Wine and Milk: Drinking Cultures as Acts of Exclusion

The Milk Booth at the State 4 H Fair at Charleston, W. Va. Location: Charleston, West Virginia, 1921. Photo by Lewis Hine.  National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-nclc-04435.

This is the first (and hopefully not the last) special guest post to the blog. Here, classicist and art historian Dr. Kate Topper explores the way drinking cultures can act as forms of identity politics in both antiquity and now. These cultures normally act to create an 'in' group -- a norm-- against which others are defined and excluded. Here she compares recent 'milk chugging' parties by some white supremacist groups to the ancient symposium. 

For additional readings on the history of the American eugenics movement and how milk fits into it, I recommend Volume 29 of the Public Historian, particularly the article on the Fitter Families programs at local, state, and national fairs.

By Dr. Kate Topper

As readers of this blog know, white supremacist groups are in the news with alarming regularity these days, and earlier this month they made headlines for a reason that – to judge from my social media feeds – struck a lot of people as really strange. Relying on a widely held but not quite accurate belief that only white Europeans are genetically capable of digesting lactose as adults, some of the more exhibitionist members of American white supremacist groups have taken to chugging milk as a way of demonstrating the “purity” of their European descent.

Following moral disgust and nausea, the most common reaction I’ve seen to this stunt is bafflement, both at its logic and at the fact that it would even occur to someone to chug milk to prove their racial superiority. Yet for someone who studies the history of a different type of drinking – ancient Greek wine-drinking, in my case – it feels depressingly familiar, and I believe that looking at white supremacist milk-drinking in light of one of its historical precedents can help to expose the emptiness of its claims in a way that scientific debunking alone can’t.

Symposium scene. Athenian red-figure cup by
Douris, ca. 480 BCE.
London, British Museum 1843,1103.15.

The focus of my research (and much of my teaching) is the symposium, a nocturnal wine-drinking party for ancient Greek men. One point I take pains to emphasize when I introduce the symposium to students is that the ability to drink wine “correctly” was considered a proxy for the ability to participate responsibly in civic life. The symposium was all about defining community – determining who got to be part of it, and who had to remain on the margins – and the people who were excluded from the rights and protections of citizenship (such as women and foreigners) were, not accidentally, the same ones who were most commonly lampooned as incompetent drinkers of wine.

Competent sympotic drinking meant drinking your wine communally and at the same pace as your companions. An early fifth-century cup shows a group of men arranged comfortably around the room, each supplied with a large cup. The wine should also be mixed with water; there was a special bowl for this purpose, called a krater, and as early as the eighth century BCE, we find oversized kraters used as grave markers. Funerary kraters sent a clear message about the deceased’s social identity – he drank his wine communally and mixed with water, so he was a civilized Greek man.

Woman drinking wine from storeroom.
Athenian red-figure cup, ca. 460-450 BCE.
Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.265. Side a.

Woman drinking wine from storeroom.
Athenian red-figure cup, ca. 460-450 BCE. 
Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.265. Side b.

Women and foreigners, by contrast, were both seen and represented as incompetent drinkers. On a cup from mid fifth century Athens, a woman gulps her wine down alone, having pilfered it from the storeroom depicted on the other side of the cup. Her body language suggests that she’s trying to drink it hastily and furtively, and the wineskin carried by her small attendant suggests that she hasn’t bothered to mix it with water. We’re probably meant to laugh at the woman’s excesses – not to mention her dubious housekeeping abilities – but the scene also contains a serious warning about women's unsuitedness for serious responsibility.

Sleeping symposiast in Asian dress.
Athenian red-figure cup by the Chaire Painter, 5th c. BCE.
Basel, Antikenmuseum und Sammlung Ludwig BS 1423.

The story was much the same for non-Greek people – who, according to a common stereotype, drank their wine unmixed. On the interior of another cup, we find a sleeping symposiast whose clothing identifies him as being from western or central Eurasia. His sympotic behavior is a collection of stereotypes about foreigners – he has passed out drunk after imbibing from the drinking horn that rests below his couch. The horn was a shape the Greeks associated with foreigners and primitives and with the drinking of unmixed wine, and it was also one that couldn't easily be put down and that thus encouraged fast, intemperate drinking. This man would be an embarrassment at the symposium – but what else, it is implied, could an Athenian expect from a barbarian, who was not culturally or physically suited to drink wine properly? Like the woman on the Getty cup, this guy was not the type to be trusted with serious matters of governance.

To come back to the white supremacist milk-chugging stunt: I’ve spent enough time looking at pictures like the ones described above not to be shocked or even surprised by this twenty-first century trend, even if I’m physically and morally disgusted by it. One thing you quickly learn when you study the history of food and drink is that eating and drinking are intimately tied to the performance of identity. For a Greek man, socially competent wine-drinking was a way to perform a specific gendered and cultural identity – if he didn’t know to mix his wine with water, or if he insisted on filling up on wine while the rest of the group drank slowly, his companions would have some questions. For a segment of American white supremacists, identity performance takes the form of milk-chugging.

And it’s very clearly a performance: in the video shared by the New York Times, a group of bare-chested men stands together, exaggeratedly flexing their muscles before attempting to pound down a half gallon of milk. Others (both men and women) take the “challenge” at home and post the video evidence to YouTube or Twitter for their followers to watch. It’s important to them that people watch, just as it was important for a Greek symposiast to be observed by his companions, because these rituals are ultimately about establishing or maintaining membership in a group to which not everyone is allowed to belong.

For me, this juxtaposition of ancient sympotic drinking and modern milk-chugging is useful because it exposes the recent white supremacist trend as nothing more than a performance – the latest version of a trick human beings have long used to reinforce the legitimacy of the existing in-group and pretend that there’s an objective basis for excluding the out-group. The scientific gloss given to the milk-chugging challenge doesn’t make its claims uniquely valid or worthy of serious consideration, and not only because, as geneticists point out, those claims distort the science. Even without the white supremacists’ (erroneous) claims about genetics, milk comes with a lot of cultural and symbolic baggage that I have to think contributed to the choice to use it as the centerpiece of this racist performance. Like wine did for the Greeks, milk has long occupied a special status in discourses about who is and is not civilized (although whether it was a drink of civilized or uncivilized people has always depended on whom you asked). And in the United States it has been closely tied to ideals of purity since the middle of the twentieth century, even when those ideals are at odds with biological facts.

Milk, in other words, is no less culturally charged for twenty-first century Americans than wine was for the ancient Greeks. As much as the white supremacist milk-chuggers want us to think that their stunt is based in biological fact, it’s really all about cultural perception – to paraphrase the cliché, it’s old wine in a new bottle, only this time the wine is milk. White supremacist groups may have chosen a different beverage to make their point, but their logic is as faulty as that of the ancient Greek man who believed that his habit of drinking wine in the culturally prescribed way made him superior to women and foreigners. We should take their claims no more seriously than we now take the ancient Greek ones.

