The Concept and Representation of Northern Communities in Ancient Greek Historiography: the Case of Thucydides

The Concept and Representation of Northern Communities in Ancient Greek Historiography: the Case of Thucydides Ioannis Xydopoulos Aristotle University of Thessaloniki ABSTRACT This chapter analyzes the criteria Thucydides used to define Greek and native communities by examining his representations of the Macedonians, Thracians, Scythians, and Il- lyrians, who inhabited the coastal regions of the northern Aegean and beyond. It focuses on the period from the mid-5th-century BC until the end of the Peloponnesian War (404 BC). This study argues that the colonial context exerted an important influence upon the southern Greek concept of these peoples during the 5th century and under- pinned the contemporary distinction between Greeks and barbarians. The latter may be defined as those peoples who first came into contact with the Greek colonies on the Aegean coast and the Propontis; evidence for these cultural encounters may be traced back to the 8th century BC. Consideration is also given to a specific Athenian ideology which developed following the Persian Wars, and which found expression in Thucy- dides’ writing. Finally, given that the notion of “ethnicity” is itself a product of 20th-century ideological concerns, this discussion reconstructs ancient perspectives by focusing instead on the precise terms and descriptive vocabulary found in the relevant sources. Η παρούσα ανακοίνωση επιχειρεί, μέσω μιας σύντομης εξέτασης των σχετικών εδαφίων στο έργο του Θουκυδίδη, να ερμηνεύσει τον τρόπο παρουσίασης των Μακεδόνων και των Θρακών κατά τη διάρκεια του Πελοποννησιακού πολέμου σε σχέση με (και συνδυάζοντας) τις σύγχρονες απόψεις και τάσεις της έρευνας στους τομείς της Κοινωνικής Ανθρωπολογίας και της Αρχαίας Ιστορίας. Παρουσιάζονται τα κριτήρια βάσει των οποίων ο Θουκυδίδης χαρακτηρίζει τα φύλα αυτά ενώ ακροθιγώς εξετάζεται και ο όρος «βάρβαρος» στο έργο του, πάντοτε σε σχέση με το αντικείμενο της έρευνάς μας. Παράλληλα, γίνεται προσπάθεια ανίχνευσης των κριτηρίων καθώς και των ενδείξεων, με τα οποία καθορίζεται από τον ίδιο η «εθνικότητα» τόσο του ελληνικού φύλου των Μακεδόνων όσο και των Θρακών. Τονίζεται ο ρόλος του αποικισμού α) στη διαμόρφωση της εικόνας που είχαν οι Έλληνες της Νότιας Ελλάδας κατά τον πέμπτο αιώνα για τα φύλα που κατοικούσαν στην περιοχή του Β. Αιγαίου και β) στη διαφοροποίηση Ελλήνων και βαρβάρων. Επιπλέον, προτείνεται ως κριτήριο διαμόρφωσης της παραπάνω εικόνας η Αθηναϊκή ιδεολογία που αναπτύχθηκε με τη λήξη των Περσικών πολέμων και η οποία απαντά στο έργο του Θουκυδίδη. Representations 2 Ioannis Xydopoulos THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY Definitions of the concept of community are problematic and the subject of considerable debate in the social sciences. One useful framework isolates three general categories employed in anthropology. ‘Community’ may be characterized in terms of: (i) common interests among people; (ii) a common ecology and locality; or (iii) a common social system or structure. Besides interests, ecology or social structure anthropologists have also traditionally emphasized an essential commonality as the logic underlying a community’s creation and perserverance. Communities have been regarded as empirical things-in-themselves, social organisms, as functioning wholes, and as things apart from other similar things. Nevertheless, notions of ‘community’ have changed, as anthropology has responded to functionalist and structuralist approaches. For example, Anthony Cohen has argued that community should be seen firstly as a symbolic construct and a contrastive one, and secondly, as a product of the situational perception of a boundary dividing one social group from another. In his view, awareness of community depends on consciousness of boundary. According to Cohen’s dual argument communities and their boundaries exist not as social-structural systems and institutions, but as worlds of meaning in the minds of their bearers1. Community is an aggregating device, which both sustains diversity and expresses commonality. It encapsulates both closeness and sameness, as well as distance and difference. Members of a community are related by their perception of commonalities, and equally, they are differentiated from other communities and their members by these relations and the patterns of association to which they give rise2. As far as ancient Greek history is concerned, I think that Cohen’s description accords perfectly with the one given by Catherine Morgan. Morgan has stated that community in its ancient Greek context should be treated as “an innocent definition of a group with which individuals identify, resting on, and reflected in factors such as shared residence, cult, or subsistence needs. A community is thus an entity that implies at once