By historical times, the Greeks were an homogeneous population speaking a standard language. The Greek tribes of the Illiad such as the Danaans and the Achaeans have been forgotten and no one even knows who they were. By the time of Plato, the original inbred clans and tribes have disappeared and the Greeks were outbreeding all over the Mediterranean (when not practicing their pederastic habits). When the apostol Paulus started to spread the Good News, it was obvious to the Greeks that all humanity were brothers (in Christ) and that a Catholic (universal) church made total sense.
Was this mixing of tribes spontaneous? I know of no historian giving a damn to this inbreeding-outbreeding issue, so I have to use my own head. The process started in Athens after it lost the war against Sparta. Sparta was a racist-militarist nation, following a proto-Nazi policy of extermination and subjection of its neighbors. Then Athens had a lucky break and by 510 BC Cleisthenes had the way clear to re-form Athens. Athens, like all Greek polis, were formed by a a population of "tribes" ruled by inbred clans and families. We can see that the ruling class of Athens was not so, it was not a class in the Marxian sense but a few families linked by blood. BTW, Cleisthenes himself was a member of the inbred family that had ruled Athens for centuries, and his daughter married within the family, but he decided that inbreeding was bad for the State. In order to destroy these great families that have dominated Greek history from the Antiquity, he dissolved all blood-linked families and re-formed the population. Attica (Athens's hinterland) was then peopled by four tribes divided into ninety inbred clans. Cleisthenes (pic) wanted to direct the loyalties of this population toward the city as a whole, creating something inexistent: Athenian patriotism.
Cleisthenes abolished of a stroke all four ancient tribes and created ten new ones in their place, each with its patron saint or eponymous hero sanctioned by the Oracle at Delphi. Each new tribe was divided into three sections - living in geographically distant areas - called deme. Democracy (government by the demes, reminding me of "All the Power to the Soviets!") was invented. The Greeks even lost their names - instead of being called Odysseus son of Laertes son of whatever, like today's Osama Bin Laden and other Arabs, they were called Thales of Milethus, or Xenophon the Athenian.
What had Cleisthenes achieved was a mixed, identity-less, Greek-speaking, patriotic population, that could be easily governed by a small self-selected committee or Boulos without any tribal attachment. Athens's immigration and naturalization rules were abolished and the concept of "citizen" was created. Athens was re-filled with peoples from all the Earth and grew to become a half-million strong city ruling about five million indifferentiated pig-Greek speaking humanity.
After a few centuries of success, Athens was replaced by Rome, another city with absolutely no family-racial awareness. Anyone could become a Roman citizen and live everywhere in the Roman world with all the privileges and State-protection of the citizenship. Paulus, when persecuted by the authorities, invoked his right as a Roman Citizen to practice a legal religion, that is, Judaism.
Conclusion: The current mixing of races taking place in America (and Israel too) is an artificial policy of the government, to create a homogeneous, governable, loyal to the State, population. It has happened before: Alexander imposed outbreeding on his subjects, Cleisthenes abolished the tribes and clans and artificially created new ones, Rome itself was created by miscegenation. One can predict that the governments in the Middle East will soon start mixing their peoples too, to create American-style patriotic democracies.
9 comments:
This is wrong. 5th century Greeks were the descendants of northern invaders mixing with the indigenous population, so were already heavily miscegenated. The Greeks of he 5th century - the brilliant period - were a heavily mixed bunch. I am not aware of a single creative and talented people that is NOT heavily micegenated - all the European populations are heavy mixes - so much so that "pure" populations seem almost incapable of doing great things.
The Ionian Greeks of the 6th-5th century who were the progenitors of philosophy and science, were heavily mixed as well, and it was they who originated the doctrines of cultural relativism and the idea that all men are brothers. They lived in a trading entrepot and had regular contact with all sorts of cultures. The later Hellenistic philosophers only picked up the thread.
The idea, in any event, was one formulated by philosophers and thinkers, not governments, most notably the Stoics who held it as a central tenet, and it gained great influence in Rome.
The reasons for it seem obvious - as a trading or imperial society gets into contact with a wide variety of cultures, some of them more impressive than yours in certain respects (Egypt, Babylon, Persia for the early Greeks), it becomes impossible for thoughtful men to not realize the relativity of their own standards and beliefs, and the essential similarity of mankind. It sets in train an inevitable mental process.
