Correcting Nonsense about the Ancient Greco-Roman Past

It has been about 2.5 years since I first wrote "Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World" for Eidolon.  The impetus for it was Donna Zuckerberg's article "How to Be a Good Classicist under a Bad Emperor," which called on classicists to teach more about the diversity of the ancient world. Like my colleagues Sydnor Roy, Denise McCoskey and Shelly Haley and others, I've been teaching iterations of this class for a long time. And, so I thought I would make a statement on why in order to encourage others to do it to. Also, of course, because teaching a class like this can be hard, Syd and I decided to make it easier on ourselves back in 2010 and publish the sourcebook in 2013--Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Sources. It isn't perfect and needs a second edition one of these days to add inscriptions, papyri, early Christian texts, focused material on immigration and enslavement. There is so much material on this topic from antiquity that it really is a life's work to track it all down. I've been gathering other people's syllabi for about two years now in order to make them available to others and to learn from how others teach their versions. And, because there is always more to learn, I am constantly changing my own syllabus.  

What follows is a reflection on the latest iteration of the class with student responses that functions as something of a revision of my Eidolon article and also as a response of sorts to the dangerous view of identity in antiquity and its modern appropriations represented in a recent review of books (screenshot of the opening paragraph--I am not linking to the site):

One of the goals of teaching race and ethnicity in the ancient world (as part of our larger courses and in stand alone classes) is to help disabuse people of these types of unserious and inaccurate positions. It is also to give students tools to identify and understand how such views are racist, orientalist, white supremacist and promote inaccuracies about both antiquity and the modern world in the service of ideology. Our success in the classroom can have impact down the road in making these sort of bad history takes less useful or common. So, here we go... 

**All materials from students used with permission.** 

I can only imagine that the true final project would have coalesced all of these aspects into one final performance on what we have learned throughout this semester. That is also what is so sad and disappointing about this semester, we never got to do everything that the course got to offer. I realize that it must be disappointing to have a plan for a semester and have it totally upended from some freak pandemic. Regardless, I really enjoyed the class and thought of it to be one of the more meaningful courses I have taken throughout my college experience so far. ~student comment

Let's start from reality. This class was not the class I intended it to be when the semester started. I had spent a lot of time this past year thinking about how I wanted to change the class based on the current cultural moment, on responses from the previous iteration, and based on my own shifting interests. So, I changed reading structure--instead of using scholarship on specific passages and text along with the ancient texts and then tagging on the reception of these ideas to the last 3-4 weeks of the term, I integrated the reception throughout and ordered Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning as the textbook we would read along side of the ancient sources. You can see that version of the syllabus (the one I gave out at the beginning of the term) here. I also planned a panel of classicists who work on various aspects of Classics Africana (or Black Classicisms) to come to campus and help us integrate the ancient material with the Kendi and with an exhibition at the Denison Museum called "Say it Loud". It included a performance of the Hype4Homer project. So awesome.  The panel happened, but 3 days later campus shut down. 

Obviously, the move to online teaching required some modifications to my syllabus. This involved reducing the length of readings, adding more visual content and restructuring the assignments. The revised syllabus for the last few weeks can be found here. What isn't visible on the new schedule is the targeted discussion questions on our Learning management System and the memes and audio recordings I asked students to do. The final project was originally for them to write an essay on the intersections between ancient and modern ideas of race and ethnicity and present it in a multimedia format (a program called Shorthand). Obviously, that was going to be rough, so instead I asked them to write a reflection of what they learned in the class and would take away with them to wherever they go in the future. For many students, this was and will be their only Classics course, so I was curious.

The plan for the semester was to integrate the discussion of modern receptions, adaptations, evolutions from, and uses of ancient ideas about race and ethnicity throughout, to help student see more jarringly the way ancient ideas moved into and were used in modern race constructs. Reading Tacitus' Germania and seeing the Nazi use of it at the same time is more impactful than reading it and then looking at Nazi receptions 4 weeks later.  Doing so, however, required that we begin the class with very clear definitions of what race and ethnicity are (or how we would use these terms in class). Students were very clear that the didn't have a definition of either (some had never really thought about ethnicity, for example), but knew that "race is a social construct"--whatever that meant. 

"The fact that race was introduced as “the institutionalization of prejudice and oppressions based on moving signifiers for human difference” because we need a different way to approach it when looking at it in ancient times really made sense. While we look at race as color and appearance now, color was used in a lot of different ways back then...For reasons like these it’s much more productive to view race as a technology that structures human interactions and manifests within institutions. The categorizations of race ideas found in Kendi—segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist—were also really significant, specifying two conflicting kinds of racism. But the argument from Kendi that resonated with me most was that racist ideas, hate, and ignorance stem from racial discrimination and policies instead of the other way around. This makes so much sense as I notice selfish motives, primarily money and status, being the actual causes of discriminatory policies not only throughout this class but throughout a lot of material from my other classes..."  ~student comment

"I remember the definitions we discussed on the first day and how we subsequently applied them to the ancient Greek sources dealing with origin myths. Based on these primary sources, I could see that today’s ethnic and racial classifications didn’t fit onto the ancient world as many people would think they did. The rubber really hit the road, so to speak, when comparing the identity discourses within the ancient sources to those that Kendi wrote about. It was clear that ideas of race and ethnicity from the late modern period, give or take, simultaneously incorporated ancient views and departed from them. The kernel of blackness in ancient descriptions of North African populations became exaggerated as the focal point for modern racist ideologies. Through this example and others, I could see that speaking of race and ethnicity in an ancient context requires an appreciation of these different paradigms." ~student comment

We started class with our working definitions and these would be the definitions we would use throughout the term. Importantly, I wanted them to understand that the terms 'race' and 'ethnicity' are not interchangeable, that theories like environmental determinism are not 'racial theories' unless that can be manifested in things like laws or political institutions and then form the basis for oppression (like the Athenian metic system or Spartan helots). As Kendi argues (rightly) racist policy creates racist ideas. By using Kendi and weaving him in throughout the course, student could see how ancient ideas came to be foundational to modern racist ideas. 

I think the class was successful in part because we had clear terms for engagement, I was very clear about why we needed to read the ancient and the modern together--in order to know how the modern world has (mis)used the ancient, they need to be laid side by side. It is unfair to ask students to infer connections that are often so embedded as 'reality' for them--prejudices, assumptions, 'nature'--without some sort of guidance or framework.  

This brings me to the silly book review screenshot above--the idea that a war in antiquity could be somehow the pivotal moment in the history of some imaginary 'western' world identity. So, what did my students learn this term? 

