Malkin Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization I Malkin - MLQ Modern Language...

Postcolonial Concepts and

Ancient Greek Colonization

Irad Malkin

Discussions of orientalism and colonialism sometimes reach back toClassical Greece, reputed to be the originator of Western binary

attitudes to the other, the subaltern, or the colonized.1 Historians areusually wary of such claims, especially when faced with anachronisms(projecting onto antiquity alien concepts, categories, and prisms ofobservation) or with disregard for processes of change and continuity.In my own work on ancient Greek religion, myth, and colonization, Ihave used postcolonial notions such as charter myths, ethnicity, binarythinking, hybridity, temporal relativism, middle ground, and networksand found them to be meaningful tools of analysis (although some ofthem may be less familiar to postcolonial thinkers who have come tothe field from literary studies). In turn, postcolonial theory might ben-efit from a closer study of ancient Greek civilization. Perhaps a reverseanachronism may be useful: sometimes projecting onto modern theoryconcepts, categories, and prisms of observation borrowed from the his-

Modern Language Quarterly 65:3 (September 2004): 341–64. © 2004 University of Washington.

1 For example, “In Classical Greece and Rome geographers, historians, publicfigures like Caesar, orators, and poets added to the fund of taxonomic lore separat-ing races, regions, nations, and minds from each other; much of that was self-serving,and existed to prove that Romans and Greeks were superior to other kinds of peo-ple” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995], 57). Cf. D.Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems,” in The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the EssexConference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester:University of Essex, 1983), 179–93. See also Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory:Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 40–53.

342 MLQ September 2004

2 See John E. Coleman and Clark A. Walz, eds., Greeks and Barbarians: Essays onthe Interactions between Greeks and Non-Greeks in Antiquity and the Consequences for Euro-centrism (Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1997); and François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus:The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1988). The latter book, dealing with binary ethno-graphic approaches to the Scythians in Herodotus, is mainly historiographical inpurpose and should not be taken as a “reflection” of general Greek views. See alsoPeter van Dommelen, “Colonial Constructs: Colonialism and Archaeology in theMediterranean,” World Archaeology 28 (1997): 305–23; and Claire L. Lyons and JohnK. Papadopoulos, eds., The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles: Getty ResearchInstitute, 2002).

tory of Greek antiquity, as well as applying some general concepts fromMediterranean studies, might prove helpful for postcolonial thinkers.

We need also to tread carefully because of the tendency of disci-plines to extend themselves. In general, applying postcolonial conceptsand terms such as colonizer and colonized to antiquity implies a widerscope for postcolonial study. But it must be asked whether we projectsuch terms onto the past in order that ancient examples might subse-quently provide historical “depth” to the modern postcolonial phe-nomenon and afford “universal” validity to observations of postcolonialthinkers. I can see why ancient Greece would be attractive: drawing par-allels and continuities from ancient Greek views of “barbarians,” orancient Greek practices of colonization, could provide historical depthto postcolonial critique, which could then contextualize itself not as anad hoc field of study, bounded by the history of the fifteenth to thetwentieth centuries, but as firmly relevant to past millennia and withuniversal implications for future history. In the same vein, students ofantiquity might find postcolonial angles attractive, since these mightmake the “classics” appear more widely relevant to the humanities.2

The ancient Mediterranean and postcolonial theory have a lot totell each other if we bear such parameters in mind. In this essay I dis-cuss a cluster of issues pertinent to the nexus of ancient and moderncolonial thought and practice. I address anachronism and binaryapproaches; compare certain characteristics of Greek colonization tomodern colonialism; examine the implications of ancient religiouspolytheism for modern binary, Christian-conditioned interpretations;suggest the usefulness of concepts developed by Mediterranean stud-ies historians, especially the réseau (network); and consider the uses of

Malkin Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization 343

the notion of the “Middle Ground,” developed by a modern historianof colonialism. I end with a historical illustration of the variabilities ofthe colonial experience in the Middle Ground, where cults and mythscould be used as charters for the conquest of or, conversely, for media-tion among colonizing peoples (Greeks, Phoenicians) and indigenouspopulations.

Binary Thinking, Ancient Political Culture, and the Notion of “Place”

Too often, ancient Greeks are treated as though they were both “white”and “European,” the people who both put together and kept rockingthe cradle of Western civilization. The fact that Europe defines itselfin terms of the ancient Greek world does not, of course, mean that theancient Greeks owed their self-definition, in terms of either racial prej-udices or national units, to categories important to modern Europe. Toillustrate with a lesser-known example: Emil Ludwig, one of the pro-ponents both of Mediterranean studies and of a naive kind of “hybrid-ity,” was keenly aware of anachronism. His beautifully written book of1942, The Mediterranean: Saga of the Sea, carried such a powerful and lib-eral message of hope that it was translated from German into English,and published that year in London, in the midst of the Second WorldWar. It is curious to find in Ludwig’s book the outline of a “liberal-racist” historical geography of the Mediterranean, which warns of a“European” anachronism in relation to the ethnicity of ancient Greece.Ludwig’s own solution was remarkable: he proclaimed that the Greeksbelonged to a special, biological “Mediterranean Race,” whose amazingachievements and civilization depended not on ethnic purity but onracial hybridity.3

Postcolonial critique is sometimes preoccupied with binary dis-tinctions of self and other, European and barbarian, West and “therest.” Sometimes the order is reversed, the self becomes the other, butthe critical mind-set is generally the same, applying itself as if on aEuclidian geometric plane of opposites.4 Binary thinking has been with

3 Emil Ludwig, The Mediterranean: Saga of the Sea, trans. Barrows Mussey (Lon-don: Whittlesey House, 1942).

4 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-colonial StudiesReader (London: Routledge, 1995), 8. On the dangers of reproducing binarism by


us since antiquity, drawing on both Greek philosophy and Hebrewsources. It is especially evident in the legacy of ancient Jewish monothe-ism. By the second century BCE a dominant section of Jewish mono-theism had abandoned the belief in “one god,” the right god for thepeople of Israel, for an exclusive belief in the one and only God and con-sequently a denial of the existence of all other gods. This concept of arevealed, intolerant religious truth captured center stage and then waspicked up and spread, often with the zeal of conversion, by Christian-ity and Islam.5

