Were the Ancient Greeks and Romans White?

Most people assume that everyone who lived in ancient Greece and Rome was white. This is a notion that has been continually reinforced through modern films and television shows. This is especially obvious in the egregiously historically inaccurate film 300, which portrays all the Greek characters as white and all the Persian characters as people of color. How accurate is this idea really, though? Were the Greeks and Romans really white? What does “whiteness” actually mean anyway?

I won’t deny that the majority of people who lived in Greece and Italy in ancient times would probably be considered white by most Americans if they were alive today. Nonetheless, the ancient Greeks and Romans certainly did not think of themselves as white and modern Greeks and Italians haven’t always been considered white either.

Furthermore, there were undoubtedly people whom we would consider Brown and Black present in ancient Greece and Rome from a very early date. These people almost certainly included famous ancient philosophers, writers, theologians, and even Roman emperors. In fact, people whom we would consider people of color probably made up a significant proportion of the total population of the Roman Empire, if not the majority.

What “race” is

The concept of “race” in humans has absolutely no biological or anthropological basis. The whole notion that people are either “white” or “not white” is entirely a modern social construct that was originally invented by people of western European descent during the Early Modern Period (lasted c. 1450 – c. 1750) in order to justify slavery, colonialism, and racism.

Of course people from different parts of the world generally tend to have certain physical features in common; no one would deny that. What lots of people fail to realize, though, is that we cannot scientifically group these people into distinct “races.” So-called “racial traits” are not concordant, meaning the presence of one trait in an individual that is normally associated with one “race” does not mean the person will have the other traits associated with that “race.”

If you don’t believe me, take it from an anthropologist. Here is an excerpt from page 103 of the third edition of the introductory college-level anthropology textbook Essentials of Physical Anthropology by Clark Spencer Larson, published in 2016:

“In the early 1970s, the American geneticist R. C. Lewontin (b. 1929) tested the race concept by studying global genetic variation. If human races existed, most genetic diversity would be accounted for by them. Focusing on blood groups, serum proteins, and red blood cell enzyme variants, Lewontin found that the so-called races accounted for only about 5%-10% of the genetic diversity. In other words, most variation occurred across human populations regardless of “racial” makeup—human “races” have no taxonomic significance. Since Lewontin’s study, many other genetic studies have reached the same conclusion.”

“Subsequent studies by other scientists—of wide-ranging characteristics such as genetic traits and cranial morphology—have all shown the same thing: so-called races account for a very small amount of biological variation. Multiple biological races do not lead to clear-cut racial classifications because traits simply do not agree in their frequency of distribution. One trait might cut across human populations one way, but another trait cuts across them in another way.”

To illustrate Larson’s point, traits that we normally associate with one so-called “racial group” often crop up in other populations. For instance, there are indigenous people from the Solomon Islands who have dark skin, but who are as blond-haired as any Norwegian and did not inherit this trait from any European.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a native girl from the island of Vanuatu with dark skin and curly blond hair

Likewise, there are Uyghurs from northwest China who have facial features that are typically seen as “Asian,” but yet who are pale-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Uyghur girl from Turpan, China, with blond hair and blue eyes

The traits that racists latch onto to define racial categories are entirely arbitrary and superficial.

How the ancient Greeks and Romans thought about skin color

The ancient Greeks and Romans did not think about race in the same way that people think about race in the United States in the twenty-first century. They had no concept of a “white race” at all. If you walked up to a random man on the streets of Athens in the fifth century BC and asked him, “Hey, are you white?” he would understand you about as much as a modern person would if you walked up to them on the street today and asked them, “Hey, are you olive?” The Greeks knew what the color white was, but they did not have any concept of “white” as a racial category.

In fact, the ancient Greeks and Romans, far from seeing skin color as determining a person’s race, most often used skin color in art to distinguish a person’s gender. Women in ancient Greece and Rome were traditionally expected to stay inside and out of the sun, so they were usually very pale; whereas men were expected to go outside and work in the sun, so they were usually deeply tanned.

Thus, in ancient Greek and Roman art, men are often depicted with dark skin and women are often depicted with pale skin. In Greek black-figure vase paintings, men are always shown in black and women are always shown in white. (See the black-figure vase painting of Achilles and Penthesileia below, for instance.) A similar rule applies to Roman fresco paintings from the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

ABOVE: Photograph of an Attic black-figure neck-amphora from Vulci, Etruria, dating to around 520 BC, depicting the hero Achilles fighting the Amazon warrior Penthesileia

ABOVE: Ancient Roman fresco from the House of Mars and Venus in Pompeii depicting the goddess Venus with pale skin and the god Mars with dark skin as a way of distinguishing gender

Changing definitions of “whiteness”

Not only is “whiteness” an entirely modern concept that would be alien to the Greeks and Romans themselves, but definitions of who counts as “white” have changed significantly over the course of history. In Britain and the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were seriously people who insisted that the Irish were not white and used this as justification for their subjugation by the English.

For instance, in 1899, the racist British author H. Strickland Constable wrote and published the book Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View, in which he attempted to argue with complete sincerity that the Irish were “originally an African race.” This seems to have been a rather eccentric, but not entirely fringe view among Anglo-Protestants at the time.

ABOVE: Gratuitously racist illustration from H. Strickland Constable’s 1899 book Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View

A time when Greeks and Italians were not considered white

As I discuss in this article from February 2020, most modern Greeks probably have a fairly large proportion of ancient Greeks ancestors and most modern Italians probably have a fairly large proportion of ancient Roman ancestors. The modern-day populations of Greece and Italy probably therefore fairly well represent the populations of those places in ancient times. Most Greeks and Italians are considered white today—but they weren’t necessarily considered white a century ago.

For a long time, in the English-speaking world, the “whiteness” of Greeks and Italians was seen as questionable at best. In the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo-Americans regarded Greek and Italian immigrants as inherently racially different from themselves. They stereotyped them as lazy, unprofitable members of society. They referred to them using hateful ethnic slurs such as “dago” and “wop.”

