Romans \'were not colour prejudiced\', research shows

[Gaius Decius Aquilius]

Now aren't you glad you are one of those people who are reading this thread and not posting?

How many more post do you think will appear here before this gets out of control and the whole thing gets shut down? lets make bets.

R. Izard

[Caius Fabius]

not many, since we have rules about religious discussions......
Back to the topic please.

[Bran ap Maclou]

Religions are most of the time a pretext or just the tenth of the whole iceberg out of water.

Your discussion has a good timing, on a medieval forum, some friends speak about texts by Usamah (not the one you think about). He tells that when the franks occupy Jerusalem, the security in the mosk is insured by templars (fine experts of oriental habits, not the fanatics one could think). Some of them are Usamah's friends and he tells how they saved him from an racist aggresion by a recently landed frank settler. In the Same time, Joinville tells us that some franks converted to Islam and some others stay christians but they adopt the customs and the food of the muslims (gaining their respect as he said) They were not harmed during military operations, they are perfectly integrated. During the crusades some muslims allied to christians and some christians fought with the muslims. Never forget that, though all muslims, arabs, persians and turks were not particularly friends.

Sorry, this is out of purpose on this forum but when you study the crusades (and I recommend you Amin Maalouf's book for the arab point of view) things are not so clear, at least no more clear than today.
The difference with Rome is that Rome is universalist and before the triumph of exclusive christianism they integrated all sort of cults. It wasn't a matter, the only credo was Rome (romanity) is destined to rule the world.

Bye.

[Tiberius Clodius Corvinus]

If racism is alive and well in the 21st century, I am sure its safe to assume it was alive in ancient times.There is no way we can make a blanket statement that "The Romans" were not racist. We are trying to place our modern wishes on a another society.

I'm not sure the Romans had an serious concept of connecting race invariably with certain characteristics AFAIK. Would have contradicted their idea of making the world (and its people) Roman IMO. Doesn't mean they did not act in a manner we would perceive as racist, but they considered no people minor for biologic reasons. Individuals might certainly have thought otherwise.

[caiusbeerquitius]

There are things mixed up in here. Religious differeneces and releigious-based fights cannot be laeled as racism, since religion is brain-based, and "race" refers to the body. Racism is to mistreat someone because his physical appearance is regarded as inferior, having in mind that the own physical appearance is superior. This is a cognitive process. Just making fun of someone who looks / behaves differently is not yet racism. As such the Romans cannot have been racists, since they never had the idea of different "races" as such, which can be seen in ancient literature. Nothing really new, though.
Racism as such, and I keep this historical, is deeply connected to monotheism, and finds its roots in the middle ages, where the first progromes took place against the katharoi, the "witches", and the jews all over Europe. Similarly the wars against the muslim world rectified through religious differences layed a bedrock on which later on racisit theories could be buildt. As for the "real" racism: Stalin grew up in a christian orthodox school, and Hitler was much more catholic, than we are led to believe by the apologetic writings of some modern christian historians. It is very helpful to read the according literature before one starts to go along and post some thoughts which just come along
in such a thread.

Wikipedia contains a very well selected literature list about this topic, which is very similar to one which I had in one of my seminars.

I suggest people to read some of these books before taking part in this discussion. May sound arrogant, but the topic is too sensitive to have people just reiterate false facts, or simply state what just crosses their minds. As it is now the locking of this thread seems just a few postings away... This can work as a discussion here, as long as the forum rules are respected thoroughly. For such a topic, which is bound to slide along the edge, I suggest that from now on people account their statements in academic fashion. Literature that can be quoted is below.

[quote]Allen, Theodore. (1994). 'The Invention of the White Race: Volume 1 London, UK: Verso.
Allen, Theodore. (1997). The Invention of the White Race: Volume 2 London, UK: Verso.
Barkan, Elazar (1992), The Retreat of Scientific Racism : Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY.
Cazenave, Noel A. and Darlene Alvarez Maddern. 1999. “Defending the White Race:White Male Faculty Opposition to a White Racism Course.â€

[Marcus Julius]

I agree that the authors of that article and possibly even the "researchers" are indeed reading way too much into what they found. Anyone who knows just a tad about Roman history knows that the northern African coast was part of Rome. Like any other part of the empire people were transplanted from there to serve in other places of the empire.

These were, of course, people of different cultures. Whether Egyptian, Numidian, Carthaginian, Parthian, German, Gallic, they were all from different cultures. They were all "barbarians" that could become romanized. My question is where the contributors to the information in that article are deriving that African means black? While I, myself, agree that skin color probably wasn't a big thing to the Romans, what disturbs me is that it appears that those people writing this article are implying that "Africans" mean dark-skinned. To the best of my knowledge, Africa never has been a purely black continent, especially when you are focussing on the Mediterranean coastal region.

