Were the Ancient Greeks and Romans white?
Three modern Italians (from central Italy)
Two modern Greeks (from Athens).
I don’t think there is any evidence whatsoever that ancient Romans and Greeks would have looked much different in skin tone - so I would daresay you could call them ‘white’. A more relevant question would be “why should I care if ancient Romans and Greeks were white”?
This is what Ancient Greeks and Romans looked like, the translations of what Homer and Hesiod said are grossly mistranslated, the fact is that the Mosaic of Alexander holds almost a Hundred different Shades, all meant to depict Alexander and Darius FACTUALLY, Alexander a Hellene Greek, Macedonian King, and Darius a Persian King in the heat of Battle, it's meant to portray absolute realism, and the features of the Mediterranean Race are clearly shown, Alexander was painted by Romans as being like themselves, Olive skinned and Dark haired, because that is what the Artist saw in Alexander the Great, a typical Mediterránean Greek Man… a Walk down the street in Greece, Italy, Spain, the Levant, Anatolia, Armenia or the Balkans and you will see these physical features all over the place, from the Mediterranean, Levant, to Armenia and Persia… So clearly the Translations don't give us the truth, at all, but the Mosaic of Alexander does… Alexander the Great was never “Blonde”, he was dark haired as his Mosaic clearly shows.
This what Aristotle wrote about both White and Black skin tones.... "Too black a hue marks the coward, as witness Egyptians and Ethiopians, and so does also too white a complexion, as you may see from women. So the hue that makes for courage must be intermediate between these extremes. A tawny colour indicates a bold spirit, as in lions; but too ruddy a hue marks a rogue, as in the case of the fox. A pale mottled hue signifies cowardice, for that is the colour one turns in terror. The honey-pale are cold, and coldness means immobility, and an immobile body means slowness. A red hue indicates hastiness, for all parts of the body on being heated by movement turn red. A flaming skin, however, indicates madness, for it results from an overheated body, and extreme bodily heat is likely to mean madness." [4]. physiognomy of skin color before the Enlightenment
No, they were not. The black/white dichotomy is a product of Western European imperialism and colonialism. It took deep roots in the slave owning communities of the American South and is now regurgitated by certain USAns (it is rude to include all of the continent in this) who are trying to impose it on peoples and cultures whose prejudices were of a wholly different kind.
Exhibit no 1
Romans thought that Germans and Britons (those top of the racist ladder “Whites”) were good for nothing, quarrelsome drunkards. Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico (51 BC):
Whenever they are not fighting, they pass much of their time in the chase, and still more in idleness, giving themselves up to sleep and to feasting, the bravest and the most warlike doing nothing, and surrendering the management of the household, of the home, and of the land, to the women, the old men, and all the weakest members of the family. They themselves lie buried in sloth, a strange combination in their nature that the same men should be so fond of idleness, so averse to peace. (XV)
On waking from sleep, which they generally prolong to a late hour of the day, they take a bath, […]. To pass an entire day and night in drinking disgraces no one. Their quarrels, as might be expected with intoxicated people, are seldom fought out with mere abuse, but commonly with wounds and bloodshed (XXII)
In quenching their thirst they are not equally moderate. If you indulge their love of drinking by supplying them with as much as they desire, they will be overcome by their own vices as easily as by the arms of an enemy. (XXIII)
Exhibit no 2
Septimius Severus was a Roman Emperor. He was born in Leptis Magna, that is now in Libya. As Mediterraneans go he is well within the variation, but he would not pass a racist’s “Whiteness” test.
Simple truth is the Romans didn’t care about the amount of melanin in your skin. They differentiated between Romans and non Romans, but the whole deal was about how one behaved and whether he (she just didn’t matter) was a Roman citizen and behaved like a Roman.
BTW the original Romans looked pretty much like modern Italians and the ancient Greeks looked pretty much like modern Greeks. And let us be honest. Those who are deep into this black/white nonsense don’t really include us Mediterraneans into the hallowed halls of Whiteness.
Julius Caesar's opinions copied from User-9938525219388766718's answer to What did the Romans and Germanic people think of each other?
Edit
I added certain to USAns. Otherwise I would be insulting all those people who aren’t.
