The Birth of Territory

Stuart Elden

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226041285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth's surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition?             The Birth of Territory provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth's surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

The Polis and the Khora

AUTOCHTHONY AND THE MYTH OF ORIGINS

Foucault warns us that genealogists will never confuse themselves with a search for origins.¹ It is for this reason that we cannot simply find a birth of territory, a singular moment, which could be outlined and its lineages traced backward. Rather, the approach taken here is to ask questions of the texts in terms of the relations between place and power that they pose, to see how they understood things in different ways and with different vocabularies, in order to try to see where strands emerge, intertwine, run to nothing, are picked up, and transformed. So, where do we begin? With a suspicion, a doubt, a question? The intent and attempt of this project has been outlined in the introduction, but the question of beginnings remains to be resolved. It is not the intention to begin this inquiry into the state of territory with an Ur-state, an Ursprung, or a primal political leap. Instead, we join the story some way along the path, at a familiar, though less well-known than might be imagined, point, at the site of the Greek polis. Martin Bernal’s important and ongoing inquiries should act as caution to see this as the root or fountain of Western culture,² and earlier configurations of location and political rule should not be downplayed.³ But a study has to begin somewhere, and the kind of approach being offered here requires some limits of temporality, scope, and especially linguistic competence.

Greek myth is a notoriously complicated and contentious field. To cite it in support of an argument may seem tantamount to collusion with the unconfirmed. A more verifiable source is tragedy, although this too is debatable in supporting a case. But both myth and tragedy were essential to a living polis, and so are potentially valuable in recapturing the use of the term.

The myth discussed here, which is often drawn upon in tragedy, is that of autochthony, the idea that men sprang up fully formed, born of the earth. There are many variants and variant interpretations of the myth of autochthony. Loraux draws a distinction between the Platonic myth of the gêgenis, the idea that people were born (gen) of the earth (gê); and the autochthonous Athenian or Theban myths—from autokhthôn, born from the earth (khthôn) itself (autos) of one’s homeland.⁴ These three main areas—the role of gêgenis and autochthony in Plato, Athens, and Thebes—will be the focus here, though, as shall be seen, the distinction is not quite as clear-cut as Loraux suggests.

An early version of the story, which lies behind many of the others, is found in Isocrates’s Panegyricus:

We did not become dwellers in this land by expelling others, nor by finding it uninhabited, nor by coming together here as a motley horde of many races. We are a lineage so noble and pure that we have for all time continued in possession of the very land which gave us birth, since we are autochthonous, and can address our polis by the very names which apply to our nearest kin; for we alone of the Greeks have the right to call it at once fatherland, nurse and mother.⁵

In Plato, there are a number of references to the myth of autochthony. In the little-known Menexenus, Socrates is repeating a speech of Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles. As the speech is a funeral oration, it is not difficult to detect a level of satire against Thucydides’s report of Pericles’s own oration,⁶ though the speech referring to autochthony is also a parody of Isocrates.⁷ According to Socrates, Aspasia suggested that Athenians were descended from men who were:

not foreigners, nor are these their sons settlers in this land, descended from strangers who came to our country from abroad. These men were autochthonous, sprung from the land itself, living and dwelling in their true fatherland, nurtured by no stepmother, as others are, but by their mother the land [khoras] where they dwell. And now in death they lie in the place proper to them, received back again by the mother who bore and nurtured them.⁸

In the Republic, autochthony is the basis of the “noble lie” (pseudos). It is suggested that with a single noble lie, the rulers themselves, or at least the rest of the polis, can be indoctrinated.⁹ This lie, called a “Phoenician lie,”¹⁰ which probably refers to the tale of Cadmus the Phoenician, discussed below,¹¹ will be to suggest that

all the nurture and education we provided happened in a kind of dreamworld; in actual fact, they were at that time being formed and nurtured deep inside the earth. . . . When they were finished products, the earth, their mother, sent them up above ground; and now in their policy making they must regard the country [khoras] they find themselves in as their mother and their nurse, they must defend her against invasion, and they should think of the rest of the inhabitants of the polis as their earth-born [gegenon] brothers.¹²

