RESEACH SUGGESTS ROMAN SOCIETY KNEW NO SUCH SOCIAL OBJECT AS A BLACK PERSON AND THAT COLOR BECAME A MODERN WESTERN CIVILIZATION ISSUE. In Roman perceptions the progeny (and a fortiori the later descendants) of a black-white mating might be swarthy or black or white; and such a person might produce a black offspring by mating with a white partner, just as he or she might produce non-black children from the same partner. In this perception, categorisation of a person as white or swarthy or black African (Aethiops) or northern paleface rested entirely on the individual observers optical registration of personal somatic characteristics, altogether uninfluenced by any facts of the observed persons parentage or ancestry (Juv. 6.600; Lucian Philops. 34; Plut. De sera num. vind. (21) [563a]; Ach.Tat. 3.9.2; Lucr. 4.1210-32; PL 64.30, 56, 79, 132f., 145f. [Boethius]; 85.378 [Fulgentius]; PG 65.469 [Philostorgius]).21 That is why Ptolemy can speak of the people of the region of Meroe as by and large the first real Aethiopes encountered in Aethiopia as indigenes by a person travelling up the Nile (Ptol. Geog. 1.9.7-10; cf. 1.8.5, 4.65). This makes it perfectly obvious that Roman society knew no such social object as a blackperson who was not physically and visibly black. The very idea of a black who is black only sociologically, but not physically and visibly, is in fact unimaginable outside the constraints of racist ideologies (the kind of culture that nurtured Madison Grants fervent conviction that the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew(22) ). But despite the firm Roman evidence to the contrary several modern comments on blacks in Roman society appear to rest on the pretence that, throughout history, every society has manifested the same kind of consciousness of human colour-differences and the same vision of discontinuity in colour categories (or racial categories) that has characterised the Western world in the past two centuries: white, black, coloured, yellow, red, brown; or negro, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon and mustee; and so on. The work of F. M. Snowden thus presents the internal contradiction of postulating a non- racial Roman society in which people were nonetheless perceived in American racial terms: as mulatto, quadroon and the like; and in which people of these kinds, though not visibly black or easily recognisable as Negroes, were still blacks or negroes, like the woman represented by a marble statue of the first century AD from Lower Egypt who is at once a mulatto woman with flat nose, thick lips (neither very pronounced) and long flowing hair, and a charming Negro woman; or Poulsens white lad of distinctly plebeian type and Bonacasas Egyptian or Libyan and Cumonts goddess Libya who are respectively Snowdens young mulatto, well-to-do black, and mulatto or quadroon.(23) Snowden rather strangely presumes that artists of the Roman world shared his own societys concept of the black or the negro, and so he can say that the blacks of the ancient artists closely resemble modern blacks, including those today described as coloured or of mixed black and white descent.(24) He likewise sees in the iconography a wide range of black types with varying degrees of Caucasoid admixture and resembling in physical appearance many a descendant of black-white mixture in various parts of the world today.(25) Unable to break free of the tyranny of such modern habits of mind, scholars have also (naturally) misinterpreted Lucians tripartite division of humanity into the categories leukoi, xanthoi and Aithiopes (Lucian Herm. 31), seeing this as a categorisation of whites, yellow peoples like the Chinese (Mongoloids), and blacks,(26) instead of (as Lucian clearly intended it) a categorisation of Mediterraneans, Central-Northern Europeans (yellow-haired palefaces), and blacks. Evidently, in the perception here demonstrated by Lucian, so-called Mongoloids like the Japanese and Chinese were generally categorised as white (with some individuals being perceived as swarthy as was the case even for some Italians), and African albinos were perceived as white also (albeit whites with rather unusual facial shapes and hair-texture, somewhat like the snub-nosed or heavy-lipped Mediterranean whites to whom Lucian occasionally refers [Lucian Navig. 2, 45; Catap. 15; Gall. 14; Philops. 34]).(27) But an excessive intrusion of modern preconceptions about blood and race will naturally blind one to this truth, just as it induced Snowden to misinterpret Statius allusion (Theb. 5.427f.) to the African peoples of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean areas (the Red Aethiopes or Erythraean Africans) as a reference to Negroes of a red, copper-coloured complexion. scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V1N4/thompson.html
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 18:02:34 +0000
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