Borders between the barbarian and the civilized in antiquity

The notions, in the philosophical sense of the term, of “barbarism” or “civilization” are familiar to neither the Greeks nor the Romans, which does not prevent either from conceiving of a border between the one who is called barbaros in Greek, barbarus in Latin, and the Greek or the Roman. It would be more fitting to speak of “borders,” for, as we shall see, the line of demarcation is a shifting one, and what seems a simple distinction becomes, in the diachronic perspective chosen here, multiple and complex.

The Greeks vs. the Barbarians

The classic, binary opposition is well known, resting on the antithesis Greeks vs. non-Greeks, established by the Greeks between themselves and all the others, the barbaroi. The meaning of this adjective is refined through a series of semantic slippages: etymologically “the one who stammers,” then “the one whose speech is unintelligible, and who therefore does not speak Greek,” then “the foreigner, the non-Greek.” Homer uses it only once, in a compound, to qualify the Carians as barbarophônoi, “of rough speech” (Iliad, 2, 868). The first attestations of barbaros on its own date from the seventh century BCE. Fragment 107 of Heraclitus is close to the etymological sense: “for men, the eyes and ears of those who have barbarian souls are bad witnesses,” which may be glossed thus: “souls that cannot understand their language,” and therefore stammer, since they have no access to the logos, in the sense both of “speech” and of “reason, the faculty of reasoning.” Diodorus Siculus quotes, at 8, 29, the oracle of Delphi answering Battos I, who had set out to found a colony in Libya, and assuring him of Apollo’s protection in obtaining victory over the inhabitants of that foreign land, “the barbarian men in tunics.” Whether the adjective characterizes these Libyan peasants or souls incapable of reasoning correctly, these two examples illustrate the conclusion on which there is now agreement, thanks to the contributions of modern linguistics, and notably of semic analysis: the meaning of a word is not given a priori but results from its significations, that is, from its semantic occurrences in the texts.¹ Now, the analysis of the occurrences of barbaros reveals that the Greek term has, from the start, a deprecatory and pejorative value.² Moreover, the definition of barbaros preceded that of “Hellene,” in the sense of “Greek.”³ One has spoken, for this term, of a “retrospective concept,”⁴ the unity of the Hellenes, not clearly defined in Homer, having been forged against the barbaroi, in particular the Persians at the time of the Persian Wars in the fifth century. From that moment, the linguistic antithesis establishes an ethnic border, then a political and cultural one — democracy vs. the Persian monarchies, the liberty of the citizens vs. the servitude of the subjects of the Great King. The civilization of paideia, Greek education, is THE civilization against the others, whose value is sometimes acknowledged but which are considered inferior, for a good reason: their peoples were vanquished by the Greeks, as the scale of Alexander’s conquests in the following century (334–323) confirms. “Hellenism” alone is a humanism, with its moral values and its foundation, the logos.

A few writers soften the pejorative value of barbaros. Herodotus, the fifth-century historian, is accused by Plutarch of “barbarophilia” toward the Medes (On the Malice of Herodotus, 857a); the sophist Antiphon affirms, in fragment 5, that “by nature we are all, in all things, identical by birth, Greeks and Barbarians alike.” But this perception is the work of an intellectual elite, by definition a minority, as E. Lévy stresses: “barbaros is not only initially pejorative; above all it indicates a one-way relation, hellenocentric, and a non-reversible otherness […]. The Ionian ethnographers […] no doubt softened the pejorative value of the term, but it is never far off.”⁵ In the same way, certain occurrences of barbaros in the tragedies modulate the opposition Greeks vs. barbarian foreigners, presenting certain Greek characters as exhibiting barbarian conduct, but these remain isolated.⁶ As for Plato’s testimony, in the following century, it is ambivalent: the philosopher denounces the opposition Greeks vs. barbarians in certain dialogues such as the Statesman (262c–d) or the Cratylus (389e–390a), and recognizes the prestige the foreigner may enjoy in others — the Republic (614b–621b), the Phaedrus (274c–275c), the Laws (747d–e); but he also stresses the superiority of the Greeks (Rep. 469b–476c).⁷

