Q&A: Franco De Angelis’ A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2020)
What are the major themes and takeaways in A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World?
Why is it that when we think of ancient Greece we pretty much associate it solely with the modern nation-state of Greece? Why is it that any ancient Greeks outside of the boundaries of modern Greece have been treated in a secondary and negative manner in histories of ancient Greece? How many ancient Greeks lived outside of Greece, and what were their worlds like? These are the main questions addressed in A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World. Given that the ancient Greeks have been central to European and New World identities since the eighteenth century, and that they once lived, in the period from Homer to Cleopatra, in such places as the Crimea in the Black Sea, Provence in southern France, Libya in northern Africa, and Afghanistan in central Asia, such a book exceeds the abilities of any one scholar and thus demands a collective effort. This is the most up-to-date and, I hope, original book on the subject, in that it ambitiously gathers and analyzes the largest ever body of historical and archaeological data. The book contains 24 chapters divided into three parts. Part I has seven chapters that deal with ancient and modern approaches. Part II comprises 14 chapters of warts and all regional history. Part III concludes with three chapters bringing together wider themes, such as the role played by ancient Greeks in culturally developing the pre-Roman Mediterranean, and how Greek migrants and their non-Greek neighbours made vital contributions to making Greece itself, in terms of supplying exports, ideas, and political and military challenges.
Where would you situate A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World in the larger field of Migration Studies? How do you see it contributing to contemporary debates?
Like so many earlier migration studies with a similar theme, a unidirectional, top-down metropolis/periphery thinking has smothered the study of ancient Greek migrations. And as with more recent, self-reflective migration studies, the discursive practices (three, in this case) shaping this narrative frame have been identified and redressed. First, modern nationalist ways of writing history were back-projected onto antiquity, which resulted in the anachronistic view that ancient Greece was like a modern nation-state. Second, the whole ancient tradition of Greek migrations was subsumed into this nationalist framework, by being stigmatized as simply “colonies,” and national histories at either the departing or receiving ends showed little or no interest in these migrants/immigrants. The practice of thinking in terms of ancient Greek “colonies” can ultimately be traced back to the early Renaissance, when the ancient Greek word apoikiai (literally “homes away from home”) was mistranslated into “colonies.” That mistranslation gained considerable momentum and became further elaborated and entrenched in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with modern Greek state formation and European colonial expansion around the globe, which brought in its train the routine centre and periphery thinking and triumphalist colonialist narratives of coming, seeing, and conquering. In relation to their homelands, however, ancient Greek migrants were emphasized as inferior, derivative, and “provincial,” pulled down in large part by the backward non-Greeks next to whom they lived and interacted (sometimes through intermarriage). For this reason, ancient Greek migrants were inserted into a racialized discourse and deemed underdeveloped or undeveloped. Third, the Cold War added a final hurdle, in which its divisions and political blocks impacted history-writing. Things that we take for granted today, most notably connectivity, inter- and transregionalism, and interdisciplinarity, were practically nowhere to be seen. Taken together, strong forces hindered serious interest in the ancient Greek migrants who left Greece.
This book is part of the postcolonial and postmodern scrutiny characteristic of the last generation of research in the larger field of migration studies. This includes discussing the appropriateness of terminology and analytical concepts. Another contribution concerns quantifying the number of migrants in the diaspora: it is now clear that about one-half of the ancient Greek world did not live in Greece! This realization coincided with another new perspective on how the Mediterranean’s ecology was essentially microregional, and not homogeneous as usually supposed. Generally, no one region possessed all the natural resources that it needed, and this imposed mobility on its inhabitants who were thus more interconnected and interdependent than earlier scholars had imagined. In other words, the ancient Greeks of Greece and their so-called colonies could not be separated from one another. Moreover, the people whom ancient Greeks encountered were often not so backward after all, and the products of their interaction, such as cultural and human hybridity, were no longer simply downgraded and, instead, came to be better understood against a new theoretical backdrop. By the start of this century, it had become starkly clear that ancient Greek migrants were a glaring gap in our accounts of ancient Greek history, and that they had to be included in a much more systematic and balanced manner than ever before. This edited book capitalizes on these new research perspectives and data and seeks to fill that gap.
What was the editorial process like for A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World?
This book is the result of nearly a decade of work, from conception through to publication this spring. Anyone who has successfully edited a project of this kind over such a time-frame will immediately understand the inherent editorial challenges. Selecting the best contributors while striking the right balance in terms of nationalities and gender, and then getting these contributors to complete their work on time and according to the conceptual template envisaged for the project, were also encountered with this project. Although the language of publication is English, this masks the multinational and multilingual diversity of the contributors. Editing drafts of chapters written by non-native English speakers was a fascinating learning process in itself—paragraph-long sentences, lost-in-translation phrases, and unique styles in the bibliographies that hardly resembled the book’s style guidelines—are only some examples of the intercultural challenges encountered. I had my work cut out for me to ensure consistency and flow throughout the book, but that was a small price to pay to bring together the best roster of contributors.
The pandemic added other challenges, of course. Various parts of the book’s editorial and production teams were located in the northeastern USA, the UK, and India. The proofs and index were being corrected and finalized when COVID-19 was ramping up in these countries and in the very same cities where the editorial and production teams with whom I was working were based. Many of the contributors also were not at home, when this was happening. So you can imagine the extra challenges contributors also had to face. Everyone involved in the project persevered professionally, a testament to their commitment, which was a most gratifying way to conclude the editing process.
Do you have any future plans to build on your findings?
My two current sole-authored book projects build on and are part of the same research trajectory as this edited book: that is, they involve re-evaluating ancient Greek mobilities and migrations in both antiquity and modernity. The first book, under contract with Oxford University Press, seeks to test the usual argument that the ancient Greeks who settled in the western Mediterranean “civilized” the backward peoples living there with a series of massive cultural and technological transfers. The encounter led to one western Mediterranean peoples, the Romans, leapfrogging ahead of the Greeks and founding an empire that lasted for seven hundred years. But that argument is much too simple and needs updating. The other book project aims to study the history of the uses of ancient Greece (and Rome) in the European settlement of North America. Most studies devoted to this subject are piecemeal and focus on matters like Classically inspired place-names and aesthetics (such as neoclas-sical architecture) in big cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago. My book extends the discussion to the entire continent, including British Columbia and Canada as a whole, and situates the uses of Classical antiquity within their historical contexts of exploration, trade, empires, nation-building, and settler colonialism with its tragic destruction of indigenous peoples. I am preparing my manuscript for the series “The New Antiquity” published by Palgrave Macmillan.