"In fact, just recently I was able to enlighten my younger sisters on where race came from while they were participating in a heated debate considering whether black people could be racist to whites. I overheard the conversation and put what I have learned in this course to the test. After conversing with my sisters I was proud of what I was able to accomplish and realized that this information will give me a step up when entering the workforce. Although preconceived notions and racist ideas may not always be on display, they are in the minds of the people around us and as a black man I am forced to think about that everyday." ~student comment

"I learned quite a bit in this class, especially about how residual some ideas are. I was shocked to read some passages about certain ethnic groups that could still be written today, and how destructive a mindset they could be. It was quite interesting to “track” these assumptions about people from their beginning in ancient times to the present, and see their true origins. My favorite class period was the one focused on the census, and tracking the evolution of racial categories from its inception in the early 1800s. Race has always been one of the biggest issues in America, and the world, so seeing how our ideas of who is who has changed, and how the need to categorize people definitively is so ingrained." ~student comment

"While I understood that racism built on foundations laid in the past centuries (or millennia) before taking this class, the examples I encountered highlighted its presence for me. Linking the caricatures of black people provided by everything from minstrel shows to Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben products today to ancient (and sometimes fantastical) descriptions of specific African groups were helpful in this respect. Another aspect of this is the white European self-identification with ancient Greeks and Romans. 23andme and other such testing services seemed harmless to me a year ago. Even cool - using science to peer into your past. That’s part of their image used to market the product, of course. But based on this class and the various related lectures I attended, I can now see how easily they can be used to affirm a subjective image of someone’s identity." ~student comment

"This class also helped bring attention to the ways in which we as a culture glorify Greece and Rome a lot. It’s really important that we ask, “What is it about us that makes us want a group to be homogenous?” when countries not only today but since ancient times have actually been mixed entities with all different kinds of people within. The fact that being Greek can’t be seen just as being from the nation-state of Greece since they were essentially spread across the span of about three continents was something I’ve never thought about before." ~student comment

"The most important part of this class that I will carry with me is the connection between ancient viewpoints and the foundational beliefs of the United States. To think the education system of the United States was very recently based in ancient Latin and Greek. The reading of ancient philosophers was basic, foundational knowledge necessary to enter into a university. I know now that many of these texts also contain racist, classist, and sexist ideas. The fascination with classicism in the United States ties to our “founding fathers’” creation of a system of government that inherently benefitted straight, white men from the beginning. The mythos that the ancient Greek and Roman empires were white or even racially homogenized only contributes to the place these texts hold in white supremacy." ~student comment

The comments are like this from almost every student. They also say that they learned how to be better critical readers, to question their own assumptions and potential biases, and feel more confident analyzing primary materials. These are all things that are so important in the world we live in today. I am pretty sure all of my students would read that review and give it the big eye roll and F-you it deserves. 

But, it isn't just how we talk about readings and videos and whatnot. Who we give voice to for our classes matters. Bringing in Kendi changed the dynamics of the class and made students, especially the white students, confront some realities they didn't necessarily know or think mattered to them. Also, the panel I organized with my colleague Omedi Ochieng in Communication had more impact on some students than the entire rest of the class:

"This experience also had a big impact on me because, as a woman of color, it really meant a lot to me to see other people of color be passionate about and accumulate success in the classics field; it reaffirmed a message that Dr. Goldman gave the first day of my “Classical Drama” course, that the classics is not just for old, white men. I will always remember this experience for both personal and academic reasons..." ~student comment

After loving the classics for years and being told by their parents that they couldn't be a classics major, and feeling unsure why they even loved classics, to have this student say this meant more than anything else.

 

Classics really can be a classics for all, if we are willing to let go of its ties to whiteness and power, be open to the world beyond the canon, and invest efforts in "non-traditional" courses in translation that can reach more students and can really be transformative for them. None of the quotations in this post are from a classics major--80% of the student had never even taken a classics course before. And yet, it meant something to them and will change the way they engage with the world around them and how the classical appears in it. Teaching this class over the years, and this year most of all, has been transformative for me in so many ways, because it meant something to nearly every student in the class who took the journey with me.

Being "American", Sophocles' Intentions, and the Debates over "Western Civ"

I have this day been having two separate conversations on Twitter that actually revolve upon the same thing. The first was a convo with a colleague on authorial intent and Greek tragedy, inspired by last night's reading of Sophocles' Oedipus by Theatre of War. The second was a query from Shadi Bartsch on mask wearing:

While my first response was flippant (as were all the other commenters), there is, in fact, a very serious answer to this and it intersects with the way we attribute genius to individuals and meaning to plays written by men like Sophocles and also, whether people realize it or not, is at the heart of the "Why we MUST revere/teach/worship Western Civ" industry.

So, what are the connections? Let's start with the answer to Shadi's query.

After my initial flippant remark ("For their purposes, American = a$$hole fascist white person."), she followed up with:

The answer, of course, is yes. One can still be an asshole without being a fascist. But, there is a particular strand of asshole that positions itself as "American". And that has its root in the notions of American exceptionalism, the American Dream™, Manifest Destiny™, bootstrapping mythologies, the myth of the American West and "rugged individualism". There are so many names for it that we have been bombarded with in our school textbooks, in TV commercials (especially for trucks). It is at the heart of Libertarianism and Randianism. At its core is the idea that what makes the US "great" is that we are all out for ourselves. That rampant and unchecked individualism and unfettered competition (CAPITALISM!) is what makes individuals exceptional and so a country full of exceptional people will, of course, be exceptional!

But, as we know, there is no such world as a world where everyone is exceptional. Instead, we end up in a world where some people are "more valuable" than others because they are exceptional while others aren't. This is an idea core to social Darwinism and eugenics (and NOT democracy), but which we used to not say out loud.  Oh, how the times have (un)changed!

So, the exceptional people have more value --they are the JOB CREATORS who just happened to have fired or laid off something like 20 million people in the month of April in order to meet quarterly stock targets. They are the ones pushing to force the 'less valuable' people back to low wage unessential work in order to get their money back even while the US government has literally handed them billions of dollars to cover losses and keep them afloat. This is the reality of American exceptionalism and "I got mine" rugged individualism, but the mythologies that surround it and which MUST BE DEFENDED from the likes of universal healthcare, support for public education, and public health policies that don't involve eugenic-style selection of the type Janet there thinks is normal, has brought those who are most harmed by these myths to become its defenders. And they defend it by rejecting vaccinations and masks in public.