In 1891, a group of nineteen Italian men were accused of having murdered the police chief of the city of New Orleans. They were arrested. Nine of them were tried. Of those who were tried, six were acquitted and three were declared mistrials. The public became convinced that the jury was being intimidated by the Italian mafia, so, on 14 March, a lawyer named William S. Parkerson rallied an angry mob to storm the city jail and kill the Italians.

The mob marched on the jail chanting “We want the dagoes!” They broke down the door with a battering ram. The guards released the prisoners from their cells so they could hide or escape, but the mob hanged two of the Italian men and shot them full of bullets. They shot and clubbed nine other Italian prisoners to death in front of the prison.

Of the eleven Italian men who were killed by the mob, none of them had been convicted. This was one of the largest and most notorious mass lynchings ever to take place in the United States of America. Teddy Roosevelt, who did not hold any elected office at the time, commented on the lynching, calling it “a rather good thing.” John M. Parker, one of the main organizers of the mob, later went on to become the 37th Governor of the state of Louisiana. In 1911, he said that Italians were “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous.”

ABOVE: Illustration from the book History of the United States by E. Benjamin Andrews, published in 1912 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, showing the angry mob breaking into the New Orleans prison to lynch the eleven Italians

Greek people have also been subjected to racially-motivated violence in the United States. In 1909, hysteria over the large number of Greek immigrants working in meatpacking factories in the town of South Omaha, Nebraska, led a local man named Joseph Murphy—who was, ironically, of Irish descent—to publish a petition to expel all Greek and other southern European immigrants from the city.

In his petition, Murphy wrote that the city had become “infested by a vile bunch of filthy Greeks who have attacked our women, insulted pedestrians upon the street, openly maintained gambling dens and many other forms of viciousness.” An op-ed in The Omaha Daily News added even more racist vitriol, declaring, “They have insulted women … Greeks are a menace to the American labouring man—just as the Japs, Italians, and other similar labourers are.”

These hateful attacks on the Greek community culminated in a bloody pogrom that lasted for seven hours on the day of 21 February 1909, known as the “Greek Town riot,” in which a mob of roughly 3,000 white supremacist men violently assaulted Greeks and other olive-skinned minorities, burned the entire Greek neighborhood of South Omaha, and displaced the entire Greek population of the city. The police stood by and did nothing. The rioters killed at least one Greek boy and caused an estimated $8 million in damages in today’s money. Greek Town was abandoned and never reestablished.

ABOVE: Photograph of a Greek-owned hotel in South Omaha that was destroyed by white supremacists during the Greek Town riot on 21 February 1909

In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was refounded. This new, refounded Klan incorporated virulent anti-Italianism and anti-Hellenism into its overarching anti-immigrant ideology. In 1924, Klansmen passed out cards at polling sites all across the United States with this egregiously racist poem, describing a world that Klansmen saw as their worst possible nightmare:

“When cotton grows on the fig tree
And alfalfa hangs on the rose
When the aliens run the United States
And the Jews grow a straight nose
When the Pope is praised by every one
In the land of Uncle Sam
And a Greek is elected President
THEN–the Ku Klux won’t be worth a damn.”

At first, it may seem a bit surprising that the Klan was anti-Hellenic, considering that the name Ku Klux Klan itself is derived from the Greek language, but this really shouldn’t be so surprising; it was widely (but certainly wrongly) believed among white supremacists in the early twentieth century that the ancient Greeks and Romans had been members of the so-called “Nordic race” and that modern Greeks were a totally different, inferior people.

The American Hellenic Education Progressive Action (AHEPA), a Greek fraternal organization, was originally founded in 1922 to combat the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-immigrant and anti-Hellenic bigotry. It also had another, unstated purpose, though: to convince Anglo-Americans that Greek people were really white.

Ultimately, efforts by Greeks and Italians to portray themselves as white proved successful and it is partly on account of these efforts that most Americans today accept them as white without question.

ABOVE: Photograph of Klansmen burning a cross in 1921. The refounded Ku Klux Klan attacked Greek and Italian immigrants in the early twentieth century.

Presence of non-Europeans in classical Greece

I think I have now established that the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think of themselves as “white” and that Anglo-Americans have not always considered modern Greeks and Italians white either. Things go much further, though, because we can be quite certain that Greeks and Italians have been in contact with dark-skinned peoples of African and Near Eastern ancestry from the very beginning of their history, from a time even before the development of the Greek alphabet.

The earliest period of recorded Greek history is the Mycenaean Period (lasted c. 1600 – c. 1100 BC). We have relatively few Greek records from this period and the records that we do have are written in a syllabary script known as Linear B. These records consist entirely of administrative documents; there are no historical accounts from this period.

In 2019, though, archaeologists discovered an Egyptian gold pendant with the head of the goddess Hathor in a Greek tomb in the city of Pylos in the southern Peloponnesos dated to around 1500 BC, proving that there was already trade between Greece and Egypt at this very early date. As I discuss in this article from April 2020, most ancient Egyptians would probably be considered Brown and there were definitely some Egyptians who would be considered Black.

In other words, from the very beginning, Greek people were in contact with people from Africa who tended to have darker skin than themselves. It’s easy to imagine that Egyptian merchants may have been a fairly common sight in Mycenaean Greece. Unfortunately, our records of this period are too sparse for us to say for certain.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from The New York Times of the Egyptian pendant discovered in a Mycenaean Greek tomb at Pylos dating to around 1500 BC

Black people in Greek mythology

It’s hard to say whether the Mycenaean Greeks were aware of the African lands south of Egypt, but, by the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 510 BC), the Greeks were certainly well aware of the fact that there were lands further away than Egypt where people tended to have even darker skin.

The word that is normally used to refer to people whom we would consider Black in Ancient Greek is Αἰθίοψ (Aithíops), which the Greeks themselves interpreted as being derived from the verb αἴθω (aíthō), meaning “to burn,” and ὤψ (ṓps), meaning “face.” Thus, in their view, the word literally meant “Burnt-Faced People.” The Greeks interpreted the word this way because it was popularly believed that the Aithiopians lived at the far edges of the world, close to where the sun rises and sets, and it was thought that they had dark skin because their skin had been burned by the heat of the sun.

