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By Root 362 0

in etymological terms, the word gens refers primarily to an extended family, the word natio to a community of such gentes, but in practice the words were interchangeable and their Greek equivalent is ethnos. There is no good English word which we can use to translate any of the three terms. ‘Tribe’ (equivalent to the modern German Stamm) is useful because it implies a sense of community and perhaps a blood relationship (real or fictive), but it also connotes the primitive in a way that only the Latin gentes conveys (and even then, only in the plural and when used of non-Romans). ‘People’ might work, but especially in American English it implies a sense of political purpose which is absent from the Greek and Latin. ‘Nation’ and ‘race’ are too weighted down with modern baggage to be of any use. Modern scholars have settled on the boring, but deliberately neutral, word ‘group’ as the safest way of translating gens, natio, or ethnos in the context of late antique barbarians. This is quite sensible, because it prevents us from implying political or cultural characteristics without meaning to do so. On the other hand, it is very important for us to realize that when the Greek and Roman sources on which we must rely use the words gens, natio, or ethnos, they do indeed mean to imply a coherent, interrelated group of non-Greeks and non-Romans that can be identified as different and which share a sense of belonging together because they do in fact belong together. In other words, the Greeks and Romans did not share our conceptual concerns about the existential nature of barbarian groups – they worried about how to tell such groups apart.

A Distorting Mirror: Interpretatio romana

All our evidence for the differentiation of barbarian groups is filtered through ancient Graeco-Roman perceptions of alterity, of the non-Greek or non-Roman. This filter is what scholars call the interpretatio romana, the ‘Roman interpretation’, or perhaps Roman distortion, of the barbarian reality it claims to report. The interpretatio romana poses real difficulties, in part because a cognitive disjunction lies at the heart of Graeco-Roman ethnographic thinking. On the one hand, at a very real level Greeks and Romans believed all barbarians were fundamentally the same. The very word barbaros may be onomatopoeia, coined in order to describe the sound that came out of barbarians’ mouths – a noise like that of animals, rather than language which was the special preserve of the Greeks.[44] Barbarians lacked language and so they were all the same. And yet they were not: ethnography, in fact, existed to tell all those others apart. It set out to abstract from the universal ‘other’ that was the barbarian a set of gentes or ethne which gave shape and order to the world beyond civilization. Although Roman generals on the frontiers had very practical experience of, and sometimes extremely detailed information about, the neighbours whom they had to fight, the ethnographic tradition was not as concerned with such practical matters as it was with abstracting reality into analytical categories. These categories might pattern the experience of reality as much as they were derived from it. For this purpose, Greek and Roman writers had a series of criteria that they could use to analyse identity and difference among their barbarian neighbours or subjects. Chief among these were habits of dress and clothing; traditional weaponry or fighting styles; sex habits and gender roles; religion; and perhaps most importantly language.

Unfortunately, each of these classificatory criteria posed interpretative problems for ancient ethnographers, because none of them was infallibly diagnostic of ethnic difference. In the case of language, for instance, there were considerably more gentes than there were languages. There were, equally, many fewer fighting styles than there were people who deployed them. And couldn’t a set of stereotyped ‘barbarian’ clothing be used to signify any barbarian in artwork? Public victory monuments have a series of iconographic codes which shout out