The subject is a complex and ambiguous one. Only a selection of topics could be covered in a short chapter. A valuable and very wide assemblage of testimony on Roman attitudes toward foreign peoples may be found in Balsdon 1979, although the organization is somewhat erratic and the analysis minimal. Momigliano 1975 remains a classic, engagingly written and provocative, but short on the Roman side. Reactions and relations between Romans and other Italian clans are given only passing notice here. But the incisive book of Dench 1995 merits recommendation. A multitude of works treat Roman responses to Greeks and appropriation of Greek culture. The relation of Hellenic traditions to Rome’s sense of its own origins and identity is discussed in Gruen 1992 and Erskine 2001. There is much to be learned about religious institutions and their implications for Roman openness to alien cults and practices in North 1979, Orlin 1997, and Beard, North, and Price 1998. The ambivalent portrayals of Phoenicians and Carthaginians need considerably more work in the scholarship. Prandi 1979 and Mazza 1988 are only a beginning. The extensive study by Kremer 1994 is the most useful compendium on the depiction of Gauls and Celts in Roman writings during the Republic, but there is room for a more analytical probe of that topic. The sensibilities of Romans toward blacks and their characterizations of peoples labeled ‘‘Ethiopians’’ have been better served in scholarship, especially by Snowden 1970, 1983 and Thompson 1989. Roman perceptions of Jews have gained widespread scrutiny, but most of the evidence is Imperial rather than Republican, and much of the discussion has been devoted to assessing the extent of Roman ‘‘anti-semitism.’’ The scholarship more recently has moved in other directions, as for example in Schafer 1997 and Gruen 2002 (with different slants). Finally, two forthcoming works merit notice. A parallel piece on ‘‘Romans and Others’’ by Y. Syed has appeared in Harrison 2005. And the substantial volume by B. Isaac 2004, a wide-ranging and very important study of ‘‘proto-racism’’ in antiquity, offers a considerably darker picture than is presented in this chapter.
World History
