Race & Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology

 About the Authors  |  Key Words  |  Overall Goal  |  Organization  |  Engagement w/ Race  |  Readership  |  Reading Tips  |  Limitations  |  Content Highlights  |  Scholarly Reviews  |  Guiding Questions & Further Comments 

All three authors of the book are Classics professors from well-known colleges across the US ( Rebecca F. Kennedy  from Denison University,  C. Sydnor Roy  from Haverford College upon publication, and  Max L. Goldman  from Vanderbilt University upon publication).

# Translation ✍️ #Human Difference 👨👩 #Race & Ethnicity 🌍 #Greco-Roman 🏺🏛️

# Maps 🗺️ (this book has VERY COOL maps that visualize the expanding knowledge of the world envisioned by ancient scholars)

“ The past is a foreign country: they do things differently here.”

This book provides a rich collection of polished translations of Ancient Greek & Roman works on how people in antiquity understood human differences and how their thought processes evolved. It inspires readers to contemplate how ancient ideas influenced modern race theories and how one could define race/ethnicity and perceive the world.

Being an anthology (a collection of literary pieces organized around a central theme), the book features selected translations of Greek and Roman authors ranging from the 8th century BCE to the 3rd century CE with a great variety of literary genres like nonfiction, poetry, drama, etc. The book contains two parts: (1) Five ancient ‘theories’ that explain human variation (Theories of Foreignness, Genealogies & Origins, Environmental Theories, Genetic Theories, and Custom/Cultural Theories), and (2) Descriptions of various populations of the ancient world (Africa, Asia, Europe, and edges of the world) written by Greco-Roman authors. Texts are arranged chronologically with clear bibliography references and summaries from the translator. Selected Bibliography and Index for key terms are also included at the back of the book.

For a quick fact-check or visual summary of this book, see the " book cheat sheet " or the idea map below.

“One could become a barbarian, and a barbarian could become Greek or Roman.”

As stated by the authors, the book title is meant to be an ‘intentional anachronism (p.xiii)’. While the ideas of race and ethnicity might seem familiar to us contemporarily, the authors believe these concepts were nowhere to be found in the classical world. As social constructs that justified European colonialism from the 16th to 18th century, the concepts of race and ethnicity intersected with the Enlightenment Era. During this time, a visual-based approach was used to differentiate humans, primarily based on physical differences like skin color. This approach  ¹  appeared helpful for one to interpret and define race and ethnicity: while ‘race’ compartmentalizes humans into biologically distinct groups with separate origins, ‘ethnicity’ could further fragment a race by varied cultural practices. Therefore, believing that race and ethnicity were too young to be present in the Classical world, the authors organized the book around “human differences” and recognized the mobility of identity between Greeks, Romans, and barbarians.

1. In Rebecca F. Kennedy’s forthcoming work (not yet published upon this book review), she defined this approach as the ‘bio-race’.

2. Left: The Skiapod, a mythological human with a single leg and a large foot to provide shade in tropical regions; Middle: The Panotti, a mythological human with large ears; Right: The Blemmyae: a mythological headless human with facial features on one’s front chest. For more information,  click here .

This is a powerful sourcebook containing a great variety of well-translated texts. Readers will understand how the perception of human differences in classical antiquity evolved and explore race and ethnicity in the modern era with fresh insights. For undergraduates/Classical scholars, this book could be a source for essays and projects, and people who mastered Ancient Greek/Latin could even trace a translation of interest back to the original text for philological inquiries. Moreover, the orderliness of this book makes it an ideal teaching source. With the proper supplement of background knowledge of the ancient world, anyone interested in the ancient world and/or race & ethnicity can read this book and communicate with the past with ease.

For readers with a limited background in classics, it will be helpful to conduct some ‘quick fact-checks’ about an author/ethnographical region of interest before starting to read. In addition, given the unique nature of this book (i.e., being a sourcebook, it doesn’t have a plot), readers don’t need to read the book from start to finish. Instead, they should read and digest the authors’ introduction, understand the book structure from the table of contents, and then locate specific passages of interest. In addition, the ‘selected bibliography’ at the end of the book contains relevant readings on the topic (with publication dates ranging from the 1990s to 2013) that are well worth checking out.

One overall limitation of this sourcebook is the fact that most of the ancient texts were Greco-Roman centered. The fact that the barbarians in the eyes of Ancient Greeks/Romans didn’t have a chance to ‘speak up’ may insinuate some inherent narrative bias on the interpretation of human differences in antiquity.

