Were Ancient Civilizations Conservative or Liberal?

I have repeatedly encountered questions on Quora asking whether ancient civilizations were “liberal” or “conservative,” so I thought I would write an in-depth response to those sorts of questions here. I think these questions arise from people perceiving what seems like a fundamental paradox: we revere ancient civilizations for things people generally see as progressive, such as technological advancements and the invention of democracy, while, at the same time, it is widely known that basically all ancient societies had slavery, oppressed women to some degree or another, and were often imperialistic, xenophobic, and culturally chauvinistic.

It’s true that ancient civilizations were generally very conservative in the sense that they tended to value traditions very highly, they were usually culturally resistant to change, and people in those civilizations rarely challenged long-established cultural assumptions and social institutions. For instance, as far as we have evidence, few people in the ancient world ever challenged the idea that men are naturally superior to women or the idea that slavery is normal and morally acceptable.

At the same time, though, it would be misleading to describe ancient civilizations as “conservative” or “liberal” without careful clarification because, among individual people in the ancient world, there was tremendous ideological diversity. Furthermore, the normative values of ancient civilizations were often very different from the values of both contemporary people who call themselves conservatives and contemporary people who call themselves liberals.

Widespread ideological diversity within ancient societies

Just like in every modern society, there was tremendous ideological diversity within any given ancient society. There were people who supported ideas that we might think of as more progressive and there were people who favored what we might think of as conservativism. In this essay, I will mostly be using examples from ancient Greece because it is the ancient civilization that I have studied the most closely and that I am most familiar with, but someone could do a similar sort of analysis for any ancient civilization.

One major political issue in ancient Greece on which there was widespread ideological disagreement was the issue of democracy versus oligarchy. The Greek city-state of Athens was famously a democracy for most of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, but there were still conflicts between pro-democratic and pro-oligarchic factions. It is easy to see the pro-oligarchic faction in this conflict, which supported concentrating power in the hands of a relatively small number of traditionally powerful aristocratic families, as conservative and the pro-democratic faction, which supported distributing more power to ordinary adult male citizens, as more progressive.

In the 460s BCE, the politician Ephialtes instituted a series of democratic reforms. Ephialtes stripped the Areios Pagos, the traditional Athenian aristocratic lawcourt, of nearly all its powers. He also instituted pay for holders of public office and reduced the property requirement in order to hold public office. These reforms took a lot of power away from the aristocrats and gave a lot more power to ordinary Athenian adult male citizens.

At the time, Ephialtes’s reforms were seen as extremely radical. If you want to be anachronistic, you might say that Ephialtes was a member of the ancient Athenian equivalent of the “far left.” The aristocrats were so upset at him for taking away their power that, in 461 BCE, someone (probably either an aristocrat or a group of aristocrats working in collusion) had him assassinated.

Ephialtes’s successor as the leader of the radical democratic faction in Athenian politics was the politician Perikles (lived c. 495 – 429 BCE), who came to dominate Athenian politics for much of the middle part of the fifth century BCE and is most famous today for having instigated the massive public works project that included the construction of the Parthenon, the Propylaia, and the Erechtheion on the Athenian Akropolis.

Of course, Perikles may have supported radical democracy, but that doesn’t mean he was progressive on every issue. As I discuss in this article I wrote in January 2021 about how Athenian democracy wasn’t nearly as great as it is often made out to have been, democratic Athens was also aggressively imperialist. Perikles was a prominent leader in Athens at the time when this imperialism was at its height, and he actively promoted imperialist policies.

Perikles also notoriously supported a law in 451 BCE that limited Athenian citizenship to only those whose ancestors had all been citizens on both the maternal and paternal sides, which effectively made Athenian citizenship for most people predicated on a kind of racial purity.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Athenian Akropolis. Most of the buildings you see here were constructed under the leadership of Perikles.

Obviously, not everyone in ancient Athens sympathized with the radical democratic faction of Ephialtes and Perikles. Many Athenians who had more conservative inclinations favored the traditional aristocracy. Because the vast majority of surviving sources from ancient Greece were produced by members of the upper class, pro-oligarchic opinions are well represented in the historical record.

