Greek archaeology is often monopolized by the art of classical Athens, thanks to its standing monuments, its vases made largely for export, and its historical reputation. In the context of this chapter, just how much wider was the world of Hellenism, and how can archaeology help us understand and visualize the expanded arena of classical antiquity? For the Greek culture of the polis flourished in hundreds of city-states, initially dispersed across the Aegean archipelago, then multiplied on the shores of the Adriatic, the Black Sea, North Africa, Europe, and eventually as far as the Indus river. Never centered on a single city or power, this expansive network of linked yet independent poleis gave Hellenism ininite confrontations with other cultures in local constellations, unlike the expanding and contracting frontiers of the Rome-centered world analyzed in this chapter. Moreover, the origins of this polis culture took root in a much wider Mediterranean world than ancient Greeks, or modern Europeans, have always recognized. The culture of classical Greece reached deep into prehistory and the Levant, while its ultimate expansion through Macedonian conquest extended down the Nile and up the Himalayas. Thus in its origins and its reach, Greece was always part of a wider world, and archaeology illustrates this extent and variety, beyond textual sources.
Prehistoric Prelude: Contacts East and West
The Mediterranean had enjoyed links with a wider world since the Late Bronze Age, when exotica such as Baltic amber from northern Europe and Mesopotamian
Seals made their way into wealthy tombs and palaces in Greece (Gale 1991; Cline 2007; Cline and Harris-Cline 1998). As with the circulation of goods in the Roman Empire, maritime trade is richly illustrated in shipwrecks full of cargoes reflecting contacts around the Mediterranean. Archaeology has animated Near Eastern texts and images of commodities and luxuries with the contents of two ships that sank off the coast of southwest Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age (Bass 1998). Key to the wider world at the time was a network of diplomatic relations maintained between Near Eastern principalities, through gift exchange and marriage alliances (Liverani 1990). While such relations survive primarily in texts (royal correspondence from Egypt, Babylon, and the Hittite capital of Hattusas), recent analysis of luxury artifacts (ivory, faience) sees artists at royal courts such as Ugarit practicing a form of “diplomacy by design,” by creating a deliberate hybridity in art (Feldman 2005). It was in such luxury arts that Aegean “Keftiu” (in Egyptians’ terms), distinguished themselves in Near Eastern sources, and applied these arts to decorate palaces in the Egyptian delta (Avaris) and the Canaanite Levant (Tel Kabri).
But Aegean rulers (Minoans on Crete, then Mycenaeans of mainland Greece) remained largely on the margins of the greater world empires of the east and their power dynamics, as did classical Greeks prior to the aggressive campaigns of Alexander the Great. “Keftiu” served as artists, merchants, and mercenaries, as in later Greek contact with the Near East. Not until the Roman period did Mediterranean leaders learn to exploit power relations with Near Eastern client kings, on an equal footing and to mutual advantage. Meanwhile, in the Bronze Age western Mediterranean, Mycenaean pottery was carried to Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and even as far as Spain, in an early prelude to later exploitation of resources by Aegean captains and entrepreneurs.
The distinctive international flavor of Greek culture proper that is the subject of this chapter belongs to the Iron Age (especially 1000-500 B. C.). Since the tenth century, Near Eastern luxury goods (faience, jewelry, ivory) had appeared in Greek tombs on Crete and Euboia, a sign of early contact probably via Phoenician traders, as well as of Greek enterprise in the Levant. Foreign craftsmen, as well, may have settled in the Aegean to produce these luxury goods (for a critical view of this hypothesis, see Hoffmann 1997). As raiders, traders, and mercenaries, “lonians” (Iavan) found opportunities in later centuries with then world powers Assyria and Egypt, leaving their names on foreign monuments (for example, at Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt) and bringing home exotic trophies (Figure 10.1). In the lands of the Bible, poets and prophets knew “Iavan” for their metals and slaves, prior to the fall of Assyria in 612 B. C. (Ezekiel 27.13), and in Egypt, Greek mercenaries were prized as “men of bronze from the sea” (Herodotus 2.152). An Ionian who served pharaoh Psammetichus in battle was rewarded with a gold bracelet and a polis, the command of a city: he commemorated his adventure on an Egyptian basalt statue, back home near Priene (Boardman 1999:281, igure 324). As much as ancient and modern sources glamorize this era (800-500 B. C.) as one of heroic exploration and adventure, in reality, Hellenes were largely in competition with, if not often in service to, Near Eastern commercial entrepreneurs and military masters, and the prizes they brought home reflect but a small share of foreign booty.
