From νῆσός to insula, from Place to Non-Place: A study of Greek and Roman discourses on ''barbarian'' insular spaces through the example of Sardinia and Corsica

Résumé En

Knowledge on the ancient history of the Mediterranean islands has remarkably increased in recent decades. These studies, as the practice of ancient history often requires, have been at the crossroads of archaeology, anthropology, and philology. However, few studies - except two remarkable research studies conducted respectively by Sylvie Vilatte and Christine Pérez on the Aegean space - have focused on the relationship that the ancient peoples maintained with regards to the concept of insularity. Moreover, no study has yet really looked into the Ancients’ reception of island spaces considered as “barbaric”, i.e. islands inhabited by populations whose original culture was considered as non-Greek or non-Latin. Yet, on this precise theme, Sardinia and Corsica prove to be privileged objects of study, because they were at the crossroads of Greek and Roman civilizations while being at the same time considered by authors of the Antiquity as being places alien to the Greco-Latin 'koinè'.Since Homeric times, ''Σαρδόνα καὶ Κύρνος'' - Sardinia and Corsica - have aroused a clear interest among the Ancients, as each has been mentioned by several dozen authors through several hundred quotations . This textual ensemble is composed of writings of varying size and interest, ranging from simple poetic verse to accounts of battles, via ethnographic investigations and geographical studies. The “Sardo-Corsican’’ corpus is nevertheless structured around three themes that can be categorized as follows: firstly, it looks into the History of those islands, thus referring to their successive waves of colonization and the various politico-military conflicts they had to confront. Then, the corpus delineates the Land, focusing on the islands’ geography, climate and natural resources. Finally, it refers to the Peoples, describing the islands’ populations as well as their habits and customs.Nevertheless, classical literary sources pose a number of difficulties for historians wishing to reconstruct past realities as – since we have not yet had access to the majority of ancient writings - we have to rely indeed on biased and fragmentary documentation.As for the meagre remaining documentation, we also know that it may have been altered over the ages. Furthermore, there is no literature produced by the so-called ‘’indigenous’’ populations, which consequently makes the contemporary reader dependent on the images and ethnotypes conveyed by the Greco-Latin sources, which first and foremost express the "viewpoint of others " and therefore cannot be representative of the discourse of a people’s viewpoint on themselves .Lastly, it is also important to mention that the overwhelming majority of ancient authors who wrote about these two islands never visited them. Many of them simply compiled existing texts without endeavoring to consider their veracity. In other words, the authors of Antiquity were more akin to “library travelers” than empirical travelers with the determination to observe, collect and reproduce real-life accounts. Consequently, these accounts primarily reflect the representations of those who produced them rather than historical and ethnographic realities. There is however a clear contrast between the sources produced in the Greek language and those produced in Latin. While Latin authors often reduce Sardinia and Corsica to second-rate lands, e.g., with a terrifying climate and populated by vulgar people, Greek writers are more measured in their accounts, even displaying traits like curiosity, at times benevolence and occasionally, although rarely, actual admiration for the indigenous cultures.Several hypotheses have been raised to explain this dichotomy. For some historians, the ‘’favorable’’ Greek bias is due to the cultural anchorage of these two islands in the Hellenic world . By contrast, the pejorative viewpoint conveyed by Latin sources would result from the difficult conquest that Rome carried out to subdue these two territories . Apart from the cultural and military context, this divergence can also be attributed to the time period in which each document was produced. Between the Classical and Hellenistic ages, when most of the Greek texts relating to Sardinia and Corsica were produced , the western Mediterranean was still an arena of confrontations between small and medium-sized thalassocracies. In this context, the large Tyrrhenian islands had an obvious economic and strategic interest, since their ownership allowed for the overseeing of the Sardinian and Tuscan straits, thus facilitating the control of trade from Sicily and Magna Graecia towards the various emporia of southern Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula. It is consequently logical that Greek texts of this period give special attention to Sardinia and Corsica. On the other hand, from the moment that Rome imposed its dominion on the entire Mediterranean world and brought rich provinces such as Africa (146 BC) and Egypt (30 BC) under its control, the interest in the Tyrrhenian islands quickly became secondary. This loss of interest increased even further from the Augustan period onwards, a time characterized by the beginning of the Pax Romana, and which from a chronological perspective corresponds to the rise of Latin literature .However, beyond the question of presumed cultural affinities and of the historical context of production, is it possible that this antagonism reflected in the literary documentation is also induced by the existence of a different relationship to insularity between Greek and Latin thought? If so, how is this difference expressed and what does it tell us about Greek and Roman representations of island spaces? To address the issue, this contribution will draw on several Greek and Latin texts produced between the 5th century BC and the 1st century AD. These extracts will enable us to study the emotions and symbols that ancient authors projected on Sardinia and Corsica and the way they expressed their relationship with insularity through them: a relationship of proximity and identification on the one hand and distancing or even abhorrence on the other. The first part of our paper will be a lexical study of the terms used in Greek and Latin to designate the ''island'' and the ''continent''. The second part will study the perception of insularity by the Greeks. It will be shown how and why the Greeks, from the Archaic period onwards, conceptualized the island space as an ideal place by associating it with the notions of centrality, sovereignty, and civic harmony. The example of Sardinia and Corsica will allow us to determine to what extent this idyllic vision of the island was at intervals able to transcend one of the fundamental frameworks of Greek thought, which consisted in dividing the oikouménē between ''barbarian'' and ''civilized'' peoples. Finally, the last part of the article will be devoted to studying the Roman perception of the island space. We will study how due to their conflicting history with the Tyrrhenian insulae, the Romans conceptualized the island space as a place of civic relegation – thus a symbolically and politically peripheral Non-Place - and the Sardo-Corsican islander as a paragon of barbarism.