Apartheid

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stronger than ethnicist or racist classism. (Egyptian slaveowners, presumably mostly men,
were more important than unwanted elite babies.) On the other hand, there was probably a
strong wish among those in power to counteract biological ethnic mixing with this law. Slaves
are of course much less likely to intermarry with the ethnic group to which their owners
belong than adopted children are. The motivations behind this strange law are apparently
either very complex or they represent conflicting interests among the elites and legislators. In
either case, racism appears to have been strongly linked with sexism. The disregard for human
life is the common denominator for any interpretation of Roman intentions here.
There obviously is a possibility of a link from ancient Greek and Roman culture to
Capitalism, Darwinism, Machiavellism, classism, sexism, and racism in modern (and
postmodern) societies and cultures with a ‘western’ emphasis. But it is equally obvious that
much of the kind of hypocrisy offered to us today by preaching equality but acting otherwise
– e.g. by the Christian churches, the human rights ideologies of the USA and the EU (the
largest weapons sellers and exporters in the world, respectively), and the mythology of
Hollywood (the ‘bad guys’ always losing in the end) – was not widespread among the Greeks.
On the other hand, they were also prone to religious hypocrisy, though of a very
different kind. For those who did not believe in the religion, and there were many of them, it
manifested itself in the dishonest, yet dutiful execution of rituals, especially with sacrifices,
wherein the culture’s fundamental brutality and lack of respect for life reveals itself further:
“[I]f there was one religious ritual that made a Greek conventionally and normatively ‘Greek’,
it was the eligibility to participate in a bloody animal sacrifice” 597 If one did not carry out the
ritual, one faced the possibility of a death sentence, as some philosophers with a secular or
critical bent experienced. It might seem overly harsh to call people who are just trying to
survive ‘hypocritical’ or ‘dishonest’, but there were many who were not directly threatened by
the death sentence, and all Greek men appear to have been schooled in the art of animal
sacrifice.
In Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, all people, but especially Egyptians, were obligated to
participate in the religious cult of the deified rulers, their families, dynasties and sometimes
even their lovers. These allegedly divine personalities had both intricate and bombastic
propaganda machinery at their disposal. With the Hellenistic Age as a whole, the relative
importance and ‘density’ of ideology reached a climax for all of Greek and Macedonian
history. We already dealt with the ideological importance of Greek history and art (especially
Homer) to Greeks in Egypt in Chapter II.7.1. Ideology also reached further into metaphysics,
in a wide sense, than before or after, especially in Egypt. 598 Religion in general was used
consciously and cunningly by the ruling class as an opium for the people, i.e. as a ‘political
instrument...purporting to symbolize the unity and equality of the two cultures – an ideal to be
given lip-service in the present and realized in some utopian future. . . in the full knowledge
that government policy was directed at perpetuating the rigidly stratified status quo.’ 599
This insight is crucial though not recognized by all contemporary commentators. For
example, the renowned and brilliant Heidelberg egyptologist, Jan Assmann, remarks that:
‘The generally positive, admiring view that the Greeks had of Egypt, the country and the
culture, strangely contrasts with their dislike of the Egyptians, whom they considered as
597 Ibid: 159ff, quote: 162. Another instance of ancient Greek religious hypocrisy would be the way that someone
like Socrates could be found guilty of misleading the youth with false gods and then sentenced to death. The
piety of his accusers was quite obviously merely a thin veneer for a political agenda. See Stone, I. F.: The Trial
of Socrates, 1989.
598 Weber 1993: 56ff, 243ff, Lewis, N. 1983: 87f; Koch 1993: 592; Huß 2001: 320ff
599 Lewis, N. 1983: 86. This is the kind of hypocrisy that then became an essential element of western culture,
perhaps most importantly with Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire and of equivalent status of
subsequent European and American powers, to this day, i.e. that there will be pie in the sky when we die. Today,
however, the mythology of Hollywood (‘crime never, or almost never, pays’) is perhaps even more important
than religion for upholding the lie, or the pious faith. See, however, footnotes 768-770 below on emancipatory
aspects of this kind of belief.