Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Textbook Barbarians in The Greek and Roman World Erik Jensen Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Barbarians in The Greek and Roman World Erik Jensen Ebook All Chapter PDF
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-city-in-the-greek-and-roman-
world-1st-edition-e-j-owens/
https://textbookfull.com/product/greek-and-roman-technology-a-
sourcebook-of-translated-greek-and-roman-texts-andrew-n-sherwood/
https://textbookfull.com/product/trade-commerce-and-the-state-in-
the-roman-world-andrew-wilson/
https://textbookfull.com/product/capital-investment-and-
innovation-in-the-roman-world-oxford-studies-on-the-roman-
economy-1st-edition-paul-erdkamp/
Families in the Roman and Late Antique World 1st
Edition Mary Harlow
https://textbookfull.com/product/families-in-the-roman-and-late-
antique-world-1st-edition-mary-harlow/
https://textbookfull.com/product/urban-craftsmen-and-traders-in-
the-roman-world-1st-edition-miko-flohr/
https://textbookfull.com/product/empire-and-ideology-in-the-
graeco-roman-world-selected-papers-benjamin-isaac/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-renewable-energy-transition-
realities-for-canada-and-the-world-john-erik-meyer/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-stolen-sisters-
psychological-thriller-1st-edition-louise-jensen-jensen/
BARBARIANS
in the
Greek and Roman World
BARBARIANS
in the
Greek and Roman World
By
Erik Jensen
21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
www.hackettpublishing.com
The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this
title.
Introduction
Maps
1. Meeting the Barbarians
2. How the Greeks Became Greek
3. The Greeks Encounter the World
4. The Greco-Persian Wars
5. Greeks, Macedonians, and Persians
6. The Hellenistic Era
7. Rome and Italy
8. An Empire of Barbarians
9. Greek, Roman, and Greco-Roman
10. Being Roman
11. The Imperial Frontier
12. Invasions, Migrations, Transformations
13. Remembering the Barbarians
Select Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
Many people have helped to shape this project and bring this book into being.
I am grateful to Rick Todhunter, Liz Wilson, and the rest of the team at
Hackett for their tireless work, endless kindness, and invaluable support. Al
Andrea and Stanley Burstein pushed me to think more carefully and write
more clearly, for which they have earned my profound gratitude. I thank my
colleagues in the History Department at Salem State University for setting
such a high standard for me to live up to (especially my confidante and
coconspirator Margo Shea, who helped preserve my sanity through the most
difficult parts of the process), and my students for always making me ask new
questions. I am also deeply grateful to my former professors David Castriota
and Natalie Kampen, for guiding me to think more deeply about cultural
interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. This book is the culmination of the
passion for ancient history and art history that they inspired in me many years
ago.
The final and highest thanks go to my wife, Eppu Jensen, not only for her
patience and support in this project but also for her detailed and critical
reading of my first drafts, without which the best parts of this book would
never have been crafted.
{vii} INTRODUCTION
The civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome did not flourish in isolation. They
were part of commercial, cultural, and political systems that spanned Eurasia
and Africa. Greeks and Romans lived, traded, exchanged ideas, and sometimes
fought with peoples of many other cultures. To describe these peoples the
Greeks invented the word barbaros, which the Romans adopted as barbarus.
Sometimes these words carried a pejorative sting, but in other cases they were
simply acknowledgments of cultural difference. Similarly, the interactions
among Greeks, Romans, and other peoples were sometimes fraught with
conflict but at other times peaceful and productive.
Histories of these interactions written before the late twentieth century tended
to focus on wars and politics, with little attention to the complexities of identity
in a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multilingual world. Important work has
been done in the field in recent generations, but much of contemporary
scholarship has been focused on particular areas and topics whose connections
to one another are not obvious at first glance. For those coming to the question
without many years of study behind them, the subject can be an impenetrable
one. This book looks at both the realities of the multicultural ancient world and
the ways in which the Greeks and Romans attempted to understand it.
{viii} An artist’s vision of the burial of the “ivory bangle lady,” reflecting the ethnic diversity of
late Roman York.
{viii} One example may stand for many others. A wealthy lady was buried in
York in northern England in the fourth century CE with an assortment of
bangles, some of white ivory from Africa, others of black jet, a gemstone mined
in Britain. Examination of the remains using the techniques of forensic
anthropology shows that she was of sub-Saharan African ancestry and had spent
her childhood in a warmer climate, perhaps somewhere in coastal Western
Europe.1 While the “ivory bangle lady” left us no record of her own thoughts
about her identity, she was clearly a person of wealth and status, and her choice
of jewelry suggests a consciousness of being both African and British.
