The Fear of Social Interaction:A Historiographical Essay on Ethnocentrism and Racism in Ancient Greece¹

This article discusses scholars who have been advocating the concepts of race and racism to explain cultural prejudices in ancient Greece and Rome. More precisely, this study debates the arguments for the case of an ancient racist or proto-racist Greece elaborated on by Benjamin Isaac (2004) in The Invention of Racism in Antiquity and Susan Lape (2010) in Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy. Thus, for this historiographical perspective, there is much more continuity between ancient and modern racism than we had assumed. This article highlights certain conceptual and argumentative flaws in this approach, maintaining that ethnic relations in ancient Greece are better explained as non-hereditary forms of cultural prejudice rather than as racism, which has a specific history related to European colonization and slave trade.

Keywords:
Ancient Greece; racism; ethnicity; cultural prejudice; autochthony