“YOU REPROACH ME,” says Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “because each of my stories takes you right into the heart of a city without telling you of the space that stretches between one city and the other, whether it is covered by seas, or fields of rye, larch forests, swamps. I will answer you with a story.” The story with which Marco Polo answers his interlocutor is about Cecilia, a city which one cannot exit because it has swallowed everything else.
The story Daniel Fallmann tells in Der Rand der Welt, on the other hand, is a story that does seem to concern itself with the distant seas, fields of rye, larch forests, and swamps that lie beyond the space of the city. This is a book, as the subtitle indicates, about how the Greeks conceived of the edges of the world in the archaic and classical periods. As a result, it is less about the physical space that lies between cities than the imaginary space that lies beyond the city, that is, beyond Greek civilization. In four progressively lengthening chapters, Fallmann discusses Greek conceptions of the boundaries of heaven and earth (cosmology), the borders of the oikoumene (geography), the spaces beyond those boundaries and borders (eschatology), and, finally, the inhabitants of these borderlands (ethnography).
And yet, in Fallmann’s story, too, the city is everywhere and has swallowed everything. Ultimately, as Der Rand der Welt convincingly shows, what the Greeks have to say about the periphery is not only told from the center but also always about the center. The edges of the world constitute a collective space for Greek reflections on self and other (“Reflexionsraum,” e.g., p. 17, 355, 431), or, to use an alternative image preferred by the author, a screen on which to project societal fears and desires (“Projektionsfläche,” e.g., p. 18, 353, 427). The space beyond, in other words, is still a city-space.
This is a large book. The first chapter of substance, on cosmology, tracks how early Greek visions of the earth as a disk, with a physical edge and center, are challenged but not wholly supplanted by a notion of the earth as a globe with a metaphysical edge and middle. The second chapter treats the persistence of Greek conceptions of center and edge even when geographic knowledge expands and the earth is considered a sphere. The frontier which marks off the inhabited earth is no longer truly an edge but flagged by physical and climatic barriers or by peoples such as the Scythians; it often coincides with the limits of knowledge and (imperial) power. The third chapter covers the spaces that lie beyond the edge – distant and unknown continents, but especially the worlds of the dead and the gods. It also covers the journeys of Greek heroes into those spaces, journeys which signal above all that these spaces are inaccessible to mere mortals. The final, 150-page long chapter is the heart of the book. It treats Greek ideas of the borderlands and border peoples. A discussion of monsters, human-animal hybrids and divine humans, sedentary and nomadic societies, gender roles, dietary and sexual practices, show the edges to be the mirror-image of the center—a negative mirroring which grows stronger as the distance from Greece increases. A brief conclusion recapitulates the arguments and traces the reception of these ideas in early modern Europe and, handsomely, in the present moment.
The question one is left with upon finishing the book is not whether this picture of the edges is correct; throughout, I have found it exceedingly difficult to disagree with the author. This is a book that impresses in its thoroughness and detail. It will no doubt become a touchstone for future work on borders and its peoples in the Greek imaginary, perhaps above all for its meticulous enumeration and sensible presentation of the extant source-material—including not only texts but also, refreshingly, vase-painting.
The question is rather whether Fallmann’s picture is taken from a fresh vantage point and asks us to substantially modify the way we look at the edge of the world. Here, I am not so sure. This is at least in part due to the absence of critical engagement with other scholarship. An important point in this context is how the book relates to James Romm’s The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (1992), the most comprehensive treatment of the topic to date. The similarities extend beyond their titles, and Romm’s work is cited dozens of times throughout the book. This is always without visible signs of disagreement, while the head-on discussion in the introduction remains minimal, emphasizing Romm’s broader scope (which extends into the 2nd c. CE and includes Rome) and his concomitant, lesser attention to Greek detail (p. 14-15). In that same introduction, Fallmann presents his guiding idea—that the edges of the world are articulated in opposition to the Greek center—by calling on the anthropologist Klaus E. Müller, whose work on mental maps had already been received and reworked among classicists by Hans-Joachim Gehrke and Tonio Hölscher, two authors that are approvingly cited throughout the book.[1] Yet it remains unclear how different such a reading is from the ‘ethnocentric’ readings advanced in Romm’s The Edges of the Earth (e.g., p. 46–48, 54–55). Fallmann, following Müller, prefers the term ‘nostrocentric’ and its flexible emphasis on a group over ‘ethnocentric’ and its more rigid emphasis on an ethnē (e.g., p. 74, 273, 426). But the divergence in meaning is arguably marginal, and one is inclined to conclude that the difference between Romm and Fallmann chiefly resides in what material the authors treat, not how.
