Greek representations of foreign peoples tend to emphasize the polarities between themselves and others, but it is important to emphasize that there are a number of overlapping models for understanding the relationship of Greek and foreign identities which cannot always be reconciled into a single consistent pattern. Alongside the neat polarities of the Nile and Danube rivers and the way Greek and Egyptian customs mirror each other (Hdt. 2.33-35), Greece (or particular localities: Ionia or Athens) can be represented in terms of climate as the center of the whole inhabited earth (Hdt. 1.142, Xen. Poroi 1.6); the further one goes north or south, the more extreme and inhospitable the conditions. As we have seen in the context of the names of the gods, there is also a powerful model of diffusion at work: everything must have had its origin somewhere, someone must have been the first inventor of any custom, and so one can trace the route by which pederasty, say, was acquired by the Persians or Poseidon by the Greeks. The tag of being open to foreign customs - applied typically to two imperial peoples, the Persians and Athenians - is at least ambivalent in the weight given to it ([Xen]. Ath. Pol. 2.8, Thuc. 2.38, Hdt. 1.135). At the same time, in some cases we can suspect a sneaky sense of cultural superiority beneath the pattern of diffusion: it is at least a happy accident that in Herodotus’s own day the Greeks possess the names of more gods even than the Egyptians. Here and in a few other instances we can also see rare glimpses of a developmental schema at work, the idea for example that barbarians represent an earlier stage of development (see esp. Thuc. 1.6; cf. Hdt. 1.56-58 on Pelasgians).
All these models for the explanation of difference can also collapse and reveal that they are underpinned by universal (Greek?) rules. Accounts of the different sacrificial or divinatory customs of x or y people all take for granted common assumptions: that sacrifice or divination are conceived of in fundamentally similar ways. Darius’s famous demonstration of the diametrically opposed customs for the disposal of the dead of Greeks and Indians - often represented as a soft statement of cultural relativism - in fact illustrates a universal principle (Hdt. 3.38; cf. 7.136): that custom is king of all, and that anyone who dares mock another’s custom is mad (as the bad end of the Persian king Cambyses then demonstrates). Similarly, if the Scythian climate is the reverse of all other countries, with rain and thunder so rare in winter that they are counted as marvels when they occur (Hdt. 4.28), the underlying explanatory framework - that reversals of what can normally be expected in a particular location count as marvels, terata - is a universal one that can be applied to any context.
At the same time, as has been much emphasized in recent scholarship, polarities between Greeks and others can also be undermined and problematized. A number of authors blur the lines between Greek and barbarian - this can be seen, for example, in Euripides’ questioning of whether Greek behavior is in fact barbaric (Said 1984), or Herodotus’s insinuation that the Athenians have taken on the imperial mantle of the Persians (Moles 1996). Foreign peoples can be characterized as providing a tidy analogue to Greek experience: so, for example, the Scythians are figured in their nomadism as foreshadowing the Athenian evacuation of Attica in the Persian Wars (Hartog 1988), the Persian expedition to Greece as a parallel to the Athenian expedition to Sicily (Rood 1999). Surprising questions are also asked about the nature of identity itself, over what are the crucial markers of identity, for example, or whether a people can determine their own identity at all: so, for example, Herodotus’s account of two communities on the border of Egypt and Libya, determined (because of their desire to eat beef) to be Libyans, but who are told in forthright terms that they have no say in the matter (Hdt. 2.18; cf. 2.30). Herodotus’s report of Egyptian linguistic ethnocentrism (2.158), while it may also be accurate (cf. the Greek graffiti at Abu Simbel: ML 6), might be interpreted as undermining Greek ethnocentrism, as showing a degree of sophisticated, self-conscious concern over the kinds of distinctions between Greeks and barbarians found elsewhere in his work. Like the “justification” for racism that other peoples are racist too, at another level it could also enable and “justify” Greek ethnocentrism (Redfield 1985).
At this point, it is perhaps necessary to throw some cold water over this kaleidoscopic analysis of Greek perceptions of their own identity vis-a-vis others. We need first to understand how perceptions of what divides the Greeks and others culturally change over time. If the opposition Greek-barbarian was only really brought into sharp focus in the aftermath or at the time of the Persian wars, it also took on a very different significance over time: the fourth century sees both Xenophon’s elevation of the barbarian Persian Cyrus into a model of just kingship (albeit Cyrus was a high point from which the Persian monarchy declined steeply) and Isocrates’ rousing of Panhellenic feeling for a crusade of vengeance for the Persian wars. The Hellenistic period, with its creation of Greek elites in the successor kingdoms of Egypt and the Near East reconfigured the boundaries of “Greek” identity yet further. To describe the character of Greek identity then by assigning places in a seemingly timeless hierarchy to the various criteria for identity ultimately appears as an artificial, even a sterile, exercise. Though, despite the evidence we have seen, Greeks did not theorize or agonize over their identity as we do, it is perhaps no less true of them than of us that it is the character of their confusion over who they were that distinguished them rather than any shopping list of distinct characteristics that they liked to see as their own.
World History
