‘Colonial’ Encounters:
Re-Conceptualizations from the Archaic Period to Postmodernism
Double Panel at the
17th Congress of the Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques (FIEC), Wroclaw, 7-11 July 2025
Double Panel Organizers:
Dr. Altay Coşkun, Professor of Classical Studies, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada (acoskun@uwaterloo.ca)
Dr. Joanna Porucznik, Assistant Professor in the Institute of History, Opole University, Poland (joannaporucznik@gmail.com)
Further Panelists:
Dr. Madalina Dana, Professor of Greek History, Université de Lyon, France (madalina-claudia.dana@univ-lyon3.fr)
Dr. Franco De Angelis, Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (franco.de_angelis@ubc.ca)
Dr. Marta Oller Guzmán, Associate Professor of Greek Philology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain (marta.oller@uab.cat)
Dr. Zachary Yuzwa, Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of History, St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan (zyuzwa@stmcollege.ca)
Double Panel Abstract:
There are multiple readings of legends of ancient settlements but few that differentiate the changing ideological contexts in which those stories were designed and retold. An analysis promises a more nuanced understanding of the represented relations, agencies, and emotions. Earliest layers seem to highlight cooperation among newcomers and locals, though mixed with fear; a founder’s marriage with the daughter of a native king is a typical element to express a lasting connection with the land and to imply the legitimacy of the settlement. Later, conflict, treachery, and expulsion were added to many narratives. Anti-barbarian rhetoric was enhanced under Athenian hegemony in the aftermath of the Persian Wars. The Roman imperial perspective articulated aspects of a cultural mission, if not the beginning of civilization with the arrival of the Greeks. This trend was continued in the Christianized empire and became predominant during early-modern conquests in the New World. Only in more recent generations, a higher awareness of the agencies of the colonized population has become part of the debate, again. Through a series of case studies, the panel seeks to explore ideological trends that shaped and reshaped the presentation of ‘colonial’ encounters from the archaic period to the postmodern age.
Panel I: Settlers and Natives in Ancient Contexts
Altay Coşkun
‘Shifting Identity Constructs in the Foundation Legends of Massalia and Other Phokaian Colonies’
Discounting the ‘Trojan’ foundation of Rome, the establishment of Massalia by Phocaean settlers (around 600 BCE) has yielded some of the most detailed narratives of an ancient city foundation. The longest version (Justin 43.3-5, quoting Pompeius Trogus) is late, as are the two runner-ups (Athenaeus 13.36 [576], quoting Aristotle F 549) and Strabo (3.4.8; 4.1.4). While traditional approaches have tried to identify one main story, I shall present a narrative analysis to show how the story was evolving from the 6th century BCE until the Augustan age. The earliest narrative focuses on the alliance and intermarriage among the first Aeolian settlers from Phocaea and the Segobrigi under king Nannus; the second phase (early-5th century) wrestles with the socio-cultural shifts after the arrival of Ionian settlers from Ephesus, which, on the one hand, was caused by or resulted in hostilities with the Segobrigi, while, on the other, redefined the ethnicity of the settler community. A third phase was influenced by Athenian anti-barbarian stereotypes, which led to the elimination of the Gaulish princess (cf. the parallel fate of Lampsake in Mysia: Plut. Mor. 255). Later layers of the story include the Romans into both the plot and its ideological outline, which equates the Greek arrival with the beginning of civilization.
Marta Oller Guzmán
‘Indigenous Women in Love: between Facilitators and Betrayers’
Greek foundation stories provide us little information on women, whether Greek, indigenous, or both. This is despite the fact that women must have played an important role in the founding of new communities. This paper will examine five non-Greek women as portrayed in ancient foundation narratives; three of them appear in historical contexts of Greek colonisation (Lampsakos [Plu. Mul. Vir. 255a-c], Massalia [Just. 43.4.3-8] and New Cryassa of Caria [Plu. Mul. Vir. 246D-E]), whereas the other two are set in a more remote mythical past (Methymna [Parth. Erot. 21] and Pedasos [Eustath. ad Il. 6.21]). These five women are presented as helping Greeks in settling for personal reasons, specifically romantic interests, but their actions clearly endanger their own communities. Their roles fall somewhere between facilitators for the arriving Greeks and traitors for the natives. One may read these stories from different perspectives. For some they are illustrations of the stereotypical transgression of gender norms among indigenous peoples. However, my emphasis in interpreting these stories will be on the agency of these indigenous women and their critical contribution to the success of the Greek settlements.
