2

The image of the barbarian

The prime function of the term ‘barbarian’ and its cognates, ‘bar¬
barous’, ‘barbarity’, etc., was to distinguish between those who were
members of the observer’s own society and those who were not. The
observers themselves - those, that is, who applied these terms to others,
since it was they who were faced with the task of classifying and
describing something they felt to be alien to them - rarely troubled to
attempt a self-definition. They assumed themselves to be all that the
‘barbarian’ was not; and the word ‘barbarian’ does have an antonym
in the terms ‘civil’ or ‘politic’ (which are generally used as though they
were synonymous) and their cognates. These terms derive, of course,
from the words civis and polis, both of which, in their rather different
ways, apply to cities - though the ways in which they apply are complex
ones - and to man as a uniquely city-building, city-dwelling animal.
The significance of this will become apparent later. For the moment,
I wish to look not at the ways in which Europeans viewed themselves,
though something of that will inevitably emerge from the discussion,
but at how they classified and described non-Europeans, ‘barbarians’.
The terms of the particular discourse I am interested in derived in the
first instance from Aristotle. Most of the writers I shall be discussing
were self-declared Aristotelians and they understood the word ‘bar¬
barian’ to mean what Aristotle and his commentators, in particular
Saint Thomas Aquinas, understood it to mean.
‘Barbarian’, however, is an unstable term for it was applied to many
different groups. The Berbers of North Africa,1 the Turks, the Scythians,
the peoples of ‘Ethiopia’, even the Irish and the Normans2 were all
described at one time or another as barbarians. Like all such categories
of description, the word could readily be adapted to meet the user’s
particular needs. The one thing, however, which all usages had in
common was the implication of inferiority. The Greeks of the seventh

15
 THE FALL OF NATURAL MAN

and sixth centuries b.c. who coined the word employed it, it is true,
simply to mean ‘foreigner’; and they applied it to peoples such as the
Egyptians, whom they respected.3 But by the fourth century, barbaros
had become, and was forever to remain, a word which was used only of
cultural or mental inferiors.
For the Hellenistic Greeks, the barbaros was merely a babbler,
someone who could not speak Greek.4 But an inability to speak Greek
was regarded not merely as a linguistic shortcoming, for a close associa¬
tion in the Greek mind between intelligible speech and reason made it
possible to take the view that those who were devoid of logos in one
sense might also be devoid of it in another. For most Greeks, and for all
their cultural beneficiaries, the ability to use language, together with
the ability to form civil societies (poleis) - since these were the clearest
indications of man’s powers of reason - were also the things that
distinguished man from other animals. For only man possesses the
reason required to communicate with his fellow creatures or, indeed, a
tongue sufficiently broad, loose and soft to be able to form intelligible
sounds (De part. an. 660 a 17—18).® Barbarians, as we shall see, were
considered to have failed significantly in respect of both these capacities.
Non-Greek speakers, furthermore, lived, by definition, outside the
Greek family of man, the oikumene, and thus had no share in the
collective cultural values of the Hellenic community. The oikumene
was, of course, a closed world, access to which was, in reality, only by
accident of birth; but for the Greeks, for whom birth could never be a
matter of accident, it was also a superior world, the only world, indeed,
in which it was possible to be truly human.6
Since membership of any community must finally depend on recog¬
nition by that community,7 and if ‘man’ is to be taken as something
more than a morphological category, the Greeks’ failure to recognise
the barbaroi amounted, in effect, to a denial of their humanity. For if
only the Greeks have access to logos, those who are not Greeks must be
rather less than fully human. The birds that watch over the temple on
the island of Diomedia are able, thought Aristotle, to distinguish
between Greeks and barbaroi (De mir. aus. 836 a 10-15) because no
barbaros may have access to mysteries only Greeks can understand, and
in which only Greeks may participate.
The Greeks were not, of course, alone in this feeling of isolation from
the rest of the species. Most societies have, at one time or another, felt
the need to distinguish between themselves and their neighbours in
similarly radical terms.8 Many, indeed, seem to possess no word which

