220 Nino Luraghi
value. This, however, is a relatively minor problem, one that does not seriously under-
mine the usefulness of the model. Carlo Tullio-Altan has shown how Smith’s categories
should be modified in order to avoid this danger, namely by building symbolic activa-
tion into the interpretation of the constitutive elements of any given ethnic configuration
(Tullio-Altan 1995).
Less obviously, but more problematically, Smith’s approach, with its insistence on the
mythomoteurof ethnic groups, implicitly posits political sovereignty as the teleological
cause of theethnie, and thereby ends up being dangerously close to projecting into the
past the nationalist rhetoric of the nineteenth century, which saw the ethnic group as
an imperfect nation, or as a nation as yet without a state. In other words, this approach
underplays the discontinuity brought about by the rise of the modern nation-state,
sidestepping the question whether the institutional framework of the nation-state may
not in itself be responsible for the mobilizing power of ethnicity. Why this is problematic
may be clearer to ancient historians than it is to their modern colleagues.
If we look at it synchronically, the world of the Greek poleis appears to be structured
according to tiers of identity, each with its own system of boundaries, some of which
corresponded to the boundaries of political communities. In some cases, the active
political boundary could as it were shift upward or downward among the tiers, as
shown by Catherine Morgan’s work on archaic Greekethne: at different points in
time, the politically significant border could be the one between Tegea and Mantineia
or the one between Arcadia and Elis, and the shift happened so effortlessly that it is
very often hard for modern scholars to tell which tier was the politically active one
at any given time, as shown by the spotty history of Greek federal states (Morgan
2003). Essentially, every single one of these systems of boundaries could be depicted as
delimiting ethnic groups according to Smith’s definition: apart from larger groups such
as Dorians or Boeotians or Arcadians, at the level of the singlepolis, the vocabulary of
kinship and blood-relatedness featured prominently in the names of the subdivisions
of the citizen body, and one only need to mention terms such asphyle,phratria,
patra, and so on. The citizen body was, to all intents and purposes, a closed descent
group: membership could only be inherited from one’s father or parents, with very
rare exceptions. For this reason, it was very rare for ethnic boundaries to cut across a
political community, with interesting exceptions in the colonial areas that would deserve
sustained attention.
Now, surely one reason why the kinship-based rhetoric of modern nationalism
resembles the ideology of thepolisis that the former was indeed formulated under
partial influence of the latter. However, the differences between the two cases are
by far more important, not to mention more interesting, than the similarities. The
rhetorical construction of the modern nation as an imagined community bears only a
superficial resemblance to that of a Greek citizen body: quite apart from issues of scale,
one only needs to think of the pervasive projection of threatening otherness across the
borders or the emotional attachment to an alleged historical destiny that characterize
nineteenth-century nationalism and provide the foundations for its inclination toward
violent action. The notion of an ethnic community as a polity waiting to happen is
ostensibly foreign to Greek mentality, as shown by the case of the Messenians, who