'WE ARE ALL GREEKS'?

ANCIENT (ESPECIALLY HERODOTEAN) AND MODERN

CONTESTATIONS OF HELLENISM
Author(s): PAUL CARTLEDGE
Source: Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies , 1995, Vol. 40 (1995), pp. 75-82
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/43646577

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 'WE ARE ALL GREEKS'?
ANCIENT (ESPECIALLY HERODOTEAN) AND
MODERN CONTESTATIONS OF HELLENISM *

PAUL CARTLEDGE

Exordium

This paper concerns the special kind of literacy we call historiography. 'History', the
word, is derived from ancient Greek historia meaning 'witness' and 'enquiry'. History
the practice, as a supposedly veridical discourse, was also largely an ancient Greek
invention, so far as the 'Western' tradition is concerned. Yet historians have never told
the truth, the whole of it and nothing but it. Consciously or unconsciously, they tell
stories in the sense both of fictions and of 'loaded' narratives.1 Thus it was with the
'Father' of History, Herodotus, and his representation of Hellenic identity. Thus it has
continued and will continue to be in the historiography of modern Greece, preoccupied as
it inevitably is with the question of what it does - or should - mean to be 'Greek'. This
paper aims principally to illuminate the nature of the connection between the Greek
origins of historiography and ancient Greek ethnic self-definition through (written)
history.

Identity
Unless I am greatly mistaken, identity, personal or group, who we think we are, is the
burning issue of our day - whether the identity that is in question is gender-related,
political, religious, racial, class-related, or (my chief concern here) ethnic. In a rather
narrowly personal sense I hope I am not mistaken, as I have recently published a book,
the fruit of several years' labour, devoted to the self-identification of the Classical Greeks
in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.2 This is couched in precisely the terms just outlined,
with one crucial addition: legal identity, that is, the polar opposition of free and slave.

*The origins of this paper lie in a commission to write a chapter entitled 'Historiography and Greek
Self-definition' for The Writing of History, edited by M. Bentley (Routledge, forthcoming). The
present text is an expanded and annotated version of a talk I was invited to give to the London
Institutes for Advanced Study conference in December 1993 on 'Empire, Nation, Language'.
Longer, and variant, versions have been delivered to audiences at the Institute of Classical Studies,
London; Harvard University; Brown University; and the University of Cambridge. For comments
and criticism at all these venues I am grateful, as I am more especially to BICS's anonymous reader
and above all to Richard Sorabji both for putting my name forward to represent the Institute of
Classical Studies at the 'Empire, Nation, Language' conference, and for agreeing to publish this
revised text.

1 Cf. C. Gill and T. P. Wiseman (eds.), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter 1993); S.
Hornblower (ed.), Greek Historiography, (Oxford 1994).
2 The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (Oxford 1993).

BICS-1995 75

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76 BICS - 1995

That addition is crucial,

practice for people livin
aware of the essential di
between our society and
tradition'. From several
that the Classical Greek
Greeks' dictum perhaps r
alone in finding this all
on a wide scale but also
definition, on that barba
just how alien from us t
The issue of the Classica
problems. For discussion
defined themselves as an
historiography, with spe

Inventing 4 Hist
Our word 'history', like
comes to us, as does so m
Latin. Its original basic
'natural history'). Second
as applied to human ac
secondary usage is possib
although for him norm
maintained the linkage b
is an exposition of the
reason why they [Greeks
However, despite all
historiography was unab
obedient servant of her
Gareth Stedman Jones i
Western society at least
sanctity to the present
explore chiefly the fif
explicitly or implicitly
answering the following
the distinction and op
Herodotus' conception of

3 See M. Herzfeld, Anthr

margins of Europe (Camb
McDonald and M. Chapma
Greeks and Anthropology'
4 Cf. Cartledge, 'Like a w
Rome 40(1993) 163-80.
5 Cf. F. Hartog, The Mirro
history (Ithaca 1988).
6 See G. Stedman Jones, 'H
Social Science: Readings in
not a myth? Bemal' s "Anc

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 PAUL CARTLEDGE: ANCIENT AND MODERN CONTESTATIONS OF HELLENISM 77

standpoint of his Greek addressees (originally listeners rather than readers), how far and
in what ways did his history contribute to the formation, or influence the expression, of
usable concepts of 'Greekness'?

