Reinventing the Barbarian: The Other in the Eye of the Beholder

The first appearance of the word “barbarian” in Western literature occurs rather ambiguously in the catalogue of Trojan warriors (Iliad, 2, 867): perhaps by archaism (G. S. Kirk, The Iliad: A commentary. Cambridge University Press, 1993–2002), barbarophonos presents as speakers of a foreign language the Carians, secular neighbours of Greek populations and possibly themselves speakers of a variant of Greek. Even so, the Homeric world, reflecting an already long experience of globalisation, does not differentiate Greek and Barbarian: the mythical heroes of Asia and even Africa are part of the same genealogies and are described in the same terms as the Achaeans. Centuries later, the Romans will claim their Trojan ancestry to legitimise their hegemony within myth and history. The Greek interaction with the “Barbarians” is very old, resulting in outstanding figures from the beginning of Greek philosophy, such as the remarkably hybrid Thales of Miletus. There being no obvious generic animosity, the difference was nevertheless noticed from archaic times and was also influenced by hostile contacts. If the Persian Wars did not invent the barbarians, the prejudice against non-Greeks wasn’t general either: speaking for the Polis, Attic tragedy, since Aeschylus’ The Persians, represents them negatively (E. Said, Orientalismo: representações ocidentais do Oriente (trans. P. Serra). Cotovia, 2004), but also recognises and discusses the various issues around the Other, especially with Euripides. Polarisation and conflict coexisted with cultural interaction, as later on in the context of Alexander the Great’s Empire (Vlassopoulos, Greeks and Barbarians. Cambridge University Press, 2013). However, this division between Greek and Barbarian, and fundamentally between West and East, deeply influenced and was deeply affected by European thought until the present day, preventing the global understanding of the Trojan War that its repercussions in Antiquity would suggest, beyond the Homeric elaboration (Eberhard Zangger et al., Middle and Late Bronze Age Western Asia minor: A status report. In I. Hajnal, E. Zangger, & J. Kelder (Eds.), The political geography of Western Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age (pp. 39–179). Archaeolingua, 2022). Analysing the Greek-Barbarian question, with its apparent Homeric beginnings, is therefore essential to frame the contemporary perspective on the Other.