THE ARRIVAL OF a stranger creates mystery. Who is it? Why is he here? What does he want? These simple inquiries tap into some of the greatest quandaries of existence. From time immemorial, strangers have brought forth questions of identity and meaning, self and community, power, knowledge, and belief. Confronted with new arrivals, we search for clues somewhere between the light of the world and our clouded imaginations. Should these newcomers be from another land, should they speak in a strange tongue, should they look and act in unintelligible ways, the discomfort may increase. For these enigmatic beings pose a challenge; they disrupt our mind’s invisible reliance on sameness and analogy. Their presence challenges our expectations.
Strangers, foreigners, and aliens provoke anxiety. They remind us that, outside the islands where we have made sense of ourselves, there exists an unimaginable array of others. A globe nearly 25,000 miles around now holds nine million species and, among them, nearly eight billion human beings. Each of these men and women possess histories, habits, norms, and specificities that can only stagger us with their complexity. To get on with each day, we narrow our sights, universalize our local verities, and extrapolate from scant experience. Strangers destabilize those illusions.
The result of such a disruption may be not just confusion and anxiety but also its flip side, aggression. Scared human beings are capable of terrible things, and in spasms throughout history, strangers have scared us terribly. Only later, often much later, may we discover these victims had little to do with the fear that possessed us.
Are such reactions, then, simply “natural”? Biologists have documented how fear and aggression toward outsiders can be observed throughout the animal kingdom. Anthropologists have found it among many human tribes. Developmental psychologists make it intrinsic to normal childhood; infants under the age of two, for a short while, suffer from “stranger anxiety” and burst into tears when an unknown person approaches. Evidence such as this seems to point to the same conclusion: fear of strangers is a highly conserved, biologically driven reaction that has long conferred an important evolutionary advantage. Fighting off foreigners worked. Tens of thousands of years ago, we may imagine, when one motley band of cave-dwelling hominoids encountered another, they showered stones on the intruders without pausing to ask if they were friend or foe. Those that leapt at outsiders survived and passed down that same predilection to their offspring. Soon enough, such reactions became “hardwired.” Sociobiologists like Melvin Konner have suggested that what others call xenophobia is simply that. By such an accounting, xenophobia would be a misnomer, for there can be nothing irrational or phobic about struggling for survival.
There are obvious problems with this logic. If evolutionary psychologists can easily conjure up Neanderthals celebrating after driving off a band of wild marauders, they struggle to make sense of a critical, contrary reality. The restraint of such aggressive behavior also clearly conferred great survival advantages. Only in that way could smaller bands merge and, over time, create complex, safe societies based on interpersonal cooperation. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould pressed this point: wouldn’t natural selection favor those who figured out when it was necessary to fight and when it was not? Bands that avoided unnecessary conflicts, unlike those isolated tribes that hid deep in the jungle, had the capacity to build diverse, powerful groups, a fact Charles Darwin himself recognized. As Jared Diamond pointed out, a crucial cultural adaptation occurred—he dared to date it at 7500 years ago—when bands and tribes learned “for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without killing them.” By managing conflict with outsiders, small tribes merged into larger populations, capable of food surpluses that allowed for stratification and technological progress. In such complex societies, individuals might compete and look out for number one, but they also buzzed about like worker bees. If we are hardwired to fight, we are also hardwired to, well … flirt. Humans meet strangers, form couples, families, larger tribes, and new nations. In these emerging structures, xenophobia is hardly an advantage. In fact, it is perhaps the most destabilizing kind of disaster.
Our contemporary predilection to biologize complex social phenomena has proven premature, empty, or ideological before. In this case, I concluded, it had again. If a modicum of anxiety before strangers is adaptive and commonplace, xenophobia is not. Nor can this set of perceptions and actions be reduced to genetic dispositions without losing the very thing itself. While the capacity for acceptance and for fearful rejection rest in our makeup, these inborn capabilities do not explain why unreasonable fear and hatred rise up in him not her, here not there, and then not now.
WORDS LIKE XENOPHOBIA are relics from forgotten times. What dramas led to the term “xenophobia” being born? What was the ecosystem of meaning that gave it birth? When did humans adapt and erect dams that sought to restrain excessive fear of strangers, seeing it as dangerous, wrong, even a touch mad?
