Rethinking “Us vs. Them” the Ancient Greek and Roman Way

In an intriguing article in The Chronicle of Higher Education Carlin Romano reviews Erich S. Gruen’s Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.

Gruen, a Berkeley professor emeritus of history and classics, offers hope that we can overcome our ingrained impulse toward demonizing the “other.” This book may not bring about world peace, but it does help us reject the unquestioned assumption that from ancient times, this conflict-based mode of thought has been our way as humans. While Gruen does not deny the frequent denigrations that passed between Greeks, Romans and Jews, he shows in great detail how the ancients “could also visualize themselves as part of a broader cultural heritage, could discover or invent links with other societies, and could couch their own historical memories in terms of a borrowed or appropriated past.” He makes the case that the ancients “had far more mixed, nuanced, and complex opinions about other peoples” than has previously been argued.

Romano opens the article with a full discussion of the contrary case—he sites some of the divisive responses to the Tucson shootings and goes on to analyze our apparently universal “hard-wiring” as binary beings. He quotes Berreby’s Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, to say there is “apparently no people known to history or anthropology that lacks a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘others.’”

Later in the article Romano summarizes Gruen’s argument in an engaging way—even if you do not want to read a whole book on the subject, Romano’s quick version is a breath of fresh air in our discordant world. You will take away some good material for thought. He ends with a quote from Obama’s Tucson memorial speech, “We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us.” Read Romano’s review—or better still Gruen’s book—to see how the ancients gave inclusion a chance.