In the Odyssey, Book One, the Aithiopians are characterized as an extraordinarily blessed and pious people who live in great abundance. They are portrayed as the only people among whom the deities are said to walk freely, without disguise. Here is how the poet describes them, as translated by Robert Fitzgerald:

“But now that god [i.e., Poseidon]
had gone far off among the sunburnt races [i.e., Aithiopians],
most remote of men, at earth’s two verges,
in sunset lands and lands of the rising sun,
to be regaled by smoke of thighbones burning,
haunches of rams and bulls, a hundred fold.
He lingered delighted at the banquet side.”

Obviously, this is a stereotypical representation. We shouldn’t imagine that the poet, who probably lived in the region of Ionia in western Asia Minor, had direct, first-hand knowledge of ancient African cultures. Nonetheless, you will notice that the stereotype presented here is a positive one; the poet sees Black Africans not as an inferior race of any sort, but rather as noble and pious.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the world as described by the fifth-century BC Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos in his Histories. Notice the “Ethiopians” living in the far south of Africa.

The Aithiopians in the myth of Perseus and Andromeda

The Aithiopians feature prominently in the myth of Perseus and Andromeda. Perhaps the most complete classical Greek version of this myth comes from the Bibliotheke of Pseudo-Apollodoros, a mythographic composition written in around the second century AD or thereabouts.

The story goes that Andromeda was the daughter of King Kepheus and Queen Kassiopeia of Aithiopia. Queen Kassiopeia boasted that her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than all the Nereids in the sea, so Poseidon sent a terrible sea monster known as the ketos to ravage the land of Aithiopia and cause widespread destruction. The king and queen became desperate to save their people, so they consulted an oracle, who told them that, in order to save their land, they needed to sacrifice Andromeda to the ketos. They therefore chained Andromeda to a rock by the sea for the ketos to devour her.

The hero Perseus, however, who was just returning from slaying the Gorgon Medousa, happened to be passing through Aithiopia. He saw Andromeda chained to the rock and the ketos approaching. He was charmed by how beautiful she was, so he went to Andromeda’s parents and told them he would save their daughter if they would grant him her hand in marriage. King Kepheus and Queen Kassiopeia agreed, so Perseus pulled out Medousa’s severed head and showed it to the fearsome sea monster. The ketos instantly turned to stone and Andromeda was saved.

Unbeknownst to Perseus, Andromeda had previously been engaged to her uncle Phineus, who was jealous of Perseus and started a conspiracy, plotting to murder him. Perseus discovered the plot, so he showed the head of Medousa to Phineus and his co-conspirators, turning them all to stone.

Curiously, even though Kassiopeia, Kepheus, and Andromeda are consistently described as Aithiopians in the ancient written sources, they are consistently represented in art as what we consider white people. In ancient Greek vase paintings, Andromeda is shown with white skin. In classical European paintings, she is always portrayed as a pale-skinned European. Even in the 2012 film Wrath of the Titans, she is bizarrely portrayed as pale and blond. This is clearly ridiculous whitewashing and it needs to stop. Andromeda should be portrayed as a Black woman.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Corinthian black-figure vase painting dated to between c. 575 and c. 550 BC, currently on display in the Altes Museum in Berlin, depicting Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the ketos

ABOVE: Painting of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the ketos by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian, dated to roughly between 1554 and 1556

ABOVE: Screenshot from the 2012 film Wrath of the Titans of Perseus and Andromeda, who is, for some reason, portrayed as a pale blond woman, even though she’s supposed to be an Aithiopian princess

Memnon, king of the Aithiopians

The most famous Aithiopian in Greek mythology, however, is Memnon, the king of Aithiopia, who is said to have been a key ally of the Trojans during the Trojan War and to have led a massive army of Aithiopians against the Achaians. He was the son of the Trojan prince Tithonos and the goddess Eos and he wore armor that had been forged by the god Hephaistos himself. He was renowned as one of the greatest warriors who ever fought and was regarded as on par with Achilles.

Memnon was such an epic warrior that the ancient Greeks actually had an entire epic poem about him (well, partially about him at least) called the Aithiopis, which was five books in length and part of the so-called “Epic Cycle.” Unfortunately, the poem itself has now been lost, but several summaries of its contents have survived. According to the Aithiopis, the Achaian hero Antilochos, the son of Nestor, killed Memnon’s dear comrade Aisopos on the field of battle, so Memnon killed Antilochos. Nestor, Antilochos’s father, begged Achilles to kill Memnon and avenge Antilochos’s death.

Achilles confronted Memnon of the field of battle. The heroes were evenly matched and they fought for a long time before Achilles finally stabbed Memnon through the heart with his spear, killing him. Memnon’s mother Eos, however, loved Memnon so much that she begged Zeus to bring him back to life and make him an immortal god. Zeus obliged.

Unlike Andromeda, Memnon is actually sometimes depicted in classical art with stereotypically African features. For instance, an ancient Greek black-figure vase painting dated to between c. 550 and c. 525 BC depicts him with thick red lips, a short, broad nose, and a projecting lower face—all features that have long been stereotypically associated with people of African ancestry.

ABOVE: Ancient Greek black-figure vase painting dating to between c. 550 and c. 525 BC, showing him with stereotypically African features

This portrayal, however, is far from consistent and most depictions of Memnon from antiquity show him without any clear iconographic features to distinguish him as African.

On the other hand, modern representations of Memnon are significantly more consistent in making him look like a Black man. For instance, below is an illustration by the French engraver Bernard Picart (lived 1673 – 1733) that clearly depicts him this way.

ABOVE: Engraving of a nude Memnon by the French engraver Bernard Picard (lived 1673 – 1733) depicting him as a Black man

Delphos, namesake of Delphoi

The Aithiopians don’t just appear in remote parts of the world in Greek mythology, though; in one myth, an Aithiopian man may even appear as the namesake of a sanctuary in the heart of Greece itself.