Figure 10.1 Syrian horse frontlet, ninth century B. C., found at sanctuary of Hera, Samos. H. = 27.3 cm. Inscribed as booty from Umqi seized by King Haza’el of Damascus (ninth century B. C.). Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut Samos 1988/1022: Kyrieleis
Perhaps the most important legacy of this early exchange was the adoption of the Northwest Semitic (Phoenician) alphabet by Greeks in the eighth century B. C., a tool passed on to Rome, Europe, and most of the literate world today. So closely associated was this innovation with its Phoenician sources that a scribe on Crete was still called a poinikastas (“Phoenicianizer”) in the sixth century B. C. (Supple-mentum Epigraphicum Graecum 27.631), and early writing was remembered as “Kadmeian letters,” named for Kadmos, a mythical Phoenician who settled at Thebes (Herodotus 5.58). Its path was complicated: Semitic alphabet writing first appears on a bronze cup buried at Knossos in the tenth century B. C., but Greek versions do not materialize until two or three centuries later, and then in several locales, including Italy. In the west, Semitic letters are scratched on Greek vases found in Italy (Ischia), Cypriots are involved at many key locales but ignored the alphabet at home, Phrygians and Etruscans may have adopted Semitic writing independently from Greeks, and the entire picture suggests multiple encounters between writers of Semitic letters and the rest of the Mediterranean. An attractive model for this important step in cultural transmission remains intermarriage and its bilingual offspring (Coldstream 1993; Shepherd 1999), a natural development among mobile and migrant populations, and one that inserts the role of women as well as men into Hellenic contacts. Meanwhile, Ionian Greeks may have adopted the demotic Egyptian system for their alphabetic numerals (Chrisomalis 2003): learning to count from Egypt but writing like Phoenicians. These lessons typify the variety of simultaneous engagements with a wider world throughout the classical Mediterranean in the first millennium B. C.
More material responses to the stimulation of Near Eastern culture include the first colossal Greek statues in stone of the seventh and sixth centuries B. C., closely modeled on Egyptian types (for an example from the island of Samos, long-time partner of Egypt, see Figure 10.2). Along with monumental architecture modeled on Near Eastern traditions, Greece eventually bequeathed these arts to post-classical Europe, together with institutions like the alphabet. Invisible until later texts are the long-lived intellectual fruits of this exchange, especially in Ionia, where developments in mathematics, cosmology, and philosophy may relect tutelage in Babylonian learning or Egyptian practices. It was in this early and fertile stage of contacts through trade and enterprise that the wider world of the eastern Mediterranean, in particular, contributed to the culture that became Greece (Burkert 1992), and these contacts are largely visible in archaeology (Morris 1992). Thus, Greece absorbed and incorporated major components of its wider world from an early age, and its natural orientation to maritime traffic and trade kept it a constant participant in the life of the ancient Mediterranean.
Famished Colonists and Thirsty Barbarians: Greeks and Others Overseas
A more deliberate stage of Greek-led expansion took the form of colonies implanted at strategic harbors and near attractive resources, all around the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea. Legends often trace these initiatives to hardship at home (as in the foundation of Cyrene in Libya: Herodotus 4.147-167), but Greeks may more often have followed the positive example and path of Phoenicians in seeking new and profitable economic niches abroad. While Greek memory celebrates heroic founders and their deeds in the textual “poetics of colonization” (Dougherty 1993),
Figure 10.2 Marble statue of youth (kouros) found in sanctuary of Hera, Samos; dedicated by Isches. Restored H. = 4.80 m. Date: ca. 560 B. C. Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut Samos 1987/908: Koppermann
Daily transactions and long-term effects may have been more closely determined by native agents and sub-elite Greek merchants, not by the aristocrats worshipped as leaders and heroes. Here the archaeological record helps restore equity across ancient lines of class and ethnicity, throughout the wider world, and demonstrates many modes of interaction and their results, not covered in literary sources.
A key recent development in understanding these relationships has been guided by new conceptualizations of the “archaeology of colonialism” (Lyons and Papa-dopoulos 2002), in a post-colonial age. Modern European experience has often influenced the way we view ancient sea-borne exploration, but new approaches and methods are uncovering a fresh variety of conigurations in this early Greek diaspora. Recently archaeologists have moved beyond identifying Greek artifacts abroad and their local imitations, and mapping their distributions as an index of Hellenism, assumed to be a civilizing force. Instead, more interesting and informative patterns of production and consumption in terms of native agendas emerge in these encounters (Dietler 1995; Shepherd 1999; Dominguez 2002). to a major shift in archaeological attention, non-Greek populations around the ancient Mediterranean are emerging more clearly. The very word “colonization” as a concept for early Greek expansion, and the powers of archaeology to distinguish and classify different historical experiences, have been questioned (Osborne 1998). Fresh new views of Greek expansion have opened up an even wider world, transcending frameworks like Hellenization or colonization, for a bilateral view of cultural interaction.
Often no more than trading outposts (manifest in names like “Emporion”) near harbors or rivers, with limited contact to the interior or up river except through indigenous partners, Greek “colonial” implantations can survive in town plans, building techniques, mortuary customs, and explicitly Greek imported goods. Moreover, within one generation of contact or settlement, local production of artifacts influenced by Greek forms displays a hybridity of culture difficult to translate into demographics, but clearly an important dimension of the way Greek culture multiplied itself across space, through time. Here archaeology allows us to compare settlements and ways of life in Iberia (at Emporion), Libya (Tocra, Cyrene), the Black Sea or Pontos (Olbia and other Milesian colonies), and Egypt, to consider the quality of life and relations with natives as a series of social experiments (Board-man 1999; Karageorghis 2003).