In this monotheistic legacy we find a major source for the binaryattitudes apparent in Western imperialism since the early modernperiod, and probably reaching back to the Crusades. In terms of colo-nialism, these attitudes form a direct continuity not from Classical Greecebut from more recent Christian history, beginning especially with theSpanish reconquista and pitting Christians, Muslims, and Jews againsteach other. This was followed by the exploration, conquest, and settle-ment of the New World, where indigenous populations were brandedas heathens, those “absolute others” of Spanish imperialism and colo-nialism.6

Binary thinking is also evident in the writings of Greek philoso-phers and in aspects of Greek ritual.7 However, when applied to eth-nicity, an “oppositional” Greek-barbarian dichotomy (i.e., a definitionof collective ethnicity as a difference from and an opposition to theother) emerged for the most part only after the Greeks had warded off

exposing it (yet insisting on its underlying colonial realities) see Abdul R. JanMo-hamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference inColonial Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59–87.

5 See Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Johannes C. De Moor, The Rise of Yah-wism: The Roots of Israelite Monotheism, 2nd ed. (Leuven: Leuven University Press,1997); Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Jacob Neusner, Bruce Chilton, andWilliam Graham, Three Faiths, One God: The Formative Faith and Practice of Judaism,Christianity, and Islam (Boston: Brill, 2002).

6 The point is made often. See Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands:The Origins of American Racism (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992).

7 See Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, 2nd ed. (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2002); and G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types ofArgumentation in Early Greek Thought (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987).


the Persian invasion in the early fifth century BCE. It was the first time,since the mythical Trojan War, that Greeks had fought a common en-emy, sharpening their common identity on the whetstone of invasion.8

Notions of Greek superiority continued to develop until, in the latefourth century, Aristotle summed up the new mentality in the openingchapters of the Politics, where he denigrated the barbarians as naturallyinferior to the Greeks.

From Aristotle’s perspective, Greeks and barbarians fit beautifullyinto an oppositional model that now justifies the claim that the sourceof modern orientalism lies in the glory that was Greece. However, andthis is important, shortly before Aristotle this had not been so. Duringthe Archaic period (roughly the eighth to the early fifth centuries BCE)both the multiethnic Near Eastern empires and the small Greek city-states were structured in such a way as to leave little room for binarismin the European-Christian sense. It was then that the major waves ofGreek colonization took place.

From the eighth century until the time of Athens’s empire andHerodotus’s writings in the mid-fifth century, when Greeks were colo-nizing and founding city-states on shores as distant from each other asGeorgia on the eastern Black Sea is from Spain in the west, the termbarbarians was usually not derogatory. Rarely used disparagingly (thephilosopher Herakleitos spoke of men with “barbarian souls”), it servedmost often as a reference to a wide spectrum of non-Greek peoples,from the nomadic Scythians to the long-settled Egyptians. One majorreason for the term’s neutrality was the Greeks’ awareness that the non-Greek civilizations of the Near East, such as Egypt and Babylon, werericher, more powerful, and far more ancient. Indeed, even after the vic-tories at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480), the Greeks still knew thatthey were living at the periphery of those civilizations. For example, theseventh-century poet Archilochos could refer to the riches of Lydia asproverbial; the fifth-century historian Herodotus and the fourth-century philosopher Plato ascribed the origins of many things Greek,such as the alphabet and even the gods, to the Near East, especially toEgypt. In historiographical terms this view is what Martin Bernal calls

8 See Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997).

“the ancient Greek model.”9 It emphasized the Greeks’ self-perceptionas a “young” people. It is sobering to remember that some of the NearEastern civilizations were as old relative to the Greeks as the Greeks areto us.10

Greek civilization of the Archaic period was a world of many godsand numerous, sovereign political communities sharing a sense ofyouthfulness and a peripheral geographic situation. Ancient Greekpolitical culture was diametrically different both from the ancientmodel of the vast, multiethnic empire and from the modern idea of anational state. Greeks lived in hundreds of small, sovereign, and auton-omous city-states (“Greece” as a nation was not born until 1821 CE).This multiplicity of Greekness has various implications, complicatingbinarism and any sense of “center” from which the world is regarded,judged, and colonized.

The eighth century BCE saw the rise of the polis and the introduc-tion of an altogether new political culture. In the Near East, huge, mul-tiethnic empires had been the norm and remained so for several mil-lennia, until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth centuryCE. In such empires the population was divided between ruler and sub-jects; there were no such things as “citizens.” By contrast, Mediter-ranean peoples (Greeks, Etruscans, Phoenicians, Latins) preferred thesmall to the large, a multitude of centers to a hierarchical and central-ized empire. They developed closely knit, small, homogeneous politi-cal communities that eventually made room (in Greece, at least) for theconcepts of koinonia (partnership and rotation) and polites (citizen).

This progression is remarkably different from what we know of theSpanish colonization of the New World and of nineteenth-century


9 Martin Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985, vol. 1 of BlackAthena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Free Association, 1987).Bernal believes that this conceptual framework also supports a positivistic recon-struction of prehistory, which is a matter for debate. Cf. Edith Hall, “When Is a MythNot a Myth? Bernal’s ‘Ancient Model,’” Arethusa 25 (1992): 181–201. For Persia “inGreece” see Margaret C. Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study inCultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

10 A fuller discussion of these points may be found in Irad Malkin, The Returns ofOdysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),14–24.