Sometime in around the late fifth century BCE, an anonymous Athenian writer whom modern scholars have nicknamed the “Old Oligarch” wrote an essay titled On the Constitution of the Athenians. He begins the essay in chapter one, section one, by complaining about Athenian democracy. He writes, as translated by J. M. Moore:

“Now, in discussing the Athenian constitution, I cannot commend their present method of running the state, because in choosing it they preferred that the masses should do better than the respectable citizens; this, then, is my reason for not commending it.”

The Old Oligarch is more direct and explicit in criticizing democracy than most other ancient Athenian writers, but, whoever he was, he was far from alone in his pro-oligarchic sentiments.

The ancient Athenian general and historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE) was probably a contemporary of the Old Oligarch. He was also possessed extraordinarily large inherited wealth; he records in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 4.105.1 that he owned multiple gold mines in Thrake. As I discuss in this article I wrote in November 2021, Thoukydides admired Perikles, but he was highly skeptical of the idea that the citizens of a state can be trusted to make decisions on behalf of it, which is the basic premise of democracy. It is unclear whether Thoukydides favored oligarchy per se, but he was clearly not a fan of democracy.

As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2021, the Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) and the Athenian general and historian Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BCE), who both came from wealthy aristocratic families and were both students of Socrates, also had pro-oligarchic political leanings that might be considered conservative in an ancient Athenian context. Plato famously portrays Socrates as criticizing democracy in the Republic 6.488a-489a through the allegory of the “ship of fools.”

Meanwhile, Xenophon was a huge fanboy for Sparta and its mixed form of government, which was far more oligarchic than the government in Athens. He praises Spartan society, customs, and government at length in his treatise On the Constitution of the Lakedaimonians, also known as On Spartan Society.

ABOVE: Photograph from Fine Art America of a bust of the historian Thoukydides (left) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of the philosopher Plato (right), who were both extremely wealthy Athenian writers who were critical of democracy

Ancient ideological diversity on women and their place in society

Women’s rights were not considered a major political issue in ancient Greece or in any other ancient civilization, but, even on this issue, there was certainly some degree of diversity as well. We know that, in every ancient society, women made up roughly half of the population. Sadly, very few women’s voices from the ancient world have survived to the present, since women were less likely to be taught to read and write than men in the first place and the works of female writers seem to have been less likely to have been copied and are therefore less likely to have survived.

Even among men, though, there were many different attitudes toward women and women’s place in society. On the one hand, as I wrote about in this article from June 2019, misogyny of the most vicious and hateful kind was absolutely rampant. For instance, Semonides of Amorgos, a Greek lyric poet who lived in around the seventh century BCE, wrote a poem called “Types of Women,” in which he divides women into different “types” based on different kinds of animals and he portrays all of them except one as bad. The poem concludes with a bitter denunciation of all women, which reads as follows, as translated by M. L. West:

“Yes, the worst pestilence Zeus ever made
is women. Even if they look to be a
helpmeet, yet the master suffers most:
the man who keeps a woman in his house
never gets through a whole day in good cheer,
nor will he soon drive Hunger from his door,
that hostile lodger, hateful deity.
When with his household he seems most content,
whether by God’s grace or on man’s account,
she finds some fault, and girds herself for war.
Where there’s a woman, they may not be keen
even to welcome in a visitor.
I’ll tell you, she that looks the best-behaved
in fact is the most rotten of them all,
for while her man gawps fondly at her, oh,
the neighbours’ merriment: another dupe!
Yes, when the talk’s of wives, each man will praise
his own and criticize the other bloke’s,
but we don’t realize it’s equal shares.
For Zeus made wives as his worst pestilence
and fettered us in bonds unbreakable.”