Ancient Greece seemed to be the answer. In one history of racism, the author asserted that the term was “invented by ancient Greeks to describe a reflexive feeling of hostility toward the stranger or Other.” It made sense. Two Greek roots had been united, probably during that fertile period when the Western world was said to originate. If undue hatred of outsiders trailed humanity like a deepening stain, perhaps awareness of this force emerged during the great awakening that took place some four centuries before Christ. Did the same blossoming that gave us Socrates, Plato, the Sophists, Hippocrates, Euclid, and the Stoics alert us to this danger?
Descended from the proto-Indo-European “ghos-ti,” the ancient Greek word xénos—I discovered—was Janus-faced. Xénos meant foreigner or stranger, but it was also a relational word, more like guest. To be a xénos was to imply that a host existed, and that both parties would be guided by the social codes of xenia. These rules of hospitality dictated that the xénos would be cared for by his host, who, in return, would be praised. In this way, a potentially fraught encounter was choreographed, routinized, and safeguarded. Gift exchanges, laudatory poems, and solemn pronouncements heralded the implementation of this code. Similar performances were used to cement alliances between neighboring cities.
This ancient code can be traced back to the earliest Greek written records. In the eighth century BC Homeric epic, The Iliad, a breach of xenia started the Trojan War, when Paris, a guest, abducted Helen from his host’s home. The ethical logic of xenia also ran throughout The Odyssey, where the exiled Odysseus struggled to return to Ithaca, often without shelter, often in need. Approaching the land of the one-eyed Cyclopes, he worried:
What are they—violent, savage, lawless?
or friendly to [xénos] strangers, god-fearing men?
The civilized were known by their kindness towards strangers, and after the Cyclops Polyphemus devoured six of his sailors, Odysseus discovered that this monster was uninterested in such protocols. So too, were those cruel hosts, Calypso and Circe. Then after finding his way back to Ithaca, Odysseus stumbled upon another breach. A group of xénoi had taken up residence in his home and flagrantly pressed his wife to remarry. Odysseus took his revenge upon these poorly behaved guests.
Rules of Greek hospitality were not just social etiquette. They were of such consequence that the rules came from the gods. Zeus himself was the protector of travelers. “We must consider the laws of intercourse with strangers,” Plato mused, “to be matters of the most holy kind … for a stranger being destitute of companions and kindred, is an object of greater pity both to men and gods.” Philoxenia was coined to refer to those who took pains to be friendly to strangers. This term filtered into the Bible, where in Hebrews it was written: “Let brotherly love [philoxenia] continue.…” From there, a short path led to the Book of Matthew, where Jesus said: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Revealingly, the author of Hebrews anchored his exhortation to philoxenia with a dire warning: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels, unawares.” To abide by the rules of philoxenia was not just morally just, it also acted as a hedge against the possibility that the outcasts at one’s door were divinities, known to sometimes sally forth incognito among mortals. In The Odyssey, Homer wrote: “The gods, like wandering strangers, take on every sort of shape and visit the cities.” For Plato, this was a superstition that terrified children and was a prime example of why poets should be banned from the republic. Yet even Plato, in The Sophist, has Socrates ask the “Eleatic Stranger” if he was not some god.
The Cyclopes defied the rules of xenia
Myths of encounters with divinities continued in Roman times. Ovid wrote of how Zeus and Hermes, arriving ragged and friendless, were coldly turned away by many and not offered a bed. An elderly couple named Baucis and Philemon took pity on these xénoi; they fed them and gave them shelter. The gods then revealed themselves and showered the couple with gifts. They also granted the couple’s wish to never suffer the other’s loss; therefore it was determined that when the moment came, they would die simultaneously.
Even if not exactly descended from the heavens, homeless strangers also could be exiled or incognito dignitaries. Such was the surprise awaiting the denizens of Colonus who lifted their noses up at a scruffy, blind beggar, King Oedipus. Royals of this sort also tended to have a long memory for mistreatment. Odysseus took vengeance upon those who refused him refuge during his arduous journey. As the traveler and geographer Pausanias once wrote, the “Wrath of the God of Strangers is inexorable.”
Alongside the moral and humanitarian implications, these taboos and rituals regulating the treatment of strangers were functional. Movement on land or by ship was treacherous. If turned away without drink or shelter, a traveler might easily perish. Conversely, taking an unknown being into one’s home posed obvious risks. How could one know he was not a scoundrel like Paris? The code of xenia helped establish a scripted dance that reassured both parties. The host opened his house and pantry; the stranger showered him with extravagant tributes. As the Theban poet Pindar sang of his host: “I am a guest [xénos]. Keeping away dark blame and bringing genuine glory, like streams of water, to a man who is near and dear, I will praise him.”
