Publication Day

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The day has arrived. By which I mean it arrived yesterday, but I was neck deep in grading and trying to avoid Twitter so I missed the publisher’s Tweet.

Not important.

The important thing is that my book has officially been released from the University of Michigan Press. This means that it is available for purchase and also to read as an open access scholarly resource. Academic books usually have short print runs, sell relatively few copies, and represent a deep investment of tens of thousands of dollars over the course of years to produce, even without lucrative contracts for the authors. This is why most publishers require authors to offset the publisher’s cost with grants and research funds in order to have their work appear open-access, and I am immensely grateful to UM Press for offering me the chance to participate in a new initiative to make a larger number of books accessible this way.

If I’m being honest, this day is more than a little intimidating. This book is a substantially revised (and improved) version of my dissertation research that began about a decade ago and that I carried on through both years of underemployment and the pandemic. I still managed to write the book I wanted to write and I am proud of the final product, but the circumstances under which I was writing created hurdles to getting there—on top of the usual anxieties like imposter syndrome. The little voice in my head who worries about how my scholarship will be received is pacing anxiously, slightly muting my excitement at having it out in the world.

But this is a concern for another day. Today, I am celebrating a personal writing milestone, and I hope that my book gives people a lot to think about.

Publications Notice 2018

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This year saw some of my work go out into the world beyond the ecosystem of this blog, in the form of two peer-reviewed articles and one book review. In reverse order, they were:

“‘Who Cares About the Greeks Living in Asia?’: Ionia and Attic Orators in the Fourth Century,” CJ 114 (2018), 163–90.

In this article I used the extant speeches of the Attic Orators as a window into Athenian public discourse about Ionia. Where a superficial distance between Athens and Ionia appeared at the start of the fourth century, these speeches, I argue, contain evidence a complex and ongoing relationship between the two even as their composers directed the attention of their audiences elsewhere.

“Oracular Politics: Propaganda and Myth in the Refoundation of Didyma,” AHB 32 (2018), 44–60.

This article challenges the widely-held position that the presence of Alexander the Great caused the restoration of the oracle at Didyma, which had lain in ruin for almost a century and a half since the end of the Persian Wars. I reinterpreted the ancient evidence for this spurious association, arguing that crediting Alexander served the political needs of the Milesians and of Seleucid royal family.

“Nudell on: P. Briant, The First European: A History of Alexander in the Age of Empire,” trans. N. Elliot (Harvard University Press: 2017).”

In January my review of Pierre Briant’s book about the reception of Alexander in Early Modern Europe, published in English as The First European appeared in CJ-online. The short version is that the book is excellent (Briant is one of my favorite ancient historians working), but I took issue with the title chosen for the English-language edition.

Each of these is a piece of scholarship, meaning that while I tried my best to keep the writing clean and readable, a certain amount of background context is assumed on the part of the reader. That said, I am happy to share copies with any interested readers, scholars, or students. If the numbers of off-prints are limited, priority goes to students and academics. Send an email to inquire about receiving a copy.

Class warfare in fifth century Ionia

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Two instances: both episodes took place c.412 or 411 BCE, when the Peloponnesian War spilled over into the Eastern Aegean and the cities there began to reject Athenian authority. The first took place on Samos, the second (which took place chronologically earlier) on Chios.

At this time on Samos, the demos* rose up against the ruling class with the support of Athenians who were there with three ships. The Samian demos executed two hundred from elite and condemned four hundred more to exile, distributing amongst themselves their land and homes. After this, the Athenians decreed them autonomous. Henceforth they governed the city, excluding the (previously) prominent men from governance and forbidding intermarriage between them and members of the demos.

Ἐγένετο δὲ κατὰ τὸν χρόνον τοῦτον καὶ ἡ ἐν Σάμῳ ἐπανάστασις ὑπὸ τοῦ δήμου τοῖς δυνατοῖς μετὰ Ἀθηναίων, οἳ ἔτυχον ἐν τρισὶ ναυσὶ παρόντες. καὶ ὁ δῆμος ὁ Σαμίων ἐς διακοσίους μέν τινας τοὺς πάντας τῶν δυνατωτάτων ἀπέκτεινε, τετρακοσίους δὲ φυγῇ ζημιώσαντες καὶ αὐτοὶ τὴν γῆν αὐτῶν καὶ οἰκίας νειμάμενοι, Ἀθηναίων τε σφίσιν αὐτονομίαν μετὰ ταῦτα ὡς βεβαίοις ἤδη ψηφισαμένων, τὰ λοιπὰ διῴκουν τὴν πόλιν, καὶ τοῖς γεωμόροις μετεδίδοσαν οὔτε ἄλλου οὐδ᾽ ἐς ἐκείνους οὐδενὶ ἔτι τοῦ δήμου ἐξῆν.