Far from being imposed by governments, the brotherhood of man is simply the most rational and sophisticated realization about yourself and mankind in general that a culture attains, usually at the height of its sophisticated. It does not, and never did, mean that all men are equal, just that they are essentially similar. Nothing in modern HBd disputes this. They may differ in relative personality and ability, but they all have the same traits and same abilities, just in differing strengths.
The Northern invasion theory is yet to be proved. Anyway, Athens and all other cities were ruled by inbreeding groups of families, and the population was divided in tribes and clans. Sparta rejected foreigners, but Athens decided to grant citizenship to all comers and abolished all inbreeding tribes. The government of Cleisthenes did it for the explicit purpose of destroying particularism and tribalism and to transfer the population's loyalty to the State. States want an alienated, identity-less mass of patriotic population, not warring ethnic groups. All States promote miscegenation. Ben Gurion in 1948 explicitly demanded all public employee to leave their Diaspora names and adopt Hebrew ones. The State promoted intermarriage and still does, celebrating Ethiopians marrying Ashkenazim.
> I am not aware of a single creative and talented people that is NOT heavily micegenated - all the European populations are heavy mixes
So... Danes are heavy mixes of what? Different Germanics of almost identical stock, from adjacent 1,500-person tribes that each owned an 8-mile radius? Or do you mean Neolithic admixture 5,000 billion years ago? Of course alleles migrate, over millennia, just from fellas marrying a girls from 15 mi away, and over 10,000s of years might very well migrate above 10,000 miles. But that's not the same as miscegenation.
I think that if Northerners really pushed into Greece, there's a 90% chance we would see their phenotype in art. I see basically no figures that look like today's mid-latitude Euros. It's possible they came as slaves, though. The idea that they conquered looks like nordicist pride and bias. I'm extremely glad for them to have much pride, within reason, but of course that doesn't mean that it cannot bias.
Fortunately, as much as the Israeli government wants the cross the Jewish races or ethnies... it doesn't want to cross Jews with others present. Still, I can understand Ahskenazi preservationist feelings.
"Fortunately, as much as the Israeli government wants the cross the Jewish races or ethnies... it doesn't want to cross Jews with others present."
The products of a caucasoid Jewish-Filipino guestworker mix are likely to have better prospects than the products of a caucasoid Jewish-Ethiopian Jewish mix.
The State, any State, always wants a mixed homogeneous population, without tribal attachments, loyal only to the State. American government is doing exactly what the Roman Senate and the Athenians did before.
J - what about the anti-misceganation laws of the American south until recent times? What about Nazi laws? And many societies don't take it to the level of actual laws because it is socially so frowned upon that laws are hardly felt to be necessary.
Resist the temptation to force facts into the Procrustean bed of your neat little scheme - fact is, sometimes some government, or elements within governments, encouraged race mixing, sometimes they did not (more often), and sometimes common folks had to be encouraged against their will, and sometimes elements within the civilian population, quite aside from governments, like the Stoic philosophers, encouraged it.
No doubt you had an idea that in todays world governments are the culprits so you sought a historical pattern based on this, yet such a pattern does not exist.
At a certain level of cultural sophistication and intellectual enlightenment, the idea of the brotherhood of man is inevitable (without implying the equality of man or even the equality of races - that is a modern addition that has no intellectual basis). Interestingly, the only societies who attained the cultural heights necessary to find this idea attractive were the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the the modern Europeans (intermittently), and perhaps, the ancient Jews.
RS - what I REALLY meant is that the CREATIVE European populations were mixed. The Danes are a perfect example of a population that did not mix, and remained barren.
Dan,
I beg to disagree. I see a pattern: all governments tend to dislike separate ethnic groups and favour mixing the population. I could bring you hundreds of examples: Argentina has a clear policy of giving Spanish names to people and teach them Spanish; Spain represses separatisms; Hungarians make Hungarians from everybody (they didnt succeed with the gypsies); every government is an equalizer, firing the melting pot and condemning Jewish hardheadedness. Even the most explicit racist government of late, the Nazis, tried to incorporate Polish and Ucrainian children, and of course mix with Danes and Norvegians. The only group they expulsed were the Jews and that only because they were considered unassimilable.
"The Danes are a perfect example of a population that did not mix, and remained barren"
I wish more peoples were so "barren".
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