In many of these locales, newly arrived Greeks met vastly different social groups: strong tribal powers in proto-urban Illyria, nomads of the south Russian steppes along with semi-settled forest dwellers on the north coast of the Black Sea, Phoenician mercantile rivals in Sicily and Spain, and eventually the expansionist Persian empire in Scythia, Anatolia, and Egypt. They also encountered institutions alien to their own history, such as monarchy, and exported traditions of their own, such as athletics: soon “barbarians” like Macedonians (Herodotus 5.22) and Molossians (Pindar, Nemean 7.34-64) discovered long-lost Greek pedigrees and competed in pan-Hellenic games. Local developments as well as changed conditions back in Greece encouraged new waves of expansion in the fourth century, with a shift to escalated agricultural production abroad near cheap land and labor, notably on the north coast of the Black Sea (Randsborg 1994; Saprykin 1994). Thus, the myth of an early “age of colonization” receives important correction from the archaeological record, with its long-term picture of Greek (and non-Greek) mobility and enterprise, independent of strictly political events.
Illyria, Iberia, and beyond
The earliest colony on the north shore of the Black Sea, the island of Borysthenes (Berezan in Russian), was settled by Greeks in the later seventh century B. C., according to imported ceramics. But local handmade vessels continued to be made and used, and it has been argued that before houses in fully Greek style, on an orthogonal grid plan, were implanted in the late sixth century, settlers lived in native dugout houses, enhanced by Greek techniques such as mud-brick walls on stone socles (Solovyov 1999; Tsetskhladze 2004). In striking fusions of native and Hellenic traditions in the archaeological evidence, we can imagine the growth of a hybrid culture under Greek influence, even when we cannot identify inhabitants by ethnicity, or settlements as colonies. The Berezan model of interaction observed in housing is matched in burial customs at other Greek colonies. For example, at the Corinthian colony of Apollonia in Illyria, the dead were buried in limestone sarcophagi with Greek pottery, but incorporated into the local tradition of tumuli, leaving hundreds of earth mounds in the necropolis. In death, as in life, Hellenism abroad evolved into a new culture that drew from multiple traditions.
Colonialism without colonies, or exploitation of resources without permanent, political settlements, has been explored in southeastern Iberia (Dominguez 2002). Within Greek colonies like Emporion (Empuries), Greeks and Iberians lived separately at irst, although the Greek quarter shows few Hellenic features. Only with the Roman conquest, it has been argued, did Greeks assert their ethnic identity with an aggressive building program at Empuries (Kaiser 2003). But archaeology demonstrates a much wider sphere of interaction than at historical colonies such as Empuries. For example, monumental sculpture in southeastern Iberia in the ifth century was clearly inspired by Greek examples, but flourished in native settlements, especially as elite monuments in cemeteries (Dominguez 1999). That these statues were identiied with a ruling elite with close ties to foreign traditions is implied by their eventual destruction, a sign of popular native resistance to this ruling elite, it has been argued. Elsewhere within the Iberian sphere, a stone statue of a warrior was reused as a door jamb in an indigenous settlement in southern France: stylistic details connect it to Etruria and Greece as well as Spain, but its original function(s) remain to be explained from local conditions (Dietler and Py 2003). The development of Greek-inspired sculpture in Iberia and Gaul, and its demise, provide a contrast with the “subversive” use of Classical-style religious sculpture in Roman-era Germania, identiied as a sign of resistance rather than adaptation (Webster 1997:327; Dominguez 2002:80). Whether this reflects the striking differences between Greek and Roman interaction with their Mediterranean neighbors, or local divergences between Celtic and Iberian cultures, requires further testing of the archaeological record, but it moves inquiry beyond marking the mere presence or absence of Classical influences in the western Mediterranean, and towards understanding them.
The Greeks in Gaul: The Bride of Massalia and the Princess of Vix
Gaul was a signiicant arena for both Greeks and Romans abroad, beginning with Phocaean migration from Asia Minor to the mouth of the Rhone in southern France (compare Dietler 1997 and Hermary 2003, for different views of Greek colonization). Its principal Greek colony, Massalia, lies buried under modern Marseille, but new exploration reveals a constellation of satellite settlements in the hinterland of the port city, under Greek influence (Hermary 2003). In legendary accounts, the marriage of a Celtic princess (Gyptis) to a Greek settler of Massalia has the bride choose her consort from a selection of Greek suitors by offering him a cup of wine (Aristotle, Frag. 549 = Athenaeus 13.576; cf. Justin 43.3), which helps make ceramics found at colonial sites more than mere imports but bearers of meaning in colonial-native encounters (Dietler 1995). The pairing of a native female partner with a Greek trader in this story restores female agents to processes often reduced to mercantile exchanges between men, and recalls the crucial role of intermarriage stressed above.
