334 Corinne Bonnet
too a guarantee of genetic barbarism, of a flawed brotherhood, whether this is a matter
of an atavistic talent for deception or a recurring tendency to impiety that they both
share (cf. the case of the statue of Apollo stolen from Gela and sent by the Carthaginians
as a war tithe to the metropolis of Tyre where the god was enchained until liberated
by Alexander: Bonnet and Grand-Clément 2010), or is a result of their lack of respect
for human life, exemplified in human sacrifice. The emphasis on thissyngeneia(kinship)
serves discursive strategies that merge Phoenician and Punic, in order to distinguish them
from Greek (and Roman).
As for Greek violence, it is a cathartic tool that prepares the way for a “conversion”
and a cultural redemption, but stops whereeusebeia(piety) is threatened, at the point
where the superior justice of the gods is placed in peril. This is why Dionysios decides
to spare his prisoners and to dispatch heralds to announce to the Carthaginians that
they will not be killed as long as they take refuge in the sanctuaries honored by the
Greeks. The rules of war, similar to the rules of cult, as on the plain of the Scamander,
outweigh the unleashing of primal instincts. In fact, at the end of the siege, similar to
some Homeric king, Dionysios assignsgeras(gifts) andtimai(honors) to each man in
order to recompense the bravery and self-control of his men (Diod. Sic. 14.53).
The anthropological vision that emerges in these texts and many others also high-
lights the importance of ethnic criteria in organizing humanpoikilia(diversity) within
a hierarchy in Greek thought. The opposition “by nature” (physei) between Greeks and
Barbarians did not have to wait for Diodorus Siculus and hisUniversal Historyto find
striking formulations. Plato had already given expression to it in a number of instances.
However, the end of the fifth century and fourth centuryBCwitnessed, in Sicily, a radi-
calization of events and positions that encouraged the exacerbation of this polarity, much
as the experience of Alexander in the East foregrounded the question of the accultura-
tion of populations once united within the Persian Empire and beyond. A debate ensued
over the power and limits ofpaideia(Greek learning), the distinctive trait of a race or
the “common property” of humanity, of which the Greeks were, finally, “evangelists.”
As for ethnicity, in the Sicilian sphere, for what concerns the relations between Greeks
and Phoenicians, the historiographical accounts provide a rich supply of evidence, but
all such evidence comes with the distortions that arise from the relationship between the
historian’s present and the burden of memory that conveys the events related. Greeks
and Barbarians never stop meeting, the better to confront each other. Face to face,
locked in the melee of battle, bearing the scars of a violence that mutilates and disfigures,
they nevertheless illustrate the irreducible tension between nature andnomos(custom),
between animality and humanity, between natural instinct and socially inculcated behav-
ior. If the Carthaginians are for the Greeks “the best of enemies,” they would become for
the Romans “the enemy to be destroyed,” the “nation” destined for destruction from
the moment of its founding (Bonnet 2011).
Material Culture and Markers of Ethnicity
Since the publication of Jonathan Hall’s work (Hall 1997, 2005, 2009) and the debates
it has excited (e.g., Luce 2007), our understanding of the relationship between material
culture and ethnic identity has profoundly evolved. Archaeologists, similar to historians,