Identities in antiquity

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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

Identity is very much a theme of the moment. With ubiquity comes an inevitable backlash. Recently, for example, Brubaker and Cooper have dismissed identity as meaning everything and nothing. The editors of Identities in Antiquity acknowledge this explicitly (p.2).[1] Arguing that the complexity of the phenomenon undercuts any possibility of an overarching theory they prefer a type of enlightened eclecticism, according to which an accumulation of test cases (27 chapters, 558 pages) should provoke a dialogue between various experts which “will generate fresh insights that advance our knowledge of past lives and societies.” Measured by these standards, laid out in a succinct and helpful Introduction, the volume can be regarded as a success. Overall, this volume is a valuable contribution to the discourse around identity. Its strength lies in its coverage of a wide variety of times and places, resulting a tome of nearly 600 pages, covering large segments of the ancient Mediterranean world over a span of hundreds of years.

Inevitably, as is always the case with such compendious volumes, the laudable aim of including a wide variety of phenomena results in a certain unevenness. For example, most authors avoid generalizations and grand claims regarding identity, which is healthy, but results in a tendency to avoid tough analysis. Most chapters begin with an auto da fé, disavowing essentialism and admitting the fluidity of identity, but few grapple with the consequences of this. Only Anthony Kaldellis takes on the challenge and offers anything like a full-throated rejection of fluidity as an analytical tool: “Eventually it plunges into incoherence: identity is a strategic deployment of artificial and infinitely malleable façades, or a fleeting rhetorical construct, wherein an ethnic group can simultaneously exist and not exist.” (p. 488) Other chapters acknowledge the complexity of identity, but most are content to leave it at that, without aiming for a higher degree of analytical precision. In an essay, for example, on the identity of enslaved persons in Mesopotamia, J. Nicholas Reid observes that, “Identities entailing slavery are social constructs that are usually conferred upon those who are considered different or belonging to the other” and later that “Treating enslaved persons as commodities de-emphasized their humanity and agency.” Both claims are certainly correct but do not add a great deal to our understanding of the specifics of slavery in Mesopotamia.

Similarly, there is a noticeable hesitancy in a number of chapters to push deeper into the significance of identity. In the cases of Andreas Gavrielatos on onomastics, Thomas Harrison on Greek racism, and Christer Bruun on Roman slavery, each explores interesting aspects of identity but also avoids firm conclusions. In the first essay we read, “As both modern onomastic studies and the examination of onomastic data from antiquity show, the relationship between names and identity cannot be easily defined.” (p. 99) In the second “What matters is only that … we investigate the fabric rather than the fact of Greek racism.” (p. 303) In the third, “The peculium, the ‘pocket money’ that owners made available to Roman slaves, must have boosted the self-esteem of those with enough business acumen and luck to possibly even (sic) buy their own freedom…” (p. 386) These are modest claims and each somewhat unsatisafactory. The first claim is overly cautious, the second opaque, and the last dubious. Even chapters in the volume’s opening section on approaching ancient identities suffer from this meekness. Johannes Siapkas’ treatment of ethnicity, for example, is a thorough survey of the theoretical landscape but concludes with an anodyne generality: “Ancient ethnicity studies have become a diverse field during the last two decades, and it continues to further our understanding of the complexities of ethnicity and antiquity.” (p. 46) Related to this are the contributions that focus on key components of identity studies, such as fluidity, intersectionality, positionality and even complexity. Many of the chapters exploring these themes rightly emphasize indeterminacy as a component of identity viewed from our vantage point but do not meet the challenge of teasing out the implications of this. Yağmur Heffron and Nancy Highcock, for example, in an essay on the Assyrian merchants, note (correctly) that identity is “highly variable, fluid and situational” but content themselves with the conclusion that recognizing this “permits greater flexibility for utilizing the different types of sources.” This is a modest gain, as is the claim that “… the lifeways of Old Assyrian merchants, highly mobile peoples of the road generated different choices concerning when and when to exert their “Assyrian-ness”.” Again, not wrong, but can’t the same be said of every traveller, tourist, migrant, and refugee? If so, what have we learned from the Assyrian merchants? This seems less a conclusion than a starting point.