“European” (or rather, national-European) colonialism.11 Spanishexplorers set out from a centralized kingdom that had grown out ofwars with the Muslims and that had culminated, in the year of “the dis-covery of America,” in the expulsion of “others,” the Jews. When theSpanish set out across the Atlantic, theirs was a civilization in which theidea of a “center” was prominent. The center was expressed in terms ofpolitical cohesiveness organized around the Spanish monarchy. It wasalso a religious construct: based on a European Christianity, dynami-cally expansionist and making universal claims of exclusive truths. ForSpain, the center was the papacy in Rome, where God’s representativecould pronounce upon the division of the world between Spain andPortugal.12 Such characteristics held up through nineteenth- and twentieth-century European imperialism, which also advocated missionary work,sought to illuminate the “dark continent,” and had an equally strongsense of a superior center.

In contrast, the numerous Greek cities that we call, for lack of a bet-ter term, “colonies” were founded during the Archaic period as inde-pendent entities along the shores of the Mediterranean and the BlackSea. There were a great variety of “mother cities” (i.e., home commu-nities recognized as the initiators of settlement), but they rarely hadpolitical control over the new settlements. These were largely inde-pendent, sovereign entities with ritual ties to the metropolis (lit. mothercity). In fact, this was not just a Greek but a Mediterranean phenome-non: the Phoenicians had set out to found city-states in the westernMediterranean and North Africa, and the Etruscans—influenced byboth the Greeks and the Phoenicians—likewise developed a city-statecivilization and maritime activity.13

The Spanish “discovery” of the New World and European colo-


11 See Marc Ferro, Histoire des colonisations (Paris: Seuil, 1994); and StephenGreenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1991).

12 See Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492–1700 (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

13 See John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade, 4th ed.(London: Thames and Hudson, 1999); and Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoeniciansand the West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001), 144–59.

nialism there and elsewhere provide the common conceptual frame-work for assessing colonialism in postcolonial studies. But analogieswith ancient Greek colonization may be misleading, if only for this rea-son: in terms of political culture, the Greek polis was radically differentboth from the centralized Spanish-Christian monarchy and from Vic-torian Britain. The Greek starting point of “place” was one of diffusion,not concentration. Greeks simply did not all come from the same place(“Greece”)—as we understand the term. Each polis emphasized its owndistinctiveness even as each was part of a network of hundreds of city-states. “Ancient Greece” may exist in book titles, but it may not be usedto denote a unified political entity.

Greek perceptions of place were closely linked with political cul-ture, actual experiences of colonization, and religion. In contrast to thecolonizers of the New World, the ancient Greeks did not perceive thelands they reached as inhabited by “absolute others.” The more distantparts of the Mediterranean were not a “New World” to them; they weremore of the same, with familiar geographic and climatic features. Mar-itime trade, exploration, and colonization were conducted not acrossan alien ocean but along contiguous coastlines or toward observablelands. Nobody feared falling off the face of the earth if they sailed toofar out into the Mediterranean. As expansion and settlement contin-ued, moreover, both the Mediterranean and the Black Sea became partof the oikoumene, the “inhabited” (i.e., familiar) world, distinct from the unknown lands of the beyond, such as those of the blessed Hyper-boreans, the utopian and inaccessible peoples of the far North. In fact,the idea of the oikoumene, in and of itself, probably helped “compact”all the lands within, both those of Greeks and those of non-Greeks, intoa more familiar mold, the reverse of the “absolute other.”

Subjugation and fear of the native led to dehumanization and “oth-ering” in modern colonial contexts, because the colonizers focused onthe capture of large territories that they then carved up for direct con-trol. But Greek settlers usually did not aim for vast territorial conquests.Rather, they conceived of colonization mainly in terms of “points” ofsettlement, of city -states, with fairly small territories.14


14 See Irad Malkin, “Categories of Early Greek Colonization,” in Il dinamismodella colonizzazione greca, ed. Claudia Antonetti (Naples: Loffredo, 1997), 25–38. Forthe modern era see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean,

Being an “alien” is a relative condition that may not apply to per-sons of similar social position. In the Archaic period, Greek aristocratsregarded other aristocrats not as aliens or savages but simply as xenoi(foreigners)—as the Spartans continued to call all barbarians in thetime of Herodotus (9.11.2; cf. 9.55.2). In fact, it is not even clear whethereighth-century Greeks were aware that they were Greeks or, if they did,what significance this identity had for them and in which contexts.15

The term xenoi also carried the meaning of “guest-friends,” personalallies who could exchange ritual gifts and whose guest-friendship wasinherited. An aristocratic, nonethnic network was therefore easilyextendable whether or not one’s ally was a Greek.16 For example,Greeks, Etruscans, Phoenicians, and aristocrats in lands colonized bythese peoples would recline on the same couches during symposia (ban-quets) held in the Bay of Naples in the mid-eighth-century BCE. As lateas the Classical period, Oloros, the father of the Athenian historianThucydides, may have been named for a Thracian king who was a xenosof the family.

A multiplicity of points of cross-reference seems to be the salientfeature of Archaic Greek civilization. Binarism seems particularly inap-propriate in this world. It is difficult to find apt terminology to describeit, since words such as decentralized or fragmented imply the absence ofsomething from a previous whole. But there was no center to beginwith: there was no Greek “place,” only hundreds of Greek city-states,some functioning as metropoleis, others newly founded, in what is todaymodern Greece as well as “overseas,” beyond ever-widening horizons.Other peoples were not “others,” since their lands possessed a famil-


1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 2–3. Hulme rightly distinguishes betweencolonial discursive practices that “relate to occupied territory where the native pop-ulation had been, or is to be, dispossessed of its land by whatever means” and those“pertaining to territory where the colonial form is based primarily on the control oftrade” (e.g., America and India). There were exceptions, of course. Greek colonizersto Heraclea on the Black Sea subjugated the native Maryandinoi. In contrast, otherGreek colonies had to pay tribute to Scythian kings.

