Multiculturalism in History: Hellenic and Roman Antiquity.
Author: David Gress
‘Orbis’
Issue: Fall, 1999
Two assumptions prevalent these days among contemporary social critics are, first, that multiculturalism is a necessary and long-overdue antidote to the Euro-American chauvinism and racism characteristic of Western civilization and, secondly, that chauvinism and racism have been uniquely virulent in the West. The planted axiom behind this second assumption, in turn, is that other societies have not based their identity on racial or ethnic hierarchies to the degree those of Europe and North America have and that the norm in history is in fact a lack of racial discrimination. The reality, as serious scholars have long been aware, is both more complicated and more interesting. Indeed, the notion that the norm outside Europe and America has been religious, racial, and political toleration and openness and a lack of xenophobia would surprise most historians, who traditionally have identified the consistent effort to overcome xenophobia and racism as a unique feature precisely of Western civilization, with its roots in medieval Christianity, the Reformation, and the secular Enlightenment. And the most important cultural antecedents of modern, liberal Western society were the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. Therefore, whether or not Western societies are in fact exceptionally tolerant or exceptionally racist, one would expect to find origins of those features in what some people still call classical civilization, especially the "golden ages" of fifth-century B.C. Athens and first-century B.C. Rome. Of course, the ancient world was hardly subsumed in those two short eras, and they should not be regarded as peaks surrounded by valleys of decadence. But they have assuredly had the strongest influence on later eras of Western history.
Ancient Mediterranean civilization is worth examining for another reason as well, namely, that it is an example of a culture remote, in time at least, from the modern West and therefore can serve as a test case of the proposition that non-Western cultures have been less ethnocentric and more hospitable to multiculturalism than our own.
A final word by way of introduction: the contemporary ideology of multiculturalism has been almost entirely shaped by a narrow liberal elite in the United States, where issues of race, identity, and inequality are dominant preoccupations. The modern concept creates a huge initial handicap when asking about multiculturalism in antiquity, because issues of race as contemporary American elites understand them - and even the idea of the nation in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century sense - did not exist. Hence the danger that contemporary American preoccupations will color, or rather discolor, our portrait of multiculturalism in the ancient world, not least because the most publicized recent work on the subject is Black Athena by Martin Bernal. The reader must take care to remember, therefore, that concerns such as Bernal's are really "ours" and have nothing to do with the people of the ancient Mediterranean.
Martin Bernal is a sinologist turned archaeologist and linguist who, in 1987 and 1991, published the first two of what will ultimately be four volumes of Black Athena. His basic thesis was that the ancient Egyptians were black Africans, conquered Greece, and thus created classical civilization. Since no one else outside extreme Afrocentric circles had ever made this assertion before, Bernal was also obliged to argue that all classical scholarship for two centuries had systematically misinterpreted the Greeks in order to turn them from Africans into proto-Europeans. His purpose, he wrote, was to "lessen European cultural arrogance."(1) Bernal's volumes are the chief items of evidence adduced by those who claim that, whereas the modern West is exceptionally racist, ancient Greece was a multicultural and even multiculturalist civilization in the sense of being open, tolerant, and non-xenophobic, and that these features are attributable to its African origins.
Bernal rested much of his case for the African origins of classical Greece on what he claimed the Greeks themselves believed. To sustain that case he asserted that a number of Greek legends contained some kind of record of actual historical events including the founding of famous Greek city-states by wandering strangers from afar. For example, in the Suppliants, a play of Aeschylus, an Egyptian prince, Danaus, flees to the town of Argos, where he receives asylum from the native king Pelasgus, whose people are variously called Pelasgians and Hellenes, that is, Greeks. Danaus's claim for asylum is based on a blood tie to the people of Argos since they, too, are said to be descended from 10, who had fled to Egypt long before. In Black Athena, Bernal took the story of Danaus and the Danaids as proof that a thousand years before Aeschylus, Egyptians (whom Bernal elsewhere equates to black Africans) settled Greece and introduced civilization. That assertion in turn allows him to claim that Zeus must be the Egyptian god Osiris, renamed by Aeschylus as part of his project (cleverly detected by Bernal) to reinterpret a true story of Egyptian military conquest in the mid-second millennium B.C. as a story of Greek hosts welcoming indigent strangers. Indeed, the very title of the play, Hiketides in Greek, must, according to Bernal, be related to the Egyptian hk hst, the name that the real Egyptians gave to those who ruled their land for some generations around 1600 B.C. and who Bernal believes were also behind the Egyptian conquest of Greece. The classicist Edith Hall called this "one of the most implausible etymological suggestions in the book."(2)
Bernal's agenda is to recover what he considers authentic features of Greek civilization and attack the dominant image of the Greeks as the first white Europeans, who in their patriotism, democratic ideals, philosophy, literature, and art inspired all that is great in the later West. Bernal charges that the modern West's virulent racism was a product of this image of the Greeks because it seemed to confirm modern Europeans and Americans in their contempt for what Rudyard Kipling called "lesser breeds without the law" - the black and brown people, who lacked the virtues derived from ancient Greece.
There is, of course, a serious logical flaw at the core of Bernal's argument independent of his archaeology, linguistics, and cultural history, whose merits, experts agree, are minimal. Rather, the flaw is in his ideological argument. Either the Greeks were the first Europeans or they were not. If Europe was bad, imperialist, and racist, but Greek civilization great, then the Greeks could not be the first Europeans. Rather, they must have been the opposite of Bernal's image of the Europeans, that is, they must have been multiculturalist. Precisely this multiculturalism was, we recall, Bernal's main claim: Greece was "a second Gift of the Nile."(3) If, however, the Greeks were in any way racist themselves (as when Bernal referred to "passionate Greek chauvinism"(4)), then it must follow that they inherited that, too, from Africa. And if that is so, then his effort to idealize Africa and demonize Europe collapses.