It will finally be noted that, apart from agriotès, “savagery,” there exists in Greek no general term to designate barbarism: the word barbaria is attested only once, and with its geographical sense of “territories where the barbarians live.” Nor does any word designate the whole set of qualities of the civilized person. Only adjectives characterize individuals: sophos, “wise,” remains very vague; hèmeros, “gentle” — “domesticated,” as opposed to agrios, “wild”; anthropinos means “human,” but in opposition to the other elements of the cosmos, the moral sense being very rare. The term philanthropia, “humanity, benevolence, goodness,” would be closest to the notion of humanism. The border is thus clear-cut: on one side are the Greeks, on the other the non-Greeks, but neither of the two groups has any abstract characterization: the concepts of “barbarism” or of “civilization” do not exist — it is the Romans who will create them.

The Latins inherit this opposition Hellenes vs. Barbarians, in which they find themselves on the side of the Barbarians. The first rupture that changes the situation is the conquest of Greece: in 148 BCE Macedonia becomes a Roman province, to which Hellenistic Egypt is added in 31. Those whom the Hellenes included among the barbaroi have conquered them; the balance of power has been reversed. The effort of the Latins will then consist in escaping this dichotomy, in making their military superiority become political, cultural, and linguistic as well. Cicero aims to render the binary opposition ternary by shifting the border: from Greeks vs. Barbarians, to pass to Romans and Greeks vs. Barbarians. To do this, two paths are possible, and Cicero will exploit both: to substitute for Hellenism the concept of latinitas; and to accentuate the dichotomy between the Romans and the Barbarians.⁸

The Romans vs. the Greeks

On the military plane, what would become, a few years later under Augustus, the imperium Romanum had supplanted the empire of Alexander; the victory of arms had spoken. In parallel, on the political plane, the model of the civitas had imposed itself over the Greek polis: with the respublica and its own institutions, one believed one could avoid the excesses of the democratic system denounced by Plato. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for his part, attempts to prove the non-barbarian origin of the Latins by giving them as ancestors the Greek Aborigines who had come from Achaea and who were said to have driven the barbarian Sicels out of Italy (Roman Antiquities, 1, 9–12). On the intellectual and cultural plane, “the Roman way of life” is set out as an alternative to Hellenistic decadence: the urbanization and the techniques of the Roman engineers,⁹ the baths or the aqueducts,¹⁰ the amphitheaters and their games.¹¹ In Book 4 of the Republic, Cicero underscores the differences: Latin education sets itself up as the equivalent of Greek paideia, on which it lays claim, but with its own specificities in its contents, in law, and in its methods — verecundia, “restraint,” in place of Greek nudity and pederasty. The aim is to surpass one’s model in effectiveness: the action of the homo politicus rather than the words of the philosophos, morality rather than metaphysics.

Let us dwell on two altogether significant aspects, for which Cicero’s role is decisive. The Latin language acquires, thanks to him, an incontestable dignity: latinitas imposes itself as the equal of Greek, the true man of letters being bilingual, utraque lingua doctus, “learned in both languages.”¹² If the grammarian Varro, in his work On the Latin Language (8, 31), underscores the grammatical analogies between the two languages, a large part of the Latin philosophical vocabulary is enriched by the orator who, instead of transcribing the Greek words, finds the Latin equivalent or coins neologisms. For example, veri-loquium rather than etymo-logia, on which it is modeled; latinitas parallel to hellenismos; and humanitas in place of philanthropia.¹³ Cicero’s rhetorical reflection is organized around this objective: to prove that the Romans are not “stammering” barbari but that they can express themselves with as much elegance as their elders. The aim is at once to abolish the border between Greek and Latin by underscoring the similarities of the two idioms, and to erect another, by giving Latin a new legitimacy that distinguishes it from the Greek of which it becomes the equal.