What does Sophocles and authorial intention have to do with any of this?

A colleague (Latin teacher and medievalist by training) had a little back and forth with myself and A. Pistone over whether asking the question "Why did Sophocles write this" functions or matters. Here is the beginning of the convo for context:

There is a difference, of course between pondering what the author of any work might have intended (we obviously intend to convey things when we create) and THE intent of the author as embodying the meaning of the work--Greg is really advocating for the former and this is a totally useful and valid conversation to have, but many people (I will not name names. I will not name names) mean the latter. There is still in classics a strong tendency to treat performance texts as written texts, to ignore the dialogic and oral nature of those texts. Looking for the singular perspective of the author (who may not even be fully responsible for the text as it has come down to us) in the case of performative texts that are, by their genre, defined by their audiences, ignores the nature of the work. But, tragedy, and Sophocles in particular tends to get trapped in "GREAT MAN CLASSICS" in ways that do this. And it was this, not Greg's point, that Amy and I reacted against. He is not the bad guy.

With Sophocles and Oedipus Tyrannos especially there is an idea that the play embodies universal truths. But those truths aren't ones that different peoples at different times and in different contexts are expected to find. No, indeed. These universal truths are really a singular TRUTH that emerges from the intent of a singular genius, Sophocles. And it is for us to both find that truth and to revere the exceptional man who produced them. And if we do not find that Truth, it is because we are incapable of it--we must be a too poor, too not white, too not a man to be able to see the genius' truth. And all those works of scholarship that propose to read Sophocles through feminist or class or other lenses are "revisionist" in a bad way and are denying Truth.

It shouldn't be controversial when someone like me says that texts have meanings that are produced despite authorial intention and at the point of reception and that this means any text can have a variety of interpretations and even 'truths'. It's what actually makes works like tragedy so appealing--because they can be accessed in different spaces and times to produce meaning while still carrying in them all the past meanings that others gained from them. It should not be controversial to say that every text contains truths and not Truth. And, yet, this brings us to our third intersection.

The emphasis on authorial genius and Truth is no different from and a product of the same myths of Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, and the American Dream. And these are foundational to the Western Civilization narrative and so MUST BE DEFENDED.

John Gast "American Progress" 1872

Classics has been at the heart of the American Exceptionalism story since its beginning, but it was in the 19th century, as the "American West" was conquered, indigenous peoples eradicated or removed, and when the Lost Cause myth started us down the road to Jim Crow that things got super entrenched. I've written about this numerous times on the blog (example), there are articles on the way Latin textbooks have been used to perpetuate the ideas of the Happy Slave, etc. The above painting is a beautiful example of the ways "America" (which became especially in the Plato to Nato era the beacon of the "West") has been dressed up by the Classical. And university education and the Western Civilization curriculum have been integral to forging a shared White, elite identity for those who view revering of the canon and the "Great Men" within it is a cornerstone of the Western Civilization narrative. This thread by Dani Bostick on the most recent entry into the "Why We Must Teach Western Civ" catalogue (shockingly, from the National Review *insert sarcastic expression*) pretty much hits a BINGO on what we can come to expect from such articles. But, some people may be unaware of how this elitist argument is part and parcel of the Libertarianism that been intentionally trickled down into the "Everyman Real American" ethos--the one time trickle down has really seemed to work!

The narrative of American exceptionalism is premised on the Frontier Thesis, which argued that it was the westward expansion that forged American identity and which, unsurprisingly, was originally explicated in a speech in Chicago in 1893 at the American Historical Association meeting--coinciding with the World's Columbian Expo. This thesis is, in many ways, encapsulates the way this myth roots the Libertarian ethos at America's imperialist, capitalist core. In decades of cowboy films, textbooks called "The American Experience", and all of us playing Oregon Trail, this idea that America was about our rugged individualism, about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, and about how we all could, if we worked really hard, own our own 40 acres and a mule or strike gold (or black gold even) has been burned into us. And it means, essentially, that our freedom, American Freedom™ is about being free to do what we want--even at the expense of others (and ourselves). As Ibram X Kendi put it in a recent Atlantic article "We're Still Living and Dying in a Slaveholder's Republic":

The freedom to do, not the freedom of others to be free from harm--that is supposedly the American way. That is where the singular genius, the competitive individualism, the search the Truth and not truths takes us. And where it comes from. This is at the heart of the Western Civilization narrative. It is the heart of the White definition of American. It is why the same people who will tell us that only Sophocles' intentions matter are the same people who want to rush to open businesses, deny care or relief for those most harmed by their actions, and refuse to wear masks to protect both themselves and others from harm. It's a most undemocratic way to express one's freedom, but somehow those of us who care about others get to be "unAmerican".

Ancient Identities/Modern Politics

This is the final of three lectures I gave  between July 9-13, 2019 as the Onassis Lecturer at the CANE Summer Institute held at Brown University. The theme of the institute was "E Pluribus Unum".  The first lecture (on identities in the ancient Greek world) has been posted previously here. The second lecture (on Athenian anti-immigrant policies and ideas) has been posted previously here.

NOTE: there are parts of each lecture where I either did not script the text and refer to slides or simply ad libbed. As a result, in those locations, I will either post the slides or will link to previous posts that explain the point I was making. 

In the wake of the increased violence fueled by white supremacism over the last year alone, understanding the ways it underpins so much of our everyday lives and assumptions is important. And as classicists, we have played our part in popularizing, perpetuating, and embedding racism into the fabric of the US. This talk examines some of the ways we have done this, even when we don't intend to, by pointing out where those who intend it manage to make their own views the 'norm' or 'mainstream' or seemingly 'neutral'.

Over the last few lectures, I have tried to get us to think about what it meant to be ‘Greek’ in the ancient world and both the ways in which ‘Greekness’ allowed for a wide range of diversity in antiquity, but also how protecting those micro-identities led to policies and practices of discrimination based on prejudice. On the one hand, as an ancient historian, I am interested in trying to reconstruct the most accurate understanding of my subject of study. On the other hand, this matters to me--and should matter to all students of the ancient world--because there have been many modern political claims made upon ancient Greece in the name of modern identities. These modern identities frequently misrepresent-- sometimes unintentionally, but often intentionally--who the ancient Greeks were and what their connection to them may be.

What I want to talk about today as my closing lecture is some of those modern claims made on ancient identities.But, instead of focusing on the most extreme voices, my interest is in looking at those misrepresentations done by fellow academics or as part of mainstream culture.

