Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece

What did it mean to be Greek in a world organised around independent—and often competing—city-states? Lynette Mitchell studies Panhellenism as an answer that was never fixed: a set of stories, memories and ideas through which Greeks repeatedly defined the boundaries of a wider Hellenic community.

Ideas of Greekness and the “barbarian” are set beside geography, warfare, cultural rivalry and shared memory. Mitchell pays particular attention to conflict with non-Greeks and to the way Panhellenic traditions could later give ideological shape to Alexander the Great’s campaign in Asia. Greek identity appears not as a simple fact of ethnicity, but as something argued over and continually reconstructed.