Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture

Jonathan M. Hall explores questions of ethnic and national identity in the context of ancient Greece in Hellenicity, drawing on an exceptionally wide range of evidence to determine when, how, why, and to what extent the Greeks conceived themselves as a single people. Hall argues that a subjective sense of Hellenic identity emerged in Greece much later than is normally assumed. For instance, he shows that the four main ethnic subcategories of the ancient Greeks - Akhaians, Ionians, Aiolians, and Dorians - were not primordial survivals from a premigratory period but emerged in precise historical circumstances during the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Furthermore, Hall demonstrates that the terms of defining Hellenic identity shifted from ethnic to broader cultural criteria during the course of the fifth century BC, chiefly due to the influence of Athens, whose citizens formulated a new Athenocentric conception of Greekness.