Barbarian

The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices. ~ William Hazlitt

A barbarian is a human who is perceived to be either uncivilized or primitive.

Quotes

• Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians… and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me, so that we can move against the barbarians and liberate ourselves from the Persian bondage, for as Greeks we should not be slaves to barbarians.
  • Alexander the Great, as quoted in the Historia Alexandri Magni of Pseudo-Kallisthenes, 1.15.1-4

• Now you fear punishment and beg for your lives, so I will let you free, if not for any other reason so that you can see the difference between a Greek king and a barbarian tyrant, so do not expect to suffer any harm from me. A king does not kill messengers.
  • Alexander the Great, as quoted in the Historia Alexandri Magni of Pseudo-Kallisthenes, 1.37.9-13

• “Demades said that Xerxes fortified the sea with his ships, covered the land with his armies, concealed the sky with his weapons, and filled Persia with Greek prisoners. And now justly the barbarian is praised by Athenians because he took captive Greeks, but Alexander, a Greek, and leading Greeks, did not take captive those arrayed against him.[...]No one of the Greek kings went to Egypt except Alexander alone, and he went, not to make war, but to consult an oracle as to where he should found a city which would forever bear his name.[...]So Alexander was the first of the Greeks to take Egypt, and so became the first both of Greeks and of barbarians.”
  • Alexander the Great, as quoted in the Historia Alexandri Magni of Pseudo-Kallisthenes, 2.4

• Civilisation is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. The boundary between 'us' and 'them' may be an internal one (for much of world history the idea of a 'civilised woman' has been a contradiction in terms), or an external one, as the word 'barbarian' suggests; it was originally a derogatory and ethnocentric ancient Greek term for foreigners you could not understand, because they spoke in an incomprehensible babble: 'bar-bar-bar ...' The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called 'barbarians' may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.
  • Mary Beard, Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith. Profile Books, 2018.

• The Barbarian hopes — and that is the very mark of him — that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
  • Hilaire Belloc. This and That and the Other (1912), Ch. XXXII : The Barbarians , p. 282

• In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.
  We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.
  We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.
  • Hilaire Belloc. This and That and the Other (1912), Ch. XXXII : The Barbarians , p. 282

• What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

  The barbarians are due here today.

  • Constantine P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians (1904) [1] – Translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1992), l. 1

• Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
  wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
  Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
  rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
  Why are they carrying elegant canes
  beautifully worked in silver and gold?

  Because the barbarians are coming today
  and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

  • Constantine P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians (1904) [2] – Translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1992), l. 16

• Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
  (How serious people's faces have become.)
  Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
  everyone going home lost in thought?

  Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
  And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
  there are no barbarians any longer.

  Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
  Those people were a kind of solution.

  • Constantine P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians (1904) [3] – Translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1992), l. 26

• We must not forget, therefore, to include the influence of civilization among the determinants of neuroses. It is easy, as we can see, for a barbarian to be healthy: for a civilized man the task is a hard one.
  • Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, New York, W.W. Norton. 1949

• The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
  • William Hazlitt, in Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

• Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.
  • Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet (1916)

• Nations are barbarian in their infancy but not savage. The barbarian is a proportional mean between the savage and the citizen. He already possesses no end of knowledge: he has habitations, some agriculture, domestic animals, laws, a cult, regular tribunals; he lacks only the sciences.
  • Joseph de Maistre, Against Rousseau (1795), p. 25

• We have said "Buy this or - take a bayonet in your belly!" People don't want the goods we offer them, but they are poor and have to buy something which [will] serve their turn anyhow, so they accept...their own goods made slowly and at greater cost are driven out of the market, and the metamorphosis begins which ends in turning fairly happy barbarians into very miserable half-civilized people surrounded by a fringe of exploiters and middle-men varied in nation but of one religion "Take care of number one".
  • William Morris, "The Depression of Trade", Speech at the Large Hall, Cucumber Gardens, Royton, Manchester, 12th July 1885. Quoted in E. P. Thompson, William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary, New York, Pantheon Books, 1976 (p. 38).

• Simple-minded barbarians met advanced, scholarly empire; barbarians sacked empire for shiny things.
  • wikipedia:NationStates, description of the "Sackers and Salvagers" history.

• Since barbarism has its pleasures, it naturally has its apologists.
  • George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society (1905-6)

• If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
  • Thomas Sowell, Wimps Versus Barbarians, May 21, 2013

• It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
  • Charles Dudley Warner, Backlog Studies, "Second Study” (1873)

• Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
  • Leonard Woolf, Barbarians at the Gate (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939), p. 83

See also

• Civilization
• Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)
• Noble savage
• War
• Warrior