Myth and History

The acute contemporary relevance of the above quotation from Stedman Jones has been
borne in on me almost continuously in the past few years, but more particularly on two
occasions when I was lecturing in Greece on subjects related to ancient Macedonia.
Herodotus, however, although he has been unwittingly enlisted under the banner of
contemporary Greek nationalism on the Macedonian question,7 would have rejected the
very terms of Stedman Jones's challenge with contumely.
He was rather scornful of myth, which he confined to the province of the poets, and
our popular and theoretical distinction between myth (false) and history (true) is in fact
owed ultimately to him. Moreover, he was confident that through the exercise in
combination of 'autopsy, critical intelligence and enquiry' ( historia , 2.99.1), he could
discriminate between the truth-values of the multiplicity of stories he heard on his
peregrinations around the Mediterranean basin and Black Sea region. What he enquired
into above all was war, the so-called 'Persian Wars', an as it were Russian-style great
patriotic war of Greeks against non-Greeks. The 'Peloponnesian War' of his major
successor Thucydides8 he would have downgraded to the status of a mere 'civil war
among the [Greek] people' (a stasis emphulios ), which for him was 'as much worse than
same-minded war against a foreign foe as war is worse than peace' (8.3.3). If a war had to
be researched and commemorated, then let it at least be a glorious one, a cause for
retrospective celebration as well as cerebration. Indeed, the celebration of a persuasively
defined Greek identity was, I would argue, of the essence of Herodotus' s historiography.

Inventing the Barbarian

On the other hand, there was nothing simplistically chauvinist about his project, either.
As he put it evenhandedly in the Preface, his self-appointed task - he was no official
historian - was to celebrate 'the great deeds of both Greeks and Barbarians'. Before he
could do that, though, the Barbarian had first to have been invented as a stereotyped
cultural category of the Greek imaginary.9 It was precisely against this overwhelmingly
negative and chauvinistic cultural construction, I believe, that Herodotus directed his
project of recuperative commemoration, his own (though he would have abhorred the
terminology) 'national fiction' or counter- 'myth' for the Greeks to 'live by'.10
The original model and inspiration of Herodotean historiography - as of Athenian
tragic drama, Pindar's epinician lyric poetry, and so much else of classical Greek
literature - was of course Homeric epic. Viewed from a fifth-century perspective,
Homer's Iliad was among many other things an epic of Graeco-barbarian military

7 Thanks to 5.22. But see now E. Badian, 'Herodotus on Alexander I of Macedón: a study in
some subtle silences', in S. Hornblower (ed.), Greek Historiography (Oxford 1994) 107-130.
8 Cf. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London and Ithaca 1972).
9 Cf. E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek self-definition through tragedy (Oxford 1989); on
modern nations as 'imagined communities' see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (2nd. edn.,
London 1991).
10 Cf. R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity 111.
National Fictions (London and New York 1989); R. Samuel and P. Thompson (eds.), The Myths
We Live By (London 1990).

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 78 BICS - 1995

confrontation, the Odyss

employed just once (//. 2
to the unintelligible ('ba
south-west Asia Minor. It
that it acquired later a
unambiguously negative
absence of any properly p
Greeks. (The latter are us
had agreed to label them
'Greeks' comes from the R
for their conquered subje
dignity and status12 is f
period between Homer an
By say 450 BC the Greeks
polar opposition of them
together collectively as 'b
'wogs', naturally and ther

Colonization

Two factors above all were responsible for this cultural transformation, colonization (so-
called) and the Persian Wars. First, from about 750 BC onwards great waves of
emigration from the Hellenic heartland of the Aegean and east Mediterranean basins left
Greek communities permanently established by 500 BC almost all round the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea littoral, 'like frogs or ants around a pond' (in Plato's
delightfully mocking simile, Phaedo 109b). Differences between Greeks and 'natives'
could not but be expressed, often in the form of military suppression of the latter by the
former, and culturally encoded.13
Conversely, the common religion of the Greeks, binding the colonists to their mother-
cities, and all Hellenes to each other through panhellenic shrines such as Delphi and
Olympia, served to promote a positive though inchoate conception of 'Greekness'.14 This
was an unstable compound of territoriality, ethnic homogeneity (common 'blood'),
common culture more generally and/or specifically common language and religion, and
finally - and least tangibly - a sort of collective subconscious: almost all of the factors,
that is, widely understood today as constituting ethnicity or nationhood.15 What that