Gyptis is not the only Celtic woman to play an active role in encounters between Hellenes and their wider world: in the mid-sixth century B. C., a magniicent bronze krater made its way into the grave of a Celtic princess, many miles up the Rhone and Seine from Greek Massalia (Figure 10.3). Probably made in Magna Graecia and re-assembled in Gaul, the size (1.64 m. in height) and splendor of this krater recall legendary vessels exchanged as gifts in archaic Greece and dedicated in Greek sanctuaries such as Samos (Herodotus 4.152). The Vix krater also claims a smaller twin in a rich burial in Trebenishte in the Balkans (Boardman 1999:237, igure 280), suggesting that certain artifacts played a key role in Greek trafic with “barbarians,” perhaps as lavish gifts establishing favorable relations. The rich variety of other imported items in the Vix tomb and at other sites in France demonstrates how successfully traders navigated local rivers and markets to distribute luxury goods far from the Mediterranean, and how these objects fed local elite ambitions and materialized their status. Indeed, certain classes of artifacts, most notably Attic black - and red-igure vessels found predominantly in Etruscan tombs in Central Italy, may have been produced largely for a non-Greek market, as barbarian tastes largely shaped specialized industries of early Greek art. How they were distributed, and what role natives rather than Greeks may have played in selecting as well as rejecting imports, are larger questions that open up important issues of social relations and local materialization of power, beyond mere “market” mechanics and notions of “trade” (see discussion in Arafat and Morgan 1994).
Just how Gaul negotiated its needs with Greeks can be compared with her unique relationship with Rome, in a later, imperial encounter where Gaul played the role of a crucial locale for “becoming Roman” (Woolf 1998; see the second half of this
Figure 10.3 Greek bronze krater found in Celtic grave at Vix, France. H. = 1.64 m. Date: ca. 530 B. C. Photo courtesy of Musee du Chatillonais, Chatillon-sur-Seine
Chapter). Explicit comparison between Hellenization and Romanization in southern France (at Glanum-St. Remy: Heyn 2006, or Marseille: Lomas 2004) illustrates how archaeology can pose and answer deliberate questions about Greeks and Romans among barbarians, with long-lasting effects on what became the culture called Europe. In the case of Massalia, its Greek identity survived, and was even actively retained by Romans, as a continuing, civilizing buffer against the “barbarians” of Gaul (Lomas 2004).
One lasting legacy of this encounter that involves both Greeks and Romans, embodied in vessels such as cups and kraters (bowls for mixing wine), was the introduction of Greek vines to southern Gaul, the basis of a long relationship that Italy, as well as Greece, conducted with the western Mediterranean. Greek drinking cups and amphoras, followed by local versions, trace the path and growth of native
Appetites for fermented goods, commodities also introduced to local agriculture (the origin of the modern French wines). But native rituals such as feasting predated the foundation of Massalia, and modern focus has shifted from Greek distribution to native consumption of these commodities (Dietler 1989). They were also linked to other trade goods, most notably slaves, by the Roman period: natives of Gaul readily traded their own enslaved war captives to Italians for wine, and Italians put those slaves to work in their vineyards to produce more wine for thirsty barbarians (Diodorus Siculus 5.26). Thus invisible cargoes, both human and consumables, lie behind the artifacts that we analyze for history, in a process where classical containers have probably played an exaggerated role in native dramas as imagined by archaeologists.
Traditions in architecture and settled life were slower to appear in Europe, but have been posited, as at Berezan. Innovations such as urban fortifications and stone socles supporting mud-brick walls at princely seats in Celtic territory (Heuneburg) have been claimed as symptoms of Mediterranean inluence (Wells 1980), when accompanied by Greek coins and pottery. But, as in the interpretation of ceramics and bronzes, other mechanisms could have inspired innovations, not merely imitation of classical forms. Are the oppida (hill forts) of Iron Age central Europe a native response to fortified citadels of the Mediterranean, a material sign of secondary urbanization, or a local development independent of classical cities (compare Wells 1984 and Hermary 2003 to Dietler 1989)? These early experiences on the edges of the Greek world form both a prelude and a contrast to Rome’s relationship with the same area (as discussed in the second half of this chapter). In particular, the dominant role of Greece and later Rome in these local urban developments, once assumed by archaeologists, has been examined more critically in Gaul and Germania (Woolf 1993).
The same building escalation strikes Illyria and other Balkan areas where Greek-style fortifications proliferate in the wake, it is assumed, of Greek colonization and inluence. Often such developments are linked by scholars to literary traditions that credit Athens with educating barbarians for a more civilized life. Tribes like the Molossians of Epirus claimed descent from Homeric heroes and sent princes to Athens for lessons in democracy (Plutarch, Pyrrhus 1), where some became honorary citizens (IG II2 226; Davies 2000). Can one apply these testimonia to the rise of planned cities and fortified citadels in northwest Greece, or are these architectural developments independent of contact with classical Greece? Comparative analysis throughout the wider world of Hellenism helps transcend local restrictions on these questions, and so do new methods in archaeology, such as surface survey which demonstrates widespread transformation of landscapes (or its absence) as a result of Mediterranean contact. Investigating a greater range of sites, such as modest native settlements as well as elite citadels, wealthy burials, or Greek colonies, may provide more information (as at Lattes, in southern Gaul: Dietler and Py 2003). By privileging classical sites and long-term effects on Europe, we surely have lost insights into regional microcosms that contributed to the larger picture.
