MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly

Discussions of orientalism and colonialism sometimes reach back to Classical Greece, reputed to be the originator of Western binary attitudes to the other, the subaltern, or the colonized.¹ Historians are usually wary of such claims, especially when faced with anachronisms (projecting onto antiquity alien concepts, categories, and prisms of observation) or with disregard for processes of change and continuity. In my own work on ancient Greek religion, myth, and colonization, I have used postcolonial notions such as charter myths, ethnicity, binary thinking, hybridity, temporal relativism, middle ground, and networks and found them to be meaningful tools of analysis (although some of them may be less familiar to postcolonial thinkers who have come to the field from literary studies). In turn, postcolonial theory might benefit from a closer study of ancient Greek civilization. Perhaps a reverse anachronism may be useful: sometimes projecting onto modern theory concepts, categories, and prisms of observation borrowed from the history [End Page 341] of Greek antiquity, as well as applying some general concepts from Mediterranean studies, might prove helpful for postcolonial thinkers.

We need also to tread carefully because of the tendency of disciplines to extend themselves. In general, applying postcolonial concepts and terms such as colonizer and colonized to antiquity implies a wider scope for postcolonial study. But it must be asked whether we project such terms onto the past in order that ancient examples might subsequently provide historical "depth" to the modern postcolonial phenomenon and afford "universal" validity to observations of postcolonial thinkers. I can see why ancient Greece would be attractive: drawing parallels and continuities from ancient Greek views of "barbarians," or ancient Greek practices of colonization, could provide historical depth to postcolonial critique, which could then contextualize itself not as an ad hoc field of study, bounded by the history of the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, but as firmly relevant to past millennia and with universal implications for future history. In the same vein, students of antiquity might find postcolonial angles attractive, since these might make the "classics" appear more widely relevant to the humanities.²

The ancient Mediterranean and postcolonial theory have a lot to tell each other if we bear such parameters in mind. In this essay I discuss a cluster of issues pertinent to the nexus of ancient and modern colonial thought and practice. I address anachronism and binary approaches; compare certain characteristics of Greek colonization to modern colonialism; examine the implications of ancient religious polytheism for modern binary, Christian-conditioned interpretations; suggest the usefulness of concepts developed by Mediterranean studies historians, especially the réseau (network); and consider the uses of [End Page 342] the notion of the "Middle Ground," developed by a modern historian of colonialism. I end with a historical illustration of the variabilities of the colonial experience in the Middle Ground, where cults and myths could be used as charters for the conquest of or, conversely, for mediation among colonizing peoples (Greeks, Phoenicians) and indigenous populations.

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 rocking the cradle of Western civilization. The fact that Europe defines itself in terms of the ancient Greek world does not, of course, mean that the ancient Greeks owed their self-definition, in terms of either racial prejudices or national units, to categories important to modern Europe. To illustrate with a lesser-known example: Emil Ludwig, one of the proponents both of Mediterranean studies and of a naive kind of "hybridity," was keenly aware of anachronism. His beautifully written book of 1942, The Mediterranean: Saga of the Sea, carried such a powerful and liberal message of hope that it was translated from German into English, and published that year in London, in the midst of the Second World War. It is curious to find in Ludwig's book the outline of a "liberal-racist" historical geography of the Mediterranean, which...