In a number of ancient texts, I came upon philoxenos or xenophilia, and was sure it was but a matter of time before I came upon their opposites, phoboxenos or xenophobia. After all, like “philos,” “phobos” was common in compound words. Then as now, it meant fear or dread. In the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, strangers regularly appeared and provoked “phobos.” I scoured everything that I could find. I turned to ancient Greek lexicons. I consulted scholarly tomes. I spoke to experts. Nothing.
It was befuddling. The Greeks were hardly blind to the host’s fears or the gratuitous cruelties that could befall a stranger. After all, xenodaites referred to those who, like the Cyclopes, eagerly devoured their guests. Xenoktónos named those creeps who took in unsuspecting guests so as to murder them. Xenophobia? Nowhere.
The word’s absence surprised me for another reason. As contemporary scholars have shown, the ancient Greeks often behaved in ways that we would call xenophobic. Aristotle originated an infamous tradition in which outsiders were deemed subhuman, hence naturally intended for enslavement. In his Politics, he cited Euripides, who wrote: “it is proper for Greeks to rule non-Greeks.” The one whom early modern Western thinkers simply called “The Philosopher” then extended this, so “that non-Greek and slave are in nature the same.” Foreigners, Aristotle argued, were like bodies without souls, animals that required masters, and women who needed to be led about by men. In “the great order of things,” it was natural for foreigners to be subdued, enchained, and put to work by their male Greek overlords. No one, it seems, called Aristotle xenophobic. Not in Athens.
Perhaps these soulless half-humans did not qualify as xénos, but rather were lumped together in a different category. Barbaroi for the Greeks of antiquity were at first merely those who spoke an inscrutable language. Scholars have contended that originally no negative judgment was implied. That changed, some scholars say, after the shocking invasion by Persia that was repulsed by the Greeks at Marathon. Over the next decades of war, barbarians became specifically the Persians, now seen as inferior, foreign enemies. Military leaders like Alexander the Great found this term useful to rouse men to war. And so, while such strangers/enemies were foreign-tongued barbarians from far-off, xénoi were more likely to be Hellenes traveling from another city-state. In the Republic, Plato distinguished rules of battle with barbarians—where brutality and slavery were allowed—from “factional” conflicts between Greeks, where no such cruelty was sanctioned. Tellingly, xénoi, for Plato, seemed to refer to traveling merchants, honored philosophers, or civic dignitaries. Not a particularly menacing group.
In the end, despite finding rampant bias against “barbaric strangers,” despite learning of the strict etiquette offered to xénoi, my search had come up empty. I never found the compound term I was in search of, though I did find traces of the idea. Sprinkled in the Greek Bible, a number of Hebrew words for sojourner, alien, or foreigner are at times rendered as “xénos.” In the Book of Exodus, the Jews were told: “You shall not oppress a stranger for you know the feeling of the stranger having yourself been strangers in the land of Egypt.” Saint Matthew depicted Judgment Day as one when the Son of Man damned those who did not feed and give drink to a xénos. Most memorably, Saint Paul took a stand against the way foreigners became enemies. Once Saul of Tarsus, this convert won Corinth over to his new faith, but after returning home, he learned that his success was short-lived. The new Christians had already divided into camps and turned on each other. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul challenged the rationale for labeling foreigners as barbarians: “There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world,” he wrote, “and none of them is without signification. Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me.”
The Greeks fought off the Persian “barbarians” at Marathon
In the end, however, “xenophobia” simply was not to be found in the surviving texts of antiquity. With so much literature lost, it is impossible to know whether “xénos” and “phobos” were ever linked by some lost scribe. However, one thing was clear: those who assumed that our xenophobia descended from ancient Greece were simply wrong. While wrapped in a toga and looking as ancient as the Acropolis, this word did not spring forth there or then.
I WENT TO MY SHELVES and pulled down the Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Made from a million index cards and lives of scholarly hard labor, this has been called the greatest dictionary ever compiled. It is the first stop for students eager to discover the history of English words. Originally twenty volumes, my copy had shrunk all that into tiny, micrographic print, crammed into a fourteen-pound behemoth. I pulled out my magnifying glass and began to hunt. Squinting hard, I found my prey on page 2533, between Xenon and Xenophontean, and there lay another clue. The first use of “xenophobia” in English, it said, was from a British magazine in 1909. Italicized and misspelled, “xenophoby” reeked of a quaint bygone era, like “Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe.” The actual quote was vague, so I decided to pull up the original article. A few paragraphs in and it all fell into place. The origin story seemed obvious.
