Voices In The Margins
Classics’ Suppression of Ancient Roman Writers of Color
Do classicists treasure Lucian of Samosata because he talks like he’s white?
Do they dismiss the New Testament Gospels because their authors sound too brown?
When I was first seeking publishers for my book on Syrians and Roman imperialism, it largely omitted the dynamic author Lucian of Samosata. My goal was to give voice to Syrians unknown to the broader world of Classics, as documented by inscriptions, papyri, and literary texts in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin and an array of material culture.
But as I conversed with other scholars, I was overwhelmingly advised to place Lucian, the virtuoso of ancient Syrian authors, center stage. After all, he was an immense literary talent. But what also distinguished him was that his prose emulated, and innovated upon, the literary paradigms of classical Athens. The implicit logic at work was that he was among the very few Middle Eastern writers or topics that interested classicists. The rest, not so much.
I have long pondered why this was, mulling over it in silence. But in the wake of this year’s annual meeting, it seems that classicists have reached a moment of reckoning in which a discussion of this issue should be more explicit. As someone who belongs to all overrepresented categories (don’t let my surname deceive you), I’m often diffident about whether I should voice my opinion on the discipline’s marginalization of persons of color.
Even so, I have long been troubled by certain perspectives in Classics that seem to dominate its conventional wisdom and to privilege notionally white European forms of Greek or Roman culture. By sharing these reflections, I hope not to crowd out the underrepresented voices of today’s Classics any further, but simply to call to mind voices of color from antiquity, especially the Roman empire.
Some might surmise that what defines classical Greek and Roman society are distinctive cultural paradigms, especially as represented by certain periods of Greek and Roman politics, literature, art, architecture, or philosophy (various ways to define “the classical,” an amorphous category, are discussed here). They may also point out that New Testament authors and many other Middle Eastern writers of Greek are vigorously studied by scholars of Judaism and early Christianity. Fair enough.
Yet it is hard to ignore that perceptions of race have made an indelible impact. They have shaped how scholars of European descent have distinguished classical traditions from notionally inferior forms of Greek and Roman language and culture — forms often known to be practiced by ancient persons of color. In this sense, sounding white continues to validate the ancient voices prioritized by the discipline, even if we usually don’t notice it.
As I finished my book on Syrians in the Roman empire, the longstanding tendency for the field of Classics to favor ancient whiteness (so perceived) had already long troubled me, but my thoughts were soon absorbed by other matters. The first violence of the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011. The accretive atrocities of the Assad regime, the wave of murderous destruction implemented by ISIS, and a catastrophic refugee crisis followed. At the time, scholars of the Roman Middle East had to confront the West’s colonial legacy in the region, one abetted by the disciplines of Archaeology and Classics, among others. Syria as a multi-denominational political entity was manufactured by Western powers after WWI. After brutally suppressing the Great Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), the French Mandate (1920–1946) and various Western archaeological teams began to conduct systematic excavations of known ancient sites on an unprecedented scale. Before that, white people mostly just absconded with antiquities and dispersed them throughout the world.
As the situation in Syria became increasingly unstable, the Roman sites of Palmyra and Dura-Europos, along with many others, suffered irreparable destruction and looting. This was in part (but not exclusively) because the destructive vision of ISIS associated them with a Western imperial perspective and market for cultural heritage (useful treatments are here and here). Khaled al-Asaad, Palmyra’s most famous scholar, was executed by ISIS for protecting the site’s antiquities (his son Waleed pays tribute to him in pp. 20–27 of this recent publication). Despite efforts to document the destruction, and even heroic attempts to preserve antiquities trapped in a combat zone, the world was largely left to ponder to whom the endangered remains of ancient Syria really belonged. Arab nationalism? ISIS? The West? The global community? The Syrians whose archaeologists of color were risking their lives to preserve cultural heritage?
Classics has been confronting a parallel issue. Whose Classics is this? To whom does Greek and Roman antiquity belong? As we know, the answers vary by political perspective. White supremacists covet Classics for white people; others envision a Greek and Roman antiquity that belongs to a diverse global community. Meanwhile, Classics continues to attract criticism for not providing equitable opportunities to scholars of color or all social classes.
But what still remains little contested in the discipline, despite our pretension of seeing the ancient Mediterranean through a “color-blind” or race-less lens, is that ancient Greeks and Romans were fundamentally white (or some slightly darker complexion thereof). Denise McCoskey has recently shown how classicists have often implicitly assumed, or even advocated for, the default whiteness of Greeks and Romans in antiquity or their isolation from the cultural influences of ancient peoples of color. In light of the differences between ancient and modern racial categories (for some key studies, see here, here, and here), our sources are often silent on the color of individuals. We usually can only speak in probabilities, or embrace our ignorance.
