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Notes
“The Development of the Idea of Race: Classical Paradigms and Medieval Elaborations,”International Journal of the Classical Tradition 5 (1998-1999), 570.
As Benjamin Isaac writes in the work under review: “There is a consensus that (racism) originated in the nineteenth century and has intellectual roots in that century… Since racism is thought not to be attested earlier, conventional wisdom usually denies that there was any race hatred in the ancient world. The prejudices that existed, so it is believed, were ethnic or cultural, not racial” (1). In support of this view, he quotes from a recent work on the history of racism likewise citing such consensus (1 n. 3). While Isaac’s work is primarily concerned with demonstrating the presence of racism in classical antiquity, there have been other important attempts to determine whether identities in the later medieval period can likewise be linked to modern notions of race. See especially Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,”Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001), 39–56.
See my review article, “By Any Other Name? Ethnicity and the Study of Ancient Identity,”The Classical Bulletin 79, 1 (2003), 93–109 for a lengthier discussion of this trend.
Isaac provides a brief evaluation of earlier studies he finds especially relevant to his own work (39-44), although he notably defers mention of scholarship on Blacks in antiquity until a few pages later, where he dismisses it rather summarily (49). Given Isaac’s interest in linking ancient perceptions about cultural contact and racial identity to more modern theories, readers might be surprised to find that he completely avoids discussion of Martin Bernal’s multi-volumeBlack Athena and the controversies it has generated, nor does Bernai even appear in his bibliography. Notably, whereas Isaac seeks to demonstrate the continuity of certain views across time, Bernal argues that scholars beginning in the eighteenth-century have imposed their own contemporary racial ideologies onto classical antiquity, distorting the ancient Greeks’ relatively positive views of their cultural connections to Egyptian and Phoenician civilization. Two volumes of Bernal’sBlack Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987–1991) have now appeared:The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (Volume 1) and TheArchaeological and Documentary Evidence (Volume 2). Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, edd.Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) provides a mainly hostile response to the entire project; many of its essays have recently been addressed at length in Martin Bernai and David Chioni Moore, edd.Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001) (reviewed in this journal by Mary Lefkowitz, “Black Athena: The Sequel (Part 1),”IJCT 9 [2002–2003], 598–603). For a fresh perspective on the influence ofBlack Athena beyond the field of classics, see Jacques Berlinerblau,Heresy in the University: the Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
See, for example,The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) andThe Near East Under Roman Rule: Selected Papers, Mnemosyne, Suppl. 177 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1998).
Isaac writes of the resulting intellectual movements: “Those who define racism in recent U.S. publications tend to concentrate on physical aspects, while those who did so in Europe in 1950 tried to understand forms of discrimination that existed in spite of the physical similarity of the discriminated. Let me state it in one sentence: U.S. blacks were never forced to wear the equivalent of the Star of David for the sake of identification” (51).
Isaac writes that “a few critics” responded to his admission that his own experiences were central to the development of his intellectual work by turning it against him and accusing him “of openly acknowledged bias” (51). I, however, found only praise forThe Limits of Empire in standard reviews, such as S. Thomas Parker’s review inJournal of Roman Archeology 5 (1992), 467–72, and Susan Alcock’s review inAmerican Journal of Archeology 98 (1994), 792–94. Still, one reviewer, Walter Kaegi, in an otherwise positive assessment inClassical Philology 88 (1993), 183–185, warns Isaac to “be careful not to project back on the Romans perspectives derived from experiences of the more recent Israeli occupation of territories and related theories and practices” (185).
Scholarly work in this area, of course, often follows broader trends in social thought and political ideology, as well as theories and methods developed in related disciplines like cultural anthropology. Examples within ancient studies include: Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas,Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, A Documentary history of primitivism and related ideas 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935); E. R. Dodds,The Greeks and the Irrational, Sather Classical Lectures 25 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1951); H. C. Baldry,The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); Page duBois,Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being, Women and Culture Series (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982); and Arlene W. Saxonhouse,Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
For example: Frank M. Snowden, Jr.,Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970) and Lloyd Thompson,Romans and Blacks (Norman, Oklahoma and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989). Such individual approaches have especially flourished in scholarship employing the terms “Hellenization” and “Romanization” and in regard to Greek colonization and/or Roman rule in various regional contexts. Isaac’s own scholarship examines the Near East under Roman domination, and other recent work addressing questions of Roman imperial policy and cultural contact within specific territories or provinces includes: Stephen Mitchell,Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); David Cherry,Frontier and Society in Roman North Africa (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Ton Derks,Gods, Temples, and Ritual Practices: the Transformation of Religious Ideas and Values in Roman Gaul, Amsterdam Archaeological Studies 2 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998); Greg Woolf,Becoming Roman: the Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Guy Jolyon Bradley,Ancient Umbria: State, Culture, and Identity in Central Italy from the Iron Age to the Augustan Era (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Robert Jackson,At Empire’s Edge: Exploring Rome’s Egyptian Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Raymond Van Dam,Kingdom of Snow: Roman Rule and Greek Culture inCappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Essay collections that apply a thematic approach to questions of cultural interaction under the Romans include: Ray Laurence and Joanne Berry, edd.,Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Mario Torelli,Tota Italia: Essays in the Cultural Formation of Roman Italy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Sarah Scott and Jane Webster, edd.,Roman Imperialism and Provincial Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Giving name to more traditional (and often one-sided) views of cultural contact, the terms “Hellenization” and “Romanization” have themselves come under closer scrutiny in recent years. See, for example, Philip S. Alexander, “Hellenism and Hellenization as Problematical Historical Categories,” inPaul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide, ed. T. Engberg-Pedersen (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 63–80. Finally, there has been substantial scholarship in recent years addressing ancient Greek and Roman interactions with, as well as accompanying attitudes towards, the Jews. Begin with: John J. Collins,Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (New York: Crossroad, 1986); Louis H. Feldman,Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Peter SchÄfer,Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997) (reviewed in this journal by Louis H. Feldman,IJCT 6 [1999–2000], 602–605).
