Constans - Roman Emperor: 337-350 A.D. -
Bronze AE2 Centenionalis 22mm (4.15 grams) Nicomedia mint: 348-351 A.D.
Reference: RIC VIII 70 (Nicomedia ).
DN CONSTANS PF AVG, diademed, draped & cuirassed bust left holding globe
FEL TEMP REPARATIO, soldier dragging young barbarian from hut beneath tree of one branch
with millet-like head with a multi-leaved stalk on each side, SMNB in ex.

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Royal/Imperial symbols of power

Ruling dynasties often exploit pomp and ceremony with the use of regalia : crowns , robes, orb (globe) and sceptres , some of which are reflections of formerly practical objects. The use of language mechanisms also support this differentiation with subjects talking of "the crown" and/or of "the throne " rather than referring directly to personal names and items.

Monarchies provide the most explicit demonstration of tools to strengthen the elevation of leaders. Thrones sit high on daises leading to subjects lifting their gaze (if they have permission) to contemplate the ruler. Architecture in general can set leaders apart: note the symbolism inherent in the very name of the Chinese imperial Forbidden City .

The term "barbarian" refers to a person who is perceived to be uncivilized. The word is often used either in a general reference to member of a nation or ethnos , typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage . In idiomatic or figurative usage, a "barbarian" may also be an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, warlike, insensitive person.

The term originates from the Greek word βάρβαρος (barbaros). Hence the Greek idiom "πᾶς μὴ Ἕλλην βάρβαρος" (pas mē Hellēn barbaros) which literally means "whoever is not Greek is a barbarian". In ancient times, Greeks used it mostly for people of different cultures, but there are examples where one Greek city or state would use the word to attack another (e.g. haughty Athenians calling the Boeotians barbarian);^[2] in the early modern period and sometimes later, Greeks used it for the Turks , in a clearly pejorative way.^[3][4] Comparable notions are found in non-European civilizations. In the Roman Empire , Romans used the word "barbarian" for many people, such as the Berbers , Germanics , Celts , Carthaginians , Iberians , Thracians and Persians .

Etymology

Routes taken by barbarian invaders , 5th century CE

 

Routes taken by Mongol invaders , 13th century

The Ancient Greek word βάρβαρος (barbaros), "barbarian", was an antonym for πολίτης (politēs), "citizen" (from πόλις - polis , "city-state"). The sound of barbaros onomatopoetically evokes the image of babbling (a person speaking a non-Greek language).^[5] The earliest attested form of the word is the Mycenaean Greek pa-pa-ro, written in Linear B syllabic script.

The Greeks and Romans used the term as they encountered scores of different foreign cultures, including the Egyptians , Persians , Medes , Celts , Germanic peoples , Phoenicians and Carthaginians . In fact, it became a common term to refer to all foreigners. However in various occasions, the term was also used by Greeks, especially the Athenians , to deride other Greek tribes and states (such as Epirotes , Eleans , Macedonians and Aeolic -speakers) in a pejorative and politically motivated manner.^[8] Of course, the term also carried a cultural dimension to its dual meaning.The verb βαρβαρίζειν (barbarízein) in ancient Greek meant imitating the linguistic sounds non-Greeks made or making grammatical errors in Greek.

Plato (Statesman 262de) rejected the Greek–barbarian dichotomy as a logical absurdity on just such grounds: dividing the world into Greeks and non-Greeks told one nothing about the second group. In Homer 's works, the term appeared only once (Iliad 2.867), in the form βαρβαρόφωνος (barbarophonos) ("of incomprehensible speech"), used of the Carians fighting for Troy during the Trojan War . In general, the concept of barbaros did not figure largely in archaic literature before the 5th century BC .^[11] Still it has been suggested that "barbarophonoi" in the Iliad signifies not those who spoke a non-Greek language but simply those who spoke Greek badly.

A change occurred in the connotations of the word after the Greco-Persian Wars in the first half of the 5th century BC. Here a hasty coalition of Greeks defeated the vast Achaemenid Empire . Indeed in the Greek of this period 'barbarian' is often used expressly to mean Persian .