On Being a [Foreign] Woman in Classical Athens

It's International Women's Day and so I want to celebrate it by writing not about powerful women in antiquity, but about two not-so-powerful women whose lives were marked not just by the fact of their being women, but, more importantly, by the fact of them being non-citizen or "foreign" women. I say "more importantly" because if it weren't for this foreignness, their non-citizen status, their lives would have been fundamentally different. Because of their foreignness, they were a twice oppressed class. If they were economically poor in addition to being women and foreign, it was a triple oppression. (You can read more about other of these women in a previous post).

Some of you will recognize the women in this post from my book Immigrant Women in Athens. Others, may recognize them from classes you have taken or other scholars' writings on them. They don't make it very far, however, into the popular imagination. We know of them because they were prosecuted in court, a function, I argue, of prejudices due to their foreignness.

***

Sandys' famous painting of Medea

could just as easily be of a woman 

like Theoris.

THEORIS was from the island of Lemnos. Although Esther Eidinow has suggested she might be a citizen due to Athens' long history of controlling Lemnos, it is unlikely that she would be recounted as "of Lemnos" is she were an Athenian citizen. What we do know, however, is that she was executed along with her offspring for the manufacture and distribution of pharmakia. We learn about her in an aside in a speech by the orator Demosthenes (25.79-80):

He is the full brother of this man on his father and mother’s side and his twin in addition to the rest of his misfortunes.  This man--I will not talk about the rest--but on his account you put to death the repulsive Theoris from Lemnos, the pharmakis, and all her family.  [80] He took these medicines and chants from the handmaid who later informed on this woman from whom this slanderer begot children, the use of charms, and quackery, and (he claims) the ability to heal epileptics, although he himself is culpable of all wickedness.

Here we can vividly witness the precariousness of this foreign woman’s life. We do not know her precise situation, but she was apparently condemned for witchcraft after selling drugs to the brother of Aristogeiton, who then resold them as a cure for epilepsy. She was called a pharmakis, a word often translated as witch, but it probably had a wide range of meanings and is literally something like “druggist” or “pharmacist.” Derek Collins has argued that Theoris was not a witch at all, but something akin to a folk healer (which I agree was most likely the case) whose remedy must have gone wrong and killed an Athenian citizen. Her punishment was extreme. She and her children were executed. 

There is no mention that she had a spouse; she may have been an independent metic ("immigrant") woman with children who earned a living by making and selling remedies and potions of various sorts. The Athenian jury must have determined that her actions were intended to harm or kill, thus the resulting death sentence. We do not know what representation she had in the court. If she was a simple folk healer (akestris) or herbalist (rhizotomos) who sold remedies or even erotic potions to customers, then it is difficult to believe that she intended for anyone to die. In the fourth century BCE, making drugs and selling them was not illegal. It was possible, however, to be taken to court if you sold a drug that went wrong. 

Was Theoris dabbling in magic and seeking to harm citizens with her potions, as her conviction and some stereotypes of foreign women suggest? It is not uncommon to hear slaves or “prostitutes” accused of selling or using love potions in court cases or in comedy. In some ancient cases, we hear of them killing by poison, thinking (Deianira-style) it is a love potion. The associations of harmful magic and drugs with mythical foreigners like Medea and Circe also encourages us to consider that Theoris’ condemnation resulted from prejudice against foreign women. Theoris may also have been a priestess of sorts. Either way, it didn't end well for her or her children.

***

Theano, citizen wife, remembered on her tomb.

NEAIRA is another fairly well-known, but not well-to-do foreign woman in Classical Athens. She is known best from a speech once attributed to Demosthenes ([Dem.] 59) in which she was accused of pretending to be an Athenian citizen when she was supposedly really a sex worker illegally married to an Athenian citizen and passing of her foreign daughter also as a citizen. Most scholars have accepted that she was a sex worker (calling her a hetaira) and many even accept the charges of illegal marriage. I am (not unusually) an outlier on this. 

Neaira, to me, perhaps best exemplifies the way prejudices impact foreign women’s lives in Athens and the violence to which they could be subjected without recourse in law. She also exemplifies for me the way scholars continue to allow those prejudices to do violence to her. Centuries later, we believe her accuser not because he proves his case, but because we buy into his biases and his story.

Apollodoros, the accuser and a political enemy of her guardian Stephanos, attacks her on charges of 1. pretending to be a citizen, 2. living in marriage with an Athenian citizen, and further, 3. attempting to pass off her own children as citizens. The speech, however, is only minimally interested in proving these charges. Instead, Apollodoros devotes the bulk of his time to weaving a sordid tale of Neaira's life from a childhood as a brothel slave to her days as a supposed sex worker in Athens itself, though the events he recounts mostly took place decades, before this case is taken to court. Neaira’s situation and the case presented against her has been much discussed by scholars--no surprise given how salacious the details are and how much of a supposed insight the speech gives us into the lives of sex workers. It is a story intended to make the jury unsympathetic to the accused, but one that demonstrates as well the violence that a foreign woman was subjected to (not to mention the prejudices). 

I think we can believe that Neaira was likely a sex worker when she was a slave--all slaves were technically able to be prostituted without restrictions--but after buying her freedom, she seems to have been uninterested in continuing that trade. As an independent woman, however, she was dependent on the goodwill of men, and particularly citizen men, for her safety particularly since she had no male relatives to properly represent her in court. 

After buying her freedom, she came to Athens with the citizen Phrynion (he had lent her some of the money she needed to buy her freedom). According to the speech, she ran away from Phrynion to Megara soon after, where Stephanos later met her. She left because Phrynion, Apollodoros tells us, treated her like as if she were his private prostitute and, beyond that, permitted her to be raped in his company, possibly even gang rape. Even Apollodoros is unable to hide the fact that Neaira was brutally abused and was horrified at this treatment of her person (he tells us that she had expected that Phrynion loved her, but was instead treated with ‘wanton outrage’).  

After she fled Phrynion, she secured the guardianship of Stephanos. Phrynion, however, attempted to have her enslaved to him by accusing her of being an escaped slave. Stephanos stood with her in front of officials and she was granted the status of a free, independent metic. Maybe they formed a relationship. Maybe, as I have considered previously, he hired Neaira to take care of his two children after their mother had died (not an uncommon occurrence in antiquity). Maybe she actually once was "just the nanny." Whether they had a more intimate relationship later wasn't illegal (unless it was marriage), but it might have angered those who thought foreigners shouldn't mix with citizens. 

