Dr. David Butterfield
speaker
616 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Dr. David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Certainly the North African coast was part of the Roman Empire.
The Berber kind of people are a much closer relation because the Phoenicians coming from modern Lebanon founded colonies on what we now call North Africa and as such were broadly Mediterranean.
Sub-Saharan, as you say, these people were known of, tribes were known of and are occasionally described, but they were cut off from both Roman rule and indeed general Roman society.
So black people do appear in Roman accounts, but there's an element of novelty and difference to them.
There isn't conventional racism against non-white people in the Roman world.
It's more pointing out aesthetic differences rather than any kind of supremacy of whiteness.
It's not a term used in the Roman or indeed in the Greek world.
They didn't talk about whites and non-whites.
What the Greeks talked about is us and the barbaroi.
the blabbing non-Greeks.
And you could be as white as could be.
It wouldn't matter.
You're not Greek and therefore you're not good.
Yeah, it would be the sort of thing that would happen with far-ranging tradesmen or people journeying on some sort of mission or military campaign.
There would not be, I think I can say perfectly clearly, there would not be in the Greek-speaking world regular interaction with sub-Saharan Africans at any point in the ancient Greek world.
Yeah, well, let's say for the sake of argument,
there was a queen of sparta in the early 12th century bc that woman is definitely not black yes and if she were black they might have mentioned it it would have been a more helpful adjective than lucola to say um she was black now it so happens that when where when homer's odyssey begins poseidon the god of the sea brother of zeus has headed deep into africa to hang out with the ethiopians
whose ethnicity is quite hard to describe, but they were definitely dark-skinned, black-skinned.
And so there's an element of mixing real human geography with a sort of fantastic land where the sun sets among the land of the Ethiopians.
So it's not an unknown world, but it's not one that's part of Greek society, no.
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