Ethnicity and Geography 305rugged landscapes and sharp changes in seasons leads to greater toughness of character,
greater courage, and an unwillingness to be ruled by kings. Greece’s role in this scheme is
not explicitly defined, although the description of those living on thin, dry, and bare soil,
with sharp changes of climate, being hard of body, fair rather than dark, and stubborn
and holding their own opinions—characteristics of a “hard” people—is likely a flatter-
ing depiction of the Greeks (XXIV). In these characterizations, the environment shapes
not just the physical characteristics of the various peoples, but theirethea, their character
and values.
The Hippocratic text’s quasi-scientific explanation proved influential on later writers.
Aristotle inPolitics(1327b18–33) followed a more schematized version of the Hip-
pocratic view, downplaying the earlier text’s emphasis on local variations. Not only is
Aristotle’s formulation even more schematic, but it only briefly touches on the role of the
environment in shaping these characters, taking it as understood. According to Aristotle,
ethnic groups in cold places and in Europe are full of energy, but lacking in intelligence
and skill; they are free, but have no political organization, and cannot rule over those
around them. Peoples in Asia have intellectual and technical capabilities, but are without
spirit; they continue to be enslaved and ruled by others. The Greeks, located geograph-
ically in the middle, have a share in both. They are spirited and clever; they continue to
be free, to be governed in the best way possible, and they could rule over all others if
they were capable of achieving constitutional unity.
While later writers of the Hellenistic period kept alive the idea that environments
shaped physical form and character among the peoples of the earth, it is important to
note that later sources do not generally attempt to apply the Hippocratic conception
of the formative nature of local environmental variation. Instead, they hew to the more
influential Aristotelian schema, in which climatic effects can be seen most clearly at the
extremes: whether east and west, or more clearly, north and south. Whatever effects
might be imparted by local climate and landscape variations are swamped, presumably,
by the effects of custom, and, more significantly for our discussion, by the movements
of peoples from their “formative” lands.
Displacement: Migration, Colonization,
Deportation, and Resettlement
While autochthony myths and theories of environmental determinism were deployed
polemically or by theoreticians of national character, they are utterly overshadowed by
the far more common discourse of displacement that shaped how the Greeks understood
their relationship to the land. Stories of individual or mass movement are ubiquitous
among human populations. They serve a particular purpose in cultures such as that of
Greece, in which scattered populations share commonalities of culture or ethnic iden-
tity, but also have marked differences among them that must be accounted for. Myths
of autochthony serve to support beliefs in the primordial uniqueness of a people, but
they fail to explain commonalities among scattered communities. Stories of population
movements provide an evolutionary framework for accounting for those commonali-
ties, particularly in a context in which the common features of which the Greeks were