What's up with those Gauls? Roman ethnic stereotypes and ancient racism
Every empire has the same anxieties of power, and so the same stereotypes keep popping up about different peoples.
The study of history is about the present. Historians have always been interested in the ancient archives for the answers they provide to the questions of the day. A lot of historians’ output right now is focused on race and racism, which makes sense given the importance of those issues to American society.
A common idea among educated people is that “race” was invented as a result of European colonialism. There is a direct line, the theory goes, from the subjugation of indigenous Americans and Africans to the decision to classify everyone on Earth by skin color.
Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity traces racism back much further, to Greek and Roman attempts to make sense of social difference. Just like the later Europeans, the classical Mediterraneans also came up with systematic ways of classifying humanity into superior and inferior groups.
The Romans in particular were constantly afraid that the “conquerors are being conquered” by their victims.1 They came up with all kinds of justifications for why the people they defeated deserved to be kept down. Unlike modern racism, these ideas were based on natural environment rather than bloodline.
In other words, a hot climate produces one type of human, a cold climate produces another, mountaineers are one way, plainsmen another. Of course, Rome produces the best type of human in the world, except when they are corrupted by foreign influences.
The ancient stereotypes are an interesting mirror for moderns. The Romans had a lot of similar racist ideas as Europeans and Americans, but they applied them to very different groups of people. Racism is really about anxieties of power, and those anxieties are the same across big conquering empires.
Unlike a lot of historians working on race in ancient times, Isaac does not focus on whiteness and blackness. The Greeks and Romans knew about an “Ethiopia” where dark-skinned people lived, he argues, but weren’t interacting very often with ethnic groups we would consider “black” today.2 Skin color was therefore less central to the way they identified people.
Isaac does focus a lot on a different modern preoccupation: antisemitism. In the understatement of the century, he begins his chapter on Jews by noting that it is an “emotionally loaded subject” for many readers.3 Isaac spends a fair bit of time debunking historians who tried to read modern antisemitic attitudes into ancient writings, sometimes with the goal of justifying those attitudes.
Roman-Jewish relations happened in a completely different social context than the anti-Jewish racism that caught on in post-medieval European and Middle Eastern societies. Trying to force ancient Roman prejudices about Judea and its natives into modern antisemitic molds actually distorts the imperial power relation at play. As Isaac emphasizes, Romans saw everyone in the Levant except for Jews as greedy and conniving.
Admittedly, I skimmed past a lot of the theoretical chapters. (Hey, I’m writing a blog post, not an academic book review.) But I found the chapters on specific stereotypes really fascinating, especially because so many were counterintuitive:
Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Syrians: sleazy merchant people and lazy bon-vivants. Romans understood the Levant’s sophisticated cities as a place where men go soft, stuffing their faces and bathing all day. Fides punica, “Phoenician honesty,” was another word for lies, often involving money. In North Africa, the stereotype about dishonesty took on a more sinister air, as the Phoenician colony of Carthage was once a major military threat to Rome.
Egyptians: an unbelievably ancient civilization with strange, mystical, terrifying customs. All in all, it seems like the closest thing Romans had to 19th century Orientalism. Roman elites also resented that they depended on Egypt’s natural resources. (Rome would literally starve without Nile grain.) Their resentment turned into a belief that Egyptians were arrogant and entitled.
Parthians/Persians: a tyrannical, alien, ultra-militaristic enemy state. Persia was the strongest adversary to Rome, and the only other organized empire in the region. The Achaemenid conquests had also left a deep mark on Greek literature, which was largely written when Greece was a backwater on the Persian frontier. Romans thus formed an image of Persians as a worthy enemy, albeit one with cruel rulers and an inferior way of life.
Greeks: an extension of attitudes towards the Levant. On one hand, the Romans saw Greece as a sophisticated urban civilization, a source of wealth and prestige; on the other hand, they resented the actually-existing Greek people as tricky, lazy, and weak. The main difference from the Levant was that Roman elites considered Greek literature and traditions part of their own heritage, which intensified these contradictory feelings.
Gauls: noble savages, at least in the beginning. Romans saw the natives of Gallia (present-day France) as hotheaded, valiant, simple people. As Roman rule over Gallia consolidated, the Gauls were seen as getting softer and more submissive. Roman elites sometimes tried to remind themselves that these civilized Gauls were once the people who tried to sack Rome and sacrificed humans in druidic rituals. There was resentment of Gaulish new money, as well a positive stereotype about Gauls being good public speakers.
Germans: like the Gauls, but nobler and more savage. Germany was the unconquerable frontier, not a rival state like Persia but a land where civilization melted away into nature. Germans were seen as a fierce people, either free-spirited warriors or wild beasts, depending on how sympathetic the description was. Roman writers sometimes romanticized Germans while also calling to crush them.
Jews: stubborn subjects with a herd mentality, willing to die in defense of strange customs. Roman writers were fascinated by those customs, including circumcision, and sometimes wondered whether Jews hated pigs or worshipped them. They satirized Jews as gullible religious fanatics, but were also nervous that Romans would be tempted to convert.
Some of these stereotypes sound the same as modern beliefs on the surface level. Egypt is indeed a very old civilization. Judaism does indeed emphasize the unique group identity of the Jewish people. The similarities are deceiving, though, because Egyptian exoticism and Jewish uniqueness resonated in different ways for the Romans than they do for modern audiences.
Other stereotypes still exist today, but are attached to entirely different groups. Europeans and Americans have an idea of noble savagery; it certainly doesn’t apply to Frenchmen or Germans. (One Roman writer made a point of calling Germans disorganized, the exact opposite of the modern stereotype.) The fear of Persia as an enemy police state resembles American views about the Communist bloc.
And to be honest, the Roman stereotypes about Jewish fanaticism seem to resemble Western fears of Islam more than modern antisemitism.
These prejudices are a reflection of power relations, not the true nature (whatever that means) of the people they’re directed at. Again, the fact that they keep echoing through history shows that most empires develop the same anxieties and complexes.
When an empire conquers a less urbanized society, it puts a mirror to the imperial elites’ moral decay. Those elites may look to the locals’ humble condition as a model of the good life. That purity turns to a source of dangerous strength when the locals fight back, or perhaps a reason for guilt if the locals are crushed.
And when an empire conquers a more urbanized society, it can make the empire’s previous standards of wealth and prestige look small in comparison. The imperial elites envy their new subjects, then get frustrated with their envy, and cope by calling those subjects weak, dishonorable, or undeservedly arrogant.
If the empire includes both, then all these feelings turn into a complex system of classifying subjects and rulers. A big enough empire will extend its prejudices into a universal theory of human nature.
It’s all insecurity, all the way down. In the end, every conqueror will be conquered.
After all, the Roman stereotypes about Greeks and Levantines now apply to the entire Mediterranean, including Italy itself. Cassius Dio and Titus Livius may have mocked the people from Athens to Damascus as vain, lazy, smooth-talking, over-perfumed foodies. The world sees their descendants in the exact same light today.
Isaac traces this idea back to Ep. 2.1.156 by Quintus Horatius Flaccus:
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio.
“Captive Greece captured its feral conqueror, and brought the arts to the land of Latin farmers.”
I actually found this book because of a Twitter post by Africanist historian Isaac Samuel, praising the way Benjamin Isaac plays with and subverts modern racialist ideas.
Isaac is himself Jewish.