Bernal's ideological problem derives from the single word "barbarian." The distinction between civilization and barbarism is one of the most notorious and indisputably Greek contributions to culture, and a cottage industry has sprung up among postmodernist classicists to analyze how the Greeks "constructed" a proto-racist discourse of contempt to define and denigrate non-Greeks. Some of these scholars are close to Bernal in their distaste for Western liberal democracy, but the thrust of their work is to undermine admiration of the Greeks by showing that they were, in important ways, the authors of ideas crucial to modern racism. Thus, they implicitly subvert Bernal, who wants to maintain the glory that was Greece but attribute it to Africans, and by inheritance, African-Americans.(5)
This cottage industry was itself inspired by Edward Said's Orientalism, one of the most influential works of cultural revisionism of recent decades.(6) Said charged that European travelers to the Near East and scholars of Islam approached their subjects, not in a spirit of academic curiosity and openness, but of imperialism and chauvinism. The main product of European studies of Islam and Asia, Said argued, was a false image of "the Orient" as a region of despotism and superstition, confirming Europeans' sense of superiority and justifying their colonial regimes. Transferring the method of Orientalism to ancient Greece, it becomes easy to demonstrate that the Greek idea of the barbarian was not a response to any realities, but an ideological construct designed to bolster ethnic identity and confirm feelings of superiority.(7) However, to do that is to follow Bernal down the path to unsustainable and misleading dichotomies. The Greeks and the other ancient Mediterranean civilizations were not either racist or anti-racist, multiculturalist or chauvinist; and in any case the category of multiculturalism is a late-twentieth-century American invention which cannot be applied to the ancient world without causing confusion.
What must instead be done is to describe the main stages in ancient attitudes toward ethnic and cultural diversity - period. In the course of that exercise, we may discover that something analogous to modern multiculturalism did appear once or twice in the ancient world, but in the neutral sense of welcoming strangeness and difference. The ancients were not guilt-ridden modern liberals.
With apologies to the reader for that lengthy, but unfortunately necessary introduction, let us now move to an especially revealing episode from antiquity, followed by sections on ancient views of ethnic diversity in the period stretching from Homer to the fifth century B.C., the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, and the long era of late Hellenism, which offers interesting multicultural features but has often been misunderstood as an era of decadence. The essay will close with some reflections on the transition from the ancient to the medieval world and to what some scholars have called the "formation of a persecuting society." In other words, the concluding question is whether the Christian West that succeeded ancient Roman society in Europe was notably intolerant and anti-multicultural compared to what went before. We will end where we began, with the question of whether non-Western societies are in any meaningful sense more tolerant or multiculturalist than the West.
Early in the year 203 A.D., Roman authorities in Carthage in the province of Africa (present-day Tunisia and coastal Algeria) arrested a number of alleged Christians. At this time, Christian belief was not in itself a crime, and the regular attitude of the Roman state was, as the historian Tacitus put it, that affronts to the gods were for gods, not men, to punish. Nevertheless, local persecution of Christians did break out from time to time, usually because Christians refused to sacrifice for the health of the emperor when asked to do so by his representative. The time of the universal, organized persecutions of 249-251 and 303-311 had not yet come. It is rarely possible to determine just what caused a particular outbreak. Most likely the Christians, who at this time probably numbered less than half of one percent of the Roman Empire, were chosen as victims when the state needed scapegoats without strong social support.(8) In this particular instance, the authorities needed victims because the emperor's birthday was approaching and, to satisfy the crowd, had to be celebrated in the municipal arena with gladiatorial combat and the spectacle of wild animals mangling and devouring criminals.
Among the Christians arrested were two remarkable women: Perpetua, a twenty-two-year-old mother, and Felicitas, a slave who was eight months pregnant. When they were asked to sacrifice for the health of the emperor, Perpetua's father, a pagan and upright citizen, pleaded with his daughter to do so. The governor, too, appeared none too eager to condemn the daughter of a prominent citizen, but Perpetua was stubborn. "I am a Christian," she said, "and I will not sacrifice." She was forthwith sentenced ad bestias, "to the wild animals," in the arena. Some time, perhaps a few weeks, elapsed between the sentence and the games. At the end of that time, Perpetua dictated an account of the Christians' trials and imprisonment that has come down to us as one of the more fascinating documents of the ancient world. Perpetua reported in her narrative of prison a series of visions in the last of which she found herself in the arena. "And I see a huge crowd of people waiting, and because I knew that I had been sentenced to the animals, I was surprised that they weren't sending any animals at me. And across from me emerged an Egyptian of hideous appearance with his helpers to fight against me."(9) The vision then takes a startling turn. "They stripped me, and I was turned into a male." As a male, who however continues to be referred to grammatically as a female, Perpetua defeats the huge Egyptian who, she realizes, represents the last attempt of the forces of hell to undermine her courage and resolution in the face of death.
Bernal, who implied that the ancient Egyptians were in fact black Africans, could take heart from this passage, for what Perpetua meant was "a black man." Note the "hideous appearance." It was generally, but not always, true that ancient Mediterranean people did not ascribe "general inferiority to any ethnic group . . . solely on the basis of body-type."(10) Blackness sometimes carried a negative symbolic and psychological charge, in much the same way as later Europeans spoke of "black magic" as the devil's art. To the ancients, black was not only the skin color of certain exotic people, but a symbol of dark forces. The poet Juvenal and the philosopher Plutarch, who was at least a partial Stoic, regarded black as the color of inhabitants of the underworld, and to meet them was bad luck. Interestingly, modern scholars have distinguished a "good black" and an "evil black" in ancient imagery and popular culture.(11) The identification of black skin with the underworld was rather rare; more prevalent were images of black people as models of exotic physical beauty and evidence of a beautiful soul.
Usually when the ancients spoke of black Africans, they called them Ethiopians, the dwellers south of Egypt whom Greeks and Romans recognized as different from Egyptians themselves. Why then did Perpetua refer to the black man in her vision as an Egyptian? Because the Christians had inherited the Jewish condemnation of Egypt as the land of bondage. In Christian theology, "Egypt" came to stand as a metaphor for the world, which was subject to the devil. "Egypt" symbolized the state of the soul's bondage to earth, matter, and carnal desire. Hence Perpetua's "hideous Egyptian" combined the non-Christian symbolism of blackness as the color of hell with the Judeo-Christian identification of Egypt with bondage. For her vision to make sense as foreshadowing her final victory over the world, the last and most ferocious assault of the devil had to take the form of a black man from Egypt.
We turn now to the long-term character and evolution of ancient views of diversity. At first glance, it might make sense to begin with the Hellenistic era, for it was then, starting with the conquests of Alexander the Great in 334-323 B.C., that ethnic and cultural encounters on a vast scale began profoundly to affect and change Greek civilization. To begin with Alexander, however, would leave out Homer and Herodotus, who are essential if we are to make sense of how the Greeks were conditioned to view members of other cultures whom they encountered.
