ABSTRACT

The study of history abounds in clichés. One of the most familiar and most profound is that every generation rewrites history in the light of its own concerns. As a result, important problems are never definitively settled but repeatedly reappear in new guises. One such problem is the nature of Greek identity. When J.L. Myres published his famous Sather Lectures Who Were the Greeks? in 1930,1 the modern discourse concerning Greek identity was already more than a century old and had engaged the minds of some of the most famous Classical scholars.