Notes · Classical CivilisationUK · A-Levels

Invention of the Barbarian

Invention of the Barbarian is one of the four Culture and the Arts options (Component 2), studying how the Greeks constructed the idea of the barbarian - the non-Greek other - and defined themselves against it. This topic teaches the whole option: Greek identity and the meaning of barbaros; the Persian Wars that gave the Greek/barbarian polarity its charge, and Herodotus's account of them; the barbarian on the tragic stage (Aeschylus's Persians and beyond); the barbarian in art and material culture, including the mythological battles of the Parthenon read as allegory; and the stereotypes of despotism, luxury and effeminacy, the axis of gender, and the modern lens of Orientalism. It teaches the sources accurately by name and models how to analyse literary and visual/material evidence for the ideas of identity they carry.

5 sections~26 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

T·0555 / 10

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of how the barbarian was constructed across Greek sources and contextsAO2 · Analyse and interpret literary and visual/material sources for their ideas of Greek and barbarian identity

Operators:analyseinterpretevaluateexplaincomparediscuss

basic level

AS-Level covers a defined selection of the sources; the analytical demands are the same.

higher level

The full A-Level requires secure knowledge of the prescribed literary and visual/material sources, with sustained analysis of both.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

Invention of the Barbarian

Greek identity and the barbarian#

FoundationOCR H408 Component 2 (Invention of the Barbarian: Greek identity)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

Greek and barbarian

Fig. 1The polarity the Greeks constructed: the free, self-governing, restrained Greek set against the servile, excessive, emotional barbarian - a system of values as much as a description.

This option studies one of the most revealing ideas in Greek culture: the barbarian, the non-Greek other against whom the Greeks defined themselves. The Greek word barbaros originally meant simply a person who did not speak Greek - whose speech sounded, to Greek ears, like an unintelligible bar-bar. From this linguistic starting point it came to mean foreigner or non-Greek in general, and then to carry a heavy load of negative associations, so that barbarian implied not just difference but inferiority. The title of the option - the invention of the barbarian - captures the central scholarly insight it teaches: that the barbarian was less an observed reality than a Greek construction, an idea the Greeks built and used to think about themselves.

To understand the barbarian you must first understand what the Greeks thought made them Greek, because the two are mirror images. The Greeks were never politically united - they lived in hundreds of independent, often warring city-states - yet they shared a strong sense of a common Greekness (to Hellenikon). The historian Herodotus famously defined it in terms of shared blood, a shared language, shared temples and sacrifices to the same gods, and shared customs and way of life. Greek identity was thus cultural and religious rather than political: to be Greek was to share the Greek language, the Olympian gods and a Greek way of living. The barbarian was, by definition, the one who lacked these things.

After the Persian Wars (the subject of the next section), one value came to stand at the centre of the contrast above all others: freedom. The Greeks, especially the Athenians, came to define themselves as free men who governed themselves under their own laws, and to define the barbarian - above all the Persian - as a slave, a subject who grovelled before an all-powerful king and had no share in his own government. This political antithesis of the free, self-governing Greek against the enslaved subject of an Eastern despot became the master-key of the whole polarity, giving it moral and emotional force and turning cultural difference into a claim of Greek superiority.

Around this core the Greeks built a whole system of oppositions, and knowing them lets you read any source in the option. The Greek was free, the barbarian enslaved; the Greek self-governing under law, the barbarian ruled by a despot; the Greek restrained and self-controlled, the barbarian excessive, luxurious and emotional; the Greek manly and hardy, the barbarian soft and effeminate; the Greek rational, the barbarian governed by passion. These paired qualities are not neutral descriptions but a structure of values, in which every quality assigned to the barbarian is the negative of a quality the Greek claimed for himself. The barbarian is the shadow that gives the Greek self-image its shape.

