Phoenix, Keltoi and Others

Early in my schooldays I did a history project on the Phoenicians. I didn’t question who or what they were. They were just part of history. By the time I was old enough to ask further questions I had left them behind and was thinking of other things. But I recently read a review of a book which seems to question their existence(1). In this view they were a construction of the Greeks who wrote about them, a collective term for a category of ‘others’, traders who operated across North Africa and Lebanon. But in spite of being described by the catch-all term: phoenix, their common identity may be no more certain than that of the mythical bird with whom they share a name. They were not, apparently, a distinct ethnic group, nor even an organised network of trading peoples. For the Greeks who wrote about them ‘Phoenicia’ might well have seemed like a distinct place which these peoples inhabited. But the Phoenicians themselves had other ideas. There is a single surviving example of one of these people describing ‘Phoenicia’ as his home. But it is a bilingual funerary inscription and this is only the case in the Greek text. In his own language the person concerned, someone called Antipatros, describes himself as an ‘Ashkelonite’. So Phoenicia is likely to be a translation into terms Greek readers of the inscription would understand.

 It may be that when people are relating to a dominant culture they will use the terms of that culture’s view of them to describe themselves. To the dominant culture ‘others’ are frequently categorised in general terms rather than specific identifiers which are of no interest to those regarding their own culture as the central focus of their world view. The Greeks similarly categorised the tribes to the north of them as ‘Keltoi’, another catch-all term which these ‘Celts’ sometimes also used to describe themselves. For the Romans, when they had become the dominant European culture, the Carthaginians, with whom they were at war, were thought of as those same Phoenicians the Greeks had described, hence the Latin descriptor ‘Punic’, a word from the same root. If they began to differentiate between the ‘Celts’ it was because they needed to differentiate between those they had conquered, e.g, the ‘Gauls’ and those they had not e.g. the ‘Germans’, tribes occupying one side or the other of the Rhine which was the frontier between territory occupied by the Romans and what was beyond.

 In her most recent work on Roman Britain(2) Miranda Aldhouse Green also deals with the sense of provincial peoples as ‘others’, even when they had become fully Romanised. It is understandable that groups such as the Druids who stood in the way of the conquering army and resisted the spread of Roman values, or the Germanic tribes who remained outside the Roman sphere, should be thought of in this way. But, to the sophisticated citizens of Rome itself, fully Romanised peoples from the provincial areas of the Empire could be similarly patronised. So the satirist Juvenal can jeer at a Gaulish consul called Laterus for worshipping the Goddess Epona rather than native Roman gods:

He swears before Jove’s high altar
By none but his revered
Goddess of horses, and images daubed
On the stinking stalls.

 So much, we might think, for the interpretatio Romana, but Green observes that Juvenal is here representing a not uncommon ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude and a hatred of un-Roman practices among the peoples of Rome in spite of the apparently tolerant attitude to the diverse and multi-ethnic nature of the Empire which sustained the home city. Green makes the comparison with modern intolerance in a number of places in her work. She begins by quoting Herodian, a Roman historian who describes Britain as a barbaric place where the natives happily wade through swamps and do not wear clothing but paint their bodies instead. This was written not before Britain was part of the Empire, but two hundred years after it had become incorporated into it. Green compares Herodian to Donald Trump and his wish to build a wall between America and those strange ‘others’ beyond the southern border of his sovereignty. She reminds us that such attitudes are not new and often coloured the accounts of other peoples of the ancient world by the colonising powers first of Greece and later of Rome. We should not take what they say too seriously. Fake news - then and now - is always with us. But avoiding an identity which mirrors that of the dominant sovereign powers, and instead finding another sovereignty which governs a more elusive sense of who and what we are - as it is suggested was the case with the Phoenicians - may make what we are harder to pin down, and enable a refusal of labels that attempt to categorize ourselves, or anyone else, as 'others'. And that, in a world of dividing walls, hard brexits and rigid nationalities can only be a good thing.

(1) In Search of the Phoenicians by Josephine Quinn (Princeton, 2017), reviewed in The London Review of Books, 3 January 2019 by Robert L Cioffi .
(2) Sacred Britannia by Miranda Aldhouse Green (Thames and Hudson, 2018).

Personal Identity

Many people think of their lives as a story with a coherent and pervasive identity enduring throughout the narrative. Some also think that the story of the life they have currently got will endure beyond it. But to stay with the things we can be certain of, the sense of a story to one’s life tends to encourage the notion that there is a meaningful purpose, often perceived of as something that is lost and must be regained: “I once was lost but now am found” as the hymn has it, or “ I once was a child , but now I put away childish things” The sense of growing into one’s correct purpose.

These ideas suggest the fulfilment of one’s ‘true self’ either by growing up or turning aside from waywardness and taking the true path. Consider here the Scottish Border Ballad of True Thomas:

O see not ye yon narrow road,

          So thick beset wi thorns and briers?

          That is the path of righteousness,

          Tho after it but few enquires.

          ‘And see not ye that braid braid road,

          That lies across yon lillie leven?

          That is the path of wickedness,

          Tho some call it the road to heaven.

          ‘And see not ye that bonny road,

          Which winds about the fernie brae?

          That is the road to fair Elfland,

          Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae.

Here Thomas’s path is subverted and he is taken on a path he had not expected. This takes the ‘story’ in another direction from the usual one of the true righteous road and the false path onto which many stray. It also raises the question of what is ‘true’ identity. The notion of a unified self which is either in a state of grace or, more likely, has to find itself among the distractions of the world is pervasive in our culture. The third alternative indicated by the Queen of Elfland above is one way of questioning that. Another is to ask if we have just one true self or a multiplicity of them spread across time, space and even, some might say, different lives?

That we appear to have a continuity of conscious identity is undeniable, though clearly this changes through time (“I once was a child …”). But even within whatever vague and elastic period we call ‘the present’ we are likely to be living with contradictions of belief, identity and even behaviour. So to oppose the notion of a ‘true self’ it might be possible to say that not only am I not the same person that I was twenty years ago, but that the person I am now is a multiplicity rather than a singularity. Clearly such an approach might cause problems with personal integrity (should that ‘me’ feel responsible for what that other ‘me’ did?) Certainly, as far as the law is concerned, the official ‘me’ will be held to account for anything we do. But that is no more challenging than the idea that a public body must take responsibility for anything done in its name by one of its members or employees.

I should stress here that what I have in mind is not that sort of facile post-modernism which suggests that one can adopt superficial identities according to the velleities of fashion, whim or desire. Rather I mean to suggest that we are complex beings who have deep-rooted contradictions in our essential selves which, in fact, may constitute different selves within the same overall sense of selfhood. So when the Queen of Elfland offers us that choice of a way between the conflicting paths of our proposed true or false selves, that is not simply a third way but a liberation from such dualistic thinking about who we are.