Pars Orientalis and the Invention of Oriental Other in Classical Antiquity

The attitudes of Greeks and Romans towards the East were extensively examined by both Classicists and Orientalists, especially in the last decades. Many of these researchers, as well as researchers from other disciplines, found in the classical narratives numerous tempting allusions for the modern Western 'self' and 'other' and the paradigms of Edward Said and his followers of stigmatization of the East and its identities by western viewers and authors.

This traditional dichotomy between the Occident and the Orient was further strengthened by the dominant anticolonial voices in the post-modern phase of the development of the disciplines that explore the ancient past. Thus, many authors and researchers still tend to trace the origins of the Orientalism in the 'Greek world' and the confrontation of the Greek city states with the Persian empire. In contrary, this paper argues that locating the creation of the Orientalism and the ‘Oriental other’ in this historical context represents a remnant of the Eurocentric ideologies of the previous centuries, where the Greco-Persian confrontation was elevated to a founding episode of the centuries-long battle between the West and the East.

The paper makes a novel attempt to locate more closely the social circumstances, the political motives, and the geographic and historical scope of the development of a conception of oriental otherness, resembling very closely, and certainly influencing the contemporary perceptions on the phenomenon. It hypothesizes the creation of the ‘oriental other’ in the late-republican and early principate years for the needs of self-identification of certain Roman elites in the process of intensified globalization of the city and Italy.

In addition, the paper explores the fluidity of the ideological and identity boundaries of Romanness, Greekness and Oriental otherness in the Roman Eastern Mediterranean, and the impact of these glocalizing tendencies in the transformation of identities and ideologies of the Classical World.