Herodotus and Ethnicity 345He does nothing of the sort, however, but instead formulates an elaborate argument
designed to establish the ethnic opposition between the two groups (McNeal 1985,
Sourvinou-Inwood 2003). On the one hand, he says, the Spartans are Dorians and of
Hellenic stock. By contrast, the Athenians, who are Ionians, descend from the Pelasgians.
The latter, as Herodotus explains, were non-Greeks. This time, different from the case
of the Greekness of Macedonian kings, he adds what he evidently regards as real proof
(1.57.1–3):
What language the Pelasgians spoke, I cannot exactly say; but if one must state it on the
basis of inference (ε
,
ιδε χρε` óν
,
εστι τεκμαιρóμενoνλεγειν́ )...the Pelasgians were speakers
of a non-Greek language. If therefore this is the case with the Pelasgians, the Attic people,
being Pelasgian, at the same time as its transformation into Greeks, also learned a different
language. And, as a matter of fact, neither the people of Creston nor those of Plakia [i.e.,
Pelasgians who now live in Thrace] speak the same language as any of their current neighbors,
but they speak the same language as each other, and show that moving to those places [which
they now inhabit] they have kept the same type of language.Herodotus, of course, is confronting genealogical traditions that are, to begin with, far
from being politically innocent. The Athenians had considered themselves Ionian since
at least the early sixth century (see Solon fr. 4 Diehl=Arist.AP5), but by Herodotus’
times they had ceased to embrace that identity and, as Herodotus says elsewhere, did not
like being called Ionians (1.143.3). In genealogical terms, this means that they under-
played their descent from Ion and emphasized instead their derivation from Erechtheus
(see Hdt. 8.55 and cf.Iliad2.547–48). The ideological reasons for this change of nar-
ratives, which may have started in the time of Cleisthenes, had partly to do with the
Athenians’ desire to distinguish themselves from the Ionians of Asia and the islands,
many of whom had been subject to Persia and were now subject to the Athenians them-
selves (Hall 1997: 53–6). Moreover, the myth of Athenian descent from Erechtheus
“the Earth-born,” by some strange metaphorical identification between people and king,
resulted in the notion that the Athenian people as a whole were earth-born (for the irra-
tional nature of claims of autochthony elsewhere in Greece, see Chapter 16 by James
Roy in this volume). The myth of Athenian autochthony, in contrast with the Panhel-
lenic views that Herodotus’ Athenians express at 8.144, helped to promote the idea of
Athenian exceptionalism vis-à-vis every other group of Greeks, and especially the Dorians
(the bibliography on the Athenian myth of autochthony is extensive, but see, especially,
Rosivach 1987; Connor 1993; Loraux 1993: 37–71; Shapiro 1998; Hall 2002: 203–4;
Isaac 2004: 114–24; Pelling 2009).
For Herodotus, the Athenians are Ionians (1.56.2), although at 8.44.2 he mentions
Ion not as an ancestor, but as a commander of the army after whom the Athenian
Pelasgians (who were first called Kranaoi and then Kekropids) finally named themselves
Ionians—name changes that in themselves testify to changes in narratives. In his digres-
sion on Spartans and Athenians, Herodotus emphasizes the Pelasgian ancestry in a way
that confirms, in historical and primordialistic terms, the newly popular Athenian myth of
autochthony, while at the same time bringing it to its ultimate conclusion with syllogistic
rigor: if the Athenians are indigenous to Attica, since Greece was once inhabited by Pelas-
gians, the Athenians were originally Pelasgians who, as Herodotus, at any rate, argues in
this passage, were non-Greeks (on the diversity of Greek traditions on the ethnicity of
the Pelasgians, see Sourvinou-Inwood 2003). The Athenians, therefore, descend from a