perceived similarities and differences and thus has clearly recognized boundaries”3. Morgan’s definition highlights the fact that we are dealing with groups which may define themselves in more than one way. Community is strongly related to the Greek terms of polis [city- state] and ethnos (the English language possesses no term for the concept of an ethnic group or ethnic community, so when we use the word ethnos [ethne in plural] we refer to people; however the adjective ethnic is used). Community may be understood in a political sense, with regard to the variety of common relations implied in residence arrange- ments, adherence to laws, warfare, cult and subsistence strategies – that is the areas which the Greek sources themselves identified as central to the expression of shared identities. However, polis does not provide a synonym for this political sense of the term4. Instead, it covers a variety of usages. All of these apparently share the common denominator of the sense of a number of people living together and acting together. While ethnos has a similar meaning, it refers to cultural, rather than biological or kinship differences; hence like cultural attributes are held to identify a group as an ethnos. As groups of men and women interpret and express their collective experiences, these interpretations and expressions The Concept and Representation of Northern Communities in Ancient Greek Historiography 3 cohere into cultural practices and attitudes over time, which are then handed onto the next generations, who modify them according to their own experiences and interactions. The continuity and survival of these ethnic dimensions of communities are key elements underpinning the formation of nations in the modern era. In fact, some scholars have studied the rise of contemporary nations in the context of their ethnic background. Nev- ertheless, the complexity of ancient Greece does not permit such analysis. In recent years the nature and role of ethnic expression in Greek antiquity have been among the most debated topics among both archaeologists and historians. One con- clusion of these debates is that it is essential to gauge the contextual complexity of this topic. Every ancient Greek belonged to a multiplicity of groups, which included: the family and household; the neighbourhood or village; the military unit; the community and its political subdivisions. The meaning of ethnos ranges across these diverse social sub-groups. As a result of this complexity, what is required is systematic analysis of everything in the available documentation that pertains to ethnic consciousness. The importance of this question cannot be overstated. It provides a crucial new dimension to the process of defining ethnic communities in pre-modern eras. The study and consideration of the various contexts outlined above is a valuable, indeed necessary sup- plement to the framework of precise criteria used to define ethnicity that have been identified by Anthony Smith: (i) a collective name; (ii) a common myth of descent; (iii) a shared history; (iv) a distinctive shared culture; (v) an association with a specific territory; and (vi) a sense of solidarity5. HELLAS, HELLENES AND BARBARIANS Definitions of ethnicity may be divided into two categories: subjective and objective. The former treats ethnicity as a process by which tribes, ‘races’, or nation-states identify themselves, other groups, and the boundaries between them, while the latter relies on criteria such as physical characteristics resulting from a shared gene-pool6. According to social scientists the criteria for determining ethnic self-consciousness would have been physiological similarity, as well as a cultural matrix of shared geographical origin, ances- tors, culture, modes of production, religion, values, political institutions, and language. Different ethnic groups privilege one or more these above the others. It may in fact be argued that ethnic stereotypes, both ancient and modern, are significantly more reveal- ing about the community that produces them than those they are intended to define. The Greeks’ subjective definitions or ideology of their own ethnicity have been the subject of considerable discussion. E. Hall has categorized the four main hypotheses developed in the course of this debate as follows: (i) the notions of Hellen and barbaros (barbarian) already existed before the completion of the Iliad; (ii) the emergence of these two notions was simultaneous and occurred between the 8th and the late 6th cen- turies; (iii) the Persian wars created a collective Panhellenic identity; and (iv) although a sense of ethnicity already existed in the Archaic period, the polarization of Greek and barbarian was magnified after the Persian wars7. In my opinion, this final hypothesis is Representations

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