Isocrates and the paideia of the Lucanians

Abstract

Building on studies emphasizing the discursive nature of ethnicity and culture in ancient Greece, the paper argues that culture and ethnicity were closely linked from the Classical period onward. In particular, the author aims to demonstrate that at the time when Isocrates conceptualized for the first time something that resembles the modern notion of “culture” (which he calls paideusis or paideia), the idea of an ethnic dimension of culture was already virulent. Moreover, the link between culture and race was present not only in Isocrates’ writings, but also in the world in which he lived. The analysis of so-called Lucanian tomb paintings from Paestum, southern Italy, suggests that Hellenicity as a concept embracing ethnical, cultural, and political values was spreading beyond Athens and Greece as early as the fourth century BC. In the same period, the figure of the Barbarian as culturally and ethnically inferior also began to spread in non-Greek communities – well before it was adopted by the Roman imperial ideology and iconography.