And yet, the treatment Neaira was subjected to by Phrynion and his friends seems to have been justifiable in Apollodoros’ estimation in no small part because of Neaira’s former status as a slave and her supposedly sordid life as a sex worker and her status as a foreigner in the city.  He expects his audience to assume the worst of her, to assume she is still a sex worker, to assume that she would steal citizenship. He also hopes that the jury will believe that the children of Stephanos are his by Neaira and so not citizens (we don't know their ages and no wife is mentioned). And the penalty to Neaira if the case succeeded? She would be sold into slavery. 

It isn't a coincidence that Apollodorus ends his speech with an appeal to the jury in the name of protecting their citizen wives and daughters. He wants to divide this foreign woman Neaira from those other, "proper" women in their lives. Neaira isn't a “whore” and corrupt and deserving of enslavement because she is a woman, but because she's foreign. And the prejudices against her run deep. 

Some (most)  scholars believe Apollodorus. I do not. We don't know how this case turned out. But we do know that he was a notorious liar. He was banned from prosecuting others in the courts, including his step-father. In his attacks on his step-father, he also accused his own mother of complicity in murder (of his father!) and implied that his brother was the child not of their father but of his mother in adultery with his step-father. He did this without proof, without any shame. And the Athenians got so tired of his frivolous lawsuits against his step-father, that they banned him from continuing them. 

Given this background, why should we believe him in this one case? Why does he and not Neaira deserve the benefit of the doubt? Why is it that even feminist scholars continue to believe him and not read between the lines and see his biases and question what has long been regarded as truth? Why is it that we can't see that her foreignness here is more important than her being just a woman? Because if she wasn't foreign, she could been Stephanos' wife. And any charges that she was illegally married would be moot. If she was a citizen of some city, she would never have been in a brothel as a slave, having to buy her freedom and make a new life for herself somewhere else on her own. 

***

Both Neaira's and Theoris' lives were defined by their being women in many ways. But their experiences as we know of them were fundamentally impacted (for the worse) because they were foreign. Had they not been foreign women in Athens, they would likely not have even made it into the historical record, because their lives would have been like most other citizen women's--safe from prosecutions, safe from the need for or charges of sex work, safe from violence, safe from sale into slavery, safe from execution. Their children would have also been safer and not marked out for the same violence their mothers experienced.  

I've spent the better part of 5 years living with these women as my research subject and daily I am struck by how relevant they are to our world. Because we aren't all "just women" or even "women first." We are variably white women, women of color, citizen women, immigrant women, wealthy women, not so wealthy women, tenured women, contingently employed women, well supported women, or women with little to no support networks to speak of (to name only a few variations). All this variety can't be hidden under the name "women" alone. The permutations of our existences matter, these other identities shape our experiences as women. Some women live closer to power, have better access to justice. Others do not. To pretend that the lack of access that being a person of color or immigrant or not wealthy doesn't mean as much as being woman alone is a mark of one's access to power--the closer you are, the less those other permutations of womanhood matter. It's a truth of privilege not just now, but in the past, too.

The Historically Contingent 'Race' Problem

At a basketball game last weekend while sitting at the scorers tables keeping book, I was asked by a ref whether or not I believed that whiteness was real. It wasn't a totally random, inappropriate question--I had Denise McCoskey's book Race: Antiquity and its Legacy and he saw it sitting there. I think I must have looked at him puzzled, but then said "Yeah. It exists."

I mean, I find the whiteness of my normal environment kind of overwhelming sometimes--our whole team (6th grade girls travel ball) and pretty much all of our teams generally in my town are 100% white. And we were playing an almost entirely black team--the reality of our whiteness was pretty obvious. This is a normally odd feeling for someone who grew up in a minority white place with a mostly non-white family. And, yes, I think about (and write about and talk about) race all the time, so the question should not have puzzled me--the context just threw me for a second.

But it also got me thinking about how I often respond to questions about race in antiquity--all the caveats and the definitions and the fine distinctions and nuances. And then I thought about why we so often try to avoid talking about race in antiquity at all (we talk about "ethnicity" instead) and all the reasons we give--why I have done so, even. And then I thought about how I would have talked to the ref at the game about all of this and how big of an eye roll I would have gotten.

And yet, as an academic, I find explaining the history of race in a clear and meaningful way difficult, especially when most of us classicists seem to want to avoid talking about race in antiquity at all. Read any book on ethnicity and you'll find some dance around the term "race" explaining why we don't use it. Some of the ways scholars do this is with fun little trite phrases like:

"Race is a social construct" and so not real and so we can ignore it. Except that social constructs are thoroughly "real" in their impacts and in shaping the worlds we live in and study.

"Race is biological and we are talking about culture." No it isn't. It is cultural and social and political. The biological part is part of its imaginary reality. The rooting of it in biology is what makes it dangerous. It emphasizes that character is embedded in physiognomy at some primordial date in the past. It privileges a mythical 'nature' over the reality of socialized, racist 'nurture.'

I think for many of us, myself included, to speak of ethnicity carries less baggage than to speak of race, but also, to speak of ethnicity is easier because we can connect it to the Greeks, at least, through the term ethnos, while race is "foreign." In my book on metic ("immigrant") women, I used ethnicity to discuss individuals mostly because people were identified on their tombstones by an ethnos--their city of origin, and most of the foreign women in Athens of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE were Greeks, too, just not Athenians. But there was and is a valid reason for me to have talked about race, which I did, but maybe not enough.

If we think about what race is, its really a way of thinking, not a "thing." It's a way of thinking that assumes hierarchies. It assumes one group of people is inherently better than another. It assumes that there is a connection between geography and identity that can't change--that you take the geography of your primordial origins with you through time and space. The Athenians believed in something like this. Its why some of us (Susan Lape, importantly, here and here) talk about race and racial identity and citizenship--the Athenians very clearly believed that they were superior to others inherently based on their birth (indigenous to their land--an autochthonous birth unrelated to the descent of other humans) and that they had to preserve this superiority by rejecting intermarriage with non-Athenians (anti-miscegenation) and in this way retaining their purity. This is pretty close to race and race thinking in in the modern world.

So, the women I studied were excluded and legally oppressed because of their race--they weren't Athenian. Didn't matter that they were Greek. And yet, while I talked about "racial citizenship" and "racial thinking", I didn't use the word "race" but "ethnic identity" when speaking of individuals and the group they belonged to. That's kind of cowardly of me, in some ways. Whatever other types of identities they constructed, Athenians had a concept of "race" that maps pretty well onto ours--even if they didn't have anything like modern race science to underscore it.

In truth, no identities are "real," if by "real" we mean an impermeable category that someone is born into that is defined through immutable characteristics. That "real" doesn't exist. No identity that we have (internally of externally constructed) can meet this criteria. Does that mean identities aren't "real," though, in the sense that they matter in the way we navigate the world around us?