There's evidence out there, if one cares to look for it:
Mineral pigments survive that indicate skin tone, traces are left in some statuary (classical statues were not always pristine white marble but realistically coloured) and some encaustic wax portraits show a range of skin tones.
There are possible arguments revolving around conventions in art, but the overwhelming preponderance of surviving artworks indicate those who were well-off and lived in shaded luxury were light skinned while those who laboured in the sun were dark tanned.
However at this point arguments kick off that seek to recategorise the art, which I think are unsustainable: a group that formally shows man and wife in their own villa - the male is sunburned and the female pale - is more probably about the idealised image of the vigorous outdoors citizen and his spouse whose province is the house and home than some tortured explanation seeking to address issues of race or colour.
These obsessions were largely unknown in the ancient world, arising only a few scant centuries past, a combination of religious dogma, and a misguided attempt to classify the whole of humanity, from its earliest origins, in terms that suited those who felt the urgent need to denigrate and despise.
Such nonsense has no basis in science, nor in history, but nevertheless there is a sometimes desperate attempt to project back in time the miserable and wholly discredited myths promulgated by racist revisionists in the nineteenth century, in a somewhat pathetic attempt to add tone to the racial and colour prejudices of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
How long this obsession will continue to torment the modern world is anyone's guess, but to really put a stop to it questions like were Were the Ancient Greeks and Romans white? would have to be reframed by adding a qualifier:
Specifically in whose opinion, by what measure and what, exactly, this decision would imply that can't be deduced from all that we already know about these civilisations?
If you mean, were they Caucasian/European - yes, they were. Their art work shows fair skin or sometimes tanned skin on male warriors & paler skin tones on the women. The art work depicting peoples from other countries shows enough variations in features, hair color & texture, and other things that it is easy enough to tell when someone of another race is being shown (whether slave, soldier, or whatever).
The stone statues that were carved were originally painted and might have had inlaid stones to color the eyes...those have been cleaned by centuries of weather or being in the ground with rain water rushing past them, so the traces of original paint colors aren't really something most people are going to see.
The Emperor, I was inclined to downvote the question, because this stuff about race in the Ancient World always brings out racists and crazy Afro-centrist theories, etc. But the truth should also be heard. See below for a picture of how Romans artists depicted Romans.
The Greeks and Romans were European Mediterranean. Based on linguistic evidence, we think Indo- Europeans from INDIA moved NE and across West Asia into Europe before 2000 BC. The people who settled in Greece and Italy and Gaul and Spain were white-ish. Unlike my Germanic/Baltic ancestors, they could tan without immediately getting sunburn. If you meet modern Italians who are not 100% Lombard, you will see the same range of complexion from fairly white to sort of tan. This might not be a coincidence. From what I can tell, Greeks were the same.
Scholars have written papers that the Greeks had a different sense of color than we do. Red and golden was the same color to them, according to one opinion. One scholar argued that the color blue is never mentioned in the Iliad or Odyssey because for them “blue” meant dark. A word that gives us cyan (blue printer ink) is used in the Odyssey several times, kyanos. But you have to read the article for yourself to see if it is convincing. The point is that hearing “dark (skinned)” does not have to mean what we today call black (pigment of sub Saharan Africans). It might mean dark hair or the skin being sun tanned. Their perceptions were different than ours if that color theory is correct.
Finally, I remind those insist the Greeks and Romans were black, orange, green, blue, or pink, that we have plenty of art that survives from the AD 70s that demonstrably proves the Romans were about the same color white as Southern Italians are today. Greeks and Romans did not think dark skinned people were inherently bad. Their prejudices were based on other factors than modern prejudices, such as Barbarian yes or no? Do they wear trousers? Yes, Barbarian. Do they drink undiluted wine? yes, Barbarian. Do they speak a language we can understand? no, Barbarian. Do they commit human sacrifice? yes, Barbarian. If the answer to 2 of the 4 was the opposite of what I put, they are semi-barbarians. And if the answers were correct 4 times they are civilized.
Their xenophobia (distrust or hatred or fear of foreigners) was not about skin color but customs.
Remember: Black figure vase pottery was a METHOD, not proof that Greeks were black. This vase does not prove Greeks were “black” anymore than it “proves” a half-bull half human species existed.