Homer's Iliad is not only the greatest war story of all time, but also the first saga of East-West conflict. The tale of the Greek expedition to the Asian city of Troy set up, at the beginning of Hellenic civilization, the polarity of a Greek West and an alien, hostile East that was later confirmed by the Persian Wars interpreted by Herodotus. Thus, the Iliad bequeathed a notion of Greek identity contrasted to a hostile "other," which later became the "barbarian." It may therefore seem that Homer's Odyssey is a better source of early multicultural attitudes by dint of the hero's travels. In the first line of the epic, Odysseus is called polutropos, which means versatile and much-traveled as well as one who has suffered many turns of fate. He "saw the cities of many men and knew their mind, many evils plagued his spirit on the sea, as he was striving to save his life and bring his companions home." If Greek civilization included, as it surely did, extraordinary impulses of curiosity, adventure, and hunger for new experience, it is in the Odyssey that these find their symbolic as well as chronological origin.
Two multicultural principles dominate the Odyssey. The first is that of curiosity and the often painful cost of gaining new experiences. The theme of "learning through suffering" and the related idea that "he who acts will incur pain" became standard elements of Greek identity. The other, which Homer shared with many traditional cultures, is that guests are precious and that hospitality creates reciprocal and sacred obligations. Much of the indignation aroused by the suitors of Penelope in Ithaca is caused by their abuse of hospitality, an insult to humanity and the gods which they compound by refusing hospitality to others.
The two themes are sometimes combined, for example in book 17, where Odysseus arrives in disguise as a beggar at his own palace and begs for food from the suitors. One of them rebukes the old swineherd Eumaeus for bringing this beggar into the palace, "as though we don't have enough of them already." Eumaeus responds by reminding the suitors of the virtue of welcoming strangers: "Who of himself ever seeks out and invites a stranger from elsewhere, unless that stranger is one of those who are masters of a craft, a prophet, a healer of ills, a builder, or perhaps a divine minstrel who gives delight by singing. For such men are welcomed all over the boundless earth."
But not everyone sees Odysseus as the symbolic founder of multicultural openness in antiquity. According to those who accuse the Greeks of proto-Orientalism in Said's sense, Odysseus prefigures a philosophy that does not really seek to embrace the other, but only to confirm itself. His voyage, after all, was a voyage home, and all his experiences amounted only to a disregard of the other. Doubtless there is some truth in this perspective, but the point about the Greeks is not that they thought themselves superior or interpreted foreign ways to suit their own prejudices, but that they overcame those barriers through a curiosity that was more than self-congratulation. All traditional societies did the former; perhaps none, other than the Greeks, consistently did the latter.
The figure of Odysseus pervaded all later Western art and literature, as contemporary examples show.(12) That a magazine published for Greeks living abroad, especially in America, should call itself Odyssey is not surprising. More startling perhaps is that a group of historians and literary theorists in post-communist Russia adopted Odysseus as a symbol of a new internationalism when they founded a journal entitled Ulysses. Their opening editorial statement read:
Our Ulysses is a voyage across the countries and the eras of world culture. Everywhere Ulysses is a guest and a stranger. A culture cannot recognize itself except at the frontier of other spiritual worlds. Ulysses is our own cultural conscience which deals with other cultures and is able both to listen and to be surprised. By embarking on this endless voyage contemporary culture sets out to find itself. Nothing is as hard as understanding oneself: it is no accident that Ulysses was not recognized in his native island. Ulysses is a thread that connects different cultures to each other. He can be called the first anthropologist or student of cultures, the one by whom cultures, so to speak, come into existence. He is a symbol of uncertainty but also of the culture's hope of survival despite the trials without precedent that it has undergone in this century.(13)
If the basis of genuine, as opposed to merely ideological, multiculturalism is curiosity about alien ways of life combined with the ability to question the cherished presuppositions of one's own culture, then the Greeks of the archaic and classical eras (600-400 B.C.) were the world's first multiculturalists. The empirical and philosophical basis of such multiculturalism was the anthropological method invented by the Greeks which they, in the words of American anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, "carried further and carried out more systematically than . . . any other people whose records have survived."(14)
One inspiration for this Greek multiculturalism was the Odyssey. Another arose when it turned out that the East-West polarity and the idea of the barbarian could also give rise to relativism, which happened at the moment when people began using the barbarian, the non-Greek foreigner, to ask questions about themselves. The Greek-born French political thinker Cornelius Castoriadis defined that moment as follows:
Until the Greeks and outside the Greco-Western tradition, societies are based on the principle of strict closure. "Our" vision of the world is the only one that makes sense and is true - the others are bizarre, inferior, perverse, bad, disobedient [to divine order]. The true interest in the others was born with the Greeks and this interest is never anything but an aspect of the critical and questioning gaze that they cast on their own institutions. That interest is therefore part of the movement to democracy and philosophy launched by the Greeks.(15)
An early example of this is the philosopher Xenophanes (ca. 600 B.C.), who observed that the Thracians, who had blue eyes and red hair, worshipped blue-eyed and red-haired gods. If horses had gods, Xenophanes went on, their gods would be horses. What appears to modern Westerners as a piece of cleverness was a stunning imaginative leap for the time. Xenophanes arrived at the idea that we make gods in our own image and immediately moved on to conclude that if gods exist, we cannot assume they will look, act, or be like us. In another fragment, he noted that Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods behavior "that men despise and condemn - theft, adultery, and deception."(16) Note again the double leap outside the bounds of traditional thought: the gods of Homer and Hesiod, our gods, behave disgracefully by human standards. Therefore, either these gods are frauds or else human standards of conduct have nothing to do with such gods. It was only a short move from such an idea to philosophy itself, that is, to free speculation about nature and justice as realities in themselves unrelated to any divine origin or human social reality. We are at the start of the passage from the idea of heteronomy, the idea that law comes from somewhere else, to autonomy, the idea that society itself is the source of law. And if society is the source of law, then the formulation of that law is the matter of politics, the merely human struggle for power, and there is no universal law given by gods or anyone else. "Custom [nomos] is the king of all things," said Pindar.(17)
There is no universal law, because no two polities are the same. In accounting for differences among societies and their values, the Greeks arrived at yet another original explanation. This was the idea that each people occupied a unique environmental niche and that the range of customs and morality found in the world was due to differences in climate and nurture that shaped its inhabitants and imposed limits it could not transcend. Hence, differences implied no moral ranking, and the Persians were not worse than the Greeks, merely otherwise.
Bernal, as we saw, gave Egypt credit for Greek civilization. He was wrong, but the idea of Egypt did play a great role in Greek culture. In the Odyssey, Egypt was a remote land known mainly for its great riches. By the time of Plato, the theme of Egyptian wealth had yielded to the overarching theme of Egypt as a land of superior, ancient wisdom and esoteric knowledge. Between Xenophanes and Plato stands Herodotus (ca. 450 B.C.), who was deeply impressed by the great age of Egyptian culture and the fact that its beliefs and customs seemed so often to be the opposite of those of the Greeks. The Egyptians did everything backwards, he said, and even the laws of nature seemed reversed in Egypt - a radical strengthening of the already established principle of Greek anthropology that "custom is king" and that all rules and mores varied with environment and circumstance.
