GREEK AND ROMAN CONCEPTS OF RACE
During the nineteenth century a peculiar rigidity was given to the
conception of race through the application of somewhat hastily formed
biological theories. One or another of the current hypotheses on
heredity was deemed an adequate or even necessary explanation, and by
any of them racial characteristics became determined, fixed: race was an
unescapable limiting condition. The Ethiopian could not change his skin.
These ideas, when popularized, corresponded crudely to certain other
ideas already present in men’s minds—ideas that often had a very
different basis. Their lowest manifestation is that form of vicarious
braggadocio which is known as jingoism, racial or national, and is
expressed in the depreciation of everything that concerns other “races.”
Many historians have been influenced by this modern and unyielding
concept of race, and have permitted themselves to make rather large
promises about the destinies of existing groups of men on the basis of
it.[45] But as late as a hundred years ago it was not yet in existence.
The term race then denoted a sum of national and social traits which it
might be difficult to acquire in one generation, but which could readily
be gained in two. Even such disparate ethnic groups as Austrian and
Magyar knew of no impassable chasm that good-will on either side could
not bridge.
It is the latter racial feeling and not the modern one that classical
antiquity knew. Consequently, in the clash of races that took place
during the period with which this book deals, “race” must be understood
as the centuries before the nineteenth understood it. Racial prejudices,
pride of blood, contempt for “slave-nations,” existed and found voice,
but the terms are not coextensive with those of to-day.
It is well-known that a primary Greek distinction was that between
Hellene and barbarian, and it is equally familiar that the distinction
had not been fully formed in the time of Homer. There is no indication
that the Trojans were felt to be fundamentally different from the
Acheans, although it is likely enough that the allies who attacked the
great city of the Troad were of different descent from those that
defended it. The one instance found in Homer of the word
βάρβαρος is in the compound βαρβαρόφωνος, “of
barbarous speech” (Iliad ii. 867), which makes the original meaning of
the word apparent. A Greek was one whose speech was intelligible. All
others were barbarians, “jabberers.” And it is not only incidentally
that Homer fails to make the racial division clear. When he of set
purpose contrasts the two armies, as in Iliad iv. 422-437, it is the
contrast between the silent discipline of the Greeks and the loose,
noisy marshaling of the Trojans: “For all were not of one speech or of a
single language. Mixed were their tongues, since the men came from
far-off lands.”
It is probably in the course of just such expeditions as the Iliad tells
of, a joint movement against a common foe, that a sense of national
unity arose, and it is likely that it came to include many tribes of
different race. We do not know what real basis there is for the
traditional divisions of Ionians, Dorians, and Aeolians. These divisions
have not proved very valuable means of classification to modern students
of Greek dialects. The generic name of Greek to the East was Yavan,
obviously the same as Ionian,[46] and that name indicates where the
first contact took place. The struggles of Greeks to establish
themselves on the coast of Asia Minor probably created the three
traditional groups, by forcing them to combine against threatened
destruction. But there is nothing to show that any real feeling of
common origin and common responsibility existed even here.
On the continent, again, there were large groups of men whom the Greeks
found difficulty in classifying. There were some Epirotes and
Macedonians whose claim to be Greeks was admitted. On the whole,
however, Epirotes and Macedonians were classed as barbarians, though a
different sort of barbarians from Scythian and Phrygian. The first
realization of national unity came with the first great national danger,
the catastrophe that impended from the Persians.
Even then actual invasion did not succeed in combining the Greeks even
temporarily. That was due to the inherent difficulty in interesting
Thessalians or Boeotians in the quarrels of Ionians.[47] In spite of
them, the danger was at that time averted, but it did not therefore
become less real. The consciousness of this ever-present danger and the
bitter experiences of subjection created groups that coalesced more
solidly than ever before about certain leaders, Athenians or Spartans.
In the fifth and fourth centuries, the concept of a Greek race received
a real outline, and the feeling of a common race pride became highly
developed.
This race pride showed itself principally in an over-weening confidence
in the superiority of Greek arms. It is a false notion that represents
the Greek as careless or contemptuously indifferent of the races about
him. Never were men more eager for curious tales of out-of-the-way
peoples. Their earliest historians won their chief success in this way.
But Greeks had beaten back the conquerors of the world, and had
maintained themselves aggressively as well. It was very natural that
something of this attitude was apparent in dealing with barbarians even
on terms of comity. The Greeks had at least colorable ground for
believing that in military matters they were masters wherever they
chose.
One phrase of which some Greek writers were fond need not be taken too
seriously. Barbarians, we are told, are by nature slaves.[48] It would
be an error to attach much importance to the statement. Greeks did not
really believe that Darius or Datames or Hamilcar was servile in
character or in disposition. The expression was merely the facile
chauvinism that military prestige readily stirs up in any nation. So at
certain times some Englishmen were ready to call the French cowards, or
Frenchmen to call Prussians so. Among the Greeks the principal basis for
the statement was the fact that the activity of Greek merchants and
pirates filled every city with slaves of all foreign nations. Indeed the
phrase is no more than a generalized assertion of that state of things.
