Daniel Tompkins
Dept. of Greek & Roman Classics
Temple University
pericles@temple.edu
May 28, 2009
http://astro.temple.edu/~pericles/Letter.htm
Responding to Professor Miller
To Colleagues:
[Note: in what follows, I follow the lead of 125 nations, including four of the five permanent
UN Security Council members, and use “Macedonian” as the appropriate adjective for the Republic of Macedonia. Note that it was the usage of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies as early as 1996. Use of a “politically correct” term would have required, as Chase and Phillips put it, “laborious periphrasis.”]
Stephen Miller, an American archaeologist, has circulated a number of versions of a statement about Balkan politics, with the expressed intent of influencing the Obama administration. I append the version to which I respond below. It differs somewhat from the online versions posted May 20, 2009 at:
http://modern-macedonian-history.blogspot.com/2009/05/letter-to-president-barack-obama-as.html
and updated to May 26 at:
http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html
Although the ostensive topic is Alexander the Great, the statement commits the author and the many scholars who’ve co-signed to two extreme positions: that President Bush’s 2004 recognition of the Republic of Macedonia by that name “was clearly the catalyst for the fantasies of a Slavic Alexander" or “unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism,” and that the inhabitants of the Republic have no right to call themselves “Macedonians.” The first of these claims is easily disproved: the Republic of Macedonia had sought to appropriate, or share, Alexander long before 2004. As to the second, the Republic occupies land that has long been called “Macedonia,” and is, to boot, a sovereign state.
In other words, Prof. Miller takes extreme positions that are not required in a scholarly discussion of ancient ethnicity. Doing so, he converts the thicket of Balkan politics into a lawn. In particular, the challenge to the sovereignty and name of a neighboring state puts Prof. Miller and his co-signers in a position to the right of the Greek government. That’s quite an achievement.
The form of the letter –its seemingly dispassionate appeal to scholars, its assurance in one draft that “many of us would prefer to avoid politics” – should not blind readers to its tendentious and inaccurate historical claims, or to its extreme conclusions.
Let’s start at the beginning. This spring, Professor Miller circulated a draft ( dated January 22, 2009) of the letter we now have. He criticized an article in the January / February 2009 Archaeology Magazine by Matthew Brunwasser: “Letter from Macedonia. Modern Macedonia Lays its Claim to the Ancient Conqueror's Legacy.” Professor Miller complains that the magazine would not print his response (which ran to 1500 words, almost as long as Brunwasser's original). Professor Miller has not shared his correspondence with the magazine. In his short piece, Brunwasser interviews some archaeologists and visits some sites, and says, "Greece insists that Macedonia should change its name, claiming that it implies ambitions over Greek territory -- the northern province of Greece is also called Macedonia -- and opposes the name as an appropriation of Alexander III of Macedon (Alexander the Great), whom the country claims as Greek." A bit later he adds: "But the subtle relations between the ancient Macedonians and Greeks are sometimes lost in today's acrimonious debate over who has the exclusive claim to Alexander's homeland."
That’s it. If I, or I think most of the co-signers, were intent on ridiculing Greek claims, we’d be somewhat more assertive and vicious. Brunwasser does mention a Macedonian kitchen utility salesman who likes Alexander as a countryman, but then quotes workmen with the opposite opinion:
"If we had to choose between Alexander and joining the EU and NATO, we’d choose Europe," says Goran Nikolovski. "History is in the past," says his colleague Zlatko Petreski. "We want the name of the country to remain Macedonia because we are Macedonians," says Nikolovski. "But we want to move forward."
“Sick of Alexander”? “History is in the past”? That is not the way people talk when they’re out to undermine “the scientific basis for our professional lives,” as Prof. Miller puts it, perhaps a tad portentously.
In the body of his letter, Professor Miller comments problematically on both ancient and modern history:
a) The ancients: Professor Miller spends considerable space reciting literalist claims about early Macedonia that can be found on many Greek disapora websites, including a very selective presentation of Alexander I in Herodotus. The goal is to demonstrate a linear and unbroken sequence of Greekness from Alexander I to Alexander the Great and up to today.
Linearity, however, is the stuff of propaganda, not of history. Discussing the Macedonia issue a decade ago, some very prominent Greek social scientists mentioned “the strategic manipulation of nationalist ideology by the Greek government” in its presentation “of political and cultural myths.” They noted that “The historical trajectory of the nation has been traced in a linear form and without ruptures or discontinuities from antiquity to modernity…. Thus, any questioning of the 'Hellenicity' of Alexander the Great is perceived as a threat to the very essence of the nation because it casts doubt on the continuity of the national community through history. The nationalist feelings of the population have … been manipulated by political parties as a campaigning device….” (Triandafyllidou, Calloni & Mikrakis [1997])
Any country seeking to map itself onto ancient history confronts a host of problems. Herodotus illustrates these clearly in his portrayal of Alexander I, who is sometimes a satrap engaged in lucrative dynastic marriage-relations with Persian royalty, and sometimes a "Hellene." He is one of only two people in Herodotus accused of athemista, “lawlessness.” Other Greeks challenge his standing as a “Hellene.” Much of this is well discussed by David Fearn, in a fine recent essay, "Narrating Ambiguity: Murder and Macedonian Allegiance (5.17-22)." Two months ago, when Prof. Miller floated his essay, I recommended the Fearn piece, but there is no sign that Prof. Miller has read Fearn or senses any scholarly obligation to do so. He remains undisturbed by the paradox of this single “Greek” satrap in all of Herodotus.