A corollary of this Greek anthropological insight was that each people must naturally prefer and want to defend its own customs. Affection for one's culture was natural and something not to be despised or brutally overridden by strangers. Herodotus made this point clearly in relation to Egypt, which was conquered by the Persians in the 520s B.C. Cambyses, the victorious king and a loyal servant of the monotheistic Persian state religion, offended the Egyptians by opening graves and staring at mummies and laughing at the images of gods in temples. He even, in some cases, had the statues removed from the sanctuaries and burned. "All in all I have to say it's quite obvious that Cambyses was completely crazy." Herodotus casually defined ethnic and religious chauvinism as insanity - a remarkable expression of the Athenian enlightenment. In the next sentence Herodotus stated that if you asked anyone to say what customs [nomous] were the best of all, everyone after reflection would say his own. "So then, each people considers its own customs and ways of life to be by far the best."(18) Herodotus was advocating a realistic multiculturalism. We all trust and like what we have inherited, what we know to be right for us. And it is folly or even insanity to despise the customs of others just because they are strange. Rather, we should be curious and want to learn.
Of course, not all that Herodotus reported about Egypt was true (some scholars maintain that virtually none of it was), but throughout antiquity Egypt remained hard for the Greeks to escape, and their dominant image of it was that of an ancient culture, powerful not in armed force, but in its secret and venerable insights into supernatural reality. Greek mercenaries in Persian service, who left graffiti on the great statue of Ramses II, did not call themselves Hellenes, but alloglossoi, speakers of a foreign tongue, because that is how the Egyptians defined them. They had taken over the natives' description of themselves.
Herodotus launched another and perhaps even more influential image into the great current of Western cultural understandings, and that was the polarity, already mentioned, of East and West, barbarian and Greek, despotism and liberty. Herodotus respected the Persians, "of all folk known to me the most wont to honor valiant warriors," and fully capable of understanding the relative merits of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.(19) Cyrus, the first great king, preferred ruling a few men in a poor land to being the master of many slaves, contrary to his descendant Xerxes. In Herodotus's account, it was the despotic hubris of Xerxes that led him to overreach himself, thinking that his empire was so rich and powerful that "neither the Greeks nor any other dwellers in the West can withstand me."(20)
The Persian Wars defined the dichotomy of barbarian and Greek. Barbarians were weak-willed, emotional, credulous, effeminate substance abusers subject to despotism - people like Cambyses, who knew no barrier between desire and act, or like Xerxes, who fell victim to unrealistic ambition. Softened by opulence and inured to slavery, the Persian was incapable of liberty and had forgotten the strict virtue of his ancestors. Faced with the seemingly miraculous victory of a few Greeks over the Persian war machine, Herodotus turned his sights away from the alien lands of Egypt, Scythia, and Persia and asked, What did the Greeks have in common, since they were often at war with each other and many of them joined the Persian invasion? The answer, as the Athenian envoys told the Spartans who were afraid that Athens might go over to the enemy, was that they had common ancestors, speech, and customs, shared the same gods, and worshipped them in the same way.
For the Greeks of the archaic and classical eras - from Homer to Alexander - encounters with the other were encounters with the marvelous or the dangerous. They took place in the framework of an evolving anthropology of curiosity and difference, accompanied and complemented from Herodotus on by an overarching dichotomy of Greek versus barbarian. Plato, coming at the end of this first period and on the threshold of the Hellenistic age, admired both Persian and Egyptian wisdom, and attributed the invention of writing to Egypt in his late dialogue Timaeus, which became a favorite of mystics and esoteric philosophers in late antiquity, Islam, and the Renaissance. In that work, Plato told a story about the Athenian poet and statesman Solon's visit to Egypt, an event which would have taken place some two and a half centuries before the dialogue was written. In the dialogue, Plato had an Egyptian priest say to his visitor: "O Solon Solon, you Greeks are always children, and there is no Greek who is an old man. . . . You are all young in your souls, and you have in them no old belief handed down by ancient tradition nor any knowledge that is hoary with age."(21) Bernal took this story to be true, which it almost certainly was not. The Egyptian priest was speaking for Plato, and by Plato's time the notion of ancient Egyptian wisdom was firmly established. Plato's multiculturalism consisted in setting up Egyptian wisdom as older and better than the Greek irreverence, inventiveness, and curiosity exemplified by Xenophanes and Herodotus.
From Alexander through late Hellenism, multicultural encounters were for Greeks and other Mediterraneans also matters of power and conflict: who was to rule, and whose rules were to count. Plato had already anticipated this question in the most important of his late dialogues, the Laws. In this work, three sages meet on the site of a proposed new settlement to determine its constitution and customs. The situation was familiar to Greeks, who had founded new towns all around the Mediterranean. The constitutional and social debate in the Laws was therefore not a utopian one, as was Plato's Republic, but a pragmatic inquiry as to "what laws should apply in a real existing city so that it will flourish?"
In the Timaeus, Plato said that Egyptian age and wisdom were superior to Greek youth and brashness, apparently repudiating the tradition of Xenophanes, Herodotus, and other Greek proto-anthropologists. Nevertheless, the Laws continued that tradition in another way, namely, by saying that no existing set of rules was right for the new city, but that those rules could and should be arrived at through reasoned debate, based on experience and on the kind of anthropological insight acquired as a result of Xenophanes' enlightened criticism of inherited religion and the curiosity of Herodotus. In this respect, the Laws anticipated the cosmopolitan multiculturalism that was one face of the Hellenistic age.
The Hellenistic era was the thousand-year result of the conquests of Alexander in 334-323 B.C. Its dominant feature was that Greek artistic styles, customs, and language spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean and far into the hinterlands of Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and even Afghanistan. Eastern religions, cults, and customs gradually incorporated Greek dress, until by the early centuries of the Christian era we find, for example, inscriptions to pre-Islamic Arab divinities formulated in Greek according to the cosmopolitan Hellenistic language of worship. Such an interpretation of Hellenism was not always prevalent. Until the later twentieth century, leading scholars of the Hellenistic period tended to see its main theme as one of culture clash between a (somewhat decadent) Greek civilization and the cults and customs of the perennial "East." Newer interpretations of the Hellenistic era, however, tend to see it as a remarkable and fruitful blend in which the Eastern influences were Hellenized as a condition of their efficacy and creativity in the new geopolitical and multicultural context of the post-Alexandrian epoch.
