Tim Whitmarsh - Black Achilles
The Greeks didn’t have modern ideas of race. Did they see themselves as white, black – or as something else altogether?
Homer’s Iliad (a ‘poem about Ilion, or Troy’) and Odyssey (a ‘poem about Odysseus’) are the earliest surviving literary texts composed in Greek. For most other Greek literature, we have a more or less secure understanding of who the author was, but ‘Homer’ is still a mystery to us, as he was to most ancient Greeks: there is still no agreement whether his poems are the works of a single author or a collective tradition. The poems are rooted in ancient stories transmitted orally, but the decisive moment in stabilising them in their current form was the period from the 8th to the 7th centuries BCE. The siege of Troy, the central event in the mythical cycle to which the Homeric poems belong, might or might not be based on a real event that took place in the earlier Bronze Age, in the 13th or 12th century BCE. Historically speaking, the poems are an amalgam of different temporal layers: some elements are drawn from the contemporary world of the 8th century BCE, some are genuine memories of Bronze Age times, and some (like Achilles’ phrase ‘immortal glory’) are rooted in seriously ancient Indo-European poetics. There is a healthy dollop of fantasy too, as all Greeks recognised: no one ever believed, for example, that Achilles’ horses really could talk.... read more:
Few issues provoke
such controversy as the skin-colour of the ancient Greeks. Last year in an
article published in Forbes, the Classics scholar Sarah Bond at the
University of Iowa caused a storm by pointing out that many of the Greek
statues that seem white to us now were in antiquity painted in colour. This is
an uncontroversial position, and demonstrably correct, but Bond received a
shower of online abuse for daring to suggest that the reason why some like to
think of their Greek statues as marble-white might just have something to do
with their politics. This year, it was the turn of BBC’s new television
series Troy: Fall of a City (2018-) to attract ire, which cast
black actors in the roles of Achilles, Patroclus, Zeus, Aeneas and others (as
if using anglophone northern European actors were any less
anachronistic).
The idea of the Greeks
as paragons of whiteness is deeply rooted in Western society. As Donna
Zuckerberg shows in her book Not
All Dead White Men (2018), this agenda has been promoted with gusto by
sections of the alt-Right who see themselves as heirs to (a supposed) European
warrior masculinity. Racism is emotional, not rational; I don’t want to dignify
online armies of anonymous trolls by responding in detail to their assertions.
My aim in this essay, rather, is to consider how the Greeks themselves viewed
differences in skin colour. The differences are instructive – and, indeed,
clearly point up the oddity of the modern, western obsession with
classification by pigmentation.
Homer’s Iliad (a ‘poem about Ilion, or Troy’) and Odyssey (a ‘poem about Odysseus’) are the earliest surviving literary texts composed in Greek. For most other Greek literature, we have a more or less secure understanding of who the author was, but ‘Homer’ is still a mystery to us, as he was to most ancient Greeks: there is still no agreement whether his poems are the works of a single author or a collective tradition. The poems are rooted in ancient stories transmitted orally, but the decisive moment in stabilising them in their current form was the period from the 8th to the 7th centuries BCE. The siege of Troy, the central event in the mythical cycle to which the Homeric poems belong, might or might not be based on a real event that took place in the earlier Bronze Age, in the 13th or 12th century BCE. Historically speaking, the poems are an amalgam of different temporal layers: some elements are drawn from the contemporary world of the 8th century BCE, some are genuine memories of Bronze Age times, and some (like Achilles’ phrase ‘immortal glory’) are rooted in seriously ancient Indo-European poetics. There is a healthy dollop of fantasy too, as all Greeks recognised: no one ever believed, for example, that Achilles’ horses really could talk.... read more:
