This chapter is concerned with identity and how it was perceived in the ancient world. The principal issue can be simplified down to whether blood (kinship) relationships or a shared cultural background (such as a common language, material culture, belief system, cultural practices) were what united ancient socio-political groups. Thus, the issue is in some sense related to the nature/nurture debate of the modern social sciences and, perhaps more pertinently, the nomos/physis divide in Greek philosophy. Scholars on each side of the debate are, of course, well aware that both ethnicity (blood) and culture (a shared heritage) played a part in the construction of ancient identities.
It is a well-rehearsed truism that scholars frame their interpretations of the past in terms of the preoccupations of the present. It is hardly coincidental that interest in identity has blossomed over the past two decades. The same period has witnessed the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the re-emergence of nationalism from the Baltic to the Balkans, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and elsewhere, concerns about globalization and the desire to promote local diversity and identity, and the emergence of a militant brand of Islam that privileges a religious identity over the nation-state entities familiar to and favored by the West.
While a preoccupation with identity and especially cultural identity may be in vogue in post-modern and post-colonial scholarship, interest in the origins of groups is by no means new. Leaving aside the interest among ancient writers (e. g. Herodotus and Cato the Elder, to name but two), modern scholarship once took a keen interest in such matters. Darwinian-type evolutionary theories, when applied to matters of race and the origins of peoples, were the stuff of respectable scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This applies not just to studies of the past but also to the social sciences, including ethnography and physical anthropology (Trigger 1989: 113-47). The more extreme versions of this type of scholarship (e. g.
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The work of Gustaf Kossina) gave a veneer of intellectual integrity to the racial policies of German fascism, and were wholly discredited when the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed. The study of the origins and characteristics of ancient races was consigned to the dustbin of scholarship. Physical anthropology now maintains that there is no way to recognize racial types in individual skeletons, though comparisons across a broad sample of a population may allow identifications to be posited with varying degrees of certainty. With the advent of research into ancient DNA, the issue of true ancestry is back on the academic agenda, though issues of race are mostly avoided. At the moment, the difficulty of recovering ancient DNA makes the sample sizes from ancient populations quite small, but we may assume that the datasets will grow over time. Recent studies on the origins of Ashkenazi Jews are just one example of where this kind of research might go in future (Behar et al. 2006).
After the Second World War the study of ethnicity was either put aside or safely sanitized by the recognition, by virtue of ethnographic analogy, that kinship relationships could be highly, if not entirely, fictional. Antiquity usefully provided plentiful examples of this. Much of the kinship diplomacy of the Greek world is based on mythological genealogies, often tenuously constructed by means of erudite and arcane scholarship. The focus on the cultural aspects of group identity similarly served to insulate the study of the past from the taboo of race. Nevertheless, the study of identity was largely downplayed until political events in the modern world brought the topic back into fashion. The new scholarship on identity could feel safe in that it was concerned not with race but with how ancient groups perceived themselves (and others) and how they were perceived by others. Such scholarship might well cast light on ancient and scholarly attitudes to race and racism (cf. Bernal 1987 and its numerous critiques, e. g. Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996), but was not concerned with race itself.
Thus, the emphasis shifted away from who people really were (and where they came from) to who they thought they were (i. e. the “construction” of identity). Group identity can be predominantly about the shared factors that united people. This is sometimes referred to as “aggregative identity.” Equally important is what excludes an individual from membership of the group and how one group recognizes another. Groups often define themselves in relation to, and especially in contrast with, others. This is referred to as “contrastive” or “oppositional identity”; a familiar example of this from classical antiquity would be the contrast between Greeks and “Barbarians.” In the language of post-colonial scholarship this is a matter of “other-ing” the outsider (i. e. emphasizing what is different, deviant and dangerous about the outsider). Again, the onus can be on ethnic differences or divergence from cultural norms or some mixture of the two. The contrast can be extreme - that the “other” is the polar opposite of the group - and is often pejorative, focusing on the dangerous and decadent. At the same time, that which is different, especially if it is decadent and a little dangerous, can also be attractive. This too has a negative undercurrent, with the “other” being characterized as seductive and corrupting. Many of these ideas can be seen in Western attitudes to the East (Said 1978).
These kinds of attitudes affect how a group sees itself and how it depicts other groups in writing and the visual arts, but can also influence how groups interact.
When studying identity we must be aware of the crucial difference between a perspective from within the group itself (an emic viewpoint) and that from without (an etic perspective).
Another factor that warrants consideration when looking at identity concerns our sources of evidence. We need to consider in what context people discuss or stress their identity. Passing references to how a group sees itself may be largely coincidental, but explicit discussions of identity are unlikely to be so. The motives for explicit expression of identity may vary (for example, group identity may be perceived to be under threat, or the informant may be seeking to flatter the reader), but as a conscious choice the evidence it provides cannot be taken at face value, and must be evaluated in context.
Physical manifestations of identity in the visual arts and material culture are even more problematic. The difficulty is this: changes in material culture need not necessarily be connected with group identity. Consistent patterning in physical evidence (e. g. in terms of artifact styles, settlement types, burial customs) allows the identification of “archaeological cultures” (Trigger 1989: 148-206). This is a meaningful way to structure the evidence for non-literate societies; when there are written sources we can hope for some evidence of a self-ascribed identity to survive. There is no a priori reason to assume that “archaeological cultures” correlate with socio-political or ethnic groupings; they are effectively modern constructs. Moreover, group identity need not be manifested physically or may have been marked in ways that leave little archaeological trace; costume is one very obvious possible example. Equally, variability in material culture need not be connected with group identity. Indeed, there is a lively theoretical debate on the meaning of stylistic variability (e. g. the papers in Conkey and Hastorf 1990). To take a crude example, in AD 384 the use of ivory diptychs was restricted to those of consular rank by imperial edict (Cod. Theod. 15.19.1). Thus ivory diptychs are a marker of social status, not ethnicity.
To discuss ethnicity in the archaeological record, the interpreter must first evaluate whether the physical evidence or representation is a manifestation of group identity; it might mark some other element in personal identity (such as gender or status). Secondly, even if it is a manifestation of group identity, one must consider whether it is a conscious expression or simply a by-product of subscribing to cultural norms (e. g. is a Roman depicted wearing a toga making an explicit reference to his citizenship or simply wearing the normal garb of a citizen?); this roughly equates to Wiess-ner’s (1990) concepts of “emblemic” and “assertive” style. Some scholars see these problems as insurmountable and eschew the use of physical evidence in this area (cf. J. Hall 2002: 24, who feels archaeological evidence for ethnicity must be informed by text). Others, including the present author, disagree while stressing the importance of context as the key to identifying conscious choice in the physical manifestation of group identity (e. g. Herring 1995).
The aim of this introduction has been to outline something of the background to and issues surrounding the study of identity in antiquity. There were a great many peoples living in and around the Mediterranean in antiquity, including Egyptians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, to list but a few well-known examples. We shall focus on the
Greeks and the Romans while referring to some of the others groups with whom they had direct contact.
World History
