Ethnicity and Geography 299between people and the land is articulated, in his view, in two fundamental ways: “we
may distinguish two kinds of sacred homeland: one is the promised land, the land of
destination; the other the ancestral homeland, the land of birth” (2003: 136).
Treatments of the problem of ethnic identity among the Greeks have taken, as a given,
the role of an ancestral homeland in the Greeks’ self-conceptions of identity, although
some recent works have paid serious attention to the complex relationship between indi-
vidualethn ̄eand the lands they occupied (see McInerney 1999; Nielsen 2002), as well
as how claims to territory have been articulated in terms of myth (Malkin 1994). The
association of ethnic identity with territory is particularly fraught in ancient Greece, given
its multiple local divisions of identity, a fragmented system of polities, and a continual
tension between local, regional, and large-scale identity, from the tribe andpolisto the
ethnosand region (not only Dorians and Ionians but Peloponnesians, “islanders,” Sicil-
ian Greeks, etc.) to the panethnic designations (Hellenes, Egyptians, Persians, etc.). The
concepts of ancestral homeland and, to a lesser extent, promised land, are present to a
limited degree in Greek expressions of self-identity, but they are surprisingly downplayed.
The clearest statement of ethnic definition from the Classical period can be found in the
words that Herodotus puts in the mouths of Athenians in response to Spartan worries
that they will abandon the Greek cause (8.144.2–3; see Konstan 2001: 32–3). In its
assertion of Athenian loyalty to the Panhellenic cause, the speech lists the following as
elements of the Athenian bond to her fellow Greeks: kinship, a common language, tem-
ples and rites in common, and a common way of life. The notion of a common homeland
is notably absent, although it may be implicit in the reference to common temples of the
gods (the ̄on hidrumata koina). However, while physical space dedicated to a particular
god was considered by the Greeks as inalienable from that god, new sanctuaries were reg-
ularly founded on virgin territory, or as often on the territories of other gods. The notion
of an ancestral bond to a sacred place is not nearly as fundamental in Greek thought as
it is in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions.
Conceptions of groups of people with distinct identities based on common ancestry or
common cultural attributes emerged in Greek thought alongside a developing differen-
tiation of the lands of the world. How these two ways of organizing the world related
to one another became a particularly challenging problem to some Greeks. As the inter-
est in cataloguing and describing lands and peoples developed, attempts to find a causal
relationship between the two emerged. However, the notion of a primordial connection
between land and people was qualified by a prominent discourse of displacement, encom-
passing traditions of migration and resettlement, as well as colonization and deportation.
The resulting relationships between ethnic identity and territory were understood by the
Greeks in complicated and diachronically evolving ways.
Genealogy and Geography
Primordially, the Greeks thought of peoples in terms of the lands they occupied. This is
expressed nowhere more clearly than in the Homeric Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.494–759).
The list on the Greek side provides—and relates—three different types of information:
the names of the leaders of each contingent (with occasional genealogical detail), the
people they led, identified through ethnonyms, toponyms, and topographical features;