The Study of Greek Ethnic Identities 215Book IV for Hartog, and Athenian tragedy, and especially Aeschylus’Persiansfor Hall,
one could say that the main differences between these two studies derived directly from
the anthropological methodologies that formed their intellectual paradigm. The influ-
ence of Lévy-Strauss’ structural anthropology impregnates Hartog’s book, and is in fact
responsible for most of the criticism leveled at it, especially by Anglo-Saxon scholars
(Munson 2001). On the other hand, in the way that Hall’s approach presupposes a
strong connection between the intellectual world of the Greeks and their social reality,
one can easily spot the heritage of functionalist anthropology and especially of the work
of Mary Douglas. Beyond this fundamental difference of paradigms, both books con-
verge in seeing the way that Greeks created an imaginary portrait of thebarbaroi,orof
somebarbaroi, as reflecting the formation and articulation of a Greek identity, an identity
that included, besides many oppositions typical of any “us–them” dichotomy, the char-
acteristic notion that political freedom, as conceived by the Greeks (Raaflaub 1985),
was essentially the boundary between Greeks and non-Greeks (an idea developed in
Meier 2009).
Reliance on very rich and complex literary artifacts, and of course authorial ingenuity,
have provided these two books a very appealing texture, elegant arguments, and no loose
ends, aspects that concurred in making them extremely influential. At the same time,
both their methods and their conclusions begged several broad questions. Apart from
the obvious fact that focus on self-definition and the construction of otherness could not
but bring the authors to overemphasizing, albeit implicitly, the cultural importance of
the patterns of thought they were illustrating and explaining, it is not at all clear to what
extent such patterns of thought should be seen as typical of the Greeks, as opposed to
the Athenians, or even only to some smaller group of which Herodotus and the trage-
dians were part. Furthermore, in both cases, what was really investigated was ideology,
not social practice. However, this complex of problems has not really become central to
scholarly concerns until very recently (Gruen 2011). The main reason of this delay is that,
during the nineties, the debate on Greek identity was radically reoriented by the rather
sudden bursting of ethnicity into the field of ancient history, brought about especially by
the work of Jonathan Hall.
Foregrounding Ethnicity
A timely book if there ever was one,Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquityhad a profound
and undeniable impact on the methods and research agendas of Greek historians over
the last decade or so, which is all the more interesting, since the book did not come from
what was at that point the most obvious premise, the study of Greek identity. In fact,
Hall’s approach had almost nothing to do with Hartog and E. Hall. It originated from a
set of questions to do with delimiting from one another political communities in the early
archaic period, in particular in the Argolid. Hall, in other words, was interested in eth-
nic boundaries within the Greek world, an approach whose avatars had been discredited
by Nazi German passion for the Dorians, to the point that, after World War II, various