The Romans did not assign any paramount importance to obvious bodily – somatic – features in the way they drew up the world. Yet they were every bit as racist and prejudiced, and every bit as murderously nasty, to the people they did define as inferior. What we might identify as their racial schema was very different from that of the modern world. Two things can, I think, emerge from that, which I call hope and vigilance. There is an element of hope, in that it shows that the world is not somehow naturally divided up into races on the basis of skin colour; in other words, there is nothing eternal or essential about modern racial categories, which in turn means there’s absolutely no reason that we have to continue to live with them, or why they can’t be abolished. That’s one half of why I call this [group of blog posts] the not-so-natural world of Late Antiquity. But the other point is vigilance. The Romans might not have been especially interested in skin-colour or other somatic ways of dividing the world but they had their own prejudices and racial schemas which could be every bit as bad. In other words, it’s not very much use abolishing one form of prejudice if you’re just going to replace it with another.
This raises an important issue which we have to discuss. There has been much debate about how the issues of race, and of racism, are to be confronted in responsible or committed scholarship. In Europe and North America, the early middle ages in north-west Europe, and elements of its culture, have been appropriated by Far-Right nationalists and white supremacists. Indeed they have been for over a century. Some have suggested that the correct response is to point out the fact that there were people whom we might now consider as 'black' or as People of Colour active in places like Britain and elsewhere. This is certainly true – and it is certainly a valid, pragmatic response in the modern context – but it is also problematic and, in my view, it isn’t historically or politically radical enough. It’s been argued that the way to deal with western racism is to abolish whiteness. This has been wilfully misread as calling for some sort of race war or extermination of ‘the white race’; it doesn’t mean that. It means you can only abolish a categorisation by abolishing the notions that have been placed at its hierarchical centre, against which everything else is judged. When did the Roman way of organising the world come to an end? Essentially when the concept of the civic male was removed from its centre, or abolished if you like.
It is not difficult to populate the northern shores of the Roman Mediterranean as far as Hadrian’s Wall or the Rhine-Danube frontier with what modern people might classify as people of colour. People from North Africa moved all over the Roman World. What’s now Tunisia was one of the most important and central parts of the Roman world; it was rich and productive; North African products like the – to late Romanists at least – famous African Red Slip Ware are found all across the Mediterranean, east to west, round the coasts of Spain and France and as far as the Irish Sea. The African church was an intellectual power-house. Saint Augustine of Hippo was a North African. North Africa and Egypt were the bread-baskets which provided Rome and Constantinople with most of the grain to feed their huge populations. Carthage and Alexandria were possibly the next two biggest cities of the Empire. There were contacts with sub-Saharan Africa, mostly to East Africa via the Nile valley but also in the West – even if the latter contacts were not as great as later. You can quibble about minor issues. Were the numerous late Roman regiments of cavalry called mauri or Moors really recruited from North African Moors? In my view mostly not, at least by the fourth century, but this doesn’t affect the main point. Africans were everywhere in the Roman Empire, and important within it.
There is no doubt that the general public ought to be made more aware of this. Not just to stop people claiming or accepting that the Roman Empire was only made up of ‘white’ people but as a way of stopping people from thinking that Roman history is only for white people. Historically, western Europe and Africa have not always stood as opposed continents divided by a great sea, but have, for centuries, perhaps millennia, also been part of a shared world linked by the Mediterranean. [Indeed before the seventh or eighth century, the Maghreb was much more a part of a shared world with Iberia, Italy and the south of France than part of the same world as sub-Saharan Africa.] This was never truer than during the Roman Empire. This is important.
