Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (review)

In a famous passage (Histories, 8.144), Herodotus has the Athenians chastise the Spartans for fearing that Athens might capitulate to the Persians. Several deterrents, according to the Athenians, keep them from betraying Greece—the places of worship that the Persians had destroyed andthe elements constituting a "common Greekness" (to Hellenikon)—common blood and language, common shrines to the gods, common sacrifices, and common customs. This seems to be straightforward testimony to the ancient Greek conception of Hellenic ethnicity, but Hall demonstrates that communally shared Panhellenic identity was unstable and, at most times, less salient than other collective identities, especially in pre-classical Greece apart from Athens.

This study traces the formation of a collective Hellenic identity in Greek antiquity, referring throughout by neologism to ancient Greek ethnic consciousness as "Hellenicity." Hall begins by setting out his methodological and theoretical positions on the study of ethnic identity. For him, ethnicity represents a constructivist "imagined community," not any primordial Stammbaum, and ethnicity "denotes both the self-consciousness of belonging to an ethnic group ('ethnic identity') and the dynamic process that structures, and is structured by, ethnic groups in social interaction with one another." The most important aspects of ethnic self-ascription are mythic common descent and kinship, an association with a geographical locality or region, and a sense of common historical experience. Above all, ethnicity is attitudinal and selective, and it is strategically employed in particular historical configurations in the interests of its constituency.

Hall takes up the question of ancient Greek origins, offering a good historical synthesis of modern archaeological and linguistic work on the problem of when Greek-speaking peoples first arrived in Greece. But this question is of peripheral importance to Hall's study. He argues that Greek-speakers' penetration into the Greek peninsula came gradually over an extended period of time, and that the idea of a massive population influx of Greek speakers is untenable. The main ethnic sub-categories of the ancient Greeks—Achaeans, Ionians, Aiolians, and Dorians—only emerged in local conditions during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. Panhellenism was a sporadic and ephemeral force in ancient Greece. It peaked under extraordinary circumstances—prospects for united aggression, the threatened security of Hellas, or international crisis for the collective Greek city-states. Hall suggests that we look to the great athletic festivals for origins; in this context, Hellenism may have been an aggregrative ethnicity that operated across geographically contiguous regions to weld together a transregional aristocracy against lesser status groups. "Hellenicity" clearly emerges only in the fifth century B.C.E., and then it was largely the production of imperial Athens, which acted as "the new self-appointed arbiter of cultural authenticity." Hellenic identity thus came to be measured increasingly in terms of culture and education rather than of putative descent groups through a process that reached its completion during the Hellenistic age.