Conquest 65
guide the process by which what is known is filtered. Some events, supportive
of the pretensions of those who welcome their retelling, will be remembered,
retold, and even reenacted in ritual,^3 while others, to which they are indiffer-
ent or which they find embarrassing, may be relegated to oblivion—especially
if they are not entertaining. What survives from the past even in modern
times is never more than part of the story. This is doubly true with regard to
pre-literate or semi-literate cultures. The stories told will almost certainly be
dramatic, and they may well be confused, conflated, and in some measure
partisan as well. But they are most unlikely to be wholly and simply false.^4
One might, of course, argue, as anthropologists of a postmodern bent are
now wont to do, that ethnic identity of the sort asserted by the Spartans, Mes-
senians, and Athenians at the micro level and by the Dorians and the Ionians
at the macro level is an artifact “socially constructed and subjectively per-
ceived,” which is “perpetually renewed and renegotiated through discourse and
social praxis”; and this assertion, though phrased in the pompous academic
jargon fashionable among social scientists, is no doubt true. Herodotus was
on the mark when he drew a sharp distinction between nature [phúsıs] and
nómos—mores, manners, custom, convention, law—and then seized on and
trumpeted Pindar’s claim that nómos is “king of all.” His Inquiries are designed
in part to substantiate this distinction and the attendant assertion and to ex-
plore their implications. Phúsıs may divide the animal kingdom into species,
but it is nómos, rooted in thinking [nomízeın] and crafted by men in response
to the circumstances in which they find themselves, that sorts human beings
into tribes, peoples, and nations. But the fact that all such human communi-
ties have their foundation in the imagination does not, in and of itself, render
fictive the kinship their members assert.^5
Ethnic connections may be recognized and celebrated, and they may be
largely ignored and even abandoned or repudiated. In principle, ethnicity can
even be invented ex nihilo. In practice, however, this never or almost never
happens. The human imagination generally has to have something on which
to work, and ethnogenesis rarely, if ever, takes place in a vacuum. The forma-
tion of a self-conscious kinship community nearly always presupposes some
sort of prior connection—a shared language or religion; shared mores, man-
ners, and ways; a common origin and history; a likeness in looks, if not, in
fact, all of the above. When human beings huddle together for offense or de-
fense, claiming to be kin and excluding putative outsiders, far more often than