Natasha Rao, University College London
Hellenistic Alexandria, with its blend of cultures, histories, and languages, provided fertile ground for interactions and conflicts between people of Greek and Egyptian backgrounds. These clashes are attested to in the wealth of literary and papyrological evidence from this period, from the Ptolemies’ privileging and preservation of Greek literature to the day-to-day disputes between Greeks and Egyptians in the lawcourts.
Theocritus, as a poet from Greek-colonised Sicily, can provide us with a unique perspective on these cross-cultural interactions. In particular, in his Idyll 15, Theocritus presents us with a fascinating vignette in which two Syracusan women navigate the streets of Alexandria while travelling to the festival of Adonis, interacting with a number of Alexandrians along the way.
One of the most interesting and central features of these dialogues is the use of stereotypes, from Gorgo and Praxinoa’s derisive descriptions of the local Egyptians (“μύρμακες”, “ἀνάριθμοι καὶ ἄμετροι”) to insults thrown at the women for their ‘broad’ Doric accent and way of speaking. This paper looks in closer detail at the stereotypes being employed in this text and their significance in our understanding of the poem and the broader historical context. In particular, adopting McCoskey’s performance-based definition of ‘ethnicity’ (2002), I will argue firstly that stereotypes were deployed as a deliberate means of asserting ethnic and class identities in Hellenistic Alexandria: whether this was in order to build community ties, to assimilate to local contexts, or to exclude the ‘other.’ To strengthen my argument, I will refer to a series of legal petitions from this period in which stereotyping ostensibly takes on the same function: namely, a tool used in a performative context to defend a (constructed) identity.
This paper will also look to locate this practice of stereotyping in its wider context and (in particular) the fluidity of ethnic identities at play in Hellenistic Alexandria – which has been explored by Clarysee (1998) and others particularly in respect of (e.g.) the adoption of both Greek and Egyptian or ‘dual’ names in administrative contexts. If stereotypes about ‘Greeks’, ‘Egyptians’ (or even ‘Syracusans’) operated in limited and performative contexts, does this support the contention that ‘Greekness’ or ‘Egyptianess’ were constructed identities in this period?