Delphos, the legendary namesake of the sanctuary of Delphoi, where the famed oracle of Apollon was located, is said in one tradition to have been the son of the god Poseidon and a woman named Μελανθώ (Melanthṓ). This name is derived from the Greek word μέλας (mélas), meaning “dark.” In another tradition, his mother is said to have been named Μελάνις (Melánis), which is derived from the same root word.

These traditions about Delphos’s mother’s name seem to have given rise to a belief that Delphos was of African ancestry. Coins dated to the fifth century BC from the Greek city-state of Phokis, which ruled Delphoi, depict a man with stereotypically African features, including curly hair, a short, broad nose, and thick lips. It is widely assumed that this man is supposed to be Delphos.

Unfortunately, because the coins in question lack clear inscriptions, we can’t be sure if this is the case. Regardless of who the man on the Delphian coins is supposed to be, though, he’s clearly supposed to be African and the fact that the features on the coin are reasonably accurate demonstrates that whoever minted the coin had at least some idea of what Africans look like.

ABOVE: Photograph of a silver coin from Delphoi dated to the fifth century BC depicting Delphos, the legendary founder of the town, with African features

Pelops

In addition to the Aithiopians, there are other people in Greek mythology who are described as having dark skin. The ancient Greeks may not have necessarily envisioned these people as what we would consider Black, but they are apparently supposed to have had darker skin than most other people in the culture surrounding them.

A notable example of this is Pelops, the king of Pisa, founder of the House of Atreus, and namesake of the Peloponnesos. Pelops’s name in Greek (Πέλοψ; Pélops) literally means “dark-faced.” Pelops is said to have been a Phrygian from the central western part of Anatolia and his skin is said to have been dark except for his left shoulder, which was white as ivory.

The story behind this is that Pelops’s father Tantalos, the king of Phrygia, murdered him, cooked him, and served his flesh to the deities as part of a feast. None of the deities ate the meat, except the goddess Demeter, who was grieving over the loss of her daughter Persephone and absentmindedly ate Pelops’s left shoulder.

The gods cursed Tantalos to eternal torment in Tartaros and resurrected Pelops, but he was missing his left shoulder because Demeter had eaten it, so Hephaistos made him a new left shoulder out of ivory.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Greek bas-relief depiction Pelops and his wife Hippodameia riding in a chariot. Pelops’s name means “dark-faced.”

Expansion of Greek knowledge of the wider world in the Hellenistic Period

All the myths I have talked about so far are attested at least as early as the Classical Period (lasted c. 510 – c. 323 BC). In the late Classical Period, though, Greek awareness of the wider world expanded greatly as a result of the conquests of Alexandros III of Makedonia (the man commonly known in English as “Alexander the Great”), who conquered nearly the entire Middle East and led his armies as far east as northwest India.

Shortly after Alexander’s death in 323 BC, his whole empire was divided up among his generals, who called themselves the Diadochoi, or “Successors.” This marks the beginning of the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 30 BC). During this period, there were Greek monarchs ruling over lands as far east as what is now Pakistan. One of the most significant Hellenistic Greek kingdoms was the Ptolemaic Kingdom, which ruled Egypt.

As a result of so much of the world being under Greek rule, knowledge about far-flung places was written down in Greek and spread throughout the Middle East. For instance, the Greek writer Megasthenes (lived c. 350 – c. 290 BC) served as a diplomat at the court of the Indian king Chandragupta Maurya and wrote a lengthy book about Indian history titled Indika.

Meanwhile, the Ptolemies sent elephant-hunting expeditions far south into what is now Sudan. Greek travelers also visited the region. These travelers brought back detailed, first-hand information about the powerful Meroitic Kushite Empire, which, as I discuss in this article from June 2020, ruled the lands south of Egypt in what is now central Sudan.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons of the empire of Alexander the Great. Notice how Asia makes up the vast majority of the empire.

People of color in Hellenistic Greece

Greek people weren’t just brought into contact with darker-skinned peoples of Asia and Africa, though; at least some people from those other cultures actually came to live in Greece itself. A famous example of this is the renowned philosopher Zenon of Kition (lived c. 334 – c. 262 BC), who was famously of Phoenician ancestry.

Zenon’s Phoenician ancestors had left their homeland in what is now Lebanon and settled on the island of Kypros in the eastern Mediterranean. He was born on this island in the city of Kition. He became a wealthy merchant, but he lost most of his wealth in a shipwreck, which left him stranded in Athens. After this shipwreck, he met the Cynic philosopher Krates of Thebes (lived c. 365 – c. 285 BC) and became his student. Zenon went on to found the influential philosophical school of Stoicism.

The Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios, who lived in around the third century AD, explicitly describes Zenon as dark-skinned in his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Here is what Diogenes Laërtios says about Zenon’s appearance, as translated by R. D. Hicks:

“Zenon, the son of Mnaseas (or Demeas), was a native of Kition in Kypros, a Greek city which had received Phoenician settlers. He had a wry neck, says Timotheus of Athens in his book On Lives. Moreover, Apollonios of Tyre says he was lean, fairly tall, and swarthy–hence some one called him an Egyptian vine-branch, according to Chrysippos in the first book of his Proverbs. He had thick legs; he was flabby and delicate.”

Diogenes Laërtios is often an unreliable source, but, in this particular instance, he cites two earlier sources, the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos of Soloi (lived c. 279 – c. 206 BC), who was a student of Kleanthes, who was a student of Zenon himself, as well as the first-century BC Stoic philosopher Apollonios of Tyre. This strongly suggests that his description of Zenon as a dark-skinned man of Phoenician ancestry is accurate.

Ironically, Stoicism has become popular in modern times among white supremacists. I guess they don’t know that the founder of this philosophy was, in all likelihood, what we would consider Brown.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the bust of Zenon of Kition from the Farnese Collection

Publius Terentius Afer: an African founder of Latin literature

Now let’s move to the other end of the Mediterranean and talk about the Romans. One of the founders of Latin literature was Publius Terentius Afer (lived c. 185 – c. 159? BC), commonly known in English as “Terence,” who was a member of the Afri, an Amazigh people who lived in the region around Carthage in what is now Tunisia.