15 See Jonathan M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2002).

16 See Moses I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, 2nd ed. (London: Chatto and Win-dus, 1977); and Gabriel Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987).

iar, even expected, environment (with some exceptions in the BlackSea). Apart from some cases in the sixth century and sweepingly so afterthe early fifth century, Greek identity in the Archaic period was neitherformed nor reinforced oppositionally, and the Greeks did not regardthe civilizations to the east as peripheral, inferior, poor, or young. Andthe whole world, as the early philosopher Thales of Miletus proclaimed,was “full of gods.”

Religion

Religion, Christian religion, contributed significantly to the Europeansense of “central place.” The religious mentality of the Greeks was verydifferent from that of the Christian colonizer, whether medieval cru-sader, Spanish conqueror, or nineteenth-century European. The dif-ference was between Judeo-Christian monotheism and ancient Mediter-ranean polytheism.

The polytheistic mentalité that characterized religions of the ancientMediterranean strongly worked against one’s seeing the world in binaryterms of “believers” and “heathens.”17 Conversion was never an issue inancient colonization. Greeks and Phoenicians, for example, had a sim-ilar polytheistic mind-set; when meeting each other, they could easilysee each other’s gods in their own deities and heroes, identifying, forexample, the Phoenician Melqart with the Greek Herakles. Neither wasconsidered a “false god,” a notion the Greeks and Phoenicians wouldhave found ridiculous. The gods of “others” were either unfamiliar(“new gods”) or the “same” but known by different names and attri-butes. Religion was langue; the names of the gods and their cults wereparole. For example, when Herodotus says that “Ammon is the name of Zeus among the Egyptians” (2.42), he sees a “Zeus” in the Egyptiandeity (langue), although his name, cult, and even status may be pecu-liarly Egyptian (parole). So what he means is, “Ammon is how you say‘Zeus’ in Egyptian.” In short, the Greeks perceived someone else’s reli-gion neither as a contradiction nor as a denial of some religious truth;it was not an “absolute other.”


17 See Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Oxford: Blackwell,1985); and Marcel Detienne, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 81–104.

With this polytheistic substrate came something else, bearingdirectly on colonization and territorial appropriation. Gods and heroeswere considered as “holding the land” (echein ten gen), independentlyof the humans who might have possession of it. A place empty of godswas apparently inconceivable, yet it was quite conceivable that meremortals would be ignorant of the gods’ identities. Once revealed, suchgods would be honored as local divinities or identified, through aprocess of syncretism, with the “equivalent” Greek gods. For example,libations from visiting ships would be poured before the epichorioi theoi,the “local gods,” as a sign of friendship and appeasement.18 By contrast,settlement implied the need for a lasting peace and ritual rapport withthe gods, and hence the inclination toward syncretism (without the tire-some issue of dogma). It was best if the local divinities and heroes couldbe identified with their Greek “namesakes,” as the ubiquitous cult ofDemeter and Persephone in Sicily seems to illustrate. It is probable thatsyncretistic influences were at work there, aided by the ease with whichlocal female divinities, perhaps having similar responsibilities for thegrowth of grain and the rejuvenation of life, were identified by bothcolonists and local populations.19 Likewise it was natural, for example,for a Greek speaker of the language of polytheism to project the myth-ical itinerary of Herakles onto a land that the hero was perceived asalready “holding,” even if he were known there by his Phoenician name,Melqart. Polytheism, in short, was a world system of diverse “sameness.”In contrast, Europeans set out to conquer and colonize the New World,confident of their superiority and their monopoly over exclusive,revealed, religious truth. Instead of occupying ourselves with observingthe differences between “absolute others,” we might look for a moresophisticated difference within a “sameness,” as the Greeks seem to havedone (Malkin, Returns of Odysseus, 17).20

The “sameness” of the world of religion also bore directly on eth-


18 See Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, 2.1271–74.19 See Roland Martin and Henri Metzger, La religion grecque (Paris: Presses Uni-

versitaires de France, 1976).20 Barbara Fuchs shifts the postmodern-postcolonial emphasis on “difference”

to investigation of “the political and rhetorical valence of sameness” (Mimesis andEmpire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2001], 3–4).

nic perceptions. Greek gods and heroes left descendants and dynastiesall over the world. Perseus, for example, could be considered the ances-tor of the Persians, Medea of the Medes, Dionysos and Herakles of theIndians, and Odysseus of the Latins. Allowing for a comprehensive per-ception of humanity and origines gentium, the “ethnic origins of nations,”was the reverse of the perception of “absolute others.”21

Hellenistic Civilization

The closest the Greeks ever came to a colonial situation of the mod-ern type was in the Classical period, when Athens sent out klerouchoi, orcitizens who would live off conquered, parceled land abroad whileretaining all their rights and duties as Athenians. In this respect theywere like the French outremer, who served in France’s army and votedfor its parliament while in Algeria. The experiment, however, took placeon a relatively small scale, was short-lived, and basically collapsed withthe fall of Athens to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. It was only in theHellenistic period (after the death of Alexander in 323 BCE) that afundamental change took place.

What became of “Greek civilization” after the conquests of Alex-ander, when the city-state lost its sovereignty and the new Greek-Macedonian empire overlapped with the Persian mega-empire, “fromIndia to Kush (Africa), one hundred and twenty seven lands” (Esther1:1)? During the Hellenistic era, roughly from the end of the fourthcentury BCE to the rise of Rome in the second, “Hellenism,” or Greek-ness at its widest, imperial, colonial stretch, metamorphosed preciselybecause of conquest, colonization, and empire building. There werefundamental changes both in the nature of the political communityand in ethnicity. It was no longer a civilization of independent, sover-eign poleis, and Greek ethnicity was no longer determined by “the sameblood” (homaimon), as it had been (alongside religious and cultural cri-teria) in earlier periods (Herodotus, 8.144).22


21 See Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1986).

22 Cf. Rosalind Thomas, “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Herodotus,” inAncient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, ed. Irad Malkin (Washington, DC: Center forHellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2001), 213–33.