It is important to warn once again against interpreting ancient Mediterranean civilization in the terms of contemporary multiculturalist ideology. If Hellenism was multicultural, it was so on its own terms. Having noted that the Greeks developed and deployed a remarkable and relaxed cultural relativism, we must also note that Hellenistic interest and involvement in non-Hellenic cultures and customs was not fully comparable to the methods of modern anthropology. In the Hellenistic age, as the historian Arnaldo Momigliano pointed out, the Greeks confronted four other civilizations: the Roman, the Celtic, the Judaic, and the Persian. The Greeks had known the Persians for a long time. The interest in Persia changed from Herodotus's study of its power and political organization to later writers' examination of its ancient Oriental wisdom. Momigliano maintained that this later interest in Persian wisdom was merely one result among many of the revulsion from political interests in Greece. Political debate no longer had a point in Greece after the Macedonian and Roman conquests. Greek philosophers were therefore tempted to look to "alien wisdom" for inspiration; their interest, Momigliano held, had little to do with the real religion of the Persians and more with how an imagined Persian wisdom could assuage the thirst for religious illumination and esoteric insights.(22)
The Romans appeared on the horizons of Greek ethnography and politics in the third century B.C., and it was via the Romans that the Greeks came to know of the Celts, the inhabitants of central and western Europe at the time. It was also the Romans who catalyzed Greek knowledge of the Jews, which might seem odd since Palestine was part of Alexander's empire long before the Romans arrived in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet this apparent lack of early Greek interest in the Jews points to the central weakness of Hellenism as a multicultural civilization: "It had all the instruments for knowing other civilizations - except command of languages. It had all the marks of a conquering and ruling upper class - except faith in its own wisdom."(23) If a cultural elite does not have confidence in itself, it cannot be truly multicultural, for it will not have the energy or courage to investigate others for what they are. It will seek in others only what will assuage its own weaknesses.
The Greeks never learned foreign languages, the only great exception being the translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint, which was commissioned by Alexandrian Jews to allow them to participate in Hellenistic culture in the only acceptable way, that is, in Greek.(24) The cultural conversation among Greeks, Romans, and Jews was started by Romans and Jews, not Greeks.
Hellenistic multiculturalism thus had two aspects. One was the day-to-day Hellenization of language and, to a large degree, of customs across the eastern Mediterranean. This was an unplanned process, which eventually produced a rich, syncretic civilization. The other was the conscious reflection on history, fate, and religious belief of historians, philosophers, poets, and mystics. This aspect suffered from an invincible parochialism. It was almost as though the intellectual exuberance of Xenophanes and Herodotus had lost contact with social reality. The willingness to speculate was still there, but had become an end in itself. The Hellenistic thinkers did not move from Xenophanes' reflections on horses and gods to investigating the actual beliefs and customs of the many new peoples with whom the Greek world was now in contact. Instead, their speculations served increasingly to feed their own hunger for reassurance and salvation.
Greek thinkers in the Hellenistic age had a choice. Those with interests mainly in history and politics, such as Polybius or Diodorus of Sicily, chose to reflect on how Greek elites could best adapt to the power of Rome. Those with interests mainly in religion looked to an imaginary Persia and an imaginary Egypt. The irony of this aspect of Hellenistic multiculturalism was that the philosophers and mystics conceived of their interest in Egyptian and other "alien wisdom" as genuinely multicultural. They sincerely believed that they were going beyond the boundaries of their culture, not realizing that in many cases what they found was merely the mirror image of their own psychological and religious needs.
In the Hellenistic age, the Romans were the better multiculturalists. Nor is that surprising. Greek civilization was culturally dominant but politically weak, and members of a dominant but demoralized culture do not initiate multicultural encounters which imply their taking the other seriously rather than taking from him what they themselves need. Here was a difference from the age of Xenophanes and Herodotus, when the Greeks had not yet acquired that sense of cultural superiority coupled with self-doubt. By the time they became seriously committed to the eastern Mediterranean, the Romans knew that they were militarily superior, but culturally inferior. In 196 B.C., the Roman commander Flamininus addressed the Greeks assembled at the Olympic games. He was leading a force sent to subdue the Achaean League of Greek cities, and the outcome of his campaign was to drive yet another nail into the coffin of Greek independence. Nevertheless, he felt obliged to defend Roman policy to its victims. "We are here to protect you," he said in effect, "because you have a superior culture, but we have the force to maintain security." If the Romans did not establish control, the Greeks might think they had preserved their independence, but in fact they would simply have laid themselves open to internecine war and invasion from the east. The long-term result was captured by the poet Horace a century and a half later, when he said that "defeated Greece defeated her savage conqueror and introduced civilization to rustic Latium."
A contemporary of Horace, the ethnographer Strabo, developed the notions of Herodotus, Hippocrates, and Aristotle on how climate shaped cultural variation and how the Greek climate in particular produced the moderate and modest character of the Greeks. Strabo extended the rewards of a challenging and beneficial climate to Romans and indeed to all of Europe, which was, he said, both varied in form and admirably adapted by nature for the development of excellence in men and governments.(25)
The Romans both admired the Greeks and despised them for having fallen from military glory in the days of the Persian Wars to enfeebled subservience to Rome. One of the important subsidiary threads of cultural change through the following centuries which contradicted Strabo's philhellenism was that some Romans transferred to Greece what had earlier been the Greek image of the decadent and dangerous East. By the early fourth century A.D., this westward shift of the line dividing many and honest West from servile and timorous East came to encompass another multicultural dimension: the vigorous West now included not only Romans, but immigrants and neighbors beyond the frontier.(26)
Before the Greeks became weak Orientals in Roman imagination, they were known as gourmets and libertines. The city of Corinth, for instance, had a reputation for luxury and debauchery. "It is not given to every man to visit Corinth," the Romans said with a frisson of shock and excitement. Throughout the second and first centuries B.C., when Roman power was rapidly growing, conservative Roman elites fought what they considered a doomed, but obligatory, rearguard action against Eastern corruptions, which now came not from Persia or Egypt, but Greece itself.
This reaction went down to apparent defeat when Julius Caesar introduced an oriental imperialism to Rome itself. The conservatives killed him, but were quickly defeated by Octavian, who, styling himself Augustus, took supreme power. But he did so by draping his autocracy in traditionalist garb and resurrecting the "customs of our ancestors." The first two centuries after Augustus were an era of a paradoxical multiculturalism, in which Greek philosophy and a growing variety of Eastern mysticisms and esoteric teachings, all of them in Hellenized form, swept westwards.
