same, applying itself as if on a Euclidian geometric plane of opposites.4 Binary thinking has been with Emil Ludwig, The Mediterranean: Saga of the Sea , trans. Barrows Mussey (London: Whittlesey House, 1942). 4 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 8. On the dangers of reproducing binarism by 3
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us since antiquity, drawing on both Greek philosophy and Hebrew sources. It is especially evident in the legacy of ancient Jewish monotheism. By the second century BCE a dominant section of Jewish monotheism had abandoned the belief in “one god,” the right god for the people of Israel, for an exclusive belief in the one and only God and consequently a denial of the existence of all other gods. This concept of a revealed, intolerant religious truth captured center stage and then was picked up and spread, often with the zeal of conversion, by Christianity and Islam.5 In this monotheistic legacy we find a major source for the binary attitudes apparent in Western imperialism since the early modern period, and probably reaching back to the Crusades. In terms of colonialism, these attitudes form a direct continuity not from Classical Greece but from more recent Christian history, beginning especially with the Spanish reconquista and pitting Christians, Muslims, and Jews against each other. This was followed by the exploration, conquest, and settlement of the New World, where indigenous populations were branded as heathens, those “absolute others” of Spanish imperialism and colonialism.6 Binary thinking is also evident in the writings of Greek philosophers and in aspects of Greek ritual.7 However, when applied to ethnicity, an “oppositional” Greek-barbarian dichotomy (i.e., a definition of collective ethnicity as a difference from and an opposition to the other) emerged for the most part only after the Greeks had warded off exposing it (yet insisting on its underlying colonial realities) see Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59–87. 5 See Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Johannes C. De Moor, The Rise of Yah- wism: The Roots of Israelite Monotheism , 2nd ed. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1997); Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Jacob Neusner, Bruce Chilton, and William Graham, Three Faiths, One God: The Formative Faith and Practice of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Boston: Brill, 2002). 6 The point is made often. See Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992). 7 See Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others , 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987).
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the Persian invasion in the early fifth century BCE. It was the first time, since the mythical Trojan War, that Greeks had fought a common enemy, sharpening their common identity on the whetstone of invasion.8 Notions of Greek superiority continued to develop until, in the late fourth century, Aristotle summed up the new mentality in the opening chapters of the Politics , where he denigrated the barbarians as naturally inferior to the Greeks. From Aristotle’s perspective, Greeks and barbarians fit beautifully into an oppositional model that now justifies the claim that the source of modern orientalism lies in the glory that was Greece. However, and this is important, shortly before Aristotle this had not been so. During the Archaic period (roughly the eighth to the early fifth centuries BCE) both the multiethnic Near Eastern empires and the small Greek citystates were structured in such a way as to leave little room for binarism in the European-Christian sense. It was then that the major waves of Greek colonization took place. From the eighth century until the time of Athens’s empire and Herodotus’s writings in the mid-fifth century, when Greeks were colonizing and founding city-states on shores as distant from each other as Georgia on the eastern Black Sea is from Spain in the west, the term barbarians was usually not derogatory. Rarely used disparagingly (the philosopher Herakleitos spoke of men with “barbarian souls”), it served most often as a reference to a wide spectrum of non-Greek peoples, from the nomadic Scythians to the long-settled Egyptians. One major reason for the term’s neutrality was the Greeks’ awareness that the nonGreek civilizations of the Near East, such as Egypt and Babylon, were richer, more powerful, and far more ancient. Indeed, even after the victories at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480), the Greeks still knew that they were living at the periphery of those civilizations. For example, the seventh-century poet Archilochos could refer to the riches of Lydia as proverbial; the fifth-century historian Herodotus and the fourthcentury philosopher Plato ascribed the origins of many things Greek, such as the alphabet and even the gods, to the Near East, especially to Egypt. In historiographical terms this view is what Martin Bernal calls See Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8
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“the ancient Greek model.”9 It emphasized the Greeks’ self-perception as a “young” people. It is sobering to remember that some of the Near Eastern civilizations were as old relative to the Greeks as the Greeks are to us.10 Greek civilization of the Archaic period was a world of many gods and numerous, sovereign political communities sharing a sense of youthfulness and a peripheral geographic situation. Ancient Greek political culture was diametrically different both from the ancient model of the vast, multiethnic empire and from the modern idea of a national state. Greeks lived in hundreds of small, sovereign, and autonomous city-states (“Greece” as a nation was not born until 1821 CE). This multiplicity of Greekness has various implications, complicating binarism and any sense of “center” from which the world is regarded, judged, and colonized. The eighth century BCE saw the rise of the polis and the introduction of an altogether new political culture. In the Near East, huge, multiethnic empires had been the norm and remained so for several millennia, until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century CE. In such empires the population was divided between