The politically independent, sovereign Greek city-states were sub-merged in the new, vast Hellenistic kingdoms. New colonies were nowfounded not as independent states, as dots on the maps of what re-mained for centuries unconquered lands, but as entities within thesekingdoms. Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, probably instructedhim in the spirit of his own treatise Politics: to value the independentpolis as the condition for the good life. But Aristotle was teaching thiswisdom to the very person who would destroy the political indepen-dence (although not the vitality) of the city-state.

In the late fourth century BCE Alexander, the young Macedonianking, conquered the Persian Empire up to the Indus valley in India andpresent-day Afghanistan. Suddenly, Greeks were faced with ruling ahuge Eastern-type empire, multiethnic, multicultural, and wholly op-posite to the small Mediterranean city-state that had been Aristotle’smodel. After Alexander’s death the empire split into a few major units.An impressive wave of new city foundations, modeled on the polis butsubject to and centralized under the new kings, followed, and massesof immigrants, ex-soldiers, merchants, and others arrived to settle them.“Hellenization” spread, often in interesting forms of cultural appro-priation. In Jerusalem, for example, the high priest adopted a Greekname alongside his Hebrew one, and the Greek symposion, the banquetinvolving drinking while reclining, coalesced with the Passover seder.

Was Hellenistic colonization comparable to modern colonialism?At first glance, it seems to have been. The territories concerned wereenormous, and it is easy to detect an imperialist model in the export-ing of a Greek culture aware of its own superiority, the taking over ofvast stretches of the earth, and the conducting of a Hellenic “culturalimperialism” over the entire Orient. But this view is simplistic. In thisnew, Hellenistic world, the ethnic perception of “Hellenism” had itselfprofoundly changed, from the binarism of Greek-barbarian enmity(especially stemming from the Greek-Persian dichotomy) to a new defi-nition of Greekness that depended on status and culture.

The category of “Greek” had been contested and redefined evenbefore the rise of Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia. ManyGreeks had regarded the Macedonians as barbarians. One Macedonianking, Alexander I (498–454 BCE, not “the Great”), had been refusedentry into the Olympics because he was not a Greek; only because he


was recognized as a descendant of Herakles was he finally allowed tocompete. In the mid-fourth century the Macedonian question becamehotly debated for different reasons. The idea of leading a Panhelleniccampaign against the Persian Empire had taken root, and it was emi-nently clear that some sort of union was necessary, as no single poliscould undertake such a war by itself. Thus the idea of a “leader” sur-faced: a leader who would invade Asia at the head of a combined Greekhost, as Agamemnon had led the Greeks against Troy. Some looked upto the Macedonian king, Philip II (Alexander the Great’s father), whowas then leading a powerful, united Macedonia to hegemony overmainland Greece.

In Athens the famous orator Demosthenes warned of the dangerthat such a campaign posed to Greek independence, inflaming hisaudience by claiming that Philip was a barbarian. It was Demosthenes’fellow Athenian and political opponent, the pro-Macedonian Isocrates,who redefined “Greek” so that Philip might lead “Greece” against thebarbarian Persians. This Greece was no longer defined by blood, how-ever, but by culture—even though Isocrates saw that culture as pri-marily Athenian: “One calls ‘Greeks’ those who share our culture[paideia] rather than those who share a common nature [physis].”23

In the Hellenistic world, cultural criteria became predominant.New colonies often comprised peoples from all over the Greek worldand thus no longer relied on the discrete sociopolitical order that eachcolony would import from its mother city. One was no longer a Co-rinthian but simply a Greek, which meant negotiating a new identityand emphasizing abstracted Greek traits. This cultural criterion of Hel-lenism offered new mobility for many who might otherwise have beenconsidered non-Greeks. Ethnicity of blood made way for a “way of life.”A Greek dialect formed and spread as the common (koine) language ofall Greeks, providing the instrument for translations (e.g., the Septu-agint) and writings in Greek by non-Greeks (e.g., Josephus, Philo). Thelibrary at Alexandria, founded by the Ptolemies, aimed to collect workson a universal scale, housing and preserving all that was best in Archaic


23 Isocrates, Panegyricus 50. See Jonathan M. Hall, “Contested Ethnicities: Per-ceptions of Macedonia within Evolving Definitions of Greek Identity,” and SuzanneSaïd, “The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates to Aristides,” inMalkin, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 159–86, 275–99.

and Classical Greek literature and thus enhancing the notion of a com-mon culture. Sometimes Greek traits were deliberately overempha-sized. For example, in the farthest Greek colonies, such as Ai Khanoumin present-day Afghanistan or Borysthenes on the Black Sea, peopleexpressed their Greekness by wearing no-longer-fashionable longbeards and building in archaizing styles.24 The practical uses of Greek-ness as an “instrumental ethnicity” became manifest as well. In Egypt,for instance, it constituted a more liberal tax bracket than the oneapplied to Egyptians.25 In short, many people were co-opted into Hel-lenic civilization, either by becoming “Greek” through education andlanguage or by becoming like Greeks, Hellenizing by adopting aspectsof the Greek way of life.

In the history of modern colonialism it is easy to discover the pol-icy options of overseas colonial powers: either not to rule at all but totap the riches of the land through trading stations (e.g., Phoenicianemporia, Portuguese “factories,” British Hong Kong), or to rule as indi-rectly as possible and to send in temporary personnel who need notmingle with the indigenous population (the British in India), or toallow immigration and settlement and run the risk that priorities willbecome local and alienated from the metropolis (the North Americancolonies, Latin America). Hellenistic colonization faced more compli-cated choices: cities were founded inside countries that did not lie faraway and overseas but were, on the contrary, ruled directly by Hel-lenistic monarchs. The circumstances may have been similar to thoseattending Russian colonization in Europe, where the Russian territoryexpanded contiguously and settlements were founded inside con-quered lands. But the “Russification” that followed in Europe was farmore intensive than what happened in the Hellenistic kingdoms. Egypt,for example, did not become Greek, even though “Greek” cities suchas Alexandria were dominant.


