” βαρβάρων δ’ Ἕλληνας ἄρχειν εἰκός, ἀλλ’ οὐ βαρβάρους … Ἑλλήνων· τὸ μὲν γὰρ δοῦλον, οἱ δ’ ἐλεύθεροι” Euripides “Iphigenia in Aulis”
The ancient Greeks, the rulers of the “City” and the ancestors of reason, distinguished themselves from the rest of humanity with a pride that bordered on divine command. For them, the “barbarian” was a creature of chaos and bestial ignorance, untamed by the laws of the city and the discipline of the “gymnasium.” Yet, even in their self-confidence in their contempt for inferiority, the Greeks, emotionally extracting, betrayed their hypocrisy. They accused the “barbarian” of cruelty, betrayal, and breaking oaths, while at the same time committing the same unacceptable acts with a cunning that could make the gods themselves avert their gaze.
This decisive distinction between Greeks and barbarians, born not of blood but of its derivative culture, was the deep foundation on which the Greeks saw the world: a sharp contrast between the light of their own culture and the shadowy wilderness of those they considered inferior. Before the word acquired its later meaning of “uncivilized and forgotten”, it was a sound-formation and reflected how the ancient Greeks heard the Persians and Arabs speaking their unknown language, often using the phoneme bar-bar. Thus, gradually bar-bar became bar-bar and finally the rough-spoken and disarticulate, “incomprehensible” non-Greek foreigners were marked as barbarians.
From the 5th century BC onwards, the word began to be used clearly with a derogatory and derogatory character towards all those who were not Greeks, now acquiring a series of negative meanings, and could in some cases mean the bestial, the man inclined to submission, the intellectually inferior. However, already in the archaic national bard of the Greeks, Homer (Iliad II, 867) there is the word barbarofonos which refers to the Carians of Asia Minor (“Nastis av Karon ígesato barbarofonos”)..
Certainly the Persian Wars made the broader dimension of the characteristics of Greeks and barbarians, the opposition of the Greek ethos to the barbarian, more intense and more evident. The first to refer to the disposition and attitude of the Greeks, in contrast to that of the barbarians, is the Marathonian Aeschylus, who contrasts the Greek “metron”, the Greek “harmony” and the Greek “freedom” with the “immoderation”, the “vulgarity” and the “servility” of the barbarians, while he highlights the “internal” opposition of the Greek human “nature” to the barbarian and the opposition of the character of the Greek people to the barbarians.
After all, later Isocrates urges the Macedonian king Philip II to conquer the barbarians of the North, who are by nature “slave tribes”, while the great Aristotle says that the Greeks “are created to rule and the Asians to rule”. Alexander the Great, the son of Philip with the votive inscription “Alexander to Philip and the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians from the barbarians inhabiting Asia”, sent 300 Persian suits of armor to Athens as a tribute to the Parthenon, the temple of Pallas, presenting the victory of the Granicus as a victory of the Pan-Hellenic people against the barbarians of Asia.
The historical evolutionary “irony” of Greek identity lies in its fragmented origins. Not all who spoke the Greek language were considered true Greeks by blood. Furthermore, the Greek and other Indo-European tribes that clung to the rugged highlands or the unruly frontiers of Greek territory, untouched by the sophistication of Greek urban life, were dismissed as little more than barbarians. These undeveloped and backward remnants of the bygone archaic era of tribal migration were despised for their lack of public meeting places, their deliberate prolonged absence from the sacred pan-Hellenic games, and their continued existence as regular raiders, plunderers, and frequent wanderers.
Even in the cradle of their civilization, the Greeks recognized the remnants of an era when their own ancestors had lived in similar misery, yet they mocked those who had not risen above such conditions. Their contempt was sharpened by their belief that Hellenism had been forged in opposition to such barbarity, as a triumph of cosmic harmony and order over chaos.
To the east of Hellenism lay the Asiatic empires, vast and ancient, their lands bathed in wealth and their rulers covered “from head to toe” with excess of splendor. The peoples of Asia were considered by the ancient Greeks to be “by nature” servile, bound by their rigid and insurmountable social stratification and despotism, their souls crushed under the weight of their own traditions. Their knowledge of the sky and their mastery of the arts was undeniable, but this only intensified the Greeks’ aversion, making their backwardness in the events of life more incomprehensible.
Here, in these countries, there were people who had surrendered their freedom for the sake of order, whose rulers stood as living gods, unquestioned by their subjects. The Greeks, who reveled in individual excellence and absolutely honored the conflict of equals, found such subjugation unbearable, seeing it as the real death of the human spirit.