ruler and sub jects; there were no such things as “citizens.” By contrast, Mediterranean peoples (Greeks, Etruscans, Phoenicians, Latins) preferred the small to the large, a multitude of centers to a hierarchical and centralized empire. They developed closely knit, small, homogeneous political communities that eventually made room (in Greece, at least) for the concepts of koinonia (partnership and rotation) and polites (citizen). This progression is remarkably different from what we know of the Spanish colonization of the New World and of nineteenth-century Martin Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 , vol. 1 of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Free Association, 1987). Bernal believes that this conceptual framework also supports a positivistic reconstruction of prehistory, which is a matter for debate. Cf. Edith Hall, “When Is a Myth Not a Myth? Bernal’s ‘Ancient Model,’” Arethusa 25 (1992): 181–201. For Persia “in Greece” see Margaret C. Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 10 A fuller discussion of these points may be found in Irad Malkin, The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 14–24. 9
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“European” (or rather, national-European) colonialism.11 Spanish explorers set out from a centralized kingdom that had grown out of wars with the Muslims and that had culminated, in the year of “the discovery of America,” in the expulsion of “others,” the Jews. When the Spanish set out across the Atlantic, theirs was a civilization in which the idea of a “center” was prominent. The center was expressed in terms of political cohesiveness organized around the Spanish monarchy. It was also a religious construct: based on a European Christianity, dynamically expansionist and making universal claims of exclusive truths. For Spain, the center was the papacy in Rome, where God’s representative could pronounce upon the division of the world between Spain and Portugal.12 Such characteristics held up through nineteenth- and twentiethcentury European imperialism, which also advocated missionary work, sought to illuminate the “dark continent,” and had an equally strong sense of a superior center. In contrast, the numerous Greek cities that we call, for lack of a better term, “colonies” were founded during the Archaic period as independent entities along the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. There were a great variety of “mother cities” (i.e., home communities recognized as the initiators of settlement), but they rarely had political control over the new settlements. These were largely independent, sovereign entities with ritual ties to the metropolis (lit. mother city). In fact, this was not just a Greek but a Mediterranean phenomenon: the Phoenicians had set out to found city-states in the western Mediterranean and North Africa, and the Etruscans—influenced by both the Greeks and the Phoenicians—likewise developed a city-state civilization and maritime activity.13 The Spanish “discovery” of the New World and European coloSee Marc Ferro, Histoire des colonisations (Paris: Seuil, 1994); and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 12 See Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 13 See John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade , 4th ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999); and Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 144–59. 11
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nialism there and elsewhere provide the common conceptual frame work for assessing colonialism in postcolonial studies. But analogies with ancient Greek colonization may be misleading, if only for this reason: in terms of political culture, the Greek polis was radically different both from the centralized Spanish-Christian monarchy and from Victorian Britain. The Greek starting point of “place” was one of diffusion, not concentration. Greeks simply did not all come from the same place (“Greece”)—as we understand the term. Each polis emphasized its own distinctiveness even as each was part of a network of hundreds of citystates. “Ancient Greece” may exist in book titles, but it may not be used to denote a unified political entity. Greek perceptions of place were closely linked with political culture, actual experiences of colonization, and religion. In contrast to the colonizers of the New World, the ancient Greeks did not perceive the lands they reached as inhabited by “absolute others.” The more distant parts of the Mediterranean were not a “New World” to them; they were more of the same, with familiar geographic and climatic features. Maritime trade, exploration, and colonization were conducted not across an alien ocean but along contiguous coastlines or toward observable lands. Nobody feared falling off the face of the earth if they sailed too far out into the Mediterranean. As expansion and settlement continued, moreover, both the Mediterranean and the Black Sea became part of the oikoumene , the “inhabited” (i.e., familiar) world, distinct from the unknown lands of the beyond, such as those of the blessed Hyperboreans, the utopian and inaccessible peoples of the far North. In fact, the idea of the oikoumene , in and of itself, probably helped “compact” all the lands within, both those of Greeks and those of non-Greeks, into a more familiar mold, the reverse of the “absolute other.” Subjugation and fear of the native led to dehumanization and “othering” in modern colonial contexts, because the colonizers focused on the capture of large territories that they then carved up for direct control. But Greek settlers usually did not aim for vast territorial conquests. Rather, they conceived of colonization mainly in terms of “points” of settlement, of city -states, with fairly small territories. 14 See Irad Malkin, “Categories of Early Greek Colonization,” in Il dinamismo della colonizzazione greca , ed. Claudia Antonetti (Naples: Loffredo, 1997), 25–38. For the modern era see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 14
