Chapter 7: Ethnicity and race in the ancient world, and why it still matters today
Maya Harriss
Blog post
Author note: I am a white author who has lived in predominantly Western countries, and I have not faced systematic racism. I give no personal views on how racism impacts lives today.
Somehow despite all the advances we’ve made as a species to reach the 21st century, discrimination against other humans is still rampant. Racism – being discriminated against or experiencing prejudice based on characteristics held by certain ‘races’ – is unfortunately an old problem humans have yet to learn to overcome. It appears racism might even be on the rise despite modern morality seemingly heading the other way.
The concept of race is just that, a concept. It attempts to group people into categories according to so-called key differences such as skin colour but always ends up being due to social and political purposes. From the physical difference of ‘black’ and ‘white’ skin colours, other features ultimately get attributed that have no scientific basis. For example, throughout history, ‘blackness’ (as in having a dark skin colour) often meant being seen as less than a ‘white’ European person. From Hippocrates in ancient Greece to the last few hundred years, being ‘Black’ (which I will keep in quotation marks to symbolise its social connotations) meant being seen as less than human, which is simply not true.
In ancient Greece during the 4th and 5th centuries BCE, as long as you were considered a Greek, and therefore a citizen, you could live your life (assuming that you were a rich man). Race wasn’t then what it is today. Hippocrates, a physician, wrote texts on what we call environmental determinism – that is, that humans develop features based on our location and environment. Hippocrates believed that Greece was in a sweet spot geographically, between Asia and Europe. In Asia the warmer climate fostered ‘laziness’ and ‘mental flabbiness’ in people but also meant that they were ‘less warlike than Europeans’. The cooler and variable climate in Europe meant the people were more courageous, as ‘distress and pain increase courage’. Hippocrates wrote: ‘That is one reason for the more warlike nature of Europeans’ (Hipp. Airs, Waters, Places 23). In this passage, Hippocrates seems to ascribe a ‘warlike’ characteristic as both positive and negative, depending on how it is used.
Despite the seemingly bizarre attributions of character to physical traits, it doesn’t seem like Hippocrates meant to discriminate against any one group of people. He was simply explaining why things were the way they were. This begins to change by the time of the Athenian concept that being a citizen was inherently better than being in any other group, such as people who started off as slaves (who could become free, despite popular knowledge) or came from outside Athens.
The ancient Greeks had different concepts of race and ethnicity from what we have today. The concept that environment impacts personal character begins as early as 500 BCE, when pre-Socratic philosophers were writing. In Athens, anyone considered a citizen was in the ‘top’ category of individuals. The word ‘metic’ referred to someone who was not a citizen but rather a legal foreigner or immigrant who intended to stay in Athens. It was a category of people below citizens but above slaves. New laws were introduced and enforced that gave more power to citizens than these other people, such as dual parentage laws regarding citizenship and bans on certain marriages. While, initially, being a metic would have been little different to being an Athenian citizen, over time the growing population and travel and trade routes meant that metics began to be freedmen and immigrants, who had different physical features to the so-called indigenous Athenians (who tried very hard to keep their being Athenian private). This likely led to prejudice based on perceived ethnicity and culture. With this automatic distrust of ‘otherness’, we begin to see the roots of modern racism.
By the 17th and 18th centuries, physiognomy (the idea of assigning characteristics to physical traits) appears again quite heavily. ‘White’ Europeans began to try to find scientific reasons to put down other ‘races’, particularly people with darker skin, so they could continue to justify their power. For example, Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) believed that African and African American people were ‘at least two grades below Anglo-Saxons in ability and intelligence’ (Jackson and Weidman 2005:68). Often the ‘scientific’ basis for these thoughts was based on ancient texts such as Hippocrates. This pseudoscience of trying to create facts to explain racism is known as scientific racism.
However, the attribution of physical features to mental or emotional ones is something that is not over. Physiognomy carries an important past that impacts modernity in hidden ways. Physiognomy was used in the last few centuries by scientists and scholars to explain away their racism, which in turn led to supporting slavery and the degradation of human beings based on skin colour without any scientific basis. These scientists knowingly used false data to maintain a social order that they benefited from. The personal biases involved in scientific racism reflect more on the people of the time than their scientific method, as they tried to create concepts of ‘race’ based on personal views rather than evidence. These categories could then further validate European centralised ideals without blaming ‘white’ individuals. In the 19th century there was a revival of physiognomy as modern racism began solidifying itself. Despite this lack of true science people are still attempting to use this ‘science’ to justify their claims.
Moving to the more recent 1900s, physiognomy has been used to try to explain any number of things – particularly the skill of ‘Black’ people in sports. When Jesse Owens, an African American man, won four gold medals in the Olympic Games in 1936, people had questions. There was a belief that ‘Black’ individuals were closer to nature – ‘less evolved’ than Europeans (and white Americans) – and better at physical labour. However, as far from these thoughts as people think they are today, there is a stereotype of ‘Black’ individuals fundamentally being better at sports than other ‘races’; this comes from a history of scientific racism based on ancient texts without modern revision.
There are many more cases of stereotypes and false information surrounding ‘Black’ people that are based on this history of scientific racism, which in turn is based on the ancient ideas of physiognomy, despite whatever the ancient authors intended. In today’s political climate it is more important than ever to be aware of humanity’s past in order to be aware of our present.