He briefly examines the status of Christians contrasting it with that of the Jews (484-491). Emphasizing the various prohibitions against Christianity, Isaac concludes that, in the eyes of the Romans, the Christians, unlike the Jews, lacked “any ethnic association” (491), i.e., they “were not a people, even if there existed a tendency, among some of their authors, to describe themselves as a people” (484). As this disclaimer suggests, however, scholars of early Christianity using the Christian texts themselves generally have a much more complicated reading of Christian identity. See especially Denise Kimber Buell,Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia Unviersity Press, 2005).
His view of the relationship between hostile ideas and imperial acts is perhaps best conveyed by his succinct (and alliterative) statement: “This is not to say that there was a direct causality, but at least a correspondence which is not coincidental” (255).
Isaac does not evaluate the specific linguistic gap identified here (i.e., whether there is in fact such a term in Greek), but rather links the sentiment to a larger range of stereotypes attached to the Greeks by the Romans (391-930), calling this particular charge “an interesting form of collective disapproval,” one made possible “because they (i.e., the Romans) knew Greek well” (392). Elaine Fantham,The Roman World of Cicero’s De Oratore (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) places Cicero’s text within its broader social and intellectual context; Fantham offersakairia as a suitable Greek equivalent forineptus (74. n. 51). Showing similar Roman disdain for the Greek language, the politician Cato, after using a translator during his visit to Athens, contrasted the brevity of his original Latin statements with the length of their Greek translations, concluding that whereas Greek words were born on the lips, Latin words came from the heart (Plutarch,Cato Maior 12.3; Isaac discusses the longer passage at 386–87).
The English word race itself makes a relatively late appearance (seemingly derived in the sixteenth-century from the French wordrace and/or the Italianrazza), while the term ethnicity can obviously be traced all the way back to classical antiquity and the Greek wordethnos. Isaac notes that the term racism itself does not even appear in the 1910Oxford English Dictionary (1).
Specifically, Isaac argues that whereas modern readers tend to interpret Herodotus as believing that the Greeks were in a “struggle for the freedom of the individual in the broadest sense of the term,” in fact, Herodotus understood the fight for freedom in the strict sense of freedom from foreign political domination (269). Kurt Raaflaub,The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, trans. Renate Franciscono (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004) (reviewed in this journal by P. J. Rhodes, “Freedom and Other Values in Greece,”IJCT 12 [2005–2006], 94–103) traces the shifting meanings of the term “freedom” in Greek thought more extensively, arguing in particular that “(t)he Persian Wars were indeed conceptualized at the time as a struggle for freedom and against servitude… Yet the idea of freedom, still understood in concrete and elementary ways, was by no means ubiquitous or dominant” (86). Raaflaub finds the shift toward greater emphasis on freedom occurring “only a few years after the events, around the mid-470’s” (86). In charting the specific connotations of the term freedom, Raaflaub helpfully points out that the concept was initially defined in relation to equality rather than opposition to tyranny (96ff.). While the latter meaning emerges specifically during the Persian Wars, he links the former meaning to the earlier spread of debt bondage, i.e., to crisis within thepolis (254ff.). According to Raaflaub, it is only when this conceptual dilemma is settled, i.e., “in (the) fully developed poleis, with a broadened and solidified base and a more self-conscious and self-confident citizen body” that the meaning of freedom can be transformed to address the threat of tyranny (255).
I must admit that my approval of Isaac’s approach corresponds in no small way to my call in an earlier review for just such precision when using terms like race in classical studies (n. 3 above). My frustration in that review emanated from what I felt was a confusing overlap between the terms race, ethnicity, and cultural identity in recent classical scholarship and, even more, an increasing avoidance of the term race.
Scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines have pointed out the fundamental flaws in treating race as an objective explanation for human difference. Those seeking to confirm its specific debunking within the scientific community, however, might begin with a series of articles published byDiscovery magazine in November, 1994.
American readers might note that, in situating his study, Isaac does not really engage the contemporary field of critical race theory which, to a large degree, has been developed in the U.S. In many ways, the methods and conclusions of critical race theory do not fundamentally challenge Isaac’s assumptions and approach, although they tend to be more attentive to the complicated relationship between terms like race and ethnicity—and to be fairly skeptical of the reasons why terms like cultural identity have increased in popularity in recent years; see, for example: Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity” reprinted inIdentities, edd. K. A. Appiah and H. L. Gates, Jr. (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1995), 32–62. Jonathan M. Hall has recently addressed the potential overlap of ethnicity and cultural identity in ancient studies inHellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). Isaac, on the other hand, remains fairly vague about the term cultural identity, nor does he acknowledge its increasing importance in classical studies. 18. This view has been perhaps most cogently expressed by Jonathan Hall; see for example:Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 182.
Isaac notes, for example, that his work does not address the “question of who and what was Greek” (511), a topic that has been energetically taken up elsewhere. See: Greg Woolf, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,”Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994), 116–143; Simon Goldhill, ed.,Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Irad Malkin, ed.,Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, Center for Hellenic Studies colloquia 5 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Kathryn Lomas, ed.,Greek Identity in the Western Mediterranean: Papers in Honour of Brian Shefton, Mnemosyne, Suppl. 246 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004). Isaac alludes to similar complexity in the term “Roman” when he writes of Plutarch: “In his historical observations and approach he fully identifies with Rome, even if he would not call himself ‘a Roman’” (401).