This statue does not prove Greeks were “green skinned.” When bronze oxidizes, it turns green.
This is how Romans presented themselves, accurately, not with a worry about looking dark skinned:
Steve Theodore gave an excellent answer. I would add that a Roman (or Greek for that matter) would not really have understood this question in the sense that it's asked.
There were certainly Roman citizens with fair skin (the sun-deprived residents of Londinium) and there were Roman citizens from Africa with very dark skin. But modern racial categories can't be applied to antiquity. The closest Roman categories would be place of origin (Spain versus Africa, for example) and citizenship versus non-citizenship, with citizenship being the most important category by far. Citizenship or slavery in ancient Rome didn't correspond to racial categories.
If you mean to ask the more specific question of "were Romans of unmixed Latin descent 'white' in the modern sense derived from 19th century Scientific racism" then sure, I guess you'd consider them to be part of the Mediterranean race, but they were "white" in the same sense as Israelites, Egyptians, and North Africans. I am pretty sure that the Latin people's of Italy wouldn't have considered themselves to be more closely related to a "white" group like the Celts than to North Africans. They certainly thought of themselves of being West Asian in origin, Aeneas having come over from Troy.
As far as genetics, you could perhaps link the Latin Romans to the Haplogroup R1b descent group, which is pretty European/white as far as it goes, but also has strong clusters in Africa and Asia. You could also link them to the Haplogroup J-P209, which looks a lot more West Asian/East African. Of course, I would argue that genetics isn't really a great resource of racial identity, since race is made up.
Calling an Roman or Greek "white" is like calling Cato a libertarian. I sort of see what you're going for, but the term just doesn't fit.
No
No, the Romans nor the Greeks before them were “White civilizations” (nor most European civilizations before them). They did not even have the concept of “race”, and hence, they were not racists.
They had practiced discrimination, but not based on race. The modern concept of 'race' was born out of the organized 'slave trade' of Black Africans, first practiced by the Arabs after the fall of the Roman Empire (ie, the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade), and which culminated into the Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade practised by the Europeans.
See: Alioune Ngom's answer to Did the Romans care about race or where someone was from?
Read: Slavery and the origins of racism
The classical empires of Greece and Rome were based on slave labor. But ancient slavery was not viewed in racial terms. Slaves were most often captives in wars or conquered peoples. If we understand white people as originating in what is today Europe, then most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were white. Roman law made slaves the property of their owners, while maintaining a “formal lack of interest in the slave’s ethnic or racial provenance.” Over the years, slave manumission produced a mixed population of slave and free in Roman-ruled areas in which all came to be seen as “Romans.”5 The Greeks drew a sharper line between Greeks and “barbarians,” those subject to slavery. Again, this was not viewed in racial or ethnic terms, as the socialist historian of the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James, explained:
[H]istorically it is pretty well proved now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard—civilized and barbarian—and you could have white skin and be a barbarian and you could be black and civilized.6
More importantly, encounters in the ancient world between the Mediterranean world and black Africans did not produce an upsurge of racism against Africans. In Before Color Prejudice, Howard University classics professor Frank Snowden documented innumerable accounts of interaction between the Greco-Roman and Egyptian civilizations and the Kush, Nubian, and Ethiopian kingdoms of Africa. He found substantial evidence of integration of black Africans in the occupational hierarchies of the ancient Mediterranean empires and Black-white intermarriage. Black and mixed race gods appeared in Mediterranean art, and at least one Romanemperor, Septimius Severus, was an African. Snowden concluded:
There is little doubt that many blacks were physically assimilated into the predominantly white population of the Mediterranean world, in which there were no institutional barriers or social pressures against black-white unions. In Antiquity, then, black-white sexual relations were never the cause of great emotional crises.The ancient pattern, similar in some respects to the Mahgrebian and the Latin American attitude toward racial mixture, probably contributed to the absence of a pronounced color prejudice in Antiquity.7
Between the 10th and 16th centuries, the chief source of slaves in Western Europe was Eastern Europe. In fact, the word “slave” comes from the word “Slav,” the people of Eastern Europe. In the Middle Ages, most people sold into slavery in Europe came from Eastern Europe, the Slavic countries. In Eastern Europe, Russia stood out as the major area where slaveholders and slaves were of the same ethnicity. Of course, by modern-day racial descriptions the Slavs and Russian slaves were white.