Greek barbaros was the etymological source for many words meaning "barbarian", including English barbarian, which was first recorded in 16th-century Middle English .

A word barbara- is also found in the Sanskrit of ancient India. The Greek word barbaros is related to Sanskrit barbaras (stammering).

Semantics

 

"Germanic warriors" as depicted in Philipp Clüver 's Germania Antiqua (1616)

"Barbarian" in Greek historical contexts

Slavery in Greece

Slaves in chains, relief found at Smyrna (present day İzmir , Turkey ), 200 AD

A parallel factor was the growth of chattel slavery especially at Athens . Although enslavement of Greeks for non-payment of debt continued in most Greek states, it was banned at Athens under Solon in the early 6th century BC . Under the Athenian democracy established ca. 508 BC slavery came to be used on a scale never before seen among the Greeks. Massive concentrations of slaves were worked under especially brutal conditions in the silver mines at Laureion —a major vein of silver-bearing ore was found there in 483 BC—while the phenomenon of skilled slave craftsmen producing manufactured goods in small factories and workshops became increasingly common.

Furthermore, slaves were no longer the preserve of the rich: all but the poorest of Athenian households came to have slaves to supplement the work of their free members. Overwhelmingly, the slaves of Athens were "barbarian" in origin^{[citation needed]}, drawn especially from lands around the Black Sea such as Thrace and Taurica (Crimea), while from Asia Minor came above all Lydians , Phrygians and Carians . Aristotle (Politics 1.2–7; 3.14) even states that barbarians are slaves by nature.

From this period, words like barbarophonos, cited above from Homer, began to be used not only of the sound of a foreign language but of foreigners speaking Greek improperly. In Greek, the notions of language and reason are easily confused in the word logos , so speaking poorly was easily conflated with being stupid, an association not of course limited to the ancient Greeks.

Further changes occurred in the connotations of barbari/barbaroi in Late Antiquity ,^[26] when bishops and catholikoi were appointed to sees connected to cities among the "civilized" gentes barbaricae such as in Armenia or Persia , whereas bishops were appointed to supervise entire peoples among the less settled.

Eventually the term found a hidden meaning by Christian Romans through the folk etymology of Cassiodorus . He stated the word barbarian was "made up of barba (beard) and rus (flat land); for barbarians did not live in cities, making their abodes in the fields like wild animals".^[27]

The female given name "Barbara" originally meant "a barbarian woman", and as such was likely to have had a pejorative meaning—given that most such women in Graeco-Roman society were of a low social status (often being slaves).^{[citation needed][dubious – discuss ]} However, Saint Barbara is mentioned as being the daughter of rich and respectable Roman citizens. Evidently, by her time (about 300 CE according to Christian hagiography , though some historians put the story much later) the name no longer had any specific ethnic or pejorative connotations. Alternatively her canonisation might have been intended to counter any such pejorative connotations, especially if her story was fictitious, as many authorities think possible, including the Roman Catholic Church since 1969 (for details of these doubts, see under Saint Barbara, Veneration ).^{[original research?]}

Hellenic stereotypes

Out of those sources the Hellenic stereotype was elaborated: barbarians are like children, unable to speak or reason properly, cowardly, effeminate, luxurious, cruel, unable to control their appetites and desires, politically unable to govern themselves. These stereotypes were voiced with much shrillness by writers like Isocrates in the 4th century BCE who called for a war of conquest against Persia as a panacea for Greek problems.

However, the Hellenic stereotype of barbarians was not a universal feature of Hellenic culture. Xenophon , for example, wrote the Cyropaedia , a laudatory fictionalised account of Cyrus the Great , the founder of the Persian empire, effectively a utopian text. In his Anabasis , Xenophon's accounts of the Persians and other non-Greeks he knew or encountered hardly seem to be under the sway of these stereotypes at all.

The renowned orator Demosthenes made derogatory comments in his speeches, using the word "barbarian."

Barbarian is used in its Hellenic sense by St. Paul in the New Testament (Romans 1:14) to describe non-Greeks, and to describe one who merely speaks a different language (1 Corinthians 14:11).

