Upside Down and Back to Front

Of all the places and peoples with whom the Greeks came into contact, it was with Egypt and the Egyptians that they had the most complex relationship. Unlike their relationship with Achaemenid Persia, one which centred on the single fact of the Greek-Persian wars (490–479 BC) long after those wars were concluded, their relationship with Egypt was not at heart antagonistic, and was based on much longer and deeper memory of contact (e.g. Austin 1970; Lloyd 1975–1989: I.1–60; Móller 2000). ¹ Egypt was indeed seen as the source of many of the most fundamental features of Greek culture, an essential detour for Greek writers. The historian Herodotus, the Athenian reformer Solon, Plato, Pythagoras, and Eudoxus are all reputed – with varying plausibility – to have visited Egypt and tapped its ancient wisdom. In doing so, they were joining a long list of more hazily historical figures: Homer, Lycurgus, Orpheus, Musaeus, Melampus and Daedalus (e.g. Herodotus I.30; Diodorus Siculus I.69.4, 96–98; Strabo XVII.1.29). ² But at the same time as Egypt was elevated above other foreign lands as a source of Greek practice and ideals, it was also distanced, seen as representing – in its climate or its customs – the reverse of the normative (i.e. Greek) world, or subsumed into the collective cliché of the ‘barbarian’.