Essay - Perceptions of Race and Racial Difference in Ancient Greece: Classical...

Perceptions of Race and Racial Difference in Ancient Greece:

Classical Greek Ethnicity and its Expression/Conception in Aristotelian Philosophy

The world known to modern philosophy and anthropology is linearly far more expansive than that with which the Classical Greco-Roman ***** was familiar. Modern thought has spanned ***** globe, and pondered the mysteries ***** civilizations in even ***** most intemperate and remote corners of two hemispheres. Nonetheless it remains true that our world appears smaller. It has been numbered and categorized ***** such an extent that the modes of thought *****d culture which in another time would seem obscure and alien are now textually documented ***** comprehensible. Much of that which is alien about outside cultures is now encompassed with***** the confines of Western thought, and indeed, so much have our borders exp*****ed that nations many times the size of ancient Greece can indeed be said to have a consistent sort ***** thought, and the simple term "Western" is capable of replacing veins of philosophical thought previously confined to the borders ***** a single metropolis. In the day of Aristotle and the other masterminds of Hellenic *****, the regions which with they were vaguely culturally familiar, and even more frighteningly, the regions which they simply knew to exist beyond the borders of their philosophical anthropology, seemed a vast and hostile alien maze. Through-out human history, it has been necessary for the species to define those who consist of "us" and those which we shall label "Not-Us" or "Them." In ***** thought, or more specifically, Athenian thought, all those ***** did not speak Greek and live according to the ethical considerations ***** ***** Greeks were in a lump considered "B*****rbarians." This grouping encompassed not only ***** cultures with which ***** were acquainted in a ***** fashion, such as the Persians, but also ***** ***** with which they had ***** mythological acqua*****tance. Unlike the world of modern thinkers, an "us" group ***** easy to ***** in terms ***** geography, language, ***** morality. It is perhaps not surpris*****g then ***** definitions ***** created for intelligentsia and common-folk based on cultural elements rather ***** more modern, and often fabricated, divisi*****s of genetic race and phenomenology.

***** mentioned above, any modern study of Greek ***** inevitably finds *****elf bound to study A*****ian thought to the general exclusion ***** o*****r regions. The ***** majority of recorded Hellenic ***** descends to us from Athens, ***** the Athenians themselves, in a display of theoretically justifiable arrogance, claim that Athens and ***** ***** *****separable. To philosophers and political theoreticians such as Aristotle, Athens and its people were a paradigm of culture and the model for everything ideally human. If one could be said to be a citizen of A*****ns, and representative of her people, then one w***** certainly Greek. Barbarity was in no small part defined in terms of a cultures or *****dividuals variance ***** the A*****ian model and ideal. It ***** Athens that passed down to the ***** ***** its conceptions ***** *****auty and artistry, its philosophical dilemmas and debates,