In the lands of the north, where the sky was rough and the ground unyielding, the Greeks encountered a different breed of barbarians. The Scythians and their kindred were by nature fearless warriors, and their life was an unstoppable rushing storm of movement and blood. They rode like the wind and struck like lightning, their freedom as unlimited as the steppes they called home. However, this freedom was a double-edged sword. For the Greeks, the wonderful unity of the Scythians, the result of steadfast traditions and tribal loyalty, was their greatest strength and at the same time their greatest weakness. It was a people living as one, acting with the unified perception and response of a flock. But such indestructible cohesion came at a cost, for it left absolutely no room for the individuality and innovation that defined Greek greatness.
Central to the Greek spirit was the “Agon”, the incessant struggle for excellence (“Aien excels and excels others”). From the sands of the wrestling arena to the heated debates of public meetings, the ancient Greeks tried to outdo each other, to prove that they were truly worthy in the eyes of their peers and their gods. This love of competition set them apart from the barbarians, who saw strength only in collectivity. Even the gods of Olympus demonstrated this characteristic in their immortal lives, a constant battle of wills and spirit. For the Greeks, this endless struggle was the driving force of development, of progress, the anvil on which they forged heroes. It was a trait that made them wonderfully admirable and unbearably unbearable to those who did not share their tireless and boundless ambition.
The gods of Greece were almost exact supernatural copies of their people – beautiful, insightful and intensely unique. Unlike the deities of the barbarians, who were often hideous mixtures of man and beast, bound by ritual and shrouded in mystery, the Olympian Gods were at once radiant, accessible and human.
They quarrelled and plotted, loved and hated, embodying the best and worst of mortal nature. To our ancestors, this was proof of divine truth, a proof of their unique understanding of the world. On the contrary, the barbarian gods, with their rigid hierarchies and their fearful worshippers, seemed ultimately to symbolize submission and ignorance. Even in their respect, reverence, and piety, the Greeks could not help but affirm their superiority in various ways.
Over time, the image of the barbarian evolved in Greek thought, becoming a contemptuous caricature of all that the Greeks despised. Homer’s noble Trojans, once depicted as equals to the Achaeans, gave way to the crude stereotypes of Euripides, who played on the prejudices of his audience with depictions of cowardice and servility. This shift showed the growing isolation of the Greeks, their belief that they alone held the torch of civilization in a world of darkness. Yet even as they mocked the barbarians, they feared their own decline, trembling at the possibility that their culture would be contaminated or overtaken by foreign influences.
The Persian Wars marked the ultimate climax, the “zenith” of the divide between Greeks and barbarians, a clash of civilizations that defined an era. In their victories at Marathon and Salamis, the Greeks saw the triumph of freedom over tyranny, of the individual over collectivity. However, the wars also revealed the fragility of Greek unity, as city-states bickered and conspired in hostility with one another, even in the face of potential annihilation by the national barbarian enemy. The conflict with Persia became a symbol of Greek identity, a reminder of their shared heritage and their duty to defend it. But as generations passed, this unity gradually disintegrated, leaving the Greeks vulnerable and vulnerable to the same forces they had once defied. In the relevant international literature, there are significant published studies dealing with the Greek-barbarian dichotomy as part of the broader distinction and connection between the West and the East. Of course, the majority of these publications focus mainly on the 5th century BC and the Persian Wars, which shaped the relationship between the Greeks and the Persians. In the consciousness of the ancient Greeks, as the greatest existential national danger they experienced, the Persians were considered the quintessential barbarians.
With the conquests of Alexander, the old distinctions between Greeks and barbarian Persians began to slowly “blur”. The cultures of the East, which had long been rejected as inferior, were now considered sources of wisdom and power. Greek philosophers studied the mysteries of Egypt, while kings of the East adopted the language and customs of Greece. The boundaries that had once seemed so clear now became blurred, as the world shrank and the exchange of ideas and traditions became inevitable. This was a time of transformation, a blending of cultures that would shape the future in ways that even the Greeks could not have foreseen.
In their twilight, the Greeks turned their gaze outward, seeking in the barbarians the virtues they had lost. The rugged simplicity of the northern tribes as well as the immense spiritual depth of the East became objects of admiration for a people deeply disillusioned by their own decline. However, this later, subsequent idealization of the barbarian was as much a grandiose Greek fantasy as his earlier devaluation. It signaled a primal longing for a past that had never really existed, a desire to regain the primal power and purity they believed they once possessed, when they penetrated the southernmost part of the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor, and spread out to the Black Sea lands and the shores of the Mediterranean. Ultimately, the barbarian was a psycho-spiritual “mirror,” which did not reflect the truth of the Greek as an “object of the other,” but projected the aversion, fears, and hopes of the Greeks themselves, towards non-Greek foreigners.
