Were Romans Racist?

When Augustus claimed that he found Rome a city made of brick and left it one made of marble (Suetonius, Augustus 29), he certainly had a point. It gleamed as white as it was possible for a city to gleam. Ever since, Rome has been closely associated with big, bold, white marble buildings, a sort of sanitised looking, hospital-clean, Logan's Run type spotless, and rather colourless cityscape that movie makers, in particular, have always seemed very fond of. To match the glowing background, the same movie makers have always tended to fill it with equally white people, and mostly men at that, to the extent that it's hard to think of any major depiction of the Roman empire created in the past few hundred years that doesn't consist almost entirely of white blokes.

Denzel Washington appears as a major character in the newest Gladiator movie, but I can't really comment on that as, for several reasons, all of which can be condensed down to "I don't want to watch it, thanks", I have yet to see it. But the previous movie contained, off the top of my head, two actors who were not obviously white - the British/Iranian comedian and actor Omid Djalili and the Beninese/American Djimon Hounsou.

The problem with this broad depiction of the social makeup of the Roman empire is that it seems to forget, or perhaps ignore, the fact that a huge swathe of it consisted of what is now northern Africa and the Middle East. The people of Rome were as likely to be Syrians, Africans, Berbers, Nubians, Parthians or Egyptians as they were Gauls or Britons, and all of these people would have found their way to the great melting pot that was Rome itself.

It would be easy to blame this apparent cultural discrepancy on racism, but would that be fair? And if it is, whose racism is it? Rome's or more modern attitudes?

There's no doubt that the modern depictions of Rome found in movies are reflections of how Roman history is, in the main, presented. Roman history could be easily summed up as 'What the emperor did" with the exploits of a few elite senators and generals thrown in for good measure. All ancient history tends to be written by the cultural elite, and when it comes to Roman history in particular, that means the cultural elite of the city of Rome itself. The Roman ruling classes of the empire tended to all come from 'old' families who, in turn, liked to trace their own ancestry back to Etruscan or certainly purely 'Italian' roots. Various laws over the years forbade any of them from marrying outside of their social rank, and so the ruling classes remained a largely incestuous bunch, at least figuratively, all the way to the collapse of the Western empire.

But that doesn't mean that marriages between these 'optimates' and elite families from around the empire didn't happen, of course, or that people from other parts of the empire didn't find themselves at the top of society. Speaking of Gladiator II, the two chaps who are emperors in that movie, Geta and his older brother Caracalla, were the sons of Septimius Severus, who was born in Leptis Magna in modern-day Libya and was described by Cassius Dio as 'Libyan by race.' ( Roman History, Book 77.6.) In addition, their mother, Julia Domna, was a Syrian, meaning that today, we would almost certainly not have described either of their sons as 'white'.

But what did the Romans describe them as, beyond 'Libyan' or 'Syrian'? The answer is simple. They didn't.

Romans seem to have been almost entirely free of any form of colour prejudice, even though they were undoubtedly guilty of cultural bigotry, particularly when it came to the somewhat feigned revulsion they felt for great big, blonde, stinky barbarians like the Celts and especially those horrible Germans from up north. However, when it came to skin colour, the issue is remarkable because of how little it is mentioned. When it came to cultural identifiers, skin colour didn't appear to be worthy of mention. Black people are mentioned, and they are depicted quite often in the epigraphy but never in a pejorative sense.

And therein lies part of the reason why Rome is so often depicted as an empire of white people. In the absence of mentions of black people, the default setting was just assumed to be 'a bunch of white people', based largely on the fact that most of the history was written by people who were largely white and all the statues either appeared to show, or were assumed to show, white people.

There's no real reason for this, of course. It's just a white person's view of history - unless there are specifically black people mentioned in the history, then the history is just assumed to be full of white people. The reality is that Roman history is as much the history of Northern Africa as it is of France or Italy, but all of it was presented mainly through the eyepiece of the city of Rome.