Thucydides, 8.21.1

*Note: demos is a somewhat loaded term since it can mean the citizen body. Here there is clear differentiation between the super wealthy and the majority. The redistribution of land indicates that Samos was experiencing a consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few, but the extent of this is unknown.

Straightway after the naval battle (Aegospotami) the rest of Hellas deserted the Athenians, save the Samians, who had gained mastery over the polis by carrying out a slaughter of the prominent men there.

εὐθὺς δὲ καὶ ἡ ἄλλη Ἑλλὰς ἀφειστήκει Ἀθηναίων μετὰ τὴν ναυμαχίαν πλὴν Σαμίων: οὗτοι δὲ σφαγὰς τῶν γνωρίων ποιήσαντες κατεῖχον τὴν πόλιν.

Xenophon, Hell. 2.2.6

The reason that they sent these ships was that the majority of the Chians were ignorant of the arrangements. The oligarchs and those in the know were not yet willing to bring war to the majority before they secured their position and because of the delay no longer expected the Peloponnesians to arrive.

αἴτιον δ᾽ ἐγένετο τῆς ἀποστολῆς τῶν νεῶν οἱ μὲν πολλοὶ τῶν Χίων οὐκ εῖδότες τὰ πρασσόμενα, οἱ δὲ ὀλίγοι καὶ ξυνειδότες τό τε πλῆθος οὐ βουλόμενοί πω πολέμιον ἔχειν, πρίν τι καὶ ἰσχυρὸν λάβωσι, καὶ τοὺς Πελοποννησίους οὐκέτι προσδεχόμενοι ἥξειν, ὄτι διέτριβον.

Thucydides 8.9.3

The episode on Chios is not class warfare in the same sense as the episode on Samos was, but very clearly indicates a conflict between the few and the many. Here, the conspirators hoped to lead Chios into revolt against Athens, but were waiting on promised aid from Sparta before making their appeal and therefore sacrificed a squadron of seven ships as a way to avert Athenian suspicion about their motives just a little longer. Thucydides’ phrasing here is interesting. The conspiracy will bring war to Chios against the will of the majority, but it is a close step from that to the conspirators bringing war against to the majority.

Alternate Colors

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I am fortunate in my online experience. Not only am I generally identified as a white man, but I have a curated existence and small footprint. I am nevertheless exhausted just as a spectator to the maelstrom. This week the storm again struck the corner of the internet inhabited by ancient history.

Here’s what happened: Dr. Sarah Bond, a professor at the University of Iowa and probably the public historian of the ancient world with the greatest breadth of subjects, published a piece for hyperallergic titled “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color.” In the article, Bond introduces the readers to the issue of polychromy—the idea that the naked marble of the surviving statues was once garishly painted (not to mention literally dressed and armed). She then transitions to how the naked marble came to represent the classical ideal and explores how this standard allows modern prejudices concerning race to be channeled onto the ancient world.

(Not for nothing, but I am reminded of the Carbon Leaf song “The War Was In Color” about remembering wars from black and white pictures.)

Bond’s article is an excellent introduction to this issue and there was some excited conversation on ancient Twitter about the legacy of the controversial Black Athena and a variety of other issues. I was absolutely delighted to see the article (for reasons I will get into below), and driving discussion of this sort is exactly what it should do. Nobody challenged its fundamental assumptions because the ancient Mediterranean was a variegated quilt of cultures and peoples. How these colors were created and looked may be disputed—I once heard a scholar suggest that the fabled Spartan crimson was actually bright pink based on modern efforts to recreate ancient pigment—but the existence of colors is not.

Outside this conversation there were death threats.

People are so committed to their preconceptions that they would rather threaten the life of an academic in an effort to bully and silence her rather than face fundamental truths. But I am not here to “defend” Bond or to chide the bullies, even leaving alone the willful misreadings of her piece. I planned to write this post before reading about the backlash.

One issue with teaching history is that it runs the risk of presenting the past either as something teleological in an endless progressive march to the present or something static. Since there are political agendas that want ancient Greece to be the self-referential origin for western civilization, it is particular susceptible to these caricatures. And yet, even in antiquity, the definitions of “Europe” and “Greece” were constantly in flux. Ionia, the subject of my dissertation, for instance, consisted of communities that were Greek, but were not in Europe. Ancient orators such as Isocrates tended to gloss issues like this when giving speeches, but the seeming dissonance has cast a long shadow, with historians of colossal stature like Rostovtzeff describing them as “fragments of the western world on the fringe of the eastern.” In point of fact, much of Greek “civilization” developed in communication with the Near East and Egypt.

Similarly, scholars have tied themselves in knots trying to explain Alexander the Great’s behavior in terms of race. At issue were his decisions (personally, and with regard to his men) about marriage and whether marrying Greek men with eastern women, either in a simple east-west binary or in a more complicated and totally anachronistic distinction between Indo-European and Semitic populations.