16
 THE IMAGE OF THE BARBARIAN

can adequately render the concept ‘man’. There exist, for them, only
the name of their tribe and then another term, or terms, by which all
those who do not belong to that tribe are known. When the Franciscan
Alonso de Molina came to compile his Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary the
only words he could find to stand for hombre were terms designating
social groups: tlacatl, which (very roughly) means ‘chieftain’ or
lord’, and maceualli, the term by which all those who worked the
land were known. For the rest he could only discover words which
described particular types of men — holy-men, men-without-pity, men-
experienced-in-war, men with big noses or large cheeks, men with six
fingers or six toes. But no word to translate the expression homo
sapiens.e For the Mexica, man, once he has left the group, ceased, in all
important respects, to be ‘man’. It is also, of course, a commonplace
that to ‘insiders’, ‘outsiders’ frequently appear as, in some sense,
members of another species, as humanoids, rather than human, or as
supernatural beings. De-humanisation is, perhaps, the simplest method
of dealing with all that is culturally unfamiliar.
To Europeans, the Amerindians and the Africans seemed to be, at
worst, defective members of their own species. But the Arawak took the
Spaniards to be sky-visitors, the Inca assumed them to be viracocha, a
term which seems to have been applied to any supernatural being, and
the Congolese imagined that the Portuguese, who carried large eyes
painted on the prows of their caravels, were the spirits of the sea.10
These ‘primitive’ reactions may be attributed not so much to fear of
Spanish and Portuguese technology - by which neither the Indians nor
the Africans seem to have been unduly impressed - but to the mere fact
that the Europeans were outsiders, strangers - and very strange
strangers at that.
Greek society, less restrained intellectually and geographically than
the Arawak, the Inca or the Congolese, did not take quite such an
extreme view. All Greeks, from Homer to Aristotle, were certain that
man was, biologically at least, a single and unique genus.11 The very
great differences they saw to exist between the barbaroi and themselves
had, then, to be judged under certain categories of value. For there are
many degrees of humanity {Pol. 1252 a iff.). A man may sacrifice his
right to be called a man by behaving in the cruel or savage ways that
are characteristic of the barbaroi {NE, 1145 a 31) who, among other
things, have a penchant for cutting off heads {De part. an. 673 a 25)
and for eating the human foetus.
For the barbaroi are bestial because they act like beasts, because, for

17
 THE FALL OF NATURAL MAN

instance, like the Achaeans and the Heniochi, tribes of the Black Sea
‘that have gone savage’, they are said to ‘delight in human flesh’ {Pol.
1338 b 19 and NE 1148 b iqff.). Cruelty and ferocity, the marks of un¬
restraint, were from the beginning the distinguishing features of a
‘barbarous’ nature. A man, after all, only becomes a real man (instead
of a beast) by actualising what is potential within him, by learning
through reason to control his animal nature. The process of becoming
is a slow and uncertain one; and some men, the barbaroi among them,
may ultimately fail to complete it. When this happens they will remain
as children, devoid of a fully operational faculty of reason, ‘and
hardly different from an animal’ {Hist. an. 688 b 1). This, it seems,
is what became of the Thracians, who can only count in fours because,
like infants, they cannot remember very far {Prob. 910 b 24-911
a 3).12
The teleological view of nature, to which all Greeks (and sub¬
sequently all Christians) subscribed, allowed for the existence of a scale
of humanity going from the bestial at one end to the god-like at the
other. On this scale the Greek, who alone had access to virtue, was the
norm.13 Though incapable perhaps, like all mortals, of becoming a true
god {Pol. 1332 b 15f.), he was similarly unable to degenerate into a
beast. The barbaros, on the other hand, lived somewhere at the lower
end of the scale. Morphologically he was a man, but one who had no
share in the life of happiness {eudaimonia) which is the highest end
{telos) of all men {NE, 1095 a 17-22) and no knowledge of virtue
{Pol. 1260 a 3iff.; cf. NE, 1142 b 34ff.).14
Greeks and barbarians may, therefore, be distinguished from one
another by their behaviour. The reason why the Greek is civil and the
non-Greek barbarous may, as we shall see, be explained in psychological
terms. The difference first came about, however, as the result of an
historical event - the creation of the city or polis {Pol. 1252 a 25ff.) -
the full-dress political and moral community in which all civil beings
- all true men - must live, if they are to be men at all.15 In the eyes of
the Greeks, they themselves were the first, and the only true, city-
dwellers. All the other races of men remained literally ‘outside’, where
they lived in loose-knit hordes like the earliest survivors of Deucalion’s
flood, without laws or any knowledge of arts and crafts, and con¬
sequently alien to any form of virtue, for virtue can only be practised
within the polis {Pol. 1253 a I5ff.).10
When, later, the barbaroi did succeed in forming themselves into
some kind of political group, they must have done so ‘barbarously’, for