In my first lecture and in other lectures by speakers and in classrooms at the Institute this week, we have looked at the ways in which the ancient world was a true plurality under the heading of thinking through the phrase e pluribus unum, from many one. We have, in most cases, treated this phrase as an ideal to which we as Americans can and should aspire. Remember our melting pot and salad bowl?

My own talks have discussed Greece from e pluribus plures to ex uno unum wondering what happened when ancient Athens rejected the plurality of Greekness and decided to emphasize and engineer its own exceptionalism. What I want to ask today is how these tensions between plures and unum have functioned in our own modern context and how the ancient world has been shaped by and used by those who would see classics as support for an Athenian-style rejection of the plurality that is our country and our world. We academic classicists have enabled and encouraged this in our own practices.

Enablers

In the shaping of the discipline that is Classics, we have repeatedly attempted to create an unum out of the variety and diversity that is antiquity, but our discipline has never truly embraced that variety and has instead restricted it. Under the heading of ‘classics’, our modern discipline has narrowed the ancient Mediterranean world to ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’, constrained it in time between roughly 800 BCE-500 CE (but, who are we kidding, really 200 CE), and elevated Greek and Roman cultures to an alleged 'superiority' over Egyptian, Persian, Judaic, Arabian, Kushite, Indian, Chinese, Armenian, Scyth, and many others. Those peoples appear in our discipline but only as curiosities, as exoticisms, and only in so-called‘non-traditional’ courses and scholarship.

The discipline of classics has also traditionally compressed the varieties of identities, peoples, and cultures of the Greek and Roman worlds themselves under these names of 'Greece' and ‘Rome', limiting our teaching to primarily Athens and to the city of Rome or maybe Italy. It has always struck me how on the literature side, we narrow ‘Greece” from the broad representation of the Greek world found in the so-called ‘archaic’ authors to almost exclusively Athenian voices in our so called ‘classical’ canon and then dismiss much of the variety and vibrancy of what we call the 'Hellenistic' period. We also forget that these labels--Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic--come from judgements made by art historians on the development of sculpture and painting from Greece. They are evolutionary and value judgements--archaic is considered un(der)developed (though they tend to excise Homer as his own ‘period’), ‘classical’ is the best, 'hellenistic' derivative and only ‘Greek-like', impure.

When we apply this to time periods in the history of the ‘Greeks’, we pass value judgments on the world they inhabited--the archaic period was a ‘developing world’ where democracy and the polis were beginning their formation, the ‘classical’ was the polis and democracy supposedly in its purest and best form, while the hellenistc world--the most diverse, the most vibrantly mobile, and with the most literary and artistic experimentation--was deemed inferior, corrupt, impure, with democracy destroyed.

Decades after the so called ’canon wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s, those of us who want to teach and study the ancient world in its infinite variety find our scholarship still often labeled ‘fringe’ or not ‘mainstream’ because it values those texts and places and peoples and approaches that some of our colleagues aren’t familiar or comfortable with or consider 'real' classics (Emily Greenwood gave a wonderful talk on the harms of this at FIEC/CA 2019 and it will hopefully be published soon).

'Classics’ is the only academic discipline that contains a value judgment in its name. We study only the ‘best’ things. And we wonder why we struggle to become an inclusive field and why our colleagues outside of classics look at us sometimes with a bit of side eye.

But we shouldn’t wonder. Because along with only studying the ‘best’ things, classics had traditionally been a discipline that also touted that it only attracted the ‘best’ people and in fact that only ‘the best’ people could be classicists--I have heard my own colleagues at numerous institutions use this language and I ave watched them single out for attention only those whom they deemed 'worthy'. Small liberal arts college (SLAC) departments are some of the worst on this front--(my own department's language in the university catalogue is jarring and I can't do anything to change it at this stage)--where 'best' means mostly ‘white people’ (or white adjacent), and really, white upper-middle class people.

Classical Whiteness

It is a known fact that classics was used as a gatekeeper to higher education against black Americans after emancipation. It was stated unequivocally by numerous leaders in academia and politics well into the 20th century that the ‘black’ mind, like the woman’s, was unable to understand and attain mastery of the classics. DuBois’s life’s work as a classicist was intended in many ways to prove this a lie and he worked to promote classical education to his ‘talented 10th’ so that through this classical education they could gain access to university education and create a professional class to serve the black communities as doctors, lawyers, etc as it became clear after Reconstruction stalled that segregation and not integration was going to be the law of the land.

And yet, in this same period, a period known as ‘Redemption’, in which white southerners reclaimed their legislatures and local governments from black Americans who had made advances under Reconstruction, sought to take their segregationist ways nation wide. They used the classics and ‘the classical’ to help do this by forging a a strong visual link between the ‘classical’ and whiteness.

As Dr. Lyra Monteiro discusses in Ch 4 of her 2012 dissertation, the connection between classics and whiteness was forged early in the US. The use of classically inspired architecture on plantations built into the fabric of the land what were 'white' spaces and which weren't.

This technique of creating white built environments was continued and nationalized (more than it had already been before) through the use of classical architecture at the US World's Expos. The Chicago expo of 1893 was the most important of these. Here, the 'White City' (they weren't even subtle) of relentless neo-classical architecture was contrasted to the Midway housing 'exotic' concessions building and displays of imported and imitated 'foreignness'. I've written about this connection in more detail on my blog, but important to mention is not only the architecture, but also the connections forged between technology/industry with whiteness and the classical. And, importantly, the identification of the classical with modernity.

The juxtapositions in the World's Expos between the classically designed and referential world of Anglo-Europeans and everyone else (presented in stereotyping, 'exotic' side shows and caricatures) made the point that northern Europeans and the US owned the classical. The Nashville Parthenon replica, made for one such expo, links classicism explicitly with the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and whiteness. If the classical was the peak of ancient civilization, then the modern US was the peak of evolution. Although it is not a certainty, I am not the only person to wonder if the Sambo caricature isn't derived from or referencing the popular janiform representations of Africans from 5th century Athens.

 The forging of this link between classics and whiteness had consequences both within and without the discipline. Within the discipline, it led to the whitewashing of the ancient Greeks and Romans. They became, as our good friend Bernard Knox so proudly put it:

That the Greeks and Romans would not have any notion of 'whiteness' or even want to consider themselves 'white' (only women, people with diseases or those burned by cold were 'white'), this idea persists and has been a central core of classics since its inception as a discipline. It is a whitewashing of the ancient Mediterranean.

And as part of this whitewashing, not only did our ancient Greeks and Romans become themselves avatars of modern white supremacism, but the discipline itself dismissed as lesser than and irrelevant the interconnected cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and created the narrow field we know today, with its almost exclusive focus on the Greek and Latin languages and canon of select, ‘golden age’ texts.