The crucial analytical move throughout the option is therefore to read representations of the barbarian as evidence about the Greeks, not about the peoples they describe. When a Greek text or image portrays Persians as servile and luxurious, or Amazons as monstrous women who fight, it tells us far more about Greek anxieties, values and self-definition than about any real Persian or any real people. This does not mean the Greeks knew nothing of other cultures - they traded, travelled and sometimes admired (Egypt, for instance) - but the barbarian as a type is a construction. Studying it is studying how a civilisation defined itself by imagining its opposite, and analysing the sources means asking always what the invention of the barbarian reveals about the inventors.

Worked example

How the barbarian defines the Greek

Explain how the idea of the barbarian helped the Greeks define their own identity.

The starting point
Barbaros meant the non-Greek-speaker and then the non-Greek generally, acquiring connotations of inferiority - a category of the other.
The mirror
The Greeks assigned to the barbarian the opposite of every quality they claimed - servility against their freedom, excess against their restraint, passion against their reason.
The self-image
By defining the barbarian as their negative, the Greeks gave sharp content to their own identity as free, self-governing, restrained and rational people.
The lesson for analysis
So a Greek portrayal of the barbarian is really a portrait of Greek values in negative - evidence about the Greeks, not about the peoples described.

Result: The barbarian was the negative mirror in which the Greeks saw their own virtues, so the invention of the barbarian was really an act of Greek self-definition - which is why its sources are read as evidence about the Greeks.

Typical mistakes

Treating Greek accounts of barbarians as accurate ethnography rather than as a construction that reveals Greek self-definition.
Forgetting that the Greeks were politically disunited, so that Greekness was cultural and religious (and, after the Persian Wars, defined by freedom), not a single state.

Active revision

Explain what the Greeks meant by barbaros and set out the system of oppositions (free/enslaved, self-governing/despotic, restrained/excessive) through which they defined themselves against it.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

The Persian Wars and the polarity#

StandardOCR H408 Component 2 (Invention of the Barbarian: the Persian Wars)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The Persian Wars

Fig. 2The course and meaning of the Persian Wars: a chain of battles ending in a Greek victory that was read as freedom's triumph over barbarian despotism.

The Greek/barbarian polarity acquired its emotional charge and its central historical reference point in the Persian Wars, the conflict in which coalitions of Greek city-states defeated the vast Persian Empire in the early fifth century BC. The empire of the Persian kings was the greatest power of the age, stretching across the Near East; that a scatter of small, disunited Greek states could repel it was, to the Greeks, an astonishing and defining triumph. The wars gave the abstract contrast of Greek and barbarian a concrete enemy - the Persian - and a story of near-miraculous victory that could be told and retold as the vindication of everything the Greeks believed themselves to be.

The wars fall into two great invasions, which you should know in outline. The first came under King Darius and was checked when the Athenians, almost alone, defeated the Persian landing at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Ten years later Darius's son Xerxes led a second, far larger invasion (480-479 BC): a small Greek force under the Spartan king Leonidas made a famous last stand at the pass of Thermopylae; the Greek fleet won a decisive victory in the straits of Salamis in 480 BC; and the following year the Persian land army was crushed at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. Against the odds, the Greek coalition had defeated the superpower of the age.

The Greeks interpreted this victory in a very particular way, and that interpretation is what matters for the option. They read it not merely as a military success but as the triumph of freedom over slavery: free Greeks, fighting willingly for their own city-states and laws, had defeated the enslaved subjects of a despot, driven into battle (as the Greeks imagined it) by the lash and the whip. The wars thus seemed to prove the whole polarity - that free men are better than slaves, that self-government is stronger than tyranny, that the Greek way is superior to the barbarian. This reading, forged in the wars and endlessly repeated afterward, is the engine of the barbarian idea.

Our principal literary source for the wars is Herodotus, often called the father of history, whose Histories set out to record the great deeds of Greeks and barbarians and to explain why they came to blows. Herodotus is a rich and often sympathetic observer of foreign peoples, curious about their customs and far from crudely hostile; but his account also builds the image of Persian despotism that the polarity needed. His Xerxes is a study in the arrogance of absolute power - a king who lashes and fetters the Hellespont for wrecking his bridge, who cannot bear opposition, whose limitless ambition tips into hubris and invites divine punishment. Herodotus both records the wars and shapes the enduring picture of the barbarian despot.