Ancient stories and modern views of these regional encounters often anticipate or assume native resistance to Hellenic settlers, and the “civilizing” power of
Hellenism that transformed native life. These assumptions become leitmotifs in how Rome viewed her “barbarian” neighbors in the same areas, centuries later, along with the polarization of Greek and native as positive and negative, or at least unequal forces, in a hegemonic process. The variety of ancient settlements and archaeological juxtapositions suggest an infinitely more varied and complicated set of encounters at the boundaries between ancient cultures, beyond the inequalities assumed from modern colonialism.
In general, Greeks enjoyed greater freedom in the pre-Punic west, even with Phoenicians as constant rivals for markets and resources, than the Romans did once Carthage loomed as enemy number one. Yet the rise of Carthage also drove Greeks from the west as it left Rome to cope with Punic power, leaving little basis for comparing Greek and Roman contact. In areas where Romans replaced Greeks as chief foreign agents, and trading posts became provincial capitals, differences are more dramatic (Randsborg 1992). In a sense, Carthage and Rome largely diminished the visibility of Greek activity in the western Mediterranean (but see Emporion in Iberia: Kaiser 2003), and the rest of the story of their wider world belongs to the east.
The Eastern Front: Egypt
The wider world offered Greeks and Romans profoundly different challenges and opportunities in the Eastern Mediterranean, where major world powers had controlled events since the Bronze Age, unlike the western Mediterranean and the north (Europe and the Black Sea). Unlike the mother-city and colony pattern emphasized in literary sources, or the independent trading posts maintained by Greek entrepreneurs, archaic settlements in Egypt like Naukratis were established according to special regulations dictated by an Egyptian pharaoh (Herodotus 2.154, 178-182). They were restricted to the Nile Delta (i. e. coastal areas) and, unlike other Greek colonies, included representatives of many different Greek cities who maintained their own residential areas and religious cults. One of the first sites excavated by the founder of modern stratigraphic archaeology, Sir William Flinders Petrie, Nauk-ratis has received renewed attention in several modern campaigns (for summaries, see Boardman 1999:118-133; Moller 2000). Trading settlements like these are likely locales for lessons in counting, and if the Ionians did adopt an Egyptian numerical system (see above, with Chrisomalis 2003), we imagine this developed through activity at sites like Naukratis. But did emporia like these, with their ceramic and faience factories, or did more independent Greek traffic provide the kind of cultural exchange we see relected as Egyptian inluence on early Greek architecture and statuary (compare Figure 10.2)? How does Naukratis compare with the more independent settlement at Berenike on the Red Sea established in Ptolemaic and Roman times (below), linked as it was both to India and to Nilotic Egypt via desert trade routes (Alcock et al. 2003)? Farther west on the north coast of Africa (Libya), Greeks settled beyond Pharaonic or Punic powers in more “typical” Greek colonies at Cyrene, Tocra, and Euesperides (Barker et al. 1985; Gill 2004). Eastward up the Via Maris into the Levant, Greeks may have settled permanently after military service with Near Eastern armies, in enclaves or garrisons resembling pharaonic Tell Defenneh (Daphnae) in the Nile Delta (Niemeier 2001).
In many ways, Egypt cast a lasting spell over the Greek and Roman imagination, first struck by the tremendous scale and age of its monuments, while forever entranced by the mysteries of its royal hierarchy and religious system. From Herodotus to Plutarch, Greeks recognized or even exaggerated what was Egyptian in their own religious practices, and often attributed their own achievements in wisdom to Egyptian sources. Much of these connections transpired through traveling priests and sages attached to eastern courts, who brought eastern lore back to Greece, and Greek specialties to the east (Burkert 1992). This kind of activity is hard to document archaeologically, but had longer-lasting effects on culture.
In short, it was the archaic period or early Iron Age that first introduced Hellenism to the western Mediterranean and Europe, in ways that had profound and lasting effects on Rome’s relationship with these areas, and ultimately on modern “Europe.” In contrast, the greater powers of the east required negotiations that continued to challenge Greece and Rome as they did Europe, long after the end of classical antiquity. This contrast has been called “learning in the east and south, teaching in the west and north” (Boardman 1999:8, 282; cf. Coldstream 1993:105), a description that forces contacts in the wider world into a didactic, hegemonic model, disguising how much inluence traveled in both directions, in more than one place.
The Classical Moment: Greeks and “Barbarians"
An extensive sphere of activity, stimulated by the movement of people and goods, and highly productive in intellectual and cultural exchange, was forever altered (largely conceptually rather than practically) by the historic encounter between eastern Greeks and the expanding Persian empire. From the fall of Lydia (546 B. C.) through the battle of Plataea (479 B. C.), Ionians, then Athenians and central Greeks, and finally most of the Greek states engaged in battle with the largest land empire of the time. It was the Hellenes involved in this encounter, and principally the Athenians, who invented the concept of the barbarian in the aftermath of their defeat of the Persians (Hall 1989), and deployed it in discourse to designate, and often denigrate, those who did not speak Greek. This established an attitude towards the wider world inherited by the Romans, who applied it largely to the cultures that became western Europe. In the Greek world, it also simplified and lattened the variety of “other” cultures on their borders, reducing them to those who did not speak Greek or live in Greek-style communities. Archaeology has recently helped to recover the tremendous variety of these cultures.
