118 Gary Reger
The landscape looks rather different in third-century-CErural Egypt. There we can see
traditional local religious festivals transmogrified by the incorporation of “outside” ele-
ments. An account of the late third century from Oxyrhynchos or the Arsinoite nome
lists a series of payments for a Serapia (festival for Serapis). The comedians, pancre-
atic wrestlers, and reciters of Homer to whom payments were made were certainly not
components of a “traditional” local Serapia, but other texts tell us that this festival was
not unique in incorporating such “entertainment” (SB4.7336; see Frankfurter 1998:
52–65). However, for the matter of identity and hybridity, the real question is, how did
the local inhabitants regard the festival with comedians, wrestlers, and Homeric reciters?
These were obviously Greek in origin. Were they seen as “add-ons,” not really part of
the traditional religious celebration? Or were they seen, instead, as nativized components?
And why were they added? Because of local demand? By imitation of other festivals? And
did these changes in what was surely an important local festival impose changes on how
the villagers understood themselves and their identity?
We must also look at ethnicity from the other direction: through the optic of the state.
State interests in the identity of their subjects can easily push toward the assignment
of a unitary ethnic identity to serve state purposes, with more or less—or no—regard
for the feelings the subjects may have about themselves. There may result deep,
irresolvable tensions between state ethnic labels and a more labile personal identity.
(Debates over the US census illustrate this tension in a contemporary setting. See Lee
1993.) Benedict Anderson traced out some of this in his exploration of the ways that
European colonial powers fixed, for their own ends, ethnicities in the territories they
ruled in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; some consequent “ethnicities”
look absurd from the outside, but these sometimes came to be embraced by the
subjects, who exploited them as foundations for nation-building (Anderson 2006).
States, especially imperial states, in the ancient Mediterranean world shared many of
the same fundamental interests as much later European colonial powers, especially the
profound need to identify and fix subjects for the crucial purposes of tax collection and
military service.
Let us consider two examples of the articulation of an ethnic identity in the interests
of the state. The first is the development of a Batavian identity on the northwestern
frontier of the Roman state in the second half of the first centuryBCE. The Batavians
did not exist as an identifiable group before around 50BCE, but by the Roman imperial
period they had emerged as a clearly defined ethnic group whose particular importance
to the Roman state lay in their contribution of about 5,000 soldiers to the army. (For
a comparable phenomenon within Italy involving the Lucanians, see Chapter 34 in this
volume, by John Wonder.) Fundamental to the shaping of this ethnic identity was the
fashioning of a myth of descent, which depended first on the appropriation of a “Tro-
jan” ancestor for the Batavians and second on Hercules and the syncretism of him with
an indigenous god called Magusanus. The resultant deity displayed strongly masculine
and military features well matched to the Batavians’ commitment to the Roman army.
Hercules, of course, also had a strong connection to cattle, which featured prominently
in Batavian lifeways and helped make the fit especially good (on Hercules, cattle, and
the western Mediterranean, see McInerney 2010: 106–12). However, the Batavian eth-
nic identity fundamentally emerged following an amalgamation—probably orchestrated
by Rome—of a small but dominantTraditionskern(“core of tradition”; see Chapter 7