For analysis, the Persian Wars should be understood as the event that turned a cultural distinction into a charged moral opposition. Before them, barbaros was mainly a marker of non-Greekness; after them, and because of how they were remembered, the barbarian became the enslaved, despotic enemy against whom free Greece had triumphed, and this version dominated Greek thought and art for generations. The wars also fostered a sense of Panhellenic identity (though the Greeks quickly fell back into their own quarrels). When you analyse a source in this option, it is nearly always against the background of the Persian Wars and their interpretation that its image of the barbarian was made.

Worked example

Herodotus and the hubris of Xerxes

Analyse how Herodotus uses Xerxes to construct the image of the barbarian despot.

Absolute power
Xerxes is shown as an all-powerful king whose subjects obey without a share in decisions, the very type of the despot the Greeks feared.
Hubris against nature
When a storm wrecks his bridge over the Hellespont, Xerxes has the sea itself whipped and fettered - an act of arrogance against the natural and divine order.
The moral pattern
Herodotus frames such limitless ambition as hubris that invites nemesis, so the Persian defeat becomes the punishment of overreaching pride.
The polarity confirmed
Against this despot stand the free Greeks who choose to fight for their laws, so the narrative dramatises freedom's superiority over servile despotism.

Result: Herodotus builds Xerxes into the archetype of the arrogant barbarian despot whose hubris is punished, dramatising the Greek reading of the wars as the triumph of free self-government over servile tyranny.

Typical mistakes

Narrating the battles as an adventure story instead of analysing how the wars' interpretation forged the charged Greek/barbarian polarity.
Treating Herodotus as simply hostile to foreigners, missing his genuine curiosity and sympathy alongside his picture of despotism.

Active revision

Analyse how Herodotus constructs the Persian king as a despotic barbarian (for example through the hubris of Xerxes), and explain how the Persian Wars gave the Greek/barbarian polarity its force.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

The barbarian on the tragic stage#

StandardOCR H408 Component 2 (Invention of the Barbarian: drama)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The barbarian stereotype

Fig. 3The recurring components of the barbarian stereotype in Greek literature and art, each the negative of a Greek virtue.

The Athenian theatre was one of the most powerful places where the barbarian was imagined and displayed to the citizen body, and its plays are central literary sources for the option. Drama could put the barbarian on stage - could give a Persian or a Trojan a voice, a costume and a manner - and so it both drew on and shaped the audience's sense of the foreign other. Because tragedy explored the deepest civic and human questions before the assembled city, its representations of barbarians carried real weight in forming Athenian attitudes, and analysing them shows the polarity being enacted in performance.

The outstanding example is Aeschylus's Persians, produced in 472 BC, which is remarkable in several ways. It is the earliest Greek tragedy to survive, and, uniquely among surviving tragedies, it dramatises not a myth but a recent historical event - the Persian defeat at Salamis, in which many in the audience had themselves fought. Boldly, Aeschylus sets the play not among the victorious Greeks but in the enemy's own court at Susa, showing the Persians - the queen mother Atossa, the ghost of the dead king Darius, and finally the broken Xerxes - as they receive the news of catastrophe. The play stages the barbarian from the inside.

The Persians presents many of the standard elements of the barbarian stereotype. The Persian court is a place of luxury, wealth and absolute monarchy; the defeat is explained as the result of Xerxes's hubris in overreaching the proper limits set for Persia and in yoking the Hellespont; and the Persians express their grief in extravagant, unrestrained lamentation, the emotional excess the Greeks associated with the East. The contrast with the free Greeks who, a messenger reports, fought as free men for their own liberty is explicit. In these respects the play confirms the polarity, dramatising Persian despotism, luxury and emotionalism against Greek freedom and restraint.

Yet the Persians is not simple triumphalism, and this complexity is important to analyse. Aeschylus gives the defeated enemy real dignity and pathos: the grief of Atossa and of the chorus of Persian elders is genuinely moving, the ghost of Darius is a figure of wisdom and warning, and the play invites the audience to feel the human cost of the disaster even to the enemy. Written only eight years after Salamis, before an audience of veterans, it could have been mere gloating; instead it treats the fall of a great power with something like tragic sympathy. The play thus both propagates the stereotype and, in its humanity, complicates it - a doubleness that makes it a rich source.

