The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds

Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Molly Jones-Lewis, Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Molly Jones-Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780415738057
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317415695
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds explores how environment was thought to shape ethnicity and identity, discussing developments in early natural philosophy and historical ethnographies. Defining 'environment' broadly to include not only physical but also cultural environments, natural and constructed, the volume considers the multifarious ways in which environment was understood to shape the culture and physical characteristics of peoples, as well as how the ancients manipulated their environments to achieve a desired identity. This diverse collection includes studies not only of the Greco-Roman world, but also ancient China and the European, Jewish and Arab inheritors and transmitters of classical thought.

In recent years, work in this subject has been confined mostly to the discussion of texts that reflect an approach to the barbarian as 'other'. The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds takes the discussion of ethnicity on a fresh course, contextualising the concept of the barbarian within rational discourses such as cartography, medicine, and mathematical sciences, an approach that allows us to more clearly discern the varied and nuanced approaches to ethnic identity which abounded in antiquity. The innovative and thought-provoking material in this volume realises new directions in the study of identity in the Classical and Medieval worlds.

PART I

Ethnic identity and the body

1

AIRS, WATERS, METALS, EARTH

People and environment in Archaic and classical Greek thought

Rebecca Futo Kennedy

Introduction

“Do it, if you want. But be prepared to rule no longer but be ruled instead. For soft men tend to come from soft lands. It’s not common for marvelous fruits and men courageous in war to grow from the same earth.” The Persians agreed, defeated by Cyrus’ logic, and decided to return home. They thus chose to dwell in a poor land and rule rather than sow rich soil and be slaves to others. (Hdt. 9.122)¹

The notion that soft men come from soft lands seems to have been an idée reçue for Herodotus and has remained so in the myths of the American West, Orientalist constructions of the East, and Blut und Boden ideologies. It rests on the notion that there is a deep and abiding connection between humans and their land. In relationship to their land, a people were thought to have developed their character and culture. More than just character and custom, the land also affected physiques. The softness of the Persians inheres not only in their temperament but in their bodies as well. Herodotus suggests this physical softness when discussing how the environment, in this case the climate, affects Egyptian and Persians skulls (Hdt. 3.12.2–4):

They say that the cause of this phenomenon is as follows (and they persuaded me easily): The Egyptians, right from childhood, shave their heads and the bone is thickened in the sun. This is the same reason why they do not become bald—Egyptians have the fewest number of bald men out of all mankind. This, then, is why Egyptian men have strong heads. The Persians have weak heads because they wear felt hats from birth to shelter themselves from the sun.

Persian skulls are weak and soft, while Egyptian skulls are hard and strong (and haired). For Herodotus, customs developed among the Egyptians that used the harsh sunlight to strengthen their skulls, while the Persians had a custom of wearing hats to protect themselves from their climate—environment determines bodies and determines customs. Which comes first, custom or nature (nomos or phusis), is a hen-and-egg question, but clearly environment and culture intersect to create identifying ethnic characteristics—skull density is an ethnic trait as all Egyptians have strong skulls, while all Persians have weak ones.²

In this chapter, I explore three interrelated ways the Archaic and classical Greeks conceptualized the relationship between environment and ethnicity: myths of metals, autochthony, and environmental determinism. I argue that these approaches to the relationship binding human and land attempt to rationalize human difference in a way that privileges indigenous status and encompasses ideas of hereditary superiority. This rationalization might be considered a type of ‘proto-social Darwinism,’ an organization of human diversity that ranks peoples on a scale from superior to inferior based on a normative standard of purity. This scale derives either from environmental metaphors or is in direct relationship to the environment itself. For my purposes, I am limiting ‘environment’ to earth and its elements, its climate, topography, and geography. I will not consider built environments except in so far as they are intended to emphasize natural environments.³

In what follows, I provide a series of case studies that explore different ways Archaic and classical Greeks conceptualized human diversity in relation to environment, in particular, the land. These may not cohere into a single over-arching theory, but are nonetheless related. Each approach tries to reconcile the visibility of human difference, both physical and cultural, with the fact that humans are a single species who can, if they desire, sexually reproduce. The reconciliation works by organizing peoples into hierarchies based on purported inherent qualities, qualities that are derived from their locations of origin. These ideas offered a response to anxieties that may have affected the Greeks when faced with a world with frequent migrations. Kaplan shows that the Greeks may have assuaged this anxiety with migratory myths and traditions that posit horizontal kinship relationships between different sets of Greeks (as well as Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Persians) throughout the Mediterranean.⁴ The environmental theories, on the other hand, offered an explanation for why these peoples should be differentiated and further justified antagonistic political realities even amongst the Greeks themselves. Kaplan’s “discourses of displacement” may have been more common in the mythscape for some Greeks, but discourses tying people to specific lands still operated and often existed side by side with migratory origin stories.

It is difficult to discuss identity without addressing the translation of the Greek terminology, in particular genos and ethnos, which are typically translated as ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ respectively.⁵ While the term ‘race’ frequently translates genos, this should not confuse us into thinking that it carries the baggage of the modern construct of scientific race as it appears in government census data and other official quarters, especially in the United States. The ancient Greeks did not have a concept of a ‘white’ or ‘black’ race, nor of ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ races.⁶ This does not mean, however, that they did not have some concept for groups of peoples defined through shared biological descent that can be approximated with non-scientific ‘race.’ The term genos is frequently used by the ancient sources in contexts of birth and descent. A genos is often linked by biology and genealogy, thus ‘race’ is not an inappropriate translation, even if it inadvertently assumes some modern baggage.

