Controvésias de Helenismo multicultural e ideologizado
As Tim Whitmarsh, professor of ancient literatures at the University of Oxford says: "What if what we think of as the classical world has been falsely invented as European, for reasons serving the cause of 19th-century imperialism? Should the Greek and Roman worlds, albeit in different ways, be seen rather as part of the Iraqi-Syrian-Palestinian-Egyptian complex? If so, what would that mean for ideas about European identity today?"
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In a controversial three-volume book, Black Athena (1989), the late author Martin Bernal also sought to place the origins of Greece in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, which in turn was a riposte to the 19th century racist view – what Whitmarsh calls the "massive cultural deception" – that the Greeks owed their brilliance to Aryan origins in central Europe.
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From a less political perspective, other scholars suggest caution, too:Greg Woolf, professor of ancient history at the University of St Andrews, warns against taking the notion of a happy ancient multiculturalism too far. The ancient Greeks, he says, "were in the business of creating an autonomous civilisation. There were cultural conflicts, and separateness, and limits to transferability. We don't have a Greek version of Gilgamesh, or Babylonian versions of Homer".
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He (Tim Whitmarsh) adds: "There is a strongly political dimension to the kind of claim I am making, and you would probably find that most people who were pushing for a very hybridised vision of the Greek world would … be naturally more left-leaning and have their own idealised view of the ancient world as a place of opportunity and hybridisation.
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Recent scholarship, though, might emphasise Herodotus's own culturally hybrid origins in Asia Minor: he was raised in Halicarnassus, on the Carian coast of modern Turkey – a city that during the Persian wars was part of the Persian Achaemenid empire, ruled by Queen Artemisia, herself half Halicarnassian and half Cretan. Whitmarsh says: "Halicarnassus was a bilingual Greek and Carian city that had been under Persian occupation. It's not inherently implausible that he had a much more informed sense of the world than we have previously given him credit for. It comes down to networks. If you see Herodotus as occupying a single point from which Greek culture is 'beamed out', that's a less interesting way of thinking of him than as a kind of nodal point between multiple different traditions and cultures. Herodotus's The Histories is a predominantly Greek-voiced text, but that doesn't mean that we should quieten all the other voices that can be detected within it."
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Another culturally hybrid work is the Alexander Romance, a story that recasts the Macedonian conqueror as secretly Egyptian, so the story of his annexation of Egypt becomes one not of conquest but of the return of pharaonic rule. Whitmarsh says the story reflects a Demotic Egyptianliterary forebear. "It is forged in a very distinctive culture in which there are Greeks and Egyptians working together. And it tells the story of Alexander the Great in Egyptian-friendly terms. The interesting thing about this text is that, other than the Bible, it's the biggest seller in antiquity – it goes into 26 languages in antiquity alone, and eventually into [the ancient Iranian language of] Pahlavi, French, Armenian, Bulgarian, Old English." (It is also mentioned in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales). Whitmarsh adds: "It is a world away from the model of Greek culture as continuous, organic, hermetically sealed from outside influence."
