Many people might read the above headline and scoff at the ignorance of the question. Of course, the land of Archimedes, Aristotle, and Alexander was a country, you ignoramus! And yet, whether or not ancient Greece was in fact a country is one of the most Googled questions on Greece.
However, before you despair about humanity’s declining intellect, the question might be far more sophisticated than you think.
Experts like Kostas Vlassopoulos (2007) and Erich Gruen (2020) argue that ancient Greek identity (Hellenicity) was not rigid but quite ambiguous.
Ancient Greece was not a “country” or a “nation” in the way we might think of the word, with its borders, flags, and standing army. Rather, ancient Greeks were comfortable with cultural ambiguity.
The history of national identity
A nation-state is a centralized political organization or state that governs a population within a specific territory with a defined shared identity. The idea of countries or nations is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of the world.
Empires throughout history were often multiethnic and multireligious. For example, the Ottomans governed their empire under the millet system, in which each ethnic group was governed according to its religion.
Nation-states were largely developed in the 17th and 19th centuries in response to the toppling of former monarchies. For example, the scattered Germanic-speaking states of the former Holy Roman Empire united under the Treaty of Münster. This document codified modern Germany’s borders and defined what it meant to be a German citizen.
It becomes patently clear, then, that defining hard distinctions between peoples is a comparatively new phenomenon in the span of human history.
The many shades of Greek-ness
In antiquity, a time long before monarchy-ending revolutions and nation theories, the ancient Greeks were content with ambiguity. Strong evidence suggests there were no clear criteria for what it meant to be Greek in antiquity.
Tribal identities
Homer’s Iliad is one of our earliest Greek sources (c. 8th century BC) and a cultural artifact that united the Greek world, and yet, Homer didn’t label the force that left the shores of Greece using a single name (Hellenes), but instead spoke of Achaeans, Danaans, and Argives (Greek tribes).
Dialectal diversity
Moreover, ancient Greece was not grouped under an official lingua franca either. Regional dialects such as Ionian, Aeolic, Dorian, and Attic were often mutually intelligible. However, no official tongue, in addition to the regional variety, existed in the same way that standard Italian acts as a lingua franca amongst the regional dialects of Italy.
Panhellenic connections and rivalries
The Panhellenic world had no cultural epicenter from where Greece defined its heartland. The Romans had their city-state (Rome), the Jews, Solomon’s Temple, but Greece had no unifying topos (place).
The many scattered polities of Hellenes around the Mediterranean traced their ancestors in myth, yet were politically, socially, and culturally diverse. There was no one archetype of Hellenicity, or Greekness.
Rather, wide varieties of Hellenicity existed, united by common myths. These differed depending on which area of Greece you were from as well as on common literary forms, such as poems, dramatic theatre, histories, and Panhellenic festivals at sanctuaries.
However, even at sanctuaries like Olympus and Delphi, which brought large swathes of Hellenic peoples together, the rivalry between Greeks was a common sight.
While the spoils of victories over non-Greeks were displayed at sanctuaries, the spoils of victories over fellow Greeks were just as visible.
Herodotus and Greek identity
Herodotus first mentions something resembling our modern perception of “ethnicity.” However, many experts conclude this example does more to illustrate how disunited the Greeks were than to prove that the ancients used the term as we do.
He writes that in an exchange between two paranoid allies at the onset of the Persian war, the Athenians responded to Sparta’s suspicions of betrayal by affirming mutual ties of “to Hellenikon,” or Greekness.
According to our source, this was based on common blood, customs, language, and religious practices. However, no legal document or manifesto codified Hellenicity. A close examination of the context suggests the Athenians attempted to reassure the Spartans of their allegiance.
Faced with an imminent Persian invasion (490–480 BC), Greek states formed stronger Hellenic ties and loosely defined their commonality. These cultural claims were aimed at quelling doubts of betrayal among Greek allies. However, such Spartan doubts may emphasize how concerned Greek states were about one another’s commitment to any sense of collective identity.
Not long after the Persian Wars, this allegiance towards Greekness was old news. Sparta allied with Persia against Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC).
Wait, Sparta?! The city that went down in popular memory as the pride of Greece? That’s them.
Lights, camera, barbarian!
