Ethnic groups in ancient Greece

While the term ‘ethnicity’ apparently made its first appearance only in 1953, the phenomenon which it describes is indisputably more ancient. The genesis of nationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not create ethnic consciousness, but demanded that ethnic boundaries should be coterminous with political ones. Thus, although Catalan nationalism may be a product of the modern era, the earlier existence of a distinct Catalan identity is demonstrated by the enrolment of the Catalan natio (this time without its political connotations) in the statutes of the University of Bologna in AD 1265. Similarly, Serbian consciousness is not a product of the nationalist movement of the 1980s, but has been preserved in the ritualised songs and epics telling of the conquest of the Old Serbian Kingdom by the Turks.

Although the English words ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ are derived from the Greek ethnos (plural, ethne), even the most cursory survey of the ancient sources is sufficient to demonstrate that ethnos could embrace a wider variety of meanings than simply ‘ethnic group’. While it certainly can describe groups of people, its use does not appear to be strictly circumscribed in any defined sociological sense. On the one hand, it may be applied to the inhabitants of a polls, as when Herodotos refers to the Athenian and Attic ethne, or the ethnos of the Khalkidians.