Barbarians appear across tragedy more widely, and the picture is varied. Foreign figures - Trojans, Egyptians, the Colchian princess Medea in Euripides, Eastern slaves - are often marked as other by their origins, and can embody danger, passion or servility; Medea, a barbarian sorceress driven by monstrous passion to kill her own children, has been read as playing on Greek fears of the foreign woman. But tragedy is capable of nuance and even of turning the categories back on the Greeks, questioning their own conduct. For analysis, then, the stage is a place where the barbarian is both constructed and, at times, humanised or interrogated. Reading a play in this option means asking how it deploys the stereotype and whether, like the Persians, it also unsettles it.

Worked example

The doubleness of the Persians

Explain how Aeschylus's Persians both confirms and complicates the barbarian stereotype.

Confirming the stereotype
The play shows a luxurious, absolute monarchy, explains defeat by Xerxes's hubris, and stages extravagant, unrestrained Persian grief - the standard image of the East.
The explicit contrast
A messenger reports that the Greeks fought as free men for their own liberty, sharpening the polarity of free Greek against servile barbarian.
Complicating it
Yet the grief of Atossa and the elders is genuinely moving, and Darius's ghost speaks with dignity and wisdom, so the enemy is given real pathos.
The overall effect
Written for an audience of veterans, the play treats a great power's fall with tragic sympathy rather than gloating, both propagating and humanising the stereotype.

Result: The Persians dramatises the full barbarian stereotype yet grants the defeated enemy dignity and sorrow, so it both builds and unsettles the polarity - which is what makes it such a rich source.

Typical mistakes

Reading the Persians as simple anti-Persian gloating, missing the genuine dignity and sympathy Aeschylus gives the defeated.
Assuming tragedy only ever reinforces the stereotype, when it can also humanise or question the Greek/barbarian categories.

Active revision

Analyse how Aeschylus's Persians presents the Persians: identify the elements of the stereotype it dramatises, and assess how far it also gives the enemy dignity and sympathy.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

The barbarian in art and material culture#

StandardOCR H408 Component 2 (Invention of the Barbarian: art)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The mythological analogy

Fig. 4The Parthenon's mythical battles all figure the same idea - order defeating chaos - read as an allegory of the Greek victory over the barbarian Persians.

The barbarian was constructed in images as much as in words, and visual and material sources are a central part of this option. Greek art developed a visual language for the other: on vase-paintings, Persians and Easterners are marked out from Greeks by their dress and equipment - trousers, sleeved tunics, soft caps and the bow - in contrast to the idealised, often heroically nude Greek warrior with his spear and shield. Barbarians are frequently shown defeated, fleeing or falling, their difference and their inferiority written into the image. Learning to read these visual markers - costume, weapons, posture, the outcome of the combat - is the analytical skill the visual sources demand.

The most powerful visual strategy was not to depict Persians directly but to represent the conflict of Greek and barbarian through myth, and the supreme example is the sculptural programme of the Parthenon in Athens. The Parthenon's carved battles show a series of mythical conflicts between order and chaos: the Greeks (Lapiths) against the wild, half-animal Centaurs; the Greeks against the Amazons, the warrior women; the gods against the Giants; and the Greeks against the Trojans in the sack of Troy. Each of these is a struggle in which the forces of civilisation and order overcome the forces of savagery and disorder. Built in the decades after the Persian Wars, this programme was widely understood as an allegory of the recent Greek victory over the barbarian Persians.

The logic of the allegory is worth setting out clearly, because it is a favourite subject for analysis. In each mythical battle, one side stands for Greek civilisation, reason and order (the gods, the Lapiths, the Greek heroes), and the other for barbarian savagery, violence and chaos (the Giants, the Centaurs, the Amazons, the Trojans). By depicting the triumph of order over chaos in these timeless myths, the Parthenon presents the Greek defeat of Persia as a victory of the same kind - civilisation over barbarism, order over disorder - and lends it the dignity and inevitability of myth. The barbarian is thus written into the very fabric of Athens's greatest monument, without a single literal Persian being shown.

