"Skilled at Grasping": The Phoenician Migrant and Exile as a Cautionary Stereotype from Classical Antiquity to Early Modern Europe

1. SEEN THROUGH FOREIGN EYES: PHOENICIANS IN CLASSICAL LITERATURE¹

δὴ τότε Φοῖνιξ ἦλθεν ἀνὴρ ἀπατήλια εἰδώς, / τρώκτης, ὃς δὴ πολλὰ κάκ᾽ ἀνθρώποισιν ἐώργει (Hom. Od. 14.288–89)

Then there came a man of Phoenicia, well versed in guile, a greedy knave, who had already wrought much evil among men.²

The first Phoenician in classical literature can also be considered, in the words of Edith Hall, "perhaps [its] first real barbarian" (1991.49 n.158). The term barbarian has very precise meanings and connotations in a book whose title is Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy. He was a Greek intellectual creation whose purpose was to provide a symbolic contrast with this civilization's own values and ideals: in short, to represent what was "other." Or, as Sergio Ribichini puts it: "l´immagine che nelle tradizioni classiche chi è conservata di popoli, civiltà e culture definite globalmente come 'barbare' … rispondeva principalmente alla necessità della civiltà greca di definirsi opponendosi ai costumi ed alle culture diverse dalla propia" (1983.443). When the Phoenician in the Odyssey is described as deceitful and greedy, the two main pillars of what would become a full-fledged stereotype in classical literature are erected. This cupidity and capacity for deceit are, moreover, directly related to navigation and trade, the occupations for which Phoenicians were best known. Phoenician merchants were assigned all the negative behaviors associated with these professions: piracy, cheating, stealing women and children, as well as robbing and selling passengers.

And yet, merely to understand that the Greeks saw such practices as "other"—rejecting them and attributing them to a foreign community that was depicted with hostility and prejudice—is a simplification of processes that were significantly more complex. For example, Irene Winter, in her study of the role of the Phoenicians in the Odyssey, prefers to identify them as a trope representing contemporary concerns about new social groups and developments in Greece itself, such as the rise of sea trade and colonization, especially in Euboea (1995.261). Robert Garland, too, connects the Greek prejudice against the long-distance trader with their view of the Phoenicians, who constituted "a byword for greed" (2014.172). In other words, the thieving and deceitful Phoenicians in the Odyssey³ would have been stand-ins for what worried Greeks about their own society at the time: the rupture of an ancient order that made the dissolution of social ties and traditional values a real and threatening possibility. Displacing the stress of the problem from one´s own society to a foreign community that was easier to stereotype and dislike would have lent clarity and dramatic strength to the portrayal of the problem. Carol Dougherty goes even further, claiming that the Phoenicians were also a negative reversal of the Phaeacians, and that each group represented, respectively, the negative and positive aspects of this emerging way of life based on overseas trade (2001.111–17). It is interesting to note that, although the epic poet created an imaginary people to represent something positive, what is negative and threatening was represented by a real "barbarian" neighbor.

Though a product of the period in which he was created and its particular concerns, this deceitful and grasping Phoenician proved to have a life of his own. The stereotype which he represented was used in other time periods to characterize these disquieting neighbors who became the enemies of the Greeks and Romans in various conflicts from the Persian to the Punic Wars. The Phoenician was also used by later writers as a negative model to point to other dangers threatening their societies.

2. REFUGEES IN THE GREEK WORLD: THE EVAGORAS AND ISOCRATEAN DIDACTIC RHETORIC

The growing impact on today's society, political discourse, and media of the refugee phenomenon has increased scholarly interest in the issues related to the forced displacement of people. Though the concept of the political refugee in the Greek world has been analyzed by various authors since E. Balogh´s seminal work on the subject (1943), a focus on the unnamed and uncounted groups of people who were displaced by episodes of stasis...