Tribalism & Racism among the Ancient Greeks A Weberian Perspective

Were the ancients Greeks “racists” in the modern sense of the term “racist”? The terms ancient Greek “proto-racism”, tribalism (and/or racism) are used here to denote the abstract, narcissistic notion that not only the non-Greek barbarians, but also certain ancient Greek tribes (like the Macedonians, the Boeoteans etc.) should be excluded from the Hellenic community, for they were considered to be inferior compared with the general Hellenic civilization.The present paper analyses comparatively the social phenomena of ancient Greek tribalism and modern racism in order to answer the following question: “what distinguishes the ancient Greek racism from the modern one?”. The basic philosophical and sociological question to be answered, running through the whole paper, is the following: “Could modern scientific, biological racism have evolved in ancient Greece?”. Scholars are right in rejecting such a possibility. However, we will see that, following ancient Greek racial thought, the interpretive model of modern racism could successfully be applied to ancient Greece. In other words, we make use of the Weberian “idealtypus” of modern racism. However, one has to cut it loose from the connotations of modern-day racism and analyse ancient Greek racism within the framework of the cultural, religious and political conditions of Antiquity. This is exactly the method that has been followed in the present study, in an effort to present in a critical spirit ancient Greek racial thought.