On March 13, 1909, an Italian correspondent, the esteemed archaeologist and cartographer of ancient Rome, Rodolfo Lanciani, excitedly made an announcement in the back pages of the liberal London weekly The Athenaeum. A stunning find had been unearthed underground in Rome. Nearly every inch of Rome had ancient ruins and wonderful stories underfoot. What, I wondered, could be so special? Lanciani assured his reader that his news was startling, and as one read on, it seemed true. For what had been unearthed upset beliefs about the very identity of Western civilization.
The origins of the “West” and the “East” as geographic markers can be dated to the third century AD, when Diocletian split the Roman Empire in two, dividing the domains on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean. By the nineteenth century, these boundaries had solidified into broader identities and organizing ideologies. As every schoolchild knew, Western civilization commenced in ancient Greece, was transplanted to Rome, then unfurled in Europe and America. It was populated by heroes like Aristotle and Socrates, then Caesar, Augustus, Seneca, Virgil, and Cicero. In this hallowed time, humans were said to have overcome their animal emotionality (never mind old Nero and Caligula) and established the foundations for European civilization.
This history of the West was not always so easy to separate from the East, especially around the easily traversed Mediterranean basin. Dusty fields like archaeology, philology, and classics were enlisted to make sure West and East did not become confused. For this laudatory account of history was valuable: it helped justify Western colonial expansion as a benevolent effort to bestow civilization on the East. Scholars prepared Western antiquity for its starring role by scrubbing it of foreign influences, an effort that was especially vigorous among nineteenth-century German scholars, who hoped to transform the ancient Greeks into descendants of northern Aryans. In this and other ways, ancient stones and weird glyphs moved to the political front lines, for who we were back then meant a great deal about what we felt entitled to do right now.
Shocking, long-buried remnants now challenged all that, Lanciani reported. A wealthy American art collector and diplomat, George Wurts, had bought an estate on the second-highest hill in Rome, the Janiculum. This mythic place was supposedly founded by Janus, the two-faced god. In 1906, while laying foundations for a gardener’s house, workers stumbled upon Greek and Latin marbles. Wurts became excited when the stones indicated his property stood on the spot that Cicero called the “Grove of the Furies.” Workers continued to dig. Nearby, they pulled up tablets with strange Eastern inscriptions.
A French expert, Paul Frédéric Gauckler, was brought in to assess the finding. Despite his lack of formal training, Gauckler had become a star in the archaeology world. After studying history and geography at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the asthmatic young man departed for a warmer climate. In 1890, he chose the French protectorate of Tunisia, once home to Carthage, Rome’s great Phoenician rival. Through pluck and talent, Gauckler became an expert on both Carthage and Rome, and was rewarded by being appointed as a curator of antiquities in the protectorate. As a correspondent for the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature, Gauckler’s work in the Orient found its way into the French press. His meteoric rise, however, came to an end when, in 1905, he abruptly resigned and left Tunisia, perhaps run out of town due to rumors of his homosexuality. Happily for George Wurts, the talented Gauckler resettled in Italy, welcomed as a member of the French Academy of Rome, where his expertise on Western and Eastern antiquity made him a perfect choice for this dig.
After examining the site, Gauckler made a startling prediction. Underfoot, he announced, a sanctuary and temple to Syrian gods existed. Though jarring, this had some logic to it. In their vast empire, the Romans modified the Greek notion of barbarian, making it less a matter of birth and more a cultural condition that could be altered. Conquered provincials, foreign elites, and even slaves could become Roman citizens. Many august Roman citizens assimilated, despite being born in North Africa, Syria, and Turkey. However, Gauckler’s prediction was not about those who had adopted Roman ways; shockingly, he now claimed that Semitic gods were venerated on sacred Roman ground.
His hypothesis drew an “especially severe” rebuke from a German scholar, Christian Hülsen. An expert on Roman topology, Hülsen scoffed at the idea that a temple to Syrian gods could possibly have been allowed, not in the outskirts but in the Grove of the Furies. Immigrants and former slaves in such a sacred spot? Never. French and German professionals faced off, but in the end, this was not an abstract debate. “Here clearly was a problem,” wrote the Harvard professor George Chase, “which only the spade could decide.” And so it did.
