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INVENTION OF BARBARIAN ANDEMERGENCE OF ORIENTALISM:

CLASSICAL GREECE

In a book entitled On Human Nature the Harvard biologist EdwardOsborne Wilson writes,

Culture elaborates the rites of passage—initiation, marriage, confir-mation, and inauguration—in ways perhaps affected by still hiddenbiological prime movers. In all periods of life there is an equallypowerful urge to dichotomize, to classify other human beings intotwo artificially sharpened categories. We seem able to be fully com-fortable only when the remainder of humanity can be labeled asmembers versus nonmembers, kin versus nonkin, friends versus foe.1

In saying this he implied that the dichotomy of “us” and “them” is anatural tendency of human behavior. Wilson’s sociobiological ideasare of course highly controversial, but his and other sociobiologicalstudies on ethnocentrism have at least suggested that ethnocentricin-group and out-group differentiation is a widespread phenomenonin human society,2 whether it is a sociobiological phenomenon or aculturally orientated one is another matter.The present author will gofurther to claim that the construction of “self” and “other” is a fun-damental strategy by which ancient civilizations defined their corevalues and developed their distinctive characteristics. It is perhaps nocoincidence that the representation of the “other” is often most forc-ibly articulated when a civilization reaches its height of development.Thus it was at the height of power of the Han Empire that the greathistorian Sima Qian portrayed the Xiongnu people as the archetypi-cal “other” of Chinese culture, describing it as a nomadic people whoneither used any sort of writing nor knew any rites or ritual, norobserved filial piety.3 Similar claims can also be made of ancientEgypt4 and perhaps of the Roman Empire of the Augustan age andlater. In ancient Greece it was during the classical period after thevictory in the Persian Wars that the representation of the “barbarian”as opposed to the Hellenes was most manifestly articulated, and thenmost powerfully in Athens which emerged as the greatest polis of theGreek world out of the confrontation with Persia. It is the contention

YANG HUANG, Professor, Department of History, Peking University. Specialty: ancientGreek history. E-mail: huangyang@pku.edu.cn

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37:4 (December 2010) 556–566© 2010 Journal of Chinese Philosophy

of this article that the course of events dictated the Greek conceptionof the barbarian in such a way that in essence the image of thebarbarian was modeled on Asiatics in general and on the Persians inparticular, thus giving rise to Orientalism that proves to be a long-lasting legacy of Western cultures.

Before we begin our discussion a few preliminary remarks arenecessary. The conception of the “other” is inevitably linked to theissue of ethnic identity as it is part of the self-identifying process. Asocial group typically develops its self-identity through recognizingthe common traits of members within the group and through differ-entiating themselves from others without the group. The two aspectscannot be separated from each other entirely, and indeed, as onecommentator puts it, the essence of ethnicity is “the ethnic boundariesthat defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.”5 Inancient Greece a certain awareness of ethnic identity can perhaps betraced back to the beginning of the Archaic period despite the factthat opinions among scholars are divided.6 The rise into prominenceof the Panhellenic sanctuaries at Olympia and Delphi is an indicator.7

The Homeric poems must also have provided cultural coherence tothe emerging Greek identity. In depicting a major war between theGreeks and an alliance of other peoples headed by the Trojans theymust have imbued the Greeks with an awareness not only of them-selves but also of the others that were different from and opposed tothem. It has been argued that in the Archaic period the Hellenicself-consciousness is not based on opposition to the others, rather it isbased on self-identification among intra-ethnic groups, and JonathanHall has termed such ethnic identity “aggregative” self-definition,arguing that prior to the Persians Wars Hellenic identity “was con-structed cumulatively ‘from within’” “rather than being defined fromwithout.” It was only after the Persian Wars that Greek self-definitionbecame what he has termed “oppositional.”8