Could I have explained this to the ref at the game? That, well, yes, I study ancient Athens and they were racists and were the "white people" of their day, even though the only actual "white people" in the city would have been the rich women or the Scythian slaves or someone with a bad skin condition or disease? He probably would have asked me why I would want to study a bunch of racists. I think some of us still struggle with the answer to that particular question.

Sometimes, it takes just a moment to realize that, when people talk about academics as "out of touch," there are reasons for it. It takes a special form of distance to be able to treat something that is so much a part of the lived experiences of others (and not in a good way necessarily) and treat it in a rationalized and abstract manner. As one commenter on a recent Twitter conversation noted (about a different issue)*:

I don't say "objective manner" for a reason, though. Because when we talk about issues like sexual assault (which the above commenter is referring to) or race and racism, objective is really just another word for "not an issue I have to deal with" or "privilege." And it is also something that results from the viewing of "black" as a race but not "white." If we "don't see race" or think that we can deal with it "objectively" or "rationally" it's because we have lived without its weight for most or all of our lives.

We academics, especially those who deal with the distant past, are trained to abstract ourselves. But, as I tell my students all the time--objectivity is a myth (which is what ideals are); whoever writes the narrative or compiles the evidence and pieces it together is a subjective part of the history. Whoever asks the questions and sets the parameters for the experiment or interprets that resulting data has included their subjective self in the study. There are no self-evident, self-monitoring, self-completing, self-narrating events, studies, or experiments. All we can do is be aware of our subjective input and do our best to not let it overtake us.

And we need to recognize this when the quest for objectivity leads us to split hairs and our lack of experience leads us to only be able to theorize and not be able to engage with our object of inquiry when they are a real person's subjective reality. Race is a reality too many of us scholars on race and ethnicity in antiquity have trouble thinking about in anything but an abstracted way because we project race (regardless of our knowledge that skin color =/= race) onto people of color both in our field and in our studies and leave whiteness as a colorless, raceless norm. We assume whiteness for the Greeks and Romans even when we don't mean too because we only ever picture race and ethnicity in antiquity as non-Greeks and Romans.

But white people have race now and ancient Greeks--the Athenians, at least--also had race then. And still we treat "race" like a historically contingent nuisance that we can articulate away through philological sophisms and rhetorical sleights of hand. We act like it is our scholarly responsibility to place it on its modern shelf and not taint our ancients with. It's one of the many reasons we have a racism and race problem in Classics.

None of this ruminating helps me with the problem of being able to articulate a history of race to the ref on the fly during a time out. But at least I can be a little more honest with myself as I prepare to do more scholarship on the history of race in antiquity and classics' contributions to modern white supremacy.


For a recent discussion of some of the dynamics of racism and race in our field see "Episode 51: Race & Racism in Ancient & Medieval Studies, Part 1: The Problem." Episode 52 (Part 2) is coming out Wednesday. A good discussion of the terms for race, ethnicity, nation, etc. in the Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon is their "Episode 44: 'Us' & 'Them' in the Ancient and Anglo-Saxon Worlds."

-------

*A reference to the Twitter convo I had with Mary Beard the other day on how using the USA Gymnastics case to talk about the need for sentencing reform was a bit tone deaf and she shouldn't be surprised if people just didn't have time for it. The commenter above joined the fray and said some very thoughtful things.

The Dorian Invasion and 'White' Ownership of Classical Greece?

I was speaking with a student last semester. She loves Classics, but she can't seem to get her parents to understand why. She's Indian and her family and family friends, she tells me, have asked her things like why she wants to give up her own culture and study someone else's. India, of course, has a long history with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Greeks even settled in parts of what was called India in antiquity (though are parts of various modern nations now). India appears in our Greek sources as early as Herodotus (and earlier is some fragmentary works), was an important players in the ancient trade networks that went through the Persian empire, and became part of Greek reality in the Hellenistic world as a major political and military player. The idea that the study of Classics is 'foreign' to a student from India more than the descendants of Celts and Germans and Norse people is weird. And one needs to wonder why (though we already know the answer: hint, it's racism).

I should not wonder why, however, as I (mistakenly) spent time today reading the comments on an article concerning the casting of a black man as Achilles in the new BBC Troy series, Troy: Fall of a City. Within the comments, all sorts of tales of genetics and descent are being thrown around--both for and against Europe or Africa as the originator of all races, the place of 'whites' vs. 'blacks' in Egypt (with the subset of Cleopatra as Greek, Arab, or black African), whether Neanderthals are part of this conversation or not, and then the "just because we come from Africa doesn't mean we are black" divisioning between sub-Saharan and north African. And then we get fun comments like (all screen grabs of comments are from the article on black Achilles unless otherwise noted):

I'm white. And yet, I have certainly not felt over the 25 years during which I have studied and worked to become a Classics professor that Classics and 'everything' came from me or belonged to me. I'm from a small town near Akron, Ohio in the middle of the US and then moved to San Diego, CA. I'm a first gen college student. Most of my family have no idea what I actually do. They certainly don't spend all that much time thinking about ancient Greece and Rome and their ownership of it in an unbroken line of descent. How can this field 'belong' to me? It doesn't. Or so I thought...

Turns out, I was wrong! I am pretty much solid German on my mom's side (she was the first generation of her family in the US to marry a non-German dating back to before the Revolutionary War) and, it so happens that, according to the Nazis and their Romantic-Nationalist predecessors and many a neo-Nazi today, THAT MAKES ME DORIAN GREEK!

In other words, it's time to talk about the myth of the so-called "Dorian Invasion" and the myth of an Aryan Ancient Greece.

H/T http://www.ars-longa.sitew.com/Le_mythe_de_l_Aryen.B.htm#Le_mythe_de_l_Aryen.B for the map.

As with many a historical myth about the origins of various Greek cultures, this one has a source in Herodotus and was an attempt by mostly German scholars (at first, it seems) to explain the changes in language from non-Hellenic to Hellenic. The mysterious Pelasgians appear as a 'native' substrate of possibly Anatolian origin (except the Athenians, who were indigenous but 'became Greek' by changing languages..maybe..Herodotus is a bit dodgy on this one), while the Dorians--those vigorously masculine Greeks best represented by the Spartans, as you can see from the map above--from a Nazi textbook--those Dorians came from Germany!

The myth of the Dorian/Aryan/Nordic invasion begins, in many ways, as a failure of methodology, specifically, as a result of historical positivism. Historian Jonathan Hall once described historical positivism as a mode of seeing in "myths of ethnic origins a hazy and refracted recollection of genuine population movements" in the Bronze Age. Variants of these myths were "pathological aberrations from a 'real' historical memory" (Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, 41). Unfortunately, these "pathological aberrations" became bound to ideological positions that became linked to political parties and movements and race science.

