The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote his ‘Defense of the Indians’ in response to the theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda’s ‘On the Just Causes of War against the Indians’. Both Casas and Sepúlveda point to Aristotle as a source for their arguments. This chapter approaches the debate as a way to think through the relationships between race and Indigeneity. First, I introduce the concept of Indigeneity and the ways it has been negotiated between Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialists. I then move to critically analysing Casas’ arguments, showing how his understanding of Aristotle’s notion of ‘barbarians’ has had a lasting legacy on the definition of Indigeneity. Finally, I turn to the absence of Indigenous voices in Casas’ account as a broader moment to consider Indigenous future(s) in Classics and possible areas for re-negotiating reception and Indigenous scholars’ agency in those negotiations.

Chapter 4 continues the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (II), exploring the intellectual framework employed by Europeans (specifically Spanish, French, and British) to situate native peoples within a European worldview, taking the narrative from the sixteenth century, through the seventeenth century, and into the early eighteenth century. The chapter considers the use of the terms “civilization” and “barbarism” to characterize indigenous peoples, traditions of millennial thought and prophecy among the Franciscan friars, theories of demonology and witchcraft as applied to native inhabitants, and the myth of the so-called pre-Hispanic evangelization of the Americas and the identification of the Christian St. Thomas with the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, the myth of indigenous peoples as descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and finally the myth of the noble savage.

Let us begin by looking at a tragedy that is largely choral. Aeschylus’ Persians was staged at the Great Dionysia in 472, only one year after the Battle of Salamis, where the Athenian fleet had defeated Xerxes’ armada. The Great King had invaded continental Greece, and on reaching Athens had set fire to the Acropolis and destroyed the temple of its tutelary deity Athena, the Old Parthenon. Aeschylus’ choregos was none other than Pericles. Here we follow the dramatic – and choral – unfolding of this tragedy whose action takes place in Susa, the capital of Persia.

Chapter 6 has three interrelated aims. First, to identify the relationship between the modern nation-state, international humanitarian law (IHL), and notions of civility; second, through a historical exploration of the relationship between military necessity, proportionality, and discrimination in IHL, to make the argument that the claimed shift from sovereignty to humanitarianism is not as complete as often argued, and that rather, raison d’état continues to be a motivating factor informing constraint during combat; and third, through an exploration of ‘the standard of civilisation’, to identify how this relationship informs discord between the universal underpinnings of contemporary IHL, and ongoing violations of the law. The chapter concludes by proposing that the oft-maligned concept of a ‘standard of civilisation’ remains valuable in exploring continuities of double standards as they relate to protections afforded by the modern laws of war.

The roles language played in shaping and articulating one’s identity in Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity constitute a backdrop against which the new developments attested in early Christianity can be measured. The ways in which foreign language speakers appeared in the Jewish Bible and Classical literature provided tropes, references, and allusions widely employed by early Christian authors. The chapter starts with an analysis of ancient Greek literary, historical, and philosophical compositions, from Homer to Aristotle, and investigates why the thought universe of the Classical Greek literati was virtually monolingual. It then proceeds to an overview of developments in the Hellenistic and early Roman eras and traces how the monolingual antiquity of Classical Greece gradually became the bilingual universe of the Roman empire, where Latin always shared its prestigious status as a vehicle of culture with Greek. The final section focuses on how early Jewish traditions depicted foreign languages and their speakers and how this culture adapted multilingual self-expression. In the conclusion, we discuss why language was rarely a decisive factor of group identity in these cultures and problematize the idea that the presence of linguistic differences by itself is a sufficient factor to trigger the processes of identity consolidation and objectification.

Apocalyptic literature of the early fifth century demonstrates renewed awareness of impending catastrophe, divine judgment, and a wide variety of possibilities for sociopolitical and cosmic transformation or restoration (apokatastasis). This chapter focuses on specific cases of systems-collapse in North Africa and southern Gaul.