What the volume sorely lacks is an editorial essay, perhaps an epilogue, to spell out the intellectual scaffolding that makes it possible to investigate identity in ways that are more than merely observational. Behind most of the contributions there lurk the shadows of Pierre Bourdieu on habitus, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the subaltern, and Antonio Gramsci on hegemony, but the volume is content to water down these concepts. Instead, what we get is much talk of elites, locals, foreigners, enslaved persons as commodities and heterogeneity. These are labels, not an analytical apparatus. As a result, despite some excellent chapters, the volume lacks coherence. This manifests itself as a lack of actual dialogue. There are three chapters on slavery (Kostas Vlassopoulos, Reid, Bruun) but no indications, aside from a single footnote in Vlassopoulos, that the chapters substantively engaged with each other at all, despite the fact that two of the chapters do engage extensively with Orlando Patterson’s notion of social death and that Vlassopoulos articulates a clear definition of how the group identity of the enslaved functions. Similarly, there are two chapters on Jewish identity (Erich Gruen and Kimberley Czajkowksi), as well as a third on exilic communities in Babylon (Pearce), all equally unaware of each other’s investigations, for all intents and purposes. Hermetically sealed off from each there, these represent missed opportunities.

In part the separateness of the chapters arises from the decision to arrange the entire volume using highly traditional divisions by time and place, rather than by theme. These sections are 1. Approaching ancient identities; 2. The ancient Near East; 3. The Mediterranean world until the age of the successors (sic); 4. The Rome world: from early republic to late empire; 5. From Late Antiquity until the Early Middle Ages: Rome, Byzantium and others. But these artificial divisions occlude fascinating themes waiting to be teased out: three chapters deal primarily with cities (Alexandria, Rome and Antioch) yet fail to articulate a coherent theory of urban identity. Instead, elite culture emerges as the generator of identity formation in one case (Czajkowksi on Jewish Alexandria), urban ‘religionification’  as the generator in another (Jörg Rüpke on Rome) and class tension by proxy in another (Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos on Libanius’ Antioch). Nor is this only a matter of missing the chance to cross-fertilize the discussion. So stark is the absence of dialogue that Anglo-Saxons, it is argued, cannot be identified by their brooches in one chapter (James Gerrard on Stützarmfibeln) while in the very next cauldrons can be used to identify Huns from Europe to Inner Asia (Hyun Jin Kim). To be clear, both are methodologically rich essays that are very exciting to read, but the juxtaposition produces less fruitful dialogue and more cognitive dissonance. Similarly, two essays, Matthew Haysom on elite identities in Egypt and archaic Greece, and Gary Farney on Roman aristocratic family identity in the Late Republic and Early Empire are both concerned with elite performance and identity formation. Haysom’s essay on elite performance notes that the luxury we might expect to attract opprobrium could actually stand for cosmic order. An explicit comparison would have been worth making, especially when one considers the Roman aristocracy’s fixation on luxury and probity. A further refraction of these ideas, playing out along class lines but expressed through religious distinctions is explored in Falcasantos’ essay on Late Antique Antioch. Religious difference, this time colliding with ethnic labels, is similarly the fault line explore by Clemens Gantner’s essay on the Papal strategy of ‘othering’ the Greeks in the 8^th century and once again triangulating any or all of these essays thematically with each other might have been worthwhile. Why? Because if one stops fixating on the labels of ‘elite’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’ there may be more profound lessons to be learned about the dynamics of identity and the conditions under which identities are formed: that those in power, for example, will exploit any epiphenomenon to advertise their power, to naturalize it, to shore it up and to safeguard it from attack. The reader may dismiss this as Marshall Sahlins-lite but the volume cries out for more comprehensive arguments to take us beyond the particular and narrowly defined instances of identity with which the various essays engage.

Accordingly, and somewhat disappointingly, we end up with a volume that continues to segmentalize and compartmentalize Ancient Studies in very traditional ways that result in a treatment of identity more diffuse than revelatory. It is frankly unlikely to be read cover to cover, and the temptation to read chapters only in one’s speciality will be hard to resist. Should the student of identity choose to cast their net more widely it is a mixed haul. Among the more compelling chapters (and here I confess to a bias as a Greek historian) are the contributions by Natalie Abell on communities of practice in the Bronze Age Cyclades, Carolina López-Ruiz on Phoenician identity, Denise Demetriou on transcultural tokens of identity and border crossing. Each is an outstanding example of how a discrete vector into identity, whether defined by a distinct theoretical approach or by a specific body of material can illuminate ancient lives. Abell demonstrates that craft production is not the result of simple gender binaries; López-Ruiz, drawing smartly on Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, introduces the categories of symbolic ethnicities and durable ethnicities; Demetriou uses the humblest of objects (symbola) to reveal how the people of the Mediterranean negotiated their world as a place of constant movement and interaction. Each of these essays is a small gem, while it should also be said that Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s chapter on race and the metic must now be required reading for anyone interested in the continuing debate over the use of race as a category of analysis in ancient studies. Her provocative claim that metic became a racialized category in the 5^th and 4^th century is argued with great skill and is an exhilarating read.

