Racial prejudice

Racial prejudice was a fact of life in Ancient Rome.⁴⁹ Despite the steady progress of universalism, the Romans of both the Republic and Principate display an undertone of sneering contempt for other races at best; and sometimes that sentiment is translated into positive action.

On the practical side it suffices to mention the lex Licinia Mucia of 95 BC which cancelled the registration as Roman citizens of Latins and Italians who had illegally registered as such. Cicero, although not sharing the xenophobia of M.Aemilius Scaurus who sponsored the law, approved of it in principle, though he did regard it as inhumanum to expel the illegal immigrants from Rome. But in his defence of the Greek poet Archias he even obscured the principle behind a smokescreen of humanitas.⁵¹

In the Principate we see Cassius Longinus justifying the use of the s.c. Silanianum against a slave population made up of â€?the scum of other nations'. He was thinking mainly of slaves of eastern origin.⁵² The sentiment was shared by Juvenal, who complained that â€?the Syrian Orontes has flowed into the Tiber'.⁵³ The thrust was broader than that of Cassius; Juvenal was thinking as much of free migrants as of slaves. Martial sneered at the freed slave who incorporated his former owner's name in his nomenclature in order to conceal his origins: â€?Cinnamus, you bid us address you as Cinna.

Although the only Republican uses of Graeculus are in Cicero,⁵⁴ the word is used so widely, and in such different contexts, in the Principate that it must be accounted part of common parlance. In an official letter to Pliny, Trajan observes that â€?the Greeklings all love gymnasiums'. Pliny himself sneers at the â€?Greekling manager' of Domitian's gymnastic festivals; he also approves of the suppression, at Vienne, of Greek-style gymnastics which had been a bad example to the rest of the empire.⁵⁵ Juvenal embellishes his remark about the Syrians with a reference to â€?true Greek scum'; elsewhere he speaks of â€?the greedy Greekling who gobbles up knowledge'.⁵⁶ Tacitus has â€?our children handed over to some silly Greekling maid', and Florus speaks of â€?the effeminacy of the Greekling city, Marseilles'.⁵⁷

Offensive language was also used for Africans.⁵⁸ The elder Pliny noted with some amusement that a well-known boxer, born at Byzantium (Istanbul) and descended from an African grandfather and a Roman grandmother, was himself black although his mother was white (NH 7.1). Seneca had tried to counteract such an attitude: â€?The colour of the Ethiopian is not something to be specially noticed; nothing is odd or disgraceful for an individual if it is a characteristic of his whole nation' (Ira 3.26.3). But Seneca was swimming against the tide.

Augustus made official discrimination against slaves, especially those of eastern origin, a cornerstone of his policy. By a series of laws he imposed restrictions on the manumission (liberation) of slaves.⁵⁹ The legislation placed a ceiling on the number of slaves that any owner was permitted to manumit. There were also restrictions on the respective ages of the manumitting owner and the slave, and— one of the most important features—on the moral credentials of the slave.⁶⁰ The purpose of the legislation was to cut down the number of Roman citizens created by manumission.

Considering it of great importance to keep the people uncorrupted by any taint [colluvio] of peregrine or servile blood, Augustus conferred Roman citizenship sparingly and put a limit on manumissions. When Tiberius sought citizenship for a Greek dependant of his, Augustus replied that he would not grant it unless the man appeared in person and showed cause for the grant.⁶¹

In other words, he wanted to make a racial assessment.⁶² Similarly, when Livia sought citizenship for a Gaul from a tribute-paying region, Augustus only granted the man freedom from tribute, declaring that he would rather suffer a loss to the treasury than debase the honour of citizenship (Suet. Aug. 40.3). He displayed another side of the same policy when he directed the aediles not to allow anyone to appear in the Forum except when wearing the toga instead of the Greek cloaks that had become popular (ibid. 40.5).

Dio says that Augustus left in his papers a directive against freeing many slaves. He also counselled against enrolling large numbers of new citizens, for that would obscure the difference between Romans and subject peoples (Dio 56.33.3). Dio's version is understandably sanitised. He could hardly be expected to come out openly with the anti-Greek motivation.

The official Augustan line⁶³ was gradually watered down as universalism took hold. Tiberius gave Junian Latins full citizenship if they performed particular public services (munera). Nero rated it as an appropriate munus if a Junian Latin possessed a certain patrimony and used at least half of it to build a house in Rome; Trajan added further exemptions.⁶⁴ But these modest relaxations were largely cosmetic, as far as slaves were concerned. Trajan did not hesitate to overturn Nero's exemption of freedmen from the s.c. Silanianum.⁶⁵ The one truly progressive force in the first century was Claudius; but he operated more in the extension of citizenship to free Greeks and others than in the specific area of slavery.⁶⁶