On the other hand, there were some male writers who seem to have been more sympathetic to women. For instance, the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) includes characters in his tragedies who criticize the treatment of women in Greek society. Most famously, in his tragedy Medeia, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 431 BCE, the eponymous protagonist delivers the following monologue, as translated by Rachel Kitzinger in lines 230–251 of her translation:

“Of all creatures that live and understand,
we women suffer the most. In the first place
we must, for a vast sum, buy a husband;
what’s worse, with him our bodies get a master.
And here’s what’s most at sake: Did we get
a man who’s good or bad? For women have
no seemly escape; we can’t deny our husbands.
We’ve come to a household with new habits, new rules,
and must divine how best to manage our bedmates
using skills we never learned at home.
If we do it right, our husband lives with us
and doesn’t fight the yoke. Then life
is enviable. If we don’t, it’s better to die.
A man, when he is vexed by those at home,
goes out to ease the disquiet in his heart.
But we have only one person to look to.
And they say of us that we’re never at risk,
sheltered at home, while they fight with spears.
How wrong they are: I’d rather three times over
stand behind a shield than give birth once.”

It is impossible to say to what extent Euripides himself would personally agree with the words he puts into Medeia’s mouth in this passage, but I do think that the fact that he allows his character to highlight the plight of women in ancient Greece with such rhetorical force shows at least some degree of ability to empathize with women.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Campanian red-figure neck-amphora by the Ixion Painter dating to c. 330 BCE, depicting a scene from Euripides’s Medeia, in which Medeia murders one of her own sons in an act of vengeance against her husband Iason

As I wrote about in this article from September 2020, Plato was not by any means a feminist or a proto-feminist, as some people have occasionally portrayed him, but he did acknowledge women’s intellectual potential. Notably, in his Republic 5.455c-456a, Plato portrays Socrates as arguing that, although men are generally superior to women in all things, an individual woman might possess talents at anything and therefore women of the “guardian” class should have the same role in governing the ideal state as men. Here is the argument, as translated by Paul Shorey:

Socrates: “‘Do you know, then, of anything practised by mankind in which the masculine sex does not surpass the female on all these points? Must we make a long story of it by alleging weaving and the watching of pancakes and the boiling pot, whereon the sex plumes itself and wherein its defeat will expose it to most laughter?’”

Glaukon: “‘You are right,’ he said, ‘that the one sex is far surpassed by the other in everything, one may say. Many women, it is true, are better than many men in many things, but broadly speaking, it is as you say.’”

Socrates: “‘Then there is no pursuit of the administrators of a state that belongs to a woman because she is a woman or to a man because he is a man. But the natural capacities are distributed alike among both creatures, and women naturally share in all pursuits and men in all—yet for all the woman is weaker than the man.’”

Glaukon: “‘Assuredly.’”

Socrates: “‘Shall we, then, assign them all to men and nothing to women?’”

Glaukon: “‘How could we?’”

Socrates: “‘We shall rather, I take it, say that one woman has the nature of a physician and another not, and one is by nature musical, and another unmusical?’”

Glaukon: “‘Surely.’”

Socrates: “‘Can we, then, deny that one woman is naturally athletic and warlike and another unwarlike and averse to gymnastics?’”

Glaukon: “‘I think not.’”

Socrates: “‘And again, one a lover, another a hater, of wisdom? And one high-spirited, and the other lacking spirit?’”

Glaukon: “‘That also is true.’”

Socrates: “‘Then it is likewise true that one woman has the qualities of a guardian and another not. Were not these the natural qualities of the men also whom we selected for guardians?’”

Glaukon: “‘They were.’”

Socrates: “‘The women and the men, then, have the same nature in respect to the guardianship of the state, save in so far as the one is weaker, the other stronger.’”

Glaukon: “‘Apparently.’”

Plato’s Socrates goes on to argue in the Republic 5.456c-d that women should be given the same education as men:

Socrates: “‘For the production of a guardian, then, education will not be one thing for our men and another for our women, especially since the nature which we hand over to it is the same.’”

Glaukon: “‘There will be no difference.’”

The Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios, who lived in around the third century CE, but relied on earlier written sources that have since been lost, records in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 3.1.46 that Plato actually allowed at least two women—named Lastheneia of Mantineia and Axiothea of Phleious—to become members of his philosophical school at the Akademia in Athens. He cites the philosopher Dikaiarchos (lived c. 350 – c. 285 BCE), who was a contemporary of Plato, as having written that Athiothea wore men’s clothing.

ABOVE: Mosaic of Plato’s Akademia from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in the Roman city of Pompeii. According to Diogenes Laërtios, Plato’s Akademia included at least two women.