Terence was most likely born in Carthage or near it, but, when he was very young, he was captured and taken to Italy, where he was sold as a slave to the Roman Senator Publius Terentius Lucanus, who is reported to have educated him and taught him to read and write. He saw that Terence had literary talents, so he set him free. As a freedman, Terence adopted his former master’s nomen and became a comic playwright. Seven comedies written by him have survived to the present day:

• The Girl from Andros (written c. 166 BC)
• The Mother-in-Law (written c. 165 BC)
• The Self-Tormentor (written c. 163 BC)
• Phormio (written c. 161 BC)
• The Eunuch (written c. 161 BC)
• The Brothers (written c. 160 BC)

As one of the earliest Latin writers whose works survive, Terence has been extremely influential on later literature. He has been especially seen as a model by Black writers. The African American poet Phillis Wheatley regarded Terence as her literary predecessor. She writes in one of her poems:

“The happier Terence all the choir inspir’d,
His soul replenish’d, and his bosom fir’d;
But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,
To one alone of Afric’s sable race;”

In point of fact, Wheatley’s statement that the Muses granted literary talent to Terence alone of all “Afric’s sable race” is not correct; as we shall see, there were far more classical writers who came from Africa aside from just Terence.

ABOVE: Fictional illustration from a ninth-century AD illustrated manuscript of Terence’s plays, depicting him as a dark-skinned North African. This illustration is probably based on an earlier third-century AD original. Even so, it still dates from hundreds of years after Terence’s death.

The diversity of the Roman world

At the time when Terence was alive, the Romans were in the process of bringing the entire Mediterranean world under their dominion. Unfortunately, Roman conquest was extremely brutal and bloody. For instance, in 146 BC, the Romans utterly destroyed both the city of Carthage in North Africa and the city of Corinth in Greece, killing thousands of people and selling perhaps hundreds of thousands of people into slavery.

Nonetheless, Roman rule did bring about a period of relative peace and stability (at least for those weren’t killed or enslaved). The Roman Empire is often thought of as a European empire, but, in reality, it was more of a Mediterranean empire. It never conquered any lands in continental Europe north of Germany, but yet it did conquer all of North Africa and large swathes of the Middle East.

At its greatest territorial extent in the early second century AD, the borders of the Roman Empire stretched from northern England in the far north to the borders of modern-day Sudan in the far south, and from Portugal in the far west to the Persian Gulf in the far east.

As a direct result of the vast territories it covered, the Roman Empire was an extremely ethnically diverse place. It’s true that there were lots of people in the empire whom we would consider white, but probably at least half the people who lived in the empire would not be considered white if they were alive today. Instead, they would be considered Brown or even Black.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the Roman Empire at its greatest territorial extent upon the death of the emperor Trajan in 117 AD

The ethnic diversity of Roman Egypt

To give you an impression of just how much diversity existed in the Roman Empire, let’s take a look at the Roman province of Egypt, which was one of the last major territories to come under Roman rule. The last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt to hold more than symbolic power was Kleopatra VII Philopator—an extremely talented and capable leader who managed to maintain her rule over Egypt for twenty-one years, despite enormous adversity.

It first became clear that Egyptian independence was doomed on 2 September 31 BC, when the Roman general Octavian (later known as Augustus) defeated Kleopatra and her ally, the Roman general Marcus Antonius in a naval battle at Actium. The Romans advanced on Egypt and, in August 30 BC, Kleopatra committed suicide to prevent them from taking her alive. (As I discuss in this article from August 2019, contrary to popular belief, she probably didn’t really kill herself by letting an Egyptian asp bite her on the breast; it’s far more likely that she either drank poison or cut herself on the arm and administered poison to the wound.)

The Romans annexed Egypt and it quickly became one of the empire’s most important and productive provinces. We actually have a fairly good impression of what people in Roman Egypt looked like thanks to the vast surviving number of highly detailed, realistic encaustic panel portraits that have survived from the province, most of which date to the second and third centuries AD.

These were originally made as funerary portraits to accompany the mummified corpses of the people they depict. They are conventionally known as the “Fayum mummy portraits,” because many of them were found at locations in or near the Fayum Basin in Lower Egypt. They depict ordinary people from the upper and middle classes of various ancestries. Some of people depicted are probably of mostly Greek ancestry, some of them of mostly Egyptian ancestry, and others of them of mixed ancestry. Here are some examples:

ABOVE: Portrait of a young woman from the city of Antinopolis in Lower Egypt dating to around the second or third century AD or thereabouts

ABOVE: Portrait of a young military officer from Lower Egypt, dating to the time of the Roman Empire

ABOVE: Portrait of a young man from the city of Antinopolis in Lower Egypt dating to around the second or third century AD or thereabouts

ABOVE: Portrait of an elderly Egyptian man from the Roman period

ABOVE: Portrait of a young man from the site of Hawara in Lower Egypt

ABOVE: Portrait of a woman dating to the early second century AD

ABOVE: Portrait of a military officer from Lower Egypt from the middle of the second century AD

ABOVE: Portrait of an Egyptian man from the Staatliche Museum in Berlin

ABOVE: Portrait of an Egyptian woman dating to the late second century AD

ABOVE: Portrait of a young man from Fayum dating to around the second or third century AD or thereabouts

ABOVE: Portrait of a woman from Lower Egypt dating to around the late second century AD or thereabouts

ABOVE: Portrait of a man from Fayum, dating to around the mid-second century AD or thereabouts

It’s really hard for someone to argue that the Roman Empire was an all-white empire when confronted with portraits like these. Some of these people would most likely be considered white if they were alive today, but most of them would probably be considered Brown and a few of them would be considered Black.

Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis

The Fayum mummy portraits probably give us a fairly accurate impression of what the population of Roman Egypt and, by extension, Roman North Africa looked like. This is important, because some of the most famous writers of the Roman imperial period came from North Africa.