18
 THE IMAGE OF THE BARBARIAN

they have no natural rulers and live only in tyrannies, which are un¬
endurable to all rational men who are, by nature, free.”
The definition of the word ‘barbarian’ in terms that were primarily
cultural rather than racial made its translation to the largely non-Greek
speaking Christian world a relatively easy business. In the first place the
criteria by which the barbarians were to be judged differed very little
between the two cultures if only because the criteria for behaviour in
the Christian world were largely derived from Greek models. The
account of the prehistory of the human race (upon which much of the
explanation of the structure of human society depended) to be found in
book 3 of Plato’s Laws was transmitted with only minor variations and
some additions via Roman intermediaries, most notably Cicero, to
Lactantius, Augustine and Isidore of Seville.18 The Christian congre-
gatio fidelium, the brotherhood of all men in Christ, was as convinced
of its uniqueness and as concerned to avoid contamination through
contact with the outside world as the oikumene had been.19 Once again,
those on the inside thought of themselves as almost another species from
those on the outside.
The one significant difference - save for the obvious fact that the
distinction between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ in the Christian world was
one primarily of belief rather than kin - between the oikumene and the
congregatio fidelium was that whereas the oikumene had been an
entirely closed world, Christendom was not. The Christian myth of a
single progenitor of all mankind, and the Christian belief in the per¬
fection of God’s design for the natural world, made a belief in the unity
of the genus homo sapiens as essential for anthropology and theology as
it had been for Greek biology. The myth of the second coming, which
played so large a role in the ideology of the Franciscan missionaries to
America and later to China, was an obvious concomitant of this belief;
for only when the spiritual and cultural world of man had, through
conversion to Christianity, reached the same degree of perfection and
unification as the biological world, would man finally be able to achieve
his telos and earn release from his earthly labours.
It was, therefore, crucial that non-Christians should be granted access
to the Christian community: and, indeed, cajoled or forced into enter¬
ing it. Conversion to the Christian faith, however, meant far more than
the acceptance of the truth of the Gospels. It demanded not only belief
but also ‘a radical change of life’.20 For, in the words of Saint John,
‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’ (3,3).
Baptism was literally a rite de passage, a means by which the convert

19
 THE FALL OF NATURAL MAN

was admitted to the only state where he might be able to fulfil his true
humanity. Through baptism the neophyte entered, as Walter Ullmann
has written, ‘a “new life” which in ordinary language meant that he
became subject to new norms of living, to a new style of life, to a new
outlook and aim’.21
Christians were thus men set apart from all the category distinctions
which had been employed in the pagan world. Eusebius of Caesarea
felt called upon to persuade his readers that he and his kind were ‘new
men’ for, he explained, ‘we do hot think like Greeks, nor live like the
barbarians’.22 It is, therefore, little wonder that by the time Gregory the
Great came to use the word barbarus in the sixth century it had become
synonymous with the term paganus23 a pagan, an unbeliever, a sense
which it retained in the language of the curia until at least the late
fifteenth century.24
But, again, the barbari were not merely men who did not, or would
not, believe in Christ. They were men who, because of this, did not
always act in accordance with true reason; for, as we shall see, although
a non-Christian may possess the light of natural reason, a light that will
allow him to ‘see’ his way without the aid of revelation, he will, unlike
the Christian, easily be persuaded into sin by the conditions of the social
environment in which he lives.
For the Christian, no less than for the Greek, the barbarian was a
specific cultural type who could be characterised in terms of a number of
antitheses to the supposed features of the civil community. Whereas the
Christians lived in harmony and concord with each other - or at least
in situations of carefully regulated violence - and ruled their lives
according to an established code of law, the barbari spent all their days
in ceaseless aggression and neither recognised nor observed any laws or
rules of conduct whatsoever.
The true civil community was made possible through the persuasive
power of language.28 It was eloquence, not violence, that first coerced
men to band together for their own protection, and it is the law that
ensures that the community is able to survive. Barbarians have no access
either to language or to laws. For Albertus Magnus (c. 1206-80), they
were
✓

those who do not observe laws and participation in the community

ordained according to the principles of justice.. .For although the name
barbarus is onomatopoeic, as Strabo says.. .nevertheless the man who does
not observe the laws concerning the ordering of social participation is most
certainly a barbarus since by this trait [such barbarians] incur many