Beyond this linguistic reflection, the moral dimension is a second axis exploited by Cicero to demonstrate the superiority of Latin civilization. The numerous faults of these people of “skittish character,”¹⁴ contemptuously called the Graeculi, “little Greeks,” are well known: luxuria, “taste for luxury”; mollitia, “unmanliness”; inertia, “absence of action,” which may be summed up in their levitas, “frivolity, lack of seriousness.” These traits of character place the Greeks on the side of the effeminate, of inconstancy, as against the majestas, “dignity,” and the gravitas, “seriousness, steadiness,” properly Roman. It remains, then, to recall the virility of these virtutes (this term has the same root as vir, “man”), Latin values whose antiquity guarantees their effectiveness, since they are rooted in the mos majorum, “the ancestral customs.” A first border is thus drawn so as to set oneself apart from the Greeks.¹⁵ The one that separates the Romans from the Barbarians defines still more sharply the contours of the humanitas of the Romans: to distinguish oneself not only from femininity but also from the beast and the sub-human.

The Romans vs. the Barbarians

One may indeed wonder why the Latins, when they had some ten terms at their disposal to designate “the foreigner,” borrowed the Greek word barbaros. This borrowing took place as early as the third century BCE, by way of literature but also by the popular route of the vocabulary of slaves and merchants. The comparison of the occurrences of barbarus with the other words for “the foreigner” provides an element of an answer. Advena is “the one who arrives from elsewhere”; alienigena, “the one born elsewhere”; alienus, “the one who is other”; exter, “the one who is on the outside,” “who is not of the family”; hospes, “the guest”; or peregrinus, “the one who travels,” “who comes from elsewhere,” and “resident foreigner.” Barbarus is the only term that defines the foreigner negatively, as “the other who is not Roman, who is excluded from Roman territory.” The border is present for the other “foreigners,” but its function is to signal the difference between a here and an elsewhere to which they belong: for the barbari, the border’s role is to exclude these foreigners from Roman territory.¹⁶ This word will thus serve the Latins in better defining themselves: as for the Greeks, one may speak of a “retrospective concept,” even if the scheme of otherness / identity does not function in quite the same way. Faced with the geographical, ethnic, and cultural diversity and multiplicity of the barbari stands the postulated unity of the populus Romanus. The proof of the political or military superiority of the Romans, from the Punic Wars to the conquest of Gaul, no longer needs to be made: the stakes are concentrated on the moral dimension. The Roman experience, faced with the barbari, is almost always one of victory, with the recurrent image of Barbarians in rout in Caesar, Livy, or Quintus Curtius.¹⁷ This incapacity to conquer is the consequence of their inferiority in every domain, including that of their nature or their mores. One can easily draw up the list of their inadequacies and their faults, summed up in their vanitas,¹⁸ “incompetence, inconsistency,” in a word their essential nullity. Privative prefixes characterize many of their qualifiers, among them in-fidus, “disloyal”; im-potens, “powerless, incapable”; in-doctus, “ignorant”; de-mens, “senseless”: in short, the barbarus is in-humanus, a sort of sub-human; it is the Roman who is humanus.¹⁹

This non-humanity of the barbarian can manifest itself also through his inhumanity in the sense of cruelty, the feritas, “savagery,” which in a way compensates for their essential vanitas. This violence prevails among certain peoples, such as the Germans, enemies far more difficult to conquer than the Gauls and about whom Caesar repeatedly couples the adjective ferus, “wild,” with barbarus.²⁰ At this point the barbarus is a danger, a threat; he takes his place on the side of the wild beast (fera), and one will soon have the vision of hordes surging forward with rudimentary weapons and terrifying howls. Poets and historians frequently resort to the metaphorical connection between the barbarian and the animal that is hunted or that goes to ground.²¹