This outline doesn’t mean to suggest a “pre-capitalist” Golden Age of racial tolerance, least of all in the slave societies of Antiquity. Empires viewed themselves as centers of the Universe and looked on foreigners as inferiors. Ancient Greece and Rome fought wars of conquest against people they presumed to be less advanced. Religious scholars interpreted the Hebrew Bible’s “curse of Ham” from the story of Noah to condemn Africans to slavery. Cultural and religious associations of the color white with light and angels and the color black with darkness and evil persisted. But none of these cultural or ideological factors explains the rise of New World slavery or the “modern” notions of racism that developed from it.
Footnotes
The category of defining people based on race didn't exist during the ancient times! Race was invented by europeans during slavery against blacks!
Well, ancient greeks often looked like this:
Ancient greeks in pottery were depicted as black but it doesn't mean they were black. They used black in the method to make pottery.
The face reconstruction of alexander the great has revealed what he looked like:
As for the romans, they didn't identity themselves based on skin color but they called themselves roman. In the roman empire, anyone was identified based on ethnicity. The romans in some cases actually looked like this:
The face reconstruction of julius caesar shows that his skin color was definitely white:
So i have given you the answer to this question and the actual answer is yes!!
Where does “white” end an “non-white” begin? Benjamin Franklin spoke of the German settlers in 18th century Pennsylvania as “swarthy”. There’s also an old English adage that “the Orient begins in Calais”. However, Marco Polo had made it all the way to China before he notices that the people are physically different. Polo also spoke of the North African Berbers as “brown”, but a lot of them are pale and light-eyed; while their Arab neighbors often call themselves “white”.
Americans often have a superstition that if it’s African, it’s “black”. Hence, a pugilist named Cassius Clay dropped the name his grandfather gave him in honor of a prominent abolitionist who walked the walk as well as talked the talk to take that of a red-haired, freckle-faced, long-nosed Albanian mercenary who stole 19th century Egypt from his Ottoman suzerain in order to make a grab for the slave trade coming out of the Sudan. Further, while many (but not all) of the ancient Greeks may have looked more like Middle Easterners than like northern Europeans, we like to call them “white” because we somehow think they had more to do with launching our civilization than the Hebrews did.
Where, presumably before the age of ocean-going explorations got us all mixed, were the “racial” boundaries drawn?
The standard Greek or Roman was white, originating from either Central Europe north of the Alps or Eurasia in the area of eastern Hungary. As for “many people claiming that they are Middle Eastern or North African,” there are those who want to promote a revisionist version of history—especially on the Internet and Youtube so they can make sensationalist claims for the sake of clicks. As a result, they seize on any tidbit of information that supports the overthrowing of traditional views along with a significant amount of cherry-picking to make Romans or Greeks into Middle Easterners or North Africans.
I suspect that your question actually conflates the Greeks and Romans into a single category covered by a recent study from Stanford University whose goal was to use DNA studies to find the origin of the population of the city of Rome. It says nothing about the Greeks, but sometimes one incorrectly combines the Greeks and Romans into a single ‘ethnic’ group because they were both ‘classical’ cultures. In any case, in my answer, I will separate the two. But their study notably revealed that “as the Roman Empire expanded around the Mediterranean Sea, immigrants from the Near East, North Africa, and Europe pulled up their roots and moved to Rome. This significantly changed the face of one of the ancient world’s first great cities” (Rome). All the revisionists on the Internet needed to see were the words: “Near East and North Africa” and that served as just the fodder that they needed for their revisionist theories.
But, first the Romans:
The Romans were a part of tribes called Latins that settled around central Italy. Historians are divided on the origin of the Latin tribes. One group claims that the earliest Roman settlers first entered Italy in the late Bronze Age via the proto-Villanovan culture, which had been a part of the central European Urnfield culture. The Urnfield culture originated in central Europe and portions of it migrated south across the Alps.
