For the Ancient Greeks, Immigrants Were Both a Boon and Threat to Homeland Security
Athenians Welcomed Strangers as Workers and Mythic Protectors, but Walled off Dangerous “Barbarians”
Even though the United States is worlds away from ancient Greece, we still sometimes use the Greeks’ vocabulary for describing immigrants and our fear of them. Like the ancient Greeks, some of the more xenophobic among us decry foreigners as “barbarians.” The Greeks named non-natives barbaroi because foreign languages to their ears sounded like bar-bar-bar. The term carried a lot of baggage: Barbarians were ruled by despots and often viewed by Greeks as servile and effeminate. By contrast, the Greeks—or at any rate the most famous of the Greeks, the …
