The Invention of Racism in Classical AntiquityThere was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. |
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... Greek and Latin literature of the period concerned . It focuses on bigotry and social hatred in antiquity . This may not be an appealing subject , but its impor- tance cannot be denied . This work is not concerned with the actual ...
... Greek lan- guage and Greek society is the word " barbarian , " still used today in English and other modern languages . This concept has been studied extensively , as it says so much about Greek and Roman culture in general . However ...
... Greek superiority ) was strongly negative . It raised a barrier between the Greeks and their neighbors that was crossed consciously , deliberately and at last wantonly . Without such a barrier there would scarcely have been an organic ...
... Greek culture was admired , studied , and imitated in Rome , the present work will concentrate more on the negative or ambivalent attitudes Rome showed towards Greeks and F. I. Zeitlin , Playing the Other : Gender and Society in Classical ...
... Greeks in their classical age failed to build an integrated empire including non - Greeks , and we know that the Roman Em- pire was a multiethnic structure for centuries . This might have led us to suppose that the attitudes of Greek ...