17/10/08- Greeks & the Barbarians

GREEKS & BARBARIANS

Cultural Exchange in the Ancient World:

Definition:
Greeks, the peoples that were sharing a common Greek culture, religion and language. As barbarians were defined by the Greeks all the others.

Construction of the identity and meeting with the “other”.

A period of transition:
After the Bronze Age, between the 11th and the 9th centuries B.C., the image of the Eastern Mediterranean world changes dramatically. Great Mycenaean palaces and cities were destroyed and abandoned. In a comparable way the Hittite empire disintegrates progressively after 1180 into smaller “Neo-Hittite” cities-states, big cities are destroyed. This time of changes, in the Greek history has been called “the Dark Ages” by earlier scholarship, considered as a transition to the Archaic and Classical periods. It is believed that the Trojan War, and the destruction of Troy, narrated in Homer’s (ca. 9th-8th c. B.C.) Illiad and Odyssey, are sort of myth-historical records of the events that took place during the Dark Ages around the Aegean. The returning journey of many Greek kings and heroes, after Troy, and their adventures when they passed by or ended up to a foreign land, are regarded as reflecting the beginning of the colonization of the Mediterranean.
In the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. the phenomenon of the Greek colonization reached its peak. Meeting, technical and artistic exchanges, influences, appropriations of people, methods and patterns. Oriental influences in Greek religion and art (pottery and sculpture).

What does the notion of barbarian say about both barbarians and Greeks?

Polarization, cultural identity and otherness:
After the Greco-Persian Wars, in the first half of the 5th century B.C., the word barbarian is often used expressly to mean Persian, with a clear pejorative connotation. Greeks see themselves as superior militarily, politically, and culturally.

However there were important reactions against this polarization:
Herodotus, in the well-known opening sentence of his account of that Persian war, gives the following statements as his reason for writing: “To the end that (...) the works, great and marvellous, which have been produced some by Hellenes and some by Barbarians, may not lose their renown; and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another.” This clearly implies equality: both Hellenes (Greeks) and barbarians are capable of producing "great and marvellous works" and both are worth of being remembered.

Plato also rejected the Greek–barbarian dichotomy as an obvious logical absurdity:
Dividing the world into Greeks and non-Greeks told one nothing about the second group. In Aeschylus’ tragedy ‘Persians’, composed short time after the Greek-Persian war, one can see a strikingly sympathetic view to the troubles of the defeated Persians. The lament of the Persian women, included in the play, may be seen as a remarkable deconstruction of this polarization.
Nevertheless one has to keep in mind that these critical positions did not really reflect the common Greek attitude towards foreign civilizations and cultures. The ancient Greeks were occasionally intrigued by the customs and religions of the many different peoples with whom they came into contact, but more often they were disdainful or dismissive, tending to regard non-Greeks as at best inferior, and at worst candidates for conquest and enslavement. Facing up to this less attractive aspect of the classical tradition is essential to seeing both what the ancient world was really like and the full nature of its legacy in modern times.

References:
- Martin Bernal, Black Athena: the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, London 1991 (1st ed.:1987).
- Greeks and Barbarians, ed. by Thomas Harrison, New York 2002.