Co-Geeking

The ancient Greeks had certain stereotypes about the people they called barbaroi: Romans were brutes; Scythians were drunkards; Persians were perverts, and so on. Like all ethnic stereotypes, these conventional views were based on prejudices and assumptions rather than truth. Not everyone necessarily believed in or agreed with these stereotypes, but they were recognizable elements of Greek culture in the same way that “French are cowards” or “Italians are reckless drivers” are recognizable stereotypes today. But what stereotypes did other peoples have for the Greeks? We don’t have very many sources that offer non-Greek views of the Greeks, but there are some hints that suggest that the common view of the Greeks, and Athenians in particular, is that they talked too much.

The Greek historian Herodotus reports a story that a Scythian named Anacharsis had traveled in Greece and come home to Scythia with a pointed opinion on the Greeks:

In fact, I have heard a story told by the Peloponnesians about Anacharsis, who was sent by the king of the Scythians to Greece to learn about our ways. When he returned, he told the king that all the Greeks strive for wisdom except the Spartans, but the Spartans are the only one who talk and listen thoughtfully.

Herodotus, Histories 4.77

Since the Spartans were famous for being people of few but well-chosen words, the point of the anecdote is that other Greeks talked to much and said too little. We can compare the story of Anacharsis visiting Greece with Herodotus’ account of the Greek scholar Hecataeus visiting Egypt and getting a lesson from the priests there about Greek pretensions:

The scholar Hecataeus was once in Thebes and recounted his genealogy back to the sixteenth ancestor, which he made out to be a god. The priests of Zeus did the same thing for him that they also did for me, though I made no such claims about my ancestry. They led me into the hall of the temple and counted out the wooden statues that were there, which equaled the number they had already told me. Every high priests erects a statue of himself there during his lifetime. Pointing to these statues and counting as they went, the priests showed me that each was the son of the man before him, from the one who most recently passed away back to the earliest of them all. When Hecataeus claimed to be descended from a god in the sixteenth generation, they did not believe that was possible. They instead traced the ancestry of the priests by counting the statues, each one a piromis, the son of a piromis (piromis being their word for a gentleman), counting back three hundred and forty-five statues, and not a one of them a god or demigod.

Herodotus 2.143

The stories of Anacharsis and Hecataeus both come to us from a Greek source, so neither is a direct report of a foreign view of the Greeks, but it is interesting that they seem to have the same point. Anacharsis approved of the Spartans because they were careful with their words. Hecataeus got put in his place by the Egyptian priests because he had made an outrageous claim before listening to people who knew better. In both cases, the Greeks would have been better off if they talked less and paid attention more. Since Herodotus was widely-traveled and had spoken with people of many different cultures, he may be giving us something reflecting an authentic perception of the Greeks by outsiders.

The richest source we have for outside views of the Greeks is the Romans. The Roman perspective is complicated because so many Romans admired and identified with Greek culture, but when we hear negative views of the Greeks from Roman sources, they often tend the same way: Greeks, and Athenians in particular, talk too much.

The Greek antiquarian Plutarch, in his life of the Roman politician Cato the Elder, reports that Cato’s opinion of the Greeks as long-winded and superficial:

He dealt with the Athenians through an interpreter, although he could have spoken to them himself […] He said that the Athenians were astonished at the speed and punch of his [Latin] words, for what he said briefly [in Latin] took the interpreter many words to say [in Greek]. It was his opinion that on the whole, the words of Greeks came from their lips, those of Romans from their hearts.

Plutarch, Life of Cato the Elder 1.12

The Roman satirist Juvenal gives a similar anti-Greek attitude to his character Umbricius:

Quick-witted, damned audacious, always ready with a

speech, and they can out-talk Isaeus [a famous orator]. What do you

suppose that one is? He’s brought us a bit of everything:

schoolteacher, professor, surveyor, painter, wrestling coach,

seer, tight-rope walker, doctor, magician—your hungry little Greek

does it all! Tell him to fly and up he goes!

Juvenal, Satires 3.73-78

While we don’t know what words non-Greeks would have used for the Greeks, parallel to the Greek word barbaros for non-Greek-speakers, there’s a good chance it was something along the lines of “blabbermouth” or “bore.”

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.