The Other European Views of

In ancient Greece, peoples of other ethnic backgrounds were identified as barbarophonoi (Homer, in the Iliad [c. 800 B.C.E.]), or as those who spoke nonunderstandable languages. However since the Greek world did not have the concept of a larger national unit, everyone outside the family or urban community was perceived as foreign, as other (allos, allodapos, and xenos). Significantly the Greeks did not necessarily differentiate between members of a foreign polis (city-state) and non-Greeks. Nevertheless the Greeks espoused the ideal of hospitality, which extended especially to foreigners; in later centuries many cities appointed a proxenos whose task it was to serve as a host for foreigners, perhaps comparable to the modern diplomatic institutions. At the turn of the sixth century B.C.E., a more xenophobic concept of the barbarian developed in Greece, triggered by a feeling of cultural superiority and also by fear of the growing Persian threat. Both Euripides and Aristotle, for instance, identified the barbarian with subhuman creatures and argued that their sole function was to serve as slaves—an attitude that slowly changed only after Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire (Stutzinger). Whereas the early Roman republic was built on a fairly strict division between Roman citizens and foreigners, during the time of the Roman Empire the Roman civitas was extended to additional population groups. The Constitutio Antoniniana (212 C.E.) awarded Roman citizenship to all free people living within the borders of the state. Nevertheless the entire ancient world accepted the idea of slavery and treated all defeated foreigners as objects that could be sold or killed at will. During the age of migration, Germanic tribes attacked the Roman Empire strengthening the notion of the barbaric others, especially since Romans regarded their nomadic opponents—in close parallel to the ideology espoused by modern colonialists, especially in the Americas and Africa—as primitive, lacking in culture and civilization.

During late antiquity the concept of monsters—teratology—living at the outskirts of the Roman world became popular; these monsters have populated literary and artistic imagination ever since. Pliny the Elder collected some of the most influential accounts about these monsters in his Naturalis historia (before 79 C.E.), followed by Caius Julius Solinus's Collectanea rerum memorabilium (c. 250 C.E.), which medieval and early modern encyclopedists and naturalists eagerly copied. Solinus's works became the source for scores of artists and writers who blithely integrated this "information" about strange beings on the periphery of human civilization into their texts and images (Williams).