Bakkhai Variations:
Villanova Theatre
Decolonizing Ancient Greece
The symbolic image of Ancient Greece as the birthplace of Western art, philosophy, culture, and governance is built upon a whitewashing of Greece and the exclusion of many of its civilizational influences. Problematizing in the entire construction of “The West” has probably served as a springboard for many a dissertation, but even if one grants the existence of a homogenizing narrative of white European history, claiming Ancient Greece as a foundation poses several problems to such an assertion. The contradictions and rewriting of Ancient Greek history suggest that Western Europeans want to connect their cultural heredity to Ancient Greece in order to legitimize and
prop up their current worldview. One of the most blatant examples of this appropriation presents itself around the discourse about French Neoclassicism. By bastardizing Greek theories and practices regarding theatre gave the French license to put a stranglehold around creativity that deviated from their own prescribed tenets. Despite the fact that many Athenian theatre goers enjoyed and reveled in theatre that Aristotle would have despised, The Académie Française used Greek treatises (filtered through Roman and Italian eyes) to boast of a legacy that began in 5th century Greece and was perfected in 16th century France.
​
But how did the Greeks consider themselves ethnically, racially, geographically? What parts of the story have been conveniently ignored to force their inclusion into whiteness? The research detailed below is meant to dismantle the notion that plays like Bakkhai ‘belong’ to white people and that black and brown people did not have a place in forming Ancient Greece.
​
This self-captions image is from a reconstructed vase showing people of darker and lighter skin tones (c.4th century BCE)
The introduction to Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World explains how ideas of race that make a “‘white’ person from Eastern Europe … racially identical to a white person from England” would be a paradigm that “would have confused the ancient Greeks” (xiii). Conceptions of ethnicity would be much more localized to nation-state cultural mores and theories around differences such as skin tone, hair color, face morphology varied from person to person. The Greeks transparently distinguished between other and familiar, though. The word ‘barbarian’ famously derives from a Greek word barbaros because any person who couldn’t speak Greek just sounded like they were saying ‘bar-bar-bar.’
The cover of Bernal’s book recontextualizes Greek images against the broader backdrop of Ancient Civilizations of that time.
Sources such as Homer’s Odyssey, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and Herodotus’ Histories often mention encounters with Egyptians who more often than not are treated with less otherness than the early Romans, Phoenicians, or the remote tribes of the northern Mediterranean. Honorable mentions go to nations in the Middle East including Lydia, Phrygia, and obviously Persia. In fact, Herodotus wrote that the infamous King Xerxes claimed that “Perses, our ancestors, was the child of Perseus son of Danae and Andromeda,” making the Persians partially Greek descendants (Histories 7.150). Historical research like that found in the groundbreaking Black Athena proposes that “there seems to have been more or less continuous Near Eastern influence on the Aegean over this millennium (2100 - 1100 BCE)” as well as constant contact between Egypt and early Greek civilizations (18). Tracing the linguistic, cultural, and religious roots back much further than the popular sources we study today emphasizes how deeply embedded the Afroasiatic fingerprints are.
​
The Greek’s own perceptions of where humanity came from and how difference was ascribed both distinguishes them from modern racial perceptions and elicits some interesting anecdotes from ancient literature. For example, Hesiod describes five races of men, but these races primarily derive from metal. “Golden was the very first race of chattering humans,” he writes, positing that “they were constructed by the immortals who have homes on Olympos” (Work and Days line 109-10). Later, the Olympians “made the next race silver, much worse than the previous one, resembling the golden race in neither speech nor mind” (128-9). Following this, “Father Zeus made another race, the third, of chattering men, the bronze race, completely different from the silver, born from tree nymphs, terrifyingly
powerful, obsessed with the keening deeds of Ares and acts of violence” (142-44). The fourth race was not from a metal, but was rather “a divine race of heroes called demigods, the race before ours on the broad earth” (159-60). This mythological perception completes the story with men of iron, who now walk upon the earth, explaining that differences in appearance may be residual features from these prior ages of men made of gold, silver, or bronze, or from demigods themselves.
​
Hippocrates, on the other hand, cited environmental factors as the cause of physical difference. In explaining why “the people of each place [Asia and Europe] differ physically from one another,” he proffers “that Asia varies most from Europe in the nature of its plant life and inhabitants … the land there is less wild than Europe, and the people are also gentler and more even-tempered” (On Airs, Waters, Places 14-17). Notably, during this treatise on Europe and Asia, Greece is excluded and considered part of neither place by Hippocrates. Sources like this and others suggest that Greeks considered themselves at the crossroads between dark- and light-skinned, Europe and Asia, hot and cold.
Interested in everything around them, the Greek artists and scholars of this time saw their society as a middle ground for the entire known world to converge. So, for the BIPOC artists working on this project or watching the final product, understand that the presumed whiteness of the Ancient Greeks is a fabrication; it ignores the plentiful evidence that these beloved artifacts and their creators took inspiration from Africa and Asia just as much if not more than they did from Europe.
Drinking cup featuring a lighter- and darker-skinned person (510–480 BCE, reconstructed and repainted for display in the MFA Boston)