356 steven a. epstein
globalization of the world from the eighteenth century to the present, the many
purities of the pre-modern Mediterranean world were an ideal context for vexing
hybridities to appear.
Athens is the label for the Greek paideia, the bundle of values and practices histo-
rians associate with Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Obviously such a generalization
can obscure more than it reveals but our focus on hybridity can resolve it to a simple
question: one of an imposed identity. Who were the Greeks and what defined them?
A study in contrasts to be sure—Greek and barbarian. This Greek culture was the first
to obtain a sizeable sway over much (but never all) of the Mediterranean. There were
never enough Greeks to accomplish this task, so in many places from Syria to Egypt
and Sicily Hellenizers appeared, hybrid people whose ethnic origins became overlaid
with a new language, a public life, and above all, a stance toward the use of the human
mind that they and subsequent generations valued as rational. Whatever Greek ideas
were concerning marrying the locals and having children with them (and plenty of
this occurred), the value some Greeks placed on reason and logic would admit no
compromise with the irrational. In other words, here too was a purity of the mind,
where any hybridity between reason and the irrational simply introduced a diseased
mind that did not work.
The legacy of Athens was Hellenism, a cultural hybrid with a long subsequent
effect in the Roman and later Byzantine worlds. It is the reason why Greek was the
first language of the New Testament, itself witness to the legacies of Hellenism. The
most important of these concerning hybridity was its openness to foreign cults, or
what some would label heresies or superstitions (Green, 1990: 453). Hellenism may
have inherited this trait from classical Greece, which was itself partly the product of
values and ideas from the eastern Mediterranean (West, 1997). This eclectic culture
gathered and spread its practices via humble colonists and the slave trade, itself a
defining characteristic of Mediterranean hybridity and one of the reasons it lasted for
so many centuries.
Rome’s legacy is the most complex because for a season it succeeded in imposing
the first (and so far the last) unity to all the shores of the Mediterranean, creating
what they named Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea.” This political reality, which lasted for
centuries into what we now call the “common era,” extended far beyond the con-
fines of the Mediterranean world, but it is still viewed as a distinctively Mediterranean
phenomenon. The Roman Empire was a kingdom of this world that eventually oblit-
erated distinctions by turning all its peoples into Roman subjects, in theory. This
universalizing value admitted no hybrids. After some early failed experiments the
Romans defined their citizenship to be absolute, unmixed, and pure. Its imperial
boundaries were often vague enough to foster a zone of mixed peoples along the
frontiers, Roman hybrids in terms of religion or political allegiances. All this became
even more complex in the fourth century ce when the Roman Empire became offi-
cially Christian and for a brief time the Mediterranean identity had a unity it would
never experience again.
In many ways this rather brief (in historical terms) unity of the Mediterranean
world becomes the touchstone by which all subsequent experiences of the hybrid are
measured. Without the political uniformity imperial Rome placed on what they called
“Our Sea,” all subsequent efforts to write histories of the peoples living in this region
would be very different. Rome contributed the basic definition to the shores and