20
 THE IMAGE OF THE BARBARIAN

vices, confusing the interrelations (communicationes)2fl within society and

destroying the principles of justice which operate in these interrelations.27

And, elsewhere, discussing the bestial/heroic opposition in book 7 of

the Ethics, he went on to observe that

Bestial men, however, are rare, since it is a rare man who has no spark of
humanity. It does, however, occur, and usually from two causes: physical
handicap and deprivation, or from disease causing deprivation. For we call
those who are not induced to be virtuous either by laws, by civility or by
the regime of any kind of discipline ‘barbarous’. Cicero, in the beginning
of the De inventione, calls them ‘wild men leading the life of animals with
the wild beasts’.. .Or, in the same way, bestial men eat raw flesh and
drink blood, and are delighted to drink and eat from human skulls.28

All the principal characteristics by which Albertus and his successors

thought it possible to define the barbarian appear in these passages.
For to all benefactors of the Greek notion of politeia it was man’s
relationship to man which alone guaranteed his humanity. For all true
men must ‘connect’ with their fellows because men are, by their very
nature, ‘connecting’ animals (zdon koinonikon), just as they are city¬
building, social animals [zdon politikon). Man’s relationship with his
fellow creatures is strictly hierarchical, but it also involves at all levels a
measure of the friendship that must inevitably spring from the fact that
men, unlike all other animals, do possess the ability to communicate
and that as members of a larger group they must all share a common
purpose.20
The barbarian, on the other hand, was thought to live in a world
where this all-important communicatio was ineffective, where men
failed to recognise the force of the bonds which held them to the
community, where the language of social exchange itself was devoid of
meaning. In most respects the barbarian was another animal altogether.
He was one of the sylvestres homines, the wild men of the literary
imagination,30 those creatures who were thought to live in the woods
and the mountains far removed from the activities of rational men,
which always took place on the open spaces and on the plains.
The cities where rational men lived were seen as outposts of order
and reason in a world that was felt to be volatile and potentially hostile.
Wild men were creatures who lurked in woodlands and mountain
passes ready to seize upon the unwary traveller; and they were an ever¬
present threat to the civilisation of those who lived in the cities. These
wild men and their companions - the pygmies and pilosi, the fauns and
the satyrs - belonged to a clearly defined group, the similitudines

21
 THE FALL OF NATURAL MAN

hominis, a class of half-man/half-beast creatures.*1 As we shall see, the

existence of a category of animal which possessed some, but not all, of
the attributes of man created formidable problems. But it was not, even
before the discovery of real ‘primitives’, unthinkable. For Christians, no
less than for Greeks, the hierarchy of nature, the Great Chain of Being,
was so constructed that the highest member of one species always
approaches in form to the lowest of the next. Thus the higher primates
were thought to have much in common with man; and man himself
who, in Aquinas’s words, is the ‘horizon and boundary line of things
corporeal and incorporeal’,*2 has a body in common with the lower
animals; but in his soul, he ‘attains to the lowest member of the classes
above bodies... which are at the bottom of the series of intellectual
beings’.**
There might, therefore, be, in the interstices of these inter-locking
categories - in what Aquinas called the ‘connexio rerum’, ‘the wonder¬
ful linkage of beings’34 - a place for a ‘man’ who is so close to the
border with the beast, that he is no longer fully recognisable by other
men as a member of the same species. Such ‘men’ would have basically
animal minds capable of performing a limited number of human
functions but be devoid of true reason, like the faun which was thought
to have visited Saint Anthony the Hermit in the desert and to have asked
him to pray for it.*8 Such creatures had for long been a part of the
popular culture of most European peoples, and at times they even
penetrated the scientific literature of the elite. The sixteenth-century
physician, Paracelsus, created a world peopled with a huge variety of
such beings; but even Albertus Magnus, who possessed a far greater
sense of zoological probability than Paracelsus, cautiously suggested that
both the wild men and the pygmies - in fact two species of anthropoid
ape - not only resembled men in their outward appearance, but also
had a share in man’s ratio. ‘These outward similarities’, he wrote, ‘also
indicate an inner similarity, since these two animals command a degree
of insight which is closer to reason than that possessed by other beasts.’*8
Some later writers, most notably Paracelsus, another doctor, Andrea
Cesalpino,*7 and the French Huguenot Isaac de la Peyrere38 held that
such humanoids as nymphs, satyrs, pygmies and wild men (a category
which included the Amerindians) might be soulless men descended
from another ‘Adam’ or created spontaneously from the earth. In
Aristotle’s classification of animals on which (or on some remote version
of which) all these men relied, all creatures which were biologically
perfect reproduced themselves. Those, however, which were classified