She was not alone. Individuals from Gaul, Italy, and Egypt are mentioned in
Roman-period inscriptions around York. Local potters made cooking vessels
characteristic of North African cuisine. The emperor Constantine began his rise
to power in the city in 306 when he was first declared emperor by one of his
companions, a Germanic king. Examination of burials in the city suggests that
the population of York in the fourth century may have been more ethnically
diverse than it is today.2 The northernmost city of any size in the Roman
empire, York was far from the cosmopolitan urban centers of the {ix}
Mediterranean. But even in York, people of many different backgrounds lived
and worked together.
Greek and Roman writers were aware of the cultural diversity of the world
they lived in, and they had varying reactions to it. Some were contemptuous of
other peoples. Others were aware of cultural differences and, though they
preferred their own ways, did not look down on the ways of others. Some
admired foreign customs. Many invented links between themselves and other
peoples or sought to blur the lines that separated one people from another.
Some saw in foreign peoples the opposite of their own identities, while others
saw people much like themselves. No single narrative dominated how the
people of the ancient world thought about their cultural differences.
We know this broad variety of attitudes from sources that themselves represent
only a narrow slice of Greek and Roman life. The authors of antiquity were
mostly (though not exclusively) male, wealthy, and urban. They typically came
from among the majority ethnic groups in their places of origin. This already
narrow selection of literature was further winnowed as works were passed down
and interpreted through history. Many works were lost, some already in
antiquity. Those that survived tended to be congenial to contemporary political
and social concerns. Later generations of Europeans and their colonial
descendants, who came to look back on Greco-Roman anti-quity as a source of
philosophical authority, mined the surviving sources for ideas that suited their
own needs. Passages that supported the social, political, and economic interests
of a contemporary elite were elevated as representing the true and timeless
opinions of ancient authorities, whereas those that did not were reinterpreted or
ignored.
In the early twenty-first century we still carry the historical baggage of the
European assimilation of ancient art and literature. Our world has been shaped
in part by Greek and Roman beliefs about relations between people of different
cultures and by the selective interpretation of those beliefs over the past five
centuries. In an increasingly multicultural modern society, we must be
conscious of our history. Reexamining Greek and Roman attitudes toward
barbarians helps us understand not only how classical ideas continue to inform
the modern world but also how much broader and more complex those ideas
were than has traditionally been recognized.
Given such a task, it may seem counterproductive to go on using the word
“barbarian.” I retain the word for three reasons. First, it is the word that the
classical sources themselves use. As we attempt to understand what ancient
authors meant by calling other peoples “barbarians,” it does us no good to avoid
the words they used. Second, the word itself is not static in meaning and does
not always carry the same pejorative connotations we give it in {x} modern
usage. We must be wary of carrying our own cultural baggage into the past.
Finally, it reminds us that we are talking about cultures in relation to one
another and not in isolation. “Barbarian” is inherently a relational term. We are
only barbarians in the eyes of others.
Categories such as “barbarian,” which only have meaning within a particular
cultural context, are known as social constructs. They are created by the
collective beliefs and attitudes of a society. Social constructs are, in a sense,
imaginary, in that they are not defined by tangible reality, but they cannot
simply be dismissed or ignored. Social pressures—and sometimes legal
authority—enforce these categories, often to the benefit of one group over
another.
The enormous diversity of cultures in the ancient Mediterranean was a
historical reality. The fact that we label many of these peoples “barbarians” is
only a product of the tendencies of Greek and Roman thought and the privilege
that the Western world has traditionally granted to Greek and Roman sources.
The aim of this book is to explore how this category was created and how it
related to the realities of ancient Mediterranean life.
1. S. Leach et al., “A Lady of York: Migration, Ethnicity and Identity in Roman Britain,”
Antiquity 84, no. 323 (March 2010): 131–45.
2. Epitome de Caesaribus 41; R. Warwick, “The Skeletal Remains,” in The Romano-British
Cemetery at Trentholme Drive, York, ed. Leslie P. Wenham (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery
Office, 1968), 113–76; Vivien G. Swan, “Legio VI and Its Men: African Legionaries in Britain,”
Roman Pottery Studies 5 (1992): 1–33; H. Cool, “An Overview of the Small Finds from
Catterick,” in Cataractonium: Roman Catterick and Its Hinterland, ed. P. Wilson (York: Council
for British Archaeology, 2002), 23–43; Patrick Ottaway, Roman York (Stroud: Tempus, 2004).
{xi}
{xii}
{xiii}
{xiv}
{1} CHAPTER 1
MEETING THE BARBARIANS
These layers of definition share the idea of lack. Barbarians are defined by
what they do not have: technology, education, social structure, settled homes,
morality, respect for human life. The things that we hold most vital to our
civilized way of life are things that barbarians do not, and perhaps cannot,
possess. A barbarian is more than just “not one of us.” A barbarian cannot even
comprehend the appeal of being one of us.
