Finally, though we should not desist from the pursuit of the historical Greeks, it is to a significant extent true that the Greeks are what we ourselves - and previous generations of scholars and students - have made of them, and that just as previous generations’ versions of the Greeks may look bizarrely and transparently of their age to us, so ours will do likewise to future generations of ancient historians.
For us, as for previous generations, Greek identity is formed by analogy to the nation state, so that (at least since the nineteenth century) “fringe” regions of the Greek world, such as southern Italy, Sicily or the Black Sea, too easily drop from our attention. Analogy with the Cold War, together with the attraction of a simple binary plot derived from Thucydides, arguably encouraged a disproportionate concentration on the rivalry of Athens and Sparta and their respective power blocks (though it is worth remembering that this also forms a significant subplot of Herodotus’s version of archaic Greek history). It is no coincidence that the emphasis on ethnic identity (and its fragmentation) and on the construction of the Other has largely arisen since the breakdown of Cold War certainties and the identification/creation of other external threats (cf. Herring, ethnicity and culture, section 1). The emphasis in the latter half of the twentieth century on excavating women’s lives was, in some cases explicitly, linked to contemporary feminist movements (cf. Richlin, writing women INTO history); recent work on the “oriental” seclusion of Greek women or on the constructed nature of gender and sexuality again reflects modern concerns (Llewellyn-Jones 2003, Golden and Toohey 2004).
The Greeks have also been - and arguably indeed continue to be - exemplary in any number of areas: in providing privileged models for art, architecture and literature (or more recently for sexual liberation), or as an archetype of a superior rationality of which “we” are inheritors. Increasingly there has been a discomfort about any such essentialist claims, and the “Greek miracle” has instead become articulated in more specific or nuanced terms: of the unique experience of the face-to-face community (so a common emphasis on the questioning nature of Greek tragedy), the quality of the literature that Greek society gave rise to, or by emphasizing the Greeks’ having been seen to be exemplary, the importance of the classical tradition, without ever quite seeming to identify with those claims of exemplariness ourselves. Needless to say, like the custom of one British national newspaper of publishing salacious “royal stories” only in so far as they are media stories, this is to have one’s cake and eat it. We do not know how to sell the Greeks.
World History