[Bran ap Maclou]

Yes, the question of the origin of people in north Africa is passionating but very sensitive.

A classical idea was that carthaginian and romans melted with numidian soudanese and generally speaking sub saharian black people. However the situation is more complex.

We have to consider that the populations from north africa have a certain number of "negroid" (ethnology term) and "european" characters.
The blood groups repartitions, the densely curly hair, the skylloïd scars and so on are rather "black" some particular genetic diseases also. However we know that some (rather caucasian) or mediterranean people also lived in Ethiopy, the ancient greeks seemed to have established some small settlements on the mauritanian coast (but this is still fiercely discussed). If you consider only the black and white melting skin colours you have 64 possible genetic combinations. So, IMO it's a bit impossible to "class" someone as black or white just considering the color of the skin and particularly around the mediterranean sea. Still today some Sicilians have a clearly caucasian face and skull but a very dark skin as an example, more dark than an average bushman.

Something else, the vandals settled in northern Africa but in less than 100 years their path disappears. So when you find in Kabylia (Algeria) or in the Rif region in Morocco some blue eyed locals who are berbere (=barbarian ?) you are tempted to say ok, they are obviously the offspring of the Vandals. However, they are also a small and long time isolationnist people struggling against the moors (though both muslims). So a genetician would tell you that a small number of breeders will help to express such recessive characters.

So, that's not so easy ! An old "black foot" (former french settler in Algeria) told me that the origin of the kabylians was the wreck of a ship full of swedish nuns in the middle-age. It sounds ridiculous but this wreck really existed ! More seriously, the mediterranean area has always been a zone of interbreeding. I come from south-eastern France. I worked in an hospital lab and if we have a lot of north-african people in this area, we have also a lot of people with no obvious connection to north Africa but who have some (rather) african physiologic characters even myself though I'm green eyed, almost redhead and with a freckled pale skin, some galician and Provencal origins and a germanic name.

So about romans, how could they manage an empire from Caledonia to Arabia ? The only "kind of" racist consideration that I found was a letter saying that the Batavians are the best warriors of all germanic tribes.

Bye

PS : The witch hunt is not really a middleAge affair, It's a renaissance matter.

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

This is very true, even some greeks can have very dark skin(especially in the summer) and there can be variations within the family too....
something that comes from thousands of years of mixing I would imagine....

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

I think their whole perception on the matter was greatly influenced by the fact that the Romans rose among so many other people close to them in their region. And before their domination(but also after) they adopted so many different things in their culture,from the Greeks,the Celts,the Italiotes etc,and it is logical that they did not consider themselves the "chosen" or the "only". The Greeks were indeed more chovinists,but even them,they believed in the superiority of their culture and not the race. In other words,anyone with greek education was considered at least not a barbarian. But again this is logical for the greeks who traded so much with the whole mediterranean,and were in close quarters with the strongest empires on the world. The Egyptians,the Persians and then the Romans. It is very important not to be the strongest in your area,and in fact the Greeks were only for a short period of time in the Hellenistic era. By then their perception was such that they did not even try to extinguish anything ungreek. And the same did the Romans. Wisely,of course,since we all know that extinguishing customs and cultures always ends to failure.
Khairete
Giannis

[M. Demetrius]

we all know that extinguishing customs and cultures always ends to failure

Well, that is directly proportional to the number of survivors amongst the conquered, isn't it? Few Carthagenian cultural customs survived in N. Africa after the 3rd Punic War...

[Q. Vipsanivs Praetextatvs]

I think their whole perception on the matter was greatly influenced by the fact that the Romans rose among so many other people close to them in their region. And before their domination(but also after) they adopted so many different things in their culture,from the Greeks,the Celts,the Italiotes etc,and it is logical that they did not consider themselves the "chosen" or the "only". The Greeks were indeed more chovinists,but even them,they believed in the superiority of their culture and not the race. In other words,anyone with greek education was considered at least not a barbarian. But again this is logical for the greeks who traded so much with the whole mediterranean,and were in close quarters with the strongest empires on the world. The Egyptians,the Persians and then the Romans. It is very important not to be the strongest in your area,and in fact the Greeks were only for a short period of time in the Hellenistic era. By then their perception was such that they did not even try to extinguish anything ungreek. And the same did the Romans. Wisely,of course,since we all know that extinguishing customs and cultures always ends to failure.
Khairete
Giannis

What happened with Filip II and Macedonians?

Macedonian culture was like Greek culture or very similar but Greeks refused them because they weren't Greeks.

