Were the Ancient Greeks and Romans White?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the study of antiquity and the Middle Ages. As always, I'm your host, Nick Barksdale, and today we are joined by a very special guest. I'm really excited to have them on this channel. A writer, a fellow history enthusiast who is pursuing history in the world of higher education, and I'm absolutely thrilled to bring you this awesome mind who has written a variety of articles that have truly captured my attention to the point I had to have them on this show. And so without further ado, I present to you Spencer McDaniel. McDaniel, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's great to be here. So I am currently approaching the end of my third year double majoring in history and classical studies here at Indian University Bloomington. I am very passionate about ancient history. I've been studying ancient Greece and Rome in particular ever since elementary school. I have a website called talesoftimesforgotten.com where I write articles about subjects related to ancient history. I've been writing articles on the website since November 2016, and at the time I started, I was still a junior in high school. And I currently, as of the time we're recording this, have 330 articles published on my website, many of them quite lengthy dealing with complex historical issues. So for instance, my most recent article that I published is about the question of did Pythagoras really study philosophy in Egypt? This is a legend that is reported by the orator Socrates in the fourth century BCE. And so the article talks about is this historical or is it just a myth? And so that can give you some, and I've written tons and tons of articles about different topics. And before we begin, don't forget, check out the links in the video description below. It's going to take you to all of the awesome work McDaniel is doing. And seriously, I cannot recommend it enough. The articles are very fascinating. They're made to where everyone can read it. And today I picked a very controversial one that I think many of you are going to either lose your minds about or you're going to find it fascinating. And that is, were the ancient Greeks and Romans white? As we dive into this episode, when you hear the terms ancient Greece, ancient Rome, based on your imagination, your research, your thoughts, what comes to your mind? That's a rather difficult question to answer because I've been studying and writing about Greece and Rome for so long that the list of things that come to mind when I think of ancient Greece and Rome is extremely long. But I think that what most people, the average person probably thinks of when they think of ancient Greece and Rome is probably Greek philosophy, Athenian democracy, classical architecture, classical sculptures, gladiators, and depraved Roman emperors probably. I think there's a lot more to those civilizations than that, but I think those are some of the things that probably your average person would think of when they hear the terms ancient Greece and Rome. And as we move towards the subject matter that is the focus of this interview, my question for you is, for our audience today, would you define what is race? There are several different definitions of the word race that a person could take, and there are different terms that have been used in different cultures throughout history that have, in various cases, been translated as race. So, for instance, the ancient Greeks had the word genos, which meant a lineage, a family, a clan, or even sometimes a nation. And this word is often translated into English as race, but it denotes a somewhat different concept from what your average American probably thinks of when they hear the word race. And so, if we were to take a very broad definition of the word race, I would say it is a social construct that divides people into groups based on perceived ancestry and or external physical features. And this is not, most people assume that race is an immutable biological reality, but in reality, it's more of a social construct. And anthropologists for the past maybe 50 years or so have rejected the idea of biological race altogether. And the traits that are usually used to group people into so-called racial categories are extremely superficial, very arbitrary, and not even necessarily concordant, meaning the presence of one trait doesn't necessarily indicate the presence of other traits. Furthermore, conceptions of race are not fixed over time or across cultures. So, for instance, in the United States today, we often think in terms of there being a white race, but there was absolutely no concept of a white race in ancient Greece or Rome. The Greeks and Romans had a concept of white as a color, but they didn't have a concept of white as a racial category. If you walked up to a random man on the streets of Athens in the 5th century BCE and asked him, are you white? It would probably make about as much sense to him as if you asked him, are you olive? Furthermore, as strange as it may seem to us, the ancient Greeks and Romans often associated skin color less with race and more with gender. Because in those times, it was darker skin was associated with men and paler skin was associated with women because men were expected to work outside and get tanned and women were expected to remain indoors and remain pale. And so, Greek and Roman artists actually sometimes use skin color as an artistic convention to demarcate gender, as strange as this may sound. So, if you look, for instance, at frescoes from Roman frescoes from the city of Pompeii, in the vast majority of them, the men are portrayed as very dark skinned and tanned, while the women are portrayed as very pale and white. And this isn't because the men and women are supposed to be of different races, but rather because that's an artistic convention that the artists use to indicate gender. Furthermore, it's important to note that even in the United States, conceptions of race have changed over time. So, for instance, even a hundred years ago, many Anglo-Americans didn't consider Greeks and Greek and Italian immigrants to be fully white. A