Race, largely seen as a taboo in scholarship post WWII, is employed by Christopher Parmenter as a useful concept in studying the ancient Greek understanding of human diversity. Aligning himself with the racial turn in research within the last decade, the author rightly critiques the use of "ethnicity" in avoidance of race, serving as an equivalent, but less provocative term in previous scholarship. He further argues that race and ethnicity can and should be used in tandem, with the former reflecting an etic perspective and the latter an emic one. From this, his overarching argument is born: "race or race-like concepts" (4) existed in antiquity and relate back to the mercantile expansion of the Greeks in the Archaic period, facilitating contact with foreign communities and the circulation of Greek ideas of difference. The author employs a commodity biography model adapted from studies of "Blackness in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world" (15). The model links the movement of commodities along complex trade routes to the end product of a "racialized Other" (18), outlining the commodification of foreign peoples' bodies (both figuratively and literally) alongside materials.

The text is divided into two parts, each consisting of three chapters, bookended by an introduction (1-23) and a postscript (206-211). Part I (27-122), "The World of the Elephantine Document", deals with Greek trade relations with Egypt, and Part II (126-205), "Letters from the Pontus", explores the Greek slave trade in the Black Sea region. Both parts look at how commodity-based interactions shaped Greek thought regarding people of these areas. Chapter 1 (27-52), "A Short History of Natron" follows the natron trade between Egypt and Greece in the first millennium BCE primarily using the Elephantine document and an unnamed document focusing on the Greek community involved in the natron trade. The author argues that natron was the important commodity for Greek imaginings of Egyptian culture, as the little information that reached Greece from Egypt was mainly through merchants along natron trade routes who were privileged individuals closely tied to the economic powers of Egypt. This chapter paints a rich picture of the mingling of cultures in Naukratis and calls into question the experience of the Greek diaspora in Egypt. Chapter 2 (53-86), "Egypt in Your Hand", builds off the trade relations established in Chapter 1, examining the spread of faience aegyptiaca, which would have necessitated natron as flux in their production. Parmenter argues that the popularity of Egyptian objects at Greek sanctuaries was a result of a deliberate glorification of Egypt by merchants to increase their status and bottom lines. This then encouraged emulation of these objects locally and an association with Egyptians as the Greeks' ancestors. The final chapter of Part I (87-122), "From Ancestor to 'Other'", outlines the shift in the subject matter represented with faience objects in the late Archaic period. The author argues that a fascination with the body in Greece at the time led to an examination of diversity in Egypt and how Greeks and Egyptians physically differed, resulting in a racialized perception of the Egyptians and the creation of the "Ethiopian race" (93). Black bodies represented in faience circulated alongside other aegyptica, further associating Egypt with the black body.

Part II outlines a shift in Greek interest from North African to Black Sea communities in the Classical period, pinning this change on the growing slave trade, a shift in trade routes, and a difference in important commodities. In Chapter 4 (125-151), "Journeys into Slavery", the author argues for the Greek slave trade as a racialized phenomenon, spurred on by the increased agency afforded to enslaved Black Sea natives due to their mobility. The Greeks of the region distanced themselves racially from the local peoples, out of fear of being enslaved themselves. This chapter points to a creation of a collective Greek identity through racialization, tying ideas of citizenship and freedom to race. However, in focusing on lines of trade, the author glosses over evidence of collaborative Greek-Skythian interaction such as those in Herodotus (Book IV) and "Greek-style drinking" (138) by local communities. Chapter 5 (152-169), "Slavery and the Balance of Trade", explores balances of trade from Athens to reconstruct the economic motivations of the slave trade in the absence of its accounting or other detailed evidence. The author argues that much of the slave trade in the Black Sea was opportunistic, serving to balance merchants' books on years when trade was lighter than the previous one. This chapter effectively demonstrates a plausible long-distance trade route over which captives "easily flowed" (168) into slavery. The final chapter (170-205), "Inventing Whiteness", argues that Classical Athens used institutional mechanisms and spectacles, such as public slave auctions and evidentiary torture of enslaved peoples, to solidify the line between free and enslaved. This then naturalized the differences as a sort of race, resulting in differential treatment based upon ancestry as exemplified by the Athenian citizenship laws, convincingly outlined by the author. However, I find this chapter, as well as Part II overall, to be Athenocentric, after the more general treatment of the Greek world in Part I. In arguing for an eastward shift of interest for the Greeks, a focus on Athens supports the argument for one isolated case, shrinking the Greek world to Athens.

On the whole, Christopher Parmenter effectively fills gaps in evidence of a Greek understanding of race through interweaving textual and archaeological sources alongside modern ethnographic and historical examples. The application of the commodity biography is valuable, as it elucidates widespread interactions with Greeks and non-Greeks through surviving objects, and associated textual sources. However, this model encourages the application of modern ideas of race and slavery, due to its origins in Transatlantic slave trade studies. In Chapter 3, the author summarizes the impact of contemporary ideas of race in the work of Grace Hadley Beardsley and Frank M. Snowden Jr. but does not devote the same attention to his own intrinsic biases. The author's application of race is vague, arguing for something close to race but not directly naming it. He sees "a real desire in Classical Athens that a concept like race should exist" (7), and notes in the postscript that what he has explored is not race, but something that would lead to our modern understanding of race. This mirrors the argumentation of Benjamin Isaac's "proto-racism". [1] However, the author does not make clear how his ideas differ or align with Isaac's or what this inkling towards race should be called, if not race. Overall, this approach does not detract from the value of the text as a fresh interdisciplinary look at large-scale interactions in the Greek world, but it potentially introduces ambiguity and anachronism into the author's overall argumentation.

Note:

[1] Benjamin Isaac: The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, Course Book ed., Princeton 2013.

Georgia Landgraf