CHAPTER 14
The Study of Greek
Ethnic Identities
Nino Luraghi
Framing the Study of Identity
The study of what the ancient Greeks thought of themselves and of how and why they
considered themselves to be different from everybody else goes back quite a while before
ethnicity and related terms became popular among Greek historians. After all, with all its
various nuances, the dichotomy Greek-barbaros, as the Greeks called everybody else, is
one of the most familiar facts about ancient Greek culture. Sure enough, similar systems
of classification, which in the end develop out of an elementary opposition “us–them,”
are present in many other cultures, as for instance S. T. Smith’s work shows in the case of
ancient Egypt (see his contribution to this volume). However, the notion that this binary
opposition was particularly central to the collective identity of the Greeks, while partly
a product of the usual isolationism of classicists, can claim some intellectual respectabil-
ity, if nothing else, because the Greeks constitute a striking example of a civilization
that kept alive such binary worldview in spite of extraordinarily intense interaction with
other cultures, and in spite of the fact that its carriers were spread discontinuously over
a comparatively large tract of land around the Mediterranean and its hinterland, inter-
spersed with people who were different from them in terms of religion, language, and
culture. Although experience on the ground and theoretical reflection in different ways
undermined the rigidness of the opposition (Skinner 2012), the Greeks had to be con-
quered by the Romans before they admitted any complication to the polarity. In classical
studies, classics such as Momigliano’sAlien Wisdom(1975) have confronted headlong
the consequences of this mental attitude, offering cultural historians abundant food
for thought.
Broadly speaking, the current of studies on what we would nowadays more likely call
Greek collective identity developed mostly after the Second World War, taking in new
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.