Ancient ideological diversity on slavery

The ideological diversity of the ancient world even applies to some extent to the issue of slavery. As I discuss in this article I wrote back in October 2019, people in the ancient world who thought that slavery is inherently morally wrong were certainly a very small minority and there was never anything resembling an organized abolitionist movement in the ancient world. Nonetheless, people who regarded slavery as immoral did apparently exist.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE) very briefly mentions in his Politics 1.1253b the existence of people in his own time who maintained that slavery is “contrary to nature.” He writes, as translated by H. Rackham:

“For some thinkers hold the function of the master to be a definite science, and moreover think that household management, mastership, statesmanship and monarchy are the same thing, as we said at the beginning of the treatise; others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.”

Aristotle, of course, immediately goes on to argue against these unnamed people. He argues that slavery is perfectly natural and completely morally acceptable, since some people have dispositions that make them naturally suited to be enslaved and some people have dispositions that make them naturally suited to enslave others. He writes:

“Hence whereas the master is merely the slave’s master and does not belong to the slave, the slave is not merely the slave of the master but wholly belongs to the master. These considerations therefore make clear the nature of the slave and his essential quality: one who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a person is a human being belonging to another if being a man he is an article of property, and an article of property is an instrument for action separable from its owner.”

“But we must next consider whether or not anyone exists who is by nature of this character, and whether it is advantageous and just for anyone to be a slave, or whether on the contrary all slavery is against nature. And it is not difficult either to discern the answer by theory or to learn it empirically. Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.”

As I discuss in this article from October 2020, Aristotle is often unfairly blamed for a lot of things, but his defense of slavery is one of the things for which we can justly condemn him.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, based on an earlier bronze bust by the Greek sculptor Lysippos

When ancient values don’t align with modern conservative or liberal values

Things get even more complicated than this, though, because describing ancient people as “conservative” or “progressive” can be very misleading if you don’t clarify exactly what you mean when you use those terms. In the present day, terms like “conservative” and “progressive” tend to denote specific ideologies, but no one in any ancient civilization ever held exactly all the same views as modern people who identify as conservatives or modern people who identify as progressives.

Take, for instance, religion. Christianity has been the dominant religion in the western world for around 1,700 years now. Most religiously conservative Christians in the west today believe that God loves everyone (or at least all Christians) and that he is infinitely just and merciful. Many progressive-leaning people today are irreligious and do not believe in the existence of God at all.

People in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, however, almost never believed that their deities were all-loving. The conception of deities as just and merciful would be more familiar to them, but, even then, more often than not, ancient people regarded their deities as powerful, capricious, and dangerous.

This view of the deities as capricious goes as far back as the earliest human records. The Atra-Hasis Epic is an ancient poem about a global flood in the Akkadian language that was most likely composed in Mesopotamia sometime in around the eighteenth century BCE. In this version of the flood myth, the god Ellil sends the flood not to punish humanity for any moral sins, but rather because humans are making too much noise and he can’t sleep. Tablet Two, the tablet in which Ellil sends the flood, begins with the following description, as rendered by Stephanie Dalley in lines 1–8 of her translation:

“6oo years, less than 6oo, passed
and the country became too wide, the people too numerous.
The country was as noisy as a bellowing bull.
The god grew restless at their clamour,
Ellil had to listen to their noise.
He addressed the great gods,
‘The noise of mankind has become too much.
I am losing sleep over their racket.’”

The standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is thought to have been composed by the Babylonian scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni sometime between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BCE based on a vast corpus of earlier Sumerian and Old Babylonian poems about Gilgamesh, also portrays the deities as cruel and capricious. In Tablet Six of the epic, the goddess Ishtar attempts to seduce Gilgamesh into becoming her lover. Gilgamesh spurns her advances and gives a long list of her past lovers whom she has mistreated. He says to her, as rendered by Andrew George in lines 44–79 of his translation:

“Come, let me tell [you the tale] of your lovers:
of . . . . . . . . . . . . his arm.
Dumuzi, the lover of your youth,
year upon year, to lamenting you doomed him.
You loved the speckled allallu-bird,
but struck him down and broke his wing:
now he stands in the woods crying ‘My wing!’
You loved the lion, perfect in strength,
but for him you dug seven pits and seven.
You loved the horse, so famed in battle,
but you made his destiny whip, spur and lash.
You made his destiny a seven-league gallop,
you made his destiny to drink muddy water,
and doomed Silili his mother to perpetual weeping.
You loved the shepherd, the grazier, the herdsman,
who gave you piles of loaves baked in embers,
and slaughtered kids for you day after day.
You struck him and turned him into a wolf,
now his very own shepherd boys chase him away,
and his dogs take bites at his haunches.
You loved Ishullanu, your father’s gardener,
who used to bring you dates in a basket,
daily making your table gleam.
You eyed him up and went to meet him:
‘O my Ishullanu, let us taste your vigour:
Put out your ‘hand’ and stroke my quim!’
But Ishullanu said to you:
‘Me! What do you want of me?
Did my mother not bake? Have I not eaten,
that now I should eat the bread of slander and insults?
Should I let only rushes cover me in winter?’
When you heard what [he’d] said,
you struck him and turned him into a dwarf.
You sat him down in the midst of his labours,
he cannot go up . . . , he cannot go down . . .
Must you love me also and [deal with me] likewise?”

Ishtar is immediately furious with Gilgamesh for calling out her mistreatment of her past lovers, so she storms off to her father Anu and she demands that he give her a giant, monstrous bull known as the Bull of Heaven so she can unleash it on the world to wreak havoc so she can have revenge against Gilgamesh for rejecting her. She threatens Anu that, if he does not give her the Bull of Heaven, she will raise the dead so that they will devour the living. She says, as rendered by George in lines 96–100 of his translation:

“If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
I shall smash [the gates of the Netherworld, right down] to its dwelling,
to the world below I shall grant [manumission,]
I shall bring up the dead to consume the living,
I shall make the dead outnumber the living.”

Anu reluctantly gives her the Bull of Heaven and she unleashes it upon the world. It kills a hundred soldiers of Uruk in its first snort and, in its second snort, it kills two hundred more.

Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu (whom some have also interpreted as his lover) eventually slay the bull and Ishtar wails in lamentation at seeing the bull defeated. Enkidu foolishly rips off the haunch of the bull, hurls it at Ishtar, and taunts her. The gods therefore decree that Enkidu must die. And all this just because Gilgamesh said no to Ishtar’s advances.

Although I know there are people today who still believe that the world is ruled by dangerous, capricious deities, this is not a view that is generally associated with contemporary religious conservativism or progressivism.

ABOVE: Ancient Mesopotamian terra-cotta relief plaque dating to between c. 2250 and c. 1900 BCE, depicting Gilgamesh slaying the Bull of Heaven

Alternatively, to see further just how different the normative values of ancient civilizations could be from those of contemporary conservatives and progressives alike, you can look at the normative ancient Greek and Roman attitude toward male sexuality.

Most people today think of sexuality in terms of the gender of the people that a person is sexually attracted to. Conservatives generally believe that it is morally wrong and aberrant for a person to engage in sexual conduct with a person of the same gender, while liberals generally believe that there is nothing wrong with same-gender sexual relations.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, however, did not generally think of sexuality in terms of the gender of a person’s partner. In fact, ancient Greek and Roman elite male authors frequently display a remarkable ambivalence toward the genders of the people they had sexual relations with. An anonymous ancient poem in the Greek language that is preserved in the Greek Anthology 5.65 illustrates this ambivalence quite succinctly:

“Αἰετὸς ὁ Ζεὺς ἦλθεν ἐπ᾽ ἀντίθεον Γανυμήδην,
κύκνος ἐπὶ ξανθὴν μητέρα τὴν Ἑλένης.
οὕτως ἀμφότερ᾽ ἐστὶν ἀσύγκριτα· τῶν δύο δ᾽ αὐτῶν
ἄλλοις ἄλλο δοκεῖ κρεῖσσον, ἐμοὶ τὰ δύο.”