We shall have to qualify similarly the statement now and then
encountered of a natural and permanent hostility between Greeks and
barbarians. It is a commonplace of Athenian orators, but it practically
always concerns the real hereditary enemy of Greeks, and particularly of
Athens—the Persians. It is in calling the Greeks against their ancient
foe that Isocrates uses the phrase,[49] and in Demosthenes[50] it is
especially based upon the hostilities so long maintained between Athens
and Persia and the ancient grudge Athenians bore for the sack of their
city in 480 B.C.E.
The first achievement of united Hellas was the invasion of Persia,
although it was under Macedonian leadership that this was done, but
soldiers of Alexander appeared as Greeks to the East, and Alexander is
מלך יון, _melek Yavan_, “king of Greece,” in the Book of
Daniel.[51]
Just at this culminating point in the development of Greek nationality,
the process of blurring began. Greek and non-Greek were no sooner
sharply contrasted than by the conscious assimilation policy of
Alexander’s successors the lines tended to obliterate themselves. At
first Greek culture was dominant, but beneath it Syrian, Egyptian, and
Cappadocian obstinately survived, and ultimately, under Christian and
Mohammedan influences, regained their place. It is with one phase of
this specific problem—the threatened submergence of an Asiatic people by
Greek culture—that we are particularly concerned.
The attitude of Romans toward other nations was, as might be expected,
even more arrogantly that of masters and conquerors. But where we find
among Greeks a certain theoretical importance attached to purity of
Hellenic descent[52] (which, by the by, was largely ignored in
practice), the Romans scarcely understood what the term meant. A system
in which emancipated slaves were citizens, who in the second generation
were eligible to high civic honors,[53] and not infrequently attained
them—such a system did not tend to encourage claims to purity of blood.
That does not mean that foreign origin, real or suspected, could not at
any time become a handle for abuse. Cicero fastens on the Celtic strain
in Piso’s lineage with savage delight, just as Demosthenes’ enemies
rarely forgot to remind him of his Scythian grandfather.[54] But these
are not matters of real significance. The significant fact was that they
who were Liby-Phoenicians in one generation were descendants of Romulus
in the next.[55]
_Sumus Romani qui fuimus ante Rudini_, “We are Romans, we who formerly
were Rudinians,” says Ennius,[56] and the metamorphosis was as complete
and as easy if, instead of Italians, they were wholly barbarous elements
that were absorbed. In religious matters the Romans more than the Greeks
felt the efficacy of form. So in political matters the formula of
emancipation and the decree of citizenship were deemed operative of a
real change in the persons affected.
The Roman nobility, it is true, often made pretensions to a purity of
descent that felt every foreign admixture as a stain.[57] But such
claims were absurdly groundless, and cannot really have deceived even
those who maintained them. The great majority of Romans had no quarrel
with any who desired and tried to be Roman. Even Juvenal’s venom is
vented only on the avowed foreigners, who as Greeks, Egyptians, and
Syrians lolled at their ease, while the ragged Cethegi and Cornucanii
munched, standing, the bread of affliction and charity. The leveling
tendencies of the autocracy removed a great many of the reasons of this
friction, and in part succeeded in giving even the Greek-speaking East
and the Latin-speaking West a common culture to maintain. But by that
time new movements of population made such race-concepts as were based
on blood-kinship too plainly out of accord with the facts to be
seriously asserted. At the close of the period we are discussing, every
man was either a Roman citizen, with a pressingly heavy share of the
burden of maintaining the Roman system, or he was not. Who his ancestors
were was wholly forgotten. It had even ceased to be of moment whether he
spoke Greek or Latin or Syriac, Punic, or even Gallic,[58] which had
never completely died out in their ancient homes.
At no time did a feeling of racial kinship make a strong sentimental
appeal. That the whole human race was an extended family was taken as
axiomatic. Striking physical differences did not prevent similarity of
names from proving kinship between Egyptian and Greek and Persian and
Ethiopian. All through Greek history factions in Greek cities called
upon outsiders against their countrymen. The Phoenicians of Utica
preferred the foreign Romans to their Carthaginian kinsmen. Similarly
the Campanians of Capua chose to fraternize with the Libyans and
Phoenicians of Hannibal’s army rather than the closely related
Latins.[59] In these circumstances nothing will lend itself more easily
to distorting our view of the times than the importation into them of
the modern view of race—of that view, at least, in which the historians
of the nineteenth century found so easy and adequate an explanation of
everything they desired to debase or extol.
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