Defining Ancient Greek Ethnicity

Abstract

As the first full-length modem study of ethnicity in the culture that gave us the word, Jonathan Hall’s book is an event in classical scholarship. Hall has brought to the task a profound knowledge of the ancient Greek world: he is equally conversant with the literary and archaeological sources, which is rare among classical historians, and thoroughly informed, as well, about the technical specialty of Greek linguistics, which is indispensable to the analysis of the role of language in the construction of ethnic identity. Hall is also up-to-date on modem approaches to ethnicity, and, in a fine introductory chapter, he reviews attitudes toward Greek ethnicity within Classics over the past couple of centuries—since the founding, that is, of the modern discipline of classical philology. Hall writes clearly, and has done what he can to make the argument accessible to non-specialists: he translates all Greek words and passages, provides thumbnail summaries of historical or geographical information, and summarizes the current state of the question in respect to the major topics he addresses. Nevertheless, the detailed investigation of obscure and complex Greek genealogies, involving multiple variants and unfamiliar names, or of the differences among the several dialects of ancient Greek and how they may have evolved, will be hard going for the reader who is not moderately conversant with the materials, or at least interested enough to peruse the book with dictionary and encyclopedia in hand. Accordingly, in this review I shall recapitulate the central themes of Hall’s book (without, of course, reproducing the meticulous documentation and careful argumentation that make the book so valuable) while simultaneously calling attention to those aspects of Hall's approach that seem to me to be problematic, or at all events debatable.