[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This short book collects papers in Spanish, English, Portuguese and Italian from a multidisciplinary conference held at the University of Valencia (Spain, 2022) on the topic of the construction of identity and otherness in the ancient Mediterranean world. It deals not only with the contact between different cultures, but also with how otherness could appear within the context of the city itself. The book explores two main lines: the different perceptions of the diversity of humankind; and the construction of political identities. As the introduction by Laia Pérez Hurtado and César Sierra Martín explains, the volume takes as its starting point the Hippocratic climatic theory that purports to account for observable differences between European and Asian peoples. Directly echoed by Aristotle, this Hippocratic basis, mentioned in the original title of the conference, is the reason why four of the nine contributions focus directly on medical issues. The volume also rests on Herodotus’s famous observation that each people, if given the opportunity to choose the most perfect customs, would elect those it already has, an observation that identifies the relativity of the customs but also their contribution to the articulation of identity and otherness.
The first paper, by Manuel Albaladejo Vivero, explores the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a work belonging to the periplographic genre that uses some topoi of geographic literature to describe the way of life of foreign people from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, with probably the first reference to China in Greek literature. María Ángeles Alonso-Alonso analyses the gradual reception and integration of Greek physicians in Roman society since the 3rd century BCE, when professional doctors did not still exist, and medicine was not an institutionalized knowledge by itself. This excellent paper is a clear illustration of how identity and otherness are not only embodied in values and customs but also imply some transfer and adaptation of knowledge and social status from one world to another. Focusing on the political topic of civil war or stasis and the issue of differences and identity within the very same city of classical Athens, Paulo Donoso Johnson claims that Critias’s political project consisted not only in defeating his enemies but mostly in annihilating them completely, even those who had been his friends at some time. Echoing the first paper of the volume, Leslie Lagos-Aburto analyses the perception of the barbarian in Arrian’s Anabasis. On more philosophical and anthropological grounds, Carolina Olivares Chávez focuses on how Xenophon’s and Aristotle’s definition of human nature goes hand in hand with the definition of otherness from their own experience and knowledge of foreign peoples.
The following three papers are on medical topics. As Joaquim Pinheiro explains, Galen and Plutarch draw close connections between philosophy and medicine, revealing specific markers of identity such as the relationship between patient and physician, or the understanding of medical tekhne. Susana Reboreda Morillo focuses on the conceptual and social identity of mothers in the Hippocratic Treatises and describes the different steps that make a woman into a mother, with the help of rich iconographic materials. Sierra Martín explores the classification of the patients according to several criteria in the Hippocratic Epidemics and their relation to the concept of philanthropia. The last paper, by Giuseppe Squillace, is dedicated to the study of an Egyptian profession in Athens of the 5th–4th century BCE, that of perfumer.
Although each paper is valuable in itself, opening up interesting avenues of research and providing useful, up-to-date bibliographies on specific topics, the thematic unity of the volume might sometimes appear hard to identify: the relationship between the political and the medical dimensions of the central theme could have been better articulated, and some of the papers do not clearly explain their relation to the topic of identity and otherness; these very concepts could also have been defined in more detail in the introduction and some papers.
The volume nonetheless provides an interesting insight into the many facets of the notions of identity and otherness in the Classical Mediterranean world.
Authors and titles
Laia Pérez Hurtado and César Sierra Martín, Introducción: identidad y diversidad en el mundo griego
Manuel Albaladejo Vivero, Alteridad en la literatura periplográfica griega: el caso del Periplo del mar Eritreo
María Ángeles Alonso-Alonso, Recepción e integración de los ἰατροὶ griegos en la República romana
Paulo Donoso Johnson, El ideario oligárquico-tanatocrático de Critias. La eliminación del adversario político para la salud de la pólis
Leslie Lagos-Aburto, Los bárbaros en la obra de Arriano de Nicomedia. La Ἀλεξάνδρου άνάϐασις
Carolina Olivares Chávez, Naturaleza humana y alteridad en Jenofonte y Aristóteles
Joaquim Pinheiro, O diálogo entre medicina e filosofia em Plutarco e Galeno: marcas identitárias
Susana Reboreda Morillo, Becoming Mothers. From the Maia to Hippocratic Treatises
César Sierra Martín, Philantrōpía: Amor al prójimo y alteridad en Epidemias del Corpus Hippocraticum
Giuseppe Squillace, Il “mestiere degli stranieri”. Profumieri egiziani ad Atene tra V e IV secolo a. C.