We begin to see what might be considered unconscious racism in the way that black people are actually shown in such movies as Gladiator. Omid Djalili plays a slave trader, and Djimon Hounsou is a gladiator, who in Rome is no better than a slave. If non-white people are going to be included in this version of history, it seems as if they could only be there if their presence is justified in a way that white people could understand 'black history'. To white people who are unaware of black historical contexts, black people are slaves or involved somehow in the slave trade. Even Denzel Washington's Macrinus, (very) loosely based on the man who was briefly emperor following the death of Caracalla, is a 'former slave', albeit one who rises to the very top of the tree. The real Macrinus, to be fair, was born in what is modern-day Algeria to a Berber family, but he came from an equestrian family and was never a slave. The only way these non-white characters can exist in this version of Roman history is via the medium of slavery because, to someone whose view of history comes almost entirely through the eyes of a white man, black people can only exist in this world if they are introduced to it via slavery. Black people only exist in, say, American history because they were introduced to it via the same means and this version of history, because there appear to be no other guidelines, is then just extrapolated to Rome.

This is, of course, a falsehood because Roman history is not, despite what some people insist, exclusively white history. Roman history is not just the history of Europe.

That said, there would have been black people who were slaves in Rome. But we must be careful not to conflate Roman slavery with what we know about Black slavery in the American South. So whilst there were black slaves in Rome, they were not many and certainly not the majority. Generally, there was no difference in skin colour, or indeed in any physical appearance at all, between master and slave in Roman society and in nearly all cases, they all came from the same stock. This meant that descendants of freed slaves, no matter what their origin, could blend freely into the population in ways that New World slaves, set apart by their colour in more modern times, could not. We must be careful not to import into discussions on Roman slavery the intellectual analysis or emotional preconceptions derived from black slavery in the New World, but movies such as Gladiator seem to either not be capable of doing this or simply didn't even consider it. Black people and history equal slavery in this simplistic viewpoint.

Having said all this, Rome did introduce a bunch of laws at various times designed to protect the 'purity' of the Roman bloodline, which all sounds very white supremacist, particularly if one only thinks of Roman society as 'white'. What they are actually trying to do is to protect it from infiltration from the blood of freedmen and their descendants. At times, the measures become quite fascistic, with people who are seen to have impure blood or simply 'foreigners' being expelled from Rome. Limits are put on how many slaves can be manumitted or on who qualifies for citizenship. But, again, none of this is driven by issues surrounding skin colour, and, anyway, they are measures which are either soon abandoned or prove to be entirely unworkable. Efforts by Tiberius (Suetonius, Tiberius, 48) to deny veterans their right to citizenship at the end of their service, for example, can be seen as an attempt to protect the Roman bloodline from foreigners but, in reality, was more to do with him being so tight-fisted that he didn't want to pay them their dues on retirement, and so just kept them on until they dropped dead.

Rome was many things - bigoted, classist, staggeringly patriarchal and treated people as chattel, but it wasn't racist. Race was not only not a barrier to any part of Roman life, it doesn't even seem worthy of being mentioned, which makes judging exactly how people's skin colour was viewed difficult. What we mustn't do, and what we might be guilty of, is assuming that because black people are not expressly mentioned, that must then mean that everyone was white. Being white shouldn't be seen as the default in Roman society, particularly in a world focused on the Mediterranean. A world that also, it must be remembered, traded heavily with cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa and the sub-continent.

In the end, it was said that everyone came to Rome, and Rome came to everyone. In his Satires (3.58-125), Martial describes the dizzying array of various cultures and people who throng Rome's crowded and noisy streets - Syrians, Greeks, Parthians, Africans, Gauls, Persians - all with their strange languages, exotic clothes and even outrageous haircuts:

"There, the high-shaven scalp and stiffened hair,

and the crowd celebrating their foreign rites."

References and Further Reading:

Suetonius, Twelve Caesars
Martial, Satires

Wells (1984), The Roman Empire, Fontana

Napthali and Lewis, (1966), Roman Civilization, Sourcebook II, The Empire, Harper.