As one can read all about in my new favorite book Brill's Companion to the Classics and Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (the chapters by Wiedemann and Whyte specifically) or (going back pre-Nazi) in Helen Roche's Sparta’s German Children, Hitler and many a German firmly believed that Spartans/Dorians and Germans were one people and that the martial valor and glory of Greece was the result of Germans invading Greece and establishing a civilization. They, the modern Germans, were then both the progenitors of ancient Greek civilization and its heirs. And they, as Tacitus explained to them, were a pure people. Their Blut und Boden  ideology explained both who they were and why they were born to be conquerors.

I've even read 19th century texts that suggest that some German scientists and anthropologists explained the fall of ancient Greek civilization by the deterioration of Germans too long from their proper climate--the heat of Greece enervated them over time, making the rise of a new Greece in Germany the only solution. Hitler certainly saw it that way as did many of his predecessors, like Karl Otfried Müller. Whatever other flaws there may be in Martin Bernal's Black Athena, pointing out the long trail of classical philologists and historians invested in a northern European invasion as the only possible explanation for the development of an advanced civilization in southern Europe was not wrong. The Aryan/Dorian (later Nordic) invasion was used to explain not only ancient Greek civilizations, but also those throughout Asia and even north Africa.

How long did historians and archaeologist struggle to fit the evidence into a narrative of a Dorian invasion? This great article from 1978 laying out the evidence debunking the invasion myth gives you a clue. And yet, even while scholars have moved on, the general population has not. And the recourse this public makes to genetics is complicating the issue. While there is quite a bit of good work being done in the realm of genetics, popularizing articles in magazines like Science and  National Geographic make it seem like we have hundreds upon hundreds of solid samples to test from, resulting in "new" discoveries every few months in the origins of genes for "whiteness" or "blackness" or homo sapiens vs. Neanderthals, etc.

Typically, however, we have only a few samples and studies of the sort that discovered "The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals" suffer from numerous flaws in the data (small sample sizes, assumptions about migration patterns, comparisons only with modern populations, choosing not to randomize samples) and give the general population a sense of certainty where there is none. The results are comments like:

This is a comment on Dimitri Nakassis' blog post about the Science article. The commentator and his predecessor "Double Helix" view the result of a 4-16% admixture of "northern" DNA possible for the samples labeled Mycenaean as DNA proof, to the commentator and others, of the Dorian/Aryan/Nordic reality of ancient Greece.  The longevity of this myth that all southern European, north African, and Eastern/Central Asian civilizations were the result of northern invaders is real, even if it is now playing out in the realm of pseudo-science. Whatever someone wants to believe, they will find evidence or skew evidence to support it because that's how ideology works.

But the Aryan/Dorian/Nordic myth does real harm if Classicists and ancient historians don't challenge it and do it regularly. It excludes people from our discipline whose history it is just as much as it is anyone's (more so in some cases) by allowing one small group of people--'white' people--to lay claim to it. It also puts a value on whiteness that encourages adoption of 'whiteness' as a way of viewing and moving in the world by those peoples who may have been excluded in the past--like  Greeks or Latino people, who are increasingly identifying as white while simultaneously developing virulent strains of white supremacy of their own. We see valuation on whiteness lead some individuals (like N. Taleb) to reject and work tirelessly to argue away cultural heritage and connections to a non-northern European past.

In the end, the lingering myth of a Aryan invasion in the popular imagination, though now grounded in different 'evidence',  perpetuates the whiteness of our field, continues to send a message that Classical Greece 'belongs' to northern Europe, and, perhaps the worst thing of all, seems to have made some corners of the internet nostalgic for the 2004 Troy movie and Brad Pitt as Achilles. What can we do when theories long debunked continue to prosper and cause harm? In addition to trying to make our research accessible to the broader public, I say we enjoy the new Achilles.

Colorlines in Classical North Africa

Last week, my Ancient Identities class discussed texts on ancient north Africa--Libya, Carthage, and Numidia. In the texts, one of the things that the students discovered is that north Africa seems to have a lot of different types of peoples living in it and that no one seemed to be all that interested in what color they were, though we know that these people were not all of the same skin tone. At one point in his description of Libya, Herodotus (4.197) tells us that the native populations of the continent were Ethiopians and Libyans (which included Marusians, aka Mauri, among others) and that the Phoenicians and Greeks were immigrants.

Typically, we read that Ethiopian is the term that the ancients used to refer to people with dark skin tones, those we would call black, and that these are often also referred to as sub-Saharan Africans. In a recent blog article, Dr. Caitlin Green sums up earlier scholarship and attempts to make sense of their arguments that the increase in 'sub-Saharan,' i.e. black Africans, in the Mediterranean in the Roman period by suggesting it was possibly a result of the slave trade by the Garamantes--she herself uses 'sub-Saharan' is quotes to indicate the inaccuracy of the term. Herodotus, however, clearly places black Africans in northwest and north central Africa and not as slaves but as indigenous and early. And according to Herodotus, they are living north of the Sahara, since the Sahara beyond its edges merges into the uninhabitable zone and then Ocean. He states that they live "south" of the Libyans, but "south" for Herodotus is still north of or in the Sahara.

As far as Herodotus and others well into the Roman period were concerned, 'sub-Saharan' either didn't exist or it was an uninhabitable zone in between them and the Antichthones, 'opposite-land' (as Pomponius Mela calls the mystical southern continent).  Strabo, too, writing in the the 1st century BCE-CE, writes of groups of black Africans living in north western Africa--the Pharusians and Nigritae, whom he places near the 'western Ethiopians' (17.3.7). How do we know they are likely black? Because they are said to be like the Ethiopians and the Pharusians, in particularly, are linked to southern Indians, whom many ancient authors think either were immigrants from Africa or migrated to Africa. The Mauri (later Moors) are also located in northwest Africa, but Mauri, like Berber, is not necessarily a clear term that associates with skin tone in antiquity--evidence links them more to geography and nomadic lifestyle and when skin colors are mentioned, they range from light to dark.

In other words, there were black Africans living north of and in the Sahara in antiquity. Herodotus never mentions their skin tone as warranting discussion, likely because he had placed them in the torrid zone on the map and environment dictated they would be dark skinned. The Phoenicians and Greeks came there with their lighter brown skin, more northern Libyans were environmentally browner than Greeks and Phoenicians, but lighter than the Ethiopians and others.

