Preface

FROGS AROUND THE POND SYLLECTA CLASSICA 14 (2003): iii–xi PREFACE In March, 2000, the Classical Association of the Canadian West and the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest met in Victoria, British Columbia, for a thematic conference on cultural diversity in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. In this volume, we have collected the keynote speech by Sarah Morris and ten papers chosen from the eighty presented at the conference. We selected these papers to reflect the enormous chronological and geographic span of the history of cultural interactions around the Mediterranean, and also as a sampling of the variety of critical approaches useful to their study. Our own era can learn much from the study of cultural interaction in the ancient Mediterranean, even though the cultures that produced the texts, artwork, and archeological evidence examined here flourished three millennia and more ago. We live in a shrinking world; contact with other cultures, through travel, trade, and communication, is a constant feature in our lives. The challenges of living in a world in which cultures, globally and within each community, necessarily and constantly interact may seem to us a product of modern technology. But in fact, ancient Mediterranean cultures likewise faced the challenges of living in a small and crowded world, cheek by jowl with other peoples, each group another’s “foreigners.” The study of how these ancient cultures interacted, negotiated their boundaries and differences, dealt with their inevitable conflicts, influenced one another and dealt with those influences, and saw and constructed each other in their own discourse, provides us with an illuminating perspective on these questions as we engage them ourselves. We hope this volume will provide a useful tool for those interested both in the study of cultural interaction in the ancient world and the lessons our own can derive from these ancient exempla. iv SYLLECTA CLASSICA 14 (2003) As editors, we recognize the recent explosion in volumes devoted to the exploration of cultural diversity in the ancient Mediterranean arena.1 We make no claim ourselves to complete coverage: this small contribution to the field presents a disparate selection and no univocal or dogmatic theoretical stance or theme. It is a volume which we expect to repay equally the reader with general or specific interests in the mosaic of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. We derive the title and the introduction for this collection from Sarah Morris’ stimulating and thought-provoking keynote speech, “Frogs around the Pond?” (pp. 1–21). Morris, an archeologist and art historian , interrogates a series of artifacts from the Bronze Age and archaic Greek world which appear to exhibit multi-cultural Mediterranean heritages .These objects combine artistic, mythological, or political elements from Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and North Africa. Although they are the most distant chronologically, these artifacts evoke issues of relevance to considerations of inter-cultural exchange throughout the ancient world and in our time; John Kearns’ comparison of linguistic interpenetration and eventual loss in Asia Minor with the loss of the native Hawaiian dialect in the face of the expansion of Western culture explicitly makes these historical connections. Morris does not offer us a simplistic, conclusory reading of the three artefacts which she evokes, but poses questions and allows that the discovery of “mixed origins, multi-directional influences, and constant exchange” in much of the Mediterranean “deeply complicates our analyses.” She also warns us against the practice of Hellenocentrism, which may blind us to the importance of other cultures around the Mediterranean in the creation of artefacts. In the case of the statue of Artemis at Ephesus, which scholars have regularly described as strange to Hellenic culture, Morris challenges our notions of what might have seemed alien to Greeks themselves. Morris also addresses the role of the profession of Classics in understanding how ancient cultures experienced their “proximity and intimacy .”The approach in her key-note speech employs an informed crossdisciplinarity , encouraging young scholars not to become inured against the solid contributions which linguistics or history can make to an archaeological argument. She concludes with a discussion of the challenges of teaching the classical world from a cross-cultural perspective. 1 Clarke; Cohen; Dougherty; Goldhill; Gruen; E. Hall; J. Hall; Huskinson...