22
 THE IMAGE OF THE BARBARIAN

as ‘imperfect’ - insects and some reptiles - were generated spontane¬

ously from the earth or were the product of some fusion of rotting
matter (De gen. an. 762 a ioff.; Meter. 381 b 10). By suggesting that
the Indians had originally been created in this manner Cesalpino,
Paracelsus, Girolamo Cardano and even Giordano Bruno were, in
effect, classifying them along with the insects. The belief in spontaneous
generation (together with the second Adam theory) was generally held
to be blasphemous and heretical as a dire threat to the unity and
integrity of the human race. ‘Nothing’, wrote the Spanish Jesuit
Martin del Rio of Paracelsus, ‘that this man has written is so false, so
blasphemous, so alien to right reason.’ For if men can be made out of
the sod, then ‘is not our own health in doubt and our own redemp¬
tion?’89 But despite fierce opposition, these theories enjoyed considerable
popularity in the late seventeenth century as effective, if rather crude,
explanations for the variety of human types.
The ‘barbarians’ whom Albertus classed with the wild men, clearly
belong in the same general category of not-quite-men as these other
similitudines hominis. And it was evidently with this idea in mind that
observers such as the bishop of Santa Marta (Colombia) described the
Indians as ‘not men with rational souls but wild men of the woods, for
which reason they could retain no Christian doctrine, nor virtue nor
any kind of learning’.40
Albertus’s work marks, of course, the reintroduction into Christian
thought of Aristotelian anthropological categories. The term barbarus
which, since the sixth century, had been used rather loosely to describe
anyone ‘out there’ was now brought under closer scrutiny in the fight
of its use by Aristotle to classify a certain type of man. When Aquinas,
to whom Albertus transmitted both his biology and his anthropology,
came to make his own synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought,
he was able to invest the word with a richer texture of meaning than it
had enjoyed since the fourth century b.c. Aquinas not only probed
deeper into the relationship between language and civility, he was also
able to distinguish between a primary and secondary use of the word
and to ask himself the question to which most commentators had
hitherto paid little attention, namely under what condition does one
race of men develop into ‘civil’ beings, while another remains, or
becomes, ‘barbarian’.
I shall examine Aquinas’s treatment of the term barbarus in greater
detail when I come to discuss the work of Las Casas, whose account of
the Indian world owes so much to Aquinas’s commentary on the

23
 THE FALL OF NATURAL MAN

Politics. For the moment, however, we may assume that from the end
of the twelfth century until the beginning of the sixteenth, the term
barbarus, or whatever vernacular form it might take, had come to
acquire two closely related meanings. As a term of classification it
applied broadly to all non-Christian peoples, and more loosely might
be used to describe any race, whatever its religious beliefs, which
behaved in savage or ‘uncivil’ ways. In both cases the word implied
that any creature so described was somehow an imperfect human being.
Although the use of the term by Christians to describe other Christians
is rare, it is not unknown. The Normans were often referred to as
barbarians, and Las Casas described the Spanish colonists in America
as ‘barbari’ because of their treatment of the Indians. By the fifteenth
century, too, it had become common for Italians to refer to their
Spanish and German invaders as ‘barbarians’.41 But most of these uses
were either, as in the Italian case, deliberate learned archaisms serving
a specific socio-political function, or were intended merely as abuse.
By and large, for any serious purpose, ‘barbarian’ was a word reserved
for those who neither subscribed to European religious views, nor lived
their lives according to European social norms.

2
Although some of the earliest observers of the American world, like
Oviedo, had an interest in botany and were thus deeply involved with
the business of identification and classification, most of them made very
little attempt to classify the Indians themselves. The Indians were
certainly ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’; but these words were used loosely
to imply only that they were neither Christians nor culturally very
sophisticated. Those who took a more optimistic view of Indian life
might be tempted, as the Milanese humanist Peter Martyr was, to
speak of the Arawak in terms of the ‘Golden Age.. .of their customs’.42
But such portmanteau phrases could be used to accommodate a wide
variety of conflicting behaviour. Martyr, for instance, seems to have
been able to accept the idolatry of the Arawak, the fact that some of the
Island Carib were said to be cannibals, that they fought wars with one
another and that, although they wore no clothes, they wished to be
instructed in the arts of medicine for all the world as if they were
Egyptians or Persians,43 and still refer, without fear of straining his
readers’ credulity, to their living in a ‘Golden Age’.44
Oviedo, more concerned with recording what he saw and with
making some kind of sense of it than with tantalising his readers with