More important than the loss to the discipline--something we can reverse and change by opening our minds and stretching ourselves out of our comfort zones, by committing to changing our teaching and disciplinary lenses--is the situation of classics as a ‘white’ discipline by positing Greece and Rome at the heart of and foundation of this thing we call ‘western civilization’ that is, for better or worse, a term used to mean white, elite, christian, civilization.

I am not going to go into this in detail--I’ve laid out the pre-WW2 data on this on my blog and if you are interested, please read Alastair Bonnet’s The Idea of the West from 2004. For Classics, the real period of development of this concept and its strong ties to classics takes place in the Cold War. At some point in the future, I will be writing my research up, but later this fall, I should have a guest post on the blog from a German scholar who is writing on the Russian engagement with the concept of ‘western civilization’--it will be quite interesting. I will point to now only as a segue into the next section of the talk to uses of this idea by contemporary politicians and, for better or worse, white nationalist terrorists that connect western civilization and the connection to Greece and Rome to a genetic or hereditary type of heritage. The Pharos website keeps a running tally of these uses.

This is a tricky connection--the idea being that there is something in our DNA that makes those of us of European descent the ‘true’ inheritors of Greek (and to a lesser extent Roman) civilizations. This idea has made its way into mainstream genetics publications and is leading is some ways to a re-emergence of scientific racism that we thought had been at least discredited by the scientific horrors of World War II.

One thing that has become clear in recent years is that there is a bit of an obsession with trying to identify 'who are the ancient Greeks' and to lay claim to direct descent from them. This isn't innocent as it was an obsession of the Nazis and other race scientists. When geneticists do it now, they are linking themselves to a long tradition of conflating culture with .1% of the human genome, with specific physical features, and with white supremacism.


THE ‘RACE’ DEBATE--aDNA to the RESCUE?

Geneticists have an obsession with ancient Greek DNA. Why not Rome? Maybe its because rome has always been viewed as a true cultural mosaic, which some see as a plus, but others see as a detriment, like those who still consider Tenney Frank's idea on 'race mixture' as the cause for the fall of the western Roman empire (which you can read more about here):

Of course, Frank and his theory cold not be tested back when he wrote his article and everyone, now assuming that the Romans are a ‘mongrel’ people, they aren’t really worth studying in order to find ‘pure’ peoples--which seems to be the goal of some (too many) geneticist. They keep searching for a time and place where they can find a ‘pure’ European or ‘pure’ African or ‘pure’ Asian DNA sequence. As even David Reich, perhaps the most well known geneticist working on aDNA, admits, there is no ‘pure’ DNA anywhere. It is all admixture. I’ll explain why this matters and why the Greeks matter here so much.

BACKGROUND: So, the Human Genome Project went from 1990-2003 and had the goal of mapping the entirety of human DNA through what are called nucleotides of which we all have over 3 billion within the haploid reference genome. The project could not sequence any individual because all individuals have unique combinations of genes, but they were able to make a composite map of all human DNA. With all humans having basically 99.9% of their genes in common (though with some variation in how much if any Neanderthal or Denisovian or whatnot might appear and in infinite combinations), scientists who are interested in trying to understand human physiological differences can focus in on trying to extract meaningful differences, but mostly, scientists have decided that what they want to understand is what the differences can help us make a distinction between someone whose ancestors are from Europe vs. those whose ancestors are from Africa, with a specific emphasis on hair texture and skin color And Greek ancient DNA is a key in many of these studies.

In 2017, a series of studies were published on the DNA of ‘Greeks’. One, perhaps the most well known, was led by Iosif Lazaridis, a geneticist at Harvard and focused on the aDNA of 19 skeletons found in mainland Greece, Crete, and Anatolia, and then compared them with DNA of 30 living Greeks. The lead author of the second study, George Stamatoyannopoulos, also participated in the first.


The Lazaridis study was published in Nature (one of the top journals) and written up in Science, an immensely popular science magazine, with the click-bait title “The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals”. The authors themselves were a bit more circumspect in their publication, but the Science popularization of the article played to the crowds:

The study emphasized continuities between the Mycenaeans, Minoans, and modern Greeks. The study was criticized by many archaeologists for its small sample size, lack of randomization and for its use of a ‘likelihood’ model of reconstruction when they were unable to get certain information from the samples. Importantly for us, they claim in the paper that they were expecting to find more variation in the genes than they did:

The continuity between the Mycenaeans and living people is “particularly striking given that the Aegean has been a crossroads of civilizations for thousands of years,” says co-author George Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington in Seattle. (Science Aug. 2017).

They ‘expected’ to find more genetic variation, but by careful selection of samples and likelihood modeling, they were able to show it wasn’t. Hmmm.

I offered the study to my own students majoring in biology who were able to point out numerous flaws in the data, including the fact that the samples were carefully selected, they pre-determined what they were looking for and how they would classify it, the small sample size, and the fact that they ‘filled in’ according to their own models data that was unable to be extracted. They also could have done additional tests, like stable isotope analysis on the teeth to try to discover if they bodies they sampled were themselves potentially from the regions other than where they were excavated.

My friend and colleague Dimitri Nakassis, a bronze age archaeologist, wrote up on his own blog a response to this study where he questioned the methodology. Responses to his post and also to other posts of the article on the internet elicited something interesting, which gives us an idea of the political dimensions of such a study within a US context, particularly how such a study can be used to support white supremacism. In each of the responses, they honed in on the fact that, while the 11 bodies from Bronze Age Crete and the 4 bodies from Bronze Age Peloponnese shared almost 70% of the genetic markers they examined (not all of them), there was a range from 4-16% of ‘northern European DNA’ in the 4 bodies from the Peloponnese, while it was non-existent in the 11 Cretan bodies.

 To these white supremacists, this was evidence of the truth of the so-called Dorian Invasion and that the ‘Glory that was Greece’ and the Spartan military machine specifically was of ‘Aryan’ extraction.

The study seems to have been intended to show that modern Greeks were indeed descended from ancient Greeks and that Crete was also Greece. There are nationalistic reasons for wanting such data, but this study, at least, was coy about any such motivations.