Another group claims that an analysis of some of the earliest settlers is consistent with an influx of farmers that primarily descended from early agriculturalists from Turkey and Iran around 8,000 years ago, followed by a shift toward ancestry from the Ukrainian steppe somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago. But in either scenario, they definitely didn’t originate from the Near East nor from North Africa.
But, the Stanford DNA study did find that Roman “ancestry came primarily from the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, possibly because of denser populations there relative to the Roman Empire’s western reaches in Europe and Africa.” So, how to reconcile these two seemingly-contradictory conclusions?
It is mostly an example of ‘cherry-picking’ of the facts. A careful reading of the Stanford study reveals that it didn’t dispute the origins of the Roman population. Instead, it looked at the population of the city of Rome itself and the surrounding areas and found that in the 1st century AD, as the empire expanded, there was a massive shift in Roman residents’ ancestry so that it came primarily from the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, possibly due to denser populations there that shifted to the city of Rome through trade and conquest.
It is always important, when considering the ethnic mix of Rome, to remember that the population of the city was very cosmopolitan from the Imperial era onward. Essentially, Rome became a melting pot of different cultures. Even a few of its emperors were not from Italy, itself, but from the provinces—one (Septimius Severus in 193 AD)—was born in Libya in North Africa.
But then, during the Late Imperial era, especially as power began shifting away from the city of Rome and toward Constantinople in the Near East, the ancestry shifted again with more migrants arriving from northern and western Europe.
As for the Greeks, there is even more dispute about from where they originated, but—again—the general consensus is that they came from north of Greece; NOT from the Near East or North Africa.
The Greeks are believed to have migrated southward into the Balkan peninsula in several waves beginning in the late 3rd millennium BC, the last being the Dorian invasion. The earliest people to inhabit the area of Greece settled primarily in the Peloponnesus. These people are called the Mycenaeans. Another group migrated to the Aegean islands and to Crete. These can be called the Minoans. In a recent DNA study, it was found that Minoans and Mycenaeans were closely related. At least three-quarters of DNA from both groups came from a branch of the Indo-Europeans, “Neolithic farmers of Western Anatolia and the Aegean.” Both cultures also inherited DNA from the peoples of the eastern Caucasus, located near modern-day Iran.
The Greeks emerged in the course of the 2nd millennium BC through a branch of the Indo-Europeans mingling with the population of the Mediterranean region during the great migrations of nations that started in the region of the lower Danube. From 1800 BC onward the first Greeks reached their areas of settlement between the Ionian and the Aegean seas. The fusion of these earliest Greek-speaking people with their predecessors produced the civilization known as Mycenaean. This group was seriously depleted in the cataclysm of the mid-13th century. From 1200 BC onward the Dorians followed from an area northwest of Greece, mingling with the survivors of the Mycenaean culture.
The Mycenaeans got over 70% of their DNA from early farmers in the Balkans and Turkey and even a bit from north-eastern people (Siberia or eastern Europe). The fact that the Mycenaeans have this DNA indicates that a wave of immigrants came from the European steppe.
So, even though there are still questions about origins, I think that based on DNA studies, neither Greeks nor Romans originated from the Near East or North Africa.
Those people are wrong, and almost certainly racists.
Both ancient Romans and Greeks looked much as they do now.
Great Question! The answer depends on your perspective:
From a blond haired pale Scandinavian, you'd get a "Hmmmm... Olive?"
From a dark colored African in the Congo, you'd get a "Hmmmm... Sure."
Think for a minute: There isn't a true "Black" & "White" out there. There Shades of pigmentation that over many generations has been selected as the most efficient to the climate in which the groups live.
It's the same question about the Ancient Egyptians. Yes, they were Africans. Were they white like a Scandinavian? No! Were they black like a Nubian? No. Were they somewhere in between and closer to the Ancient Greeks & Romans? Probably. Look at the coloration on the bust of Nefertiti.
I hope that this helps.
PS. They're almost always white guys & gals in the Movies because that's the actor & actress pool that was available in Hollywood!
You can't change the little minds of ignorant people.
If you want to see what an ancient Greek looked like, they left us some clues.
Good looking lot weren't they.
Yes, they were always Caucasians and originated first from the hunter-gatherers of the Middle East and later from the Middle Eastern Farmers who migrated into Europe.