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Being an “alien” is a relative condition that may not apply to persons of similar social position. In the Archaic period, Greek aristocrats regarded other aristocrats not as aliens or savages but simply as xenoi (foreigners)—as the Spartans continued to call all barbarians in the time of Herodotus (9.11.2; cf. 9.55.2). In fact, it is not even clear whether eighth-century Greeks were aware that they were Greeks or, if they did, what significance this identity had for them and in which contexts.15 The term xenoi also carried the meaning of “guest-friends,” personal allies who could exchange ritual gifts and whose guest-friendship was inherited. An aristocratic, nonethnic network was therefore easily extendable whether or not one’s ally was a Greek. 16 For example, Greeks, Etruscans, Phoenicians, and aristocrats in lands colonized by these peoples would recline on the same couches during symposia (banquets) held in the Bay of Naples in the mid-eighth-century BCE. As late as the Classical period, Oloros, the father of the Athenian historian Thucydides, may have been named for a Thracian king who was a xenos of the family. A multiplicity of points of cross-reference seems to be the salient feature of Archaic Greek civilization. Binarism seems particularly inappropriate in this world. It is difficult to find apt terminology to describe it, since words such as decentralized or fragmented imply the absence of something from a previous whole. But there was no center to begin with: there was no Greek “place,” only hundreds of Greek city-states, some functioning as metropoleis , others newly founded, in what is today modern Greece as well as “overseas,” beyond ever-widening horizons. Other peoples were not “others,” since their lands possessed a famil-
1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 2 – 3. Hulme rightly distinguishes between colonial discursive practices that “relate to occupied territor y where the native population had been, or is to be, dispossessed of its land by whatever means” and those “pertaining to territory where the colonial form is based primarily on the control of trade” (e.g., America and India). There were exceptions, of course. Greek colonizers to Heraclea on the Black Sea subjugated the native Maryandinoi. In contrast, other Greek colonies had to pay tribute to Scythian kings. 15 See Jonathan M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: Uni versity of Chicago Press, 2002). 16 See Moses I. Finley, The World of Odysseus , 2nd ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977); and Gabriel Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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iar, even expected, environment (with some exceptions in the Black Sea). Apart from some cases in the sixth century and sweepingly so after the early fifth century, Greek identity in the Archaic period was neither formed nor reinforced oppositionally, and the Greeks did not regard the civilizations to the east as peripheral, inferior, poor, or young. And the whole world, as the early philosopher Thales of Miletus proclaimed, was “full of gods.” Religion
Religion, Christian religion, contributed significantly to the European sense of “central place.” The religious mentality of the Greeks was very different from that of the Christian colonizer, whether medieval crusader, Spanish conqueror, or nineteenth-century European. The difference was between Judeo-Christian monotheism and ancient Mediterranean polytheism. The polytheistic mentalité that characterized religions of the ancient Mediterranean strongly worked against one’s seeing the world in binary terms of “believers” and “heathens.”17 Conversion was never an issue in ancient colonization. Greeks and Phoenicians, for example, had a similar polytheistic mind-set; when meeting each other, they could easily see each other’s gods in their own deities and heroes, identifying, for example, the Phoenician Melqart with the Greek Herakles. Neither was considered a “false god,” a notion the Greeks and Phoenicians would have found ridiculous. The gods of “others” were either unfamiliar (“new gods”) or the “same” but known by different names and attributes. Religion was langue ; the names of the gods and their cults were parole . For example, when Herodotus says that “Ammon is the name of Zeus among the Egyptians” (2.42), he sees a “Zeus” in the Egyptian deity (langue ), although his name, cult, and even status may be peculiarly Egyptian ( parole ). So what he means is, “Ammon is how you say ‘Zeus’ in Egyptian.” In short, the Greeks perceived someone else’s religion neither as a contradiction nor as a denial of some religious truth; it was not an “absolute other.” See Walter Burkert, Greek Religion , trans. John Raffan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); and Marcel Detienne, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 81–104. 17
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With this polytheistic substrate came something else, bearing directly on colonization and territorial appropriation. Gods and heroes were considered as “holding the land” (echein ten gen ), independently of the humans who might have possession of it. A place empty of gods was apparently inconceivable, yet it was quite conceivable that mere mortals would be ignorant of the gods’ identities. Once revealed, such gods would be honored as local divinities or identified, through a process of syncretism, with the “equivalent” Greek gods. For example, libations from visiting ships would be poured before the epichorioi theoi , the “local gods,” as a sign of friendship and appeasement.18 By contrast, settlement implied the need for a lasting peace and ritual rapport with the gods, and hence the inclination toward syncretism (without the tiresome issue of dogma). It was best if the local divinities and heroes could be identified with their Greek “namesakes,” as the ubiquitous cult of Demeter and Persephone in Sicily seems to illustrate. It is probable that syncretistic influences were at work there, aided by the ease with which local female divinities, perhaps having similar responsibilities for the growth of grain and the rejuvenation of life, were identified by both colonists and local populations.19 Likewise it was natural, for example, for a Greek speaker of the language of polytheism to project the mythical itinerary of Herakles onto a land that the hero was perceived as already “holding,” even if he were known there by his Phoenician name, Melqart. Polytheism, in short, was a world system of diverse “sameness.” In contrast, Europeans set out to conquer and colonize the New World, confident of their superiority and their monopoly over exclusive, revealed, religious truth. Instead of occupying ourselves with observing the differences between “absolute others,” we might look for a more sophisticated difference within a “sameness,” as the Greeks seem to have done (Malkin, Returns of Odysseus , 17).20 The “sameness” of the world of religion also bore directly on eth-
See Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica , 2.1271–74. 19 See Roland Martin and Henri Metzger, La religion grecque (Paris: Presses Uni versitaires de France, 1976). 20 Barbara Fuchs shifts the postmodern-postcolonial emphasis on “difference” to investigation of “the political and rhetorical valence of sameness ” (Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 3 – 4). 18
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nic perceptions. Greek gods and heroes left descendants and dynasties all over the world. Perseus, for example, could be considered the ancestor of the Persians, Medea of the Medes, Dionysos and Herakles of the Indians, and Odysseus of the Latins. Allowing for a comprehensive perception of humanity and origines gentium , the “ethnic origins of nations,” was the reverse of the perception of “absolute others.”21 Hellenistic Civilization
The closest the Greeks ever came to a colonial situation of the modern type was in the Classical period, when Athens sent out klerouchoi , or citizens who would live off conquered, parceled land abroad while retaining all their rights and duties as Athenians. In this respect they were like the French outremer , who served in France’s army and voted for its parliament while in Algeria. The experiment, however, took place on a relatively small scale, was short-lived, and basically collapsed with the fall of Athens to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. It was only in the Hellenistic period (after the death of Alexander in 323 BCE) that a fundamental change took place. What became of “Greek civilization” after the conquests of Alexander, when the city-state lost its sovereignty and the new GreekMacedonian empire overlapped with the Persian mega-empire, “from India to Kush (Africa), one hundred and twenty seven lands” (Esther 1:1)? During the Hellenistic era, roughly from the end of the fourth century BCE to the rise of Rome in the second, “Hellenism,” or Greekness at its widest, imperial, colonial stretch, metamorphosed precisely because of conquest, colonization, and empire building. There were fundamental changes both in the nature of the political community and in ethnicity. It was no longer a civilization of independent, sovereign poleis , and Greek ethnicity was no longer determined by “the same blood” (homaimon ), as it had been (alongside religious and cultural criteria) in earlier periods (Herodotus, 8.144).22 See Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 22 Cf. Rosalind Thomas, “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Herodotus,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity , ed. Irad Malkin (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2001), 213–33. 21
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The politically independent, sovereign Greek city-states were submerged in the new, vast Hellenistic kingdoms. New colonies were now founded not as independent states, as dots on the maps of what remained for centuries unconquered lands, but as entities within these kingdoms. Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, probably instructed him in the spirit of his own treatise Politics : to value the independent polis as the condition for the good life. But Aristotle was teaching this wisdom to the very person who would destroy the political independence (although not the vitality) of the city-state. In the late fourth century BCE Alexander, the young Macedonian king, conquered the Persian Empire up to the Indus valley in India and present-day Afghanistan. Suddenly, Greeks were faced with ruling a huge Eastern-type empire, multiethnic, multicultural, and wholly opposite to the small Mediterranean city-state that had been Aristotle’s model. After Alexander’s death the empire split into a few major units. An impressive wave of new city foundations, modeled on the polis but subject to and centralized under the new kings, followed, and masses of immigrants, ex-soldiers, merchants, and others arrived to settle them. “Hellenization” spread, often in interesting forms of cultural appropriation. In Jerusalem, for example, the high priest adopted a Greek name alongside his Hebrew one, and the Greek symposion , the banquet involving drinking while reclining, coalesced with the Passover seder. Was Hellenistic colonization comparable to modern colonialism? At first glance, it seems to have been. The territories concerned were enormous, and it is easy to detect an imperialist model in the exporting of a Greek culture aware of its own superiority, the taking over of vast stretches of the earth, and the conducting of a Hellenic “cultural imperialism” over the entire Orient. But this view is simplistic. In this new, Hellenistic world, the ethnic perception of “Hellenism” had itself profoundly changed, from the binarism of Greek-barbarian enmity (especially stemming from the Greek-Persian dichotomy) to a new definition of Greekness that depended on status and culture. The category of “Greek” had been contested and redefined even before the rise of Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia. Many Greeks had regarded the Macedonians as barbarians. One Macedonian king, Alexander I (498–454 BCE, not “the Great”), had been refused entry into the Olympics because he was not a Greek; only because he