The other study, led by Prof. Stamatoyannopoulos, is a bit different and is far more explicit. It’s stated goal is to prove statements by 19th century German historian Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer wrong when he claimed that modern Greeks were NOT descended from the ancient Greeks, but had been replaced by Armenians, Turks, and others in the Byzantine and Ottoman periods. I believe a direct quotation of Fallmeyer is something like “Not the slightest drop of undiluted Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.” Fallmeyer’s sentiment was accompanied by a conviction that northern Europeans were the true inheritors of the ‘Glory that was Greece’, something shared by later people like Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race, who posited ‘Nordic’ origins for all ancient ‘civilizations’ (Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, etc) which ended, he claimed because of miscegenation with non-Nordics. American eugenicists and the Nazis loved this idea.

So, here is the introduction to the study meant to disprove Falmeyer:

The citations for this introduction come from no scholarship dated after roughly the 1970s and the evidence for the Dorian invasion--yes--the Dorian invasion--is Herodotus. They have not read a single discussion by historians of it. In fact, historians are dismissed as ‘ideological’, while this study, with this framing is ‘objective’ SCIENCE. But look at the language.

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 pre-Nazi text--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.

And now, they are being published as facts in top scientific journals by teams of geneticists who are dismissive of social sciences and humanities, who present their work as silver bullets to solve all the great mysteries of antiquity and who neither do their research, nor have large enough sample sizes to make the grand pronouncements they make.

Why does this matter to us as classicists? It matters because, as archaeologist Susanne Hakenbeck writes in a new article on archeogenetics, many of these studies, far from reading the data neutrally, instead use the data to affirm 19th century racist theories of northern migrations (like the Dorian invasion) as true events of population replacement--in other words, aDNA is being used to write histories that return to models anew that erroneously suggest that all Mediterranean civilizations are the products of European, typically northern European aggression. Even when the archaeology does not support this, SCIENCE is claiming to provide ‘objective’ evidence that ‘speaks for itself’ to support these racist narratives.

And this is exactly what is happening with these studies, which are being popularized so quickly and without context or nuance and which are being published by geneticists with their own political agendas and with no input from archaeologists and historians.  As Hakenbeck’s research shows, the far right nationalist groups, including neo-Nazi groups, are using these studies in their political campaigns and to promote hate and violence on their web platforms. Golden Dawn in Greece, while currently on the outs again in terms of political representation in parliament thanks to the recent election July 7 2019, uses these studies to fuel their own nationalist ends.

Perhaps closer to home, however, these studies are being used by scientists like David Reich to demonstrate mass migrations and replacement of populations through war and violence (something that a few dozen DNA samples simply cannot show). This fuels contemporary fears by white supremacist groups that such ‘replacements’ are real and that ‘race genocide’ is real.

Some of us work on college campuses where white nationalist groups have hung posters either to recruit new members or to impact campus climate an intimidate those who speak out against them.

If you recall anything about the reports of the Charlottesville raly from 2 years ago, the chant being uttered was “Jews will not replace us” and, in the above poster from Daily Stormer, the book ‘The Great Replacement’ is in the hands of the New Zealand killer--the book refers to a 1978 novel of the same name by a French nationalist and is a dystopian fiction about mass immigration of north Africans into France that literally overnight replaces the entire population. Now imagine this book being promoted during the current refugee crisis as not a work of fiction but as a prophecy for the disappearance of ‘white Europe’

And if we think that this is just fringe groups, remember our 'friend' Steve King, who has repeatedly retweeted white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers (and he is not the only one in our Congress who thinks this, just the only one who says it openly):

Another person who also adheres to these views is Victor Davis Hansen, who publishes them under a blog and then talks about them on a podcast called ‘The Classicist”. 

When you put all of these things together, you can see that aDNA studies of the Bronze Age that are searching for the ‘origins’ of the Greeks or other ancient groups in the Mediterranean aren’t innocent or objective. They are part of an ongoing political climate promoted by white supremacism and colonialism and are used to promote fear of diversity, fear of decline. And they are part of the long tradition of centering the classics and the Greeks as the foundation of a ‘white’ 'western’ and ‘christian’ civilization. They try to make that cultural heritage a GENETIC inheritance that only certain people are entitled to. They want to say that some people have 'civilization' in their DNA.

CONCLUSION

Our discipline was built to exclude. It continues to be used to craft and promote exclusions. I look around this room today and I see a sea of whiteness, just like we see at every conference and still too often in our classrooms. If we want to change that, we have to work for it--it won’t just happen on its own. And that means, making ourselves uncomfortable, studying and working to understand and mitigate our biases and prejudices busting open the canon, being creative in our pedagogies, taking chances with new types of evidence and methods, collaborating with our colleagues outside of our departments and programs, seeing our own teaching as continual opportunities for learning, analyzing the institutions we are part of and seeing where we can push back against the status quo, looking around our classrooms and conferences and not trying to figure out who the ‘real’ classicists are or may be, but truly embracing a ‘classics for all’ mentality and way of acting, and understanding that ‘classics’ doesn’t have to be an ex uno unum--it is and should be an e pluribus unum.

Rejecting 'Greekness': Classics Athens’ Anti-Immigrant Policies and Practices

This is the second of three lectures I gave  between July 9-13, 2019 as the Onassis Lecturer at the CANE Summer Institute held at Brown University. The theme of the institute was "E Pluribus Unum".  The first lecture has been posted previously here.

NOTE: there are parts of each lecture where I either did not script the text and refer to slides or simply ad libbed. As a result, in those locations, I will either post the slides or will link to previous posts that explain the point I was making.

In my first lecture, I discussed the fact the “Greeks” were a plurality--they weren’t bothered by being both “Greeks” and Spartan, or Corinthian, or Milesian, or Ephesian, or Samian or Egyptian, Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, even Persian! It’s just how things were. But not all Greeks thought their fellow Greek were their equals--some ‘Greeks’ were, they thought, better than others. The most well know of these ethno-exceptionalists were the Athenians.

Athens, the place where most of my research has focused in the past, had one of the largest ports--Piraeus, a hub for merchant activity, industrial weaving and pottery production, and a thriving shipping industry-- and it had, as far as we can tell, one of the most ethnically diverse populations among the Greeks of the Classical period--thousands of immigrants between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE flooded into the polis either looking for work or seeking refuge from the continual wars that plagued the Aegean. This is not to mention the tens of thousands of enslaved persons being imported at the same time--enslaved who were both fellow Greeks and non-Greeks. However, the Athenians also had, as far as we can tell, some of the most restrictive laws for foreigners. the metic system (metoikia), which I want to talk about today. It was, I would argue, one of the few only truly racist systems in Greco-Roman antiquity and seemed to depend upon a certain level of anxiety about foreigners and foreignness. It may have been instituted, after all, as Aristotle said--because of ‘too many citizens’.

