Who got counted as Greek (excuse me, Hellene) was contested. The Greek-speaking Macedonians were correctly regarded as a bunch of near-barbarian backwoods hicks until Philip and and the very young Alexander smashed the Thebans and the rest if the self-styled "real Hellenes at Chaeronea in around 340, wiping out Thebes' "Sacred Band" of tough gay (we'd say today) lovers-warriors, and opening the way for the Macedonian conquest of Hellas. That made them Greek/Hellenes. You gotta problem with that?
Aristotle, a Greek-speaking Stagyran, that is to say, another backwoods hick, was probably tolerated as barely Greek/Hellene when he got to Plato's ultra-sophisticated academy around 360, at least until he started to talk and blew everybody away, including Plato. This is sheer speculation, but it is almost certainly right given how people from the northern hinterlands were regarded and given Ari's talents and the effect that they must have had among all the third-raters and the one other first-rater at the Academy.
Speaking Latin was expected, after the ascent of Rome as the dominant power in the Mediterranean, complete, more or less, by Caesar's time, the way English is now. It was the lingua franca. Even the snobbish Greeks/Hellenes had to speak it and read it, if only to deal with their Roman overlords.
Mastery of either or both of these languages did not bar you from being a slave. Plato himself was briefly enslaved in Syracuse during an unsuccessful attempt to make a philosopher king of the tyrant Dionysus. Aristotle, never enslaved, had better luck as Alexander's tutor.
Race, marked by skin color, was an alien concept in the ancient Mediterranean. That doesn't mean that different peoples weren't snobbish, bigoted, and xenophobic, as I have indicated. The Romans thought the Greeks unmanly. The Greeks thought the Romans uncivilized. The Persians looked down on everyone. The Jews thought that there was only one God and he belonged to them. Everyone else thought they were crazy.
Martin Bernal's astoundingly learned and amazingly silly attempt (In Black Athena) to prove that classical civilization was derived from Africa and invented by blacks ("the blameless Ethiopians," Homer calls them, Zeus goes at one point to party with them) would have been simply incomprehensible if presented to anyone in that world. It is totally anachronistic. As, btw, is the Will and Ariel Durant attempt to treat classical civilization as "Western," somehow linked specially to the civilization of what we would today call European whites and what Mediterraneans of all colors would have regarded as nonexistent.
--- On Wed, 1/21/09, farmelantj at juno.com <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
> From: farmelantj at juno.com <farmelantj at juno.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Cockeyed Optimism
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, January 21, 2009, 7:02 AM
> Our current-day notions of race were
> largely absent in those days. People were,
> of course, aware of differences in skin
> color, but I have the impression that they
> didn't make that big a deal over them.
> The important thing in the Greco-Roman
> world was that one was fluent in Greek
> and Latin. If you were, then you were
> a civilized person, otherwise you were
> a barbarian.
>
> Jim F.
>
> -- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> They weren't considered "black" as a separate
> category of people. ;)
>
>
> --- On Tue, 1/20/09, Matthias Wasser
> <matthias.wasser at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Matthias Wasser
> <matthias.wasser at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Cockeyed Optimism
> > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> > Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 11:40 PM
> > The Romans had a few black emperors, IIRC. Some of the
> > better ones, too.
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
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>
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