How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person’s physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one’s skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories ‘Greek’ and ‘Barbarian’, and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as ‘black and ‘white’ in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern – across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal’s seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.

This paper examines the models classical historians and papyrologists use to study Greek and Egyptian identity during the period of Greek occupation of Egypt (332-30 B.C.E.). Employing the concept of ethnicity, some scholars have recently emphasized the fl uidity with which identity seems to operate in colonial documents from the Ptolemaic period. In particular, scholars argue that these documents attest to the increasing ability of certain “native Egyptians” to act as “Greek” in various administrative and legal contexts. While fi nding this recent use of ethnicity productive in grappling with the complexity of identity as a form of social practice in Ptolemaic Egypt, I nonetheless caution against over-emphasizing the role of context and individual agency within this colonial framework. In contrast, I argue that the concept of race should be added to current models to allow historians of this period to situate certain performances within a larger colonial structure that continued to treat the categories of “Greek” and “Egyptian” as conceptually distinct and indeed representative of inverse positions of social power.

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