Such clear-cut distinction, while useful for us to grasp the salientfeatures of different periods, should not be overemphasized, however.After all, Homer was talking of a war not between the Greeks and theTrojans alone, but between the Greeks and an array of peoplesheaded by the Trojans, including the Dardanians, the Zeleians, thePelasgians, the Paionians, the Paphlagonians, the Mysians, the Phry-gians, the Maionians, the Carians, the Lycians, and the Thracians.9 It isperhaps not too unreasonable to think that to some extent the twocamps reflected an opposition between the Greeks and others.10 Onthe other hand, in the Odyssey the uncivilized way of life of theCyclops is clearly contrasted to the Greek way.11 Greek colonizationmay also have helped to create the notion of a differentiation, if notopposition, between the Greeks and others.12 It is true that the Greek

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word later used to denote all peoples other than the Greeks them-selves,barbaros,a word that originally denotes people who“babble”or“stammer” and whose tongues are therefore unintelligible, does notappear in the Homeric poems.When its compound form does appear,whereby the Carians are called barbarophonoi,13 it probably does notcarry any pejorative meaning with it other than indicating the foreign-ness of their language, as has been pointed out.14 Nevertheless lan-guage was itself an important factor in the Greek distinction ofthemselves and others.15 In a recent article Shawn Ross has shown howthe diversity of languages among the Trojan camp is emphasized incontrast to the uniformity of the language of the Greeks in the Iliad.16

What is at issue here is perhaps not that “oppositional” self-definitiondid not play a significant role in the construction of Archaic Greekidentity, but that the notion of the generic barbarian as opposed to theGreek with all its derogatory cultural traits was not fully developed.Even so, it should be acknowledged that the Homeric poems played animportant role in the Greek construction of the other in that for laterGreeks Homer was the first to have revealed the great confrontationand conflict between them and theAsiatic peoples.17 More importantlyperhaps, the Homeric poems had already established a model in whichthe Orient was represented and written about by the “West.” TheTrojans had left no literary records about themselves or their adver-saries. The Orient had become the silent subject that was to be repre-sented, written about, and constructed.

But it was the Persian Wars that had decisively shaped the Greekconception of the barbarian, which, in the eyes of Yvon Thébert,amounts to “a new definition of the difference between Greeks andbarbarians.”18 The massive Persian invasions and the presence ofpotential threat even after the Battle of Plataea had compelled theGreeks to study and comprehend the dangerous and unknownoutside world, to grasp it conceptually and to represent it to theircompatriots in a meaningful way. It was against this historical back-ground that a system of discourse about the barbarian began toemerge. In the eighth year after the Battle of Salamis (472 bce)Aeschylus staged his Persians in Athens. The play recounts the greatsea battle of Salamis, not from the viewpoint of the victorious Greeks,but from the viewpoint of the defeated Persians. It pretended to be atragedy on the side of the Persians whose Greek expedition ended indisaster, but its real intention was to highlight Greek victory throughreenacting the Persian defeat. The contrast is made clear in manyrespects. At the beginning of the play the Persian queen Atossadreams of two sisters: one is called Asia and is willingly living underPersian yoke, the other is called Europe and has shaken it off.19 At onetime Atossa asks about the Athenians,“Who rules them? What master

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do their ranks obey?” And the chorus of Persian elders answers,“Master? They are no servants to any man.”20 Here the Atheniandemocratic way of life is highlighted through Persian thinking accus-tomed to despotism.21 When the Persian messenger reports thePersian defeat at the Battle of Salamis, he describes it in such a waythat Greek courage and Persian cowardice are in direct contrast. TheGreeks are represented as bursting out a battle cry: “Forward, yousons of Hellas! Set you country free! Set free your sons, your wives,tombs of our ancestors, and temples of your gods.”22At the same timeit is said of the Persian side that there rose “the manifold clamour ofPersian voices”23 that also seems to have stressed the barbarian char-acter of their tongues. The drama ends with the infamous withdrawalof the Persian king Xerxes and the desperate moaning of the Persiannobles. The whole play contrasts Greek democracy, freedom, andvictory with Persian despotism, servitude, and failure, but speaksthrough the mouths of the Persians. It is not difficult to imagine howdramatic and vivid the effect was on the Athenian spectators, many ofwhom must have fought personally in the Battle of Salamis. Througha theme that was familiar to the spectators, Aeschylus presented the“therness” of the Persians to the very eyes of the Athenians.

