Negotiation, Collaboration and Conflict in Ancient and Medieval Communities

Christian Krötzl, Katariina Mustakallio, Miikka Tamminen, Christian Krötzl, Katariina Mustakallio, Miikka Tamminen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032234465
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000567847
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Focusing on forms of interaction and methods of negotiation in multicultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual contexts during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, this volume examines questions of social and cultural interaction within and between diverse ethnic communities. Toleration and coexistence were essential in all late antique and medieval societies and their communities. However, power struggles and prejudices could give rise to suspicion, conflict and violence. All of these had a central influence on social dynamics, negotiations of collective or individual identity, definitions of ethnicity and the shaping of legal rules. What was the function of multicultural and multilingual interaction: did it create and increase conflicts, or was it rather a prerequisite for survival and prosperity? The focus of this book is society and the history of everyday life, examining gender, status and ethnicity and the various forms of interaction and negotiation.

Part I Segregation and Integration

1 Difference and Essentialism The Polemics of Physiognomy in the Later Roman Empire

Antti Lampinen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277644-3

Introduction

This chapter will discuss some late-imperial texts which either engage explicitly with physiognomical theory or interact in other ways with their contemporary physiognomical knowledge frame. Its aim is to provide some insights into the ways in which the visible phenotypic differences between the inhabitants of the Later Roman Empire could be turned into a tool for moralising polemic and essentialising argumentation about both neighbours and strangers. It will discuss how a set of mostly fourth-century CE authors directed their diagnostic gaze not only at individuals but also at the multiplicity of the empire’s subject peoples and groups beyond its borders in pursuit of a variety of rhetorical and polemical purposes. These could range from the simple character-assassination of their competitors to formulating strategies for the continued survival of the empire. Such operations seem to have assumed the existence of a fairly widely shared knowledge base that was framed in terms of physiognomical analogies. By examining Late Antique physiognomical texts in their cultural and literary context, it may be possible to garner evidence for this ‘commonly-known’ or proverbial epistemic base about the supposed properties of different peoples and what evidence it might offer regarding the segregating and integrative speech acts that the ‘visually other’ denizens of the Later Empire had to navigate. In pursuing these questions, this chapter will first discuss the epistemology of ancient physiognomy, as well as its second-century heyday, which formed an important background to the late-imperial popularity of the theory. Next, I will discuss the techniques of segregating and integrating individuals and entire population groups by their looks in later-imperial texts ranging from physiognomical treatises themselves into such works of historiography as Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res gestae. Finally, concluding reflections on the epistemic, social and cultural dynamics at play are offered.

Ancient physiognomy was inference from signs.¹ Its first flowering seems to have been in the Hellenistic era – from which the earliest preserved Greek physiognomical texts stem; among them is a treatise attributed to Aristotle, but in fact written by a slightly later Hellenistic author.² Aristotle’s genuine Rhetoric did showcase physiognomical arguments, too, and subsequently they became a constant in the Greek art of oratory; physiognomic inferences are also offered in other parts of the Corpus Aristotelicum.³ Later, during the imperial era, physiognomy was used with various degrees of intensity and theoretical framing in order to read the quality of a person’s soul from evident real-life indications.⁴ We meet physiognomically articulated commonplaces and clichés in a range of texts. In the second-century CE, Marcus Antonius Polemon of Laodicea produced his influential Physiognomy, which survives through Late Antique authors summarising or reusing it, as well as an Arabic translation that has now been expertly edited and translated by Robert Hoyland in a collected volume put together by Simon Swain and others.⁵ It is the third period of physiognomy’s efflorescence – that of the fourth-century CE – that will be the primary chronological framework of this article.⁶

While it is not obvious that these three periods of intensified production of literary manuals on physiognomy track realistically the interest in physiognomical arguments as such, the value of the physiognomist’s tekhne to rhetoricians is easy to see. Ethopoeia, or the fashioning of indirectly represented speech according to the character of the purported speaker, was an established technique in the ancient rhetorical theory: other rhetoricians called the technique prosopopoeia, personification.⁷ What attracted speakers to physiognomy was its empirical claim that it endowed the rhetorician with a weapon tailor-made for eviscerating his opponents with an ostensibly objective theory. Conjuring up vividly (enargôs) in the audience’s minds an image of the real-life person, physiognomical rhetoric also enabled the speaker – or an author, in the case of literary works – to showcase their skill at ekphrasis.⁸ Perhaps relevantly, Simon Swain has also connected the ‘culture of inspection and moral evaluation’ evident in Polemon’s Physiognomy with the inter-elite competition and rivalry during the second century.⁹ Many of these same conditions still prevailed in the fourth century.

