This book's dust jacket describes I. as ‘one of the most distinguished historians of the ancient world’. Several reasons for this well-earned reputation are on display in this volume of I.’s selected papers. Of seventeen chapters, only two (Chapters 4 and 6) are previously unpublished. I. organises his chapters thematically. The first major theme is anachronism. The first six chapters ‘attempt to trace anachronisms in modern views of ancient empires’ (p. 1), anachronisms leading to fundamental misunderstandings of the ancient world.
For example, the idea of Rome as an eternal city – still common enough today to be a cliché – ‘is not typical of classical antiquity’ (p. 44). It appears in some historians of Rome (Livy) but not in others (Polybius), and should not be read back into the evidence. Likewise, the idea that some Graeco-Roman visual representations were ‘personifications’, allegories or symbols – a common interpretation of visual imagery in modern scholarship – has no basis in the ancient evidence. I.’s basic point is that modern scholars are overthinking. To take a single example, images of defeated peoples on Roman coins are not personifications or allegories of those peoples (p. 55). Sometimes a defeated Gaul is just a defeated Gaul.
A larger collection of nine chapters – indeed, the core of the book – addresses questions of culture and ethnicity. Anyone with a passing exposure to ancient literature knows that it is full of ethnic stereotyping. But the casual observer might guess that this stereotyping is static and more or less uniform. Conditioned, perhaps, by knowledge of our own history, in which slavery and the emergence of scientific racism went hand in hand, modern scholars frequently paint a picture of the ancient world as free of the same type of racism.
I. is cautionary. He argues that ‘prototypes of racism were common’ in antiquity and that there were ‘close links between those forms of prejudice and ancient ideas about slavery’ (p. 178). In Chapter 8 I. explores five concepts he considers crucial: environmental determinism; the heredity of acquired characters; those two ideas in concert; government; and autochthony and purity. Obviously, neither the Greeks nor the Romans had ‘intellectual, moral, or emotional objections against [the] generalizations’ (p. 179) necessary to form hostile opinions towards foreigners. And the generalisations they formed based on I.’s five concepts amount to racism.
Several examples from the fifth century bc to the fourth century ad show Classical writers associating collective characteristics with climate and geography. (The Greeks and the Romans are, of course, safely in the Mediterranean Goldilocks zone.) Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny and others show a Lamarckian tendency to believe in the transmission of scars, tattoos, skull elongations and other acquired features. I. finds the combination of these two concepts to justify ‘describing ancient ethnic-prejudice as a form of proto-racism’ (p. 186). Greek authors show a tendency to ascribe characteristics to a people based on the characteristics of their rulers. But more importantly – and more resonant with modern thought – ancient authors emphasised the importance of a pure lineage: ‘intermarriage and mixed blood are considered bad and conducive to degeneration’ (p. 189). This tendency ‘most closely approaches modern racism’. The convergence of these concepts justifies both slavery and imperialism: the Syrians, for example, are slaves because they are born to be, while the Germans are dangerous rivals because of their pure blood and independence.
Chapters 9 and 10 address the question of barbarians and nomads. I. wants to reconsider ‘what the word [‘barbarian’] says about Greek and Roman attitudes towards other peoples’ (p. 197). In the Greek world, the term transforms in the late fifth and early fourth centuries bc from a more or less neutral term for non-Greek peoples to one embedded in an anti-Persian imperial ideology. Romans shared with the Greeks a tendency to ‘deny the barbarian the qualities which they themselves regard as essential’ (p. 220). Graeco-Roman attitudes towards nomads are analogous. Ancient authors ‘thoroughly misunderstood the essence of pastoral nomadism’ (p. 227) and judged nomads by the degree to which their existence was diametrically opposed to the values of polis civilisation. Nomads in the Graeco-Roman imagination are frozen in time: they ‘never change, an assumption that is one of the essential ingredients of racism’ (p. 230).
By this point in the book, when Chapter 11 asks ‘A Multicultural Mediterranean?’, the average reader will likely be able to predict the answer. I. delivers it in the form of an extended review of E. Gruen's 2011 book Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. I.’s review is an attempt to push back against what he describes as ‘a good deal of utopia’ (p. 243) in Gruen's work. Following the OED definition of ‘multicultural’, I. is sceptical that the ancient Mediterranean can be described as ‘a single, coherent society adhering to an ideology that respected internal diversity’ (p. 253). Gruen's point that Greeks and Romans were comfortable sharing common ancestry with foreign nations in the mythic past does not change the fact that they regarded foreigners as inferior in the actual present.
