116 Gary Reger
However, borderlands, boundaries, and frontiers need not be physical. Barth’s ethnic
boundaries are marked by social practices, not physical space, and so, similar to the sym-
bolic boundaries of anthropological and sociological study (Lamont and Molnár 2002:
167–9), a “borderland” too need not be a physical space; a number of other metaphoric
spaces may also serve as borderlands where inter-ethnic contact, conflict, mixing, and
perhaps articulation of a hybrid ethnicity might emerge. Some sociological literature on
ethnic identity emphasizes this social space rather than the physical space where ethnici-
ties meet and, by their interplay, create, define, and maintain identities: “The social spaces
wherein cross-group interactions take place are the effective social boundaries between
groups” (Sanders 2002: 328). It is in these social borderlands that hybridities can emerge,
perhaps more often than at geographical borders.
Consider, for instance, the island of Delos in the later second and early first centuries
BCE. Stripped of import–export duties in 167BCEby the Romans and returned to Athe-
nian authority, the island developed as an important central Aegean trading center with
ties extending to the Levant in the East and Italy in the West. Merchants and traders from
both ends of its economic catchment basin transited, sometimes staying for longer peri-
ods. With the withering away of Athenian authority, the different groups on the island
created a local identity anchored in the notion that anyone there had a right to participate
in the governance and social life of the island. Thus, we find people who, in an ordinary
polis, would be stigmatized as foreigners serving on the council and participating in the
ephebic organizations of the island. From a kind of social borderland, something new
emerged. However, this tale also raises a deep question, for it is far from clear that what
develops on Delos is anything like a new, hybridethnicidentity. It rather resembles the
hybridized social identity created in a middle ground for specific purposes; we will return
to this question in the text that follows.
Hybrid Ethnicity and Borderlands
in the Greco-Roman World
These preliminaries aside, I would now like to take a look at examples from Greco-Roman
antiquity where one or more of the features of hybridity and ethnicity on the one hand,
and borderland phenomena, on the other, have been proposed or might be sug-
gested. The examples are in no particular order, but let us begin with the matter of
common descent.
One place where common descent operated in a way suggestive of, or implying (if taken
seriously), a hybridization of ethnic identity is in claims by non-Greek cities or peoples
to common descent with the Greeks as a whole, or more specifically with a particular
Greekpolis. Olivier Curty has collected a corpus of inscriptions illustrating this practice
(Curty 1995). In the later second centuryBCE, the city of Tyre in Phoenicia wrote to
the citizens of Delphi as “relatives” (syngeneis) in the desire to “increase the blending
(synkrasis) that exists with you” (Curty 1995: 27–8 no. 12; Jacquemin, Mulliez, and
Rougemont 2012: 314–15 no. 173). The Tyrians do not expatiate in the preserved text
on the nature of the relationship, although the description of it as involving “blending” is
certainly provocative. The citizens of Mylasa in Karia evidently claimed a relationship to
the Kretans on the basis of shared descent from Minos (Chaniotis 1988, summarized by