It is significant that the Persians was the first extant Greek literarywork in which the word barbaros is used abundantly,24 whereas beforeit was rarely attested, appearing only in a fragment of Heraclitus andin adjective form in a fragment of Anacreon.25 That the barbaroi andthe Persians were prominently figured in the same context and theways in which the two were tied to each other suggests that forAeschylus the barbarian was exemplified by the Persian. Thus EdithHall is able to conclude:

The presentation of the Persians is predicated on the antithesis ofHellene and barbarian; the barbarian character is powerfully sug-gested not only by the elaborate rhetorical style but by the use of adistinctive new vocabulary of words, symbols, significant actions, pos-sible rhythm and by the emotional excess, especially in the closingscene. . . . The tragedy is not ornamented by oriental colouring butsuffused by it, indeed it represents the first unmistakable file in thearchive of Orientalism, the discourse by which the Europeanimagination has dominated Asia ever since by conceptualizing itsinhabitants as defeated, luxurious, emotional, cruel, and always asdangerous. The language in which the Persae expresses its Oriental-ism is a daring result of the poets’ search in the years during and afterthe Persian wars for a new literary language in which to imply theascendancy of Hellas and express the “otherness” of the invader.26

Said also noted that here

Asia speaks through and by virtue of the European imagination,which is depicted as victorious over Asia, that hostile “other” world

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beyond the seas. To Asia are given the feelings of emptiness, loss, anddisaster that seem thereafter to reward Oriental challenges to theWest. . . . It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation isthe prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator,whose life-giving power represents, animates, constitutes the other-wise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries.27

If, as Edith Hall has said, tragedy created a new language that wasemployed to articulate the “otherness” of the barbarians, then historythat was born after the Persian wars was no less so.28 The “Father ofHistory” Herodotus spends almost half of his Histories on describingthe history, culture, and manners of the peoples within the PersianEmpire or on the fringes of its borders. In doing so he virtuallypresented the entire known world to his compatriots. Yet there issomething more to that. More importantly, he attempted to tell hisGreek readers how to comprehend the world. For him the world wasdivided into two opposing parts, namely the Greeks and the barbar-ians, as he makes clear at the beginning of his work that his “historia”is to record the “astonishing achievements of both the Greeks and thebarbarians, and more particularly, to show how they came into warwith each other.”29 In his eyes the many barbarian peoples are parts ofthe Persian Empire, and they constitute an entity polarized with theGreeks. Just as François Hartog has argued, the Histories of Hero-dotus actually served as a mirror through which the Greeks looked atthemselves. What the historian created was “a rhetoric of alterity”(une rhétorique de l’altérité). The alterity or otherness of the barbar-ians is most clearly manifested in the inversion of their logoi andcustoms. Hartog has noted in particular Herodotus’s representationof the inversion of Egyptian and Amazonian customs. For Herodotusthe Egyptian nomoi represented a fundamentally different way ofhuman existence. He says,

Not only is Egyptian climate peculiar to that country, and the Niledifferent in its behaviour from other rivers elsewhere, but the Egyp-tians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversedthe ordinary practices of human kind.

