122 Gary Reger
noticed, for instance, that indigenous Egyptians under Ptolemaic and Roman authority
often bore two names, one Greek and one Egyptian, used depending on whether they
were dealing with the ruling bureaucracy or with other Egyptians (Goudriaan 1988).
This practice becomes especially clear in the context of the Roman imperial world. In
a recent study of Herodes Atticus’ self-advertisement of his identities, Maude Gleason
shows in detail how a negotiation of multiple, non-amalgamated identities might work
for someone born Greek, belonging to the highest elite of the Roman world, and married
to a woman descended from a high-ranking Italian family:
How did this unusual man construct his identity? Clearly there was no single identity
paradigm in which he could seamlessly immerse himself, achieving, in Stuart Hall’s phrase,
a “fantasy of incorporation,” a merger that erases difference. To the extent that identifi-
cation “operates across difference, it entails discursive work,” particularly the making and
marking of symbolic boundaries...Herodes was actively engaged in identity-negotiation,
and...his multiple cross-cultural foci of identification entailed a huge amount of discursive
work.(Gleason 2010: 160)Gleason reads this “discursive work” in Herodes’ building projects in Attica and the
Italian countryside, arguing that he attempted to advertise yet keep separate his dis-
tinct identities, one “ethnic” at least in the sense of the Second Sophistic, as a direct
descendant of Greeks, the other consequent on his marriage and his role in the Roman
imperial world.
Now let us turn to some examples of ethnic identity as a compound—that is, hybrid-
ity in the classic sense. During the reign of the emperor Hadrian, a league called the
Panhellenion was created. Membership and representation on the Panhellenic Council
depended on proof of descent from one or more of the three groups that made up the
original Greeks: Ionians, Dorians, and Aiolians. The Panhellenion was conceived, then, as
an expression of one of the fundamental properties of ethnic identity—argued by some
to bethereigning feature (so Roosens 1994)—common descent. (See Chapter 26 in
this volume, by Adam Kemezis.) This comes out clearly in an inscription recording a
decision imposed on members by the Panhellenion from the town of Kibyra, situated in
the interior of Asia Minor: “Thepolisof the Kibyratai,” the text proclaims at the very
start, was a “colony of the Lakedaimonians and relative of the Athenians and friend to
the Romans” (OGIS497; Curty 1995: 204–5 no. 81). The situation was much less
clear-cut for another member city, probably Ptolemais-Barke in the Cyrenaica in North
Africa. In a dispute, settled by Hadrian himself, with its neighbor Kyrene over the legit-
imacy of membership in the Panhellenion, Kyrene claimed a purity of Greek descent,
whereas Ptolemais-Barke, although admitted to the Panhellenion, was awarded fewer
votes because its identity as a Greek colony had been watered down, so to speak, by the
introduction of Makedonian colonists (Romeo 2002: 26–7). This is a very good example
of outside ascription of a hybrid ethnicity. The citizens of Ptolemais-Barke saw themselves
(at least for the purpose of petitioning for full admission to the Panhellenion) as “au-
thentic Greeks,” as the inscription recording Hadrian’s decision remarks, but outsiders
regarded them rather as hybridized, thanks to the introduction of Makedonian “blood.”