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"Wah wah wah we're all unique people with our own culture and-" shut the fuck up and pay your taxes, barbarian
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Isn't barbarian a term to mock their language?
Racist example
Imagine if we referred to all East Asia as "ChingChongs"
or if the way they talked about Muslims in Team America was the normal way we talked about them.
'Barbarian' is a term for all non-Romans, sometimes (but not always) exempting Greeks. It's not a 'friendly' term, no.
Barbarian has the most slur energy of any word I'll type out in it's entirety. The romaboo fascination with racism that gets a pass because because the targets of said racism don't exist anymore low key disgusts me. Low key because as far as I can tell nobody is actually harmed by it anymore, but it's used in the same contexts and with the same energy as I heard the term "sand n*" tossed around when I worked for the air force and it makes my skin crawl in exactly the same way.
i wonder if Romans were considered racists in their own time.
The concept of race as we would understand it didn't really exist at the time. Romans included men from North Africa and their Syrian wives just as well as natives of the Italian peninsula and those who hailed from Britannia.
Romans were certainly considered arrogant, even by the standards of their time - it's said/joked in contemporary accounts that the Roman Republic had to destroy the Republic of Rhodes, because it offended the Romans that the Rhodians were the only peoples in the world as arrogant as the Romans themselves were.
However, while their chauvinism is certainly strong by modern standards, it's also a far-cry from the ethnonationalist screeds one thinks of in the modern day. The Romans not only believed that it was normal and necessary to include conquered peoples' as fellow members of the polity, being founded as a city of criminals and exiles, but also that cultural diversity within the Empire was a positive thing, and that it was good that provincials still followed the ways of their ancestors (so long as they still obeyed Roman law).
In contrast to the Greeks, amongst even the much-vaunted Athenians a resident foreigner would remain a foreigner no matter how long their ancestors had lived in Athens nor what services they rendered to Athens; or the contemporary Han Chinese, who believed that non-Han culture produced nothing of value; the Romans both offered a full share (if contingent on service) in the Roman polity to provincials and acknowledged that provincials did a great many things better than the Romans themselves.
trying to put modern concepts like racism is a stupid task, but yhea, chauvinism is a much better term that can apply to Romans.
interesting that despite it, they were open to other cultures.
if my question was stupid is because I genuinely want to know more
The question wasn't stupid at all, it was very valid! While modern racism solidified from the ~16th century onward, the past before that has a great many concepts of 'othering', some of which are recognizably roughly 'racist', and others which are probably more distant from the concept. Wondering about where a particular polity falls on this spectrum is commendable interest in the subject!
The Romans were a funny folk in that way. Immensely arrogant and capable of great snobbery, but also capable of accepting people from diverse backgrounds. The Emperor Pertinax, for example, was the son of a freed slave, while Emperor Septimius Severus (whose tondo I linked in the above comment) was a visibly darker man of Punic and Berber descent from North Africa, married to a Syrian woman. What made someone 'Barbarian' was mutable rather than immutable, and dependent on cultural affectations rather than birth.
There's a bit by the Emperor Claudius arguing in the Senate house that I always like to note:
it's so interesting that all the protofascist Rome fans nowadays are so racist that would make Romans want to distance themselves from them.
wonder how Romans would react to the modern race concept or that "some skin colours are superior to others".
Bemusement at the 'barbarian' concept, probably! The Romans believed (somewhat simplistically, but not entirely inaccurately) that skin color was the product of exposure to sun - people from Africa were darker-skinned because they lived in a land where the sun was constant and harsh; while people from Germany were pale because they lived in a land where sunlight was less intense. There was a great emphasis in Roman thought on the idea that environments made people, rather than birth - in part for that reason, Roman cities everywhere from Africa to Britain followed extremely similar construction patterns, under the idea that even in foreign lands that were altogether too hot or too cold, and intermarrying with foreign peoples, people in suitably Roman social environments would grow up to be Romans, or Roman-material.
It's a shame that whenever I see someone with a Graeco-Roman bust as a profile picture, my first assumption is not "Classics fan" but "fascist". We might reclaim some of that imagery someday, but I'll probably be old and gray by the time we succeed - IF we succeed. Bloodsucking fascist fucks.