Even at the moment the term “barbarian” was invented, the concept and its ideology veiled a material world long enchanted with eastern luxury goods—from peacocks to parasols—the archaeological record betrays an appetite for the culture of the enemy (see illustrations in Miller 1997). Like the captivation Greece exercised over its Roman captors (Horace, Epistulae 2 1.156), Achaemenid Persia largely shaped life in the eastern Mediterranean for Greeks, Persians, and many others, before and after the Battle of Marathon. While their influence is most vivid in metalwork, seals, and ceramics, even the design and message of the Parthenon frieze— perhaps the most famous classical work of art in modern eyes—may have been inspired by royal reliefs of Achaemenid Persia, the culture whose defeat it sought to celebrate (Root 1985). Other neighbors of Greece had become part of daily life and work. The very barbarians whom Herodotus analyzed and classiied in his Histories (4.1-82) policed the streets of Athens as Scythian archers or decorated the Parthenon frieze (horsemen in Thracian dress: see essays in Cohen 2000). Artists responsible for these vases and sculptures were often non-Athenians, who signed their works with foreign names; in building accounts, workmen on the Erechtheion frieze who were metics (resident aliens) or slaves (often foreigners) greatly outnumbered citizens as artists (Randall 1953). Thus, while rhetoric helped Athenian speakers and audiences distinguish themselves, for political purposes, from foreign enemies—Persians in the ifth century, Macedonians in the fourth century—their material world was an international one, with as many imported exotica and migrant artists as in the archaic period.
Similarly, Greek art and artists flourished in “barbarian” locales from the sixth century B. C. Most famously, the Persians themselves captured war trophies fTom Greece, including images of Athenian heroes like the Tyrannicides, and the statue of a woman made famous from Homeric poetry (the so-called “Mourning Penelope,” was found at Persepolis: Ridgway 1970:101-104, igure 139; Palagia 2008). Their palaces were decorated by eastern Greek craftsmen, who represented eastern costume with Greek drapery folds (Nylander 1970), just as later Persians (Parthi-ans) emulated Greek statuary (Boardman 2000). But elsewhere in the Persian empire, closer to Greece, contact and influence are also visible. Only recently has Achaemenid (rather than Greek or Anatolian) culture seen archaeological investigation in Asia Minor, with dramatic results (Bakir 2001; Dusinberre 2003). Within the borders of the Hellenized Persian world, stone carvers disseminated a distinctly “Graeco-Persian” style in gems, vessels, and funerary art (gravestones, sarcophagi), especially at locales such as Daskyleion in northwest Asia Minor, seat of a Persian satrap (Kaptan 2002). The fusion of Persian ambition with Greek style in service to a third party shows us the other side of the coin, as it were, to the non-Greek role noted above in Athenian art. Emphasis on Persia as the chief non-Greek “other” (Cohen 2000), in ancient and modern sources, also skirts the rich variety of other non-Greeks in Asia Minor: Carians adopted both Greek and Persian traditions to forge new identities in material culture, at contact points between East and West (Linders and Hellstrom 1987). Other native cultures of Anatolia at the interface of Greek and Persian spheres include Lydians and Phrygians (see essays in Cohen 2000 and in Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Kuhrt 1991), or the Lycian elite who affected Achaemenid styles in their tomb paintings and sculpture (Childs 1981; Miller 1997: igure 29).
Cultural encounters between Greeks and Persians transcended their own political boundaries and outlasted the ifth century. In a striking example of ethnic and aesthetic triangulation, one Greek artist signed a red-igured relief lekythos, depict-
Figure 10.4 Lekythos: Boar Hunt, the Xenophantos Painter. Clay, relief, red-igure painting, Athens. Second half of the 4th century BC. Inv. Number PA-1837.2. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.
Ing Persians hunting creatures both real and imaginary in an Oriental paradeisos, as “Xenophantos the Athenian.” (Figure 10.4) But he made it for a Crimean customer in the early fourth century: the vessel was found in a grave at ancient Pantikapaion on the north-eastern shore of the Black Sea (Miller 2003; Franks 2009). Beyond its fascinating incorporation into Greek art of Achaemenid hunting iconography (probably borrowed from imported stone seals), this vase also demonstrates the widened horizons of Graeco-Persian artistic activity that anticipates the cultural expansion enacted by Macedon. These experiences wove barbarian tastes and talents into “Greek” art in many locales over the centuries, in a way that challenges us to define Hellenism, in cultural and material terms, separately from its wider world.