Is Athens exceptional in this regard? Or is it the case that whenever a population feels they are being pushed out by ‘others’ we should expect this reaction? Does it have to be this way? It’s a question we need to consider more broadly if we want to understand the world we ourselves live in, where debates surrounding immigration, refugees, and national boundaries are ever looming. Understanding Athens is particularly important given how often Athens is used as a model for democracy, its high period of empire and anti-immigration sentiment a ‘golden age’ in our textbooks, popular journalism, and entertainment. For example:

In truth, for about four centuries, Athens rejected the plurality of Greekness and insisted not only on its own supremacy, but sought to engineer Athenian ethnic homogeneity. That thing--racial homogeneity--that I argued the other day did not apply to the Greeks generally was, in fact, an ongoing wish for the Athenians--ex uno unum.

My goal for today is to break this wish down, show its ebbs and flows, its final decline, and the contexts in which it functioned. My hope is that it will give us some food for thought as we enter the second decade of an international refugee crisis in which over 10 million people have been forced by war, violence, corporate exploitation, and interventionists policies of superpowers to leave their homes and seek safety in our own and other ‘democratic’ countries, some of whom (like Hungary, Italy, the UK, and the US) have shut their borders and enacted policies that encourage at the least negligence and at the worst human rights violations and cruelty. 


TIME LINE and LAWS

I will start with orienting us with a chronology and explanation of the policies:

Cleisthenes and the Synoecism, 508/7 BCE:

καὶ δημότας ἐποίησεν ἀλλήλων τοὺς οἰκοῦντας ἐν ἑκάστῳ τῶν δήμων, ἵνα μὴ πατρόθεν προσαγορεύοντες ἐξελέγχωσιν τοὺς νεοπολίτας, ἀλλὰ τῶν δήμων ἀναγορεύωσιν. ὅθεν καὶ καλοῦσιν Ἀθηναῖοι σφᾶς αὐτοὺς τῶν δήμων.
       
And he made those dwelling in each deme of the same deme as one another, in order that they not ascertain who were the new citizens (νεοπολίτας) when addressing them by patronymic, but would publicly announce them as belonging to the deme. Thus, Athenians name themselves by their demes (Aristotle Ath Pol 21.4).

Cleisthenes' reforms, if we believe Aristotle, involved making citizens out of those who would be in later times called metics. In 508/7 BCE, however, they were incorporated into the new Athens as citizens. Of course, what Aristotle means precisely by νεοπολίτας here is not certain. It could refer to indigenous inhabitants of Attica in places that had not yet been fully synoecized. Or, it could refer to any residents, whether born in Attica or not. Either way, this is a move that creates the idea of a united Attic Athens and everyone no so incorporated is 'Athenian' and will get to be part of the myths and institutions that held it together under the claims of a pure, 'Athenian' descent.

After the Persian Wars (490 BCE and 480-79 BCE) we see an uptick in anti-Persian rhetoric, but also anti-Ionian Greek rhetoric; policy of subjugating Ionians to Athenian control under the Delian League may stem from animosity over the Ionians generally fighting on the side of Persian in the war.

Institution of metoikia--laws (470-460 BCE)

Periklean Citizenship Law (451 BCE): Both parents must be citizens; law was not retroactive, though some scholars (like D. Ogden) have argued [unconvincingly] that this law reflects practice in Athens towards children of a foreign mother prior to the law's passage.

Relaxations (429 BCE, after 415 BCE): There is evidence that the law was relaxed in the face of first the plague and then the disaster in Sicily that allowed citizen men who had a child by a foreign women to request they be granted citizenship. Carawan (see biblio below) argues that the 429 BCE exception was for those whose legitimate citizen heirs had died. After the Sicilian disaster, we have evidence from the 4th c. BCE that it was--Demosthenes and many others speak in orations of their own parents being born "at the time when" it was required to only have one citizen parent. Chronologically, this falls into the period of the Peloponnesian War. There was a stigma attached to this, but it didn't prevent them from being prominent citizens.

After 403 BCE: After the reign of Thirty Tyrants and restoration of the democracy, one of the first things the restored Athenian assembly did was re-establish the restrictions on foreigners--women immigrants could no longer bear citizen children to citizens. Those children also were additionally banned from being heirs to citizens.

A ban on marriage followed a bit later and enforcement seems to have ramped up--penalties for failure to register and pay tax or for pretending to be a citizen: sale into slavery and the person who reported received a portion of the sale. A man name Aristogeiton, is one of the most well known for this. According to Demosthenes 25, he sold his own sister and attempted to have Zobia, an independent metic woman sold as well. 

Around 322 BCE, Athens attempted to put in place a new metic tax, but the city was soon to lose its independence. In 317 BCE, Cassander, an heir to Alexander, imposed Demetrius of Phalerum on the city as its governor on behalf of the Macedonians. He seems to have removed the ban on foreign ownership of property. He may have ended the taxes on metics. Regardless, even with its loss of independent status, the Ahtenians continued to maintain citizenship as the prerogative of only those with two citizens parents and the marriage ban seems to have remained in effect.

Between 200-100 BCE, outside of Athens, we see Athenians in Athenian settlements (like Delos) intermarrying with non-Athenians; Maybe a sign the chauvinism was diminishing? Regardless, after 200 BCE within Athens itself, we see evidence of the ban on intermarriage with non-citizens being lifted--over 40 tombs for Milesian women married to Athenian citizens have been noted and there are likely many more.

This is quite a trajectory and the most restricted times for immigrants in Athens were during the periods when democracy was supposedly at its height. The equality of the citizens could only be achieved, it seems, through exclusions. Otherwise, what was citizenship other than a burden or series of obligations? To make it desirable, it had to have privileges. And instead of making everyone truly equal (economic inequality was rather high), the elites pushed legislation that targeted foreigners (especially foreign women) and promoted national myths that all Athenians were equal in their purity of descent.

 What reasons? Why would they do this? What is the underlying logic?

RACISM, that weed Knox and many others have convinced themselves could never grow in Greece, especially in Athens, which recall, he calls the polis in its advanced form.

But, as discussed in the last lecture, this homogeneity was a myth as was the idea that our concept of race can be applied to antiquity--race in antiquity is different. Instead, we should consider race as a structuring mechanism. Here is Falguni Sheth:

In other words: Race is more a technology that structures human interactions and embeds prejudices against racialized peoples into systems of oppression-- there are three things: human difference, prejudice, and race: race is the institutionalization of prejudice based on moving signifiers for human difference. Sometimes this involves the biological, sometimes not. If we understand, as Sheth does, race not as a ‘descriptive modifier’, but as “a mode or vehicle of division, separation, hierarchy, exploitation’, we can see better how institutions that seem to be, as she calls it ‘race neutral’ are actually how race itself functions.