lot of times, Greek and Italian immigrants were referred to by very hateful ethnic slurs, which I won't repeat here. And they were sometimes targeted by racial violence. So, for instance, one of the largest mass lynchings in United States history was a lynching of 11 Italian men in New Orleans on the 14th of March, 1891. And one of the organizers of that lynching was a guy named John M. Parker, who later went on to become the 37th governor of Louisiana. And in 1911, he said that Italians are, quote, just a little worse than the outdated word for black people, being, if anything, filthier in their habits, lawless and treacherous, unquote. And then a 1909 op-ed in the Omaha Daily News describes Greek people saying, quote, they have insulted women. Greeks are a menace to the American labor and men, just as the racial slur for Japanese people, Italians and other similar laborers are, unquote. And there was a, this was written in the context of, there was a major pogrom against Greek people known as the Greek Town Riot on the 21st of February, 1909, which lasted for seven hours, in which a racist mob burned the entire Greek border of South Omaha, assaulted Greeks and other olive-skinned minorities, displaced the entire Greek population, and killed at least one person. And then a Ku Klux, the Ku Klux Klan was also anti-Hellenic. A Ku Klux Klan propaganda card from 1924 has a racist poem describing what they envisioned as the worst possible scenario for the United States. And in it, among other things, they say, quote, a Greek is elected president, unquote. And this is all obviously just horribly racist stuff, but it's important to recognize that our modern conceptions of race have changed quite a bit. And, you know, when you think about these pogroms that they had and the riots, they're really not that long ago. And in that brief short of a time, our concept of race has changed even more, you know, and so it's really good that you brought that up. And so when it comes to your article, when it comes to the ancient Romans, the ancient Greeks, does the modern concept of race even have a place in ancient history? It's complicated because the Greeks and Romans did not think of themselves as white. And so we should not assume that the Greeks and Romans are thinking in terms of modern racial categories, but it can, in some circumstances, be important to think about how our understandings of race are influencing maybe the way that we think about ancient Greece and Rome. So, for instance, there is this widespread portrayal of ancient Greece and Rome as white civilizations. And if you watch Hollywood movies, they routinely portray the Greeks and Romans as all white. And so this is something that is, I think, influenced by our modern way of thinking about race. And it's important to recognize that this is not an accurate conception. It's important to note that the ancient Greeks and Romans were in contact with darker-skinned peoples from outside of Europe from a very, very early date. In fact, there are Egyptian trade goods that have been found in Greek tombs dating to the Mycenaean era in the second millennium BCE, which is the earliest period of Greek history where we know the Greek language was being spoken. And the Greeks had a word that is roughly translatable into English as a black person, and that is Aithiopis. And the Aithiopis are mentioned near the very beginning of book one of the Odyssey as a pious people among whom the gods can visit openly. There's a description of Poseidon visiting the Aithiopians, and they appear fairly frequently in Greek mythology. So the princess Andromeda in the story of Perseus is said to have been an Aithiopian princess, and the character of Mimnon in the legend of the Trojan War is said to have been the king of the Aithiopians. And there was actually an epic poem known as the Aithiopika, which was about, or in part, about Mimnon and his role in the Trojan War. And there were people of non-European ancestry living in Greece and Rome throughout most of Greek and Roman history, and some of them actually became quite famous. We know that there were philosophers, church fathers, orators, even Roman emperors who were of non-European ancestry, many of whom were fairly dark-skinned. So for instance, the philosopher Xenon of Kythion is very famous as the founder of Stoicism, which is a really popular philosophical school right now. It's having kind of a huge fad. But interestingly, the 3rd century CE biographer Diogenes Laertius records in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 711 that Xenon was a, he describes him as having been of Phoenician ancestry, and he actually says that he was noticeably dark-skinned. And Diogenes Laertius was basically a philosophy fan boy. He wasn't really a critical scholar. So a lot of times you have to take what he says with a grain of salt. But in this particular instance, he cites a work written by Precipice of Soloi, who was a student of Cleanthes, who was a student of Xenon. And so you would think that Precipice would have some idea of what Xenon looked like and where he came from. And then another example is Publius Tergentius Afer, who is known in English generally as Terrence, and he was one of the earliest, he's one of the earliest authors in the Latin language for whom we have any complete writings. He was a comedic playwright, and he was actually, he's actually believed to have been a member of the Afri, who were an Amazigh tribe in North Africa in the Tunisia. And he seems to have been captured at a young age and taken to Italy as a slave, but he eventually managed to acquire his freedom and become a really famous playwright. And he's seen as one of the founders of Latin literature. And then we have Roman emperors who came from North Africa. So the emperor Septimius Severus, who was the founder of the Severan dynasty, was born in the city of Leptis Magna and was now Libya. And he, his mother was of Italian ancestry, but his father was of Punic ancestry and possibly also Amazigh ancestry. And then interestingly, every single member of the Severan dynasty that Septimius Severus founded was of non-European ancestry because Septimius Severus' wife