From a different point of view, however, barbarians can also be a positive
force. When a society doubts its own worth, barbarians offer an alternative,
even a path to salvation. Thinkers of the Enlightenment period imagined a
“noble savage” who lived a life of simple virtue free from the corruption of
“civilized” life.5 To a civilization in decline, barbarians appear not as a
destructive force but as the necessary flame that clears away dead wood. -
Barbarians can become part of the narrative of national rise and fall, wiping
away civilizations that have run their course to make room for new, more
vigorous ones to take their place.6 C. P. Cavafy imagined barbarians this way in
his 1904 {3} poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” describing an idle and
demoralized imperial city waiting for the arrival of barbarians who fail to
appear. The end of the poem suggests that the barbarians were “a solution of a
sort” to the state’s troubles.7
In popular culture, barbarians have become a symbol of the power of
unbridled will to solve problems that paralyze the civilized world. Literary
characters such as Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Roy Thomas and Barry
Windsor-Smith’s Red Sonja are marked not just by their muscle but also by
their willingness to take action. These barbarians represent both a power fantasy
and a protest against a modern society in which strength has given way to
mechanics, heroes to committees, and individual initiative to collective
impotence.8 These literary heroes have helped create an archetype that lives in
the “barbarian” characters of modern fantasy literature and the role-playing
genre of games inspired by that literature.9
While these modern conceptions of the barbarian descend ultimately from
Greek and Roman ideas, they also respond to the concerns of their own times.
So did Greek and Roman conceptions of the barbarian. The idea has never been
a static one. When classical sources, therefore, use the term barbaros or
barbarus, we must not assume that it meant the same things to the authors and
their audiences that “barbarian” has come to mean to us.
»No niin, minä sanon sen teille», sanoi Billy ylpeänä. »Se on
Tailholt
Mountain.»
»Vai niin!»
»Ette etsinytkään?»
»En.»
»Oli kyllä. Minulla oli suuri tehtävä. Katsokaas, sitä minä mietin
Metsärajalla koko yön: koetin löytää toisen keinon sen täyttämiseen.
Kertoisitteko minulle, mikä tehtävä se on?» kysyi Phil uteliaana.
»Muukalainen.»
Palanen menneisyyttä.
»Ei, ei se, mitä mies saa, tee häntä rikkaaksi, vaan se, minkä hän
kykenee säilyttämään. Ja ne ihmiset, jotka halveksivat
vanhanaikaista rakkautta, joka rakentaa koteja ja pystyttää perheitä
ja panee miehen ja naisen yhdessä tekemään työtä ja kestämään
hyvät ja pahat päivät ja onnellisina vanhenemaan yhdessä, jos he
uudenaikaisten aatteiden vuoksi hylkäävät kaiken tämän, he tekevät
huonon kaupan ainakin minun mielestäni. Voi tapahtua sellaistakin,
että mies tai nainen sivistyksensä takia menettää parhaan onnensa.
Jollei Rovasti olisi ollut niin vaipunut omiin ajatuksiinsa, olisi hän
hämmästynyt siitä vaikutuksesta, jonka hänen sanansa tekivät
nuoreen mieheen. Hänen kasvonsa lehahtivat tulipunaisiksi ja
kalpenivat sitten kuin äkillisestä pahoinvoinnista, ja hän heitti
Rovastiin häpeää ja tuskaa kuvastavan syrjäsilmäyksen. Honourable
Patches, joka oli herättänyt Risti-Kolmio-Kartanon miesten ihailun ja
kunnioituksen, oli jälleen alakuloinen, arka, piilotteleva pakolainen,
jonka Phil oli tavannut Metsärajalla.
»No niin», jatkoi Rovasti. »Hän tuli seudulle noin kolme vuotta
sitten — suoraan yliopistosta — ja hän on varmasti saanut paljon
aikaan. Hän on saanut koulutusta ja sivistystä, mutta hän pitää
paikkansa kenen miehen rinnalla hyvänsä. Ei ole sitä miestä koko
Yavapai Countyssa — olipa hän karjamies tai kaivostyöläinen tai
mikä hyvänsä — joka ei nostaisi hattuaan Stanford Manningille.»
»Ei, kuulin, että hänen yhtiönsä kutsui hänet pois täällä noin
kuukausi takaperin. He aikovat lähettää hänet kaivoksilleen
Montanaan, luulen.»
»Niin, ja kun tutustutte Kittyyn, niin sanotte kuten minäkin, että jos
Yavapai Countyssa on ainoakaan mies, joka ei ratsastaisi parasta
hevosiaan kuoliaaksi saadakseen häneltä hymyn, niin hänet pitäisi
hirttää.»
Juoksuaita.
»Se oli kierosti tehty, Will Baldwin», torui Stella, kuten aina
ajatellen poikiensa mukavuutta. »Tiedäthän poikaparan varmasti
eksyvän tuossa autiossa Tailholt Mountainin seudussa.»
Pojat nauroivat.
»Jos hän vain huomaa sen ja antaa Snipin pitää päänsä», sanoi
Curly.