For instance, the novelist Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 AD) was born in the city of Madauros in what is now northeastern Algeria. At the time, the city was part of the Roman province of Numidia. Like Terence, Apuleius was probably of Amazigh ancestry. Unlike Terence, however, he was raised in an elite Romanized household and was taught about Greek and Roman literature from a young age.

Apuleius is best known today for his novel The Golden Ass, which is the only ancient novel written in the Latin language that has survived to the present day complete. It is considered a foundational work of western literature. It tells the story of a Greek man named Lucius who is accidentally transformed into a donkey by a sorceress and goes on all sorts of crazy misadventures all over the Roman world before he is finally turned back into a human being by the Egyptian goddess Isis.

ABOVE: Fourth-century Roman medallion with a probably fictional portrait of the famed novelist Apuleius (We can’t really be sure what Apuleius looked like.)

Loukianos of Samosata

In addition to the famous writers of Amazigh ancestry who lived under Roman rule in western North Africa and wrote in Latin, at the other end of the Mediterranean, there were people of Middle Eastern ancestry who were writing in Greek. Most famously, the satirist Loukianos (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 AD) was an ethnic Syrian who was born into a lower middle-class family in the town of Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates River on the very easternmost outskirts of the Roman Empire.

Loukianos’s native language was neither Greek nor Latin, but rather Syriac. He seems to have left home and traveled to Ionia in western Asia Minor, where he learned the Greek language, acquired an education, and earned a name for himself as a rhetorician. He probably settled in Athens sometime around 165 AD and lived there for at least a decade, during which time he wrote a large number of satirical essays, dialogues, and other works in the Greek language.

Loukianos’s works remained wildly popular after his death. Over eighty works attributed to him have survived to the present day. His most famous work is his novel A True Story, which is a satire against people who tell outlandish tales and try to pass them off as true. The introduction explains that the title of the book is a lie and that everything in it is completely made up.

Loukianos then goes on to describe bizarre lands in the far west, a trip to the moon, interplanetary war between the moon and the sun, a trip to the Underworld, adventures inside the belly of a giant whale, and all sorts of other hilarious amusing things. It’s an absolutely brilliant and unique work that blends elements of both satire and science fiction. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in ancient literature.

A few of Loukianos’s other surviving works that I particularly enjoy include:

• The Lover of Lies (a satirical dialogue making fun of superstitious beliefs)
• Alexandros the False Prophet (a satirical work making fun of the dishonest religious leader Alexandros of Abonoteichos)
• Dialogues of the Gods (a set of satirical dialogues making fun of the Greek deities)
• Dialogues of the Dead (a series of satirical dialogues making fun of traditional beliefs about the afterlife)
• The Passing of Peregrinos (a satirical letter making fun of early Christians)
• Philosophies for Sale (a satire against contemporary philosophers)

Loukianos has been a tremendously influential writer. He was especially popular with the Renaissance humanists. His novel A True Story served as partial inspiration for Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels and, as I discuss in this article from August 2018, it was a line from his Dialogues of the Dead that inspired Christopher Marlowe’s famous line “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”

Unfortunately, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many racist western European scholars rejected Loukianos’s literary output on account of prejudice against his status as a Brown Syrian. The renowned German classicist Eduard Norden (lived 1868 – 1941) called him an “Oriental without depth or character… who has no soul and degrades the most soulful language.”

ABOVE: Fictional seventeenth-century illustration by the English engraver William Faithorne depicting Loukianos of Samosata as what was then perceived as a stereotypical “Syrian” appearance. No one knows what Loukianos really looked like.

The Severans: a whole dynasty of non-European Roman emperors

Of course, non-Europeans were not just writing great works of literature during the time of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire may have started out as an Italian empire, but it wasn’t long before people who were native to lands outside of Italy and eventually outside of Europe were actually ruling it.

The first Roman emperor born outside of Europe was Septimius Severus, who was born on 11 April 145 AD in the city of Leptis Magna in what is now northern Libya. His mother was of Italian ancestry, but his father was probably of mixed Phoenician and Amazigh ancestry. As if to only further demonstrate the ethnic mixing that was so common throughout the Roman Empire, Septimius Severus married a Syrian woman named Julia Domna in 187 AD.

Septimius Severus proclaimed himself emperor and seized power during the Year of the Five Emperors in 193 AD. Some people have described him as a “Black Roman emperor.” As I discuss in this article from September 2019, this description is a bit misleading. Nonetheless, Septimius Severus was certainly not white; if he was alive today, we’d probably describe him as Brown.

Septimius Severus ruled for nearly two whole decades. Upon his death on 4 February 211 AD, he was succeeded by his two sons with Julia Domna: Geta and Caracalla, who were, in all likelihood, of mixed Italian, Phoenician, Amazigh, and Syrian ancestry. Caracalla murdered Geta under unclear circumstances on 26 December 211, leaving himself as sole emperor of the whole empire.

In 212 AD, Caracalla issued the Constitutio Antoniniana, which officially granted full Roman citizenship to all free men living within the borders of the Roman Empire and granted all free women the same rights of citizenship as Roman women. As a result of this decree, hundreds of thousands of Brown and Black people living in Rome’s African and Middle Eastern provinces gained Roman citizenship. The only people left without citizenship were the enslaved.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Severan Tondo, a family portrait of the Libyan emperor Septimius Severus with his Syrian wife Julia Domna and their sons Geta and Caracalla that was painted in around 199 AD or thereabouts

Caracalla was assassinated on 8 April 217 and succeeded by Macrinus, an ethnic Amazigh who was born in the town of Cherchell in northern Algeria. Julia Domna’s sister Julia Maesa, who was an ethnic Syrian like her sister, instigated a rebellion, which toppled Macrinus, and installed her grandson, the fourteen-year-old Elagabalus, as emperor on 8 June 218.

Elagabalus has captivated modern audiences because of the outrageous stories that are told about him. The Greek historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD), who hated Elagabalus with a burning passion and wanted to portray him as depraved and insane, claims in his book Roman History that the young Syrian emperor plucked out all his body hair and often wore makeup and wigs to make himself look like a woman.