was Julia Domna, who was Syrian. And they had two sons, Gedda and Caracalla, who were of mixed Italian, Syrian, Punic, and possibly Amazigh ancestry. And Caracalla is actually known for, on the 11th of July, 212 CE, he issued an edict known as the Constitutio Antoniniana, in which he, which granted all freeborn people throughout the Roman empire, Roman citizenship. And so under this new edict, this meant that all free peoples in the parts of North Africa and the Middle East that were ruled by the Roman empire automatically became Roman citizens. And then the emperor after Caracalla was Macrinus, who was an Amazigh. And then the emperor after him was Elagabalus, who was from Julia Domna's family and was Syrian. And then he was succeeded by Alexander Severus, who was also Syrian. And then there were many later Roman emperors who were from outside of Europe. So, for instance, Philip the Arab was called Philip the Arab because he was an Arab. And then we also have famous writers who came from outside of Europe. So, for instance, Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis, known generally in English as Apuleius, is the author of The Golden Ass, which is the only novel written in antiquity in the Latin language that survived to the present day complete. And he was an Amazigh born in the city of Madauros in Algeria. And he became this very famous author and he wrote this novel. And then the writer Lucianus of Somosata was a satirist and he was a Syrian. He was born into a probably a working class family in the town of Somosata on the banks of the Euphrates River on the far eastern fringe of the Roman empire. And his native language was probably Syriac, but he managed to learn the Greek language and became an extraordinarily prolific and very, very popular author. There are over 80 works attributed to him that survived and he was a satirist. And so he wrote, he's actually one of my favorite authors because he's really wickedly funny. And one of his most famous works is A True Story, which is often considered to contain elements of science fiction. And it's kind of making fun of people who tell incredible tales. And then many of the early church fathers were also from outside of Europe. So for instance, Orgygenus of Alexandria was born in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. And although he wrote exclusively in the Greek language, he may have been of Egyptian ancestry, or at least partially. His name Orgygenus means born of Boris, which seems like a fairly Egyptian name. And there's some evidence that he may not have been a Roman citizen until after the Constitutio Antoniniana. And so it's possible that his mother may have actually been Egyptian. And then Tertullianus of Carthage was an Amazigh from Tunisia. And the most famous of all the church fathers, Augustine of Hippo, was born in the city of Tegaste in Algeria. And he was almost certainly of Amazigh ancestry. And he actually saw himself as African in his Epistola 138-419. He refers to Apuleius, the same novelist who I mentioned earlier, as novus afris afer notior, that is an African well known to us Africans. And he was an extraordinarily prolific author. He's known for his work Confessions, which is seen as one of the earliest surviving works of autobiography. And he also wrote a really famous apologetic treatise called The City of God. And he is probably one of the most influential figures on Western Latin Christianity ever. And actually, the city of St. Augustine, Florida, which is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the United States founded by Europeans, is actually named after him. So ironically, the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the United States founded by Europeans is named after an African man. And then I've mostly been talking about just people of non-European ancestry in general. But we know that Black people, or people who we would consider Black specifically, in many cases had Roman citizenship and fought in the Roman army. There are portraits, surviving portraits from Egypt that show men who we would clearly consider Black wearing sword belts, indicating that they were members of the Roman military. And then the in the Life of Septimius Severus 22, 4 through 5, references an Ethiopian soldier fighting in the Roman ranks. And then we know that Black people were present in Europe, including in Greece. We know that the orator Herodotus Atticus, who lived in the second century CE, had an adopted son in Mimnon, named after the famous mythological Ethiopian king, who was of Ethiopian ancestry. And there's actually a surviving portrait head of Mimnon that was discovered in Herodotus Atticus' villa that shows him with distinctively African facial features. And we also know that in some cases, Black people intermarried with Europeans. The Greek writer who was writing in around the late first century CE, early second century CE, mentions in his De Serra Numinis Vindicta 21, a Greek woman whose great-grandfather was an Ethiopian. And there's evidence of Black people living in the Roman Empire as far north as Britain even. Actually, there's an example of a woman from the city of Boracum, which is now the city of York, known as the Ivory Bangle Lady, who has been identified based on bone analysis as probably having been of African ancestry, although bone analysis can get kind of unreliable in some cases. But still, and there are other examples as well. And we know that there were people from all over the Roman Empire who came to Roman Britain. So, for instance, there's a stela that was erected by a Syrian man for his British wife. And it's written in Aramaic, which is a Syrian language. And that was found in Britain. And so when we come to our modern time and the debates that rage online everywhere from politically, racially charged articles to just flat-out arguments on Facebook or Twitter, we come to a topic of whiteness and the history of civilization. And people tend to look at places like ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and for them, they have to see it as a white European society. And so my question is, why is that? Why is it so hard to acknowledge the oftentimes