214 Nino Luraghi
directions the earlier concerns regarding the problem of political unity within the Greek
world that reflected very clearly a nineteenth-century agenda dictated by nationalist ide-
ology. Research has tended to cluster around two periods of time, the Persian Wars and
the Hellenistic period. The Persians being thebarbaroipar excellence, it should not
surprise that the two turning points in the relationship between them and the Greeks
should garner most attention. The two clusters had markedly different characteristics,
which derived directly from the kinds of evidence available in each case and had a direct
impact on the kind of research that emerged.
Sources for Hellenistic history do not include a continuous ancient narrative, except
for Alexander’s campaigns, and Hellenistic literature has mostly not survived beyond the
Middle Ages, but on the other hand, inscriptions from all over the Greek world and Asia
Minor and papyri from Egypt offer a wealth of documentary evidence that is unparalleled
for previous periods of Greek history. This means that historians have a real possibility of
observing interactions between speakers of Greek and local populations on the ground,
but also that sweeping generalizations are more difficult to make—all the more difficult
because of the inherent conservatism of fields of research that are heavily based on doc-
umentary evidence. This, however, is only one part of the story. By and large, in spite of
the head start provided by Momigliano’s study, Greek identity in the Hellenistic period
has until recently lacked a true theoretical framework. The accumulation of studies on the
role of local elites in the administration of the Hellenistic kingdoms makes this problem
even more evident. Accordingly, broad questions of the articulation and transformation
of Greek identity have remained anchored to the foundational moment of Alexander’s
conquest until the end of the last century.
For research clustering around the Persian Wars and their aftermath, the situation
was entirely different. From very early on, Aeschylus’Persiansand Herodotus’Histo-
riesformed the backbone of interpretations that have seen the Persian Wars as crucial to
the rise among the Greeks of a sense of their distinct identity (Pugliese Carratelli 1966).
Only at a much later stage did archaeological evidence enter the picture, complicating
it in many ways and showing that, in fact, various aspects of Persian culture exerted a
powerful attraction on the Athenians, supposedly the flag-bearers of Hellenocentrism
(Miller 1997).
The dominance of highly sophisticated works of ancient literature meant that this
branch of the study of Greek identity profited deeply from the linguistic turn in histor-
ical studies, which from the 1980s onward brought to a new level of subtlety the study
of literary texts, and especially historiography, as historical evidence (Spiegel 1997). The
picture that resulted, well summarized and nuanced in Paul Cartledge’s 1993The Greeks:
A Portrait of Self and Others, showed the Greeks’ image of thebarbaroias the product
of a Foucaultian discourse of otherness, in which thebarbaroiembodied the opposite
of all that the Greeks (or perhaps the Athenians) thought of themselves. Most repre-
sentative of this scholarly paradigm are François Hartog’s 1980Le miroir d’Hérodote
and Edith Hall’s 1989Inventing the Barbarian. Apart from taking as their starting
points two different sets of texts, Herodotus’Histories, and especially the ethnographic
excursus on the Scythians and the story of Darius’ campaign north of the Danube in