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Reviewed by:
  • Rethinking the Other in Antiquity by Erich Gruen
  • Susan Stephens (bio)
Erich Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 413 pp.

Gruen’s book contributes to a growing trend in classical studies that aspires to move beyond the straightjacket of binary oppositions (Greek-barbarian, for instance) to a more transactional view of ancient cross-cultural exchange. In his “alternative approach,” Gruen sets out the case that the ancients had complex, mixed, and nuanced views of other cultures; he draws his evidence from Greek (fifth to third centuries BCE), Roman (first century CE), and Jewish writings. His selection from this evidence supports his conclusions, but his readings tend to take the authors’ statements at face value, while the structuralist and post-colonialist scholarship that he is writing against interprets examples (often the same examples) with quite different results. For example, Gruen assumes that Herodotus’s statement about Egyptians in Chemmis celebrating games to Perseus in the Greek manner is accurate and builds his argument on it. Commentators who study Egyptian culture think the statement must refer to practices of a Greek or Greco-Egyptian population in Egypt, which would then support a postcolonial argument that Herodotus’s vision of the “other” was actually a mirror of his own world. Gruen does not include material written in languages other than Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. This limitation unconsciously reinforces the very category he seeks to criticize. For when we limit ourselves to what Greeks [End Page 577] or Romans or Jews say about Egyptians, Persians, Gauls, and “peoples of color,” the “other” remains mute or ventriloquized.

Susan Stephens

Susan Stephens is Hart Professor of the Humanities and professor of classics at Stanford University. The author of Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria and coauthor (with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes) of Callimachus in Context: From Plato to Ovid, she is coeditor (with Jack Winkler) of Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments.

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