Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation

by Max L. Goldman (editor/translator), Rebecca Futo Kennedy (editor/translator), C. Sydnor Roy

By offering fluent, accurate translations of extracts and fragments from a wide assortment of ancient texts, this volume allows a comprehensive overview of ancient Greek and Roman concepts of otherness, as well as Greek and Roman views of non-Greeks and non-Romans. A general introduction, thorough annotation, maps, a select bibliography, and an index are also included.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History, Reference, Race, School, Classics

434 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2013

Reviews

[Abby Swihart]

I won't rate because it's an anthology, but it was a very well detailed and organized collection of texts.

[adrienne]

read this for a college class it was lit

[Anna]

counting this as fully read despite only reading the race theory and africa chapters because these are the ones that are set for my module, but fully intend on reading the chapters on the jewish diaspora and ancient britain.
read for *uni* for a module on africa in latin literature that i am very excited for.
some bits i really liked are:
the definition of 'race' in the introduction - 'the modern concept of race is a product of the colonial enterprises of european powers from the 16th to 18th centuries that identified race in terms of skin colour and physical difference.'
the selection of ptolemy's tetrabiblos
+ lucan's civil war sections about cleopatra

[Natalya Delsante]

lovely synthesis of ancient ethnographic information. what i learned most, however, was about the loss of true ethnographic data. it seems like a lot of the information was regurgitation of previous writings on people of the edges of the earth. lucian’s A True History is a funny one to read after this.

[D]

school

[Buğra Duman]

an invaluable anthology for a non-Latin non-Greek speaker like myself.

[G]

Loved the collection of various sources. Good organization for when I used this for research but it’s dense that’s for sure

[Karl]

Excellent compilation of ancient texts relating to race, ethnicity, and geography. The selections show the wide range of viewpoints regarding difference in the ancient classical world, from assumptions of ethno-superiority and Human equality to musings on the links between culture, geography, and climate. There is frequently a clear sense of the separation of the self from the other, along with a tension between viewing the other as "different" but still "civilized" (or too "different" to ever be "civilized"). Some authors accepted difference as a function of climate, divorced from any moral judgement; others insisted on a link between physical form and character. Still others seemed to delight in describing the weird alleged behaviors of "distant barbarians". There were some regular templates applied: the eating of strange food, odd sexual practices, and tendency to view the people of X-land as a monolith. "Here be monsters" has a long and near-universal pedigree. In general, however, there is no single consensus because classical Greek and Roman authors were all over the map on the answers to these questions.

The passages from the historians were the most useful, even if Herodotus must be taken with several large doses of salt. The most interesting aspects were the attempts to work out the geography of more distant lands and the cultures of the people who lived there. The interior of Africa, northern Europe, and China were clearly less familiar to classical Mediterranean societies than even India and Ethiopia. No doubt such accounts were based on varied and fragmentary information passed through a word-of-mouth game of telephone. On the other hand, I found the plays to be the least informative, as their references to ethnicity/race were scattered and not always easy to separate from individual characters. Since only excerpts are included, the stories of the plays (and some of the poems) were difficult to follow as well. Nonetheless, this should be a very good sourcebook for anyone wanting to better understand the different ways people in classical Greece and Rome approached Human difference, how it was sometimes similar to modern ideas, and how often it was remarkably different.