24 See Frank W. Walbank, The Hellenistic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1981), 60–62; cf. Walbank, “The Problem of Greek Nationality,”Phoenix 5 (1951): 41–60, rpt. in Selected Papers: Studies in Greek and Roman History andHistoriography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–19, and in Greeksand Barbarians, ed. Thomas Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,2001), 234–56.

25 See Dorothy Thompson, “Hellenistic Hellenes: The Case of Ptolemaic Egypt,”in Malkin, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 301–22.

As independent city-states carving up niches on the shores of theMediterranean and the Black Sea, Greek colonies never became so pre-dominant as to change the cultures and languages of local populationsfundamentally. “France” did not become Greek just because Massalia(Marseille) and some cities on the modern French Riviera were foundedby Greeks. Instead of domination, especially during the Archaic period,what characterized contact with local populations was cultural negoti-ation and mediation. These processes found expression either in mate-rial culture (e.g., in the use of Greek-made terracotta roof tiles or drink-ing cups) or in the realm of histoire de mentalité.

The function of the myth of Odysseus, for example, is suggestive.The hero, returning from Troy, reached places never heard of inHomer but current in ancient myth. Regarded as the father of “Lati-nos” (i.e., he was the eponymous hero of the Latins), Odysseus wasadopted by the Etruscans as Utuse, founder of an Etruscan city wherehe was venerated with his own cult and led the mythical Etruscan migra-tions into Italy. Even though Greeks exported his story, Odysseus wasnot a Greek hero; he moved easily among different cultures. His adop-tion occurred very early, probably during the first colonial encountersbetween Greeks and Etruscans in the eighth century in the area of theBay of Naples (where the Etruscans too were arriving by sea)—in otherwords, at least two centuries before the fifth-century naval battles be-tween Greeks and Etruscans.26 What characterized such early colonialencounters was therefore not conquest and domination but the emer-gence of a material and cultural Middle Ground.

The Middle Ground

Middle Ground, a term coined by the historian Richard White, refers towhat emerges from encounters between colonizing and indigenouspopulations.27 White is interested in how various “sides” (whites, Fox,


26 I have dealt with various aspects of such identifications in three books: IradMalkin, Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (Leiden: Brill, 1987); Malkin, Mythand Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1994); Malkin, Returns of Odysseus.

27 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the GreatLakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Note esp.the introduction (ix–xvi).

Hurons, Iroquois, etc.) reached an “accommodation,” constructing acommon and mutually comprehensible world beyond a mere “contactzone.”28 The context of these encounters was not the sweeping territo-rial conquests and the destruction of Native American peoples but oneof significantly longer periods when no single, dictating authorityexisted in most of the areas concerned. Too often we think of colo-nization in terms of the conquest that it became in later generations.But it is the inability to dictate, that is, the lack of hegemonic controlover vast territories, that lies at the heart of the colonial experience.There are many examples in antiquity, and similar processes have beenidentified (without the application of Middle Ground terminology) byRobert Bartlett in medieval Europe, by Solange Alberro in Mexico, andby Norman Etherington in South Africa.29

The Middle Ground is a field in which each side plays a role dic-tated by what it perceives as the other’s perception of it, resulting fromthe mutual misrepresentation of values and practices. In time this role-playing, the outcome of “creative misunderstandings”—a kind of dou-ble mirror reflection—creates a “third” civilization that is neitherpurely native nor entirely imported by the colonizer. White observesthat when people apply their conventions and cultural expectations tonew situations, their performance causes a change in culture, a shiftin the conventions of both colonizer and colonized. Because of its insis-tence on historical contextualization and careful study of social prac-tices and representations, the Middle Ground approach is a convincingtool for problematizing the relationships of colonists and indigenouspopulations. Concepts such as “creolization,” “hybridity,” and “contactzones,”30 while helpful for pointing out “mutualities and negotiations


28 For the origin of the term contact zone see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Pratt’s emphasis on“transculturation,” the process of intercultural negotiation and selection, is impor-tant; White’s analysis adds another dimension to our understanding of this process.

29 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and CulturalChange, 950–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); SolangeAlberro, Les Espagnols dans le Mexique colonial: Histoire d’une acculturation (Paris: Colin,1992); Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa,1815–1854 (Harlow: Longman, 2001).

30 See Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 183–84, with reference especially to thework of Homi K. Bhabha; and Pratt.

across the colonial divide” (Moore-Gilbert, 116), are often too broadand too detached from historical processes, causes, and conscious agen-das. “Contact,” in particular, is unsatisfactory. Like “connection,” it isalways true in some sense, yet precisely for this reason it signifies littleunless heavily qualified. Hybridity has too many biological connotationsand, again, means little in and of itself. Creolization, because it is a lin-guistic metaphor, perhaps comes the closest to describing culturalnegotiation and mediation involving clearly defined cultural change(an aspect missing from both “hybridity” and “contact”). Middle Groundis vague, but thanks to White’s book about its function, it may now serveas a heuristic concept.

Yet the concept of the Middle Ground is appealing in the Mediter-ranean, where there was no empire to dictate anything (until Rome andits mare nostrum). The Mediterranean also forces us to see the “Greekversus natives” problem in terms of “networks of exchange” rather thanas if one culture poured itself from its own overflowing cups into theempty containers of the receiving culture. If “the Mediterranean isexchange,” as Fernand Braudel claims, it is the Mediterranean net-works that provided a context for colonial Middle Grounds.31

“Network” (réseau) is a key term in Mediterranean studies. The net-work may be one of trade: one port has no existence without another.It may be one of myth and religion: the presence of the Phoenician godMelqart in western Sicily made it possible for the myth of Herakles’ trav-els to be superimposed on the terrain. It may be one of identity: themythical Greek Odysseus became Utuse, the ancestor and leader of theEtruscans. These days the network concept is filtering everywhere,changing sets of values and assumed hierarchies of centers and periph-eries. It is characteristic of aspects of the Internet and postmodernthinking, presenting a new vision of geography and human space. It isquickly replacing the botanical metaphor common since the nine-teenth century: the “tree,” with its trunk and subsidiary “branches” oflanguages and races. The new mind-set is apparent in a variety ofexpressions in current critical thought. Arguing against “arborism” and