Michel de Certeau presents an invaluable model for identifying resistance in a range of everyday social practices and procedures inThe Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steve Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Resistance and other tactics of the structurally disempowered have been a critical, if at times muted, theme of classical scholarship over the past decades; see: Ramsay MacMullen,Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966); David Daube,Civil Disobedience in Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972); Christopher and Sonia Hawkes, edd.,Greeks, Celts, and Romans: Studies in Venture and Resistance, Archaeology into History 1 (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973); Keith R. Bradley,Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 B.C.-70 b.c. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Peter S. Wells,The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Isaac, for example, discusses a passage from Pliny the Younger’sPanegyricus, in which Pliny displays conspicuous anxiety about the Romans’ reliance on Egyptian grain, despite the fact that they have conquered Egypt militarily (31-32; Isaac discusses at 360–61). In his attempt to (re)define the relationship as one of Egyptian subservience rather than Roman dependence, Pliny pointedly orders Egypt to consider its grain “tribute” rather than “sustenance” (discat igitur Aegyptus credatque experimento, non alimenta se nobis sed tributa praestare, 31.3). The Romans’ complicated view of Egyptians involves their recognition of Egypt’s past greatness, even as they feel contempt for its present status, a tension between past glory and present subordination that features in their attitude towards the Greeks as well.
Although noting the difference between European and American versions of race, Isaac suggests that the American form, through events like the civil-rights movement, has dominated the global imagination, observing that: “The external appearance of the body received more attention over the past decades, and people tend to forget that racism could exist just as well where physical differences are insignificant” (19). It is only by adhering to this often overlooked alternative definition of race today (one not reliant on skin color distinctions) that Isaac can make a statement like: “(I)t could even be said that the Athenians regarded themselves as a ‘race’ in modern terms” (165).
Roxann Wheeler,The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, ser. New Cultural Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) gives an excellent analysis of some of the debates behind various racial theories. To learn more about the specific impact of theories of human origin on racial “science,” begin with Stephen Jay Gould, “American Polygeny and Craniometry Before Darwin: Blacks and Indians as Separate, Inferior Species,” in S. Harding, ed.,The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, ser. Race, Gender, and Science (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 84–115.
See Snowden (n. 9 above) and Snowden,Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983). Mary Lefkowitz, “Ancient History, Modern Myths,” inBlack Athena Revisited, edd. M. R. Lefkowitz and G. M. Rogers (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), for example, openly seeks to shift the terms of debate away from race by evoking Snowden in arguing that “the Greeks classified people by nationality rather than skin color, as Frank Snowden pointed out a quarter-century ago” (21).
Snowden (n. 9 above), 218.
Comments like the following simply dodge the question: “An omission that will strike many readers as eccentric is systematic discussion of the attitudes towards black Africans. Ancient ideas about Africans are highly interesting. Much has been said, and may still be said, about Blacks in the ancient world, but the present study is not the place for it, because they did not form much of an actual presence in the Greek and Roman worlds” (49).
In fact, it would be even more accurate to note that the black skin of male heroes on Attic black-figure vases is a function of the vases’ mode of production and resulting artistic conventions. So, too, as Bridget M. Thomas notes, skin color distinctions of black versus white on Greek vases are far more likely to serve as markers of gender, that is, masculinity versus femininity, than of racial identity. See: Thomas, “Constraints and Contradictions: Whiteness and Femininity in Ancient Greece,” in L. Llewellyn-Jones, ed.,Women’s Dress in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth; Swansea: Classical Press of Wales; Oakville, Connecticut: David Brown Book Co., 2002), 2. Thomas goes on to trace the use of “whiteness” as an ideal of femininity in Greek literature, as well as to discuss Greek women’s presumed practice of using white lead make-up in trying to embody such an ideal (3–12). It is more apparent in the reproduction on the inside of the book that Heracles’ skin is slightly lighter than that of the priests, but, given the cover’s visual impact, I have used black to refer to both shades in my discussion.
Martin Bemal provoked similar critique for his admission that, although he suggested changing the working titleBlack Athena, his publisher insisted on keeping it, claiming: “Blacks no longer sell. Women no longer sell. But black women still sell!” quoted in Bemal, “Black Athena and the APA,”Arethusa special issue (1989), 32.
There is one ancient literary text that explores the role of skin color in marking difference: Heliodorus’Aithiopika. Daniel L. Seiden has written an important study of both the semiotic function of skin color in Heliodorus and the text’s subsequent influence on later African American writers in “Aithiopika and Ethiopianism” in Richard Hunter, ed.,Studies in Heliodorus, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Supplementary volume, n. 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1998), 182–217. Arguing that theAithiopika “identifies skin color as anaporia” (184), Seiden concludes that the text ultimately demonstrates “the impossibility of correlating skin color with ethnicity or race in any meaningful way at all” (212). Selden’s reference to later racial ideologies in plotting the significance of the ancient text is very helpful, but the novel itself should not be taken as any clear evidence for the emergence of a racial theory based on skin color in antiquity. For one, the text draws as much on theories of aesthetics and representation, ideas central to the ancient novel, as any discourses about identity and race. Thus, the novel suggests that an Ethiopian princess has been born with white skin because her mother was looking at a painting of a white-skinned Andromeda at the moment of conception. Although, the novel does, then, exhibit cagey awareness of the incongruity of certain aspects of Greek myth and art in light of rapidly expanding contact with, and knowledge of, other cultures (bringing into question, for example, the previous naive imagining of a white Ethiopian princess), it does not necessarily treat such attitudes as racial theory. Given the overall centrality of skin color to the narrative, I realize that my arguments against its expression of any comprehensive racial ideology may seem too labored, but, since the Greeks and Romans often record a difference in skin color between themselves and other groups, the question remains whether such observation is primarily empirical or whether the terminology of skin color has acquired a series of standard connotations beyond the merely descriptive, i.e., whether black has become “black” (or white, “white” for that matter). And while Heliodorus’ text illustrates a heightened thinking about such terms, their meanings do not yet seem fixed or codified into a dominant racial ideology. Indeed Heliodorus’ text, in Selden’s terms, seems to argue for the innate instability of any such attempt.