Middle Eastern Farmers migrate Europe about 8000 years ago:
European DNA MAP:
Ancient Roman and Greek mosaics showing ancient Greeks and Romans looked NO DIFFERENT to their descendants:
Greek:
Roman:
The ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans both originated in Europe and were white. But even if they were to originate in the Middle East or North Africa (which they didn’t), they would still be white. You see, the white or Caucasian race encompasses not just Europeans but also Middle Easterners and North Africans and even many Indians. Each race is subdivided into sub races. The Caucasian race has four sub races: Nordic (blond haired, blue eyed), Alpine (brown haired, with either green, blue, or black eyes), Ginger (red haired, freckled), and Mediterranean (black eyed, black haired with either straight or curly hair). Most (but not all) Caucasians living in the Middle East, North Africa, an India belong to the Mediterranean sub race of the Caucasian race.
If you mean "white" as in members of the Caucasian race, then yes the Greek and the Romans were primarily descended from Caucasians. However, There were several precursor groups living in both regions. Earlier Caucasian peoples such as the Etruscans in Italy and the Mycenaeans and Minoans in the areas around Greece. Peoples, who were eventually replaced by or interbred with other peoples moving from other areas of Europe into both Greece and Italy.
These new migrants were mainly branches of other Caucasian peoples. Some parts of Italy were even settled by Greek colonists. Moreover, there was some intermixing of peoples from Northern Africa, who crossed the straights of Gibraltar and then moved into Spain. The Carthaginians had a racial presence in Spain long before the Romans.
The Carthaginians were believed to be descendants of Phoenicians from Tyre. However, the Carthaginians were most likely a mixture of Northern African peoples combined with the Phoenicians who ended up settling in that area.
There were also two major infusions of Asiatic or Mongolian peoples into the Roman World. Asiatic peoples who interbred with European stock as they moved across Europe during the times of Attila the Hun and the Mongol invasion.
Even the vast majority of those living in India are also considered descendants of a branch of Caucasian people. A group who migrated into India around 4,000 years ago from out of Mesopotamia.
It is generally accepted that the entire region of the world stretching from Europe to India was settled mostly by Caucasian related branches of humanity.
You know the truth.
Racial slurs are invented to celebrate the defeat of powerful enemies from another race and immortalize the dethronement of kings, lords and masters from another race.
People should study the etymology of racial slurs. They ALWAYS reveal a hidden racial war that took place in the distant and so distant past. Those who won the racial war immortalize their victories through racial slurs targeting the descendants of the defeated and their mixed race descendants.
The G-word is the ultimate insult for Italians. The G-word refers to a people, place, region in “Sub-Saharan” West Africa thousands of miles from the Italy and the Mediterranean region. There was a time when the G-word was used for the entire coastal region of West Africa, including West-Central and Southwestern Africa.
The W-word is the ultimate insult for Mediterranean people. The W-word is derived from a black faced minstrel character. It is also a racist doll gifted to white girl children in order to instill negrophobia at a very early age.
Moricaud, a derivative of More, is the equivalent of the N-word in France. Blacks are racially abused as Moricaud in France. The Crowned Moor heraldic symbol is also known as Caput Ethiopicum. There is a long list of ancient cities (Mortain, Moreac, Mauriac, Maure, etc.) in France named after Romanized Moors who were granted colonies during the Pax Romana.
Kushi, a derivative of Kush, is the equivalent of the N-word in Israel. Blacks are racially abused as Kushi in Israel. Kushite King Nimrod, son of Ethiopia, the first world emperor, is immortalized through the Nimrod Castle in Israel. Kushite King Nimrod is often referred to as Mesopotamia or the King of Assyrians.
Arapi, a derivative of Arab, is the equivalent of the N-word in Greece. Blacks are racially abused as Arapi in Greece. Ancient Arabians, including the Bessarabians were a Kushite branch who ruled in Central and Eastern Europe. They are immortalized in geographic and place names in Central and Eastern Europe.
Mayate, a derivative of Maya, is the equivalent of the N-word in Mexico. Blacks are racially abused as Mayate in Mexico by the Latinos, the descendants of Iberian conquistadors. The Maya are depicted as frizzy haired Blacks on the oldest frescoes in Mexico.
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