The Amazons deserve particular attention, because they add the crucial dimension of gender to the polarity. As women who reject marriage and the household to fight as warriors, the Amazons invert the Greek norms of proper female behaviour, and they are associated with the East. In the Amazonomachy - the battle of Greeks against Amazons - the defeat of these monstrous, mannish women by Greek men enacts the restoration of the proper order of the sexes as well as of Greek over barbarian. The Amazon is a compound anxiety: the foreign and the female out of place at once, and her defeat reassures the Greek male viewer on both counts.

For analysis, material culture shows the polarity working at its most immediate and pervasive. A vase in a household, a sculpture on a temple, worked on the viewer directly and constantly, without the argument of a text. The mythological analogy of the Parthenon in particular shows the sophistication of the strategy: rather than crudely mocking a real enemy, it raises the Greek/barbarian conflict to the level of cosmic myth, making Greek superiority look eternal and divinely ordained. When you analyse a visual source in this option, identify the markers of the barbarian (or the mythical stand-in), read the outcome of the scene, and interpret what the image claims about Greek order and barbarian chaos - turning a description of an artwork into an analysis of the idea it carries.

Worked example

The Parthenon as allegory

Explain how the Parthenon's sculpture figures the Greek/barbarian conflict.

The mythical battles
The Parthenon depicts gods against Giants, Lapiths against Centaurs, Greeks against Amazons and Greeks against Trojans - conflicts of order against savagery.
The shared meaning
In each, the side of civilisation, reason and order defeats the side of chaos, violence and the monstrous - a single idea repeated across the building.
The historical reference
Built after the Persian Wars, this triumph of order over chaos was understood as an allegory of the Greek victory over the barbarian Persians.
The effect
By raising the conflict to the level of myth, the Parthenon makes Greek superiority look eternal and divinely ordained, without depicting a single real Persian.

Result: The Parthenon's mythical battles all figure order overcoming chaos and were read as an allegory of the defeat of Persia, giving the Greek/barbarian polarity the timeless, sacred authority of myth.

Typical mistakes

Describing the visual sources without decoding their markers and outcomes (who is defeated, and how difference is signalled).
Missing that the Parthenon battles are mythical allegories of the Persian conflict rather than direct depictions of Persians.

Active revision

Analyse the Parthenon's mythical battles as an allegory of the Greek/barbarian conflict; explain how each pairing (Lapiths and Centaurs, Greeks and Amazons, gods and Giants) figures order overcoming chaos.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

Stereotypes, gender and legacy#

AdvancedOCR H408 Component 2 (Invention of the Barbarian: stereotypes and legacy)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The axes of the stereotype

Fig. 5The barbarian stereotype along its axes - political, moral, emotional and gendered - all serving to define the Greek by his opposite.

Drawing the option together, it helps to set out the developed barbarian stereotype along its main axes, because these recur across every source and give an essay its analytical backbone. Politically, the barbarian is despotic and servile - ruled by an all-powerful king, his people mere slaves without freedom or law. Morally, the barbarian is excessive: given to luxury (tryphe), softness and self-indulgence, lacking the Greek virtue of self-control. Emotionally, the barbarian is uncontrolled, prone to extravagant grief and passion where the Greek is restrained. And in terms of gender, the barbarian is effeminate - Eastern men imagined as soft and unmanly - while barbarian women may be dangerously unfeminine. Each axis is the negative of a Greek virtue, and together they compose the type.

Gender is worth dwelling on, because it runs through the whole construction. The Greeks mapped the polarity of Greek and barbarian onto the polarity of masculine and feminine: the ideal Greek was manly, hardy and self-controlled, while the barbarian was cast as soft, luxurious and emotional - qualities the Greeks associated with women. Eastern kings and courtiers could be portrayed as effeminate, undermining the masculinity proper to a free citizen. Conversely, the figure of the Amazon - the woman who fights and rules - embodied the terror of gender out of place, and was firmly associated with the barbarian East. The barbarian was thus not only foreign but, in the Greek imagination, improperly gendered, and this doubled the anxiety the type expressed and relieved.