In interpreting the meaning and tone of such images, Isaac would be wise to consult Snowden’s work (n. 24 above), which assembled a broad catalogue of representations of Blacks in ancient art, then interpreted their cumulative effect. It is, of course, tricky at times to distinguish a “purely” aesthetic effect from one laden with more disturbing connotations (i.e., to what extent people of divergent skin colors are popular in ancient art because they allow a greater range of visual effects versus being popular because they signify a difference of power that is itself pleasurable to the viewer). The problem here, though, results from the assumption that black skin color inevitably has more connotations of powerlessness than other skin colors in ancient art. Moreover, Isaac extends such logic to insinuate that blackness can serve as a visual shorthand for slavery itself, despite the fact that slavery in antiquity was not determined by skin color. F. Hugh Thompson,The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery, Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London 66 (London: Duckworth, 2003) briefly discusses the visual representation of slaves in ancient art, noting the increasing emphasis on differentiating slaves from masters beginning in the fifth-century (19). Thompson argues that such visual codes emphasized both clothing and somatic features, the latter he describes as “coarse and sometimes negroid” (20). Thompson notes, however, that free men of lower classes were often represented in similar ways (20). In terms of identifying slaves during the course of the actual slave trade itself, Thompson points out that at auctions slaves’ feet could be whitened with chalk “to distinguish them from those of local origin” (9), suggesting that physical appearance alone could not conclusively distinguish slaves from others.
There are a number of excellent works on ancient slavery that examine not only the abstract concept of slavery, but also its material operations, see, for example: Yvon Garlan,Slavery in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988); Keith Bradley,Slavery and Society at Rome, ser. Key Themes in Ancient History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); W. V. Harris, “Demography, Geography and the Sources of Roman Slaves,”Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999), 62–75; and Thompson (n. 30 above). Although a variety of types of servitude existed in antiquity, “chattel slavery” had become the most prominent by the sixth-century B.C.E., a form of slavery that viewed slaves “as possessions, which could be freely bought and sold on the open market.” Slaves in this system were generally acquired by force, i.e., through war, piracy, and kidnapping (Thompson, 5). See also Yvon Garlan, “War, Piracy and Slavery in the Greek World,” trans. Marie-Jo Roy in M. I. Finley, ed.,Classical Slavery (London and Totowa, New Jersey: F. Cass, 1987), 7–21. The extent of breeding as an internal source of slaves is difficult to determine, begin with K. R. Bradley, “On the Roman Slave Supply and Slavebreeding” inClassical Slavery, 42–64. The actual geographic origins of foreign slaves varied over time as the site of conflict shifted. For classical Athens “the majority of slaves were derived from regions to the north and east—Thrace, the lower Danube, the coasts of the Black Sea, and Asia Minor … For Rome, the military campaigns … provided slaves in vast quantities… from: North Africa, Sicily and Spain during and after the Punic Wars, from Gaul and Britain as a result of Caesar’s campaigns, and intermittently thereafter from campaigns on the Rhine and Danube, and in Judaea and Parthia” (Thompson 3–4). So, too, during the Roman period, the “well-established sources in the Black Sea area and Asia Minor continued to supply their quota, as well as Illyria and Transalpine Gaul” (4). In terms of specifically black slaves, Garlan writes only that “characteristic of the Hellenistic period is the increasing, although always limited, number of Blacks imported, along with monkeys and ostrich feathers, from deepest Africa” (47). Echoing this idea that perhaps black slaves were valued as a kind of exotic commodity, Isaac himself posits that black slaves might be “popular” earlier in Athens because of their rarity (50), which seems more plausible than taking “popularity” as meaning numerically significant. Overall, however, the attention Isaac gives to black skin color in representations of Athenian slavery seems more misleading than revealing.
David S. Wiesen, “Herodotus and the Modern Debate Over Race and Slavery,”The Ancient World 3 (1980), 3–16 presents a fascinating example of the ways in which Herodotus “was drawn into controversy over an issue utterly unknown to the Father of History: the origins of racial distinctions and the justice of slavery” (3).
While he occasionally discusses the Ethiopians in passing (e.g., 71, 80, and 151), Isaac states that he has “excluded Ethiopians from systematic treatment because for some authors they are clearly mythical and this study deals only with people whom the Greeks and Romans actually experienced” (50, see also 407). Such an explanation, however, strikes me as distinctly unsatisfying, especially given that, as he acknowledges, the imagination can be as significant in crafting stereotype as any “real” experience (see his discussion on the page before concerning perceptions of Russia, 7). Even more, the distinction between imagined and real peoples can seem artificial when spaces like the edge of the world clearly play an important role in structuring ideas of human difference—whether or not the ancient Greeks and Romans “actually” believed in the people who lived there (203, 245, and 263). See: James S. Romm,The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Rhiannon Evans, “Ethnography’s Freak Show: The Grotesques at the Edges of the Roman Earth,”Ramus 21 (1999), 54–73. Isaac also denies the Scythians, the occupants of the proverbial north to the Ethiopians’ proverbial south (67), their own treatment, although he discusses their appearance in individual texts like the HippocraticAirs, Waters, Places (e.g., 66–67).
The author ofAirs, Waters, Places concisely articulates the central principle of the theory when professing “(y)ou will find, as a general rule, that the constitutions and the habits of a people follow the nature of the land where they live” (ch. 24, trans. J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann). 35. Herodotus, in his account of Egypt, however, memorably casts Egypt as the polar opposite of Greece (2.35). Cf. Stephanie West, “Cultural antitheses: reflections of Herodotus 2, 35–36,”IJCT 5 (1988–1999), 3–19.
Isaac explores the development of the environmental theory in other ancient texts (69ff.), as well as providing a general outline of its adaptation from the Renaissance to the nineteenthcentury (102-108). I discuss the text and some of its later influences as well in my article “OnBlack Athena, Hippocratic Medicine, and Roman Imperial Edicts: Egyptians and the Problem of Race in Classical Antiquity,” in R. D. Coates, ed.,Race and Ethnicity Across Time, Space and Discipline, Studies in Critical Social Sciences 2 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 297–330.
On the general importance of heredity to theories of human difference, see 74–82. Pointing out that “(a)n important difference between ancient and nineteenth-century ideas is that the ancients, unlike modern scientists, did not consider the difference between simple heredity and the heredity of acquired characteristics conceptually important” (78), Isaac suggests that the importance of the distinction lies in how fast change is presumed to take place, with the heredity of acquired characteristics allowing a much quicker adaptation than something like Darwin’s theory of evolution (78-79, n. 90). Isaac later links the decline of the belief in environmental determinism in modern times to the discrediting of this “associate theory,” i.e., the belief that acquired characteristics could become hereditary (77).