And this is how the metic system operates. We miss the implications of the system and its nature if we mistake ‘race’ for a something as banal as skin color--a difference of a few hundred alleles in our genes out of about 3 billion.

Let me explain: How was the Athenian system a race system built on racism? I am going to put up a slide at the end with a select bibliography where you can see where these issues have been discussed before. Susan Lape and I are probably closest in our understanding of race in Athens, though she argues from race as embedded within the idea of descent instead of looking at the structures that support the idea of descent based citizenship. My interest is really in understanding race as a system within institutions, even institutions that can purport to be 'race neutral', as Sheth discusses.

5th century (after 450 BCE): Autochthony and the search of purity--eugenics? Ion--lots of discussion also in Herodotus, Thucydides, the funeral orations. There is a large scholarship on this (see biblio below for a selection). Here are some samples from Athenian tragedy that reflect these ideas.

Foreign women in tragedies are points of contamination, danger (Phaedra in Euripides' Hippolytus, Medea, Andromache in the plays named after them by Euripides)--the language around Phaedra, especially, is the language of nosos, disease. The best metic is the one that sacrifices itself for the state (Euripides' Herakleidae) or can offer divine protection (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus). I discuss this in Ch 2 of the Immigrant Women in Athens book, if anyone wants to take a look at the detailed discussion.

The fact that naturalized citizens in no period could hold the archonship or certain priesthoods--only their grandchildren (so long as their naturalized children married born-citizens) could--points to the fear of reproducing foreignness.

In the 4th century, metics appear in oratory as inherently untrustworthy--Geoff Bakewell has written on this issue in Lysias--another sign of fear of contamination.

380s BCE: Isocrates attempts repeatedly in his speeches to recruit the Athenians to unite the Greeks in a war with Persia. The Athenians weren’t interested--maybe they didn’t see much difference between their fellow Greeks and the ‘barbarians’? He eventually decides Philip of Macedon is a better choice. At least one Athenian wasn't opposed to foreigners...

There was, then, a LOT of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner sentiment in Athens from the 1st quarter of the 5th century to the last part of the 4th. This rhetoric was accompanied by very strict policies that were very harmful to the metics who lived in the city. But it may have also have been not just prejudice against foreigners--certain foreigners were welcome to the city and over the course of the 5th and 4th centuries, we see various periods when wealthy men are invited to Athens to set up factories (Lysias’ father Kephalos, for example) or are made citizens though having been enslaved (Pasion and Phormio the bankers; Apollodoros, the son of Pasion).

We also see evidence of proxenia for metics, a typically honorary status, that also grants them the right to own land in Athens, if not citizenship. We even see a couple of block grants of status (maybe not actual full citizenship) to refugees from Plataea (427); Samos (403/2); and Olynthus (348).

Its also wrong  o say that Athenians were all hateful to the foreign residents living in the city--#notallathenians. There is tomb evidence that some of the immigrant or slave women living within the city were loved by citizens--despite their status as foreign--nurse tombs:

So, we see evidence of acts of kindness to individuals and even certain groups who were ‘other’. But the policies can overwhelm those individual kindnesses. Those individual acts of gentleness are great, but they are only necessary because there are policies that create incentives to cruelty. And these acts of kindness can be hallmarks of systems of oppression--examples trotted out to show it 'wasn't that bad'.

What do we make of all of this? Why do I think it matters here to think about this through the idea of race?

Let’s go back to the ideas I mentioned earlier from political scientist Falguni Sheth: If we understand that race is NOT a content signifier--it isn’t skin color of hair type or any sort of physiological, visible difference (most of the resident foreigners in Athens were other Greeks, after all)--but the mechanisms used to enforce discrimination, inequality, and oppression through those or other shifting markers, then we can understand better how systems of oppression are formed and how they act. We can see what is happening in Athens as a process that isn’t built into ‘nature’ but is constructed willfully, one law, one lawsuit at a time. It gives us a much more accurate picture of what was happening in Athens and gives us the tools we need to see how their imperialism, ethno-centrism, exceptionalism, misogyny, and militarism intersected and fed each other.

It also gives of better tools with which to see beyond and through the elites of many of our literary sources like Thucydides and the orators and get a better picture of those members of Athenian society who lived at the margins. In other words, it gives us a much more accurate picture of what it was like to live in Athens in antiquity, of what it was like to be the person upon whose labor the amazing architecture was built (many (most?) of the craftsmen were foreigners or enslaved). In other words, the “Glory that was Greece” had an underbelly that we, as Americans would do well to pay heed to because our own history shows that the Glory that is America is built on equally if not worse racism and structures of oppression. By ignoring this aspect of one of the models for our democracy in our teaching and discussions of classics, we allow ourselves to ignore it in our own history and daily lives as well.

CONCLUSION

But, I don’t want to leave us on a down note--as Robin reminded us yesterday, IT’S SUMMER! AND SUNNY!. But also because there are alternatives to this exclusionary model presented by Athens in the 5th-2nd centuries. Miletos. From Miletos, we have a series of decrees that span from around 250 BCE to 100 BCE. Some of them are extremely fragmentary, but they attest to 100s of people from all over Greece, the Black Sea region, Italy and Sicily, Asia, the Levant, and North Africa being granted citizenship in the city over the period. Most of them were granted citizenship as whole families--husband (frequently the husband and wife had the same ethnic identifier, but not always), fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. Some were individual women, some individual men.

Of particular note are the inscriptions from 228/7 BCE and 223/2 BCE which include large block grants of citizenship to Cretans. These Cretans came to Miletos as mercenaries. We would expect them to have come alone because that is how we imagine mercenaries from Xenophon’s Anabasis. But, no. These Cretans brought their families. And they settled. And then they became Milesians.

We don’t have a lot of records like this from antiquity, and we don't know everything about these decrees that we would like to know about them. And we know that something was going on that caused Miletos to relax its own citizenship restriction, but this is a significant concession.  I imagine that if we did, we would find that many Greek poleis were far more open to foreigners that we often assume because our most well attested example, Athens, twas so restrictive. This evidence suggests--as does the lack of foreign burials in Miletos--that maybe these foreigners weren’t segregated and derided when they arrived, whether as refugees, as freed slaves, or as free immigrants, but were welcomed in as part of the city.