ABSTRACT
All peoples, everywhere, perhaps, have at some point in their history conceived of a radical distinction between themselves as members of a particular ethnic group and the rest of humanity. Many, indeed, possess no terms which can adequately render the concept of “the human.” As Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed,“a great number of primitive tribes simply refer to themselves by the term for ‘men’ in their language, showing that in their eyes an essential characteristic of man disappears outside the limits of the group.” 1 This does not, of course, mean that such people cannot distinguish adequately between their neighbors and say giraffes. It merely means that they feel no obligation to extend any of the reciprocity, or the recognition, which determines life within the kin group to those outside it. The Greeks, although they did have a word, anthropos, which described both themselves and all human others, were no exception to this rule. In The Statesman, Plato made his protagonist, a “Stranger from Elea” (a town in southern Italy), complain of the Athenians:
In this country they separate the Hellenic races from the rest as one, and to all the other races, which are countless in number and have no relation in blood or language to one another, they give the single name ‘barbarian;’ then because of this single name they think it a single species. 2