Then he goes on to list a vast number of Egyptian customs thatseemed to him to be the inversion of normal practices as defined byGreek standards.30 Commenting on these passages Paul Cartledgepoints out that “polar opposition is what shapes Herodotus’s Egyp-tian logos throughout and yields the locus classicus of ‘reversed world’othering.”31 The Amazonian narrative is another telling example. It ishard to believe that Herodotus took the Amazons as a real ratherthan a mythical people, and yet the historian did not hesitate toinclude them in his description of the barbarian peoples, preciselybecause the female-dominated society of the Amazons represented

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the exact opposite of the community of adult male citizens typical inthe world of the Greek poleis.32

Thus, for Herodotus, as for Aeschylus, the polarization of theGreeks and barbarians was essentially one between Europe andAsia.33 The inclusion of the Amazons in Herodotus’s narrative hasanother symbolic significance. It suggests that for Herodotus the“Other” no longer denoted specifically the Persian Empire, it ratherdenoted a generic type of the barbarian modeled on the Persianand centered on Asia. This generic barbarian included not onlyreal barbarian peoples, but also mythical and imagined barbarianpeoples.

In the later part of the fifth century the image of the genericbarbarian was powerfully represented in the visual arts. According toPausanias, a painting on the so-called Stoa Poikile in the AthenianAgora, built around 460 bce, combined together three themes: theAthenians led by Theseus defeating the Amazons, the Greeks sackingTroy, and the Battle of Marathon with the Persians on the verge offleeing.34 Here the legendary battles against the barbarians werelinked to the war against the Persians in a way that it suggested to theviewer that the Trojans, the Amazons, and the Persians were of thesame camp, common enemies of the Greeks. The Amazons wereprobably seen as the forerunners of the Trojans and the Persians inattacking the Greeks, as one French scholar points out, “The attackon Attica by these barbarian women was seen as a prefigurationof the expedition by Medean and Persian barbarians, in no way lesshistorical.”35

Similar scenes appeared on the Parthenon that was destroyed bythe Persians and rebuilt after 447 bce. The relief on its metopes high-lights the Athenian polarization between Greeks and barbarians. Themetopes on the northern side depict the Trojan War, those on thewestern and southern sides showing Greeks fighting the Amazons andthe centaurs, whereas one of the themes on the inner frieze is theBattle of Marathon. It is not difficult to see how these images con-veyed to the Greek viewers a sense of the general opposition ofhostility between the Greeks and the barbarians. Again here thelegendary barbarians were linked to the Persians. The mythic themesof Centauromachy and Amazonomachy, or of the Trojan War becamethe symbolic means by which the Persians were characterized, whichexplains their popularity as themes of visual expression in the secondhalf of the fifth century bce.36 Any barbarian people who fought theGreeks was now included in the Persian camp. Such an ideology wascentered in, but not limited to Athens as these mythic themes wererepeatedly represented on the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and theTemple of Apollo at Bassai. The Aiakid heroes depicted on the pedi-

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ments of the temple of Aphaia on Aigina illustrate this symbolism ina subtle yet unmistaken way. The heroes distinguished themselves inthe Trojan War, just as the Aiakids distinguished themselves in theBattle of Salamis.37 Out of the mythic enemies the most noteworthy isthe changing image of the Trojans, who were not differentiated fromthe Greeks, at least not in a systematic way, in the Homeric poems, butwere now thoroughly barbarized as predecessors of the Persians. AsAndrew Erskine has pointed out,

In the aftermath of the Persian invasions the Trojan War seemed tooffer a mythical parallel for the struggle with Persia; here was aGreek victory over a powerful eastern kingdom. In imitation of thePersians the Trojans came to be called “barbarians,” that derogatoryterm for all who were not Greek.38

In tragedy Trojan figures began to be created in imitation of thePersians, and they were now represented in Persian costumes. More-over, other mythical peoples also began to be represented as theOriental barbarian.39 Studies on Greek vase paintings have shownthat before the mid-fifth century bce, the legendary Phrygian kingMidas, the Trojan king Priam, and prince Paris were often depictedlike the Greeks themselves, but thereafter they wore Persian attire.40

The treatment of the story of Heracles killing the Egyptian kingBousiris further illustrates the point. In a vase painting of about470 bce by the Pan Painter the artist contrasts the heroic figure ofHeracles with the frightened Egyptians.41 Further studies have shownthat earlier vase paintings dealing with the subject emphasized theEgyptian characteristics of Bousiris and his priests, but now thoseEgyptian characteristics were replaced with Persian traits.42 Thus wesee that “the generic oriental developed, loosely based on a Persianmodel, and embracing all peoples to the north, east, and south, bothmythical and real.”43 This generic Oriental became the typical“Other” of the Greeks.