multicultural, multi-ethnic, and yes, let's say multi-racial aspects of empires and small kingdoms? So I think that what it is, is people have really, a lot of people have really internalized the idea of sort of a white identity where they see the Greeks and Romans as their ancestors and because they see themselves as white and the Greeks and Romans as their both cultural and racial forebears. And so I think that that's something that a lot of people struggle to let go of. And I should clarify that probably the majority of people living in Greece and Italy in ancient times were probably what we would consider white, but a lot of people will insist that they were all white or that there was no contact with people who we wouldn't consider white. And I think that they do this because they feel the need to hold onto this idea of a white racial identity. And a lot of this is the notion of quote-unquote Western civilization is often used as a euphemism for essentially white male supremacy, which I've written about this too is another topic, but we can cover this in a later interview perhaps. And so based on your experience, your research, and your knowledge when it comes to people like me and our view of the past, when it comes to let's say an ethnic view or even a racial one, how should people view ancient Rome and ancient Greece? Well, I would say that these were civilizations that most modern Americans, if they were to go back in time and see them, would consider to be very racially diverse. And I think that this is something that should probably be more reflected in popular culture portrayals of these ancient cultures. I've written about the movie 300, which is really essentially a propaganda piece for white supremacy. I won't go into all the really, really problematic things about that movie, but one of the things is they portray all the Greek characters as unambiguously white, and they're portrayed actually not by Greek actors, but by actors of mostly British and Northern European ancestry. And all the major Spartan characters in the film are pale-skinned and blue-eyed, and at least one of them has blonde hair. And meanwhile, the Persians in the film are all portrayed by actors of color, and actually none of them are portrayed by Iranian actors. The Messenger is portrayed by a Ghanaian actor. Xerxes is portrayed by a Brazilian actor. And so they're very clearly trying to establish this racially coded message of Greeks are white Europeans, and Iranians or Persians are non-white, non-Europeans. And it's a very inaccurate and simplistic portrayal that they're doing as part of this very racially motivated message that they're trying to send. There's often this portrayal of Greece as arising kind of on its own and being a thoroughly European civilization, uninfluenced by the civilizations of the ancient Near East and North Africa. And this is very much an inaccurate view. We've known for a long time that, for instance, archaic Greek art is heavily influenced by Egyptian art. And the Greek alphabet is based on the Phoenician alphabet. And the Greek goddess Aphrodite is probably derived from the Phoenician goddess Astarta, who is associated with actually the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar. And the Iliad and the Odyssey have a lot of parallels with Near Eastern literature, especially the Epic of Gilgamesh. And the Theogony of Hesiodos of Ascre is clearly unambiguously related to an earlier Hittite myth called Kingship in Heaven or the Song of Camargue. And for my viewers who may not be familiar with what we just discussed, he's referring to what's commonly referred to as the Greek miracle. It's like Greek civilization popped up in Europe overnight. It was amazing. Oh yeah, super great. Except this tends to be pushed by people with extremely Orientalist views, especially in historiography. Some of you are going to be familiar with the works of Victor Davis Hanson. He's notorious for this. I watched one of his lectures on the subject and it was so bad it made me nauseous, which is saying a lot because I've seen some bad ones. But he completely excludes the East from the foundations of what we if you want to call it Greek civilization, completely excludes it. Like, oh, they were there, but no profound impact whatsoever. We're just going to ignore a bunch of actual history and archeological evidence here. And so you see that pushed a lot. And even today, Orientalist historiography is very much alive and well, whether you pick up The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon, which is centuries ago, and you can follow it all the way up through if you want to call it academia today in writings like those presented by Victor Davis Hanson, who I just mentioned, or even more controversial writers like Richard Spencer, who is one of the voices of the alt-right. And so that's why I think it's very important to acknowledge not only that many of these city-states and eventual empires are very much ethnically and even racially diverse, but that they're also heavily influenced by, in many cases, their rivals or groups, cultures, and civilizations that they came into contact with. Because in reality, that's how it works. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us here today at the Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As always, I'm your host, Nick Barksdale, and we have been joined by a spectacular guest. We had a lot of fun discussing some of the misconceptions that revolve around certain empires and ancient civilizations in antiquity. It was a pleasure, and Spencer, thank you so much for coming on the show today. You're welcome. It was really fun. I'd be happy to do it again. And so once again, to my subscribers, if you love history, you love reading about history, even if it's controversial, check out the links in the video description below. It's going to take you to all of the awesome work that Spencer is doing. Give him your entire support and really take advantage of the awesome insights he has for you and me to help us better understand the subjects that we all love. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all so much, and have a wonderful night.