The stereotype received a notorious theoretical formulation from the philosopher Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BC. In his Politics, Aristotle argued that some human beings are by nature suited to be ruled - natural slaves - while others are fitted to rule, and he associated this natural servility with barbarians, suggesting that it is fitting for Greeks to rule barbarians as masters rule slaves. This doctrine of natural slavery gave the prejudice the appearance of philosophical justification, turning a cultural construction into a supposed law of nature. It is a striking and disturbing example of how deeply the polarity was rooted, and of how a great thinker could lend his authority to it.

A powerful modern lens for understanding all this is the idea of Orientalism, associated with the scholar Edward Said and often applied by classicists to the Greek material. Said argued that the modern West constructed the East as its exotic, irrational, despotic and inferior other, largely in order to define and flatter itself - and the parallel with the Greek invention of the barbarian is close and illuminating. Used carefully as an analytical tool, the concept of Orientalism helps explain the deep logic of the Greek sources: the barbarian is the East imagined by the Greeks to give their own identity shape and superiority. It also reminds us that constructing an inferior other is not a peculiarly Greek habit but a recurring human one.

For the exam, the strongest answers combine command of the stereotype with two kinds of caution. First, the invention of the barbarian was never wholly monolithic: the Greeks could be genuinely curious about and admiring of other peoples (Herodotus on Egypt, for instance), they traded and mixed with non-Greeks, and some sources are far more nuanced than the crude stereotype. Second, representations of the barbarian are evidence about the Greeks, and reading them as sober facts about Persians or others is a basic error. The barbarian was a construction that helped the Greeks define themselves as free, rational, restrained and manly by imagining an other who was none of these things - and its legacy, the enduring binary of a civilised West against a barbarian East, is one of the most powerful and dangerous inheritances of the ancient world.

Worked example

The barbarian as self-definition

Explain how the barbarian stereotype functioned as Greek self-definition, using the Orientalism lens.

The negative mirror
Each axis of the stereotype - despotic, servile, luxurious, emotional, effeminate - is the negative of a Greek virtue, so the barbarian is the Greek in reverse.
The theoretical hardening
Aristotle's doctrine of natural slaves gave the prejudice a philosophical dress, presenting Greek rule over barbarians as natural.
The Orientalism parallel
Said's account of the West constructing an inferior East to flatter itself closely parallels the Greek invention of the barbarian, illuminating its self-serving logic.
The necessary caution
But the construction was not monolithic - Greeks admired Egypt, mixed with non-Greeks - and its sources are evidence about the Greeks, not the peoples portrayed.

Result: The barbarian was a self-serving construction, hardened by thinkers like Aristotle, through which the Greeks defined their own virtues - a logic the Orientalism lens illuminates, provided its non-monolithic reality is kept in view.

Typical mistakes

Presenting the stereotype as monolithic, ignoring Greek curiosity about and admiration for some foreign peoples.
Applying Orientalism as a slogan rather than as a tool, or forgetting that the barbarian is a construction revealing the Greeks.

Active revision

Using the idea of the barbarian as a construction that defines the Greek, analyse how the stereotype's axes (despotism, luxury, emotion, effeminacy) work; assess the value and the limits of the Orientalism lens.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

References & sources

Sources

OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)

OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation

Invention of the Barbarian

5 sections~26 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

Invention of the Barbarian

Key points

How the barbarian defines the Greek

Key points

Herodotus and the hubris of Xerxes

Key points

The doubleness of the Persians

Key points

The Parthenon as allegory

Key points

The barbarian as self-definition

Sources

Invention of the Barbarian

Key points

How the barbarian defines the Greek

Key points

Herodotus and the hubris of Xerxes

Key points

The doubleness of the Persians

Key points

The Parthenon as allegory

Key points

The barbarian as self-definition

Sources