Paul Gauckler in his Tunis apartment
In April of 1908, beneath a fountain opening, Gauckler’s crew pried up a stone and beheld a ruined Syrian temple. “A Semitic Discovery in Rome!” one journal cried. “A Temple to the Oriental Gods,” another proclaimed. The Classical Weekly reported that Paul Gauckler had shaken “the foundations of the archaeological and scientific world, and the Italian government.” Yes, the Italian government.
Lanciani informed his readers that at the center of the Roman Empire, an immigrant colony with its Eastern “superstitions” once thrived. Worshipers of Mithras and Isis were in this sanctuary, not on the margins of the capital. The unavoidable implication was this: there was a time when some powerful Romans worshiped Eastern Syrian gods. Someone high up went over to the other side. Even more distressingly, perhaps the sides were never so clear.
As the dig went deeper, more upset lay in store. Gauckler and his workers uncovered a secret chamber with a human skull and an even spookier find. Inside a triangular altar, they came upon a small, mummified statuette of Mithras, wrapped in a snake, with five cracked chicken eggs deposited between the coils of the serpent’s tail. Readers of The Athenaeum must have felt a familiar thrill, for this tale read like then-popular adventure stories. Our intrepid explorer had entered the “dark, unexplored East” and, while peering into its mysteries, had come face-to-face with horrid sacrifices and savagery. The only difference was that the savage land sat at the epicenter of Western Christianity. And it was not fiction.
During the second century AD and afterward, a Syrian cult was a part of Rome, was Roman. Was “Oriental superstition” and “Eastern savagery” part of the origins of Western civilization? How did this square with the rational mastery of animal desires? In 1911, the Italian government shut down such questions by closing the site. In a tragic finale, a few years later, Gauckler drank poison and ended his life.
By the time of this discovery, Europeans had long since swept out into the world carrying ennobling accounts of their identity. Ancient Greece, Rome, the West, Christianity, and Enlightenment modernity: these were their stories and they packed them in their bags as they went forth into foreign lands. That patrimony granted them reason, law, and cultural superiority; it justified conquest. However, as the dig at the Janiculum in Rome demonstrated, the difference between West and East could become murky. And the discomfort such impurity created could be acute. Lanciani’s tale bespoke of a shock regarding Eastern infiltration into Western origins. His report from the underworld evoked that discomfort, for in this buried temple to Mithras were strangers so comfortably ensconced inside the origins of the West that they may not have been strangers at all.
As his report in The Athenaeum drew to a close, Lanciani shared his distress over the politicized reception of this discovery. It was easy for me to anticipate where this was going. For British liberals, suspicious of Rudyard Kipling’s injunction—“East is East, and West is West”—the entire thrust of this tale seemed to require a comment on bigotry. Obviously, this dignified Italian scholar would now scold those whose xenophoby forced them to deny the presence of a Semitic temple in the heart of Rome.
Having set the stage, Lanciani delivered his summation:
These, then are the discoveries which have absorbed the interest of professional people for the last three weeks. They appear even more remarkable if we consider them, not as a gift of chance, but as the outcome of a plan most carefully studied, and carried into execution inch by inch, by one who knew what lay concealed underground. I say this because the gentle breeze of chauvinism is already blowing in the direction of the Janiculum: but let there be no misunderstanding on this point. Those whose sense of justice and fair play, is not impaired by prejudice or “xenophoby” know to whom the honor is due for this new and exciting chapter in the history of Roman excavation.
I read it again. And again. Finally it seeped in. This was not at all about the East and the West. Lanciani “inaugurated” this term to chide those whose professional rivalry and national prejudice pressed them to diminish poor Gauckler. While France had been busy touting their countryman’s discovery, experts from Germany, Italy, and elsewhere had discounted this discoverer due to “xenophoby.”
I was crestfallen. Had Lanciani’s recriminations been any more oblique, my own biases would have hurtled me toward the conclusion I already held. It was a useful warning. While studying a reflective bias against strangers and strangeness, I would need to manage my own preconceptions, my own assumptions about what was strange and what was not. In this vertiginous and uncanny tale of a Semitic shrine buried in Rome, the quick read for a twenty-first-century reader, or at least for this one, was obvious and wrong. If the whole story pulsed with an anti-Semitic subtext, the only acknowledged “xenophoby” focused not on that at all. No, xenophoby, that terrible allegation, had issued forth in 1909 to condemn a petty and frivolous competition for national accolades. It referred to the rejection of a French scholar by competitive Germans and Italians. That was my first real clue, and I followed it.