In both examples, the history of these academic debates was driven by or responding to racially-motivated agendas. As Bond makes clear in her article, not all of the scholars were racist but, intentionally or not, their scholarship worked in tandem to support these agendas. The end result is that the statues became marble-white and Greece became singularly European.

Ancient Greece, ranging far beyond the modern national borders, was deeply enmeshed in the ancient Mediterranean and would have had many different shades, not lease because of the historical movement of people and ideas. The variations became even more pronounced after Alexander’s conquests when there were people who were culturally Greek as far east as central Asia. Redefining Greece is nothing new and was, in fact, a fairly standard feature of diplomacy in the ancient world, including one instance when the Judean kingdom claimed kinship with Sparta. The result was successive layers of definitions that bore only a loose connection to history. These were, and are, political agendas.

To come full circle, then, I want to echo Bond’s core point: the ancient world was awash in color, most of which was not white. Art history is not my wheelhouse, but many of the same forces are at work in scholarship on other issues. Greece was not European adjacent to, but separate from, the Mediterranean. Greece was Mediterranean and shaped by continuous movement of people and ideas in trickles and waves, with all of the colors that go along with that.

Two Ancient History Books from 2014/13

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Being alive today means that one usually has little spare time because the small things (like Twitter!) seep into every available crack. Being a graduate student means having less, and being at the dissertation stage means that there is a constant pressure to write–besides, having passed through the comprehensive exams scarred, but in one piece, means that one should be able to focus the reading toward that eventual product. As much as it was exhausting and is designed to traumatize students into building their personal library of previous scholarship, there is something nostalgic about the process where your primary responsibility for months on end is to read history books and think about them. I’ve been carving out time to read fiction since passing through my comprehensive exams and I am trying to clear enough time to read one or two recent history books in my field or related fields every month. While I would like to get to a point where I do one a week, alternating between my own and other fields, I am right now trying to use this minimal time to read books not directly related to my dissertation, but within the field of Greek History (loosely constructed) that are a) recently published and b) connected to my dissertation either thematically or because they fall just outside the chronological parameters of my study.

So far I have only had minimal success in holding myself to these goals, but between this and my dissertation research, I want to endorse two recent ancient history books.

1) Naoíse Mac Sweeney, Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

The most commonly known account for the foundation of the Ionian cities (on which I am doing my dissertation) is that of the Ionian Migration, where a group of plucky Greeks under the leadership of Athenian princes sail to what is now Turkey and steal that land from the inhabitants. One might say that this is a myth in line with Western Civilization. The problem is that each of the cities had its own foundation myth and the region had another set of foundation myths, namely the war against Melie, that bound them together. In this book, Mac Sweeney evaluates these “native” Ionian myths by way of an exploration of Ionian identity. She also makes the argument that the Ionian Migration is a comparatively late myth, sponsored as part of Athenian hegemony over the region because it justified Athenian control.

There is a fairly large historical backdrop against which Mac Sweeney writes, but I think that the stories themselves, which are the subject, are understandable without needing to know it and she brings in relevant information when discussing, for instance, the Ionian League. I particularly appreciated the way in which Mac Sweeney was able to reorient the discussion about Ionian toward appreciating the region on its own merits through these aspects of Ionian identity.

2) Rachel Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

Mairs offers a reevaluation of the archeological evidence for the Graeco-Bactrian and Graeco-Indian kingdoms of the Hellenistic Period through a post-colonial lens. These kingdoms, which are in what is now Afghanistan and the surrounding regions, have long been known about, but difficult to understand because there are only intermittent archeological digs and coins and inscriptions as evidence. No literary histories exist and it has long been assumed that the kingdoms consisted of Greeks in exile in Central Asia, with discussions of whether the inhabitants were Hellenizing natives, Greeks going native, or Greeks. In part, these ideas emerged because it was thought that Bactria was wild and untamed, even by the standards of the rest of Persia, which those same scholars often considered “barbarian.” Mairs quite reasonably argues that this is an inappropriate way to evaluate this region, and suggests both that Bactria operated as any other Persian satrapy and that hybridization and/or creolization, with the creation of a distinct Helleno-Bactrian identity, is a much more likely scenario than a stark binary between Greeks and non-Greeks.

There is a lot of archeological evidence in this book, but Mairs does a nice job of explaining trends in research and past historical debates in an approachable way. I often found myself nodding when she discussed the problems of locating identity in a region where there were official languages of inscriptions (often Greek or Aramaic), because it is probable that Ionia contained relatively large populations of people who were considered non-Greek, but who likely spoke Greek and who probably would have conducted official business–the sort of business that could be recorded on an inscription–in Greek. The problems of this sort are starker in Hellenistic Bactria, both because the site is further from a place where the majority of the inhabitants spoke some sort of Greek and because there is less in the way of surviving materials, but they are familiar nonetheless.