Why do I care about this? Well, for a number of reasons. The first one is that I have frequently been told that individuals like Augustine of Hippo, whose father was a Berber, could not possibly have been black African. And because whenever the issue of blackness in northern African spaces is discussed, there is pushback (especially concerning Egypt) even though we have ample visual and literary evidence that north Africa and West Africa in antiquity were not singular in skin tone. But there is an investment in trying to keep it as 'white' as possible. I often recall to mind that, as the Roman historian Sallust reminds us, many ancients thought Africa was part of Europe (BJ 17.3). I'm sure many an anti-black African ignores or does't know this or assumes it makes them 'white'.

The other reason is because my class starts on ancient texts on Ethiopia tomorrow and I asked them to read an article by a Late Antiquity/Early Medieval religion scholar ("Racism, Color Symbolism, and Color Prejudice" by David Goldenberg) who argues that there was clear color prejudice in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds in contrast to Frank Snowden's contention that antiquity was "Before Color Prejudice." Of course, all scholars pretty much see the problematics of Snowden's arguments, but Goldenberg's are also problematic. The first is that he has to hunt through about 4-5 definitions of racism (or, Ben Isaac's proto-racisms) before he lands on one that fits his needs. Second, he, like Snowden, basically finds evidence by looking for texts on Ethiopians or where 'blackness' is a specific point of discussion.

Many of the texts on Ethiopians are non-derogatory--they are praised and admired for various reasons. The texts on blackness, however, tend to carry negative connotations--it is clear that characters in Juvenal and Petronius, at least, do not find the physiology of black Africans attractive. They don't find people who are pale (i.e. anyone from northern Europe) attractive either. Their own somatic norm--a light brown--is preferred aesthetically. What Goldenberg and others miss, however, are all the texts that discuss people who are clearly black without ever mentioning their color at all. If you include those texts in the discussion and unskew the evidence, the number of ancient Greek and Roman texts that make clearly negative statements that see black skin as denoting both physical and mental or moral defectiveness is surprisingly small. It exists, but not as the norm.

We see clear racism (or proto-racism) in our ancient texts, but it is distinctively different, as Goldenberg states, from anti-black racism as it exists today and has existed for centuries. He isn't necessarily on point about the obviousness of color prejudice in Greek sources (he has a point that Juvenal clearly doesn't like dark skin, but Juvenal hates on everyone). What Goldenberg is really valuable for, though, is tracing the negative connotations of the color black--from associations with death, ill-omen, and evil--and its transference to people. Perhaps unsurprisingly to some and surprisingly to others, it is in the early Christian (really starting in Origen) and patristic literature that we see the prejudice against blackness truly become a 'thing.' As Goldenberg writes:

"The innovation of Christianity was not in the essential nature of the association of black and evil. It was, rather, in the degree of application of the association. In the church fathers, the theme of Ethiopian blackness became a crucial component of the Christian focus on the battle between good and evil, which pervades patristic writing."

Ethiopians in Christian writings are even associated with devils and demons. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the conversion of black slaves in the southern United States was resisted by many slave owners--not only might it mean that these slaves would need to be treated as their neighbors in God's eyes, but also that, legally, it might mean they would need to be freed. Many a colonial legislature passed laws declaring that Christianity didn't fundamentally change the nature or soul of the black slaves. If blackness is evil, the logic goes, then how could black peoples become otherwise without changing skin color? Christianity has this notion embedded from its early(though not earliest) phases.

The question of when black skin color became a target of group prejudice is one that my students come back to again and again and I am sure it will come up this week as we read texts about and look at representations of ancient Ethiopians through Greek and Roman eyes. Not everyone agrees on how neutral the descriptions are--there are scholars who argue that Herodotus was clearly prejudiced against the blackness--but he doesn't even bother to remark on blackness on many occasions when discussing peoples who are most definitely balck and his assumption that Indian and Ethiopian semen must be black (3.101.2; an easily refutable hypothesis that Aristotle bluntly refutes at Hist. Anim. 523a17-8) may be more an attempt to understand how it is that Indians and Ethiopians gave birth to dark skinned children even when outside of the heat of their native territories--the heat was thought to burn the skin (or the semen) thus making people darker.

I can't say exactly how any of the ancients understood skin color as an environmentally, and yet heritable trait precisely; they are clearly puzzled themselves. What we can say, however, is that black Africans lived throughout the continent as it was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, including in Egypt and western and central Libya at least as early as the 5th century BCE. Their territories skirted on the Sahara or they were thought to have lived as Nomads within it; in other words, they weren't strictly 'sub-Saharan.' But, is prejudice against blackness coincident with their appearance in the historical imagination of the Greeks and Romans? I would argue no. And the racist desires of some people to keep them out of north Africa altogether in Classical antiquity should not make us overlook the fact that they were there, not as merchants, not as slaves, but as indigenous, permanent residents according to our Greek and Roman sources.

Ethnicity in Herodotus--The Honest Entry

I keep wanting to finish my post on the use of the Dorian invasion myth as a way of claiming ancient Greece for northern Europeans and (now) whiteness, but I am having a hard time getting to it since I have to write this entry for the Herodotus Encyclopedia on ethnicity and it is killing me. So, I have decided to use this blog post to write out what I would say to Herodotus if I did not have to write a neutral representation of Herodotus' writings or the 40-some years of scholarship that is expected of an encyclopedia entry. 

***

Damnit, Herodotus. Can you please decide what it is you think you are doing with all these ethnographic passages? If, as Hartog suggests, you are doing it in order to get your Greek readers to reflect upon their shared identity as Greeks, can't you be clearer on that and just say Greeks are Greeks because x, y, and z? Instead we get something like "Egyptians aren't like us in these ways and they are like us in these ways, so that means that these are the categories that matter at this moment in my story in defining who we are as Greeks--we don't speak an Egyptian language, we don't worship half animal gods, and we pee in private instead of outside...oh, and we don't usually let our wives do all the shopping--how silly is that!". So--language and customs seem to matter most. So say many a scholar, like Dihle, Hall, van Wees, and Jones.

But this one time in Book 8 (you know, at almost the end!), you have characters (very important ones, at that) give a magical list that says that what makes Greeks Greeks. The Athenians tell the Spartans that of course they won't betray them and side with the Persians after all (you know, like the other hundreds of Greek poleis who did, like the Thebans and all the Ionians) because we share: blood (homaimos), language, institutions of worship, and cultural character (ethos). I get that the shared blood thing works for Athenians and Spartans who are both pretty exclusive societies when it comes to intermarriage and stuff, but that means they don't intermarry with each other either! How mythical is this blood? And the other stuff? Did you mean it? Because if you did, can you tell me what you mean by ethos? Is this cultural? Inborn? How is it determined? Is it a Greek thing?