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was recognized as a descendant of Herakles was he finally allowed to compete. In the mid-fourth century the Macedonian question became hotly debated for different reasons. The idea of leading a Panhellenic campaign against the Persian Empire had taken root, and it was eminently clear that some sort of union was necessary, as no single polis could undertake such a war by itself. Thus the idea of a “leader” surfaced: a leader who would invade Asia at the head of a combined Greek host, as Agamemnon had led the Greeks against Troy. Some looked up to the Macedonian king, Philip II (Alexander the Great’s father), who was then leading a powerful, united Macedonia to hegemony over mainland Greece. In Athens the famous orator Demosthenes warned of the danger that such a campaign posed to Greek independence, inflaming his audience by claiming that Philip was a barbarian. It was Demosthenes’ fellow Athenian and political opponent, the pro-Macedonian Isocrates, who redefined “Greek” so that Philip might lead “Greece” against the barbarian Persians. This Greece was no longer defined by blood, however, but by culture—even though Isocrates saw that culture as primarily Athenian: “One calls ‘Greeks’ those who share our culture [ paideia ] rather than those who share a common nature [ physis ].”23 In the Hellenistic world, cultural criteria became predominant. New colonies often comprised peoples from all over the Greek world and thus no longer relied on the discrete sociopolitical order that each colony would import from its mother city. One was no longer a Corinthian but simply a Greek, which meant negotiating a new identity and emphasizing abstracted Greek traits. This cultural criterion of Hellenism offered new mobility for many who might other wise have been considered non-Greeks. Ethnicity of blood made way for a “way of life.” A Greek dialect formed and spread as the common (koine ) language of all Greeks, providing the instrument for translations (e.g., the Septuagint) and writings in Greek by non-Greeks (e.g., Josephus, Philo). The library at Alexandria, founded by the Ptolemies, aimed to collect works on a universal scale, housing and preserving all that was best in Archaic Isocrates, Panegyricus 50. See Jonathan M. Hall, “Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia within Evolving Definitions of Greek Identity,” and Suzanne Saïd, “The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates to Aristides,” in Malkin, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity , 159–86, 275–99. 23
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and Classical Greek literature and thus enhancing the notion of a common culture. Sometimes Greek traits were deliberately overemphasized. For example, in the farthest Greek colonies, such as Ai Khanoum in present-day Afghanistan or Borysthenes on the Black Sea, people expressed their Greekness by wearing no-longer-fashionable long beards and building in archaizing styles.24 The practical uses of Greekness as an “instrumental ethnicity” became manifest as well. In Egypt, for instance, it constituted a more liberal tax bracket than the one applied to Egyptians.25 In short, many people were co-opted into Hellenic civilization, either by becoming “Greek” through education and language or by becoming like Greeks, Hellenizing by adopting aspects of the Greek way of life. In the history of modern colonialism it is easy to discover the policy options of overseas colonial powers: either not to rule at all but to tap the riches of the land through trading stations (e.g., Phoenician emporia , Portuguese “factories,” British Hong Kong), or to rule as indirectly as possible and to send in temporary personnel who need not mingle with the indigenous population (the British in India), or to allow immigration and settlement and run the risk that priorities will become local and alienated from the metropolis (the North American colonies, Latin America). Hellenistic colonization faced more complicated choices: cities were founded inside countries that did not lie far away and overseas but were, on the contrary, ruled directly by Hellenistic monarchs. The circumstances may have been similar to those attending Russian colonization in Europe, where the Russian territory expanded contiguously and settlements were founded inside conquered lands. But the “Russification” that followed in Europe was far more intensive than what happened in the Hellenistic kingdoms. Egypt, for example, did not become Greek, even though “Greek” cities such as Alexandria were dominant. See Frank W. Walbank, The Hellenistic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1981), 60–62; cf. Walbank, “The Problem of Greek Nationality,” Phoenix 5 (1951): 41–60, rpt. in Selected Papers: Studies in Greek and Roman History and Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–19, and in Greeks and Barbarians , ed. Thomas Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 234–56. 25 See Dorothy Thompson, “Hellenistic Hellenes: The Case of Ptolemaic Egypt,” in Malkin, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity , 301–22. 24
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As independent city-states carving up niches on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Greek colonies never became so predominant as to change the cultures and languages of local populations fundamentally. “France” did not become Greek just because Massalia (Marseille) and some cities on the modern French Riviera were founded by Greeks. Instead of domination, especially during the Archaic period, what characterized contact with local populations was cultural negotiation and mediation. These processes found expression either in material culture (e.g., in the use of Greek-made terracotta roof tiles or drinking cups) or in the realm of histoire de mentalité . The function of the myth of Odysseus, for example, is suggestive. The hero, returning from Troy, reached places never heard of in Homer but current in ancient myth. Regarded as the father of “Latinos” (i.e., he was the eponymous hero of the Latins), Odysseus was adopted by the Etruscans as Utuse, founder of an Etruscan city where he was venerated with his own cult and led the mythical Etruscan migrations into Italy. Even though Greeks exported his story, Odysseus was not a Greek hero; he moved easily among different cultures. His adoption occurred very early, probably during the first colonial encounters between Greeks and Etruscans in the eighth century in the area of the Bay of Naples (where the Etruscans too were arriving by sea)— in other words, at least two centuries before the fifth-century naval battles between Greeks and Etruscans. 26 What characterized such early colonial encounters was therefore not conquest and domination but the emergence of a material and cultural Middle Ground. The Middle Ground