About a hundred years after Paul's time, Lucian – a native of Samosata , in the former kingdom of Commagene , which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria – used the term "barbarian" to describe himself. As he was a noted satirist, this could have been a deprecating self-irony. It might also have indicated that he was descended from Samosata's original Semitic population – likely to have been called "barbarians" by later Hellenistic, Greek-speaking settlers, and who might have eventually taken up this appellation themselves.^[28][29]

The term retained its standard usage in the Greek language throughout the Middle Ages, as it was widely used by the Byzantine Greeks until the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century.

Cicero described the mountain area of inner Sardinia as "a land of barbarians", with these inhabitants also known by the manifestly pejorative term latrones mastrucati ("thieves with a rough garment in wool"). The region is up to the present known as "Barbagia" (in Sardinian "Barbàgia" or "Barbaza"), which is traceable to this old "barbarian" designation – but no longer consciously associated with it, and used naturally as the name of the region by its own inhabitants.

The Dying Galatian statue

The Dying Galatian, Capitoline Museums , Rome

Some insight about the Hellenistic perception of and attitude to "Barbarians" can be taken from the "Dying Galatian", a statue commissioned by Attalus I of Pergamon to celebrate his victory over the Celtic Galatians in Anatolia (the bronze original is lost, but a Roman marble copy was found in the 17th century).^[30] The statue depicts with remarkable realism a dying Celt warrior with a typically Celtic hairstyle and moustache. He lies on his fallen shield while sword and other objects lie beside him. He appears to be fighting against death, refusing to accept his fate.

The statue serves both as a reminder of the Celts' defeat, thus demonstrating the might of the people who defeated them, and a memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries. The message conveyed by the sculpture, as H. W. Janson comments, is that "they knew how to die, barbarians that they were."^[31]

The Greeks admired Scythians and Galatians as heroic individuals – even in the case of Anacharsis as philosophers – but considered their culture to be barbaric. The Romans indiscriminately regarded the various Germanic tribes , the settled Gauls , and the raiding Huns as barbarians.

The Romans adapted the term to refer to anything non-Roman. The German cultural historian Silvio Vietta points out that the meaning of the word “barbarous” has undergone a semantic change in modern times, after Michel de Montaigne used it to characterize the activities in the New World of the Spaniards – supposedly representatives of the “higher” European culture - as “barbarous”, in a satirical essay of the year 1580.^[32] It was not the supposedly “uncivilized” Indian tribes who were “barbarous”, but the conquering Spaniards. Montaigne argued that Europeans noted the barbarism of other cultures but not the crueler and more brutal actions of their own society, particularly (in his time) in the so-called religious wars. We – the Europeans - were the real “barbarians”. In this way, the Eurocentric argument was turned around and applied against the European invaders. With this shift of meaning a whole literature arose in Europe that characterized the indigenous Indian peoples as innocent, and the militarily superior Europeans as “barbarous” intruders into a paradisiacal world.^[33][34]

Barbarian puppet drinking game

In the Tang Dynasty houses of pleasure, where drinking games were common, small puppets in the aspect of Westerners, in a ridiculous state of drunkenness, were used in one popular permutation of the drinking game; so, in the form of blue-eyed, pointy nosed, and peak-capped barbarians, these puppets were manipulated in such a way as to occasionally fall down: then, whichever guest to whom the puppet pointed after falling was then obliged by honor to empty his cup of Chinese wine .^[91]

Japanese culture

When Europeans came to Japan , they were called nanban (南蛮^?), literally Barbarians from the South, because the Portuguese ships appeared to sail from the South. The Dutch , who arrived later, were also called either nanban or kōmō (紅毛^?), literally meaning "Red Hair."

American cultures

In Mesoamerica the Aztec civilization used the word "Chichimeca" to denominate a group of nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes that lived in the outskirts of the Triple Alliance 's Empire, in the North of Modern Mexico, which were seen by the Aztec people as primitive and uncivilized. One of the meanings attributed to the word "Chichimeca" is "dog people".