The noble lie serves a key purpose: it will enable all people to claim noble origins.¹³ It makes explicit the close and organic link between the people, the land (khora), and the polis. In the Republic, Plato recognizes the important political implications this can have, even as, in the Menexenus, he satirizes the idea. It may not be true, but if it can be believed, it can have a powerful effect as a founding myth. The notion is also treated in the dialogue known as the Statesman. Statesman is a limited English equivalent of Politikos, which means “the possessor of politiké tekhné or the skill of uniting and organising a political community.”¹⁴ Here, the visitor relates a story of a past age, in which people were born from the earth rather than from other humans.¹⁵ The earthborn (gêgenis) race would reform in the earth after their death and come back to life. This would be in accord with the “reversal undergone by all natural cycles.”¹⁶ In time the earthborn race was exhausted, because every soul had fulfilled its quota of incarnations.¹⁷

What is important about the use of the myth in the Statesman is that it refers back to a past age, which precedes the current one; and that all humans at that time were earthborn. The implication is that no one can claim uniqueness in being descended from these earthborn humans, because, at the same time, none and all were. As Lane puts it, “No city can claim its founders in these earthbound humans, lodged firmly in an era without politics and deprived of the sexual intercourse by which the polis is perpetuated.”¹⁸ However, the treatment in the Statesman seems to be the exception, and in the use to which Plato envisages the myth can be put in the Republic, there is a reflection of the actual situation in Athens and Thebes.¹⁹ The autochthonous birth of Athenians or Thebans is enough to set them apart.²⁰ Others might be initially migrant people who settled in a certain area, but the people of Athens and Thebes had a deeply rooted attachment to the soil, to the particular place. They were not just born there, but born from there. As Aristotle notes in the Rhetoric, good birth for a nation or polis is either autochthonous or at least ancient.²¹

The story of Athens is passed down largely through mythic accounts such as those recounted by Apollodorus and is found in Herodotus’s Histories, and drawn upon in Euripides’s play Ion. A standard version of the story is that Erichthonios was a miraculous child born from the earth (ge), or Gaia, made fertile by Hephaistos’s desire for the virgin Athena.²² Athena had been born from Zeus, with Hephaistos acting as a kind of midwife, splitting Zeus’s head open so she could spring forth. It is unclear whether Hephaistos’s desire for her was immediate or consequent; usually the story is that she went to have some armor fashioned by him. Hephaistos tried to rape her, and in so doing, he spilled semen on her leg, which she cleaned off with a piece of wool. Athena dropped the wool to the earth, and Erichthonios was born. Earth gave the child to Athena, who brought him up in her temple. Euripides says that Erichthonios was gêgenous, “born of the earth”; that Athena took him up from the earth with “virginal hands.”²³ Erichthonios’s name derives from this act: erion (wool) or eris (struggle) joined with khthon (earth).²⁴ He is sometimes fused with his grandson Erechtheus and their stories conflated.²⁵ This gave Athenians a language for speaking about the origin of the city. For Euripides, they are the “renowned earth-born [autokhthonas] inhabitants of Athens”;²⁶ for Aristophanes, “The true-born Attics are the genuine old autochthones, native children of the ground.”²⁷

Erichthonios is both autochthonous and a product of a bisexual transaction. Athenians can thus claim to be the children of earth and gods,²⁸ and in Homer’s Iliad, Athena fostered the child born by earth.²⁹ Loraux suggests that Kekrops, the first king of Athens, is a witness or even arbiter of this divine eris, but though he is the first king, it is Erichthonius who is the first Athenian. “Kekrops rules and establishes order in a barely civilised land; Erichthonios, in Herodotus, exercises a power that is already political.”³⁰ It is for this reason that Loraux calls Athens the “most ‘political’ of all the Greek poleis.”³¹ She notes how this notion of autochthony functions as a civic bond, particularly in the funeral orations, of which Pericles’s is only the most famous. She suggests that the funeral oration utilizes the patriotic and civic myth of autochthony in order to promote the unity of the Athenian community, and that it “is a political symbol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Coda: Territory as a Political Technology
• Notes
• Index