24
 THE IMAGE OF THE BARBARIAN

titbits of exotic information, chose to compare the Indians with a real

rather than an imaginary race of people. The Indians, he thought, most
clearly resembled the ‘Ethiopians’45 — the barbarian inhabitants of a
vague geographical area that spread from the Atlas mountains to the
Ganges - and Aristotle’s favourite barbarians, the Thracians.46 This
method made possible the identification of certain types of behaviour
- for instance, polygyny, polyandry and matrilineal descent.47 It also
placed the Indians quite firmly in the barbarian camp, although
Oviedo himself offered no definition of the word. Categorising of this
type was, of course, fairly common. Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola,
to mention but one well-known case, had classed the Amerindians
together with the ‘Ethiopians’ and those legendary enemies of the
Christian Church, the Scythians. He did this in order to make a
point about the variety of human types; but his choice of races is
no accident and the effect is to ‘read off’, so to speak, the unknown
factors about Indian behaviour from the known ones about Scythians
and ‘Ethiopians’.48 Oviedo uses the same method when he claims that,
since both the Thracians and the Arawak practised polygyny, we
should expect the Arawak to sacrifice all foreign visitors (it is very un¬
likely that they did; but the ill-treatment of visitors, which violated the
laws of hospitality, was, in any case, held to be a characteristic of all
barbarous peoples) because, according to Eusebius, the Thracians did
this also.49
Such simple one-to-one identifications as these do not, however, take
the reader very far; nor do they explain very much about the motives
or the sources of Indian behaviour. But then, of course, they were not
intended to do this. Whether they attempted to locate the Indian in
some vague period of human prehistory, or to demonstrate by analogy
that he belonged to the same genre as the familiar barbarians of the
ancient world, these chroniclers were trying only to solve the immediate
problem of what to look for in a world of bewildering and unrecog¬
nisable shapes.
The observer did riot, after all, require much more unless he was also
troubled by a philosophical cast of mind, which neither Martyr nor
Oviedo really was. But very soon other men, men who were troubled by
philosophical problems, were drawn into the business of classifying
Indians. These men were all either university professors, or university-
trained churchmen. Most of them were professional theologians and
they took all knowledge for their province because, as one of the greatest
of them, Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1492-1546), once observed, ‘the

25
 THE FALL OF NATURAL MAN

office of the theologian is so wide that no argument, no dispute, nor any

subject (locus) is alien to its profession’.50 They, of course, were looking
for answers to a rather different set of questions from those which seem
to have troubled Oviedo. Questions such as, why did the Indians behave
in such unstructured ways, instead of in the ways which nature should
have taught them, as she has taught all other men? Why did Indian
society not develop like European society? And, most crucial of all, how
could the existence and the behaviour of the Indians be explained in
terms of the system, part-sociological, part-psychological, which was
known to control the behaviour of all the other peoples of the world?
It is clear that answers to such questions could be found in history.
Broadly speaking, barbarians were thought of as men who had failed to
progress. Their societies were primitive ones, their behaviour strikingly
reminiscent of the descriptions of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero of the
behaviour of the earliest men. Indians might, therefore, be described
merely as ‘backward’. But this explanation, though it had the merit of
being both simple and obvious and, as we shall see, ultimately successful,
begged a further question. Namely, why were they backward? Since all
men were descended from one of the sons of Noah, and all were
equipped with the same basic mental machinery, why had they not all
learned to follow the same basic rules of behaviour, why had they not all,
in the terms of the ancient metaphor, learned to read the same things
in the ‘book of the Creature’, in the book of nature?51 In the sixteenth
century, fully persuasive answers to such questions were to be found,
not in history but in faculty psychology. It was evident to all who
encountered him that it was the Indian’s mind, what the colonists
referred to as his ingenio or capacidad - words of whose appropriate¬
ness they were aware, but of whose full significance they were almost
certainly ignorant - that was ultimately at fault.
The very first ‘model’ used to explain the causes of Indian behaviour
was consequently one based on psychology. This was Aristotle’s theory
of natural slavery.

26