Routledge’s Rewriting Antiquity series, of which Identities in Antiquity is the latest output, is designed to bridge disciplinary, chronological, geographical and methodological divides. It is difficult to imagine, therefore, a more apt topic than ancient identity for such a series, a subject as broad and malleable as it has proven omnipresent in the last few decades of scholarship (and western popular and political culture more broadly). At 27 chapters excluding the introduction, ranging across three millennia, from Anglo-Saxon Britain to the Xiongnu of Inner Mongolia via various Mediterranean and Near Eastern polities, peoples and places, editors Skinner, Manolopoulou and Tsouparopoulou can be congratulated for following their brief. Equally, this breadth evidences a second strength of the volume, that highlighted by the plural in its name. A movement arguably initiated (at least in anglophone research on ancient Greece) by J.M. Hall (Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity [1997]) nearly 30 years ago has reached its crescendo: students and scholars of the ancient world must now accept as a point of departure the polyvalency of ancient identity. Greeks, slaves, elites and any other specific grouping within ancient demography can no longer be easily understood as uniform groups. Several chapters illustrate the complexities that undermine the traditional categorisations of ancient populations, and the best of these provide dynamic solutions to encourage a more fluid understanding of identity for future research. At the same time, other chapters equally, occasionally more persuasively, argue against such fluidity, instead calling for more rigid, perhaps traditional, conceptualisations of ancient identity to remain (or be reinstated). Still other chapters eschew the ideological and methodological tensions of the subject almost completely, serving rather to champion specific sources of data. Consequently, when surveying the breadth of topics, approaches and ideas contained in the volume, it is less clear whether this multiplicity has succeeded in building the ‘comprehensive and comparative overview’ of its various broad themes and subjects, as the Rewriting Antiquity series intends. While readers of the entire book are sometimes rewarded by a thematic overlap or methodological insight across a disciplinary boundary, the insularity of many of the contributions coupled with the unwillingness to address meaningfully their discrepancies in both approach and conceptualisation mean that Identities in Antiquity is ultimately best appreciated as a collection of interesting contributions rather than as a cohesive whole.
In part, this is by design. As stated in the introduction, the editors explicitly refused to provide a template for authors to adhere to in preparing their chapters. As a result, the diversity of the papers serves to demonstrate precisely the variety of approach, evidence-base and historiographical background that characterises the study of identities in the various disciplines represented. Moreover, ‘by providing a snapshot of work that is ongoing across different disciplines – rather than implying that scholarship was moving forward in anything resembling a unified manner’ (p. 9), the present work serves to facilitate knowledge exchange. This ambition underpins the curation of the first part of the book, ‘Approaching Ancient Identities’. The six chapters of this section are purposefully loose in their ancient theme: some stand as essentially commentaries on the vagaries of historiographic discourse (J. Siapkas) or unpack established definitions (E. Isayev) with little discussion of specific ancient cultures or identity categories, while others focus on particular (albeit broadly conceptualised) bodies of evidence (names: A. Gavrielatos) or ancient social identities (slavery: K. Vlassopoulos; religion: J. Rüpke; the other contribution, by M. Haysom, is discussed below). In line with the ambitions of the editors, this part is presumably designed to be the most accessible, appealing to scholars from a variety of disciplines and specialisms seeking a broader understanding of the topic of identity. Such readers will be by turns enlightened and frustrated. Vlassopoulos’s chapter on slavery, for example, is compelling and persuasive, drawing on a range of examples to illustrate not simply the plurality of identities it is possible to explore in the data on ancient enslaved individuals, but the scholarly utility of the term ‘enslaved person/s’ over ‘slave’ as a way to ensure the latter identity does not overshadow those others held by the individual in question. It is little surprise that, as noted in the introduction (p. 9), this chapter has already proved successful at influencing cross-disciplinary scholarship, at least as regards the nomenclature chosen by J.N. Reid and C. Bruun in their later contributions on, respectively, Mesopotamian and Roman slavery. In contrast, the characterisation of DNA analysis as a return to the race theory essentialisms of the early twentieth century may surprise archaeologists who read Siapkas’s chapter alone. While his warning about the dangers of this outcome is prescient, by not engaging substantively with the explicitly post-colonial aspects of, for instance, the ‘ontological turn’ in archaeology (mentioned merely in a brief footnote as so many ‘isms’, p. 48 n. 75), this critique only finds full justification much later in J. Gerrard’s more evidence-driven account of the history of the study of Anglo-Saxon brooches.
