Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World ed. by Tim Whitmarsh (review)

Local histories are nothing new in ancient history, but today’s rampant globalization has inevitably attracted increased attention to the differences of places and peoples in an interconnected world. Whitmarsh introduces the papers from a conference in 2004 at Exeter by a superficially paradoxical comparison of Aelius Aristides’s speech on Rome with the contemporary guidebook to Greece by Pausanias. Aristides sees the Roman empire as a vast international community under the aegis of Rome, whereas Pausanias sees local differences everywhere inside mainland Greece. But the paradox only reflects the genres of both writers. Encomium and description inevitably produce different pictures, and Whitmarsh is right to step back from this paradox by observing that the idea of the local can only arise from a supralocal perspective. As he observes, people living in isolation on an island would not think of themselves as local. After all, Aristides, praising Rome, and Pausanias, describing Greece, both came from Asia Minor. What Whitmarsh and his colleagues tried to do was to broaden current interest in identity by investigating the strength of attachment to local places and traditions. These are the microidentities of the title.

Five years after Whitmarsh’s event at Exeter, two French scholars, Anna Heller and Anne-Valérie Pont, organized a conference at Tours on multiple citizenships in the imperial Greek world, and they thereby complicated the issue of microidentities, demonstrating that various identities could coexist. The title of their book of 2012 Patrie d’origine et patries électives, clearly exposes their theme. Two of the contributors to Whitmarsh’s volume also contributed papers to the recent Tours volume, Christopher Jones and Onno van Nijf. Jones develops his earlier work on kinship diplomacy to show how traditions of shared ancestors, heroes, and gods reinforced the continuity of local identities and the usable memory of the past. In the Tours volume, he directly approaches the question of multiple citizenship through an analysis of Dio Chrysostom’s oration no. 38, which shows Dio as an adopted citizen of several Greek cities besides his own. By contrast, in writing for Whitmarsh, van Nijf dilates on the cemeteries of Pisidian Termessos in order to determine its local identity, but in the Tours volume he concentrates on Greek public competitions (agônes) and the citizenships conferred upon widely traveled athletes and performers. His conclusion that these minor celebrities transformed “the way that citizenship was experienced” hardly follows from the examples he adduces.

The emphasis on local identities in the Whitmarsh volume cuts deep into the social fabric of the Greek Roman empire, whereas the proliferation of multiple citizenships does little more than illustrate the international character of the age. Although the two books complement each other helpfully, the Exeter volume includes a dazzling essay by Maud Gleason on bicultural identity in the commemoration of Regilla by Herodes Atticus. Her essay makes the whole concept of microidentity seem hopelessly simplistic.