Even so, we can’t assume whiteness in the service of creating a Greek and Roman past in the traditionally white image of Europeans, often while, paradoxically, invoking the absence of race in antiquity. After all, Roman citizens and subjects throughout Syria and North Africa, numbering in the tens of millions, were of Syrian, Arabian, Phoenician, Libyan, Judaean/Jewish, and Egyptian descent, with others being of sub-Saharan, East African, or South Asian origins. A good number migrated, or were violently abducted, to Rome and throughout the empire as merchants, soldiers, and the enslaved.
But then, perhaps this is why Classics scarcely gives voice to them, as if they weren’t really Greeks or Romans in their own time. If we ignore them or their brownness (or blackness), don’t we get to pretend that Greeks and Romans were devoid of race — by which we really mean white?
These considerations bring us back to Lucian. Despite all his literary talent and skill, Lucian’s “race” has in the past diminished the value of his work in the eyes of classicists. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European scholars were confounded that a Syrian could emulate (and parody) the elevated prose of classical Athens. They often discredited his literary value.
This interpretation fit with the view, now mostly dismissed, that Greek literature in the Roman empire was an inert imitation of classical Greek paradigms. But Lucian was a step further removed, as shown by Daniel Richter. According to Henry Hime, Eduard Norden, and Rudolf Helm, all writing c. 1900, he was in racial terms “essentially Oriental,” an “Oriental without depth and character, and a “thoughtless Syrian” (writers quoted from Richter, 89–91). For the luminary Latin epigrapher and Roman historian Theodor Mommsen, Lucian’s works were “after a genuinely Syrian type…incapable of saying amid his laughter the earnest truth or of even handling the plastic power of comedy.” Mommsen’s student Otto Seeck rendered a more favorable verdict but conceived of Lucian’s Heimat (and by implication, Lucian) as either entirely Semitic or half-Semitic. This perspective isolated Lucian from putatively Aryan European authors. Since he was “Oriental” or “Semitic,” he couldn’t really be Greek or Roman.
Lucian’s treatment was not isolated. In fact, the dystopian horrors of the twentieth century — spawned by a volatile cocktail of racism, nationalism, and colonialism — were around the corner, and racial politics were shaping a hierarchy of classical authors, periods, and perspectives. Many scholars idealized the forms of Greek and Roman culture practiced by notional Aryans of the Mediterranean during their most ostensibly vibrant periods. In some views, these ultimately were tainted or became inert as the forms exhibited by Middle Eastern figures of the Roman empire exerted their impressive energy (see here and here). Whether praised or derided, “Semitic” or “Oriental” races had felt the effects of classical Greek or Roman civilization, but they weren’t really integral to it.
Intriguingly, the racist thinking of the period strained to define “Semites,” often conceived as the polar opposites of Aryans, in terms of their complexions (for scholarship, see here, here, and here). For some, they were one of the brown races. For others, they were white by origin but had features reflecting how they had “mixed” for millennia with darker peoples. They could also be considered part of a “Mediterranean race.” Such perspectives maintained momentum in the twentieth century as white colonialism restructured the Middle East. An influential article published in 1951 even illustrated how racial “Semites” at Roman Dura-Europos eventually wrested local governance from the Greco-Macedonian settler elite (critiqued by Jennifer Baird, 83–85).
Racialized in such terms, any cultural or religious life with roots in the Roman Middle East, including Judaism and Christianity, was contrasted with supposedly authentic (ie., Aryan or white) Greek and Roman traditions and peoples. The Greek prose of the New Testament authors, influenced by Hebrew and Aramaic paradigms and Middle Eastern cultures, was located safely beyond the space inhabited by classical authors. Yet, paradoxically, even “Semites” or “Orientals” who adopted the proper Greek or Roman (i.e., Aryan or white) forms were liable for exclusion on racial grounds. They could earn Roman citizenship, write in Greek or Latin, emulate classical Greek and Roman authors, or worship the gods of various Mediterranean peoples. They could be admired or disparaged by European scholars. But they were not really Greek or Roman.
Attitudes like these are likely why Lucian was dismissed for so long. A period of remarkable rehabilitation has commenced, and Lucian is now receiving his due. Some even see him as a precursor to twentieth-century postcolonial theory, a provincial who critiqued contemporary Greek elitism and its Roman patronage by mastering “the dominant language of the other” and its literature (quotation from Richter, 93). We classicists now give voice to Lucian, as shown by a recent wealth of international scholarship on his corpus. In the end, he figured prominently in my book too.
But something about Lucian’s restoration is troubling. We still have failed to acknowledge his (probable) brownness, even if we embrace him as a Syrian, Greek, and Roman.