Middle Ground , a term coined by the historian Richard White, refers to what emerges from encounters between colonizing and indigenous populations.27 White is interested in how various “sides” (whites, Fox, I have dealt with various aspects of such identifications in three books: Irad Malkin, Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (Leiden: Brill, 1987); Malkin, Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Malkin, Returns of Odysseus . 27 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650– 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Note esp. the introduction (ix –xvi). 26
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Hurons, Iroquois, etc.) reached an “accommodation,” constructing a common and mutually comprehensible world beyond a mere “contact zone.”28 The context of these encounters was not the sweeping territorial conquests and the destruction of Native American peoples but one of significantly longer periods when no single, dictating authority existed in most of the areas concerned. Too often we think of colonization in terms of the conquest that it became in later generations. But it is the inability to dictate, that is, the lack of hegemonic control over vast territories, that lies at the heart of the colonial experience. There are many examples in antiquity, and similar processes have been identified (without the application of Middle Ground terminology) by Robert Bartlett in medieval Europe, by Solange Alberro in Mexico, and by Norman Etherington in South Africa.29 The Middle Ground is a field in which each side plays a role dictated by what it perceives as the other’s perception of it, resulting from the mutual misrepresentation of values and practices. In time this roleplaying, the outcome of “creative misunderstandings”—a kind of double mirror reflection—creates a “third” civilization that is neither purely native nor entirely imported by the colonizer. White observes that when people apply their conventions and cultural expectations to new situations, their performance causes a change in culture, a shift in the conventions of both colonizer and colonized. Because of its insistence on historical contextualization and careful study of social practices and representations, the Middle Ground approach is a convincing tool for problematizing the relationships of colonists and indigenous populations. Concepts such as “creolization,” “hybridity,” and “contact zones,”30 while helpful for pointing out “mutualities and negotiations
For the origin of the term contact zone see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Pratt’s emphasis on “transculturation,” the process of intercultural negotiation and selection, is important; White’s analysis adds another dimension to our understanding of this process. 29 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Solange Alberro, Les Espagnols dans le Mexique colonial: Histoire d’une acculturation (Paris: Colin, 1992); Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (Harlow: Longman, 2001). 30 See Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 183–84, with reference especially to the work of Homi K. Bhabha; and Pratt. 28
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across the colonial divide” (Moore-Gilbert, 116), are often too broad and too detached from historical processes, causes, and conscious agendas. “Contact,” in particular, is unsatisfactory. Like “connection,” it is always true in some sense, yet precisely for this reason it signifies little unless heavily qualified. Hybridity has too many biological connotations and, again, means little in and of itself. Creolization, because it is a linguistic metaphor, perhaps comes the closest to describing cultural negotiation and mediation involving clearly defined cultural change (an aspect missing from both “hybridity” and “contact”). Middle Ground is vague, but thanks to White’s book about its function, it may now serve as a heuristic concept. Yet the concept of the Middle Ground is appealing in the Mediterranean, where there was no empire to dictate anything (until Rome and its mare nostrum ). The Mediterranean also forces us to see the “Greek versus natives” problem in terms of “networks of exchange” rather than as if one culture poured itself from its own overflowing cups into the empty containers of the receiving culture. If “the Mediterranean is exchange,” as Fernand Braudel claims, it is the Mediterranean net works that provided a context for colonial Middle Grounds.31 “Network” (réseau ) is a key term in Mediterranean studies. The net work may be one of trade: one port has no existence without another. It may be one of myth and religion: the presence of the Phoenician god Melqart in western Sicily made it possible for the myth of Herakles’ travels to be superimposed on the terrain. It may be one of identity: the mythical Greek Odysseus became Utuse, the ancestor and leader of the Etruscans. These days the network concept is filtering everywhere, changing sets of values and assumed hierarchies of centers and peripheries. It is characteristic of aspects of the Internet and postmodern thinking, presenting a new vision of geography and human space. It is quickly replacing the botanical metaphor common since the nineteenth century: the “tree,” with its trunk and subsidiary “branches” of languages and races. The new mind-set is apparent in a variety of expressions in current critical thought. Arguing against “arborism” and
This phrase is often repeated in various forms in Braudel’s seminal work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , trans. Siân Reynolds, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Glasgow: Collins, 1972–73). 31
