“Skilled at Grasping.” The Phoenician Migrant and Exile as a Cautionary Stereotype from Classical Antiquity to Early Modern Europe.

Abstract

Greco-Roman prejudice towards the long-distance trader is often connected to their view of Phoenicians. Phoenicians constitute “a byword for greed” in the Odyssey, a negative trope, embodying the prejudice and fear evoked by a social class which also existed in Greece and, later, Rome. Here, we investigate a similar process involving the characterization of Phoenicians as political refugees in Classical sources. Like the long-distance traders, such people could evoke feelings of prejudice, especially the fear that they would usurp land or political power from the host community, and the stereotypical Phoenician traits of greed and deception were useful to highlight this.