ABSTRACT
It is easy to assume today that the notion of dividing the peoples of the world into a series of biological races has always been with us and that the concept of human races has a great antiquity in human thought. But that would be wrong. Most historians argue that race as we know it in the Western world is a notion that arose during the Middle Ages, perhaps as recently as 500 years ago. While the ancient Greeks and Romans recognized that populations from different continents were physically and culturally diverse, this recognition of human diversity never led to the development of a racial ideology or worldview. In typically ethnocentric fashion, the ancient Greeks divided the world into Greeks and non-Greeks or barbarians, but they recognized that this was a purely cultural distinction. Barbarians were all foreigners who could not speak Greek, but it was acknowledged that barbarians could become Greek. They were not considered deeply or inherently different from Greeks; they were just unlucky enough to have been born and raised somewhere other than Greece. Later, the Roman Empire was built on the notion of making Romans out of foreigners, usually after military conquest. If you were conquered by Rome, you could become Roman by paying taxes to Rome, by becoming part of the Roman political system, and by learning to speak Latin. While it is true that slavery was common in the ancient Mediterranean world, slavery was never reserved for people of a particular racial or ethnic background: anyone could become a slave, and many slaves were able to eventually purchase or otherwise regain their freedom and become full citizens of Rome. As anyone who has seen the movie Gladiator knows, even former Roman generals could become enslaved. This was very unlike the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, which was based on a belief in the biological inferiority of Africans.