Like notions of Greek ethnicity, being non-Greek or Barbarian was equally vague.
The term Barbaros is likewise nowhere to be found in the Iliad, apart from a passing comment that the Carians were barbarophonon (spoke a foreign tongue). The historian Thucydides confirms Homer never used the term.
Contrarily, the Homeric tradition conceptualized a familiar Trojan with a range of Greek attributes.
In the 5th century, playwrights such as Euripides broke away from this tradition and portrayed the Trojans with “barbaric” qualities.
The creation of “barbaros”
Euripides describes Troy as having barbarian laws or customs and Paris as draped in barbarian pomp. He also says Paris’s ship sailed to Greece with barbarian oars. So why the sudden breakaway?
The theater of 5th-century Greece was conceived in the context of the Persian wars. In a period of rivalry with an external empire, the Greeks took an analogous conflict in their history (the Trojan War) and associated it with the contemporaneous threat of Persia.
Suddenly, the Trojans became the precursors to the Persians and their current foe. Indeed, scholars argue that actors donned Persian garb when portraying Trojans to further substantiate the connection between the contemporaneous enemy and the Trojans on screen.
In ancient Greece, the concept of what was deemed “barbaros” was manufactured in this political upheaval. But even so, the term did not connote the allusion to savagery and sub-humanity the way it does today. Instead, “barbaros” stood as a label for the political enemy of a particular Greek people.
Despite this invention, Euripides did not seek to besmirch non-Greeks. As scholar Dué (2006) explores, the invention of Trojan “barbarity” could even be seen as a narrative ploy to emphasize the commonality of suffering amidst cultural differences. “Barbaros,” then, was not an exonym or a way to alienate non-Greek people, but it was a nebulous term invented by playwrights likely to tell a better story.
OK, barbarian
Adding to the complexity, barbaros was not exclusively used to describe non-Greeks either. Greeks often labeled other Greeks who posed a threat as barbarians. The term’s inclusion of Greeks undermines any argument that seeks to define “barbaros” as a term of racial or ethnic alienation. The following are some key examples.
Athenians, especially politicians, used “barbaros” prolifically to smear their rivals who were otherwise of accepted Greek origin. For instance, despite the support given by figures such as Herodotus and Isocrates for the Greek roots of the Macedonian dynasty, Demosthenes asks: “Is he (Phillip II) not our enemy? Are not our possessions in his hands? Is he not a barbarian?”
Yet, in Against Meidias, Demosthenes then calls Meidias, another Athenian statesman, a person who possesses “true, native barbarism and hatred of religion…” In another example, the comic Aristophanes imagines Socrates calling the Athenian Strepsiades an ignoramus and a barbarian.
Greeks of barbarian origin
Further illustrating the ambiguity of the Greek/barbarian paradigm, Greeks had no qualms in accepting that their customs were of barbarian origin. Herodotus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates believed Athenian laws, arts, and writing were sourced from Egypt.
Moreover, there was a plethora of Greek cities and peoples thought to have been unabashedly founded by non-Greeks. These include the Phoenician Cadmus (Thebes), the Lybian Danaus (Argos), and the Egyptian Pelops (Peloponnese).
The Greeks, then, were careless in using the “barbarian” descriptor. They even used the term to characterize accepted Greeks and Greek customs.
Ancient Greece and now
In essence, ancient Greece did not define its borders, people, or even culture as being purely original. Greeks and their neighbors saw themselves as distant relatives who stressed commonality, interchangeability, and compatibility rather than cultural hostility and exclusion.
Rather than basing an identity on rigid definitions, Greeks entertained an inexactness of “Greek and non-Greek.”
As Gruen concludes:
“…ancient societies generally shunned the sense of ethnicity as an undeviating marker of distinctiveness stemming from descent, and that they were, therefore, open to change, adaptation, intermingling, and incorporation” (Gruen 2020).
This attitude invites us to reflect on the historical development and evolution of our geopolitical views. Modernity’s obsession with nationality speaks more to the values of our time than to the ancient world. Why are we so concerned about these labels?
Furthermore, comparing our ideas with antiquity helps us understand our world and how it was formed. In what other ways of thinking do we differ from our ancient ancestors, and in what other ways else did their perception of the world contrast with our own?