31 This phrase is often repeated in various forms in Braudel’s seminal work TheMediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds,2nd ed., 2 vols. (Glasgow: Collins, 1972–73).

in favor of networks, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari usethe image of the rhizome, an “endless,” interconnected root system (anetwork with no center) giving rise to leafy plants above the surface.The rhizome “assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface exten-sion in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers.” The rhizome,therefore, is a network: “Any point of a rhizome can be connected toany other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root,which plots a point, fixes an order.”32

It is my view that the interconnectedness of ancient Greek city-states, whose geographic horizons were ever widening—through suchnetworks as those of mother cities and colonies, trade connections, rit-ual embassies, oracular centers, Panhellenic sanctuaries, and politicaland military alliances—is not only what came to be “Greek civilization”but what was mainly responsible for it. The network, with its changingconnections and “bypasses,” its fluctuating points of importance andlack of a hierarchical center, created the virtual center of Greek iden-tity.33 Within these networks, it was confrontation in the MiddleGround—inhabited, from the Black Sea to the western Mediterranean,by non-Greek peoples more different from one another than theGreeks were among themselves—that shaped the “Greek” identity. Itwas also this Middle Ground that sometimes created irredentist claimsto colonial territories and at other times served the purpose of accom-modation.

Accommodation and Appropriation in Ancient Sicily

Both irredentism and accommodation are apparent in the ancientMediterranean and are prominently expressed in one historical situa-tion where Greeks, Phoenicians, and Elymians (of western Sicily) con-fronted each other. Analysis of this situation may illustrate the limits ofbinarism; the need for temporal relativism; the Greek, decentered


32 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-phrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),6–7.

33 See Irad Malkin, “Networks and the Emergence of Greek Identity,” in Mediter-ranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity, ed. Irad Malkin (London: Routledge, forth-coming).

approach to place, religion, and ethnicity; and the emergence of a Mid-dle Ground as a place of mutual negotiation within the Mediterraneannetwork.

In western Sicily, the Middle Ground is not just a metaphor but aphysical space where peoples interacted. Depending on changing cir-cumstances, each side—Greek and Phoenician colonists, native Elymi-ans—appropriated certain aspects of cultic and mythical figures fromthe “other,” sometimes for the sake of mediation and coexistence andsometimes to justify hostilities. The framework of this dynamic is myth-ical: one of the labors of Herakles was to overcome the monster Geryonand bring his herd of cattle from the edges of the earth back to Myce-nae. En route he stopped in Sicily (at modern Erice), where he foughtwith Eryx, the eponymous ruler of the northwestern tip of Sicily; hav-ing won, Herakles left the land in the hands of its inhabitants until theday when one of his own descendants should claim it.

Aristocrats who were considered true Herakleidai (descendants of Herakles) were often regarded as rightful rulers and founders. InSparta, for example, the heads of both royal houses were Herakleidai,as were the Corinthian founders of Syracuse (Sicily) and Corcyra(Corfu). About 580 BCE Pentathlos, a Herakleid from Knidos, in AsiaMinor, attempted to conquer western Sicily but failed; around 509 BCEDorieus, a Herakleid Spartan who was frustrated in his designs on thekingship, tried the same, hoping to found a city that he would call Her-akleia in honor of his ancestor. Dorieus was making use of a prophecythat claimed that “Herakles himself had acquired all the country ofEryx to belong to his descendants” (Herodotus, 5.43; see Malkin, Mythand Territory, 203–18).34 But he was killed while fighting a coalition ofPhoenician colonists and native Elymians. One of his followers, Philip-pos of Kroton, who also died in battle, embodied the fluidity of Greek-barbarian boundaries: he was “the most handsome of the Greeks of hisday” (Herodotus, 5.47), and because of his beauty, the Elymians, hisenemies, venerated him with his own cult. After Dorieus’s death, oneof his lieutenants, Euryleon, abandoned the Eryx project and instead


34 The final section of this essay is developed in much greater detail in IradMalkin, “Herakles and Melqart in the Western Mediterranean,” in Ethnic Appropria-tions and Cultural Borrowings, ed. Erich Gruen (forthcoming).

took over a colony belonging to the Greek city Selinous (modern Seli-nunte) in southwestern Sicily, which he refounded as Herakleia.

At first the story seems succinctly binary: a charter myth as explicitas that of Abraham and the Promised Land in the Old Testament, anattempted colonization with clear irredentist proclamations, initial fail-ure, and eventual fulfillment of the prophecy—although not at the siteoriginally intended. However, here too a Middle Ground approachreveals a far more complex and reversible situation.

The Herakles myth in Sicily belongs to the pan-Mediterranean net-work of Greek-Phoenician exchange. It was Phoenician Tyre that dis-seminated Melqart, with whom Herakles came to be identified, in thewestern Mediterranean.35 Tyre had been colonizing there at the sametime as the Greeks, founding settlements in Tunisia (Carthage), Sar-dinia, Malta, Sicily, and Spain. In Tyrian colonies the cult of Melqart,considered the founder both of Tyre itself and of its dynasty, was promi-nent, and annual ritual visits from the colonies to Tyre were de rigueur.That there were no kings in these colonies probably reflects the exclu-sive prerogative of the king of Tyre, who was defined in terms of hisassociation with Melqart (the name combines the words Mlq, “Lord,”and qrt, “city,” and so signifies “Lord of the City”). The Phoeniciansbrought his cult to Carthage, to Gadir in Spain, and to Sicily, where itwas associated with the temple of Astarte in Eryx. Founding a city andfounding a temple to Melqart were conceptually equivalent. Since theHerakles portrayed by Homer had been a wild adventurer and a nomad,rather than the founder of a city, it seems likely that attributing to himthe idea of a god-hero taking possession of territories and laying thefoundation of a city was originally Phoenician (see Aubet, 144–59).