[Theodosius the Great]

While xenophobic, the Romans were confident that an individual of an other culture could be elevated into their "superior" Roman society. False ideas of biology didn't come into it.

The Romans did have "false ideas about biology" when it came to disabled or handicapped people whose conditions were thought to have been the result of divine wrath. One just has to read about the life of Emperor Claudius to see how he was mistreated growing up.

Racism is to mistreat someone because his physical appearance is regarded as inferior, having in mind that the own physical appearance is superior.

That definition still seems too broad since it would cover disabled members of society, again, like Claudius. And they endured more than mere mockery, it would seem, being viewed as divine punishment. This fact would seem to undermine the link between "monotheism" and racism.

Another consideration is the practice of eugenics at one time or another by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Infanticide, as notoriously practiced by the Spartans, was committed after an examination for deformities. So, clearly the ancients had a sense of inferiority based solely on physical attributes. Until the time of Hippocrates, educated Greeks thought that deformities were caused by evil spirits or divine displeasure.

Something else I came across : the pre-Islamic Persian legend of Zāl. This legendary warrior was an albino who was rejected by his own father due to his condition. He was left exposed atop of a high peak as an infant. So, at least the idea of color-based prejudice seems to have already taken root long before the ascendancy of the so-called Abrahamic faiths.

These were, of course, people of different cultures. Whether Egyptian, Numidian, Carthaginian, Parthian, German, Gallic, they were all from different cultures. They were all "barbarians" that could become romanized. My question is where the contributors to the information in that article are deriving that African means black? While I, myself, agree that skin color probably wasn't a big thing to the Romans, what disturbs me is that it appears that those people writing this article are implying that "Africans" mean dark-skinned.

I agree, the article seems worthless. It's merely provocative and has a sensationalist overtone to it.

PS : The witch hunt is not really a middleAge affair, It's a renaissance matter.

Yes, I too have read up on this subject over the last few years. I think it's no coincidence that the rise of witch-hunts and modern European racism occurred with the "rediscovery" or misreading of classical texts - especially Greek texts.

~Theo

[Aetius Helvius Merula]

This is purely speculation, and the question directed towards those better read in the classics than I. But if the concept of racism as we understand the term today was a big factor in Roman/Latin thought, would not some patrician with lots of time and writing materiels have written it down, or indicated it in some indirect way?

[caiusbeerquitius]

That definition still seems too broad since it would cover disabled members of society, again, like Claudius. And they endured more than mere mockery, it would seem, being viewed as divine punishment. This fact would seem to undermine the link between "monotheism" and racism.

Yes, if you take it out of the context in which I wrote this sentence.

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

I think their whole perception on the matter was greatly influenced by the fact that the Romans rose among so many other people close to them in their region. And before their domination(but also after) they adopted so many different things in their culture,from the Greeks,the Celts,the Italiotes etc,and it is logical that they did not consider themselves the "chosen" or the "only". The Greeks were indeed more chovinists,but even them,they believed in the superiority of their culture and not the race. In other words,anyone with greek education was considered at least not a barbarian. But again this is logical for the greeks who traded so much with the whole mediterranean,and were in close quarters with the strongest empires on the world. The Egyptians,the Persians and then the Romans. It is very important not to be the strongest in your area,and in fact the Greeks were only for a short period of time in the Hellenistic era. By then their perception was such that they did not even try to extinguish anything ungreek. And the same did the Romans. Wisely,of course,since we all know that extinguishing customs and cultures always ends to failure.
Khairete
Giannis

What happened with Filip II and Macedonians?

Macedonian culture was like Greek culture or very similar but Greeks refused them because they weren't Greeks.

It's going to get a little off topic here,I fear,but you seem too sure that Macedonians were not Greeks! The only racist coments-if those are considered racist-come from Athens,in a times that the biggest state in Greece had lost or was about to lose her independace,and was in war with the Macedonians. The Macedonians never tried to change greek culture for two reasons: They didn't have any reason to,and they wouldn't have anything to change,since they were the same culture. You can stay assured that Had the Thessalians risen instead of the Macedonians,the attitude of the rest of Greeks against them would be the same. Similarly,the Spartans made war with Athens in 430bc in order to "free the Greeks from the Athenians". This way,one could claim that the Athenians were not Greeks and they tried to enslave the rest of the Greeks. Ironically they influenced them more than the Macedonians ever did!
Now,the Macedonians when they rose to power after Alexander,in the whole world,they did much less for the Hellenization of their empire than they could possibly do. Their influence was great in many cases,as they were the conquerors,they were rich(!) and bureucratic enough. But I don't remember any case that skin colour or race is mentioned as a factor for the (mis)treatment of anyone.
Again sorry for the kinda off topic.
Khairete
Giannis