With Aeschylus and Herodotus, the polarization of Greeks andbarbarians were not only linked to that of the Greeks and the Per-sians, but also to that of Europe and Asia. Thus the idea of a divi-sion of Europe and Asia is also grounded in the Greek conceptionof the barbarian. In an extraordinary treatise in the Hippocraticcorpus entitled Airs, Waters, and Places the contrast of Europe andAsia is set out in a very subtle way.44 Having discussed how naturalenvironments caused differences between the inhabitants of Asiaand Europe, the author concluded that the Asiatics were cowardand slavish whereas the Europeans were generally more coura-geous. At this point he turned to political institutions, stating thatthe latter also contributed to this difference, for the Asiatics weremostly under despotic rule and were not free people.45 Thus the

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treatise not only echoed the contrast between Greek democracy andOriental despotism found in Aeschylus and Herodotus, it also gavea natural explanation to Greek courage and Asiatic cowardice. Theantithesis of Greeks and barbarians was now subsumed under thatof Europe and Asia. The Scythians were still singled out as a bar-barian people as in Herodotus, but only within the context of theEurope and Asia antithesis.

By now it should be abundantly clear that the Greek conceptionof the barbarian is constructed fundamentally on the Persian, theAsiatic, and the Oriental. The notion of barbaroi may have emergedsometime in the Archaic period, but it probably denoted mainly alinguistic differentiation.46 It was in the course of the Persian Warsthat the barbarian was endowed with all the cultural properties ofdespotism, slavishness, cowardice as opposed to Greek democracy,freedom and courage on the basis of Persian and Greek antithesis.47

Thus Orientalism had become a way with which the Greeks definedthe barbarian, the anti-Greek, and hence a means with which toconstruct their own identity.48

In the fourth century bce Orientalism came to a new turn as itbecame a way of dominating the Orient and of forging Panhellenismat the same time. This domination was at first conceptual. Throughthe discourse over the Oriental “Other,” the Greeks were now con-vinced that they were culturally superior: they were free, brave,strong, and victorious; in contrast the Orientals were servile, ugly,effeminate, weak, and always defeated. For the Athenian orator Iso-crates, Greek superiority should naturally lead to its conquest ofAsia. For this reason he repeatedly called on the Athens, Sparta, andthen king Philip of Macedonia to take on the lead to conquer Asia.49

The reasoning behind his suggestion is that it is a great “disgrace”“to allow Asia to be more successful than Europe, barbarians moreprosperous than Greeks.” “None of this can be permitted. It needsto be altered to the exact opposite.”50 Isocrates’ younger contempo-rary Aristotle expounded similar views, but at the philosophicallevel. In his discussion on monarchy, Aristotle concluded that king-ship among the barbarians are of tyrannical nature. He then gavethe reason for this, saying that “barbarians are by nature moreservile than Greeks, and Asiatics are more servile than Europeans,and they will therefore tolerate despotic rule without any com-plaint.”51 On another occasion he contrasted the peoples of Europeand Asia, believing that the former were full of spirit and remainedfree, while the latter were skilled and intelligent, but lacked spirit.For this reason they remained subjects and slaves. On the otherhand, the Greeks possessed both spirit and intelligence. They weretherefore capable of ruling all others if they were united.52 It is

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perhaps no coincidence that Alexander, his one time pupil, shouldhave led a Greek conquest of the Orient.

PEKING UNIVERSITYBeijing, China

Endnotes

This article is partly based on an article that I published under the title “Orientalism in theAncient World: Greek and Roman Images of the Orient from Homer to Virgil,” Bulletinof the Institute for Mediterranean Studies 5 (March 2007): 115–29. I thank Professor Dr.Fritz-Heiner Mutschler for inviting me to participate in the conference “Empires andHumankind: China and the West Compared” (June 12–15, 2008, Dresden) and otherparticipants for the discussions. Thanks are also due to the editors of JCP, especiallyEditor-in-Chief, Professor Chung-ying Cheng, for helpful comments.