Ciceronian rhetoric will amplify this twofold perception of barbarism — synonymous with incompetence or with menace — by adding to it still other dimensions. A linguistic dimension first: in his rhetorical works, Cicero hunts down barbarisms to guarantee the correctness and beauty of Latin, as opposed to the barbarian tongues composed of “breaths and hissings.” The orator will also wield barbarus as an insult, for example in his speech Pro Fonteio, where the use of this term in paragraphs 4, 23, 31, and 33 (as well as barbaria, in 44 and 49, until then limited to its geographical acceptation) aims to disqualify the Gauls, who are on the side of his client’s accuser, and their language.²² Thus the author comes, logically and by ricochet, to use humanus with the meaning of “civilized, non-barbarian,” whereas the usual senses had been more restricted, “affable,” “cultivated.” For example, in the treatise On the Orator, at 1, 33, there is talk of “drawing men out of their fierce (ferus) and savage life to bring them to our state of civilized life (cultum humanum) and of political organization.” Humanitas is then defined in a sense close to “humanism,” the whole set of qualities that make up the dignity of the civilized person. The barbarus is the one who does not respect the values proper to Roman society, summed up in the word humanitas: “only the awareness of what the Roman values truly were, and the enrichment of the vocabulary of ‘civilization’ and of ‘non-civilization’ in accordance with those values, allowed the Romans to wrench themselves free from the ‘barbarism’ that the Greeks inflicted on them so naturally”²³: the dividing line has been shifted; henceforth, with respect to the Barbarians, the Romans are on the same side of the border as the Greeks.

The example of the barbarians in the arenas allows this approach to be visualized. In the Tusculan Disputations (2, 17, 41), Cicero admires the courage shown by the gladiators, “either men without faith or law, or barbarians,” in the course of this “cruel and inhuman” spectacle. These barbarians are barbarians whose danger is circumscribed within the space of the arena, channeled and ritualized by the code of the games, like their Gallic, Thracian, or Samnite weaponry. The spectacle thus offers an inverted image of barbarism: normally excluded by being cast beyond the borders, it is here excluded by being shut up within the circle of the arena. But in both configurations there is exclusion, separation between the humanus Roman and the inhumanus barbarus — who is moreover set against wild beasts. One may then allow oneself to admire the latter’s strength and courage, without risk, since the spectacle gives precisely the difference to be seen, thereby underscoring the values of the city.²⁴ That said, one would search in vain for a Roman racism: these barbari, once conquered, are considered “recoverable”²⁵ and may, through the assimilation resulting from the conquest, be civilized and become human. The border exists, but it is not watertight.

Roman barbarians

Cicero also brings about another shift of the dividing lines by enlarging the semantic field of the term: he is the first Latin author to qualify Romans as barbari. The rhetorical weight of the word, still felt as foreign because the apophony that would have been expected in *barberus did not occur, helps to drive home the insult against the praetor Verres in the Verrines (3, 23; 5, 148) or the triumvir Antony, target of the Philippics (3, 15; 11, 2; 13, 21). Barbarism is no longer a characteristic reserved for foreigners; a Roman can, in his conduct, display his barbarism — whether incompetence or cruelty. In which case he is unworthy of being Roman and represents a danger to the city and the State. The step taken is important, and these occurrences signal a decisive coming to awareness. If until then barbarism had been envisaged as the preserve of non-Romans and exclusive of humanity, one now realizes that the porosity of the border between barbarians and the civilized allows the inverse contagion. Barbarism can be internal to Rome; the civilized Roman can become a barbarian. From then on, the blurring of the antinomy barbarus vs. humanus will go on intensifying.

The conquests of imperial Rome, while multiplying the contacts with the barbarian peoples, lead to a fresh gaze upon oneself. After Caesar and Pompey, Caligula, Nero, Trajan, and Caracalla identify with Alexander, whose continuators they claim to be.²⁶ This boundless ambition, added to the often murderous tensions in the corridors of power, the taste for luxury that invades the Roman aristocracy with the importation of exotic products — so many signs of what the writers denounce as a moral depravity that moves Rome ever farther from its past grandeur and its republican values, even if few of them directly qualify Romans as “barbarians.”

