Warfare in ancient literature: the paradox of war

In any attempt to understand Roman history the first half of the second century B.C. must have a special place. Victory in the Hannibalic war had laid the foundations of a general dominance of the Mediterranean world, but had hardly yet produced an Empire. Outside Italy, only Sicily, Sardinia and two commands in Spain were normally allotted as provinciae for annual magistrates; and this list was not increased by the famous victories in the Greek East, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia and Pydna. Roman imperialism is too crude a term for what we can observe between 200 and 151 B.C. Roman dominance was felt everywhere, from Spain to Carthage, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch and Ankara; Roman militarism was demonstrated consistently in N. Italy and Spain, at various periods in Greece and Macedonia (200–194, 191–187, 171–168), and for one period of three years in Asia Minor (190–188). Roman colonialism was still confined, with one very marginal exception, to the Italian peninsula.

Despite having emerged in the heyday of a dominant Europe, of which Ancient Greece is the hallowed spiritual and intellectual ancestor, anthropology has paradoxically shown relatively little interest in contemporary Greek culture. In this innovative and ambitious book, Michael Herzfeld moves Greek Ethnography from the margins to the centre of anthropological theory, revealing the theoretical insights that can be gained by so doing. He shows that the ideology that originally led to the creation of anthropology also played a large part in the growth of the modern Greek nation-state, and that Greek ethnography can therefore serve as a mirror for an ethnography of anthropology itself. He further demonstrates the role that scholarly fields, including anthropology, have played in the construction of contemporary Greek culture and Greek identity.