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Black Achilles: the chromatic Greeks

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/when-homer-envisi...-black-man

EXCERPT: Few issues provoke such controversy as the skin-colour of the ancient Greeks. Last year [...] Sarah Bond [...] caused a storm by pointing out that many of the Greek statues that seem white to us now were in antiquity painted in colour. This is an uncontroversial position, and demonstrably correct, but Bond received a shower of online abuse [...] This year, it was the [...BBC...] series * Troy: Fall of a City* to attract ire, which cast black actors in the roles of Achilles, Patroclus, Zeus, Aeneas and others (as if using anglophone northern European actors were any less anachronistic). The idea of the Greeks as paragons of whiteness is deeply rooted in Western society. [...]

My aim in this essay, rather, is to consider how the Greeks themselves viewed differences in skin colour. The differences are instructive – and, indeed, clearly point up the oddity of the modern, western obsession with classification by pigmentation.

[...] it’s important to stress that early Greek colour terms have been at the heart of these debates [...] The early Greek vocabulary of colour was very strange indeed, to modern eyes. The word argos, for example, is used for things that we would call white, but also for lightning and for fast-moving dogs. It seems to refer not simply to colour, but also to a kind of flashing speed. Khlōros (as in the English ‘chlorophyll’) is used for green vegetation, but also for sand on a shore, for tears and blood, and for the pallor of skin of the terrified. [...] Weirdly, some early Greek terms for colour seem also to indicate intense movement. [...] xanthos is etymologically connected to another word, xouthos, which indicates a rapid, vibrating movement. So, while xanthos certainly suggests hair in the ‘brown-to-fair’ range, the adjective also captures Achilles’ famous swift-footedness, and indeed his emotional volatility.

[...] And what of ‘black-skinned’? Was Odysseus in fact black? Or was he (as Emily Wilson’s acclaimed new translation renders it) ‘tanned’? Once again, we can see how different translations prompt modern readers to envisage these characters in completely different ways. But to understand the Homeric text, we need to shed these modern associations. Odysseus’ blackness, like Achilles’ xanthos hair, isn’t intended to play to modern racial categories; rather, it carries with it ancient poetic associations. At another point in the Odyssey, we are told of Odysseus’ favourite companion Eurybates, who ‘was round-shouldered, black-skinned (melanokhroos), and curly-haired … Odysseus honoured him above his other comrades, because their minds worked in the same way.’ The last part is the crucial bit: their minds work in the same way, presumably, because Eurybates and Odysseus are both wily tricksters. And, indeed, we find the association between blackness and tricksiness elsewhere in early Greek thought.

‘Black’ (melas) and ‘white’ (leukos) are also – importantly – gendered terms: females are praised for being ‘white-armed’, but men never are. This differentiation finds its way into the conventions of Greek (and indeed Egyptian) art too, where we find women often depicted as much lighter of skin than men. To call a Greek man ‘white’ was to call him ‘effeminate’. Conversely, to call Odysseus ‘black-skinned’ might well associate him with the rugged, outdoors life he lived on ‘rocky Ithaca’.

So to ask whether Achilles and Odysseus are white or black is at one level to misread Homer. His colour terms aren’t designed to put people into racial categories, but to contribute to the characterisation of the individuals, using subtle poetic associations that evaporate if we just plump for ‘blond’ rather than ‘brown’, ‘tanned’ rather than ‘black’ (and vice versa). Greeks simply didn’t think of the world as starkly divided along racial lines into black and white: that’s a strange aberration of the modern, Western world [...] Greeks certainly noticed different shades of pigmentation (of course), and they differentiated themselves from the darker peoples of Africa and India, sometimes in aggressively dismissive terms that we would now call racist; but they also differentiated themselves from the paler peoples of the North (see Hippocrates’ On Airs, Waters, and Places). Greeks did not, by and large, think of themselves as ‘white’....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/when-homer-envisi...-black-man
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#2
Magical Realist Online
It's so strange how used we are to the white sculpted classical ideal. If we saw one of their statues garishly painted today, we'd likely say, "Ugh, how kitsch!" Apparently the alabaster nude form was taken too literally. As indeed the whole concept of whiteness as a "value"..
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