| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Benjamin Isaac. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 563. $45.00.

In the past, scholars tended to emphasize only the positive side of our legacy from the Greeks and Romans. In recent years, they have concentrated increasingly, and sometimes excessively, on the negative aspects of the classical inheritance. One such double-edged gift is the art of classification, which is the foundation of philosophical and scientific thought but at the same time the inspiration for the construction of pseudoscientific theories. Analogy and polarity, the basic techniques of reasoning in antiquity, can be used to support many bad ideas, among them the notion that women are by definition inferior to men or that slavery is a natural state. As Benjamin Isaac shows in this comprehensive book, there are clear precedents in ancient Greek and Roman thought for the kind of proto-racist thinking that has already done and still continues to do such irreparable harm to humanity.

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