The first six chapters also introduce broader issues that recur throughout the four subsequent case study-led sections: ‘The ancient Near East’; ‘The Mediterranean world until the age of the successors’; ‘The Roman world: from early republic to late empire’ and ‘From Late Antiquity until the Early Middle Ages: Rome, Byzantium and others’. One such concern is the difference between identities as they are given (or, to use Gerrard’s term, ‘assigned’, p. 431) to individuals and those that are self-chosen (‘avowed’). Such a contrast is at the centre of Vlassopoulos’s introductory chapter and those of Reid and Bruun, R.F. Kennedy’s chapter on metics, and E.S. Gruen and K. Czajkowski’s contributions on Jewish identity. R. Stephens Falcasantos’s chapter on Libanius’ Oration 30 similarly focuses on the contrasting, and potentially deadly, conceptualisations of a feast: outsider Christians saw an act of pagan worship, while for the participants it was simply a typical elite (and secularised) ritual. As the chapters on slavery most clearly attest, the tensions between these perspectives speak to the limitations of our evidence. Neither Reid nor Bruun, for example, fully escape a focus on the vastly better attested motivations and actions of slave masters and the formerly enslaved, despite their stated focus on the enslaved. But the difficulty of reconciling outsider perspectives with individual lived experience is not restricted to the study of primary sources. Modern scholarship is itself an act of interpretation from without, and some of the liveliest contributions to this volume address this core aspect of our scholarly praxis head on. While not all will be persuaded by C. López-Ruiz’s categoric takedown of the modern tendency to deconstruct Phoenician identity out of all existence, for example, none will fail to be entertained by it. Further, despite being essentially at theoretical loggerheads, with the former arguing for a complete retreat from territorialised conceptualisations of identity and the latter bemoaning the constant push for greater and greater degrees of fluidity, the contributions of Isayev and A. Kaldellis illustrate well the extremes of methodological approach to this issue. It was dissatisfaction with the imposition of precisely such identity-centred and modern categorisations onto material culture that inspired the ‘non-representational’ (A. Van Oyen and M. Pitts [edd.], Materialising Roman Histories [2017]) movement in archaeology, and one wonders if a broader engagement with these ideas across the disciplines represented might be the way to ‘tell [the] new and different stories’ (p. 444) urged by Gerrard.
Another recurrent feature of the volume is the study of elites, which begins in Part 1 with Haysom’s comparative chapter on those of Middle Kingdom Egypt and Archaic Greece. Continuing through G.D. Farney’s discussion of aristocratic ‘corporate identity’ (p. 355) in Republican Rome, Stephens Falcasantos’s aforementioned contribution and the final chapter by R. Betancourt on the presentation of Manuel I Komnenos, elites do not dominate proceedings, but the frequent interest in this group is worthy of note. While this can once more be explained as a reflection of the limited evidence, it perhaps gives us pause to think about what precisely we want our study of identities to do for us. Given the references to Donald Trump, Brexit and myriad other figures and events that characterise the identity politics of modern times across the volume, as well as certain deplorable episodes in our disciplines, readers may expect a more full-throated critique of older scholarship in these pages or even a foregrounding of some of the underrepresented minorities of today in their ancient context. True, T. Harrison gives the Greeks a good kicking, arguing we should just call them out for the racists we all know they were, and Betancourt explores ‘trans male saints’ (p. 514) and fluid conceptions of gender, race and sexuality, but the concerns of modernity are only rarely foregrounded in this work, relegated mostly to the footnotes or closing paragraphs. Identities in Antiquity consequently does not come to bury traditional approaches, but rather to update them, a nuance that one fears could attract praise and disappointment in equal measure by different readers.
Overall, Skinner, Manolopoulou and Tsouparopoulou have done a good job in collating a wide-ranging, consistently interesting and cross-disciplinary study of a topic that belies easy categorisation. The volume’s usefulness lies not only in those chapters that demonstrate this complexity, but in those that largely avoid overt theoretical positioning, instead presenting the value of underutilised categories of evidence and approaches. D. Demetriou’s study of symbola/tesserae hospitalis and D. Tober’s of ancient Greek local histories, for example, would sit well in any undergraduate reading list as introductions to less traditional sources of ancient evidence, irrespective of an explicit focus or otherwise on the topic of identity. Similarly N. Abell’s communities of practice approach to the study of the Bronze Age Cyclades serves as an excellent demonstration of how archaeology can uncover polyvalent understandings of ancient communities from the local to the regional scale. If the volume can be criticised, it is primarily for a lack of clear direction and unity of purpose; reading this book cover to cover will not give you a clear, concise and adaptable definition of identity, much less a framework for scholarly practice. But it is debatable whether such would be desirable or even possible, given the fluidity inherent to the subject. Instead, any who take on this challenge will have much food for thought, undoubtedly learn something beyond their specialism and perhaps be encouraged by the pluralism on display to define the strictures and emphases of a study of identity for themselves. One suspects this may have been the true goal of the editors. On these terms, consequently, even if its internal contradictions ultimately limit its utility as an integrated whole, Identities in Antiquity is a successful and worthwhile contribution to the field.