Using the label "late Hellenism" to describe the era from the first through the sixth centuries A.D. privileges the Greek-speaking regions of the empire. It is useful to keep this essay in reasonable bounds, but is not fair to the Latin-speaking Westerners, who performed heroic multicultural tasks of their own in bringing Roman civilization to the nations and tribes of central and western Europe, especially after many of those tribes invaded and settled in the empire starting at the end of the fourth century. Few multiculturalists today would describe the conversion of the Germanic tribes to Christianity as a multicultural exercise, since it implied a transformation of native culture. Yet, under a wider definition of multiculturalism that better reflects ancient realities, the process of Christianization in the West as well as the East was profoundly and unavoidably multicultural. The message preached by Augustine of Canterbury to the Anglo-Saxons in the early seventh century was both the same and radically different from that preached by the apostle Paul to the Corinthians over five hundred years earlier.
The most important development, from a multicultural perspective, in the early phases of late Hellenism was the spread of the philosophy known as Stoicism. In fact, next to the unabashed relativism and early anthropological speculation of the late archaic era of Xenophanes around 600 B.C., the high Stoicism of Plutarch, Aristides, and Marcus Aurelius in the second century A.D. marks the second moment of genuine multiculturalism in antiquity.
Stoics held that "all men are by nature equal" and that the wise man, who understood the universe, was a kosmou polites, or "cosmopolitan." The wise man, who lived according to Stoic precepts, did not think of himself as a citizen of any particular country, for unseemly attachment to a place, city, or family was just another of the irrational ties that could produce inappropriate desires and emotions. The Stoic must seek the good of all creatures equally.
The world, or universe - both are translations of the Greek kosmos - must be accepted with gratitude as offering to the wise man the opportunity for a life of modesty, self-control, and duty. "Accept all that comes," wrote the emperor Marcus, "for it leads to the health of the universe." This Stoic belief that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds was not silly optimism, but a necessary realism. Without such realism, you risked high expectations, consequent disappointment, and unseemly rage and desire. The good life was one in which the emotions were controlled, bodily gestures and acts measured and slow, and the state of the mind and soul one of resigned balance.
Stoics rejected ethnic and political boundaries and considered no city, nation, or empire better than any other. Stoics conceived of themselves as unselfish and were devoted to the common good because the common good was the precondition of individual flourishing. "What does not benefit the hive does not benefit the bee." Ultimately, however, all human action was vain, for human prejudices could not be changed, and even emperors died and were forgotten.
In practice, Stoicism contributed less to true multicultural exchange and understanding than to a sentimental image of the world as the cosmopolis of all right-thinking people. Stoics rejected existing ethnic and political boundaries, but they divided mankind into those who belonged to a community of reason and were therefore citizens of the world, and those who lived as slaves to undisciplined feelings. Stoicism resembled many later movements of intellectuals who were convinced that the passions driving common folk were illegitimate and a barrier to universal harmony. If only those passions could be eradicated and all people would come to share the Stoics' high enlightenment, then a world community run by the great and the good would eventuate.
The Stoic philosophy was also a multiculturalist moment in that it posited a cosmopolitan standard and looked toward a world community of peace and order. Unconsciously, its elitism and moralizing bear a family resemblance to the ideology of contemporary multiculturalism, which often has less to do with multicultural understanding than with promoting a highly specific message about the errors of American society and what to do about them.
This parallel can be drawn further. Contemporary multiculturalism claims to be universalist, but in fact promotes a particular agenda drawn from late-twentieth-century American elite opinion. Similarly, the Stoic thinker Aelius Aristides in the mid-second century clothed his cosmopolitanism in a paean to the Roman Empire, prophesying that the cosmopolitan culture to come would and should be Rome writ large: "in the end, all the world will be Rome," and all the world would live according to Stoic precepts, for they were the best.
The point here is not to ridicule Stoicism, but to show what appears to be a recurrent temptation of elite intellectuals in powerful societies. Marcus Aurelius, whose book of reflections became the most popular ancient book among American undergraduates in the 1990s, was a genuinely dutiful and self-sacrificing statesman, administrator, and commander. What never seems to have occurred either to him or to any other Stoic thinker whose works survive is the irony of rejecting ethnic and cultural boundaries in favor of a much more ruthless boundary between the right-minded and the ignorant, passionate, and unenlightened. The result was not a true philosophy of coexistence, but rather one of priggish self-righteousness.
Also, as the example of Aristides shows, Stoicism shared the tendency that Momigliano noted in Hellenistic philosophy of laying claim to curiosity about the world but then persistently interpreting the world in terms of its own hopes, values, and fears. For example, the sage and wonder-worker Apollonius of Tyana, who, like Pythagoras, was supposed to have visited all the known world from the Atlantic Ocean to India, encapsulated his experiences by saying that "to the sage, everything is Greece." In another episode of Apollonius's life as recounted by the Stoic writer Philostratus, the "possessions" which he declared to the customs inspector at the frontier of the Parthian Empire included "wisdom, justice, virtue, self-control, courage, and askesis [spiritual exercises to tame the will and the emotions]." He was bringing Greek wisdom to the ends of the earth, rather than going forth to find the strange and learn from it. Pythagoras wanted to study with the Egyptian priests. Apollonius went to Egypt to instruct the Egyptians. But if Greece was everything and everywhere, it was also nothing in particular.