This means, in my own translation:

“As an eagle Zeus came to godlike Ganymedes
and as a swan to the tawny-haired mother of Helene.
In this manner, the two [passions] are incomparable. Of the two,
one seems better to some; for me, both are good.”

Instead of thinking in terms of the gender of the people that a person had sex with, the Greeks and Romans thought of sexuality primarily in terms of the role that the person took during sex (i.e., whether they were the one who penetrated the other person or the one who was penetrated). They believed that to penetrate was masculine, superior, and glorious, while to be penetrated was feminine, inferior, and utterly disgraceful.

It was therefore generally seen as completely normal for a free adult man to have sexual relations with women, adolescent boys, and enslaved people of any gender—as long as he was always the penetrator and never the one who was penetrated. Normative Greek and Roman society generally regarded men who enjoyed being sexually penetrated as unmanly, inferior, disgusting, and weak. They described such men using degrading insults, such as κίναιδος (kínaidos), βάταλος (bátalos), εὐρύπρωκτος (eurýprōktos), and μαλακός (malakós) in Greek and cinaedus, pathicus, and mollis in Latin.

The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) relentlessly mocks men who apparently had reputations for enjoying being sexually penetrated throughout his various surviving comedies. He especially ridicules a certain Athenian man named Kleisthenes, son of Sibyrtios, for his supposed sexual passiveness and effeminacy.

Kleisthenes appears on stage in Aristophanes’s comedy The Women at the Thesmophoria, which was first performed in 411 BCE, most likely at the City Dionysia. The Thesmorphoria was a religious festival that only women were allowed to partake in, but, in the play, Aristophanes portrays Kleisthenes as taking part in the celebration because he’s basically a woman.

Even unverified rumors of sexual passivity could mar politicians’ careers. The Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 CE) in his Life of Julius Caesar 2 and the historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 CE) in his Roman History 43.20 both record that none other than the famous general Julius Caesar was haunted throughout his whole career by rumors that, when he visited the court of King Nikomedes of Bithynia as a young man, he allowed the king to sexually penetrate him.

Some might say that this attitude toward sexuality is “liberal” because it assumes that it is normal for men to have and pursue same-sex attractions. Others, however, might say that it is “conservative” because this whole way of thinking about sexuality is predicated on the notion of masculine superiority and it sees people who undergo sexual penetration as feminine and therefore inferior. Whatever your thoughts may be, though, it’s clear that this attitude is very different from anything that normative liberals or conservatives believe today.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix by the Briseïs Painter dated to c. 480 BCE, showing an erastes (the young adult male partner in a pederastic relationship) kissing an eromenos (the adolescent boy partner)

As a final example, we might look at the normative ancient Greek and Roman attitudes toward race. Today, conservatives generally believe that racism no longer exists or is no longer a significant influence in society, that white people have no social advantages over people of color, and that, when white people do better than people of color, it is due to objective “merit.” Progressives, by contrast, generally believe that systemic racism is still very much a problem in society and that this is the reason why white people have, for instance, better access to education, housing, and employment.

One of the very few things that conservatives and progressives agree on is that the white race exists, at least as a social construct. As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2020, however, the ancient Greeks and Romans had absolutely no concept of a white race. In fact, ancient Greek and Roman men generally believed that white skin was a very bad thing for a man to have.

As with everything in their world, ancient Greek and Roman normative expectations for skin color were highly gendered. They generally believed that men were supposed to work outside in the sun and therefore be deeply tanned in complexion. The ideal skin color for men was seen as a brownish tan. By contrast, they believed that women were supposed to remain indoors and therefore be very pale, as close to white as possible. As I note in this article I wrote in August 2021 about ancient Greek makeup, women in ancient Greece (and also Rome) would often powder their faces with lead carbonate, a toxic white powder, in order to make themselves look paler than they really were.

Greek and Roman artists commonly employed an artistic convention of portraying men with dark skin and women with white or very pale skin. This convention is especially evident in Greek black-figure pottery and Pompeiian wall paintings. When a man is described as “white” in an ancient Greek or Roman source, it is usually to designate him not as a member of any sort of white race, but rather as an effeminate coward who spends too much time indoors.