1. Edward Osborne Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1978), 70.

2. Vernon Reynolds, Vincent Falger, and Ian Vine, eds., The Sociobiology of Ethnocen-trism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism and Nation-alism (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987). Cf. Malcolm Chapman, ed., Socialand Biological Aspects of Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Onancient Greek ethnocentrism, see John E. Coleman,“Ancient Greek Ethnocentrism,”in Greeks and Barbarians. Essays on the Interactions between Greeks and Non-Greeksin Antiquity and the Consequences for Eurocentrism, ed., John E. Coleman and ClarkA. Walz (Bethesda: CDL Press, 1997), 175–220.

3. Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, “Xiongnu Liezhuan”(Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju Publisher, 1982, second edition).

4. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian. Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1989), 4.

5. Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.The Social Organization of CultureDifference (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1969), “Introduction,” 15.

6. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 6 and more recently Shawn A. Ross, “Bar-barophonos: Language and Panhellenism in the Iliad,” Classical Philology 100 (2005):299–316 summarize the different positions of scholars.

7. Cf. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 6–8.8. Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1997), 47.9. Iliad, II, 811–77.

10. Cf. Edmond Lévy, “Naissance du concept de barbare,” Ktema 9 (1984): 5–15. Chris-tiane Sourvinou-Inwood goes even further as to argue that the opposition of Greeksto non-Greeks can be traced back to the as early as the Iliad. See her Hylas, theNymphs, Dionysos and Others. Myth, Ritual, Ethnicity (Stockholm: Svenska Instituteti Athen [distributed by Paul Åströms Förlag], 2005), 29–43.

11. Odyssey, IX, 106–15.12. Carla M. Antonaccio, “Ethnicity and Colonization,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek

Ethnicity, ed. Irak Malkin (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2001),113–57; cf. Ingomar Weiler, “Greek and Non-Greek World in the Archaic Period,”Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 9 (1968): 21–29. He argued that even in theArchaic period the Greeks were aware of the polarity between the Greek and theforeign world.

13. Iliad, II, 867.14. Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Other (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2002, second edition, first published in 1993), 53.

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15. See Harold Carparne Baldry’s comments on Hans Diller, “Die Hellenen-Barbaren-Antithese im Zeitalter der Perserkriege,” in Grecs et Barbares, Entretiens surl’Antiquité Classique, Tome VIII (Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1962), 69.

16. Ross, “Barbarophonos,” 299–316.17. François Hartog, “Fondements grecs de l’idée d’Europe,” Quaderni di Storia 43

(1996): 5–17.18. This seems to have been the general consensus until recently.Among others see Edith

Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 56–57; Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiq-uity, 47; Cartledge, The Greeks, 54; François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus. FrontierTales from Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 81. For thequotation of Yvon Thébert, see his “Réflexions sur l’utilisation du concept d’Étranger:évolution et fonction de l’image du barbare à Athènes, à l’époque classique,” Diogène112 (1980): 96–115. More recently Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Myth, Ritual, Eth-nicity, part I, chapter 2, and Lynette Mitchell, Panhellenism and the Barbarian inArchaic and Classical Greece (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2007), xxi, haveargued against this view. While the former believes that the opposition between theGreeks and the barbarians went back much earlier, the later suggests that the decisiveperiod for the formation of Greek identity was the sixth century.

19. Aeschylus, Persae, 181–97.20. Ibid., 241–42.21. Cf. Simon Goldhill, “Battle Narrative and Politics in Aeschylus’ Persae,” Journal of

Hellenic Studies 108 (1988): 128–93.22. Aeschylus, Persae, 403–5.23. Ibid., 406–7.24. Edith Hall has counted that barbaros appeared in the Persians for no fewer than ten

times.25. For Heraclitus, see Hermann Alexander Diels and Walther Kranz, eds., Die

Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmann, 1951), vol. I, 22B107; for Anacreon,see Denys L. Page, ed., Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962),313.6.

26. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 99–100. For a more thorough reading of thePersians, see Thomas Harrison, The Emptiness of Asia. Aeschylus’ Persians and theHistory of the Fifth Century (London: Duckworth, 2000).

27. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994, first edition in 1978),56–57.

28. See Simon Hornblower, ed., Greek Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994), 15–16 and note 24.

29. Herodotus, I. 1. See James Redfield, “Herodotus the Tourist,” in Greeks and Barbar-ians, ed. Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2002), 24–49 (originallypublished in Classical Philology 80 [1985]: 97–118); Donald Lateiner, The HistoricalMethod of Herodotus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), chapter 7, esp. 152.

30. Herodotus, II, 35–36.31. Cartledge, The Greeks, 58; cf. Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 50–54.32. François Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre (Paris:

Gallimard, 1991, Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, première édition, 1980). “Unerhétorique de l’altérité” is the title for chapter 1 of part II; for discussions on inver-sion, see 227–29. Rosalind Thomas, “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Hero-dotus,” in Malkin, Ancient Perceptions, 213–33 cautions against an oversimplifieddichotomous reading of Herodotus.

33. See Thébert, “Réflexions sur l’utilisation du concept d’Étranger,” 96–115; Hartog,“Fondements grecs de l’idée d’Europe.”

34. Pausanias, I, 15. 2–4.35. Jeannie Carlier, “Voyage in Greek Amazonia,” in Antiquities, ed. Nicole Loraux,

Gregory Nagy, and Laura Slatkin (New York:The New Press, 2001), 134–42 (originallypublished as “Voyage en Amazonie grecque,” Acta Antiqua Academiae ScientiarumHungaricae 27 [1979]: 381–405).

36. Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chainof Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), chapter II.

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37. Herodotus, VIII, 64. See Sara P. Morris, Daidalus and the Origins of Greek Art(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 333–34.

38. Andrew Erskine, Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7–8; see also chapter 3, “The Persian Warsand the Denigration of the Trojans.”

39. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, chapter 3.40. Keith DeVries,“The Nearly Other: the Attic Vision of Phrygians and Lydians,” in Not

the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art, ed. BethCohen (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 338–63.

41. For a more detailed discussion of the Bousiris story by the Pan Painter, see FrançoisLissarrague, “The Athenian Image of the Foreigner,” in Harrison, Greeks and Bar-barians, 101–24 (originally published as “L’immagine dello straniero ad Atene,” in IGreci, 2.II Definizione, ed. Salvatore Settis Turin: [Giulio Einaudi, 1997], 938–58), esp.122–23.

42. Bousiris and the Egyptian priests in contrast to Heracles, see Claude Bérard, “TheImage of the Other and the Foreign Hero,” in Not the Classical Ideal, 390–412; for theshift to Persian traits, see Margaret C. Millar, “The Myth of Bousiris: Ethnicity andArt,” in Not the Classical Ideal, 413–42.

43. Millar, “Myth of Bousiris,” 413–42.44. Cf. Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, 93–4.45. Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, and Places, xvi, xxiii.46. Cf. Lévy, “Naissance du concept de barbare,” 5–15.47. It is beyond the scope of this article and the ability of the author to chronicle the

Persian view of the Greeks, but see Amelie Kuhrt, “Greeks” and “Greece” in Meso-potamian and Persian Perspectives (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 2002).

48. It should be noted that Greek attitudes to the Asian peoples were more varied thanwhat has been outlined here. See, for example, Pericles Georges, Barbarian Asia andthe Greek Experience from the Archaic Period to the Age of Xenophon (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

49. Mitchell, Panhellenism and the Barbarian, 12.50. Isocrates, To Philip, 132.51. Aristotle, Politics, 1285a19–22.52. Ibid., 1327b27–32.

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