Thus, one of the strands of culture in later Hellenism led to an insipid dead end, in which cultural particularity disappeared into the Stoic world-city, which was itself but a pale projection of certain elite values. There were other strands, some of them recognizably descended from the bold common sense of Xenophanes. Bardaisan, for example, a third-century Christian and the court philosopher at the Syrian town of Edessa, "had set out to disprove the power of the stars and the doctrines of astrology by arguing from the diversity of national customs, which compel people to behave in ways that could not possibly be predicted from their stars."(27) Here, in a Hellenized Syrian, the spirit of Herodotus lived on. Bardaisan wrote The Book of the Laws of Countries, arguing that custom was indeed, as Pindar had said, the king of all things. Because of the weight of Hellenistic speculation, which by the third century had become heavily infused with fatalism, Bardaisan's line of argument was the opposite of Xenophanes'. The archaic Greek thinker noted that customs and beliefs differed and concluded that there were no supernatural sources of universal law, for if there were, customs would be observably similar. Bardaisan started from the common assumption of his time that supernatural forces, in this case the stars, determined human culture. Since culture in fact varied, those supernatural forces could not be as powerful as many people imagined. Bardaisan reverted to the classic Aristotelian idea that what shaped culture was nature or the environment, chance, and human decision and that, within those constraints, human decision was free.(28)
Bardaisan was not unique. His town of Edessa, which became part of the Roman Empire in his time and remained so until 364, was in the orbit of Beirut, the center of Roman law and law-making in the field of ancient international law, the "law of peoples." That Roman legal tradition may warrant a better claim to multiculturalism than Stoicism, for it was concerned not with personal improvement according to elite values, but with the customs and values that were common to various peoples, and could therefore form a common basis for orderly political relations. A fourth-century ethnographic work described Beirut as "the city that upholds all the legal learning of the Romans."(29)
Stoicism was a minority phenomenon. The same was long true of another doctrine that emerged from eastern Hellenism, namely, Christianity. This religion had its own multicultural origins in that it combined Jewish and Greek beliefs, including Stoicism. One of the earliest challenges for Christian theology was to prove that the new religion was in fact venerable and therefore worthy of being taken seriously. One answer was to maintain that Greek wisdom itself was derivative since it had been borrowed from the Jews. As Numenius of Apamea asked in the second century, what was Plato but an Attic Moses? Momigliano commented that "such a question underlined the most obvious historical consequence of the subordination of Greek thought to Oriental wisdom, that is, the change from the conquest of truth through reason to the acquisition of truth through revelation."(30)
This crucial shift in late Hellenism determined its cultural development, not just in regard to Christianity, but to other, more esoteric beliefs and cults. All of them shared the multicultural facade of much Hellenistic thought in that they claimed to be recoveries of the ancient wisdom of strange peoples, and all shared the Hellenistic tendency to find in the alien what their adherents desired, rather than what was truly different.
The philosopher and mystic Iamblichus, the head of the Neoplatonic school in Egypt, wrote ten books, the Egyptian Mysteries, arguing that the Egyptians were closer to the nature of things and thus to God. Their unchanging customs were superior to those of the Greeks, which were unreliable because they were constantly changing. As a response, Iamblichus promoted the so-called Hermetic writings, which offered initiation into esoteric and secret wisdom about the universe, fate, and immortality. The writings claimed to be derived from the Egyptian god Thoth, named Hermes in Greek, whose teaching was far older than that of Plato or any other Greek. In fact, they were typical products of late Hellenistic culture, written in Greek and for Greek speakers who longed to believe that they were in touch with ancient mysteries. Hermetism thus forms an appropriate coda to our treatment of ancient Mediterranean multiculturalism.(31) The Hermetic writings enjoyed considerable success in non-learned quarters during the later centuries of Hellenism and continued to be copied and read in the eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire, which endured until 1453. At that time they were brought to Western Europe where they astonished Renaissance thinkers who were engaged in their own search for the wisdom of the ages beyond orthodox Christianity. In 1614, the Dutch Protestant scholar Isaac Casaubon demolished the myth of their authenticity in a famous article proving that they could not be products of genuine Egyptian wisdom and were not older than the Bible or Plato. Even so, the Hermetic writings continue to influence artists, poets, and mystics in the West.
The Rise of a Persecuting Society?
The martyr Perpetua was shown a vision of the forces of evil in the shape of a black gladiator. While Christian theology and popular belief inherited from both Judaism and ancient paganism an idea of blackness as the color of sin and death, Christian teachers also took pains to subvert that popular imagery in order to emphasize human equality. Origen, a contemporary of Perpetua who later died after torture suffered during the Decian persecution of 249-251, wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs, the great love poem of the Old Testament in which the young bride says of herself, "I am black, but comely, o ye daughters of Jerusalem."(32) In traditional Christian exegesis, the bride of the Song of Songs is the church or, in some versions, the human soul, who eagerly awaits the incarnate bridegroom, who is Christ. Origen asked "in what way she is black and in what way fair without whiteness. She has repented of her sins; conversion has bestowed beauty upon her and she is sung as 'beautiful.' If you repent, your soul will be 'black' because of your former sins, but because of your penitence your soul will have something of what I may call an Ethiopian beauty."(33) Origen was a Christian, but as an educated ancient multiculturalist he shared an admiration for African beauty.
A hundred years after Perpetua was devoured by wild animals in the arena at Carthage, her faith triumphed in the Roman Empire. A hundred years after that, the emperors decided that Christianity must be the only legally permitted religion of the empire, and a long history of Western political affiliation with the Christian Church began. Some scholars, observing this development from within the modern notions of toleration and post-Enlightenment suspicion of clerical orthodoxy, have referred to the rise of the Christian empire, and after that to the rise of a Christian society in Europe, as the formation of "a persecuting society."
One area where scholars once perceived a distinct rise in intolerance was sexuality. A relaxed and bisexual pagan libertinism was supposed to have been quashed by repressed, tight-lipped puritans. This prurient Hollywood image of a lusty polytheism is no longer tenable. Christians certainly suspected and often feared sexuality. So did many others in the ancient world, none more than the Romans, whose "harsh distrust of sensual delight and a fear that the body's pleasures might weaken the resolve of the public man" survived in the sexual ethics of the Christian West.(34) So, in particular, did Stoicism, which along with Neoplatonism strongly influenced early Christian teaching. Hellenistic and Roman civilization was not, despite the lurid stories of Tacitus or Petronius, awash in carefree, polymorphous perversity. The askesis of an Apollonius of Tyana was more typical of elite values.
Starting in the 1960s, scholarship has modified this image so far as the late Roman period is concerned. The imperial edicts against pagan worship were issued in a society in which official and even popular Christianity coexisted with a range of attitudes and behaviors. For example:
In 630, three hundred prostitutes demonstrated against the Byzantine governor of Syracuse as he relaxed in the public baths. . . . The governor . . . pacified the protestors by appointing the Catholic bishop of Syracuse as imperial inspector of brothels. Good citizens of the Roman Empire in its last days, governor and bishop took for granted that their first duty was to preserve law and order in the city. In Syracuse, as elsewhere, the codes of behavior associated with the Catholic Church still had to coexist with a texture of urban life that had come of age long before Christianity.(35)
The post-Enlightenment, liberal interpretation of the Christianization of Western Europe as the "formation of a persecuting society" is simplistic and parochial. In a mirror image of earlier, pious historiography which portrayed early Christianity in the Roman Empire as constantly persecuted and harassed by a debauched and immoral pagan society, it uses episodes of anti-pagan oppression in the later empire to paint Christian rulers and priests as uniformly and obsessively intolerant. It is more informative to regard Christianization as a long-lasting and many-layered clash of civilizations, one that resulted in a Christian civilization of the West that ultimately produced a revival of the spirit of Xenophanes, Herodotus, and even Stoicism.