He says that Elagabalus routinely sold himself as a prostitute to male clients in brothels, in taverns, and even in a special room in the imperial palace itself. He claims that the emperor ordered men to pay for his services as a prostitute and that he would often boast to the other prostitutes that he had more lovers than any of them. He even claims that the emperor had scouts whose job was to scour the empire for handsome young men with large penises for him to have sex with.

Kassios Dion claims that these scouts once brought the emperor a handsome Greek athlete named Zotikos for him to have sexual relations with and, when Zotikos greeted him for the first time as “lord,” the emperor assumed a feminine pose and told him, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady.” Dion also claims that Elagabalus offered to pay a vast sum of money to any physician who could give him a vagina.

As I discuss in this article from August 2020, some have argued based on these reports that Elagabalus was a trans woman. This is possible. Unfortunately, all the surviving sources about Elagabalus were written by people who hated him and the stories that are told about him are similar to the kinds of stories Roman historians often told about other emperors they personally disliked. Therefore, it is hard to say which of these stories—if any of them—are actually true.

In any case, Elagabalus and his mother were both murdered on 11 March 222. Their bodies were mutilated and thrown in the Tiber River and Elagabalus’s cousin Alexander Severus, another Syrian, was installed on the throne. Alexander Severus ruled until he was assassinated on 19 March 235 at the age of twenty-six. His assassination brought an end to the Severan Dynasty—a dynasty entirely composed of Roman emperors with non-European ancestry.

There were non-European emperors who came to power after the Severans. Notably, Philip the Arab (ruled 244 – 249 AD) was an Arab born in the city of Shahba in what is now southern Syria on the very edge of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, the Severans were unique in the fact that they were an entire dynasty of six emperors in a row who all had non-European ancestry.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head of the emperor Elagabalus, who was a Syrian

African Church Fathers: Tertullianus and Origenes

While Severan Dynasty was ruling in Rome, Christianity was spreading throughout the Roman Empire. Some of the most influential early Christian writers were natives of Roman North Africa. One such writer was Tertullianus of Carthage (lived c. 155 – c. 240 AD), a theologian and apologist who wrote in Latin. He was born in the city of Carthage—near modern-day Tunis—and was probably of Amazigh ancestry.

Tertullianus is best known for his Apologeticus, in which he defends Christianity against various accusations that were floating around at the time and argues for the fair treatment of Christians. He is also known for his treatise On the Prescription of Heretics, in which he rather viciously attacks various Christian sects that he regarded as heretical.

Tertullianus was an older contemporary of Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 AD), an Egyptian Christian theologian, apologist, and scholar who wrote in the Greek language. Origenes’s mother was probably a native Egyptian. His name in Greek is Ὠριγένης (Ōrigénēs), which means “Born of Horus.” We don’t know for certain what he looked like, but we can probably imagine that he was what we would consider Brown.

Origenes is best known for his On First Principles (a four-volume treatise on Christian theology) and his Against Kelsos (an apologetic treatise written in response to the anti-Christian tract The True Word, written by the Greek controversialist Kelsos), but he also wrote extensive commentaries on books of the Bible, including a Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew and a Commentary on the Song of Songs. He was deeply learned about Greek philosophy and literature and was the foremost ancient proponent of the allegorical interpretation of scripture.

ABOVE: Fictional illustration by the French artist André Thevet intended to represent Origenes of Alexandria. This is a fictional representation; no one knows what Origenes really looked like.

Augustine of Hippo

By far the most revered early Christian Church Father, though, is Augustine of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 AD). He was born in the city of Thagaste in what is now northern Algeria. Like Apuleius and Tertullianus, he was probably of Amazigh ancestry, but he was a Roman citizen from birth and he grew up in a relatively elite household, immersed in Roman literary culture.

Augustine was an extraordinarily prolific and influential writer. His book Confessions, in which he describes in great detail his life story and how he ultimately became a Christian, is considered perhaps the first true autobiography in the western tradition. His apologetic treatise The City of God is regarded as one of the greatest classics of Christian literature. He also wrote several commentaries on the Book of Genesis, which I discuss in this article I published last week.

It’s hard to convey just how influential Augustine has been on the Christian literary tradition. He is responsible for developing the concept of Original Sin as most Christians conceive of it today and he was revered in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages as a theologian of monumental importance. He was one of the few theologians whose works the leaders of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation both enthusiastically embraced.

The oldest possible surviving depiction of Augustine is a fresco dated to the sixth century AD—at least a century after his death. Nonetheless, it seems to depict him with relatively brown skin. Alas, the iconographic tradition swiftly changed and, by the Late Middle Ages, he was being consistently portrayed in art as a pasty white guy, despite the fact that he was born in Algeria. This trend has continued up until the present day.

ABOVE: Sixth-century AD Roman fresco probably intended to represent Augustine of Hippo. This is probably the earliest surviving depiction of Augustine and it is from at least a century after his death.

ABOVE: Imaginative portrayal of Augustine of Hippo, painted between c. 1645 and c. 1650 by the French painter Philippe de Champaigne, showing him as a pasty white guy

Black people in Roman Greece

Now, based on what we know, people like Zenon, Terence, Loukianos, Apuleius, Septimius Severus, Tertullianus, Origenes, and Augustine would probably be considered more Brown than Black if they were alive today. There were, however, certainly people whom we would consider Black living in the Roman Empire at this time. Indeed, there were even people whom we would consider Black living in Europe.

The Greek Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 AD) argues in his treatise De Sera Numinis Vindicta 21 that physical features sometimes lie dormant for several generations before reappearing. In support of this argument, he cites the example of a Greek woman who gave birth to a baby with dark skin and was accused of adultery. In response, she proved that her great-grandfather had been an Aithiopian. Here are Ploutarchos’s own words in Greek:

“ὡς γὰρ ἀκροχορδόνες καὶ μελάσματα καὶ φακοὶ πατέρων ἐν παισὶν ἀφανισθέντες ἀνέκυψαν ὕστερον ἐν υἱωνοῖς καὶ θυγατριδοῖς: καὶ γυνή τις Ἑλληνὶς τεκοῦσα βρέφος μέλαν, εἶτα κρινομένη μοιχείας ἐξανεῦρεν αὑτὴν Αἰθίοπος οὖσαν γενεὰν τετάρτην:”

Here is my own translation:

“For indeed, the warts and moles and freckles of the forefathers that are unseen in their own children later reappear in their sons’ children and their daughters’ children; a Greek woman bore a Black child and, being judged guilty of adultery, showed that she was the fourth descendant [i.e., great-granddaughter] of an Aithiopian.”

