Rome's racist view of peoples
This is how Rome sees all the peoples different from it and who live outside its borders: transmitted from Roman and Greek sources loyal to the Roman court.
History is history, with its brightness and darkness, with its positives and negatives, pages of light and pages of darkness.
Barbarians according to what Roman sources agreed upon describing them (barbarian)
The word barbarian comes from the Attic Greek word meaning "foreigner" and was used by the Romans to refer to peoples living outside their borders. in general, In the popular imagination, the term "barbarians" is associated with savage, fur-clad, bloodthirsty, axe-in-hand warriors who destroy everything within their reach and leave a trail of death and destruction in their wake. This word is usually used to talk about peoples who opposed the Roman Empire and did not share culture or traditions, but this image was severely distorted over time.
Origin of the term: Linguistically, the word 'barbarian' is a word of Greek origin ('barbaroi') which the inhabitants of the Attica Peninsula used to call foreigners, understood as any people who did not have Hellenistic culture and Greek speech as a basis (Egyptians, Persians, Carthaginians). To Greek ears, the languages of these people were intelligible except for a kind of recurring onomatopoeia that sounded like “bar, bar, bar” (something similar to the present word “blah, blah, blah”) and from this there is confusion about the word barbarian since the “a” was a frequent sound in the Persian language, it is believed that contact with them gave rise to the term.
Other languages have terms similar in origin, meaning or form. For example, in Sanskrit we find the word "barbara" which can be translated as "stuttering".
Until now, the word barbarian was an adjective like any other that was used to distinguish Greeks and Hellenic peoples from other cultures and civilizations. It was some time later, when the borders of Rome already extended across half the world, that the pejorative value of it became apparent. Following the usage introduced by the Greeks, the Romans maintained the original definition of the word "barbarian" and used it for foreigners who did not follow Greek and Roman traditions. However, it ended up referring to those cities that remained outside Rome's borders and against which the Roman legions fought to avoid losing territory. Among these tribes are the Picts, Scots, Goths, Vandals, Alans, Suebi, and Saxons.
Although they referred to them in an undifferentiated way, the truth is that there was not a single barbarian people, but rather different populations or tribes that could ally or confront each other depending on the moment. The fact that the so-called barbarians were enemies of Rome made their view increasingly biased and Manichaean. Thus the members of these peoples were viewed as cruel, brutal, evil, and uncivilized creatures, turning the Romans into superior beings and the barbarians into mere wild and primitive beasts.
The term “barbarians” appeared strongly, especially in the Carthaginian and Roman wars, where the Carthaginians were described as barbarians, and they were also described as Numidian peoples. The term “Numidian” is not the name of a kingdom, as some believe, but rather it is an attributive term and its description is more hideous than barbarian, because barbarian means different, while Numidian means primitive barbarian. The one who lacks culture.. The Libo tribes were also described, as we talked about in (an old publication), with bad culture, as well as banditry and banditry, and historical narratives from the sources are still the reference to look at until now, the same terms are circulated with the same descriptions and linguistic abuse.
Sources: The book Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine
Hans-Georg Pflum, Roman Africa, Paris, 1978, p. 162-163
Michel Dubuisson, “Barbarians and Barbarism in the Greco-Roman World,”
The barbarians 2016
Source: websites