FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: THE STEREOTYPE OF DANGEROUS THESSALIAN HOSPITALITY IN THE LATER CLASSICAL PERIOD

Abstract

It is over seventy years since Francois Ollier published his important work on the “mirage spartiate,” in which he drew attention to the elements of idealisation in such works as Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans, and to the hazards of their use as evidence for the realities of life in ancient Sparta. Since then, of course, major studies have been undertaken into the conception of identity in Greek culture, shining particular light onto how the Greeks, and sub-groups of Greeks, perceived themselves and others. The methodological difficulties revealed by Ollier’s study have not, however, gone away. Historians of ancient communities which did not create substantial literary traditions in their own right, whose reconstruction rests on texts from outside the region in question, are all too familiar with the challenge of distinguishing the historical from the imaginary in those ancient narratives. The relationship between the two elements is of course fruitful as well as exasperating, and ancient history is as much about examining discourse as it is about establishing fact; none the less, the identification of elements of stereotype, generated from outside the region described, is an essential precondition of meaningful interpretation of the ancient literary record. Only when such trends in characterisation have been highlighted can their contribution to the big picture of real and perceived identity— that inextricable dichotomy which forms the “being” of every community—be understood. Thessaly is not Sparta. The ancient components of the Spartan mirage have survived because of (among other things) the lasting importance of Sparta as a symbol of Greek accomplishment, and Thessaly has not enjoyed anything like this reception; indeed, it is one of the more obscure regions of ancient Greece