Ethnicity in the Ancient World—Did It Matter? by Erich S. Gruen (review)

Matters of understanding ethnicity and race are far from academic. As the history of scholarship attests, research on conceptions of race in society can have far-reaching implications, richly documented for the modern landscape in Susannah Heschel's The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). It is the ancient world and how moderns perceive their understandings of race that occupy Erich S. Gruen in this volume, a book that contains some previously published (though extensively reworked) material as well as new contributions. In it, he argues lucidly and, as one would expect of a scholar of G.'s stature, with an impressive array of primary source material that the ancients had no singular, inherent, undeviating, or genetic sense of ethnicity. Rather, ancient authors conceived of ethnicity in terms of shared cultural practices and traditions. Yet the application of this conclusion is no less relevant for current issues. As G. states in the introduction, an exploration of the manner in which ancients navigated these issues displays their ability to evince "change, adaptation, intermingling, and incorporation," all of which can offer modern society "a salutary corrective" (p. 7). The result is a rich volume with both clear argumentation and an abundance of documentation.

In the introduction, G. examines the theoretical issues in play when exploring matters of ethnicity. In particular, he critically interrogates the positions that ethnicity is either a genetically determined fact or a culturally fluid conception consisting of rites, practices, and traditions. The value of this discussion is that G. examines both positions, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of each. In other words, G. has thought carefully about which position he adopts in the volume (ethnicity consists of shared cultural practices), and the reader is sure that he does so carefully and with consideration of the theoretical issues involved.

Chapter 1 then contains an evaluation of the term "barbarian" in classical sources. Beginning with Herodotus and ending with Josephus, this chapter displays the manner in which these authors understood the term as a fluid marker, and not one of unchanging genetic dispositions. In this fashion, the chapter also functions as a sort of prelude to the contributions that follow. Yet the argument exists on its own as well. Through an evaluation of possibly the most famous term for defining insiders and outsiders in Greek and Roman sources, G. conveys how complex and necessary the fuller study of ethnicity in ancient sources is.

In chap. 2, G. provides an analysis of a famous passage in Herodotus, Hist. 8.144.2, which is often invoked as an example of the Greek idea of ethnicity (though G. argues that Greek had no singular term for the concept) over against non-Greek. Exploring Herodotus's writings more widely and the context of this passage, G. concludes that Herodotus did not have a genetic sense of ethnicity, and that this passage, containing the thoughts and perspectives of a spokesman replying to Spartan perspectives, represents a particularly Athenocentric point of view. It was not reflective of Herodotus himself. Chapter 3 contains an analysis of Polybius, who had little love of foreigners and catalogued their distinctive qualities extensively. These qualities, as G. argues, are of a cultural and not genetic character.

Chapters 4 and 5 entail considerations of ethnicity from the perspective of wider Roman history and society (including Italy more broadly in chap. 5), into the Roman Republic. G.'s presentation of the data and his analyses are as clear as they are profound. Both in matters of Roman self-perception and in terms of non-Roman Italy, the founding stories of Rome, containing narratives of mixed marriages with many peoples, set the framework for seeing ethnicity in more ambiguous, shifting, and culturally (if not also politically) expedient terms. Any sense in which Romans understood outsiders in negative ways was tempered by these founding narratives, which underscored Rome's history itself as a "conglomerate" of ethnicities...