350 Rosaria Vignolo Munson
declared Greek, they were admitted to the Olympic games. When the oracle of Ammon
decreed that two borderline cities were Egyptian, their inhabitants conformed to Egyp-
tian religious rules (2.18). The half-Greek Geloni worship Greek divinities, including
Dionysus—a god despised by the Scythians—and have sanctuaries with statues, altars,
and temples in the Greek manner, except that they are all made of wood (4.108.2). These
practices, other than their physical differences from the red-haired, blue-eyed Budini next
door, are empirical indices of their mixed heritage (4.108–109). The most reliable evi-
dence for the Egyptian origin of the Colchians is not so much their historical memory
(not reciprocated on the Egyptian side), nor is the fact that they have dark skin and
curly hair (“since other peoples have these characteristics”), but their custom of circum-
cision, which they only share with Egyptians and Ethiopians (2.104.1–2). The Sauro-
matae speak pigeon-Scythian and live differently from the Scythians because their women
ride, hunt, and fight dressed like the men in the tradition of their Amazon ancestresses
(4.116.2–117). The Massagetae share certain practices with the Scythians and are easily
confused with them, but are not Scythian: in fact, they have marriage and funeral cus-
toms all of their own (1.216.1–3). Throughout theHistories,anethnosis what it is—and
expresses different degrees of separation and belonging to other groupings—primarily
by virtue of its culture.
Herodotus’ notion of culture (customs and laws
, ́
ηθεατεκα ́ `ινo ́μoι, 2.35.2) includes
a common history and the stories that members of a society tell about themselves. As
with their practices, prescriptions, and prohibitions (strictly speaking,νóμoι, although
Herodotus’ uses this term also in a broader sense), these stem from their shared values
andmentalité(
, ́
ηθεα), which represent the last of the criteria of ethnicity mentioned by
the Athenians at 8.144.2. The Persian ethnography, for example, is introduced with the
sentence: “I know that the Persians have the following customs” (1.131.1), where “I
know” (o
~,
ιδα) defines the area of maximum certainty of what is the case, and “customs”
(νóμoισι) points to practices but also includes, as we discover when we read the entire
ethnography, fragments of the Persians’ worldview (their
, ́
ηθεα)—the shape they attribute
to the gods, their definition of courage, their notions of what is appropriate or inappropri-
ate, and all the other strong opinions Herodotus seems to have learned through virtual or
actual conversations with unnamed Persians (Munson 2009). Culture, including mate-
rial culture, may not have a prominent place in some modern definitions of ethnicity
(on the issue, see Chapter 3 by Bernard Knapp and Chapter 5 by Johannes Siapkas in
this volume, and cf. Antonaccio 2010: 37–8). In Herodotus, however, it represents a
fundamental ethnic identifier.
Scholars have often misunderstood Herodotus’ ethnographic present. It signals not so
much that cultural traits are timeless, but rather that they belong to the sphere of what
is present and verifiable: an ethnographic description presents data that are, to some
extent, provisional and in need of continuous updating, especially in the case of societies
that Herodotus represents as engaged in history. Cultural traits may help to explain polit-
ical actions, but they are themselves subject to mutation, borrowing, and obsolescence,
and are continually reshaped over time by historical events and experiences, sometimes
in unexpected ways (5.9). To take once again the Persian ethnography as an example,
Herodotus here describes what A. Smith would call an “aristocratic lateralethnie”that