Barbarians Were People Who Didn’t Speak Greek

MessageToEagle.com – Who were the Barbarians? The term “Barbarians” is today greatly misused. In modern times we often say Barbarians are uncivilized people or evil people.

However, the true meaning of the word has been forgotten.

The word originated in ancient Greece, and it initially merely referred to people who did not speak Greek.

According to Konstantinos Vlassopoulos, a professor of Greek history at the University of Nottingham, the earliest attestation of the word barbarian in Greek literature is in Homer’s descriptions of the Carians as ‘barbarophonoi’.

Vlassopoulos notes that the ancient Greeks themselves used this word in a confusing and contradictory fashion. One problem they had is that there was no agreement among the ancient Greeks as to who spoke Greek and who didn’t, at least up until around the time of Alexander the Great.

There “existed a variety of local and regional dialects, which were mutually comprehensible to a larger or smaller degree,” writes Vlassopoulos in his book Greeks and the Barbarians.

So the original meaning of the word “barbarian” did not refer to acts of evil but rather to those who were not Greek or did not speak Greek. Also who didn’t speak Greek was a matter of debate among the ancient Greeks themselves.

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