Hellenism Abroad: Macedon and After
The political limits of the Greek world were changed dramatically with the expeditions of Alexander (the Great) of Macedon, whose ten years of campaigns brought Greek culture through conquest to Syria, India, and Egypt by 323 B. C. For the second but not final time, classical armies clashed with and triumphed over Persians, later reborn as the Parthian enemies of Rome. Short-lived as a world empire, this vast territory, combining the lands of Darius V and Philip II, soon re-consolidated itself following the death of Alexander into kingdoms based at Antioch (Syria), Alexandria (Egypt), Seleucia (Mesopotamia), and Pella in Macedon (Greece). Many of these cities lie buried under modern successors, but archaeological research in areas like Syria has produced valuable results in regions overshadowed by Roman remains. This fragmented Greek world was eventually absorbed by Rome through conquest and bequest, but the eastern Mediterranean remained profoundly Greek until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, or even the expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor and Egypt in the twentieth century. The Euphrates remained a significant frontier for the Romans as for Seleucid kings, requiring the establishment of border posts such as Dura-Europos and Ghebel el-Khalid as a bulwark against the Parthi-ans. Like Germania in the west, Persia and its successors defined the limits of Mediterranean expansion in the east. But they also transmitted (as Parthians) a classical style in sculpture and imagery that far outlasted the political power of Greece and Rome, and spawned a new classicizing style as far as the Hindu Kush (Boardman 1994:75-153).
While historical studies of this period are dominated by conquests, kings, and cities, its economy was far more visible in archaeology, in the contents of shipwrecks, and the production of amphoras that anticipates Roman trade patterns (Archibald 2002). It was in this era that Mediterranean interests in luxury goods and specialty commodities reached the Indian Ocean, a prelude to the escalation in Roman trade with the Asian sub-continent (Salles 1996).
In the wake of Macedonian conquest, garrisons and outposts of the Greek city mushroomed across Asia (Leriche 2003). At Ai Khanoum in Afghanistan (ancient Bactria), implanted classical theaters and gymnasia hosted Hellenic cultural practices such as drama and athletics, next to Persian-style palaces and houses built in local mud-brick technique. Local rulers reinvented themselves as Greek dynasts who minted coins and promoted their own portraits on them (Figure 10.5). Meanwhile, Greek cities at home became subject to Macedon, and to the rule of monarchy: Athens herself, bastion against barbarians, experienced Macedonian rule, which left its mark on Athenian art and archaeology (Palagia and Tracy 2002). In between Greece and Afghanistan, archaeological research in the Levant reveals
Figure 10.5 Bactrian coin (silver tetradrachm of Agathocles, 190-180 BC: British Museum, Coins and Medals 1923, 00101.7-1. © Trustees of the British Museum, 00031399001.
Hellenization on the ground, in architecture, sculpture, and mosaics at sites like Tel Dor in Israel (Stewart and Martin 2003).
At the same time, as in earlier ages, cultural influence traveled in both directions. In one lasting development in architecture, the practical and long-lived arch and its extension, the barrel vault, may have been launched in Greece as a re-creation in stone of mud-brick forms viewed by Alexander’s engineers in the east (Boyd 1978). Most notoriously, the conqueror himself, Alexander, was reputed to have adopted eastern dress, promoted marriage for himself and his officers with Persian wives, and demanded eastern-style obeisance from his soldier-subjects (Plutarch, Alexander; Arrian 4.10.5-12.5, 7.4.4). Modern and ancient versions of these anecdotes either deplore this behavior as signs of “going native,” or praise it as a vision of universal brotherhood; neither scenario may be close to ancient events. But even the legends underscore the implied or actual role of intermarriage in cultural interaction, emphasized above in considering encounters between Greeks and their neighbors in an earlier era (see above). Greek names soon proliferate in documents throughout the Hellenized Near East, without guaranteeing that we can thereby distinguish a Greek or Macedonian from a Hellenized native. Perhaps the most interesting conversions in both directions took place in the ritual sphere: Macedonian generals restored the shrine of Marduk at Babylon, even the highly Greek Ai Khanoum maintained a strictly Mesopotamian temple, and Greek kings in the east converted to Buddhism by the second century B. C. (Colledge 1987; Potter 2003). In Egypt, the new Macedonian dynasty founded by Ptolemy adopted Serapis (Osirapis: a fusion of Osiris, god of the underworld, and the bull-god, Apis), already popular among Greeks of Memphis, as the patron god of their new capital, Alexandria. Back in the Aegean, archaeological and epigraphic evidence shows a
Proliferation of foreign cults from Egypt, Syria, and Persia, at international places like the island of Delos.