Taking up the example of the barbarians in the arenas in a famous letter to Lucilius (1, 7, 35), Seneca presents the matter quite differently from Cicero. The endurance praised by the latter is now stigmatized, and the situation completely reversed. Instead of barbarism being the preserve of the gladiators and circumscribed within the enclosure of the amphitheater, it spreads to the tiers of seats and by contagion reaches the Roman spectator, all the more strongly as he takes pleasure in watching this spectacle. The consequence is implacable: “I come back greedier, more ambitious, more given to pleasure — what am I saying? — crueler and more inhuman (inhumanior) from the fact of having found myself among humans (inter homines)” (our emphasis). To replace inter barbaros, which Cicero and his contemporaries would have written, with inter homines reveals all the distance traveled in a few years: the danger comes not (only) from without, from the foreign barbarians; it lies within man himself, in this case the Roman who calls himself civilized. The didactic dimension of the collection perhaps prompts Seneca to seek a pretty turn of phrase through the kind of oxymoron inhumanior / inter homines; nonetheless, the Stoic philosopher amplifies the extension of the concept of barbarism initiated by Cicero. The faults traditionally attributed to the barbarians are also the doing no longer only of a few Romans, who can still be regarded as exceptions; they can be the doing of any Roman whatever.

This blurring of borders will go on growing. A generation later, the historian Tacitus is ferocious in his critique of power: the emperor Nero lets himself be dominated by barbarian freedmen, such as Polyclitus, on whom the Romans have become dependent (Annals, 14, 39, 1–2). Juvenal lashes out violently, in the third of his Satires (vv. 62–68), at the loosening of mores resulting from the contamination by the Graeculi. The scandal constituted by Hellenistic influence on Roman civilization comes from the taste for exotic and gaudy outfits, for complicated musical instruments, but it also results from depravity, with the increase in the number of prostitutes — “those barbarian she-wolves, with their motley headdress.” For the satirist, “the perversion of values is general.”²⁷ And the reversal of the situation is total, for it is now the Greeks — come from Asia Minor or from Egypt, it is true — who are the barbarians.

According to the principle of communicating vessels, the more one criticizes the barbarism of the Romans, the more one points to the humanity of the barbarians: in parallel with these criticisms, a few occurrences valorize their naturalness. Tacitus seems fascinated by “those handsome animals, rich in the noblest instincts, that the Germanic warriors are in his eyes.”²⁸ If the historian insists on the cruelty of their conduct during the massacre of Varus (Annals, 1, 61, 3), his monograph on Germania gives a more positive image of this people, whose roughness, simplicity, and naturalness are underscored as against the decadence, the luxury, and the corruption of his own contemporaries. Ignorance is no longer a fault but becomes a quality attributed to peoples still close to the state of nature (Germania, 45, 5).²⁹ It is through Tacitus that “the idea that there are doubtless some noble savages” is introduced, even if, in other respects, “he takes up the stereotyped image of the barbarian that all the earlier literature furnished him.”³⁰ The poet Martial valorizes barbarian naturalness still more. Two epigrams sing of the beauty and fertility of the “barbarian” countryside, where nature can flourish, contrary to urban sterility (3, 58, 1–7 and 10, 92, 1–4). In the same way, an endromis, a piece of cloth used to cover oneself after exercises at the gymnasium (4, 19, 1–5), or a vase (14, 99, 1–2) will be gifts appreciated for their naturalness, guaranteed by their barbarian origin. Barbarism then becomes synonymous with an original purity, with a sort of golden age before the degradations brought about by civilized man in his sole self-interest.

Who are the Barbarians?

