Fragments from the 'Middle Ground' - Posidonius' Northern Ethnography (original) (raw)

Arctos (Acta Philologica Fennica)

This article attempts to provide a realistic, securely contextualised estimate regarding the formation and extent of Posidonius of Apamea's (c. 135-51 BCE) contribution to the Greco-Roman tradition of ethnographic writing about the population groups of Europe - and his much-discussed 'Gallic ethnography' in particular. The significance of being able to assess correctly the contents and the context of Posidonius' so-called 'ethnography' is obvious, especially when keeping in mind the optimistic and trusting tone that some past reconstructions of his fragments have exhibited. With all the accruing understanding of the tradition of ancient ethnographic writing, a critical eye must be cast at a contribution so often postulated as unsurpassed in its influence. In this article, I submit the texts usually taken as Posidonian fragments to a reading informed by recent advances in the study of knowledge ordering (e.g. in eds. König & Whitmarsh 2007), information generation 'on the middle ground' (Woolf 2011), and the interplay of Greek writers and Roman audiences (Clarke 1999). There existed a wide range of interlocking 'middle grounds' which the ethnographical writers of the Late Republic navigated, even when they pursued goals to which ethnography was wholly subservient – as ancient ethnography nearly always was. Rather than being a record of his personal observations and meetings with Gauls, to a much greater extent the northern ethnography of Posidonius was constructed through literary processes based on his reading and his conversations with Romans and Greeks.

The Use of Ethnography In Tacitus’ Agricola and Germania

Tacitus, in his various works, presents several examples of what can be termed “ethnographies”, works whose purpose is to inform the reader of the various customs and living conditions of groups that are otherwise foreign to the reader. Tacitus’ Germania serves as ethnography on the various Germanic peoples. Agricola, while ostensibly a panegyric on his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, also contains ethnography on the various peoples of ancient Britain. However, in each of these cases Tacitus presents the culture, practices, and institutions of various ethnic groups in such a way so as to demonstrate and thereby prove a political or moral point. Ethnography in Tacitus is thus not a study or presentation of ethnic groups, but a subversion of a classical historical style and methodology by Tacitus to present “case-studies”, real world examples of the political and moral argument that Tacitus is attempting to make throughout all of his works. This paper will examine the historiographical background of Tacitus by examining how classical authors prior to Tacitus presented and utilized the issue of ethnicity in their own writing and how these techniques and models are reflected in the works of Tacitus. This paper will then examine how Tacitus uses these models in his presentation of various ethnic groups in order to highlight his own specific political or moral arguments regarding Rome and Roman culture. Finally, this paper will present explanations as to why Tacitus either chose or felt it necessary to disguise his moral and political statements as ethnographies.

Stay who you were: Keeping the Roman Provincials 'Ethnic' from the Second to the Fourth Century

In this research seminar paper I will discuss the ways in which the writers and rhetoricians of the High-Imperial era adopted and adapted elements of ethnographic writing into their discourse of cultural belonging. The knowledge-ordering and social-identity-building aspects of the ancient uses of ethnographic - or rather, ethnographic-looking or ethnographically presented - information are foregrounded. What is intended by picking a certain selection of ethnicised exemplars? What are the implied associations triggered by the selection? Why are contemporary groups omitted in favour of antiquarian ones – or the other way around? And what was the degree to which inherited ethnonyms or ethnic categories were still ‘good to think with’? Another big question, so far quite seldom explored, is the connection and position of ethnographicising gestures within and in relation to the register of technical writing in antiquity. Throughout the paper I will in particular pay attention to how the Roman administrative divisions, primarily provinces, begin in the High Imperial period to obtain a degree of ‘entitativity’ – the quality of being naturalised entities of stereotyping – and emerge as meaningful frameworks of ‘common knowledge’ instead of the previously more narrowly ‘ethnicised’ categories. This would have highlighted the already-existing Greco-Roman tendency to think about population groups in an ‘essentialising’ fashion; an ideological pattern which resulted both from inherited literary tropes and some of the most elaborate technical theory-building of the ancient world – particularly the climatological, astrological, and physiognomic ones.