While Isaac argues that ancient racism “lacked the biological elements of modern racism” (37), the role of the body in ancient environmental theory certainly deserves closer attention. For example, attempting to explain the workings of heredity,Airs, Waters, Places argues in one passage that “healthy” seed derives from “healthy” body parts (and “unhealthy” seed from “unhealthy”) (ch. 14); the Hippocratic essay later draws a more explicit connection between the environment and the working of the body by claiming that seasonal variation affects “the coagulation of the seed” itself (ch. 23). On the other hand, the Roman author Vitruvius emphasizes the role of blood, linking human difference to the thickness of blood in the body, a density determined by the sun’s heat (6.1.3). The later writer Pliny the Elder similarly believes that the “effect of the heat on bodily fluids” determines “different physical and mental characteristics” (Isaac 94; PlinyNH 2. 80.189-90). Although skin color is not central to ancient racial theory, the environmental theory nonetheless provides an explanation for black skin color, deeming it the result of the sun’s burning heat (Isaac 80 and 158; see also Pliny NH 2.80.189 on the “scorching” of the Ethiopians). As Wheeler (n. 23 above) argues, this environmental “explanation” of black skin color persisted into the nineteenth-century, helping provide the initial “scientific” foundation for a racism that would eventually be based in skin color difference itself (24-27). Isaac also identifies an additional theory in antiquity that insisted on a direct correlation between external physical appearance and internal mental capacities: physiognomy (149-163 and 165–166).
Due to its interest in situating disease according to regional variables,Airs, Waters, Places is often considered a key text in the development of the modern fields of geographical medicine and medical geography; see Frank A. Barrett,Disease & Geography: The History of an Idea, Geographical monographs 23 (Toronto: Atkinson College, Department of Geography, 2000), 5.
Airs, Waters, Places seems to address the problem of Greeks living in Asia Minor when it professes that both Greeks and non-Greeks can have (or in the case of Greeks presumably “retain”) an independent warlike spirit, unless they are ruled by tyrants (ch. 16)—in other words, the text posits that political structure can circumvent any negative influence of the “new” environment.
But see n. 40 above on Asiatic Greeks inAirs, Waters, Places for a significant exception. In arguing for a general expectation of decline throughout antiquity, Isaac gives special exemption to the Augustan age, citing “its state-sponsored belief in progress” (304). E. R. Dodds examines the idea of progress in ancient thought in much greater depth in his essay “The Ancient Concept of Progress” in hisThe Ancient Concept of Progress and other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1–25, concluding that “(i)t is untrue that the idea of progress was wholly foreign to Antiquity (sic); but our evidence suggests that only during a limited period in the fifth century was it widely accepted by the educated public at large” (24). Dodds also proposes that a “tension between belief in scientific or technological progress and belief in moral regress is present in many ancient writers—most acutely in Plato, Posidonius, Lucretius, Seneca” (24).
Suggesting that change is only perceived as occurring one-way in antiquity (he presumes, for example, that a writer like Isocrates only envisions Greeks degenerating into barbarians and not vice versa, i.e., barbarians “rising” to the level of Greeks), Isaac goes against the view of other scholars who believe that cultural practice provides a powerful mechanism for transforming one’s identity in antiquity, i.e., that by adopting Greek customs and speaking Greek, non-Greeks could achieve meaningful recognition as “Greek.” For example, Ptolemaic Egypt provides evidence of some degree of social mobility among “native” Egyptians, a mobility that is presumably achieved through social performance and cultural behavior. See: Dorothy J. Thompson, “The Infrastructure of Splendour: Census and Taxes in Ptolemaic Egypt,” in P. Cartledge, P. Garnsey, and E. Gruen, edd.,Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography, Hellenistic Culture and Society 26 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 242–257 and Denise Eileen McCoskey, “Race Before ‘Whiteness’: Studying Identity in Ptolemaic Egypt,”Critical Sociology 28. 1–2 (2002), 13–39. The complexities of social performance (as opposed to the more rigid categories demanded by ancient ideology) are primarily outside Isaac’s scope, although his discussion of the term “Syrian” admits some of the difficulty in making clear distinctions between “Greek” and “native” in certain periods (335ff.).
Isaac explores two significant topics here: eugenics (124-133) and the virtues attached to pure lineage (134-148). See also n. 55 below regarding autochthony, a theory that helps establish the ostensibly pure lineage of the Athenians.
Horace, as Isaac notes, provides thelocus classicus for one form of anxiety, when, lamenting the Greek cultural influence over the Romans, the Roman poet declares that the Greeks are now conquering those they were conquered by:Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio (Ep. 2.1.156-57; Isaac discusses at 394). Many Roman authors expand such claims, warning that the Roman empire, through its rapid expansion and grasping for material wealth, was sowing the seeds of its own destruction (308-309). Velleius Paterculus adopts phrasing that closely echoes Horace’s formulation when he characterizes Cicero as the very person who saved the Romans from such cultural submission:quique effecit, ne quorum arma viceramus, eorum ingenio vinceremur (2.34.3). (I am grateful to Wolfgang Haase for calling my attention to this passage.)
In contrast to the “optimism” (however perverse) of an idea like “white man’s burden,” which presumes “native” peoples can be “civilized” by contact with western culture, the Romans are on occasion notably ambivalent about the effect their own culture has on subject populations, perceiving it at times as a form of corruption (e.g., 191). Still, according to Isaac, most authors like Strabo feel comfortable weighing the benefits of Roman rule for the vanquished against any drawbacks (244 and 407).
Aristotle, however, might not be the first to apply environmental theory to political purposes; despite the difficulties in dating (and the avoidance of direct reference to the Greeks throughout the text; Isaac, 68), some scholars have argued thatAirs, Waters, Places should be read in close conjunction with the Greek victory over the Persians in the Persian Wars. See McCoskey (n. 36 above), 320.