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

ABOVE: Ancient Roman fresco from the House of Mars and Venus in Pompeii dating to the first century CE depicting the goddess Venus with very pale skin and the god Mars with very dark skin

ABOVE: Roman fresco from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii dating to the first century CE, depicting the mythical sacrifice of Iphigeneia, the daughter of Agamemnon, with the men in the painting being portrayed with much darker skin than the women

The ancient Greeks and Romans also generally saw northern Europeans as fundamentally racially different from themselves. Aristotle writes in his Politics 7.1327b that the peoples of Europe and colder climates are naturally full of spirit, but they lack intelligence and skill, so they live in freedom, but they are incapable of building great political institutions or conquering other peoples.

He goes on to contrast European peoples with the peoples of Asia and warmer climates, who he says possess great intelligence and skill, but lack spirit, so they are able to build mighty empires, but they live in perpetual servitude to despots. Finally, he concludes that the Greeks, who live in between the two continents and the two climates naturally have all the best qualities of both and are therefore fit to rule over all other peoples. Here are Aristotle’s own words, as translated by H. Rackham:

“The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity.”

Notice how Aristotle sees the peoples of Europe north of Greece as just as fundamentally different from Greeks as the peoples of Asia.

This racial attitude endures in later Roman sources. The Roman writer Gaius Petronius Arbiter (lived c. 27 – c. 66 CE) wrote a novel in the Latin language titled Satyrica, large chunks of which have survived to the present day. All the main characters in the novel are Romans from Italy. In section 102 of the surviving text, the main character Encolpius is on a ship with his sixteen-year-old catamite Giton and an aged poet named Eumolpus when he discovers that the captain of the ship is his sworn enemy. Giton discovers that a woman named Tryphaena, who is infatuated with him, is on the ship as well.

Encolpius and Giton therefore begin frantically searching for some way to disguise themselves so that the others on the ship will not recognize them. Encolpius proposes that they color their skin with ink to look like Black Africans. He says, as translated by Michael Heseltine:

“‘Look at what I thought of. Eumolpus, as a man of learning, is sure to have some ink. We will use this medicine to dye ourselves, hair, nails, everything. Then we will stand by you with pleasure like Aethiopian slaves, without undergoing any tortures, and our change of colour will take in our enemies.’”

Giton, however, immediately mocks this proposal, joking that they might as well circumcise themselves to look like Jews, pierce their ears to look like Arabs, or chalk their faces white to look like Gauls, because, no matter what race they choose to disguise themselves as, they will never be able to pass convincingly:

“‘Oh! yes,’ said Giton, ‘and please circumcise us too, so that we look like Jews, and bore our ears to imitate Arabians, and chalk our faces till Gaul takes us for her own sons; as if this colour alone could alter our shapes, when it takes a number of points in unison to make a good lie. Suppose the stain of dye on the face could last for some time; imagine that never a drop of water could make any mark on our skins, nor our clothes stick to the ink, which often clings to us without the use of any cement: but, tell me, can we make our lips swell to a hideous thickness? Or transform our hair with curling-tongs? Or plough up our foreheads with scars? Or walk bow-legged? Or bend our ankles over to the ground? Or trim our beards in a foreign cut? Artificial colours dirty one’s body without altering it. Listen, I have thought of this in desperation. Let us tie our heads in our clothes, and plunge into the deep.’”

Notice how Giton defines Roman men from Italy as having a middle skin color that is darker than the pale skin of a Gallic person from what is now France, but not as dark as the skin of a Black African person. Also notice how he assumes that pale Gauls are just as racially different from tanned Italians as Black Africans.

This is a way of thinking about race that is very different from how any liberals or conservatives think about it today. I could go on for years listing examples of how the ancient world was drastically different from the world we live in today, but I think that, by this point, people get the idea; although we can talk about how the ancient world influences modern politics or how modern politics influence the ways we think about the ancient world, and we can even compare modern politics to the ancient world, we cannot assume that modern political labels apply to the ancient world in the same ways that they apply to the present day.

ABOVE: Illustration by the Australian artist Norman Lindsay (lived 1879 – 1969) depicting the characters in the Satyrica boarding the ship on which Encolpius and Giton will later seek to disguise themselves