The claim to be a “Hellene” is one, but only one, of several cards this Alexander plays. He protects himself and his people by cannily playing the odds (and using the talent of silver his mines produced daily). That’s why Spartans and Athenians treat him with such contempt at the end of Book 8. Scholars of ethnicity and acculturation in antiquity won’t be surprised at his ambiguous status, especially given Jonathan Hall's warning against a "transhistorically static definition of Greekness." (Hall, p. 166) Prof. Miller's letter shows no awareness of the anthropologically sophisticated work on ancient ethnicity now being produced in our field.
Now, it is true that both the Greek and Macedonian governments, as well as their diaspora supporters, have gone to absurd lengths to claim ancient ties. The list of examples is endless. Classicists seeking the ancient “Via Egnatia” may be surprised to observe that it now begins in Igoumenitsa not Durres, and lies wholly within Greek borders. The Greek-American Pan Macedonian Union urged not only denial of its northern neighbor's right to name itself and the return of the Marbles, but US intervention on behalf of the "Kalash of the northern Himalayan region of the Hindu Kush Mountains of Pakistan [who] are Hellenic descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great." Skopje claims its own Nepalese "relations" – an initiative the supposed propagandist Mathew Brunwasser has reported many Macedonians find “funny or pathetic.” (International Herald Tribune, October 2, 2008)
For an even-handed comment on the “name” issue, consider Roudometoff in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies:
In the case of the controversy between Greece and FYROM, two identifications have been developed with respect to one homeland (that of Macedonia). Consequently, two narratives have formed, each of which seeks to establish a genealogical tie between a people and the land which that people inhabits…. The affirmation of minorities is interpreted, according to the nineteenth-century Balkan mentality, as representing the first step toward irredentist activity.
Both sides operate with the assumption that nationhood provides the essential component for nation-building. Both view national narratives as providing an essential ingredient for their national identity. The two national narratives, however, encroach upon one another, tending to claim Macedonia … exclusively for their particular side. For Greeks, Macedonia is a name and a territory that is an indispensable part of the modern Greek identity. For Macedonians, it provides the single most important component that has historically differentiated them from Bulgarians.
Elsewhere, Roudometoff says, “Greeks rallied to defend their national narrative--in effect, denying the claim of the Macedonians to stand for an independent nation.” (1999: 459)
b) Turning to the modern world, what is noticeable is Prof. Miller’s insistence that the Republic of Macedonia has shown deplorable manners: "Why would a poor land-locked new state attempt such historical nonsense? Why would it brazenly mock and provoke its neighbor?"
Prof. Miller treats the question as a rhetorical one. But it’s not rhetorical. While I’ve no inside information, the current nationalist tendency of Macedonian history seems in part to be a response to seventeen years of interference and economic oppression by the large neighbor to the south. It’s not only Cavafy’s narrators who celebrate an oppressor’s frustration: “To ousiodes ine pou eskase” (“The important thing is, he blew up”). Monteagle Stearns and Susan Woodward both discussed the danger that Greek actions would have a negative outcome in 1997.
What do I mean by “oppression”? Most notably, the threats of Serbia and the Mitsotakis government in the early 90s to carve up the new Republic between them. Milosevic seems to have proposed the idea. See the discussion of this topic, of the “Samaras Pincer,” and of Virginia Tsouderou’s convenient 1992 discovery of Hellenized Vlachs in need of rescue in Macedonia, in Michas, pp. 53ff. Michas provides some testimony about initial Greek willingness to invade, though he has no documentary proof. Prof. Miller’s little joke (“Greece should annex Paionia”) may betray unawareness that annexation was seriously considered. Macedonians don’t see the humor.
Then came the blockades (I use the plural because Michas mentions several “unofficial” blockades as well as the official one). For 20 months in 1994-95, Greece imposed a crippling embargo that cut off two-thirds of the new state's oil. One Greek official proclaimed, "We will choke Skopje into submission." Export earnings for the Republic of Macedonia fell by 85%, imports of food by 40%, of crude oil by two thirds. Inflation soared. (As Michas points out, Foreign Minister Antonis Samaras was a major promoter of these and other destabilizing measures, in partnership with Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic. Coincidentally, Samaras is now Minister of Culture, in charge of Greek antiquities.)
