Depictions of African blacks in Greco Roman Art

Controversy surrounds the academic discourse of the status of black Africans in Greco-Roman antiquity. One view is that blacks as a whole were victims of slavery and white racism at the time and that this legacy continued to dominate the relationship between African and European peoples into the modern period. Patterson's view is that slavery indigenous to Africa and slavery experienced by black Africans in European societies had the effect of transforming blacks into nonpersons worthy only of contempt in popular imagination. His analysis of slavery in Africa is that ambitious slaves sought and "self-interested master[s] offered . . . reduction of the slave's marginality and his partial resocialization in the master's community" (Patterson A 23). The idea of resocialization, which is full inclusion in the dominant culture, is important for Patterson because

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of the Mediterranean area. The Roman poet Horace, says Hamilton, "never took note of slaves" and wrote of "their terrible punishments with complete unconcern . . . as a matter of course" (Hamilton 125). A slave of antiquity did not have to be black to be beaten, but it is not safe to assert that Greeks and Romans considered blacks too exotic to enslave. They were no less vulnerable to enslavement than other peoples that Greco-Roman civilization encountered. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that the black slave shown on the krater is also an essential component of, i.e., has a role in, important work of the ancient aesthetic culture. Tending the fire for an artist may be warm work, but it is also plainly a trainable skill, and no slave who was not considered able to learn that skill would be trusted to assist one over whom the very gods are watching. The fact that the slave is African is incidental to the fact that he is a commonplace necessity in the presence of the artist and for that matter of the gods themselves. Indeed, Snowden cites another vase in which a Negro youth is presented as "an attendant of the sons of Niobe" (36). Meanwhile, it is also noteworthy that the vase artist was selective in assigning physical attribut
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Approximate Word count = 2619
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)