Barbaricum Depictum: Images of the Germani and Xiongnu in the Works of Tacitus and Sima Qian
By Randolph Ford
Sino-Platonic Papers, No.207 (2010)
Introduction: A fundamental catalyst for change in human history has been contact, peaceful or military, between peoples hitherto unknown to one another. Empires have fallen, kingdoms been established, religions proselytized, and learning shared due to these contacts. The participants in these exchanges must have seen one another in a markedly different light, although this may only be guessed at, for we only have written records of the city-dwelling agriculturalists, that is, the cultivators of letters, art, and other tokens of civilization. From their perspective at least, the new peoples from the wilderness were almost invariably referred to as barbarians, people living outside the familiar sphere of civilization in a state little removed from that of animals. W. R. Jones offers the following definition of barbarism as a familiar notion in the ancient world:
The concept of ‘barbarism,’ like its antonym, ‘civilization,’ was the invention of civilized man, who thereby expressed self-approval by contrasting his condition with that of others whom he assumed to exist at lower levels of material, intellectual, and moral development. The awareness of being civilized, that new sense of identity which civilization gave its participants, was as much the product of cultural growth and refinement as the more tangible and visible achievements of civilized experience. The antithesis which opposed civilization to barbarism was a highly useful cliché, and one which served equally well as a means of selfcongratulation and as a rationalization for aggression.
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