Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.2 (2003) 303-306 [Access article in PDF] Jonathan M. Hall. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xxii + 312 pp. Cloth, $50. "To a wise man," wrote Philostratus in the third century C.E.in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, "everything is Greece." For a properly educated person, there is a frame of Greek knowledge for looking at anything, and there is nothing that is not to be viewed through that frame. (There are quite a few classicists who might agree...) In Philostratus' wonderful account, Apollonius was a marvel-working sage who did indeed travel throughout the known world, taking his Greek knowingness with him as a guide for all occasions and as a mastery of all situations. Although he learnt much from the mysterious wise men of the East, the Gymnosophists and the Brahmins, it should be no surprise that even these gurus quote Euripides as an authority. In the Roman Empire, Greek culture was at a premium (despite all the sniffy remarks of hard Roman traditionalists), but "being Greek," hellenizein, was a quality that at first sight has little to do with ethnicity. Apollonius, after all, is from Tyana. "Although from Gaul," boasted Favorinus of Gaul, "I became Greek." By this he means that through his rhetorical training, his language, and his whole style of being and thinking, he conforms to an ideal of "Greekness." The fact that he sets this claim parallel to two further outrageous self-descriptions—"although a eunuch, I was prosecuted for adultery, and although I argued with the Emperor, I lived to tell the tale"—shows that Favorinus is peddling cultural paradoxes rather than describing a norm. He's making a case for his own outstanding nature. But Lucian, too, describes how as a Syrian innocent he learnt rhetoric and philosophy (before deserting them for satire) and thus learnt to talk Greek, walk Greek, dress Greek, and beGreek. Greek sophistication, which comes from Greek paideia, is a value for the citizens of the whole Empire and can be fought over, denied, and aspired to like any other grand idea of social normativity. Plutarch is clear (in the Livesin particular) that the attainment of Greek culture—paideia—is an essential quality by which a man, even—especially—a Roman man, can be judged.For all that Greekness may thus appear to be a culturalvalue, nonetheless promoting a genealogy can still be a strategy of self-authorization and an assertion of true breeding. So we are told that the Jews tried to find an ancestral link with the Spartans (of all people). There is a letter of Apollonius of Tyana himself, transmitted with the manuscripts of Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, which reviles Greeks for wanting to take Roman names and thus deny their pedigree; and in the Lives of the Sophists, also by Philostratus, Herodes Atticus finds the most perfect Attic Greek spoken by a pastoral figure from the deepest interior of [End Page 303] Attica, because "the interior is untainted by barbarians and its language is healthy, its tongue rings pure Attic." It would seem that the best Greek is naturally and integrally tied to the Greek soil. Culture may be exportable, but there lingers the lure of the origin, the belief in a true bloodline, the homeland. In Greece, it alwaysmatters who your parents are and where you come from. Even when all can be Greek, some may be more Greek than others.The space between cultural value and the authority of ethnic descent is a prime matrix of social conflict—it is the arena from which the bloody history of nationalism arises and from which the daily crimes of racial prejudice, social exclusion, and self-congratulation are fed. "This is what it means to be Greek/American/Black/ White/Female..." shifts towards "You do not understand what it means to be...," to "You are not part of us who are...," to "This is what happens to people who are not...,' down the line towards violence and the battlelines of hierarchy and power. In...