The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Whatever the truth of that self-serving story, power relations clearly ruled the day, and the powerful would have their due. According to Herodotus, once again, every fifth year the Colchians and peoples around them traditionally paid a tribute to Persia of one hundred boys and one hundred girls. Already well established in Herodotus’s time, this levy’s origins could not be traced.28* And it must have continued long past the days of Herodotus, for more than three hundred years later, the Greek historian Polybius (ca. 203–120 BCE) notes the Black Sea origin of life’s everyday necessities: “cattle and slaves.”29† Indeed, this slave trade from the Black Sea region (of people later considered white) continued for more than two thousand years, ending only with Ottoman modernization at the turn of the twentieth century.‡ Such was the lot of masses of Europeans in ancient Greece.

  2

  ROMANS, CELTS, GAULS, AND GERMANI

  What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for. As imperial power shifted west from Greece to Rome, so did the dominant culture’s view of barbarians. Greek savants continued to investigate the world out of fairly pure intellectual curiosity, while from around the time of the birth of Christ, Roman generals concentrated on practical knowledge for their own purposes of warfare and conquest. Roman armies reached the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel between the first centuries BCE and CE, encountering for the first time western barbarians on their own turf. Moving north and west, Romans began to separate—to name and to define—Gauls and Germani from among the western peoples the Greeks formerly had vaguely lumped together as Celts. Not that any names or any of these distant peoples emerged with complete clarity: what made a Gaul a Gaul, a Celt a Celt, and a German a German long remained ambiguous.

  The Germani first came into Roman view in the 70s or 60s BCE, as Roman scholarship was beginning to replace the Greek and when the most learned man of his time, the Greco-Roman Stoic philosopher Posidonius of Rhodes (ca. 135–51 BCE) bestowed that name on all the northwestern barbaric tribes beyond Roman control.1 Even within the Roman homeland, the Spartacus slave revolt of 73–71 BCE in the region of Naples, Italy, revealed the popular recognition of northern slave identities. Spartacus himself hailed from the traditional source of ancient slaves: Slavic Thrace (now in neighboring regions of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey). But Romans further discerned relatively new slave identities: among the two hundred or so insurrectionary slaves, Romans recognized gangs they termed either Gauls or Germans. Over time the most learned Greco-Romans further sorted out Celts from Gauls and both from Germani with increasing clarity.

  Both Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian from Sicily, controversial for his loose way with facts and quotations from other authors and for plodding repetition, writing in the 50s to the 40s BCE, and the more authoritative Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in about 20 BCE, classed the Germani as a branch of the Celts. The greatly influential Greek scholar Strabo, writing during the reign of the great emperor Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE), went further. Strabo saw the Gauls as a kind of double-distilled Germani. Surveying all the peoples known to the Greeks and Romans, his seventeen-volume Geographica (7 BCE–23 CE) repeats a description that by his time had become commonplace: “The whole race which is now called both ‘Gallic’ and ‘Galatic’ is war-mad, and both high-spirited and quick for battle, although otherwise simple and not ill-mannered…. As for their might, it arises partly from their large physique and partly from their numbers…. [T]hey are all fighters by nature.” To Strabo, the Rhine River hardly constituted a barrier, as “their migrations easily take place, for they move in droves, army and all, or rather they make off, households and all, whenever they are cast out by others stronger than themselves.”2 The wealthy, well-educated Strabo (also from western modern Turkey) thus lumps the Gallic and German peoples together according to physique and culture. He judges their differences merely as a matter of historical contingency rather than as inherent dissimilarity.

  Clearly, to the Romans, civilization, not blood, set the two peoples apart. Roman conquest was busily taming the formerly warlike Gauls west to east, while the Germans, still unconquered, maintained their own wild, barbarian ways, remaining a truer kind of Celt than the Gauls. Strabo appeals to etymology to reinforce his reasoning. Romans, he says, named the wild tribes “Germani,” because the word means “genuine” in Latin. The Germani, therefore, were “genuine” Gauls.3 What the Germani still were—big, blond, wild, simple, and warlike—the Gauls had once been. In the West’s first close look northwest, imperial Rome’s greatest general stresses the fading but still warlike character of the Gauls.

  JULIUS CAESAR (ca. 100–44 BCE) was the first to depict the West’s original noble savages in his eyewitness account called De bellum gallico (On the Gallic War) of 54 BCE, a book that lent some clarity to this chaotic nomenclature.4 On his way to vast imperial power, Caesar spent nine years in the wilds beyond the Roman province we call Provence. Roman Gaul then encompassed modern-day France, the southern Netherlands, Belgium, most of Switzerland, and Germany west of the Rhine. Even so, Gaul, though huge, played a mere supporting role in Caesar’s larger ambition of regenerating and reforming the Roman empire as a whole. The Romans had already swallowed up a Greek empire that stretched east toward the Black Sea, and they now were dominant in areas south and west around the Mediterranean in today’s Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Gaul, therefore, belonged to a vast imperial realm.