Given the spell cast by Egypt and its relative proximity, it was no accident that the foremost of the cities founded by Alexander lay in Egypt, and ultimately replaced Naukratis as chief domain of Greek activity in coastal Egypt. The modern city has made ancient Alexandria difficult to trace archaeologically (see Alexandria and Alexandrianism, for a survey of material arts and culture), and recent exploration has focused on its submerged remains. Inside and outside of Alexandria, our understanding of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt is dominated by documents, chiefly papyri, and exploration of the interaction of Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, and Romans heavily weighted towards texts (e. g., Bilde et al. 1992). Yet these texts also suggest strategies for archaeological research beyond cities and archives. For example, the most multicultural arena of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been the countryside, where Greek settlers and Macedonian veterans (and later Romans) took advantage of new land and opportunities (Rowlandson 2003). Documentary papyri suggest how regional survey might reveal such textures, and current archaeological survey (e. g. in the Fayoum lake area, drained by the Ptolemies) could restore these dimensions of Greek life in Egypt. A shift in focus away from texts and monuments towards the more ubiquitous minor arts in clay, so productive for the study of early Greek activity in the Mediterranean, offers a more informative and equitable picture of eastern life in the Hellenistic period, especially in Alexandria (Rotroff 1997). Through Antony’s affiliation with Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler, Hellenistic Egypt took the losing side in a Roman civil war and fell to Rome as enemy territory. But a taste for Egypt long animated the world of Rome, not just in obelisk trophies or “pyramid” tombs set up in the capital, but in the widespread cult of Serapis and Isis, and in “Nilotic” landscapes decorating Roman villas.
One model for this vast new world, widely Hellenized after Alexander, derives from the ancient literary paradigm of the oikoumene or “inhabited,” i. e., civilized, world. But this concept privileges Hellenism as it overlooks the great variety of local cultures, maps the oikoumene along political borders, and neglects local developments that may have transpired independently of Greek or Macedonian influence. The Bosporan kingdom on the Black Sea is one case in point where local consolidation of power took place on its own terms (Alcock et al. 2003). As in the western sphere of Mediterranean activity, regional analysis helps greatly by “breaking up the Hellenistic world” into landscapes transformed, to transcend a narrow focus on cities and temples, statues, and coins as measures of Hellenism exported. A striking variety of regional identities was expressed in material culture, beyond strictly Greek and Persian styles. For example, a new style of column capital developed by Per-gamum, deliberately recalling earlier local forms, was featured in buildings they donated to cities like Athens. The fate of those identities in transition to more uniform Roman rule, and ultimately into the shadow of a new pair of superpowers, Romans and Parthians, has also recently come under scrutiny by archaeologists.
Beyond Greeks, Persians, and Macedonians as major players, old neighbors became new “barbarians,” in particular the Celts of Gaul. Reborn as Galatians, they attacked the city of Rome, the sanctuary of Delphi in Greece, and invaded Asia
Figure 10.6 Funerary monument of Philopappos of Besa, Mouseion Hill, Athens. A. D. II4-II6. Photo: Marie Mauzy
Minor in the third century B. C. (Mitchell 2003). Art and literature offer one picture of their assault and defeat, but only recently has archaeology revealed dozens of sites they fortified in Asia Minor, and cemeteries (e. g., at Gordion) where they buried their dead with Celtic rites (such as horse sacrifice). Resembling or even absorbing those natives of Anatolia invisible between the literary poles of Greeks and Persians, the Galatians emerge as a major force of minor barbarians, in archaeological survey and research in regional landscapes (Strobel 2002). Their archaeological profile includes Hellenized Anatolian natives, assimilated to both Greek and Celtic ideals, and more convenient for the Romans to treat as Greeks, or Gallograeci (Livy 38.17.9). Like the Phoenicians, the Celts challenged both Greeks and Romans, in East and West, and during Archaic as well as Hellenistic times, as a lasting element of Europe in contact and conlict with the Mediterranean.
What was the ultimate fate of this vast panorama of local kingdoms, based on classical-style cities but ruled by “barbarians,” and how did it survive in Roman terms? The eastern world obeyed no single master, but all honored the cultural magnet that was still Athens, long after its political power had disappeared and it had become, to all intents and purposes, a town of universities and museums. Eastern benefactors continued to endow the city of classical culture with monuments, notably the kings of Pergamum, sent their sons to be educated in Athens, and even took refuge there from local disasters. One of the latest and most prominent classical monuments in Athens has crowned the Mouseion hill since the second century A. D. (Figure 10.6). It commemorates Philopappos, the last member of the eastern Commagene dynasty (whose kingdom was annexed by Rome); Syrian and Seleucid by birth, he became a naturalized citizen of Rome and Athens, held office in both cities, and was buried in Athens. Until the Christian emperor Justinian banned pagan teaching of philosophy in the city in the late sixth century A. D., Athens lourished as the cultural and pedagogical capital of the international Mediterranean, and its Greek learning outlasted it for many centuries.
The ultimate European legacy of the Hellenized eastern Mediterranean, it can be argued, was a new religion, Christianity. Born in an eastern province of Augustan Rome among native speakers of Aramaic but disseminated by Hellenized Jews, it was eventually adopted by Roman emperors and their successors, East and West. Greek remained the chief language of the eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years, not only under Byzantium but also in many cities of the Ottoman empire, just as Latin survived in the west as a theological and scholastic idiom until recent centuries. The boundaries of Christianity replaced the reach of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean in many locales, and became the most lasting legacy of ancient multicultural life.
The references for this chapter are on pp. 416-424.
World History
