Ρατσισμός: Ἕλληνες, Ρωμαῖοι, Νούβιοι

The Romans' attitude toward the Aethiopes may well bear a similar interpretation. The term "Aethiopes" denoted all those races whose skin was black. These peoples "who lived near the sun" were reputed to be pious, long-lived, and blessed, and to excel in religious matters, in philosophy, and in the astrological sciences. This fame had been theirs since the time of Homer and persisted from Mimnermus and Herodotus down to Philostratus (Vita Apollonii) and pseudo-Callisthenes (Romance of Alexander) in the early third century A.D. The color of their skin, darkened by the rays of the sun, was simply explained by the environment in which they lived and was often contrasted "to the constant blossoming of pure white flowers from the soul" (thus a non-Christian epigram from Antinoe in Upper Egypt, of the third century A.D.). […] A change in attitude can be traced, however, from the age of Decius (A.D. 249-51) onward. For the first time after centuries of peaceful neighborliness, there began to build on the southern borders of Egypt and the Cyrenaica the threatening pressures that were destined to create many grave problems for the Empire down to the time of Justinian. Thus, parallel to a more precise definition of the Ethiopians (be they Blemmyi, Nobades, or Aksumitae) as an articulated political, economic, and commercial reality that had to be reckoned with, there emerged in literature the notion of the Ethiopians as a dangerous military force (for example, in a popular romance such as the Aethiopica by Heliodorus, of the pretetrarchic age). And it was in Egypt, in northern Africa, and in Syria-Palestine that the ancient identification of the color black with wickedness and ill omen generated the idea of the black man as a metaphor of evil: especially in the Christian hagiographic literature of these regions, it was associated with the idea of sin. According to his βίος, Moses, the Ethiopian ascetic, was able to free himself from subhuman "negritude," from his "natural tendency toward evil," and reveal "a shining soul"-though in a "black body"-only thanks to a miracle of God. In this way was born the representation of the Devil as a repulsive and fierce Ethiopian, an image destined to become the standard representation of the Devil in literature and art from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

L. Cracco Ruggini, Intolerance: Equal and Less Equal in the Roman World, Classical Philology 82.3 (1987) 194 - 195.