In fact, it is the essays that develop novel and unexpected arguments that make the volume most exciting. Just as Futo Kennedy situates the legal category of metoikia within a broader kaleidoscope of contested statuses structured around inclusion and exclusion, so too Roland Betancourt expands the representation of Manuel I Komnenos to explore the intersections of gender, sexuality and racialization within a similar grammar of identity formation. Had the volume been arranged thematically this would have been a nice companion to Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Saana Svärd on gender identities in Mesopotamia. Failing that, a useful editorial afterword might have pulled together some of the disparate threads that run through the volume. For example, the chapter on Mesopotamian gender also develops the notion that elite and non-elite discourses develop in very different ways. The same observation emerges from the juxtaposition of Farney’s discussion of Roman elite identity construction and Andrew Gardner’s exploration of Roman military identities, where once again more explicit comparisons might have yielded more compelling arguments. Aside from the opportunities for cross fertilization between contributions thematically linked, the volume could also address questions of gender, religious ideology, class and ethnicity all more systematically, that is, as themes deserving exploration across ancient cultures rather than as phenomena episodically intersecting with identity.

In conclusion, the volume points to the many areas of ancient lives where identity was expressed and constructed, but raises more questions than answers.[2]

Authors and titles

Introduction: Joseph Skinner, Vicky Manolopoulou, and Christina Tsouparopoulou

PART I Approaching ancient identities

1. Challenging essentialism: disentangling ancient and modern notions of ethnicity: Johannes Siapkas
2. Elite identities: Greece and Egypt in comparative perspective: Matthew Haysom
3. The identities of enslaved persons: Kostas Vlassopoulos
4. Personal names and identity: a socio-onomastic approach to naming practices in the ancient world: Andreas Gavrielatos
5. Religious identities in ancient cities: Jörg Rüpke
6. Open dynamic stewardship: alternatives to understanding diversity and transformation: Elena Isayev

PART II The ancient Near East

7. Construction of gender identities in Mesopotamia: Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Saana Svärd
8. Mercantile and religious identities in Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age: Yağmur Heffron and Nancy Highcock
9. The identities of enslaved persons in ancient Mesopotamia: J. Nicholas Reid
10. Exilic communities in Babylonia: Laurie Pearce
11. Ancient Judaism: nation, ethnicity, or religion?: Erich S. Gruen

PART III The Mediterranean world until the age of the successors

12. A community of practice perspective on craft production and culture change in the Bronze Age Cyclades: Natalie Abell
13. Reconstructing Phoenician identities: a glass half-full: Carolina López-Ruiz
14. Transcultural tokens of identity: the mechanics of crossing borders in the ancient Mediterranean: Denise Demetriou
15. Classical Greek racism: Thomas Harrison
16. Race and the Athenian metic: Rebecca Futo Kennedy
17. Greek local identity and Greek local history: Daniel Tober

PART IV The Roman world: from early republic to late empire

18. Roman aristocratic family identity in the Late Republic and Early Empire: Gary D. Farney
19. Identities of enslaved persons in the Roman world: Christer Bruun
20. Identity construction in Alexandria: Greeks, Jews and Romans: Kimberley Czajkowski
21. Roman military identities: Andrew Gardner

PART V From Late Antiquity until the Early Middle Ages: Rome, Byzantium and others

22. Peripheral identities: ethnicity, Anglo-Saxons and the Stützarmfibeln: James Gerrard
23. The identity of the Huns: Hyun Jin Kim
24. Sacrifice, banquets, and drunken elephants: the problem of Christian identity in Libanius’s Oration 30: Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos
25. The open secret of Byzantium’s national identity: Anthony Kaldellis
26. Demarcating Rome: the papal strategy of Othering and the re-invention of Greeks: Clemens Gantner
27. The case of Manuel I Komnenos: articulating identity through gender, sexuality, and racialization: Roland Betancourt

Notes

[1] Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. “Beyond ‘Identity.’” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47.

[2] A few errors noted by page:
82  Idélos for IDélos
114 Hebrews for Hebrews
235 craft-speople for crafts-people.
379 “…  consider themselves free is they’ve removed …” for “…. consider themselves free if they’ve removed …”
511 ‘… of thliterary hero” for “… of the literary hero…”
512, 513 Indented quotes not closed with punctuation