foreigners and barbarians: Rome Although the treatment of the helots is an extreme example, being an outsider in a Greek town could have disadvantages People who were neither slaves nor citizens of the towns in which they lived were called metics The laws governing metics differed in each town, but metics often had to perform some type of military service or pay additional fees to live in a town or both In Athens metics could not own land The disadvantages of being a metic in Athens may not have been too oppressive, however, because many outsiders resided there, such as the famous philosophers Aristotle and Theophrastus It was not just that Athenian metics faced certain restrictions; in 451 b.c.e the Athenian statesman Pericles persuaded his fellow citizens to approve a law limiting citizenship only to those born to Athenian parents Before Pericles’ law took effect, a person with an Athenian father but a non-Athenian mother could be a citizen Ironically, later in his life Pericles was a victim of his own law when he fathered a son by a nonAthenian woman An exception was made for this son, however, and the law was soon repealed When Pericles was Athens’s leading citizen, he also persuaded the Athenians to embark upon an ambitious building program The most famous product of this program was the Parthenon, built between 447 and 432 b.c.e Given Pericles’ law on citizenship, some of the sculpture on this temple is noteworthy The temple’s southern metopes (decorated panels) show a battle between two mythical tribes, the Lapiths and the centaurs (the western end of Zeus’s temple at Olympia also depicts this subject); its northern metopes have scenes from the Trojan War; the eastern and western metopes portray, respectively, the Olympian gods battling a group of giants and the Greeks battling the Amazons, a tribe of warlike women Thus, each sculptural group portrays Greeks battling against non-Greeks (Trojans, Amazons) or beings (centaurs, giants) that threaten their civilization According to mythology, the Greeks or their gods had triumphed over these “foreign” enemies in each case The Athenian ideal of triumphing over barbarians or uncivilized peoples suffered a severe blow after Pericles’ death in 429 b.c.e By 404 b.c.e the Spartans had defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War Ironically, Greek culture experienced its widest diff usion by a people that most Greeks would have considered barbarians, even though they spoke a dialect of Greek By 323 b.c.e the Macedonian Philip II and his successor, his son Alexander, had conquered the whole of Greece Alexander went on to triumph over the Persians and tribes as far away as India, and he spread Greek culture by encouraging his soldiers to intermarry with these foreigners After Alexander’s death and the gradual breakup of his empire, both Macedonians and Greeks eventually came under the control of the Romans in the second century b.c.e Although they were non-Greek speakers, the Romans became captivated by the culture of their captives and incorporated many Greek elements into their own society In the first century c.e., however, Christianity began spreading through both 489 Greek and Roman cultures, and the apostle Paul, writing in Greek, would declare to the Colossians that in the Christian way of life distinctions no longer existed between Greeks and Jews, slaves or free persons, or Scythians and barbarians ROME BY KIRK H BEETZ During the era of Rome’s first kings (ca 753–ca 510 b.c.e.) Romans apparently held fairly relaxed attitudes toward outsiders Foreigners were absorbed into the city and could even achieve important positions in government For instance, the legendary king Ancus Marcius (r 642–617 b.c.e.) was a Sabine (a people of the Apennine Mountains) by ancestry Perhaps this accommodating attitude reflected Rome’s small size—at that time it was still a small town—as well as its not yet having achieved a view of itself as different from the other towns in its part of Italy These circumstances changed in 510 b.c.e when Tarquinius Superbus (r 534–510 b.c.e.), a king who had been exiled from Rome, returned with an Etruscan army to reclaim his throne There was no question that Tarquinius Superbus’s army represented outsiders trying to impose their will on Rome During the early years of the Roman Republic (ca 509– 27 b.c.e.) almost everyone was a foreigner to the Romans, and nearly every foreigner was a potential enemy Italy was populated by several cultures, with Celts in the north, Greeks in the south, and at least eight other distinct cultures, the Latin culture of the Romans being the smallest in population Yet through conquest and diplomacy Rome managed to gain control of central Italy by 290 b.c.e Those under its rule who were not Roman citizens were the “Italian allies.” Romans regarded them with disdain, but by about 200 b.c.e the Italian allies wished to be recognized as Roman citizens themselves By then the Roman government included the office of tribune, a person elected by the plebeians (lower-class Roman citizens) to represent them in government affairs One tribune, Gaius Gracchus, was a hero to the plebeians for advocating their rights until, in 121 b.c.e., he proposed extending Roman citizenship to the Italian allies It was a serious misjudgment of public opinion The plebeians did not want to share the benefits of Roman citizenship with outsiders, and Gaius committed suicide just before an angry mob could kill him In 91 b.c.e the tribune Marius Livius Drusus was murdered because he advocated giving citizenship to everyone in Italy, all of which Rome by then controlled His enemies insisted that other Italians were barbarians and utterly inferior to Romans His death touched off the Social War of 91–89 b.c.e., during which the Italian allies tried to set up their own independent state They lost the war but won Roman citizenship In 146 b.c.e Rome had conquered Macedonia and most of Greece To the Romans the Greeks were puzzling For instance, Greeks were comfortable with homosexuality, which Romans regarded as degenerate behavior Yet the Romans had