It seems evident, if paradoxical, that the Phoenician colonists inSicily were responsible for creating there a cult geography of Melqart,which Greek colonists, in turn, identified with the mythical itinerary ofHerakles and then transformed into an irredentist charter. But it tookalmost a century and a half for the myth to become irredentist. Therewas a significant period during which, as White’s Middle Groundapproach would indicate, no single dictating authority existed in most


35 See Corinne Bonnet, Melqart: Cultes et mythes de l’Héraclès tyrien en Méditerranée(Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 1988).

of the areas concerned. Western Sicily had mostly been a “nondictat-ing” Middle Ground of Greeks, Phoenicians, and Elymians since thelate eighth century BCE until the failed attempts of Pentathlos (c. 580)and Dorieus (c. 509). Only with these two do we find Herakleid Greekstrying to “dictate” by creating a new language of colonial appropriationand justification. Their violent, unsuccessful efforts at colonizationneed not overshadow, teleologically, the long period of Middle Groundaccommodation that preceded them.

It was this Middle Ground situation that also allowed for a reversalof the use of the Herakles myth. Shortly after the death of Dorieus, themyth was used to pacify and mediate relations. Dorieus’s successor,Euryleon, founded his Herakleia on a site that had once belonged toPhoenicians and then had been taken over by another Greek city, Seli-nous. Its previous name, Makara, was Phoenician, and the promontoryby the city was probably called rsmlqrt, “Headland of Melqart.” If theidentification of Herakles and Melqart served Dorieus to justify irre-dentist claims, the same identification now served the purposes ofaccommodation and cooperation with Phoenicians and indigenouspopulations. When Euryleon’s Greeks founded the new Herakleia, theywere allying themselves with non-Greek locals against other Greeks.“Greek” colonization, therefore, did not mean Greek solidarity.

The binary approach is certainly legitimate, but only for the firsthalf of the story, the “Promised Land” part. If we scrape the surface, wesee that it was possible for the Greeks to graft the myth of Herakles ontowestern Sicily because the Phoenicians had already done so—the resultof a Middle Ground that had existed for almost two centuries. Para-doxically, this is probably why Dorieus expected his charter myth to betaken seriously. It is a mistake to see charter myths as merely cynical orone-sided. Wrongheaded or far-fetched as it may seem, an invadingpower with an explicit justification engraved on its banner expects thejustification to be accepted.

The Herakleia that was finally founded had a new emphasis: nolonger aggressively irredentist but, on the contrary, dedicated to theaccommodating language of the Middle Ground. It implied a newalliance with Herakles, the god-hero who could be seen as venerated byboth Greeks and Phoenicians. In Greek religious terms, Herakles-


Melqart already “held the land.” Thus a colonial charter myth meta-morphosed into a myth of pacification and mediation.

Conclusion

Greek colonization illustrates the prior existence of modalities differ-ent from modern colonialism. Although often treated in modern schol-arship as “Western” in culture and conduct, Greek colonization indi-cates, on the contrary, the existence of a world diametrically opposedto the hierarchical, centralized concept of the Christian-territorial king-dom or empire: a decentered political space comprising numerous sov-ereign, geographically noncontiguous city-states. And unlike Christiancolonialism, Greek colonization did not aim to convert. It operated inthe polytheistic Mediterranean, a diffuse world of gods and heroes, withreligions devoid of canonical sacred texts, often lacking professionalcastes of priests and revealed (or any other) “truths” to teach theindigenous peoples. Nonhierarchical and nonexclusionary, Greek col-onization shared in a wide-ranging network that included various nativepopulations and other maritime colonists, such as the Phoenicians andthe Etruscans.

Nor did the Greeks set out with the explicit intention to “Hel-lenize.” During the Archaic period they did not colonize to disseminatea superior civilization, for the simple reason that they did not think thatthere was any “Greek man’s burden” to bear. In the Mediterranean Mid-dle Ground a new discourse of hostility might have emerged, but nei-ther calculated Hellenization nor cultural imperialism can be tracedthere. Instead of considering acculturation a zero-sum game, a searchfor “who was first” or whose influence was stronger, one should applythe concept of the network—reciprocal, accumulative, dynamic—toanalyze colonial encounters. The Sicilian Middle Ground worked be-cause it belonged to a much greater network: the ancient Mediter-ranean, where a Phoenician Melqart could be exchanged with a GreekHerakles, with diametrically opposed political uses: irredentism andaccommodation.

Observing ancient Greek colonization through the prism of mod-ern imperialism and colonialism is therefore misleading. It must be


viewed rather as a network with crosscurrents gradually growing andspreading through the constant overlapping of additional subnet-works—of trade, religion, migration, religious cults, and more. Theseaspects form a multifocal lens through which to view colonial encoun-ters and identities.

The contemporary need to theorize our postcolonial world—cast-ing doubt on essentialism and accepted hierarchies—and the empha-sis on creolization, hybridity, and contact zones have joined here withMediterranean historiographical concepts, especially Braudel’s réseau,and with colonial Middle Ground theory. I doubt that such helpful con-cepts could have emerged without changes in our own prisms of obser-vation and new questions posed by postcolonial theorists. These nowallow (and are prodding) historians of antiquity to see ancient colo-nization in a different light.

Irad Malkin is Maxwell Cummings Chair for Mediterranean History and Culture andprofessor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University, where he coedits the MediterraneanHistorical Review and directs the Center for Mediterranean Civilizations Project.Among his publications are Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (1987), Mythand Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (1994), and The Returns of Odysseus:Colonization and Ethnicity (1998), as well as an edited collection, Ancient Perceptionsof Greek Ethnicity (2001).


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