Ethnicity and Geography 301from the eponym of the mountain overlooking Lakonia (she herself the daughter of the
eponymous Atlas) suggests a close connection between the people and the geographi-
cal environment. Similarly, according to Acusilaus, Phoroneus of Argos, the first man,
was born from the river Inachos, and was father to Sparton, who was in turn father to
Mykenea (Acus. FrGrHist 2 F 23c, 24; Fowler 2000: 18–9; Loraux 2000: 8–9). Tying
people and places together by means of genealogy blurs the distinction between ethnic
groups and physical entities, and emphasizes a primordial identification of the one with
the other. At the same time, they provide an elementary causal mechanism to understand
both relationships and differences between the peoples and places of the world.
Mapping Peoples, Populating Maps
In early Greek thought, geography and ethnography both emerge, as Cole has recently
argued (2010), as means of cataloguing and identifying differences in the surrounding
world. The two were first bound together through the explanatory medium of geneal-
ogy, but the development of geography as a discipline entailed the separation of a purely
spatial conception of the world from one in which relationships are constituted through
genealogical ties. By the same token, ethnography became a means of cataloguing dis-
tinctive cultural and physical features; the question of ethnic origins and relationships
receded into the background. At the same time, geographical and ethnographic thought
remained highly proximate; the relationship of lands to the peoples that occupied them
continued to trouble Greek thinkers, who attempted to explain perceived ethnic differ-
ences and connections in terms of spatial relationships.
A primary motivation for the development of both geography and ethnography was the
encounter with the Other. The desire to describe lands, and eventually to order them in a
visual representation, such as the desire to describe and account for peoples, was born out
of Greek encounters with communities of peoples who were markedly different from the
Greeks themselves—generating the fundamental division betweenHell ̄enesandbarbaroi
that became fully expressed in the generation after the Persian Wars (E. Hall 1989). While
some of the earliest exercises in spatially ordering places—the Greek Catalogue of Ships
and the itineraries embedded in the Homeric Hymns to Apollo and Dionysus—were set
within the Aegean, the growth of trade in the Archaic period, and the rapid expansion
of Greek settlement throughout the Mediterranean, brought Greeks into close contact
with unfamiliar lands and peoples, and led to a desire to systematically catalogue the
lands and peoples they encountered, and to understand the differences they observed.
The earliest project along these lines was created by Hecataeus of Miletus in the later sixth
centuryBCE. Hecataeus wrote aGenealogyas a means of synthesizing the origin stories
of Greek heroes and communities; however, he located them within the Mediterranean
landscape as he knew it, asserting, for example, that Herakles recovered the cattle from
Geryon not in an indeterminate Far West in Iberia or beyond the Pillars of Herakles, but
in Western Greece (FrGrHist1 F 26, Arr.Anab. 2.16.5, Eusthath.Dion. Per. 558). The
other work for which he is famous, theG ̄es PeriodosorPeri ̄eg ̄esis, was a more ambitious
attempt to locate the cities and peoples known to him in a framework of the physical
territory of the known world. Enough of this work survives in fragments to demonstrate
that Hecataeus used primitive spatial locaters: probably following an itinerary around the