But another explanation for physiognomy’s popularity at these chronological frames can also be advanced – namely, that the surviving physiognomical treatises seem all to stem from periods when the Greek (or Roman) political rule over many different populations was put into particularly vigorous use as an argument on its own right; this could perhaps be called ‘valorisation of multiplicity’. This article will examine the physiognomising of one’s neighbours and further-away strangers, arguing that provincials – especially ones with visible characteristics connected in the common understanding with distinct origins – could have been at a disadvantage in an epistemic climate where the visual differences between human individuals could be turned into a tool for moral evaluation. Of course, they were not the only ones who could be physiognomised to a negative effect – any person with a non-normative feature would have been liable to this. If the physiognomist’s gaze is akin to the diagnostic gaze of the doctor, as Tamsyn Barton (1995) suggested, the analysis of provincial populations’ typical features could have obtained some of the quality of an empiricist medical writer’s technical treatise on the natural propensities of different organs and parts of the body.¹⁰

Polemon’s Physiognomy and Its Fourth-Century Reception

Marcus Antonius Polemon of Laodicea (c.88–144), one of the most celebrated sophists of his generation, hailed from the relative cultural backwater of Laodicea-on-the-Lycus in the borderlands between Caria and Phrygia. Only a minuscule fraction of Polemon’s literary output has survived: besides two extant declamations, his influential treatise on physiognomy (from the late 130s CE) can be fairly well reconstructed through later translations or works abridging it.¹¹ At least from Philostratus’ Lives, an image appears of Polemon as not a very pleasant person.¹² In the course of his career, Polemon went on to reach the friendship of the emperor Hadrian, but on the other hand became known for his overweening arrogance and clashes with other sophists; his most famous feud was with Favorinus of Arelate, which became entwined into the rivalry between the cities of Smyrna and Ephesus.¹³

The bustling and cosmopolitan cities of the empire’s Greek east in the second-century CE were certainly an environment that was conducive to stereotypical conjectures being drawn from the external characteristics of human beings.¹⁴ These social and cultural hubs hosted people from a wide range of origins, both inside and outside the empire. Ria Berg has recently studied objects displaying foreign physiognomies among the finds from Ostia, and despite the ubiquity of visible human difference on display every day, the object finds do support the idea that caricatures of foreign looks were common and covered a wide range of ethnic categories.¹⁵ Looking at the bodily diversity of subalterns of all kinds – the old, the poor, the foreign – was clearly a common pastime and appears to have frequently led to mockery. Some cities, such as Smyrna on the Ionian coast, have provided a significant amount of cheaply made terracotta figures with frequently grotesque, but oftentimes simply emotive, ethnic or socially stigmatised features.¹⁶ Alongside the lower-class mobility caused by slavery and trade, the possibilities of the elite education caused further mobility. We know that sophists attracted students even from outside the empire: Herodes Atticus’ black African student, only known to us with his nickname Memnon, is a case in point.¹⁷ Polemon – based in Smyrna, where the plentiful evidence of terracotta figurines from the second century shows that the observation of non-normative physiognomies was very popular and quite mordant – responded to the variatio or poikilia evident in the Greek metropoleis of his time through the jealous guarding of the old Hellenic centrality. This is particularly prominent in the textual remains of his Physiognomy, and it is from this that Polemon’s value as a source to the prejudices of his audiences – or at least to some of the rhetorical communication taking part within them – stems from.¹⁸

In addition to physiognomical rhetoric making most sense in a multicultural but inherently discriminatory context, Polemon’s use of the template was probably conditioned both by his own prejudices and those of his audiences. Polemon’s strict delimitation of Hellenicity, in particular, s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Neighbours or Strangers? Identities, Minorities and Ethnic Relations in Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• Part I Segregation and Integration
• Part 2 Power and Social Competition
• Part 3 Negotiating Identities
• Index