11 Cf. R. Browning, 'Greeks and Others: from antiquity to the Renaissance', History , Language
and Literacy in the Byzantine World (Northampton 1989) chap. 2.
12 Cf. M. S. Silk, Homer: The Iliad (Cambridge 1987) 98.
13 Cf. C. Dougherty, The Poetics of Greek Colonisation: From City to Text in Archaic Greece
(New York 1993); 'Archaic Greek foundation poetry: questions of genre and occasion', JHS 114
(1994) 35-46.
14 Cf. M. I. Finley, 'The ancient Greeks and their nation' (1954) reprinted in The Use and Abuse
of History (2nd edn., London 1986); C. A. Morgan, Athletes and Oracles: The Transformation of
Olympia and Delphi in the Eighth century BC (Cambridge 1990); e adem, 'The Origins of pan-
Hellenism', in N. Marinatos and R. Hägg (eds.), Greek Sanctuaries: New approaches (London and
New York 1993) 18-44; S. Said (ed.), HEILENISMOS. Quelques jalons pour une histoire de
l'identité grecque (Paris 1991); F. W. Walbank, 'The problem of Greek nationality' (1951)
reprinted in Selected Papers: Studies in Greek and Roman history and historiography (Cambridge
1985) 1-19.
15 Cf. N. Glazer and D. Moynihan (eds.), Ethnicity: Theory and experience (Cambridge, Mass.
1975); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme , Myth , Reality (2nd edn.,

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 PAUL CARTLEDGE: ANCIENT AND MODERN CONTESTATIONS OF HELLENISM 79

inchoate sense of Hellenic nationhood or ethnicity at first significantly lacked, howe

was any strictly political component, largely because what is now often referred t
'civic' nationalism was more than adequately catered for by other means. It wa
political dimension that the Greek victories over Persia in 480-79 BC went some (sm
way towards supplying.

Persian Wars

Down to 500 BC, a crucial part of the Greeks' self-definition had run directly counter to
any fully panhellenic construction of their common identity. In precisely political terms,
Greeks typically exhibited a primary and radically exclusive commitment to the city
{polis) of which they and they alone could be full members, that is, citizens (politai ).
Greeks belonging to other Greek cities were thus as much foreigners as were non-Greeks,
and Greek inter-state relations were as likely to resolve themselves into warfare as to take
the form of peacefully mutual interchange, let alone co-operation.16 It took the Persian
Wars to alter this normal situation of inter- or intra-Greek military conflict, though it did
so but temporarily and only up to a point. Nevertheless, that famous victory of David over
Goliath was enough to constitute the second factor determining the negative construction
of the Barbarian. Thereafter, 'being Greek' normally and normatively comported a
political component (to the nature of which we shall return) besides the existing
ideologico-cul turai ingredients.
This paradigm-shift of collective self-consciousness was quickly given linguistic
expression and consecration - inevitably, since for the Greeks language was (to use
Weberian terminology) a criterion not a mere indicium of ethnicity.17 Non-Greek
foreigners now all became barbarians, and barbarians were easily considered both
barbarous and barbaric. By Herodotus' day the Spartans were tellingly unique among the
Greeks of his very wide experience in preserving archaic usage and eliding the new,
culturally loaded distinction between Greek foreigners, strangers or outsiders (xenoi) and
non-Greek barbarians.18 But then the Spartans were also unique in practising periodic
'expulsions of xenoi9 (. xenêlasiai ), Greek as well as non-Greek.

Ethnography as History by 'Other' Means

The military confrontation of Greek and Barbarian provided Herodotus with his subject
Arguably, also, it was the polar ideological opposition of the two in the form of Hellenic
liberty against Barbarian oriental despotism that provided one of the essential conditions
- possibly even the essential condition - for the invention of History itself, or at least
for the conduct and exposition of Herodotus' 'enquiry'.19 Yet although Herodotus was

Cambridge 1992); M. Howard, The Lessons of History (Oxford 1991); M. Ignatieff, Blood and
Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London 1993); J. S. Mill, 'Considerations on
Representative Government' in R. Wollheim (ed.), Three Essays , (Oxford 1975; 1861); Tonkin et
al. (n.3).
16 See A. D. Momigliano, 'Some Observations on causes of war in ancient historiography' (1954),
reprinted in Studies in Historiography (London 1966) 1 12-26.
17 Cf. A. D. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge 1975); C. W.
Müller, K. Sier and J. Werner (eds.), Zum Umgang mit fremden Sprachen in der griechisch-
römischen Antike (Stuttgart 1992).
18 9.11.3,755.2.
19 Cf. A. D. Momigliano, 'Persian empire and Greek freedom', in A. Ryan (ed.), The Idea of
Freedom: Festschrift Isaiah Berlin (Oxford 1979) 139-51; P. A. Cartledge, 'Herodotus and "the
Other": a meditation on empire', Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views n.s. 9 (1990) 27-40.