Undeniably, the Christian emperors wished to extirpate paganism and so proved themselves bad multiculturalists. But their actions sometimes had multicultural effects. In 529, the emperor Justinian closed the Academy in Athens founded by Plato nine hundred years earlier, an act condemned by all liberal historians as cultural vandalism. The professors emigrated to the Persian Empire, which they expected to be a land of serene wisdom, honesty, and virtue, in accordance with Herodotus's account. "They would have sung a different tune very quickly, when confronted by a harsher, more hierarchical, and less hellenized society than the one they expected to find," a modern historian wrote.(36) So what did they do? They returned to Roman territory and refounded a Neoplatonist school in the border town of Harran, under the joint guarantee of the Roman emperor and the Persian shah of shahs. The pagan academy of Harran survived, unbelievably, until the eleventh century, when it was closed for good, not by Christians, but by the puritanical Seljuk Turks.
The multicultural coexistence of Mediterranean natives with Germanic, Slavic, Persian, and Arab invaders, conquerors, and settlers takes the chronicle of multicultural relations beyond the limits of the ancient world. The rival monotheisms of Islam, Christian Byzantium, and the Christian West produced persecutions and intolerance, but also, and more interestingly, long periods of coexistence and consolidation in which the leading forces of the rival faiths sought less to establish imperial control than to create what historian Garth Fowden called diverse "commonwealths." His own work has focused on multicultural coexistence in the "Mountain Arc" stretching from the Caucasus through Mesopotamia and Iran to the periphery of the great Arabian desert. A similar "commonwealth" has long been seen by historians in the emerging civilization of medieval Western Europe, the civilization that ultimately gave rise to the state system, democracy, economic development, and political liberalism of the modern West.
Multiculturalism in antiquity was, in important ways, the polar opposite of today's pinched and angry ideology. In trying to create a multicultural history of the ancient world, Martin Bernal succeeded merely in displaying modern prejudices. Greeks and Romans were, for all their diversity, members of traditional societies. More remarkable were the occasional moments when a few of them reached for and grasped the exhilarating idea that norms, values, and culture need not be treated as god-given, but could be examined, criticized, and understood by human reason. The multicultural moments of antiquity are these: the beginnings of anthropology in the archaic era, symbolized by Xenophanes, followed within a century and a half by the Athenian enlightenment and in particular by Herodotus; and, in later Hellenism, the Roman international law of the Beirut school and the doctrines of Stoicism. Roman international law resurfaced in the Middle Ages as the foundation for the modern law of nations and all later pragmatic attempts to limit war by neutralizing clashes of civilization. Stoicism, on the other hand, was a precious multiculturalism of closeted academics and offered no viable path for a culture that wanted to change and survive.
1 Martin Bernal, Black Anthena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. to date (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1987-), vol. 1, p. 73. A comprehensive selection of generally devastating criticisms of Bernal's theories and results - described as "a whirling confusion of half-digested reading, bold linguistic supposition, and preconceived dogma" - is Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Quote on p. 277, from Emily Vermeule, "The World Turned Upside Down."
2 Edith Hall, "When Is a Myth Not a Myth? Bernal's 'Ancient Model,'" Black Athena Revisited, p. 342.
3 Ibid., p. 178.
4 Bernal, Black Athena, vol. 1, p. 100.
5 As the classicist Richard Jenkyns pointed out, this idee fixe of Bernal's, that black Americans need a high culture in their racial pedigree, is patronizing and, ironically, Eurocentric. Richard Jenkyns, "Bernal and the Nineteenth Century," Black Athena Revisited, p. 420.
6 For example, the third edition of the standard reference work, the Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), contains an entry on "orientalism" in which Said is lavishly praised and Bernal lauded as "interesting, though in several respects maverick."
7 Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), showed how to describe the origins of the Greek distinction of Hellene and barbarian without treating the Greeks as proto-racists.
8 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 7, for the estimate of Christian numbers in 200 A.D.
9 Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, 10.5-6 in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. H. Musurillo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), my translation. The colloquial tone is Perpetua's.
10 Antony Spawforth in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. "race." According to the Hellenistic ethnographer Agatharcides, only children would be upset by the dark color of Ethiopians (i.e. black Africans). For that and other examples, see Frank Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
11 L. Cracco Ruggini, "Il Negro Buono e il Negro Malvagio nel Mondo Classico" (The Good Negro and the Evil Negro in the Classical World), in Conoscenze Etniche e Rapporti di Convivenza nell'Antichita, Contributi dell'Istituto di Storia Antica, No. 6 (Milan: Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 1979).
12 W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963).
13 Quoted in Francois Hattog, La Memoire d'Ulysse (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
14 Quoted in Frank Snowden, Jr., "Bernal's 'Blacks' and the Afrocentrists," Black Athena Revisited, p. 127.
15 Quoted in Hartog, Memoire d'Ulysse, p. 13.
16 Fragments 169, 171-2 in Geoffrey S. Kirk and John E. Raven, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957).
17 Fragment 169a, line 1, in The Loeb Classical Library Edition of Pindar, ed. and trans. William H. Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), vol. 2, p. 384.
18 Herodotus, Histories 3.38, my translation.
19 Ibid., 7.238.
20 Ibid., 5.111.
21 Plato, Timaeus, 22b, quoted and translated by Jenkyns, "Bernal and the Nineteenth Century," p. 415.
22 Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 2-6, 147-48.
23 Ibid., p. 149.
24 It was known as the Septuagint (Seventy) because, according to legend, seventy sages translated the text independently, and when the translations were compared, all, thanks to divine guidance, were identical.
25 Strabo, Geography, 2.5.26.
26 For example, in the Panegyric to Constantine of 313, as reported by L. Cracco Ruggini, "Culture in Dialogo: La Preistoria dell'Idea di Europa" (Cultures in Dialogue: The Prehistory of the Idea of Europe), in Storia di Roma, ed. Aldo Schiavone (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 358.
27 Quoted in Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 63.
28 See Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 108-110. Bardaisan was, for example, well acquainted with Buddhism, which was prevalent in the Kushan Empire of eastern Iran and northern India.
29 The Expositio totius mundi, quoted in Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, p. 64.
30 Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, p. 147.
31 The social and cultural context of the Hermetic writings was thrillingly uncovered in Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind, 2nd ed. with new preface (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1993), a work rich in insights on ancient multiculturalism.
32 Song of Songs 1:5, King James Version.
33 Quoted in Frank Snowden, Jr., "Bernal's 'Blacks' and the Afrocentrists," p. 126.
34 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 426.
35 Ibid., p. 431.
36 Pierre Chuvin, Chronicle of the Last Pagans, trans. B. A. Archer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 138.
David Gress is Professor of Classics, Aarhus University, Denmark, and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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