------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III GREEK AND ROMAN CONCEPTS OF RACE During the nineteenth century a peculiar rigidity was given to the conception of race through the application of somewhat hastily formed biological theories. One or another of the current hypotheses on heredity was deemed an adequate or even necessary explanation, and by any of them racial characteristics became determined, fixed: race was an unescapable limiting condition. The Ethiopian could not change his skin. These ideas, when popularized, corresponded crudely to certain other ideas already present in men’s minds—ideas that often had a very different basis. Their lowest manifestation is that form of vicarious braggadocio which is known as jingoism, racial or national, and is expressed in the depreciation of everything that concerns other “races.” Many historians have been influenced by this modern and unyielding concept of race, and have permitted themselves to make rather large promises about the destinies of existing groups of men on the basis of it.[45] But as late as a hundred years ago it was not yet in existence. The term race then denoted a sum of national and social traits which it might be difficult to acquire in one generation, but which could readily be gained in two. Even such disparate ethnic groups as Austrian and Magyar knew of no impassable chasm that good-will on either side could not bridge. It is the latter racial feeling and not the modern one that classical antiquity knew. Consequently, in the clash of races that took place during the period with which this book deals, “race” must be understood as the centuries before the nineteenth understood it. Racial prejudices, pride of blood, contempt for “slave-nations,” existed and found voice, but the terms are not coextensive with those of to-day.