Joanna Porucznik
‘Peaceful Co-Existence or a ‘Colonial’ Conflict? The ‘Priest’s Letter’ from Olbia (SEG XLII 710)’
This paper discusses a late Archaic graffito known as the ‘priest’s letter’. It was discovered in 1991 at Olbia, a North Pontic Greek apoikia. The letter mentions altars located most probably in Hylaia, a wooded place in the vicinity of Olbia, further saying: ‘the altars had been damaged again’. However, the reason behind this damage remains unknown due to the fragmentary nature of the text. Yuri Vinogradov and Anna Rusyaeva have understood the aggression as directed against the Greek ‘colonists’ by the Scythians who supposedly did not tolerate Greek cults. This interpretation surmises a sharp Greek-Barbarian opposition and is influenced by some ancient sources that reflect such a general dichotomy, such as Herodotus 4.76 who mentions that the philosopher Anacharsis was punished with death by his fellow Scythians for performing a Greek ritual. It is also in line with some parts of the modern colonial experience. But such conflictual perspectives should not be taken for granted in multicultural encounters even in colonial contexts, since the evidence is much more multifaceted and thus allows for a more nuanced picture of human interaction in ancient apoikiai. Additional archaeological and literary materials are analyzed in order to demonstrate a wide range of emotions experienced by North Pontic societies that fluctuated between conflict and collaboration.
Panel II: Settlers and Natives in Classicising (Early) Modern Ideological Contexts
Zachary Yuzwa
‘The Land Speaks: Making New Worlds in the Latin Literature of 17th-Century New France’
Our understanding of the early contact period in what is now Canada has been defined by the writings of Jesuit missionaries whose education is permeated with classical learning and the cultural assumptions that undergird it. We can better understand the ways that early modern texts shape contemporary discourses of colonization, if we understand the ancient literary sources that inform the work of these Jesuit authors. I propose to examine a corpus of 17th-century Latin literature across a range of genres: letters, classicizing poetry, monumental histories. I focus especially on moments when the land itself or its indigenous inhabitants are made to speak. In their writings, Jesuit authors attempt to render the ostensibly unintelligible speech of the new world’s land and its peoples into disciplined and ordered accounts, signs that simultaneously proclaim the providential inevitability of French empire in the new world and occlude the epistemic violence at the heart of Jesuit missionary efforts in New France. This corporate Jesuit literary project serves to conjure a particular kind of colonial fantasy across time and space, one in which the landscape of North America can be rendered legible to a European audience and written into history as a fixed space whose contours match the familiar outlines of an old world always already defined by a canon of ancient history and mythology.
Franco De Angelis
‘The Ideological Underpinnings of Ex Oriente Lux Thinking’
This paper examines Ex Oriente Lux thinking, which forms the master narrative of all foundation legends for the ancient western Mediterranean. Anyone who studies the cultural histories of the western Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE before and during the early Roman Empire must deal with the strong forces of this master narrative, which maintains that Greek and Phoenician foundations brought ‘civilization’ to ‘backward’ indigenous peoples. I engage in a Foucauldian archaeology that is attentive to diachronic stratigraphy and that focuses on the ancient and modern ideological underpinnings of Ex Oriente Lux thinking, drawing attention to their features and original functions. In doing so, I underline how ancient and modern ideologies aligned and merged in the nineteenth century thanks to the convergence of several notable factors. Such a merger created a powerful package of academic and intellectual practices that haunt still today the fields of Classical and Near Eastern studies. In exposing such ideologies, I demonstrate that new questions and perspectives emerge from such a ‘genealogical’ exercise, and I conclude by emphasizing the importance of all such exercises as more than simple preludes to ‘real empirical’ scholarship.
Madalina Dana
‘“Comment on écrit l’histoire”: Greeks in the Western Pontus and the writing of Romanian History’
Istros is the oldest Greek settlement by the mouth of the Danube. Its archaeological museum welcomes visitors with a large map depicting the populations that inhabited the region in Antiquity. It shows the ‘indigenous’ Getai, Romans, and Slavs, but no Greeks! When the Dobruja was integrated into the emerging Romanian state in the 1870s, Romanian intellectuals were not just fostering the Latinizing of their language and culture, but also took a broader interest in the Greeks who founded cities along the Black Sea coast. The study of ancient objects in private collections of and in the ‘national’ museums flourished before and after World War I. After World War II, however, research in and on Istros was dominated by the Communist authorities. They deployed considerable resources to explore the material culture produced by a slave-owning society but aimed to conceal the identity of the historical populations, particularly the representatives of the ‘decadent’ classical culture. As a result, the Greeks were marginalized from the 1960s onwards, a trend that has gradually been reversed after the fall of the Iron Curtain. This paper seeks to explore the place of the Greek settlers in the construction of Romanian national identity since the 19th century.