Identities, Ethnicities and Gender in Antiquity

Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Alison Keith, Florence Klein, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Alison Keith, Florence Klein

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110719970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The question of 'identity' arises for any individual or ethnic group when they come into contact with a stranger or another people. Such contact results in the self-conscious identification of ways of life, customs, traditions, and other forms of society as one's own specific cultural features and the construction of others as characteristic of peoples from more or less distant lands, described as very 'different'. Since all societies are structured by the division between the sexes in every field of public and private activity, the modern concept of 'gender' is a key comparator to be considered when investigating how the concepts of identity and ethnicity are articulated in the evaluation of the norms and values of other cultures. The object of this book is to analyze, at the beginning Western culture, various examples of the ways the Greeks and Romans deployed these three parameters in the definition of their identity, both cultural and gendered, by reference to their neighbours and foreign nations at different times in their history. This study also aims to enrich contemporary debates by showing that we have yet to learn from the ancients' discussions of social and cultural issues that are still relevant today.

Part I: Masculinity, Dress and Body

Ionians, Egyptians, Thracians: Ethnicity and Gender in Attic Vase-Painting

François Lissarrague

More than 40 years ago, around 1977, I began a dissertation project dealing with ‘the representation of Barbarians’ in Attic vase-painting. The topic was suggested to me by Pierre Vidal Naquet, to whom I had submitted a paper on the fight between Pygmies and cranes. He was at that time interested in ‘marginals’, forms of alterity and ‘otherness’ (without any Lacanian perspective). No one spoke of ‘ethnicity’. As to ‘gender’, that was still to come. The great novelty of the time was, some years later, the development of the history of women.¹

During that research on ‘Barbarians’ I was using an ‘emic’ concept, βάρβαροι (‘barbarians’), and dwelled on a saying attributed to Thales, who was happy “to be a human being, not an animal; to be a man, not a woman; to be a Greek, not a Barbarian”.² This Hellenocentric scheme fit perfectly with Athenian vase-painting, and I only had to collect the evidence and organize it to produce a relatively complete catalogue of such documents. I never wrote that dissertation, because a German colleague published his own dissertation under the title Zum Barbarenbild in der Kunst Athens.³ So I shifted my project, limiting it to Thracians and Scythian warriors.⁴ However, I used some of that evidence in separate articles, written in collaboration.

The first one deals with images of comasts commonly called ‘anacreontics’, in the scholarly tradition; it was written in collaboration with Françoise Frontisi and published in 1983.⁵ The second, written with Jean-Louis Durand, analyzes the story of Herakles and Busiris.⁶ A third group of images was discussed at length with Marcel Detienne, when he was working on Orpheus; it was not published as a joint article, but I dedicated a later paper, published in 1994, to him: “Orphée mis à mort.”⁷

The reason for turning back to these articles is not just selfish nostalgia; it seems that they can be usefully combined in terms of articulation around the notions of identity, ethnicity, and gender. This last notion, in particular, which was not used in these early papers, sheds an interesting light on the categories at stake in these three groups of images.

In this short paper I will briefly summarize the main aspects of each of these three series of pictures, using a sample of characteristic examples, in order to underline the relationship they suggest between identity, ethnicity, and gender, and to show how gender, as an analytical tool, helps to better understand the contrasts involved in these groups of representations, and also to better understand the way images build a network of discriminating signs structuring the Athenian imagination.

1 ‘Anacreontics’

Let us begin with the so called ‘anacreontics’.⁸ It is a group of vases showing a bearded figure in a long chiton, wearing a σάκκος (‘headgear’), sometimes earrings, these last two signs being a visual mark of female dress (fig. 1).⁹

Fig. 1: Boston 13.199, red-figure lekythos.

When such figures wear an open dress, the male sex is visible, which demonstrates that these figures are not bearded women dressed as men, but the opposite: men dressed as women, playing the Other (fig. 2).¹⁰

Fig. 2: Paris, Louvre G4bis, red-figure cup.

The beard is a graphic way of showing the maleness of these figures. Some of these images are labelled with the name of Anacreon and some authors think they are portraits of the poet himself (fig. 3).¹¹

Fig. 3: Syracuse 26967, red-figure lekythos.

We have demonstrated that this is not the case; the word ‘anakreon’ appearing on some vases is not a label naming the poet, but a reference to a poetic genre, and to a kind of κῶμος (‘dancing group’), popular in Athens when Anakreon paid a visit to that city.

This series of images plays with the reference to the Ionian world, without really marking a specific ethnicity, as the Athenians do not need to distinguish themselves form the Ionians. In this series, it is the experimentation of feminine alterity which is displayed, in the frame of the Dionysiac practice. Gender is temporarily put into question as a category, which can elucidate the shift from anatomical maleness to social experimentation of the other sex.

2 2 ‘Busiris’

The Heracles and Busiris series has much to do with ethnicity. Heracles reaches Egypt at the time of a drought; Busiris, the Pharaoh, in order to obey an oracle, sacrifices every oncoming foreigner; so Heracles is to be sacrified. We see him taken to an altar, and suddenly realizing he is the victim; he fights against the priests and destroys the entire order of the ritual. We were interested, Jean-Louis Durand and myself, in this story because these images show a kind of human sacrifice in which the sacrificial ritual is inverted, and all the elements of the standard sarifice are displaced; the sacrificial basket is falling down, and the μάχαιρα (‘sacrificial knife’), the sacrificial knife, which is almost never shown in standard sacrifices, is here clearly visible. By this displacement, these images reveal what is usually hidden, or at least not shown, in the standard sacrifice. Clearly these images have nothing to do with ethnographic documents; they do not describe the Egyptian way of sacrificing. They show how the Greek vase-painters imagine the Egyptian episode in the Heracles saga. All the instruments reproduced in these pictures are perfectly Greek (altar, basket, knives, spits, etc.).

More interesting, in terms of ethnicity and gender, is the way the Egyptians are conceived and depicted. On a pelike by the Pan painter (fig. 4),¹² the Egyptians are bald, pug-nosed, and their chitons are systematically lifted to show their genitals, and that they are all circumcised. A different masculinity is exhibited by the painter, clearly a non-Greek masculinity. On other images in that series, the Egyptian priests wear long dress and earrings, which are feminine markers (fig. 5).¹³

Fig. 4: Athens NM 9683, red-figure pel...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I: Masculinity, Dress and Body
• Part II: Gender, Political Leaders and Ethnic Identity
• Part III: Cleopatra’s Survival and Metamorphosis in RomanPoetry
• Part IV: Love, Oriental Ethnicity and Gender in Roman Literature
• Part V: Constructing or Deconstructing Female Ethnicity in Late Antiquity
• List of Contributors
• General Index
• Index Locorum