Greek Ethnography and Archaeology: Limits and Boundaries

Traditionally conceived as an exclusively literary genre predicated upon stark polarities between “Greeks” and “Barbarians”, ancient ethnography might seem to encourage the view both that ethnic groups and boundaries were clearly perceived in antiquity and that these were often identified and categorized according to variations in material practice. However, whilst we have ample evidence that ancient Greeks associated material objects with specific identities, close examination of ancient ethnographic interests reveals a body of thought and enquiry encompassing a wide variety of media and genre incorporating Greeks and non-Greeks alike. Far from being a convenient prop upon which to base essentialized notions of “Greek” or “barbarian” culture, discourses of identity and difference were socially constructed and historically contingent. Like material artifacts, their analysis requires close attention to the specific frameworks and contexts in which they were created if we are to understand their full significance in the wider processes of identity construction. In both cases, the complexities surrounding their origin, mode of production, adoption and reception make it difficult to avoid labels, ethnic or otherwise, that aren’t subject to the same “play” of difference characteristic of all modes of cultural production (Hall S. 1990).

'Ethnographicising' Arguments between the Second-Century Genres

This paper studies the ways in which – and the aims for which – ‘ethnographicised’ information or topoi are wielded across differing second-century genres in the Greek- and Syriac-speaking East. The paper’s source texts represent four second-century authors (Polemo of Laodicea, Claudius Ptolemy, Lucian of Samosata, and Bardaisan of Edessa), as well as referring to the rebuttal of Celsus by Origen, which casts interesting light upon the monotheistic doctrinal disputes within which ‘ethnicised’ themes became increasingly used during the Later Antiquity. Common to all of these texts is that they stem from the cross-pollinating exchange of ideas, theoretical structures, and rhetorical tropes which took place in the context of the Imperial Eastern Mediterranean, facilitated by common language and almost as widely shared common understanding of how ethnographical-seeming details could help to build a winning argument – no matter what the occasion. Inter-generic interactions are evident in many stages of the ancient tradition of ethnographical and ‘ethnographicising’ writing, but the often antiquarian-seeming elements about population groups that are time and again recirculated in Imperial literature have not been extensively studied in terms of their rhetorical and epistemic underpinnings. Their usefulness seems to be confirmed by their constant presence in a variety of registers, and essentialist – often physiognomic – arguments could be deployed both about individual characters and broader group characteristics alike. The orators of the ‘Second Sophistic’, represented by Polemo and Lucian in this paper, found many uses for the technique of keeping provincials ‘ethnic’ for the purposes of their own arguments. The technical literature represented by Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos – and to a certain extent the surviving evidence for Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of the Countries – found much use for essentialist representations of provincial character(istic)s. Origen, hailing from Alexandria like Ptolemy did, demonstrates in his rebuttal of Celsus’ True Discourse (Orig. Contra Celsum) the freedom with which the supposed ‘ethnic’ antiquities of a number of peoples could be put to use in expositions which had very little to do with ‘real’ ethnography. Identities and religious affiliations are also crossed among this selection of writers in ways that highlight important dynamics (and ironies) associated with the ‘conditioned co-opting’ of provincial backgrounds into the ranks of cultural/doctrinal insiders. Lucian and Bardaisan are Syrians, but while Lucian is in many ways comparable to Polemo, a native of Laodicea, in his approach to the cultural belonging as a ‘sophist-as-Hellene’, Bardaisan has some points in common with both Ptolemy (in terms of his astrological subject matter), and Origen (in the moralising argumentation that pervades his cultural critique). Social and personal interactions become thoroughly enmeshed in some of the examples of rhetorical one-upmanship and self-fashioning involved, whether we are dealing with sophistic set-pieces or doctrinal disputes. For such agendas, the cultural and phenotypic plurality of the Empire’s provinces formed a common pool of ‘embodied knowledge’, to be used when necessary by the learned writers.

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