us and implicitly racist in perspective" (Patterson B 421).
Another view of the status of black Africans in Greco-Roman antiquity is noteworthy for what it does not do, i.e., make a presumption that blacks were objects of racism as it is commonly understood in the modern period. In that regard, Snowden (31) acknowledges that Greeks and Romans were perfectly aware of distinctive physical features of African blacks (e.g., skin color, wide nose bridge, thick lips); however, these features did not take on a racist connotation. That is, while there were racial designations, "race" as a defining feature of social psychology does not appear to have been a preoccupation of antiquity. In that connection, Snowden cites Herodotus's differentiation between what he calls "the woolly-haired and the straight-haired Ethiopians" (Snowden 31). This description, says Snowden, carries no derogatory implication. Rather, the Greeks "regarded blackness as typical of the Ethiopian's color" for purposes of identification, not racist vilification.
To the degree Greeks and Romans may have vilified persons who were "other," they seem to have made no distinction between African blacks and other non-Greeks or non-Romans. The problem with Ethiopians, Numidians, and the like was not that they were black or African but that they were not Roman; neither were the Gauls and the host of other peoples conquered by the Caesars. But Caesar, for example, employed Numidians as military mercenaries in the conquest of the Belgae (Caesar 61), which indicates expedient Roman dealings with African peoples that the Romans felt were impossible for the barbaric Gauls, Helvetii, Belgae, and so on. In that regard, Hamilton explains that the Romans "were not an intellectual people. Their place was the world of practical affairs, not of thought" (Hamilton 138). As for Herodotus's description of physical characteristics of Ethiopians, Snowden does not mention a fact of which he was un...