Assome readers of this blog ( https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/) know, I am currently working on a book that has been about 10 years in the making — a discussion of race and ethnicity in Greco-Roman antiquity and some of its modern implications and complications (I talked about it with Elton Barker of Classics Confidential in Jan.). The book is yet untitled (I am trusting the people at Johns Hopkins University Press who get paid to come up with cool titles to help me out). One of the primary points of this blog is to give me a space to work through my research in a less formal setting as I try to figure out just what it is that I want to say and, of course, just what I think is happening in the past.
Who were called barbarians in antiquity?
In antiquity, the term “barbarians” originated in ancient Greece. The Greeks called all foreigners who did not know their language barbarians (the word “bar-bar”…