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Ancient History Devoid of Racism

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Petr:
How come ancient history is so amazingly devoid of racism?( referring to roman and greek history )
They managed to create one of the largest contiguous empires but didn't become racists so to speak. I mean of course they thought they were the "sons of mars" and all that pagan gods stuff, but these were mainly cultural and religious, not really racial, beliefs.
Back then they didn't make the association that humans could be divided into races like other animals. They knew lions were stronger than wolves but didn't make the analogy with human beings.

Q: Do you agree with the above? Justify.

IMO it were their republican values that kept them together, the idea that a man's worth what he can put forth. I think they were just so busy fighting their wars they didn't have time to think about stuff like that. What good would it make anyway, if it didn't win battles: "It could end up making the men too confident of themselves and we'd then lose the battle!"
These two quotes that pretty much sum up why I think racism did not pervade roman society
"Courage may be taught as a child is taught to speak." - Euripides Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)
"Few men are born brave. Many become so through training and force of discipline" - Vegetius

Skot the Sanguine:
Neither of those empires were not racist.  For Christ's sake the Greeks dubbed the term barbarian because they were making fun of the way non-Greek speakers sounded.  The Romans also had auxilliary units of foreigners coming from the outer parts of the empire, as they were not true Romans in their eyes and formed in separate units.

These cultures saw you as one of their own (usually as a citizen of a given city) or not.  You either were a Roman citizen, or not.  You were an Athenian, or not.  You were a Corinthian, or not.  For the longest time the Samnites were not given the same rights as the Romans and they were only from the opposite side of a mountain range.

I think your view of these cultures is a bit too rosy.

Edit: also, if you mean they weren't racist because of skin color...that is because everyone was Caucasian in those empires...except the occasional Nubian.

Gilgameshismyhomey:
I disagree with everything you said.  This statement is justified because I said it and everything I say is justified.

xenoargh:
Racism as we know it is a relatively new concept, actually; most of it dates from the period of colonialism and gradually reached full flowering during the 18th and 19th Centuries, when Europeans and various peoples in the Americas started to form a philosophical construct to justify a system of slavery and used their very poor understanding of genetics as a basis for asserting that, in fact, some people are just meant to be the masters by God's design :lol: 

That doesn't mean that there wasn't any discrimination that functioned in a similar fashion, however.  What changed was the justifications, not the practice.

During the 15th Century, for example, a captain of a British ship fighting with Frenchmen in the Channel or on the Mediterranean might have had all sorts of people on his ship, from black Africans from the coastal areas of the Mediterranean and Egyptian ports to Slavic people from as far away as the Black Sea.  But if you weren't a white, Christian, land-owning member of the British nobility, let alone of a funky color, your chances of going higher than Lieutenant were very low, because you would not have "interest".

Turning to the Greeks and Romans... if anything, many of the Greek city-states were positively xenophobic towards outsiders, regardless of skin color, and the Romans, while actively pursuing a policy that permitted many of the cultures they conquered to continue to keep their old customs, was pretty ruthless about keeping people who weren't born in Rome to a smallish number of "noble houses" from having a lot of practical power.

It wasn't "racism" as we currently understand it, being not predicated directly on one's skin but largely on accidents of birth, but it functioned in a very similar fashion.

Papa Lazarou:
People tend to be nice to their own group and nasty to other groups. Groupings for this purpose can be based on pretty much anything. Race - like sex or citizenship - is just a particularly obvious way to group people. Racism may have been less important in the ancient world, but I doubt intergroup dynamics were very different.

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