A new redefinition of the borders is brought about by a political decision, the edict promulgated by Caracalla in 212 that confers the status of Roman citizen on all the free inhabitants of the Empire.³¹ This formidable extension of the borders of citizenship dilutes still further the notions of barbarism and civilization. The most celebrated examples are the proponents of the new rhetoric, a cultivated elite represented by former barbarians become Romans, such as Apuleius and Fronto, Tertullian and then Saint Augustine, all natives of Africa, of Numidia, or of Carthage. The border between the barbarian and the civilized is definitively no longer geographical or even ethnic; the definition is now merely a question of morality.

We shall end with a last, but not final, blurring, the one introduced by Christianity. The term barbarus takes on a new acceptation, not unrelated to its original value: the barbarian is the one who has no access to the Word, to the divine logos, and therefore the non-Christian, the pagan. Onto the opposition barbarian vs. civilized is superimposed the opposition unbeliever vs. believer, infidel vs. faithful. The conversion of the emperor Constantine in 314 illustrates this scheme by making latinitas, civilization, and Christianity coincide. In the same way and at the same period, Prudentius, in his Against Symmachus (1, 808–820), draws a parallel between three antithetical pairs — men vs. beasts, Romans vs. Barbarians, and Christians vs. Unbelievers — within which he establishes a hierarchy that culminates in casting the adversaries of Rome into the camp of the Unbelievers, who are conflated with the Barbarians. Now things are in reality more complex, and the superimpositions are not always total.³² To return to the case of the games of the amphitheater, one will recall the example of Tertullian who, in his On the Spectacles (12–19), violently condemns the cruelty of these games as the emblem of the idolatry and the pagan barbarism of the Romans. But the prohibition of the games of the circus will come about only two centuries later, with the fall of the Roman empire in 476, which shows that one can be a Christian Roman emperor and keep barbarian customs. Conversely, the quality of being a Christian does not suffice to preserve one from barbarism: some of the invaders who surge over Europe during what is commonly called “the barbarian invasions” are Christians, such as the Visigoths and Vandals converted to Arianism. Finally, just as there are barbarian Christians (and thus inhuman ones), there are pagan Romans who are civilized. The whole literature of the Church Fathers of this period bears witness to the necessity of rethinking the classifications; it is traversed by this delicate question: are the ancient authors, who are not Christian — and for good reason — humanists or barbarians? The answers are many and varied, ranging from pure and simple exclusion to the recuperation of authors regarded as pre-Christian or as Christians without knowing it.³³ The only way out of the impasse is to agree upon a common foundation of values, communis hominum sapientia,³⁴ whose continuity defines humanitas, on a moral and intellectual plane, against the barbarians defined as all those, whoever they may be, who oppose by force or by obscurantism these values — barbarians internal or external, pagan or Christian, Roman or foreign, etc.

The share of the Latin authors, foremost among them Cicero, is thus fundamental in the definition of barbarism and, by rebound, of civilization. Heirs to the Greek term barbaros, “the one who is not Greek,” they accentuated its pejorative values and enlarged its semantic field: the barbarus is, whether foreigner or Roman, the one who is “inhuman” in every sense of the term, as against the one who displays the qualities of humanitas. Above all, they conceptualized the notion of barbarism by detaching it from its geographical or ethnic anchoring so as to confer on it a rich polysemy, thus opening the way to multiple and fluctuating fields of application. The border established by the Greeks between themselves and the barbaroi has been considerably modified. Henceforth the dividing line, the dividing lines, between civilization and barbarism will multiply and shift according to the epochs and the places, each becoming the barbarian of another in the sixteenth century,³⁵ until one can say, in the middle of the twentieth century, with Lévi-Strauss, that “the barbarian is the one who believes in barbarism,”³⁶ and several authors since have interrogated the different faces taken on by barbarism.³⁷ Insofar as the Latins understood that the opposition between barbarus and humanus is not one-way but reversible, that the demarcation is not absolute but relative, their reflection — if it is but one stage in the history of the definition of the borders between the barbarian and the civilized — is a decisive stage.

Notes