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in favor of networks, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the image of the rhizome, an “endless,” interconnected root system (a network with no center) giving rise to leafy plants above the sur face. The rhizome “assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers.” The rhizome, therefore, is a network: “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.”32 It is my view that the interconnectedness of ancient Greek citystates, whose geographic horizons were ever widening—through such networks as those of mother cities and colonies, trade connections, ritual embassies, oracular centers, Panhellenic sanctuaries, and political and military alliances— is not only what came to be “Greek civilization” but what was mainly responsible for it. The network, with its changing connections and “bypasses,” its fluctuating points of importance and lack of a hierarchical center, created the virtual center of Greek identity.33 Within these networks, it was confrontation in the Middle Ground—inhabited, from the Black Sea to the western Mediterranean, by non-Greek peoples more different from one another than the Greeks were among themselves—that shaped the “Greek” identity. It was also this Middle Ground that sometimes created irredentist claims to colonial territories and at other times served the purpose of accommodation. Accommodation and Appropriation in Ancient Sicily
Both irredentism and accommodation are apparent in the ancient Mediterranean and are prominently expressed in one historical situation where Greeks, Phoenicians, and Elymians (of western Sicily) confronted each other. Analysis of this situation may illustrate the limits of binarism; the need for temporal relativism; the Greek, decentered Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo- phrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 6 –7 . 33 See Irad Malkin, “Networks and the Emergence of Greek Identity,” in Mediter- ranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity , ed. Irad Malkin (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 32
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approach to place, religion, and ethnicity; and the emergence of a Middle Ground as a place of mutual negotiation within the Mediterranean network. In western Sicily, the Middle Ground is not just a metaphor but a physical space where peoples interacted. Depending on changing circumstances, each side— Greek and Phoenician colonists, native Elymians—appropriated certain aspects of cultic and mythical figures from the “other,” sometimes for the sake of mediation and coexistence and sometimes to justify hostilities. The framework of this dynamic is mythical: one of the labors of Herakles was to overcome the monster Geryon and bring his herd of cattle from the edges of the earth back to Mycenae. En route he stopped in Sicily (at modern Erice), where he fought with Eryx, the eponymous ruler of the northwestern tip of Sicily; having won, Herakles left the land in the hands of its inhabitants until the day when one of his own descendants should claim it. Aristocrats who were considered true Herakleidai (descendants of Herakles) were often regarded as rightful rulers and founders. In Sparta, for example, the heads of both royal houses were Herakleidai, as were the Corinthian founders of Syracuse (Sicily) and Corcyra (Corfu). About 580 BCE Pentathlos, a Herakleid from Knidos, in Asia Minor, attempted to conquer western Sicily but failed; around 509 BCE Dorieus, a Herakleid Spartan who was frustrated in his designs on the kingship, tried the same, hoping to found a city that he would call Herakleia in honor of his ancestor. Dorieus was making use of a prophecy that claimed that “Herakles himself had acquired all the country of Eryx to belong to his descendants” (Herodotus, 5.43; see Malkin, Myth and Territory , 203–18).34 But he was killed while fighting a coalition of Phoenician colonists and native Elymians. One of his followers, Philippos of Kroton, who also died in battle, embodied the fluidity of Greekbarbarian boundaries: he was “the most handsome of the Greeks of his day” (Herodotus, 5.47), and because of his beauty, the Elymians, his enemies, venerated him with his own cult. After Dorieus’s death, one of his lieutenants, Euryleon, abandoned the Eryx project and instead
The final section of this essay is developed in much greater detail in Irad Malkin, “Herakles and Melqart in the Western Mediterranean,” in Ethnic Appropria- tions and Cultural Borrowings , ed. Erich Gruen (forthcoming). 34
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took over a colony belonging to the Greek city Selinous (modern Selinunte) in southwestern Sicily, which he refounded as Herakleia. At first the story seems succinctly binary: a charter myth as explicit as that of Abraham and the Promised Land in the Old Testament, an attempted colonization with clear irredentist proclamations, initial failure, and eventual fulfillment of the prophecy—although not at the site originally intended. However, here too a Middle Ground approach reveals a far more complex and reversible situation. The Herakles myth in Sicily belongs to the pan-Mediterranean net work of Greek-Phoenician exchange. It was Phoenician Tyre that disseminated Melqart, with whom Herakles came to be identified, in the western Mediterranean. 35 Tyre had been colonizing there at the same time as the Greeks, founding settlements in Tunisia (Carthage), Sardinia, Malta, Sicily, and Spain. In Tyrian colonies the cult of Melqart, considered the founder both of Tyre itself and of its dynasty, was prominent, and annual ritual visits from the colonies to Tyre were de rigueur. That there were no kings in these colonies probably reflects the exclusive prerogative of the king of Tyre, who was defined in terms of his association with Melqart (the name combines the words Mlq , “Lord,” and qrt , “city,” and so signifies “Lord of the City”). The Phoenicians brought his cult to Carthage, to Gadir in Spain, and to Sicily, where it was associated with the temple of Astarte in Eryx. Founding a city and founding a temple to Melqart were conceptually equivalent. Since the Herakles portrayed by Homer had been a wild adventurer and a nomad, rather than the founder of a city, it seems likely that attributing to him the idea of a god-hero taking possession of territories and laying the foundation of a city was originally Phoenician (see Aubet, 144–59). It seems evident, if paradoxical, that the Phoenician colonists in Sicily were responsible for creating there a cult geography of Melqart, which Greek colonists, in turn, identified with the mythical itinerary of Herakles and then transformed into an irredentist charter. But it took almost a century and a half for the myth to become irredentist. There was a significant period during which, as White’s Middle Ground approach would indicate, no single dictating authority existed in most