A subset of the chapters on culture and ethnicity addresses questions of ancient Judaism. Chapter 13 on ‘Ancient Antisemitism’ begins with a thought-provoking terminological discussion in which I. argues (p. 286) that antisemitism ‘is not racist, but a form of ethnic or religious prejudice, if it does not deny in principle the possibility of change or variation at an individual or even collective level’. Anti-Jewish sentiment emerges only in the Hellenistic period. I. distinguishes carefully between the Alexandrian tradition, ‘aiming at denigrating the Jews who allegedly have inferior origins’ (p. 287), and non-Egyptian traditions more concerned with a perceived lack of Jewish sociability and contribution to civilisation (pp. 288–90). (I. notes but does not discuss in detail Diodorus Siculus’ report of the only ‘call for the total eradication of the Jewish people’ in antiquity [p. 288], at the court of Antiochus Sidetes.)
Roman antisemitism is a somewhat different creature. The Romans inherit the Hellenistic critique of Jewish lack of sociability, but add particular concerns about the ‘substantial presence of Jews inside the city of Rome’ (p. 291) and their ability to influence public meetings. More important, and not specific to Judaism, is the ‘fear of foreign secret cults … already prevalent in Republican Rome’ (p. 294). I. finds Roman fear of Judaism ‘to some extent irrational’ (p. 296). Here, he is not entirely convincing. True, ‘people of every period are guided more by emotions than by numbers and facts’ (p. 303), and conversion to Judaism was not an existential threat to traditional Roman religion. But conversion to Christianity would prove to be. The Romans were wrong about the Jews per se, but not irrationally so, as events with Christianity would show.
I. is more convincing in his treatment of Roman religious policy and the Bar Kokhba War (Chapter 14). Only Cassius Dio and the Historia Augusta report the causes of the revolt. We are left to choose between Dio's claims about new construction in Jerusalem and the HA’s claim of a general ban on circumcision by Hadrian. Generally speaking, ‘foreign cults were left alone in the provinces’ (p. 312), but those ‘which attracted followers in the city of Rome and in Italy were resisted’ (p. 308). In other words, as the previous chapter showed, Romans resisted conversion from their state religion to Judaism. Thus, a specific ban on circumcision of non-Jews is completely understandable as a ban on conversion to Judaism, and a general ban on all circumcision is not, since the Romans were otherwise perfectly happy to leave the Jews alone. The logic of Roman religious policy eliminates the HA’s claim of a general ban on circumcision as a plausible explanation of the revolt.
One recurring theme throughout I.’s chapters is a plea for precision. He frequently corrects sloppy usage endemic among modern scholars: various artistic representations are not ‘personifications’ (Chapter 2); the ancient world was not one of Wallerstein's world-systems with core and periphery (Chapter 5); ‘barbarian’ does not always refer simply to language or culture (Chapter 9). I. is consistently correct, but I suspect he will do little to coax us from our sloppiness. Scholars as much as regular people are prone to employing shorthand, trading efficiency for accuracy.
The book includes an extensive 32-page introduction to the contents. This introduction is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it provides an overview to help the reader think through some of the connections between the pieces, for example the apparently ‘opposite, or at least paradoxical, conclusions’ (p. 7) in the first two chapters on the idea of Rome. On the other hand, the introduction is sometimes too repetitive of the chapters themselves, as when for example the introduction's discussion of the first chapter (p. 4) copies almost verbatim a passage from that chapter itself (pp. 47–8).
Collections such as this are necessarily somewhat variable. One weak link in the collection is Chapter 7, ‘Attitudes towards Provincial Intellectuals in the Roman Empire’. The chapter's aim is ‘to see what we know about the level and integration during the Principate of people from other, non-Latin parts of the Empire’ (p. 151). The chapter's organisation escapes me, and the title itself is somewhat misleading. Much of the chapter is really about the attitudes of provincial intellectuals, particularly when it comes to connections between Hellenic culture and provincial ancestry. Only towards the chapter's end do we learn much about what Romans themselves thought of provincials, and that predictable snobbery tells us little about ‘the level and integration’ of those provincials, whatever that phrase itself means.
The volume is generally well edited and helpfully includes both an index and a bibliography for the volume as a whole. More importantly, the book does a real service simply by making available in one place items either originally in Hebrew or unlikely to appear on the shelves of the average college library. We may hope for more volumes such as this, but at US$120 we may also hope for a lower price.