It is important to note that in ancient thought, the world is also divided into temperate zones (another feature of the environmental theory), as well as continents—both of which contribute to the overall perception of the world and the peoples who inhabit it. In fact, as Isaac discusses, although the later geographer Ptolemy divides the world into the standard three zones, he dramatically rewrites some of the meanings attributed to each one (319-320). For a nice introduction to the problem of continental division in antiquity, see: Rosalind Thomas,Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 75–101.
Isaac describes Strabo’s method as “an interesting combination of his own application of the environmental theory and the achievements of Augustan imperialism” (409), but his view of Strabo is nonetheless mainly positive, asserting elsewhere, for example, that Strabo “more often than not had a tolerant view of strangers” (93).
Admittedly, no evidence of any debate of this kind survives (Isaac, 167).
See McCoskey (n. 36 above), 319–321 for further discussion of this tension inAirs, Waters,Places.
Isaac points out that many later texts emphasize the specific effects of wealth and luxury on human character (63).
Lamenting the vulnerability to attack and general corruption of port cities, Cicero claims that Romulus was able to found Rome without the usual disadvantages of a port city by wisely placing it on a river that flows into the sea rather than on the sea itself (De rep. 2.3.5-5.10).
In a world in which the term “globalization” is regularly used to describe the increasingly imbricated cultural and economic relations across national borders, at the very least our concerns about the effects of cultural contact seem to take radically different shape. Still, J. Peter Euben furnishes a provocative examination of modern globalization’s relation to ancient ideology inPlatonic Noise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 112–40, beginning with the question of whether there is “an illuminating analogy to be drawn between the experience of political dislocation and the theoretical struggles to understand it that accompanied the eclipse of the classical polis, and our experience of globalization, as process and ideology, and our attempts to understandit” (113). Richard Hingley likewise alludes to the current prominence of the concept of globalization in the provocative title of his new book:Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity, and Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
Such fears concerning the army may relate to its central position in ancient society overall. Given that individual units of the Roman army could buttress the political power of their leaders they were often rewarded (or kept loyal) by various economic policies, such as land grants for veterans. See Paul Erdkamp, ed.,The Roman Army and The Economy (Amsterdam: Gieben, 2002) for essays exploring a number of ways in which the Roman army interacted with the Roman economy. Isaac writes that troops in Gaul openly mocked the later Roman emperor Julian (402), suggesting some of the confidence and authority they must have felt in their position. Richard Alston attempts to place the Roman army in its broader social context in “Arms and the Man: Soldiers, Masculinity and Power in Republican and Imperial Rome,” in L. Foxhall and J. Salmon, edd.,When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power, and Identity in Classical Antiquity, Leicester-Nottingham studies in ancient society 8 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 205–223. Of course, the fact that the Roman army as an institution could wield significant political and economic power within Roman society does not necessarily mitigate the fact that it could also demand very lengthy and harsh service from its individual soldiers.
Isaac finds in the term “Blut and Boden” an “insistence on a combination of racial purity and attachment to soil” (133). As Wolfgang Haase has pointed out, however, the German reference to soil is less literal than the Athenian, i.e., it evokes a mythical connection to the land rather than any literal origin. In this way, David Welch,The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) argues that the doctrine ofBlut und Boden “attempted to define the source of strength of the Herrenvolk (master race) in terms of peasant virtues, the Nordic past, the warrior hero, and the sacredness of the German soil” (83). The Athenian idea of their own autochthony, in turn, merits further investigation of both its own theoretical underpinnings and its companion ideologies. For example, inLes Enfants d’Athéna: Idées Athéniennes sur la Citoyenneté et la Division des Sexes, ser. Textes à l’appui, Histoire Classique (Paris: F. Maspero, 1981);The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, trans. C. Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Nicole Loraux argues that the Athenian insistence on autochthony sought not only to establish a pure lineage, but also to deny women any role in the (re)production of citizens. Significantly, in more modern times, the association of a group’s origin with the soil has tended to imply inferiority or bestiality rather than purity (Isaac, 197). Isaac gives considerable emphasis to the authority of Tacitus’Germania in later German ideology, pointing in particular to its insistence on the Germans’ pure lineage, a feature he claims led Momigliano to place it “among the hundred most dangerous books ever written” (Isaac, 137).
Aristotle’s theory has received considerable scholarly attention. For a helpful introduction to its central tenets and later influence, begin with Peter Garnsey,Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, ser. The W.B. Stanford Memorial Lectures (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Garnsey memorably labels Aristotle’s arguments concerning natural slavery a “battered shipwreck of a theory” (107).
Aristotle seems to leave open the precise source of such difference, e.g., whether heredity or environment (Isaac, 177).
On ancient slavery, see n. 31 above.
For a more extensive reconstruction of the arguments opposing slavery, see Giuseppe Cambiano, “Aristotle and the Anonymous Opponents of Slavery,” trans. Mario di Gregorio, inClassical Slavery (n. 31 above), 22–41 and Garnsey (n. 56 above), 53–63.
Garnsey (n. 56 above) discusses the importance of war to Aristotle’s formulation of the category of the natural slave, writing that Aristotle “is by no means concerned to offer a justification for the system of slaveryas it operated in his time (sic). He admits that there is no justice, nothing natural, in legal slavery, unless legal slaves happen to be natural slaves. He knows that might not be. The ‘wrong people’ might become slaves, typically in consequence of capture in war” (77). Later, noting the many contradictions in Aristotle’s formulation, Garnsey concludes that “(n)atural slave theory offered ideological support to slave owners rather than prescriptions for or descriptions of actual master/slave relationships” (127).
See, for example: William Fitzgerald,Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination, ser. Roman Literature and Its Contexts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 87–88. In terms of the actual Roman practice of manumission, begin with K. R. Bradley,Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 81–112.
