that have been passed down from generation to generation (except material remains) were produced by a small class of educated elites who consistently accounted for only a miniscule percentage of all premodern societies.
Such accounts are of extreme importance, as without them we would know very little about history. Nevertheless, any assumption, determination, or conclusion regarding the worlds of the past that does not take into consideration the subjectivity and narrow intellectual perspective of all written testimony—whether literary, legal, or from some other realm of social activity—is ultimately worth very little. Historians, who presumably are aware of the technology of their own narrative reconstructions, must recognize that they will never know the true thoughts and feelings of those who worked the land, the silent majority of all past societies who left behind no written remnants. As we know, every tribe, village, and valley had its own dialect. Members of nomadic tribes and land-bound farmers, who possessed extremely limited means of communication and lacked basic knowledge of reading and writing, did not need to develop sophisticated vocabulary to work, to give birth, or even to pray. In the world of agriculture, communication was frequently based on direct contact, gestures, and vocal tone, rather than on the all-encompassing abstract concepts formulated by the few educated members of the community and recorded in written texts, some of which we have at our disposal today.
The royal court scribes, philosophers, clergymen, and priests, in cultural and social symbiosis with the landed nobility, the wealthy urban classes, and the warrior class, provided future generations with a great deal of information. The problem is that historians all too often treat this material as an easily accessible, criterionless bank of comprehensive data regarding the basic systems of conceptualization and practices of the society as a whole. This has resulted in the widespread misleading and indiscriminate application to premodern societies of terms such as “race,” ethnos, “nation,” “migration of peoples,” “exile of peoples,” and “national kingdoms.”
Primary sources are like the beam of a searchlight, illuminating small, isolated regions within an otherwise overwhelming sea of darkness. Every historical narrative is ultimately held captive by written remains. Careful researchers know that they must navigate such artifacts with caution and hesitation. They must work with no illusions, knowing that their writing relies on historical products indicative of the spirit of a small elite, representing the very tip of an iceberg that has melted away and can never be fully recreated.
This section offers a brief survey of a number of ancient Mediterranean texts and well-known European texts. Although the following discussion will unfortunately be extremely Eurocentric, its narrow perspective stems much less from any ideological position on my part than from the limitations of my own knowledge.
We begin in ancient Mediterranean society, where we encounter the concept of homeland in relatively early literary works. When the classical poet Homer refers to someone’s land of birth in his epic poem The Iliad, he makes repeated use of the term patrida (
Some three hundred years later, in his play The Persians, the oldest surviving tragedy, Aeschylus passionately describes the famous battle of Salamis fought between the Hellenic coalition and the Persian armies in 480 BCE. In it, he attributes this cry to his heroes: “Sons of Greece, go!/Free fatherland,/free children, wives,/shrines of our fathers’ gods,/tombs where our forefathers lie./Fight for all we have!” The remains of the invading Persian army also return vanquished to the patrida and their family members in order to bemoan their bitter defeat.14 But we must also pay heed to the fact that neither Greece nor Persia constituted the homeland of the warriors. Their homeland was their home, their city, their place of origin. It was the small territory where they were born, of which all of its children, its descendants, and its close neighbors possessed firsthand physical knowledge.
Later plays, such as Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Medea, and other works from the fifth century BCE, also feature the homeland as a place of incomparable importance that must not be abandoned, regardless of the cost. Being displaced from a homeland is always perceived of as eviction from a warm and protective home, as a major disaster, and, albeit rarely, as an exile worse than death. The homeland is the known, the safe, and the familiar, outside of which everything is foreign, threatening, and alienating.15
A short time later, when the warriors of Syracuse did battle with the Athenians, Thucydides wrote that the former fought to defend their homeland, while their enemies, the Athenians, waged war to annex a foreign land.16 The concept of homeland appears many times in The History of the Peloponnesian War, but it is not a single place universal to all Hellenes. Although modern proponents of Greek nationalism would have liked it to be otherwise, the patrida of ancient literature is not identical to the land of Greece and cannot be conceived of as such. Historians use the term “homeland” only to refer to a single city-state, a specific polis. For this reason, in Thucydides’ recreation of Pericles’ famous funeral oration, it is Athens that is described as an object of admiration and worship.17
Greek references to the idea of the homeland suggest a unique and fascinating form of politicization of a territorial site. The home-land and its emotional baggage not only relate to geographic location but are also frequently applied within specific political frameworks. Just as territory was politicized, Hellenic politics were always territorial. To better understand this point, we momentarily direct our attention to the logic of Plato.
Like Thucydides, the Athenian philosopher employs the term “homeland” to refer not to greater Greece but to an individual polis. Here, it is the sovereign city-state, together with its institutions and system of laws, that constitutes the true patrida. Plato repeatedly uses the term not merely in the simple sense of a place of birth or a physical area with its own longed-for landscapes, but primarily for the political entity, including its entire apparatus of civil administration. For example, in his well-known dialogue Critias, Plato attributes the following words to Socrates, in admonishment of his interlocutor:
Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding? . . . and if she leads us to wounds or death in battle, thither we follow as is right; neither may anyone yield or retreat or leave his rank, but whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him; or he must change their view of what is just: and if he may do no violence to his father or mother, much less may he do violence to his country.18
As in other cases, here, too, the Platonic homeland is a city that constitutes a supreme value to which all other values are subordinate. Its uniqueness and moral power lies in its existence as an area of self-government exercised by sovereign citizens. Because of their great personal interest in this political entity, its members are obligated to defend their homeland—their community. This is also the origin of the need to sanctify it, to incorporate it into religious rituals, to worship it on holidays. Plato’s unconditional patriotic demands revolved around a city-homeland that subordinated individual interests to the needs and values of the collective.
In