Fallmann’s main claim to novelty indeed consists of presenting his own project as occupying a middle ground: not quite Romm’s bird’s-eye view of all classical antiquity nor exactly the view from up close provided by studies of individual ancient authors or texts (p. 16–7). The latter, claims Fallmann, cannot see the forest of ‘Greek structures of thought’ (p. 17) for the trees, while the former lacks historical specificity by lumping attitudes together which should be differentiated across time and place. Placing oneself at this half-way level may well be a defensible choice, yet one wishes that the author had more explicitly justified opting for what now seems a precarious tertium quid—is it really true that Romm falls short on material base while individualized studies, like Hartog’s Mirror of Herodotus (1980), lack in conceptual superstructure? Some might also press the author on whether the notion of ‘Greek structures of thought’ is not already too generalizing; others might wonder – in the face of many continuities and direct lines of reception—why Fallmann’s notion of ‘Greek structures of thought’ allegedly works as a heuristic category for exploring the edges of the world, while a notion of ‘Greco-Roman structures of thought’ does not.[2] Greater attention given to the many parallels practices in neighboring societies to the east and south, treated in detail neither by Romm nor Fallmann, could have challenged these notions altogether: are these anyone’s structures?[3]
Fallmann more generally steers clear from staking out a scholarly position where this would have been helpful to the reader. The Vorstellungen of the volume’s subtitle has a distinct French ring, for example, but the introduction only briefly nods to the Paris School and their efforts to reconstruct l’imaginaire grec (p. 16). The emphasis on the simultaneous reality and fantasy of border spaces (e.g., p. 13-4, 390, 407) reminds one of R.G.A. Buxton’s attempt, in Imaginary Greece (1994), to grapple with the intellectual legacy of the imaginaire-approach in classical studies, but that volume (including Buxton’s work on the real-and-imaginary space of Greek mountains) is absent in this book. How does Fallmann situate the project in this broader scholarly landscape? The answer, at least to this reader, remains murky.
Position-taking, I should say, does at times appear. The conscious choice for a plural in the subtitle, Vorstellungen, instead of the singular Vorstellung (p. 21n20), acknowledges the distortions that accompany a collective singular like the Greek imaginary, which conceals the diversity of views not only across time, but also at any given point within society. This is an admirable prise de position – the societal norms that are projected on the edges of the Greek world inevitably work to obscure and suppress societal division on the home front. Some of the most exciting work on the Greek imaginary, indeed, highlights the interests of the specific groups that promote and benefit from images of false unity.[4] Just how this might work in Fallman’s project is evident in, for example, the depraved, promiscuous, and ‘cattle-like’ sexual license ascribed by Greek authors to peoples in borderlands (p. 347-350)—which is surely of a piece with practices of sexual policing at home, particularly of female bodies. But Fallmann, while recognizing the elite, Atheno-centric, and male perspective(s) offered in our sources (p. 22), could, on the whole, do more to expose the stakes of these views. The project remains somewhat static and faithfully reproduces the material on, e.g., extreme climates and excess (p. 121-135), inverted gender roles (p. 355-368) or ‘corporeal abnormality’ (p. 373-416) without always addressing what work such projections do back in the city and for whom. Even with positive Greek reviews of the borderland peoples (p. 288-317) one should note that they place genuinely different and better societies out of Greek temporal and geographical reach, effectively stifling internal change. One wonders, ultimately, what Fallmann would have to say about a figure like Thersites in the Iliad, who challenges societal norms in both word and appearance, but is undeniably a part of society. Yet little space is allotted in this book to the dynamism created by citizens that inhabit the edges of the world but live inside the city.
Even as I sometimes found myself wishing for a glimpse of the cracks and fissures in the photographic negative of society that Greek reflections on the world’s edges produce, I should stress that Fallmann does an impeccable job in reconstructing the overall picture. He has his sights set on both the individual details and the larger patterns which together create a coherent, Greek image of the edges of the world. And while a book so concerned with borders and exclusion will naturally draw attention to its own demarcations, once we accept the author’s choices and follow Fallmann to the edges of the Greek world, he is a sure and steady guide.
Calvino’s Marco Polo could not be trusted, because for all his discussions of fantastic cities, he only ever talked about Venice. The same goes for Fallmann’s Greeks, who have many things to say about the edges of the world, but always end up talking about Greece. As a vademecum for these strange and deceitful worlds, Fallman’s Der Rand der Welt itself, however, can readily be depended upon.
Notes
[1] K. E. Müller, Das magische Universum der Identität (Frankfurt a. M. 1987) and Die Siedlungsgemeinschaft. (Göttingen 2010); H.-J. Gehrke, “Die Raumwahrnehmung im archaischen Griechenland,” in M. Rathmann (ed.), Wahrnehmung und Erfassung geographischer Räume in der Antike (Mainz 2007), 17–30, 18; and, most recently, T. Hölscher, Visual Power in ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley 2018), 16–22.
[2] Primarily evidenced in Romm’s The Edges of the Earth, but see also, e.g., Timothy C. Hart, Beyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome (Michigan 2024), esp. at 69–126.
[3] See, for some parallels footnoted in Fallmann: 64n152; 205-206; 264n398; 304n152; 308n172; but the methodological ramifications of works like, e.g. M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon (New York 1997) (cited) or Carolina López-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born (Cambridge 2010) (not cited) are not tackled by the author.
[4] See, above all, Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens (Harvard 1986).