CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 170Classical Antiquity StudiesRace, Genetics, and SocietyClassical Philosophy and Thought

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Race: Antiquity and its Legacy: Ancients and Moderns

McCoskey, Denise Eileen·2012·I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd eBooks
DOI 10.5040/9780755697878
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

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.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.5040/9780755697878

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Still being checked.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 101–169 of 169

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
McCoskey, D. E.
Corresponding author
McCoskey, Denise Eileen
ORCID
McCoskey, Denise Eileen
Venue
I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd eBooks
Publisher
I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
Published
2012
DOI
10.5040/9780755697878
OpenAlex
W3032110010
Cited by
170
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 31 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 41 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 1
FWCI
2.93
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Classics › Classical Antiquity Studies
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Race, Genetics, and Society
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Classical Philosophy and Thought
Keywords
race, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, skin colour, racial theory, Persian Wars, classical literature, epic, tragedy, novel, colonialism, slavery, Black Athena, Theocritus, Tacitus, Pliny, Toni Morrison, European exploration, racial hierarchy

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review