344 Rosaria Vignolo Munson
ethnic identity (“we are all Greeks”) and political solidarity (“we will fight on your side”)
does not entirely undermine the definition itself. The “package” consisting of blood,
language, religious cult, and customs would have appeared reasonable and empirical to
most people. We still use these diacritical signs in our modern discussions of ethnicity (see
the preceding text). Other factors, such as territory and physical characteristics, are only
mentioned by Herodotus in special cases (2.18, 3.16, 3.20, 2.104.2, 4.108–109; see the
following text), and are not at any rate generally suitable for distinguishing Greek from
non-Greek. The lands on the far side of the Black Sea, for example, may be inhabited by
Scythians, but also by Greek colonists.
Herodotus never disputes the existence of “we the Greeks,” nor does he undervalue
the emotional impact of such a category. He does, however, subject proclaimed criteria
of ethnicity to a critical analysis. If we look especially at the issue of “blood” or kinship,
we notice that, unlike the Athenians in Book 8, he does not appear particularly inter-
ested in emphasizing the importance of the common origin of the Greeks. The term
,
oμαíμoυς/
,
oμαíμoνες(“of the same blood”) occurs only two other times in theHistories.
Aristagoras, a famously unreliable speaker, urges the mainland Greeks to come to the
aid of the Ionians, who are of their same blood; since he addresses this argument to the
Spartans (5.49.3) before giving a modified version of the same speech to the Athenians
(5.97.1–2), Aristagoras is here referring to the common ancestry of the Greeks across
the Ionian–Dorian divide, as the Athenians do in Book 8. In a more restricted sense and
in his own voice, Herodotus draws attention to the consanguinity between two Aeolian
cities of Lesbos when he says that the inhabitants of Methymna enslaved those of Arisba
“who [or ‘although they’] were their kin” (1.151.2). Thus, as in the Athenian speech
at 8.144, words connoting shared blood appear in contexts that draw attention to their
affective force, but that at the same time also undermine an assumed connection between
ancestry and behavior and, in particular, between kinship and political solidarity. If one
considers the state of discord that existed among the Greeks in Herodotus’ times, that
is no surprise. (Incidentally, Herodotus is equally skeptical about the unifying effect of
marriage alliances or blood ties within the family as we see, for example, at 1.61.1–2
and 1.75.1.)
More interesting for our purposes are several passages that contest the very idea of the
“common blood” of the Greeks and rather point out their internal ethnic fragmenta-
tion. In his digression on the origins of Spartans and Athenians as the most powerful
of the Greeks in Croesus’ time, for example (1.56–58), Herodotus would have had
the option of mentioning their common descent from Hellen who, according to the
canonical genealogy, was the eponymous ancestor of all the Hellenes, especially Dorians,
Ionians, and Aeolians (Hesiod, fr. 9 Merkelbach/West; see Hall 1997: 42–3, 48–51).
HellenAiolos DorosIonXouthos m.ErechtheusCreusaAchaiosFigure 23.1 The Genealogy of the Hellenes.