Ethnic Identities, Borderlands, and Hybridity 121in the corps of prostitutes operated as a large-scale business in the forts along the roads
of the Eastern Desert in Egypt (Cuvigny 2003: 2, 374–95; but see the important effort
to periodize sexual relations between Romans and locals on the frontier in Whittaker
2004: 132–8).
Mixture or Compound?
I had promised to canvass another metaphor for hybridity, and I would now like to turn
to it—a metaphor borrowed in this case from chemistry. A chemical mixture consists
of two or more entities mixed together but not bound to one another chemically. Salt
and pepper may be poured into the same container, shaken up, and mixed; but they
can be separated—if with some tediousness—by simple mechanical means. The salt in
this mixture, however, consists of bound atoms of sodium and chloride—a compound
whose chemical properties are different from those of the compositional elements, which
cannot be separated by simple mechanical means. In the same general way, there seem
to be cases of “multiple ethnic identities” that, as with mixtures, consist of separate
identities that can be deployed together or separately, as circumstances dictate. A gen-
uinely hybrid ethnicity, in contrast, will be like a compound: something new confected
by the creative conjunction of constituent elements, which can no longer be so easily
separated out.
Multiple ethnic mixtures are easy to find in the Greco-Roman world. By the third
centuryBCE, the southeastern Italian district of Apulia had been brought under Roman
domination, marked, among other things, by the implantation of a Latin colony at
Brindisium in 244BCE. The regional elite, at the least, learned Latin, and a number
of locals proved their loyalty to Rome during the war against Hannibal. However,
the Apulian district had a more complicated past. On the one hand, Greek colonial
settlements had been implanted by the eighth centuryBCEat Tarentum and other
sites. On the other, the territory had been occupied by non-Latin, non-Greek groups
with their own culture and language, Oscan. This district produced the first great
Latin writer, the poet Ennius. According to a later account, “Quintus Ennius used
to say that he had three hearts, because he could speak Greek, Oscan, and Latin”
(Gell.,N.A. 17.17.1). A recent review of the literary, epigraphic, and archaeological
evidence from Ennius’ world suggests that he, and the members of the regional elite
from which he emerged, deployed these three identities under different circumstances,
as appropriate—Greek in relations with the Greek world, as for instance when inter-
acting with the great sanctuary at Delphi; Apulian (or Oscan) when operating in the
local sphere; and Latin (or Roman) when dealing with the Roman world. In their
graves, the Apulian elite placed objects redolent of all three identities. However, their
movement among these identities did not result in their amalgamation, in the creation
of a hybrid. Rather, they kept the three separate: three hearts, not one (see Yntema
2009). This labile multiplicity of ethnic identities has been described as “situationalism”
(see Verdery 1994: 35–9).
The availability of multiple, distinct identities among which a person can shift as nec-
essary carries particular advantages in an imperial/colonial context. It has long been