The Incas of South America used the term "puruma auca" for all peoples living outside the rule of their empire (see Promaucaes ).

The white settlers of the United States referred to Native Americans as "savages."

Early Modern period

 

A defeated Sarmatian barbarian serves as an atlas on a 16th-century villa in Milan . Sculpted by Antonio Abbondio for Leone Leoni

Italians in the Renaissance often called anyone who lived outside of their country a barbarian.

Spanish sea captain Francisco de Cuellar who sailed with the Spanish Armada in 1588 used the term 'savage' ('salvaje') to describe the Irish people .^[92]

Marxist use of "Barbarism"

In her "Junius Pamphlet" of 1916, strongly denouncing the then raging First World War , Rosa Luxemburg wrote: Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.^[93]

Luxemburg attributed it to Friedrich Engels , though – as shown by Michael Löwy – Engels had not used the term "Barbarism" but a less resounding formulation: If the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place ^[94]

Luxemburg went on to explain what she meant by “Regression into Barbarism”: "A look around us at this moment [i.e., 1916 Europe] shows what the regression of bourgeois society into Barbarism means. This World War is a regression into Barbarism. The triumph of Imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of Imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of Socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the International Proletariat against Imperialism and its method of war."

"Socialism or Barbarism" became, and remains, an often quoted and influential concept in Marxist literature. "Barbarism" is variously interpreted as meaning either a technologically advanced but extremely exploitative and oppressive society (e.g. a victory and world domination by Nazi Germany and its Fascist allies); a collapse of technological civilization due to Capitalism causing a Nuclear War or ecological disaster ; or the one form of barbarism bringing on the other.

The Internationalist Communist Tendency considers "Socialism or Barbarism" to be a variant of the earlier "Liberty or Death", used by revolutionaries of different stripes since the late 18th century ^[95]

Modern popular culture

Modern popular culture contains such fantasy barbarians as Thundarr the Barbarian and Conan the Barbarian .^[96]

In such fantasy, the negative connotations traditionally associated with "Barbarian" are often inverted. For example, "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932), the first of Robert E. Howard 's "Conan" series, is set soon after the "Barbarian" protagonist had forcibly seized the turbulent kingdom of Aquilonia from King Numedides, whom he strangled upon his throne. The story is clearly slanted to imply that the kingdom greatly benefited by power passing from a decadent and tyrannical hereditary monarch to a strong and vigorous Barbarian usurper.

Flavius Julius Constans (320-350) was a Roman Emperor who ruled from 337 until his death. Constans was the third and youngest son of Constantine the Great and Fausta , Constantine's second wife.

On 25 December 333 Constantine elevated Constans to Caesar.

In 337 he succeeded his father, jointly with his older brothers Constantine II and Constantius II , receiving Italy , Pannonia and Africa as his portion. Constantine II, who ruled over Gaul, Spain and Britain, attempted to take advantage of his youth and inexperience by invading Italy in 340, but Constans defeated Constantine at Aquileia , where the older brother died. The invasion was the effect of brotherly tensions between the two emperors. Constantine II was, at first, Constans's guardian. As Constans grew older, Constantine II never relinquished that position.

In 341-2, Constans led a successful campaign against the Franks and in the early months of 343 visited Britain . The source for this visit, Julius Firmicus Maternus , does not give a reason for this but the quick movement and the danger involved in crossing the channel in the dangerous winter months, suggests it was in response to a military emergency of some kind, possibly to repel the Picts and Scots .

Regarding religion, Constans was tolerant of Judaism but promulgated an edict banning pagan sacrifices in 341. He suppressed Donatism in Africa and supported Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism , which was championed by his brother Constantius the latter. Constans called the Council of Sardica , which unsuccessfully tried to settle the conflict.

In 350, the general Magnentius declared himself emperor with the support of the troops on the Rhine frontier, and later the entire Western portion of the Roman Empire. Constans lacked any support beyond his immediate household, and was forced to flee for his life. Magnentius' supporters cornered him in a fortification in Helena, southwestern Gaul, where he was killed by Magnentius's assassins.