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80 BICS - 1995

not above exploiting th

mythologer of an official
represents the denial of o
say, the triumphalist ann
'manifest destiny' ideolog
be struck by the relative d
Greeks and non-Greeks, f
In this, it might be urg
whether Homeric inspirat
Greeks' anti-Barbarian eth
personal background m
Halikarnassos in Caria.20 B
believe, a principled cultu
movement of thought ass
was centred upon Athens.
human affairs? To the or
all times, what their cult
what was natural, was rig
confidence not merely to
largely subconscious preju
were by definition in ever
Herodotus conspicuously e
demonstrate and corrobor
employed the literary dev
Great King Darius I of P
against each other over th
cultural markers (3.38). Fo
simplified: thus Greeks sa
Indian people who alleged
not to berate the Indians fo
addressees a lesson in hum
own customary practices a
so Herodotus urged, was a
as much attention to cultu
than to those of the Greek
Two general features of
illustrations: his handling
Greek women of citizen s
public, among unrelated m
self-esteem that he be a
gossip. Herodotus, howeve
societies as a device for in
human race.23 Thus the p

20 Cf. Gould, J.
Herodotus
21 See Ostwald, M.
' Athens
1992) 306-69.
22 Cf. Hartog (n.5); Cartledg
23 Cf. M. Rosellini and S.
d'Hérodote', Annuario della

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 PAUL CARTLEDGE: ANCIENT AND MODERN CONTESTATIONS OF HELLENISM 81

placed a barbarian society at the furthest remove from the normative Greek end
spectrum; copulation in private but without the benefit of legal marriage ranked i
little nearer. Those societies, like Persia, which practised polygamy were of
culturally as well as naturally un-Greek, but at least they recognized the institut
marriage and outlawed adultery.
However, when such a sexually deviant society combined polygamy with de
rule, its treatment of women served further as a distinctive marker of political al
and thereby entered Herodotus' alternative discourse of Greek self-definition thro
polar opposition of republican, civic politics to oriental despotism. The paradigm
here was that of Xerxes, son and successor of Darius. He had in one sense inherit
father's unfulfilled project of a punitive invasion of mainland Greece (in revenge f
expedition of 490 BC that had culminated in defeat at Marathon), but he transfor
allegedly into a war of conquest and annexation - or, as Herodotus represente
terms of the Greeks' polar opposition of freedom and slavery,24 a war for the exti
of Greek liberty.
Again, an exemplary parable of ideological confrontation was pressed into servi
this case opposing Xerxes to one of his Greek vassals, ex-King Damaratos of Spart
after his expulsion from his native city had found a warm welcome at the court of
(7.104.4). Regardless of actual fact, about which he could hardly be well info
Herodotus used 'Damaratos' as a dramatic character to bring out what was most al
abhorrent to Greek republican sentiment in oriental barbarian absolutism. Speaki
Xerxes of his former fellow-citizens with a properly Greek freedom of spi
expression, 'Damaratos' tells his incredulous suzerain that the Spartans will resist
however heavily outnumbered they may be, because they are free and not subject t
overlord. Or rather, because they acknowledge one and only one, non-human, ma
namely Law. Herodotus uses the same word nomos to mean both 'Law' here
'custom' in the anecdote about burial practices cited earlier. It was, in other word
customary practice and established norm of the Greeks of the city-republics to tole
absolute suzerain as free Greek citizens. Here, in a nutshell, is Herodotus' ideologi
ethnocentric explanation of the victory of Greeks over Barbarians in the Persian W
was a triumph of Hellenic freedom under Law over oriental barbarian abso
despotism.

Greekness

Scandalously, however, it had not been a victory over barbarians only. Actually, far more
Greeks fought among than fought against the Persian-led invaders in 480 and 479 BC,
when scarcely more than thirty of the over 700 Greek mainland and Aegean island states
stood shoulder to shoulder against the barbarian horde. To his enormous credit,
Herodotus - in rather striking contrast to, say, Aeschylus in the Persians - in no way
disguised or palliated that breach in the mythical united front of Hellenism. Indeed, he
was all too keenly aware that as he compiled, composed and recited his histories between
about 450 and 430 BC the Aegean Greek world was again - or still - riven with
intestine discord. The cause in chief was the rise of an Athenian empire, many of whose
Greek subjects felt rightly or wrongly that they had been delivered from an exotic oriental
despotism only to fall prey to a home-grown Greek tyranny.
It was therefore symbolically apt that it should have been in the collective mouth of
'the Athenians' that Herodotus defiantly placed his persuasive definition of Greekness,

24 Cf. Cartledge (n.4).

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82 BICS - 1995

notionally addressed dir

'Not all the gold on earth
Athenians signally lack
enslave our fellow-Greek
foremost, the burning a
to Hellēnikon [literally,
altars and sacrifices we
This formulation is o
Barbarian polarity, but
ethnic triumphalism b
Herodotus rather than of
one but two agendas on
chauvinism or ethnocen
panhellenic consciousness
two agendas proved inc
almost completely with b
an exemplar of good his
his sturdily independent

Clare College, Cambrid

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