To comprehend the points of contact between the so-called Greek world and that of the eastern Mediterranean and to describe it over a two-hundred-year period is no light undertaking. There are many reasons for this. First, the juxtaposition of‘Greeks’ and ‘non-Greeks’ suggests these were two separate ‘worlds’, and the opposites of ‘Greeks’ and ‘non-Greeks’ implied therein clearly betrays a Hellenocentric point of view and one which is likely to detract from how this period must be more objectively approached. Yet this is a question which must be considered first and foremost: is this point of view grounded in historical fact or does it merely reflect an ‘orthodoxy’? There is also the problem of historical methods, which must not be simply ignored.
Hellenocentrism has characterized the study of all aspects of classical antiquity for centuries. That there was one Greek World and on Greek Identity was regarded as being as much a fact as a unique Greek Way in world history. It was supposed to have generated itself essentially from within itself; in a special relationship with the so-called Western World. These premises have begun increasingly frequently to be questioned in recent years, even though mainstream scholarship remains wedded to them (Rollinger 2004a). As a result, the idea of the unity of the Greek world yielded to a conception which emphasizes regional differences and its special identities, and subjected any definition of ‘Greekness’ based on Sparta and Athens to critical reexamination. This observation is valid not only for the pre-archaic and archaic periods (Gehrke 1986; Morris 1997; 1998; 2000), but also for the classical (P. Funke 1994; 1997; 1998; S. Funke 2000). Moreover the legend of the ‘Greek wonder’ as a selfgenerated process, which owed its suggestive power to an alleged uniqueness of the ‘Greek spirit’ and of the ‘Greek character’, yielded to a growing awareness that the drive towards advancement, observed in certain regions of Greece, is simply unthinkable without the external impulses of an extensively integrated Mediterranean world (Burkert 1992; Rollinger & Ulf 2004a). Any description of the contact between the ‘Greeks’ and the ‘non-Greeks’ in a set geographical area therefore meets with already nearly insurmountable difficulties. This subject and its problems become even more precarious because modern scholarship has largely exposed both the notion of the ethnos (Ulf 1996a; J. M. Hall 1997; Mclnerney 2001; Morgan 2001) and that of culture (J. M. Hall 2004) as constructs, which were themselves subject to strong diachronic fluctuations and falsely an only apparent measure of stability.
Although this chapter directs our attention to intercultural contact with the eastern Mediterranean in the fifth and fourth centuries bce, the premise is not one of a collision of two distinct worlds, which are to be understood as ‘Greek’ and ‘nonGreek’, but rather under the auspices of contemporary patterns of awareness, their exploitation from within and without, and the historical implications bound to them (for panhellenic notions and their exploitation, cf. Flower 2000; for the actual lines of confrontation transcending ‘national’ frontiers, e. g., Ritter 2001). In the following our focus of attention will be the manifold interrelations with the Persian empire, which informed the Greek view of their eastern neighbour just as profoundly as the Greeks were bound to this vast empire in multiple patterns of exchange and contact (for this generally, Starr 1975; 1977; Vickers 1990; Jacobs 1994a; Briant 2002; de Jong 1997; Tuplin 1993; 1996; Duchesne-Guillemin 2002; Shaki 2002; Scheer 2003; Wiesehofer 2002; 2003a).
World History
