Minorities and Racism

There is no doubt at all that the Hellenics often treated outsiders badly. The idea of the “barbarian” (someone whose speech is just an incomprehensible “ba ba”) is a well known Hellenic invention. But the cultural identity of both societies was even more pervasively based on what we would now see as an unhealthy distrust of anyone different from themselves. Xenophobia in other words.
The word barbaros, from which “barbarian” is derived did not originally have pejorative connotations. It simply meant people who didn't speak Hellenic and their speech sounded to the Hellenics like bar-bar-bar.
But is it all quite so simple? Probably not. In modern society, the key natural characteristic has been skin colour, but not so for the ancient Hellenics. The Hellenics were not colour-prejudiced; instead they were geographical, culture and environmental determinists.
To over-simplify a bit, the Hellenics were seen as “proto-racists” in the sense that they believed that the characteristics which certain races derived from their (inferior) environment and from the climate in which they lived---the rain and fog of Northern Europe, for example -- were fixed and irreversibly inferior. The list of unnatural things that foreigners were supposed to get up to is a long one. It ranged from peculiar eating habits (not just frogs legs or poppadoms, but at its worst cannibalism) to strange regimes of hygiene (women standing up to piss was a notable source of wonderment and/or disdain) and topsy-turvy ideas of sex and gender.

Related Ethnicities

• Hellenic