The connection between genos and kinship that we see in the texts discussed in this chapter might lead one to assume that ethnos is used when identity is defined through political and/or cultural associations and is therefore understood as a subset of genos. This is sometimes the case, but it is also clear that ethnos is used as well in the ancient sources to denote peoples linked biologically or through kinship. Both genos and ethnos can refer to groups defined by distant kinship even if ethnos in the texts discussed in this chapter is also suggestive of shared culture or political structures. An ethnos is usually a group of people who share a government—among Greeks, the polis of one’s origin is frequently an ethnos, while Hellene is sometimes a genos, sometimes an ethnos, and Ionian can be a genos, an ethnos, or phulē.⁷ Thus, the ‘ethnic’ for a metic in Athens was typically something like “of Byzantium” or “of Miletus”, while their genos was likely Hellene, if they lived in a period when ‘Hellene’ was recognized as a universal category for those living in the Greek world, who shared certain cultural characteristics and descent. If one were a Hellene and not an Egyptian, Phoenician, or Persian, for example, their phulē would have, perhaps, been Ionian or Dorian. Despite this lack of consistency, I have elected to translate the term ethnos with ‘people’ (as a collective singular), a usage that includes under its umbrella cultural, political, and kinship associations. For clarity’s sake, however, I will include the Greek terms when they appear in each text for categories like race, ethnicity, tribe, or other similar affiliations.

What of the prejudices associated with modern categories of race and ethnicity? If there are no ‘race’ or ethnicity’ as we understand them in modern terms, is there racism or ethno-centrism? Here things are even more difficult to sort because there is evidence from antiquity of stereotypes and prejudices against groups based on kinship, physical appearance, perceived inherent character, gender, language (including accents), and social or economic class, almost all of which groups can be defined using the terms genos or ethnos. Thus, the prejudices associated with the terms genos and ethnos in antiquity are not limited to modern racism or ethnocentrism. The type of hierarchization I am arguing for in this chapter, however, might fall clearly under the terms ‘racism’ or ‘ethnocentrism’ today.⁸ Some of the responses to and manifestations of these prejudices could even be called ‘racialist,’ as with the 451 BCE Citizenship Law of Perikles in Athens.⁹ But my argument is not that the relationship posited by these texts between identity and environment are racist, racialist, or ethnocentric in the modern senses of the words, and one may ask why we even need to find a modern practice that corresponds exactly to ancient types of discrimination. The Greek texts offer a variety of ways for their audience to imagine, construct, and define their own identity and the identity of others based on different associations with place and space, some of which appear analogous to racism and ethnocentrism. They are not the same as our modern pseudo-scientific model of racism, but inherent in these ways of imagining are value judgments that classify people as superior or inferior, as part of in or out groups, in ways that could not easily be altered simply by moving to another climate or geographic location, environment at conception and birth mattered most.¹⁰ These value judgments are at first attached to consecutive genē of humans (as in Hesiod’s myth of metals), but soon are used to subdivide humanity just as the oikoumenē itself was divided. This division and the value judgments inherent in them begins with Hesiod, who presents us with an example of the notion of ‘purity,’ and who hints at a concept of anti-miscegenation that I think is one underlying current in the construction of ethnic identities in ancient Greece.

Hesiod’s metal men

Where did human beings come from? The Greeks told a number of different stories, some of which they derived from their eastern neighbors.¹¹ In Hesiod’s Works and Days (Op. 109–201),¹² the earliest of our Greek authors to speculate on the origins of people, humans are made by the Olympian gods (athanatoi poiēsan), presumably from earth and other natural elements. In fact, there are five attempts at creating humans, the first four of which end in mass extinctions. It has been long understood that the metallic associations of the five ‘races’ of mortal men (genē) reflects a valuation of the qualities of the humans made from them not only in life but also in death. One aspect of this valuation, however, has been overlooked, and that is the purity of the metals and its significance. While the first two genē are pure metals, the other three races are impure—they are either represented by alloys, are metals that require extensive refining and purification, or are products of miscegenation between two different genē. The status of pure or impure is reflected not only in their names, but in the way their lives and after-lives are represented. Purity equates with luxury, ease, and honors after death, while impurity equates with hard labor, lack, and no clear honor in death.

According to Hesiod, there are five genē: gold (chruseon), silver (argureon), bronze (chalkeon), “godlike race of hero-men” (andrōn hērōōn theion genos, 159) also called the “half-gods” (hemitheioi, 160), and iron (sidēreon). The first two genē are marked by ‘pure’ metals, noble metals that can be easily extracted from ores and do not oxidize.¹³ The hallmark of these groups is the ease of their lives—the land yielded up its fruits spontaneously (automatē) and ungrudgingly for the golden genos, and gave them a life free of sorrow and pain, just as the gods had (hōste theōn),¹⁴ while the silver spent the bulk of its life in childishness, tended by their mothers (we have no idea who they are). Further, in death, both were marked as blessed and granted honors. The golden was honored as “pure mortal spirits” (daimones hagnoi epichthonioi) and warders off of evil: “who watch over judgments and wicked deeds while clad in a mist, roaming everywhere upon the earth, granters of wealth” (Hes. Op. 122–6). The silver, while “by far worse” (polu cheiroteron) than the golden, “are called blessed mortals under the earth (hupochthonioi makares thnētoi)—in second place, but similar honor accompanies them” (141–2).

The next two races characterized by metals—the bronze and iron—live lives of violence and need. The bronze genos (145–55), made from ash trees (ek melian), is enamored of violence (hubris) and is characterized by its brute strength (megalē biē) and hardness of heart (adamantos kraterophrona thumon); it kills itself off (151–5). Their association with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Map
• Introduction: identity and the environment in the classical and medieval worlds
• PART I Ethnic identity and the body
• PART II Determined and determining ethnicity
• PART III Mapping ethnicity
• Index