One noteworthy content for visual readers is the collection of reconstructed maps that represent ‘the progression of Greco-Roman knowledge of [the] world’. While it seems fascinating to see the world ‘expanding’ with more details across time, the great intellectual creativity instilled in these maps again reveals the ‘fluidity of self & others’ in the ancient world. As multiple scholastic theories build upon one another, many prior regions of ‘unknown’ become ‘known’, and many ‘imaginative barbarians’ become recognized as Greek, Roman, or respectable friends or adversaries within a given historical era.

⬅️ Top left: Homer’s world (~8BCE), Top right: Herodotus’s world (~5BCE) Bottom: Ptolemy’s world (~2CE), maps are featured in p.xix, xx, and xxiii within the book.

”In a few words I will make clear the size of each continent and [how they] should be on a map.” (p.85)

The main tasks for creating this book involved great volumes of manuscript translation (more than 225,000 words in three years), editorial notes, peer-review activities, and more. Besides delicately organizing their translations into meaningful categories, the authors have expressed their willingness to share the course syllabi surrounding this book with any interested educators.

Many scholarly reviews of this book were written by Classicists in universities or journals related to the field (e.g., Journal of Classics Teaching). In general, the book is very well received within the community for its logical structure and accessibility as a teaching source. However, my concern about the translated texts’ nature as Greco-Roman centered echoes with some of the critical reviews. 

  "Since for ancient Greeks and Romans one essential element of identity and difference was customs, we learn a lot from these texts about sex and marriage, funerals, and warfare in the Mediterranean and surrounding lands. But the ancient authors also featured banalities such as clothing, horse bits, cooking, and even trash talking.

   "The translations are fresh, accurate, and accessible. . . . In a brisk and smart Introduction [the editors] point out the absence of fixed words for race and ethnicity in classical antiquity even as they provide some good references for exploring the complexity of these modern concepts."

For more reviews, see the book's  official press website .

“ In general, a more critical approach to the sources throughout the book would have been desirable. In their introduction, the editors state that the sourcebook will include only written sources, as evidence from material culture and iconography “can be difficult to present and interpret” (p. xiv). The implication, perhaps unintended, is that written sources are not difficult to interpret. It would have been preferable to communicate the opposite – i.e. the need for careful and critical engagement with the source material. As has long been established, the ‘facts’ about identity and ethnicity in classical antiquity cannot be straightforwardly read from the texts. It is now widely accepted that, rather than passively reflecting social realities, our source material (such as that presented in this book) was part of an ongoing discourse which was constantly shaping and re-shaping ancient identities. Given that the nature of the theme – race and ethnicity – engenders heated debate and politicised argument, a more explicit acknowledgement of historiographic problems would have been good. A stronger theoretical framework may have helped with this. Reference is made in the general introduction to the distinction between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, but the terminology is not used consistently throughout the book, and the suggested further reading does not include many of the more recent works on the topic.”

To view the full review article, visit  the Bryn Mawr Classical Review .

[Marie]: As a Classics undergraduate, I am looking forward to trying out some self-learning activities after understanding the book’s goals and structures.

After reading several pieces of text, readers should be able to build a ‘virtual mind map’ by connecting texts written by different authors (e.g., How might Ptolemy become inspired by Herodotus’s writings and create his delicate map of the world? How might the descriptions of Jews differ between Horace and Petronius?). The self-discovery process of how ancient intelligence merges and grows over time can be very rewarding, and it could be helpful to formulate and analyze these questions using a critical mindset as suggested by Professor Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s book review.

Our understanding of race and ethnicity has always been evolving due to their controversial nature. Up to this book’s publication date in 09/2013, the definition of race and ethnicity had been properly mentioned in the introduction but hadn’t been used consistently throughout the work. While the need to properly define the terms and consistently employ those definitions in scholarly discussion appears to be a meaningful goal for the authors, it could also be a thoughtful practice for us readers. I highly agree with Professor Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s idea that understanding identity and ethnicity from ancient texts is “an ongoing discourse [of] constantly shaping and re-shaping ancient identities”, and I hope readers of this book can also be aware of this ongoing mission.

Citations:

1. Kennedy, Rebecca Futo. Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World : An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation / Selected and Translated by Rebecca F. Kennedy, C. Sydnor Roy, and Max L. Goldman. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2013.