These remarks are fascinating because they not only prove that people with ancestors from the region of Africa south of Egypt were living in Roman Greece in the early second century AD, but also that these people were able to freely marry into the local population wherever they lived and that there were apparently no concerns about miscegenation.

We know some specific details about at least one other Black person who lived in Greece during the Roman period. The wealthy Athenian philosopher Herodes Attikos (lived 101 – 177 AD) had an adoptive son named Memnon, who was of Aithiopian ancestry and was named after the legendary Aithiopian king whom I discussed earlier in this article.

When archaeologists excavated Herodes Atticus’s ruined villa, which is located in the central Peloponnesos in southern Greece, they found a realistic marble portrait head of Memnon dated to around 170 AD that clearly shows him with African features. Memnon’s portrait head leaves no doubt about the fact that there were Black African people living in Roman Greece.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head of Memnon, the adoptive son of the Athenian philosopher Herodes Atticus, showing him with distinctively African features

Black people in the Roman army

There is substantial evidence that people whom we would consider Black were not just living in the Roman Empire in the second century AD (sometimes with Roman citizenship), but also actively serving in the Roman military. One piece of evidence comes from an anecdote recorded in the Historia Augusta, an often unreliable collection of biographies of Roman emperors that was most likely written in around the fourth century AD or thereabouts.

The story goes that an Aithiopian Roman soldier attempted to greet the emperor Septimius Severus. Supposedly, the emperor was frightened by the man’s black skin because he thought it was an ill omen and ordered for the man to be removed from his sight. Here is the passage from “The Life of Septimius Severus” 22.4-5, as translated by David Magie for the Loeb Classical Library:

“On another occasion, when he [i.e., Septimius Severus] was returning to his nearest quarters from an inspection of the wall at Luguvallum in Britain, at a time when he had not only proved victorious but had concluded a perpetual peace, just as he was wondering what omen would present itself, an Ethiopian soldier, who was famous among buffoons and always a notable jester, met him with a garland of cypress-boughs.”

“And when Severus in a rage ordered that the man be removed from his sight, troubled as he was by the man’s ominous colour and the ominous nature of the garland, the Ethiopian by way of jest cried, it is said, ‘You have been all things, you have conquered all things, now, O conqueror, be a god.’”

We probably shouldn’t assume that this particular incident really took place, since the Historia Augusta is a notoriously unreliable source. Nonetheless, the fact that the author tells this story indicates that people whom we would consider Black were serving in the Roman military.

It also, unfortunately, indicates that some people—including perhaps even brown-skinned North Africans like Septimius Severus—had a superstitious fear of Black people because of their skin color. I guess that, while the ancients may not have been strictly racist in the contemporary sense, xenophobia and prejudices based on skin color still existed.

ABOVE: Illustration by AMELIANVS on DeviantArt of the alleged racist encounter between Septimius Severus and the Ethiopian Roman soldier described in the Historia Augusta

Africans and Syrians in Roman Britain?

There weren’t just people whom we would consider Black living in Roman-occupied Greece and serving in the Roman military, though; some evidence indicates there may have been people whom we would consider Black living as far north as Britain. A craniometric study conducted in 2016 on the skeletons of twenty-two individuals who lived during the Roman imperial period in the Roman city of Londinium, which is now the modern city of London, England, concluded that four of those individuals probably had ancestors from the region of Africa south of the Sahara Desert.

Craniometry is not always a reliable way to determine the ethnic background of an individual, but the bones in question were also subjected to isotopic analysis, which indicated that the individuals they belonged to probably spent their childhoods in a warmer climate than Roman-era Britain would have offered.

Another interesting example of a person whom we would probably consider Black living in Britain during the Roman period is the Ivory Bangle Lady, a wealthy young woman of high status who lived in the fourth century AD in the Roman-Celtic city of Eboricum, which is now the modern city of York. The conclusion that the Ivory Bangle Lady probably had recent ancestors from the part of Africa south of the Sahara Desert is based on craniometric measurements of her skull, which, again, aren’t always reliable, but are at least suggestive.

ABOVE: Forensic facial reconstruction of the so-called “Ivory Bangle Lady,” a wealthy woman of probable African ancestry who lived in the Roman city of Eboricum (modern York) in the fourth century AD

Africans were not the only people living in Roman Britain who might be termed “people of color.” There is also evidence that there were people who originally came from as far east as Syria and Iraq living in Britain during this time period. In the second and third centuries AD, soldiers from all over the Roman Empire were stationed along Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, including soldiers from western North Africa and from Syria and Iraq.

In the Arbeia Museum in South Shields, England, there is a tombstone from the late imperial period in Britain that was erected by a Syrian man named Barates for his wife, a British freedwoman named Regina, who tragically died when she was only thirty years old. The tombstone has a double inscription written in both Latin and Aramaic, a Semitic language that was spoken in Syria.

ABOVE: Tombstone of British freedwoman named Regina erected by her husband, a Syrian man named Barates, bearing an inscription in Aramaic

Conclusion

Contrary to how they are portrayed in modern popular culture, ancient Greece and Rome were not ethnically homogenous societies. There were people in classical Greece and Rome who had ancestors from the Middle East, North Africa, and even the region of Africa south of the Sahara. It’s true that people whom we would consider Black and Brown were not the majority in Europe in ancient times—but they were definitely around.

It is important for us to remember the ethnic diversity of the ancient world when we portray it in books, films, television, and other media. Portraying everyone in the ancient Mediterranean world as white is whitewashing and it should be recognized as such.