Nonetheless, were one to do this, one would still be left – no matter how hard one tried – with the inescapable fact that the great bulk of the inhabitants of the Empire’s European provinces were not, by modern European standards, people of colour. They would, in modern European terms, be white. People of colour would still be a minority. The current binary – and that sense of majority and minority – would be eternalised
Now, the Romans themselves didn’t see the inhabitants of North Africa as different from themselves in any significant somatic sense. They didn’t see North Africans as Aethiopes - dark-skinned Africans. When they commented on the appearance of the North African Moors, the Mauri, the ancestors of the modern Berbers, it was their curly hair that they commented on. Some people have tried to argue that North Africans like Augustine were ’black’ and other people (with rather less justification) have tried to deny this and claim that he was ‘white’. The truth of the matter is that we have no idea what he looked like; it’s reasonable to suppose that a modern American would see him as a person of colour. But it’s also reasonable to suppose that a modern inhabitant of the Mediterranean regions, especially in North Africa, wouldn’t. Many, maybe most, modern Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans and Egyptians do not regard themselves as 'black' and can react quite angrily to the suggestion that they might be – even if this attitude can sometimes be grounded in their own, differently racist, attitudes towards sub-Saharan Africa/ns. Anyone who has visited North Africa knows that, in terms of actual skin colour there is a range of skin-tones from very dark to very pale (as there always has been). That spectrum continues, without a break, on the other side of the sea. People in Spain, Sicily and Italy might now make what they see as a colour-based distinction between them and their North African neighbours but this is entirely cultural.
This is the heart of the issue. If one takes a colour chart and defines people within a certain part of that spectrum as ‘people of colour’ according to modern, especially according to modern American, categories, you are naturalising, eternalising and essentialising a categorisation that is social and contingent. Because not everyone sees the world now – let alone in the past – according to that schema, you are colonising the past every bit as much as old Europeans did when they made everyone in antiquity white, and scrubbed statues and so on to prove their point. You’re still imposing a modern, western view (even if it’s a different one from before) on the Mediterranean as a whole and North Africa in particular. This isn’t decolonising the past. We need a more radical solution. The issue is not about who was white and who was black or ‘of colour’; these are all modern categories that didn’t apply in the Roman world. I don’t want to use that point just to sweep the issue under the carpet, though. We can use it much more creatively.
Here I return to phenomenology and my critique of materialisms. People don’t engage with other people in their unmediated materiality, any more than they interact with anything else like that. People are categorised, as we’ve seen, in all sorts of ways, and categories work as signs. When a modern racist sees a black person, he sees a sign with a particular signified; when he sees a white person, he sees a different one. A Roman presented with people who looked exactly like both of those people didn’t see either of those things. A Roman saw a pale-skinned northerner and a North African with, perhaps, a slightly darker skin than his or her own as signifying very different things. Very different indeed, and with very different relationships to his or her way of ordering the world, its cultural capital and its power relations. They saw people differently; in phenomenological terms, people were presented in entirely different form. Recognising that the northern half of the Empire contained many people who wouldn’t now be seen as ‘white’ doesn’t change – in a way – the balance of power or the fact that people are still implicitly being contrasted with ‘whiteness’. But ‘whiteness’ can safely be abolished from the Roman world. The Romans didn’t see themselves as white (certainly not as ‘pale-skinned’). How Romans saw self and other was entirely different: if you went back in time and showed a Roman man a picture of, say, David Lammy in a toga, or Naga Munchetty in traditional Roman dress, and me with a top-knot wearing trousers and asked who he thought looked the most different or ‘other’, compared to himself, he’d say me, and if he said Naga it would be because she’s a woman. When Hadrian, an African abbot who lived in southern Italy, accompanied the new Archbishop Theodore (who himself came from Tarsus in modern Turkey) to Canterbury about a generation after the close of our period (it was Hadrian’s 3rd trip to England, by the way) no one remarked upon their skin colour. Whatever it might have looked like to us, they didn’t see it. It was much more a sign of worrying otherness that Theodore spoke Greek and might introduce Greek church customs!
Late Antique people didn’t look like us in either sense – in the way they looked out and saw their fellow people, or in the way they looked to the people looking at them. We need to embrace the radical possibilities that this permits. What kinds of modern people portray the people of late antiquity can’t be a question of historical accuracy. The past is other. As I said it looked different, and it looked differently. If I were casting a film set in the late Antique west I would like to have all sorts of people play the parts in a way that underlined the difference, but also the categories that late antique people have – have Gauls played by south Asians, Spaniards by East Asians, Barbarians by white people, Italians by African-Caribbean actors. It’d possibly make the Daily Mail self-combust but that’d only be a side-benefit. It’d bring home the idea that the late antique European/Mediterranean past doesn’t belong to any modern group any more than any other. It’s open to everyone. I’d really like to see that one day.