And what about shared descent with non-Greeks? Are Greeks and Egyptians intermarrying? Do they come from the same geographic space originally? Gruen tells us that we should ignore everything Herodotus tells us when trying to figure out what does and does not constitute ethnicity in Herodotus (or anywhere else in our Greek sources) because everyone knows that it is only blood that matters and that ethnicity in antiquity meant blood--culture, customs, language? None of that is a concern. But if this is the case WHY, HERODOTUS, DID YOU SPEND SO MUCH TIME TALKING ABOUT ALL THAT STUFF!? PAGES AND PAGES?! And why don't you just say that in the beginning?! Instead, you do all this stuff about barbarians and women-knapping.

Speaking of barbarians--is it a linguistic category? Or is it a cultural thing? Is it something you can stop being? Can you become one or are you born that way? Hartog and Lloyd and Rossellini and Said (both of them) and the other Hall don't all agree, but seem to make a really big deal out of it. Oh, and so do pretty much all the scholars writing between 1989 and, like, 2015. Is barbarian like your "42"--the answer to life the universe and everything?

Both J. Hall and Thomas suggest what you really emphasize is nomoi and origin myths. I get the origin myth thing. You tell us a lot of those and, if we believe you, everyone is related (usually thanks to Herakles or his daddy)--one big human happy family with some cultural differences. How they got those differences you don't say--though, let's recall your awesome (wrong) theory that Ethiopians and Indians are black because they have black semen. This is an easily testable hypothesis, dude. Get it together.

Sometimes you give me the impression that you think climate and geography are the creators of ethnic difference (soft lands breed soft people, anyone?), but then maybe custom is king? At this point, I have no clue what ethnicity is in your book filled with descriptions of peoples and cultures. You tell a good story, but you are wearing me out. 

Immigrants and Cruelty

Tomb of Eirene from the city of Byzantium, buried in
Piraeus, Athens. Her name is recorded in both Greek
and Phoenician script. 4th century BCE.
Photo by Rebecca Kennedy. 

There are days when my scholarship and teaching resonate with the modern world more than others. Today is one such day. Yesterday, Pres. Trump rescinded the executive order known as DACA, passed in 2012 to protect so-called "Dreamers," non-citizen residents of the US who were brought here as children and who have lived their entire lives here. DACA created a pathway for them to get work permits, legal identification, attend college, and generally participate in everyday life without fear of deportation to places they have never known. DACA isn't perfect--they had to register and re-register every 2 years. And it was only a deferment of possible deportation.

Although there is some talk of Congress acting to pass legislation that will replace the executive order, history suggests to me that there are enough members of Congress for whom the cruelty of deporting these individuals is "just business" that no law will come. AG Jeff Sessions seemed particularly pleased at the announcement. Because sometimes, let's be clear, what is morally right and what is legal are not the same thing; sometimes what is legal is morally reprehensible. This is especially the case when it comes to treatment of immigrants in democratic societies.

In my Eidolon article, "We Condone It by Our Silence," I laid out some of the laws Classical Athens had in place for treatment of immigrants. Its strict citizenship policy and its requirements that resident immigrants (known as metics) register every year with the city and pay an immigrant tax are well documented. The registration policy is actually quite similar to DACA, except that it was the universal policy for immigrants as there was no differentiation between "legal" and "illegal"immigrating, only a failure to register once you did. And failure to register meant sale into slavery--the "deportation" of the ancient world. It didn't matter how long you lived in Athens, even if you were born there and your grandparents were born there--you could rarely become a citizen. To register, you had to have a sponsor. The sponsor had to be a citizen (male, over the age of 30). If you were a man or a family immigrating, you paid 12 obols a year. If you were a single woman, you paid 6. I wrote a book on the women who fall into this latter category, and it is those women I am thinking about today.

We don't know a lot of women from Classical Athens--they weren't permitted to participate in politics and when they appear in court cases or histories, they are often left unnamed. We do see some of the names of metic women, though, in courtroom speeches. They are often being maligned or mistreated. We also see their names on tombstones, where we know they were immigrants because they recorded their city of origin. These women's lives often go unrecognized in our histories or, when they are mentioned, they are discussed as if the slanders of their male citizen attackers are truth. What I want to do in the rest of this post is simply describe a few of their experiences. Like the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in this country whose lives are being upended by the DACA decision, that these women were real people with real lives is too often forgotten or ignored.

Zobia: An immigrant woman in Athens, who had the misfortune of being involved with a citizen man named Aristogeiton. She lent him a cloak and some money one day and upon request for repayment, he seized her and dragged her to the court, seeking to denounce her as an unregistered immigrant. Lucky for her, the tax collector vouched for her as did her sponsor and denied Aristogeiton a chance to make money from selling her into slavery.

Aristogeiton's non-citizen sister: We don't know her name, but we are told a court case against him that he denounced her as an unregistered metic and sold her into slavery. Their brother may have intervened, but we don't know the outcome.

Theoris: Theoris was a n immigrant from Lemnos who seems to have made a living selling medicines and love charms. She got involved with Aristogeiton, who got caught selling fake epilepsy cures, and he offered up Theoris as to blame and as a witch. She and her entire family (including children) were executed for witchcraft.

The Nurse: In a speech attributed to Demosthenes (Against Evergus and Mnesibulus), we learn of an old former nanny, who had once been the speaker's family slave. We don't know her name, but we know how she died. The speaker's father freed her and she married and lived in Athens. After the death of her husband, in her old age, she returned to live with speaker, whom she had cared for when he was a child. In a dispute over a debt, the nurse was attacked by men attempting to rob the home. She was injured and died a few days later. The speaker was distraught, not just because she died, but because there was nothing he could do to punish the men who killed her. She wasn't his slave anymore and she wasn't his relative, so, according to the laws, she had noone to prosecute for her murder. Her death, the death of a former slave and metic, was not considered valuable enough in law to hold anyone accountable.

I am reminded of these immigrant women and more in Athens when I read of women dropping charges of domestic abuse for fear of deportation. Or women being granted sanctuary in a churches to avoid being deported and separated from her citizen children. The callousness of those who support the end of DACA, who will never be impacted by it personally, who say "just deport the whole family."  The idea that these women, because they were "immigrants," were somehow worth less than others, makes me angry. It should make us angry to see it still happening now.

All the talk of progress and here we are where the Athenians were 2500 years ago, treating some people as if they are as much cattle. What did they do to deserve this treatment? This disregard? What makes our nation so frightened of them? Or our land so limited and small or poor that we can't possibly house them? Aristogeiton preyed on these women because he could, because he clearly kept getting away with it. The court cases where these crimes are listed are not about those crimes, but about other offences against citizen men. The men who killed the nurse also got away with it. Immoral men still get away with hateful acts especially when they prey on non-citizens, those deemed somehow less worthy of human status. And I'm angry. And sad.