Perhaps here we encounter a conceptual distinction between the experiences and capacities of individual slaves versus the presumed collective “servility” of an entire people, but it would be useful for Isaac to treat manumission more fully. I was also disappointed by his failure to address the important differences between Greek versions of citizenship and Roman ones. In contrast to the weight he gives Pericles’ law in structuring citizen identity in Athens (116ff.), he gives only perfunctory mention to the mechanisms and ideologies of Roman citizenship (e.g., 491).
He calls the distinction between mountaineers and plains dwellers “a remarkable variation” of the environmental theory “since it is applied, not to people living in different parts of the world, but to peoples living in close proximity” (410).
He concludes that Roman attitudes towards the Jews cannot be equated with later forms of anti-semitism (481), and that the Roman view represents “ethnic hatred” rather than “ancient racism or proto-racism” (482). This view emerges, in part, from his forceful argument that, for the Romans, “religion was made an inseparable part of ethnic identity” (481), making conversion to Judaism a distinct threat to Roman society because it entailed “a change not merely of cult practice, but of ethnic identity and all this entailed in the sphere of loyalties and obligations” (479). The emphasis on religion as a primary element of ethnic identity makes his denial of such identity to Christians seem somewhat convoluted (see n. 10 above).
In similar fashion, he later plots the Romans’ complex attitude towards the Greeks along the same spectrum, writing that it was “marked by admiration and high regard, combined with a pattern of prejudices and xenophobic responses that often approaches proto-racism, but has far less of this than, for example, attitudes towards Syrians or Egyptians” (405). He establishes another interesting contrast when he suggests the Greeks are the most intimate Other for the Romans (381), the Parthians the most remote (256 and 371). Isaac evaluates individual theories in terms of the same criteria and terminology, arguing, for example, that, unlike the environmental theory, the notion of autochthony “is easily covered by a narrow definition of racism” (133).
Locating their mode of representation in regard to other groups, Isaac writes: “In terms of Roman value judgments they are regarded as the opposite of Asiatics and Syrians. However, as an object of proto-racist thinking and ethnic prejudice they are their equals” (439). The potential for such “proto-racist” ideas to be inverted in order to provide a positive means of identification by a group is powerfully suggested by Isaac’s recognition that: “It so happens that these ideas were absorbed by a modern nation particularly susceptible to them in the early and modern periods” (499). Still, although a steep task, it would be helpful if Isaac gave more attention in his analysis to the reverse, that is, how the process of imperialism helped structure stereotypes, including the ways in which the representation of individual groups accords with the manner in which they were brought into the empire and the relative stability they demonstrated once absorbed. He points briefly to this dynamic when examining some of the relatively positive attitudes towards Gauls, who “were subjected in a relatively short war” (419).
As Isaac himself admits, one of the greatest challenges facing a study of this kind is the frequent silence in ancient sources when it comes to justifying institutions like slavery and empire (221-222 and 249).
When he looks at ancient attitudes towards “large-scale killings and genocide” (215ff), he concludes that “(a)lthough these happened not infrequently, it is clear that there was no accompanying proto-racist justification” (250).
The comparison of ancient and modern racial systems has hinged in particular on the question of whether the environmental theory is as rigid in its organization of human difference as the modern “biological”/“scientific” theory of race. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah,In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), for example, contrasts the environmental theory positively with the modern form, calling attention to its ability to allow change (11); Goldenberg (n. 1 above) quotes a similar assessment in the writings of Toynbee (563). Isaac, however, is more cautious, and I think correct in his willingness to call it a racial theory, as well as to emphasize its collaboration with the idea of heredity and the idea of decline: “Assuming the environment to determine human character and quality, combined with a belief in the heredity of acquired characteristics, leads to an outlook almost as deterministic as modern racist theory” (503).
Isaac seems to underestimate the anxiety and violence associated with a belief in the capacity for change when he states categorically that we do not “encounter in the history of European colonialism anything like the Roman fear of corruption of the colonial armies by natives. In modern times, disapproval of individuals ‘who went native’ was censure of an individual form of presumed degeneration, which could be avoided and was not regarded as a serious large-scale threat. On the whole the European colonial powers were confident of the superiority of their own Christian faith…” (510). While expressive of economic relations rather than military conflict or religious belief, a text like Joseph Conrad’sHeart of Darkness seems to identify anxieties far beyond those of individual pathology, and, indeed, to challenge the flow of power and corruption in the entire colonial system of exploitation.
For example, Isaac quotes a part of Atossa’s dream, but astonishingly leaves out the imagery of yoking that powerfully underlines a fundamental difference between the Greek woman and the Persian one. His brief reading of thePersians serves as part of an attempt to demonstrate that certain highly charged and polarizing views of the Greeks and Persians emerge only later in the fifth-century (276-277 and 297). Isaac, thus, disagrees with Edith Hall’s reading of the evolution of the idea of the barbarian in Greek tragedy, as developed in her 1989 studyInventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy, ser. Oxford Classical Monographs (Cambridge and New York: Oxford University Press), preferring to see its full emergence in tragedy with the later Euripides (277). I do not find Isaac’s arguments concerning Aeschylus particularly persuasive, but nor does it seem necessary to me to pinpoint the shift so precisely; after all, heightened rhetoric about Persia may appear in tragedy before other textual genres. His overall point that we should look more closely at writers active around the time of the Persian Wars, especially Herodotus, to see if they hold the same attitudes about the event as later writers seems a valid one, especially given the dramatic symbolism that has been attached to the event in post-classical eras (257-261). See n. 14 above.
He tries hastily to justify the omission (e.g., 48 and 511), and does briefly consider Alexander in relation to the Greek view of Persians (298-302), asserting that “the general transformation of the Greek perception of Persia was part of the mentality that led to Alexander’s onslaught” (296). Phiroze Vasunia,The Gi\ of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander, Classical and Contemporary Thought 8 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) considers at much greater depth the connections between Greek representations of Egypt and Alexander’s subsequent campaigns.