One must wonder why classicists are now so interested in a few exceptional Syrian writers like Lucian but not in the millions of other people from the Middle East caught in Rome’s imperial web. At the margins (or beyond) of Classics is an array of Platonist and Judeo-Christian authors, the Jewish historian Josephus, and above all the New Testament Gospels, easily the most influential texts ever written in Greek. Classicists who dare work on these (and some do) often discover that they are moving beyond the canonical boundaries of their discipline, not expanding its horizons. If we include the epigraphic or material records of Palmyra, Dura-Europos, and elsewhere in the Roman or Parthian Near East, the list becomes virtually endless. To be sure, the same can be said about many other regions of the Roman empire, particularly the non-European ones.
Aside from his obvious talent, why is Lucian so uniquely attractive now? Is it because he mastered the proper classical (i.e., white) literary styles and conventions of Greek? Is it because the authors of the Gospels write the “bad” Greek of “Orientals?” Is it because the origins of Christianity, like those of the Carthaginian Republic, were reputedly couched in an irrational spiritual dogmatism that typified Middle Eastern peoples, and not the notionally philosophical Greeks and Romans? Altogether, if classicists had once looked beyond Lucian’s Greekness to classify him as “Oriental” or “Semitic,” he now seems to be the Syrian of choice in part because he doesn’t sound as brown as the rest.
Since the most valuable — that is, whitest — Roman voices have long held center stage, it has become all too easy to replicate their biases. A brief summary of Syrians in the Roman empire gives a general sense. We find their traces in the Roman army throughout Europe and North Africa. We encounter them in the immigrant population of Rome. Over time, many became Roman citizens, equestrians, and even senators. The Palmyrene dynasts Odainath and Zenobia briefly governed vast territories in the Roman Middle East, thus raising the specter of brown imperial management. Syrians were also remarkably diverse. Some claimed descent from Greeks, others Arameans, others Italians, others Arabians, others Iranians. Their cultural and religious lives were wonderfully eclectic.
Just as remarkable is how Roman authors like Cicero and Tacitus filtered this diversity to conceive of a homogenous race of Syrians. Their eastern environment and despotic traditions allegedly made them prone to every gluttonous excess, sexual transgression, and religious deviance. The texts that excoriate the emperor that we now call “Elagabalus” (reigned 218–222) because he famously valued his connection to Elagabal, the aniconic sun god of Syrian Emesa (modern Homs), replicate such standard themes. The surviving sources classify Zenobia as a hypermasculine barbarian who dominates her foreign realm of emasculated eunuchs, not the empowered Roman woman that she was. One of them even intriguingly delineates her brownness (HA TT, 30.15–16).
We in the field of Classics have largely given voice to such racialized perspectives, even if we’re often unaware that we’ve done so. Like our classical authors, we see even assimilated Middle Eastern Romans as almost Greek or Roman, but not quite (I borrow from the phrasing of Homi Bhabha, 127–28). Even as we increasingly focus on race, ethnicity, and inclusivity, the discipline still prioritizes, and builds departments around, a selection of voices long associated with the most “vibrant” periods (i.e., whitest) of Greek and Roman society or their later emulators. Classics departments in the US routinely house experts (often in multiples) who give voice to how Herodotus, Vergil, Tacitus, or Juvenal’s Umbricius, just to name a few, characterized Egyptians, Phoenicians, Libyans, Jews, and Syrians. Do they usually create proportionate space for scholars who enable these peoples to talk back in Greek or Latin, indigenous languages, or material culture? It seems not.
To be sure, this pattern is not restricted to Classics. Anne Bailey, a world-renowned expert on the African diaspora, has published a vital book with the title The Weeping Time (see here for interview). It focuses on the largest attested auction for enslaved Africans in a daring, sophisticated effort to capture the voices of Africans and African Americans living in a web of systemic violence. In a recent public lecture, to which I am very indebted, she pointed out how the history of modern African slavery in the Americas has, quite strangely, often given greater priority to white voices than those of enslaved Africans.
For us, this should raise a related question. Why is the discipline of Classics so structurally disposed against hearing Romans of color, in their own voices, as closely as possible? Shouldn’t a greater effort to embrace inclusivity militate against this tendency?
Creating a Classics (if we retain the name) that is inclusive of past and present voices of color would require substantial restructuring. It would involve realigning hiring priorities, reconfiguring conference programs, and shifting focus away from people, periods, and cultural forms long identified as the most vibrant or classical due in part to their association with (Aryan) whiteness. Of course, it would involve a more diverse discipline, and one that distributes support to a greater range of research endeavors. I hope that we rise to the challenge of creating this inclusive future, one in which voices of color matter. Some of these voices are speaking right now (like here and here). Some have been for two thousand years.
Nathanael Andrade is an associate professor of ancient history at Binghamton University (SUNY). He has written Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2013); The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Zenobia: Shooting Star of Palmyra (Oxford University Press, 2018).