Bibliography for Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World

In order to make the link to this biblio more stable, I am making a dedicated page for it where I will make updates. You can find it here: 

RACE AND ETHNICITY BIBLIOGRAPHY

How is the Ancient Mediterranean Diverse If Everyone There Is "White"?

In my last blog post, I pointed to the slippery nature of the category "white" and its use to dismiss arguments for the diversity of the ancient world. I have a later blog post planned on the category of "whiteness" in antiquity, so I won't go into too much detail here, but it should be noted that, when commenters appeal to the over-arching racial category of "white" in order to co-opt a whole slew on non-European peoples into their narrative of white supremacy, they often do so by trying to turn the ancient Mediterranean into an "Anglo-Saxon" fantasy land through the use of technical language of out-dated physical anthropology.

As is pretty much accepted as fact by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and biologists alike, race is a social construct that is not grounded in any biological facts. The "science of man" emerged from colonialism and slavery. The terminology is still used by physical and, in particular, forensic anthropologists, but the scientists pretty much all agree that 

"Race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation" (Race Reconciled, 2009: 2; special issue of The American Journal of Anthropology)

The  pseudo-science of race even in its own day was considered highly questionable and was abandoned almost entirely around World War II. Nevertheless, the internet (and some die-hard ideologues) persists. For example (from a FB comment on my last blog post),

“not africanoid its negroid. Its a valid descriptive term among physical anthropologists. African is a geographical term not a race. We North Africans are "Africanoids" too=caucasoid Mediterranean”

Note the terms. They exactly mirror the terms shown in the 1950s encyclopedia entry pictured above. Those terms derive from 19th century race scientists like Blumenbach, but are also incorporated non-Europeans into the category of "white", based on the linguistic category "Indo-European", conflating language family trees with made up biological categories, none of which are reflected in skin tones and none of which are considered very useful or accurate today (despite their perpetuation in popular fiction).

This is not to say that there are no legitimate physical variations among humans. Even the ancient Greeks recognized this reality. Take the Attic vase pictured. Represented is the myth of Andromeda. Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus, a Phoenician (he was the son of Phoenix) and of Casseopeia (maybe an immigrant like Cepheus, maybe not). They were the mythical king and queen of Ethiopia. Andromeda is the figure being supported by the two smaller boys. Cepheus is the seated figure--they are both represented as "Persian" types--the hats and animal print pants are your typical dead give away. 

The physical features of the Phoenician characters, however, are indistinguishable from how Greeks would represent themselves--as Perseus is represented standing in travel gear near Cepheus. The other figures are all "Ethiopians" marked by their facial features (though clothed Greek-style). Here is another version of the same scene, though the painter uses skin tone instead of features as a marker for the "Ethiopian" characters and clothing (again) for the Phoenician.

What is the point? The point is that there IS recognizable physical variation in humanity, but that physical variation does not make "race" more than a socially constructed reality. And that physical difference didn't mean that some of the people were somehow inherently better than others. I put "Ethiopian" in quotation marks because, technically, all the character except Perseus in the vases are Ethiopian--Andromeda, Cepheus, and the rest. 

The Greeks recognized physical difference, but generally didn't think the people who had them were any more different from them than people in another family or in one Greek city-state and another (they used the same term, genos for everything from ones direct offspring to a household to women to a generation to what we might refer to as an ethnic group). The flexibility of such terms shows their constructedness. Those who appeal to biologically rigid categories of "race" don't seem to understand their fallacy. They appeal to physical anthropology as a defense for dismissing the realities of diversity in the name of coopting all historically "important" cultures to "whiteness". In reality, "white" only came to encompass the Mediterranean in the 1930s or 1940s at the earliest. 

But, what basis in fact do the appeals commenters make to these categories of race science and physical anthropology? In an in depth review (from 2013) of a special issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2009) titled "Race Reconciled" at Living Anthropologically (which you should read regularly if you want to say you know anything about what is happening in physical anthropology circles), we learn that leading physical anthropologists find skin color incapable of denoting race, cranial measurements only useful for locating possible geographic region of decent, and, the relationship between geographic descent group and genetic phenotype as "subjective". Use of skin color itself is called "arbitrary and subjective" and the scientists state that no actual group clusters or "races" can be discerned by skin color. One author, John Relethford, author of the textbook The Human Species, states of "race" that it is

“a culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation” (Race Reconciled 2009:20).

This is not a new idea, of course (see link above)--the linked anthropology issue came out in 2009, which means the research was being done long before that and builds upon decades of earlier research. And, even Relethford's connection of craniometrics and genetics is increasingly being demonstrated to be inaccurate. For over 30 years now, as the articles at Living Anthropologically show, calls have been made within the field for admitting to the subjectivity and ideological underpinnings of racial classification by forensic science.

In another of the articles, titled "Understanding race and human variation: Why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race" the conclusion is that forensic scientists are so good at categorizing bones by race because the categories are, essentially, made up. Forensic scientists could just as easily invent a new classification system for humans and define our differences through that. In fact, the author attributes the ability to categorize bones by racial groups to "institutional racism". Another article in the volume asserts that the methods of forensic anthropologists themselves lead to racist classifications. The image below, from Nott's 1854 Types of Mankind might give readers a clue as to what type of racial bias has been present. Nott's so-called "science" was considered illegitimate and motivated by prejudice when it was published. The anthropologist to whom the book was dedicated (Samuel George Morton) essentially disavowed it.

What does this all mean in terms of people who dismiss diversity in antiquity? Well, the same commenter who had recourse to the pseudo-scientific language of race science to try to co-opt all Mediterranean peoples to their own whiteness showed their cards by committing all three of the actions I identified in my post. First, the individual posted a link to my Eidolon article and charged I advocate "changing history" in the name of "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" [their caps] and in order to build the self esteem of minorities. Additionally, the individual used an appeal to "genetics" (out-dated physical anthropology discussed above that not even physical anthropologists support) to manipulate the category of "whiteness" to dismiss my points. 

All of this amounts to an attempt to dismiss the last 50 or so years of scholarship on race and ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean and in anthropology as "revisionist" But that shouldn't be a bad thing. My fellow scholars and I are revisionist--we critically examine the past scholarship, bring in new evidence, and address methodological biases in order to correct the misrepresentations and manipulations of the 19th and early 20th centuries done in the name of appropriating Greek and Roman (and Egyptian and Persian) cultures for a mythical and supposedly superior "Anglo-Saxon white race". The general public doesn't seem to be ready to let it go. But, wouldn't it just be easier to admit that the world is and always has been full of people with differences and that this is ok? Instead, people clinging to the world view that "whiteness" is a biological reality march around carrying tiki torches in the name of their superiority, chanting "Blood and Soil" as if they were not immigrants in this land we call America.