  This is not to say the Gallic war meant nothing. Frontier campaigns like the ones in Gaul funded Caesar’s political machinations back in Rome, as the spoils of conquest—booty and slaves—flowed steadily south, paying off allies, securing shaky loyalties, and inserting northern Europeans into Italian society. Caesar’s defeat of the Belgae in 57 BCE, for instance, garnered 53,000 people, all of whom he sold at a swoop. On defeating the Veneti of Brittany, Caesar executed the leading men and sold the rest—man, woman, and child—into slavery.5 As he replenished his coffers in Gaul and added northerners to the population mix of Italy, Caesar came to know the northern tribes as both their conqueror and their military commander. In time, the Roman army inevitably employed masses of northerners as mercenary soldiers, and their aptitude for war appears prominently in Roman descriptions of inherent ethnic traits.

  An able and complex man, Caesar both made history and wrote ethnography. As an anthropologist with imperialist goals, he begins to disaggregate from up close the tribes whom Americans would later regard as white ancestors, famously beginning by dividing the whole of Gaul “into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, and the third a people who in their own language are called ‘Celts,’ but in ours, ‘Gauls.’”6* Already the distinction between Celts and Gauls had come to depend on how the Romans talked about them, and increasingly the terms stood for the barbarian traits. Caesar’s term Germani came to label only those beyond Roman control. The Belgae—barbarians within Roman Gaul—introduce a little more complexity, however, for they had originally been Germani. Thus, and somewhat messily, the term Germani prevailed as a name for the tribes living to the north of the Roman empire from around the first century BCE and six centuries onward. For Roman purposes, politics and warfare defined ethnic identities. Caesar’s classic Gallic War remains true to its title, in both its stress on war and its respect for the considerable military prowess of the Gauls, to which he repeats a defining chorus: “There was slaughter everywhere.” “Massive slaughter ensued….” “Massive slaughter followed.”7 It seems the defeat of such valiant barbarian warriors demanded massive slaughter, for the Gauls put up a very good fight, if not a shrewd one: “The Gauls are impulsive and sudden in their decision-making,” Caesar notes. Indeed, the big, tough Gauls indulged in some foolish overconfidence when initially encountering the smaller, shorter Romans. “For the main part,” Caesar says, “Gauls are very tall, and hold our slighter build in contempt.” Size counted for only so much on the frontier, however, and Gallic bulk went down to defeat before Roma
n tactical skill.8

  Book 7, the last and longest chapter of The Gallic War, chronicles the great revolt of Caesar’s most formidable Gallic opponent, Vercingetorix (d. 46 BCE).† Although Caesar ultimately defeated Vercingetorix in 52 BCE, he credits him with waging an epic struggle for the liberty of his tribe: “the whole of Gaul was united in the desire of restoring liberty and their former reputation for warfare.”9 Such heroic tales have a long life, and in the figure of Vercingetorix, book 7 gave nineteenth-and twentieth-century French nationalists their ancestral warrior-hero, the great Gaul of nos ancêtres les Gaulois (“our ancestors the Gauls,” a phrase dating back to the sixteenth century).* Not only is there the famous French cigarette Gaulois, but also, and more tellingly, the Astérix French comic books have depicted the adventures of the fictional, fun-loving Gallic warrior Astérix for more than half a century.† Since their debut in France in 1959, Astérix comic books have been translated into a hundred languages. Their hero inspired creation of the amusement Parc Astérix just outside Paris, which opened in 1989, and gave a name to the first French satellite, launched in 1965: Astérix-1.

  It might be said that the story of Vercingetorix and his Gaulois reverberates through history, but not solely in France. Caesar’s Gallic War also foreshadows and parallels chapters in the history of the United States, in which U.S. Americans play Caesar’s imperial role. Readers of American history can draw parallels between Caesar’s war of conquest and the Indian wars of North America, with Gauls cast as Indians and Vercingetorix as the Seneca chief Pontiac, the Apache chief Geronimo, or the Lakota (Sioux) chief Sitting Bull at Wounded Knee: all valiant, but all defeated.‡ More to the point in the present undertaking, however, Caesar’s Gallic War introduces the tribes of the ancient Germans and Britons.

  ON THE whole, Caesar’s paragraphs on the Germani are spare, providing only brief and patronizing accounts of barbarians to the north of Roman Gaul. For instance, he denotes the largest of the German tribes, the Suebi Germans living east of the Rhine, only as “ignorant and uncivilized” and mentions just one German character by name, the blowhard Suebi chieftain Ariovistus, who presumes himself the equal of a Roman general, proclaiming “his own excellence” in a loud and long performance. Caesar demeans this pretentious fellow, whose own Germanic language the imperialists cannot understand and who thus is forced to speak to Romans in the Gallic language.10 Since no other German appears individually, the balance of Caesar’s account of the Germani is anthropological.

  Sounding not a little like earlier Greek judgments of, say, the Scythians, Caesar heaps scorn mixed with grudging respect on the Suebi’s undisciplined manner of living. They farm just a little, feeding themselves mainly on milk and meat: “Their diet, daily exercise, and the freedom from restraint that they enjoy—for from childhood they do not know what compulsion or discipline is, and do nothing against their inclination—combine to make them strong and tall as giants. They inure themselves, in spite of the very cold climate in which they live, to wear no clothing but skins—and these so scanty that a large part of the body is uncovered—and to bathe in the rivers.” Interestingly, Caesar says the Suebi consider the use of saddles to be shamefully effeminate.

