Black Roman soldiers

[Nathan Ross]

Racism has finally reared it's ugly head Here!

Eh? Did I miss something? :???:

If you look at the various prosopographical Personennamen etc you can see a few nick names which certainly suggest blacks.

Possibly. We were discussing the cognomen Maurus as a possible ethnic identifier a while ago. Even so, it's probably not that simple - the name Maurus does indeed turn up frequently in north Africa, and among liberti in Rome, but somebody from Mauretania may not have been 'black' as we would understand it anyway.

Part of the problem, I think, is that many modern cultural debates about blackness/whiteness are rooted in earlier concepts of self and other. The Romans had these concepts too, but with different definitions (barbarism and civilisation) which were rather mutable and not determined by ethnicity. So to try and identify people we would consider black (those of sub-Saharan African origin, probably) in the texts of a society and culture that did not recognise the distinction is going to be tricky...