As argued in the previous lecture, we can think of race as a sub-category of the general phenomenon of ethnicity. In racial theory the ‘other’ is conceived of as inferior on scientific or natural grounds, which go beyond the simple rivalry or chauvinism of neighbouring ethnic groups – however nasty and murderous the latter might be. We have seen that in the Roman world view, discussed in Lecture Package 4, element B – which has been the spring-board for many subsequent lecture package elements since – the Roman male’s distinction from and superiority from the barbarian was based around a pseudo-biological set of ideas that argued that the geographical location of the Roman meant that his bodily make-up enabled him to be a superior human to the barbarians who lived round about. As we saw, the latter was assimilated with the feminine – subdued barbarian populations were represented as a woman – and as we saw the feminine in Roman thought was simply a lesser or incomplete version of the male. Or they could be likened to children – in other words people who had simply not reached a stage of maturity or education. The parallels between this and 19th-20th-century European and American imperial attitudes are pretty clear.
The barbarian was, however, not only equated with the sub-masculine but with the sub-human, likened to animals. As we saw in [the last lecture package], at the extremes of the world, the Romans indeed thought that barbarians began to shade into animals. If you went too far south of the imperial frontier in Africa, for instance, you would encounter the Blemmyes who according to Pliny the Elder had no heads, just a face in the middle of their chest, satyrs (half man, half goat) and the Sciapodes with one big foot that I mentioned before; far north of the northern frontiers there were supposedly people with dogs’ heads. Some of these ideas had a very long life. The Blemmyes were still thought to be like that by thirteenth-century English map-makers, despite the fact that by then the Blemmye kingdom had been a dangerous enemy bordering Roman Egypt and its citizens well known to have proper heads just like everyone else.
These attitudes could become absolutely horrific in practice. Because the barbarians were thought to be wild and akin to animals, it was considered appropriate to throw captured barbarians – of whatever rank – to be publicly torn to pieces by wild beasts in the arena. Periodically, if it was deemed that a group of barbarians on the frontier needed to be taught a lesson then the army would be unleashed upon them with orders to attack their settlements and leave nothing they found there alive: everything – men, women, children, livestock, poultry, dogs, cats, whatever – was to be killed. No distinction was drawn between the barbarians and their animals. The Roman’s construction of the difference between the civilised Roman and the barbarian was entirely socially constructed – had no actual basis in reality – but it could nevertheless be turned into a terrifying reality for the people that one Roman writer described as ‘having nothing human but their limbs and faces’.
This is a very important point. I argued that race, like ethnicity, is a social construction; that it has no actual scientific basis; that whatever scientific or pseudoscientific arguments are adduced are there to justify the a priori categorisation. That is absolutely indisputable. But the important point is that that does not stop racial or ethnic conflict being among the most vicious; more importantly it does not stop people defined as inferior according to some sort of somatic (i.e. bodily/corporeal) feature from living every day of their lives with the very real weight of oppression. They experience it day in and day out in their very inhabitation of their bodies, no matter how high they rise in society. To those people, the essentially fictive nature of race is small comfort.
I would like to explore two points in this [post]. The first is to ask how the Romans – and indeed their non-Roman soldiers – could treat non-Romans in this brutal, even genocidal fashion and yet at the same time have non-Romans reach the very highest ranks in society and have Romans happily serving under them, or joining army units with self-consciously barbarian identities or cultures. Closely related to that is my second question: can we make a distinction between the racialised and non-racialised elements of Roman attitudes towards non-Romans. Partly this is because, as I made clear in the previous lecture, I think it is important not simply to replace ‘ethnic’ with ‘racial’, to fold all sorts of chauvinism or prejudice into the category of the racial, which has been done in some recent work on our period (which isn’t to say that the latter isn’t interesting and thought-provoking: quite the opposite). There is, in my view, an important qualitative difference between the two, as I argued in the [last blog post]. I won’t necessarily have a clear or coherent answer.
To answer the first, I am going to refer to Slavoj Žižek’s first (and best) book, The Sublime Object of Ideology. Žižek points out that racist thinking lies entirely in the order or register of the Imaginary: this is one of Lacan’s three registers and is the one that concerns ideals about how the world really is or should be. This in a sense is why it can be entirely incoherent. It’s also why ‘the other’ can be seen as good at some things while being represented as generally inferior. The inferior other can be viewed as what Žižek (again following Lacan) calls ‘the subject presumed to enjoy’; in other words, the other is somehow good at all the things the person wishes they were good at, or is allowed to do things which the person thinks they are themselves barred or prevented from doing. Now, the vast bulk of Roman ‘binary’ ethnography, discussed in [a previous video lecture] can be seen in this light. Indeed I argued in a conference paper that a lot of modern thinking about the late antique barbarian can also be seen in that light too.
The thing is, though, that the order of the imaginary doesn’t deal with everyday lived realities, even if it reflects upon them. That is the business of the order of the symbolic: the world of language, signs and symbols, social structures and so on. Now, in Žižek’s view, and I find this compelling, the reason why, on the one hand, an individual can hold violently racist views about a group of people and yet at the same time have friends from that group, even be married to one – why the famous line that ‘I can’t be racist; I have black friends’ is possible – is precisely because these two aspects of their lives operate in different psychoanalytical registers. In a way, the taxonomic level of Roman ethnography is that which operates in the sphere of the Symbolic. The ‘other’ is a figure of the Imaginary; it doesn’t actually exist as a real person. As we saw, it’s really there as a yardstick against which to judge Romans; or it is a constitutive outside, to use the phrase I used in the last lecture package. If compelled to deal with barbarians as actual people, Romans had to switch to the Symbolic register – unless, and we can see this in all sorts of persecutions – those people can somehow be prevented from being seen as actual other people. Actual barbarians, even actual barbarian groups can be grasped within the taxonomic level, like peoples within the Empire: I hate barbarians but you/your people aren’t really barbarians, not like that other lot. You have doubtless heard of the equivalents of this... So, eminent non-Romans are often never mentioned as having barbarian roots. There are, for example, no references to the Vandal parentage of the general Stilicho until after his fall from power in 408. At that point, all the usual anti-barbarian rhetoric was wheeled out to damn him as a public enemy. As one historian said, had he died of natural causes in around 406 he would have gone down in history simply as a Roman general with a funny name.
The second question is more difficult to answer. Did barbarians experience life within the Roman Empire as racialised minorities? Part of the issue here is the extent to which one might instantly be recognised as a non-Roman. It’s difficult to see somatic features like skin or hair colour as determinant in Roman ethnography. Sub-Saharan Africans – Ethiopians as the Romans called them – would probably usually be visibly different, but so too would people from the far north: the people the Romans considered to be pale-skinned and fair-haired. If anything, in most of the Empire there was possibly more prejudice (as far as I can see) towards the latter than the former. Things were possibly very different in Egypt, where there was a long history of chauvinistic treatment of the peoples of the upper Nile: Nubia - Sudan. There is an important discussion in Black Skin, White Masks, by the great Francophone, Martiniquais psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, where he talks about how the black man feels himself in the gaze of the white man all the time and internalises all the white man’s expectations of what black people are supposed to be like; feels he has to behave in a particular way. Did non-Romans experience something like this inside the Empire? It’s something to think about and probably deserves much closer attention.