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. The goal is to map the distribution, intensity, and variety of racializing discourse across the archaic and classical corpus, and to ask what patterns emerge when the full range of the evidence is made visible at once.