Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy

This is an interesting book which primarily focuses on Hellenistic and Roman texts. It also detaches the concept of race from phenotypical appearance distancing itself from current usages of the concept. The two issues pose a clear problem. First, focusing on two imperial periods without looking at what preceded allows the writer to overlook the relationship between empire and forms of ethnic discrimination. Second, by detaching race from forms of discrimination based on perceptions of phenotypes, the book closes the door to the examination of other forms of identity building through contrast with others which do not use the social construct of race.

Race and Antiquity

Ancient Greek authors did not simply describe foreign peoples — they constructed them. Through the accumulation of claims about bodies, customs, intelligence, and moral character, texts from Homer to the Hellenistic period produced and reproduced hierarchical distinctions between Greeks and non-Greeks that bear a structural resemblance to what we now call racial thinking. This project examines that process computationally and qualitatively. Working from TEI-encoded Greek texts, a pipeline of NLP tools and large language models pre-annotates passages containing ethnonyms according to a four-tier scheme — gate, domain, register, valence — which is then validated through close reading.