See Corinne Bonnet, Melqart: Cultes et mythes de l’Héraclès tyrien en Méditerranée (Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 1988). 35
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of the areas concerned. Western Sicily had mostly been a “nondictating” Middle Ground of Greeks, Phoenicians, and Elymians since the late eighth century BCE until the failed attempts of Pentathlos (c. 580) and Dorieus (c. 509). Only with these two do we find Herakleid Greeks trying to “dictate” by creating a new language of colonial appropriation and justification. Their violent, unsuccessful efforts at colonization need not overshadow, teleologically, the long period of Middle Ground accommodation that preceded them. It was this Middle Ground situation that also allowed for a reversal of the use of the Herakles myth. Shortly after the death of Dorieus, the myth was used to pacify and mediate relations. Dorieus’s successor, Euryleon, founded his Herakleia on a site that had once belonged to Phoenicians and then had been taken over by another Greek city, Selinous. Its previous name, Makara, was Phoenician, and the promontory by the city was probably called rsmlqrt , “Headland of Melqart.” If the identification of Herakles and Melqart served Dorieus to justify irredentist claims, the same identification now served the purposes of accommodation and cooperation with Phoenicians and indigenous populations. When Euryleon’s Greeks founded the new Herakleia, they were allying themselves with non-Greek locals against other Greeks. “Greek” colonization, therefore, did not mean Greek solidarity. The binary approach is certainly legitimate, but only for the first half of the stor y, the “Promised Land” part. If we scrape the surface, we see that it was possible for the Greeks to graft the myth of Herakles onto western Sicily because the Phoenicians had already done so—the result of a Middle Ground that had existed for almost two centuries. Paradoxically, this is probably why Dorieus expected his charter myth to be taken seriously. It is a mistake to see charter myths as merely cynical or one-sided. Wrongheaded or far-fetched as it may seem, an invading power with an explicit justification engraved on its banner expects the justification to be accepted. The Herakleia that was finally founded had a new emphasis: no longer aggressively irredentist but, on the contrary, dedicated to the accommodating language of the Middle Ground. It implied a new alliance with Herakles, the god-hero who could be seen as venerated by both Greeks and Phoenicians. In Greek religious terms, Herakles-
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Melqart already “held the land.” Thus a colonial charter myth metamorphosed into a myth of pacification and mediation. Conclusion
Greek colonization illustrates the prior existence of modalities different from modern colonialism. Although often treated in modern scholarship as “Western” in culture and conduct, Greek colonization indicates, on the contrary, the existence of a world diametrically opposed to the hierarchical, centralized concept of the Christian-territorial kingdom or empire: a decentered political space comprising numerous sovereign, geographically noncontiguous city-states. And unlike Christian colonialism, Greek colonization did not aim to convert. It operated in the polytheistic Mediterranean, a diffuse world of gods and heroes, with religions devoid of canonical sacred texts, often lacking professional castes of priests and revealed (or any other) “truths” to teach the indigenous peoples. Nonhierarchical and nonexclusionar y, Greek colonization shared in a wide-ranging network that included various native populations and other maritime colonists, such as the Phoenicians and the Etruscans. Nor did the Greeks set out with the explicit intention to “Hellenize.” During the Archaic period they did not colonize to disseminate a superior civilization, for the simple reason that they did not think that there was any “Greek man’s burden” to bear. In the Mediterranean Middle Ground a new discourse of hostility might have emerged, but neither calculated Hellenization nor cultural imperialism can be traced there. Instead of considering acculturation a zero-sum game, a search for “who was first” or whose influence was stronger, one should apply the concept of the network—reciprocal, accumulative, dynamic—to analyze colonial encounters. The Sicilian Middle Ground worked because it belonged to a much greater network: the ancient Mediterranean, where a Phoenician Melqart could be exchanged with a Greek Herakles, with diametrically opposed political uses: irredentism and accommodation. Observing ancient Greek colonization through the prism of modern imperialism and colonialism is therefore misleading. It must be
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viewed rather as a network with crosscurrents gradually growing and spreading through the constant overlapping of additional subnet works— of trade, religion, migration, religious cults, and more. These aspects form a multifocal lens through which to view colonial encounters and identities. The contemporary need to theorize our postcolonial world— casting doubt on essentialism and accepted hierarchies—and the emphasis on creolization, hybridity, and contact zones have joined here with Mediterranean historiographical concepts, especially Braudel’s réseau , and with colonial Middle Ground theory. I doubt that such helpful concepts could have emerged without changes in our own prisms of obser vation and new questions posed by postcolonial theorists. These now allow (and are prodding) historians of antiquity to see ancient colonization in a different light.
Irad Malkin is Maxwell Cummings Chair for Mediterranean History and Culture and
professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University, where he coedits the Mediterranean Historical Review and directs the Center for Mediterranean Civilizations Project. Among his publications are Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (1987), Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (1994), and The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (1998), as well as an edited collection, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (2001).