  Furthermore, Caesar echoes Strabo’s view of the process that has distinguished Gauls from Germani, drawing a larger lesson from history: “There was a time when the Gauls were more courageous than the Germans and took offensive military action against them,” he notes, but pax romana has fostered settlement and prosperity. Settlement and prosperity, in turn, did their own work, luring the Gauls from “poverty, privation, and hardship,” transforming warriors into mere consumers, docile and militarily impotent.

  According to Caesar, this process of civilizing and softening proceeds by degrees. Conquest has already more or less wrecked Gallic bravery. The land of the Gauls lies subdued, so that only the Belgae, living remote from centers of Roman culture, can still claim relative manliness: “the Belgae are the bravest, for they are furthest away from the civilization and culture of the Province. Merchants very rarely travel to them or import such goods as make men’s courage weak and womanish. They live, moreover, in close proximity to the Germans who inhabit the land across the Rhine, and they are continually at war with them.” The Suebi Germans, swearing not to fall into that trap, forbade the import of wine from the South, thinking that “it makes men soft and incapable of enduring hard toil.”11 Here lies one of Caesar’s central themes, setting up a tension between barbarism and civilization that reverberated for two thousand years.

  Of course, Caesar did not speak in terms of race, a discourse invented many centuries later. But in the nineteenth century, when race talk ruled, his descriptions of the Germani served theorists searching for immutable Teutonic traits. Looking backward, they magnified the differences Caesar traced between Gauls and Germans, as though they were racial rather than cultural, permanent rather than in flux. Unless we take their word for it, we must turn to Caesar for ourselves.

  Speaking always as an imperialist focused on military conquest, Caesar highlights German traits related to war. The sparsely settled Germani, he notes, fiercely ravaged their borderlands, driving away all who drew near, German-speaking or not. And, then, in a step dear to later racial theorists, Caesar apparently linked German sexual ethics, morality, and war. German men, he said, show an admirable sexual restraint; though they live alongside women who bathe in the rivers beside them and wear scanty hides and skins, sex remains off limits until the men reach twenty. Chastity relates to war, for the Germani were said to believe that abstinence makes men taller and braver, evidently channeling sexual frustration into healthy violence: “acts of robbery which take place outside the borders of each state: in fact, Germani claim that these take place to train their young men and reduce their laziness.”12

  Others of Caesar’s comments fit poorly into the lore of Teutonists. Consider the central role of women in war. As soothsayers, Caesar notes, women decide when to wage war, and once an enemy is engaged, women and children accompany their warriors into the field to bolster their bravery.13 Latter-day Teutonists made war a strictly characteristically masculine affair.

  CAESAR’S WAS also the first direct Roman report regarding the people of Britain. He obviously knew more about Germani than about Britons, but this lack of knowledge hardly prevented him from describing and judging those peoples across the Channel. He had visited only the coast of southeast Kent and the mouth of the Thames. Even so, he writes confidently of the interior. Britons there, he says, live by hunting and gathering and claim to be original inhabitants. They eat meat and milk, dress in skins, and dye their bodies blue with woad, which makes them “appear more frightening in battle. They have long hair and shave their bodies, all except for the head and upper lip.” And then there is, again, sex. In contrast to the Germans’ abstinence, in Britain “groups of ten or twelve men share their wives in common, particularly between brothers or father and sons. Any offspring are held to be the children of him to whom the maiden was brought first.”14 All along, Britons contrast poorly with Belgic immigrants from the west bank of the Rhine who had supplanted the natives on England’s southern coast and gone on to live quite civilized lives, farming peacefully like the Gauls only a day’s sail away on the mainland.

  CAESAR’S GALLIC WAR endures as the pioneering—and primary—description of ancient Gauls and Germani. Its information, as we have seen, ranges widely, and it inspired those who followed through the centuries. Well into the 1800s, The Gallic War was cited as the source of what then seemed immutable truth: the notion of the river Rhine as a dividing line between permanently dissimilar peoples. Regrettably, this notion distorts Caesar’s views, transforming what he saw as manifestations of conquest and commerce into inherent racial difference. During Caesar’s own time, the Rhine was not yet thought to separate peoples according to essential differences.

  GAIUS PLINIUS SECUNDUS, Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), wrote a century after Caesar, completing his Natura
l History in 77 CE. Two years later he died the death of a scientist—while witnessing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius near Naples that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. The Natural History contains thirty-seven “books” of varying length—book 7, “Man,” for instance, is only thirty pages long in current book publication. Aiming to sum up all existing knowledge and explain the nature of all things, Pliny drew heavily upon both Greek and Roman authorities. In book 7, Pliny praises Julius Caesar as “the most outstanding person in respect of his mental vigour.”15 To this accumulated knowledge Pliny added the fruit of his own military experience in Germany from 46 CE. The result is an extravagant, entertaining, and comprehensive work of 600-plus pages all told in English translation.