For an introduction to the question of how the ancient Egyptians themselves may have thought about identity and racial categories, see Kathryn A. Bard, “Ancient Egyptians and the Issue of Race,” inBlack Athena Revisited (n. 4 above) 103–111. Although there has been a huge controversy in recent times over the “actual” color of the ancient Egyptians’ skin, the issue is entirely a modern preoccupation. There is no evidence that the ancient Egyptians privileged skin color in assessing themselves or others.
See Rose, “Theorizing Athenian Imperialism and the Athenian State” in Thomas M. Falkner, Nancy Felson, and David Konstan, edd.,Contextualizing Classics: Ideology, Performance, Dialogue: Essays in Honor of John J. Peradotto, ser. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 19–39. Rose has also discussed methods for teaching ancient imperialism more responsibly in “‘The Conquest Continues’: Towards Denaturalizing Greek and Roman Imperialisms,”Classical World 96 (2003), 409–15. On the intersections of democracy and other darker forms of political behavior in classical Athens, as well as our own modern tendency to overlook the latter when idealizing the former, see also: J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober, edd.,Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994); Jennifer Tolbert Roberts,Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, edd.,Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Loren J. Samons II,What’s Wrong with Democracy?From Athenian Practice to American Worship (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004).
Notes
Frederick Seidel, “An Interview with Robert Lowell,Paris Review 25 (Winter-Spring, 1961), reprinted in Michael London and Robert Boyers (eds.),Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time (New York: David Lewis, 1970), 279–80.
Seidel (above, n. 1), p. 280.
A representative instance of glossing over the problem, precisely because he is both an excellent critic and attuned to the classical presence in Lowell’s poems, is Stephen Yenser,Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1975), p. 160, where all that can be said is that the poem “seems to have begun with a translation of Catullus” (my emphasis).
Philip Hobsbaum,A Reader’s Guide to Robert Lowell (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 90–92. Hobsbaum acknowledges his dependence on translations for the sense of Catullus’s Latin.
The text from this and other quotations from Catullus is that of R. A. B. Mynors,C. Valerii Catulli Carmina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).
Paul Mariani,Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York and London, 1994), p. 48.
Mariani (above, n. 7), p. 47.
Ian Hamilton,Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), 14, reports that Lowell at school “is remembered as dark, menacing, belligerent; always bigger, stronger, shaggier than his contemporaries—always ready to take his own unpopularity for granted”, and quotes a classmate who recalled that “Lowell was stronger and a whole lot wilder… He was ready to take on everybody. That’s why they called him Caligula” (p. 19).
Blair Clark, “On Robert Lowell”,Harvard Advocate CXIII (Nov. 1979).
This point is stressed by Hamilton (above, n. 9), p. 20.
For Ransom’s classicism see Cleanth Brooks, “The Doric Delicacy,”Sewanee Review LVI (Summer, 1948), 402–15; Miller Williams,The Poetry of John Crowe Ransom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 3–6, 61–89, 121; Thomas Daniel Young, “The Evolution of Ransom’s Critical Theory,” in Thomas Daniel Young (ed.),The New Criticism and After (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 23–25; Karl F. Knight,The Poetry of John Crowe Ransom: A Study of Diction, Metaphor, and Symbol (The Hague, London, and Paris: Mouton and Co.,1964), 30–34. For a detailed account of Tate’s classicism, followed by a discussion of Lowell’s involvement with the Southern Agrarians, see Theodore Ziolkowski,Virgil and the Moderns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 163–181.
Mariani (above, n. 7), p. 69.
Seidel (above, n. 1), p. 278.
Mariani (above, n. 7), p. 70.
Mariani (above, n. 7), p. 176.
Mariani (above, n. 7), p. 254.
For the zealousness of Lowell’s Catholicism, see Hamilton (above, n.9), 78–84, and Mariani (above, n. 7), pp. 92–109.
Ziolkowski (above, n. 12), 178–181, demonstrates that Lowell, in “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid,” had “appropriated from his Southern mentors [TÄte and Ransom] the Virgilian analogy for the Civil War. For TÄte … the Trojans in their defeat by the upstart Greeks were eventually seen to prefigure the aristocratic South and its culture”.
Cf. “Words for Hart Crane” 11. 7–8: “tell my country: I,/Catullusredivivus”, the speaker’s bitter renunciation of the American literary establishment, with the phrasing of Catullus’renunciation of his mistress at 11.15pauca nuntiate meae puellae.
The motto is a variation on such Renaissance mottoes asflectere vel frangere, flectitur obsequio, andflectimur nonfrangimur (respectively col. 1498, 153, and 357 in Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Shöne [eds.],Emblematta. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967). (For this point I am indebted to Professor Wolfgang Haase.)
Hobsbaum (above, n. 4), p. 89; the view is corroborated by Yenser (above, n.3), p. 159, Mark Rudman,Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 80; and Burton Raffel,Robert Lowell (New York: Unger, 1981), p. 54.
For Lowell’s Horatian versions, including a discussion of their relevance to Lowell’s anti-war activities, see Theodore Ziolkowski, “Uses and Abuses of Horace: His Reception since 1935 in Germany and Anglo-America,”International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12 (2005–2006), 203–4.
The poems of Quevedo and Gongora are conflated under a single title, “The Ruins of Time.”
Hamilton (above, n. 9), p. 349.
Hobsbaum (above, n. 4), p. 141.
E.g., Jerome Mazzaro, “Robert Lowell’s Notebooks,”American Poetry Review 29:2 (January/ February, 1981), pp. 39–47.
Mariani (above, n. 9), p. 157.
Seidel (above, n. 1), pp. 278–79.
J. P. Sullivan,Propertius: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 117.
Paul Keegan (ed.),Ted Hughes: Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
George Parfitt (ed.),Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988).
Lowell’s language here may owe something to George Santayana’s description of Properitus in a 1948 letter to Lowell (p. 697), as Hamilton astutely notices.
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McCoskey, D.E., Talbot, J. Naming the fault in question: Theorizing racism among the Greeks and Romans. IJCT 13, 243–280 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02856295
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02856295