For example, how would the average citizen react to seeing an African? or an Asian person? Would it be “eh”, curiosity and a crowd forming, or would they be actively hostile?
Neither crowds nor hostility. The ancient world was far more cosmopolitan than you think. Of course they (and pretty much every other culture) were also very chauvinistic. They believed that everybody else (non-Romans) was inferior to them (including people from other parts of Italy who weren’t citizens of Rome). They had slaves (many - probably most - taken in war) of every imaginable ethnicity that could be found in Europe, the Middle East (Asia Minor and Arabia), or north Africa, and no doubt some from farther away, brought in from long distances as “curiosities”.
Rome did have residents (not citizens) who had voluntarily moved there from other places. Roman citizenship was harder to come by than American citizenship. Residents of Rome also included a large number of “freedmen” - former slaves.
A “real” Asian (e.g., Chinese) probably would have fired their curiosity, but Romans valued their pride much too highly to permit themselves to gawk like someone from the countryside.
Romans were not racist per se. But they were incredibly clannish. The right ancestry was often the only difference between those of high public esteem and the social climbing nobodies. In the corridors of power, nobody cared how wealthy or how capable you were. If your father and grandfather were great Romans, though, the world was your oyster.
Rome had a pretty long history; it’s more than likely that attitudes to various ethnic and cultural groups shifted over time. Keep in mind that Rome had its share of non-Italian emperors and usurpers, including the Thracian barbarian Maximinus Thrax, and Pescennius Niger, who was black.
My dad told me this one and I don’t have a cite for it, but…
The Romans withdrew from Brittania when one of the generals determined that the locals there were ineducable, they would be worthless as slaves because the cost of feeding them far outstripped the value of any slave labor they were capable of performing.
This Roman general was black.
As a minor refinement, I’d point out that adoption, even of adults, was a fairly common way to add members to your clan, especially if there was no natural male heir. It was nice but not critical to preserve one’s bloodline - it was more important to ensure a transfer of wealth and power to people who thought as you did and, once adopted, a boy or man was expected to adhere to the philosophies of his new family.
I’m afraid your father was wrong, Julius Caeser just dipped his toe in Britain, when the Romans withdrew in about 400 AD, they did not exactly withdraw, they just took away the legions because they were needed elsewhere.
They left behind a civilian population that considered themselves thoroughly Roman - but were not capable of seeing off the Saxons, Angles and later the Danes etc (although they really came later).
The idea the Britons make poor slaves may have originated (or at least was greatly publicized) with Robert Graves’s “I Claudius”. I don’t have a copy handy, but I clearly recall the notion being expressed in one of the episodes of the 1976 mini-series, with (I believe) Germanicus overseeing his sons playing some kind of strategy board game and debating how to conquer Britain. He told them not to bother. It struck me as a tad phony, a bit of nationalist chest-beating about how the ancestors of the people making (and initially watching) the series wouldn’t knuckle under to the Romans, no sir.
Is this true? Wikipedia makes this claim but other sources seem to indicate that he was in fact an Italian native.
Ancient Roman citizens strike me as more nationalist elitist bigots than racists. They didn’t hate you because of your race; you were looked down or subjugated because you weren’t Roman.
Discriminatory? Sure. Prejuiced? Uh-uh. Smug bastards? Yessiree. White supremacists? I don’t think so.
It’s worth remembering that there were 3 African Popes during the Roman Empire (although there are no records as to their skin color). African includes North African.
Especially since the whites current supremacists idolize were barbarians during the period of the Roman Republic and Empire.
Here’s a coin of his:
http://www.livius.org/a/1/emperors/pescennius_niger_coin.jpg
He’s pretty clearly an Italian, and the Wikipedia claim (where they cite Cassius Dio’s Chapter 75), is a misunderstanding of Cassius Dio. Here’s the part I’m assuming they’re misreading, bolding mine:
So, the Wikipedia person reads that, and reads that “he was the black man in question”, when really Cassius Dio is saying, "By looking at his name, (Niger=Black), people realized that Niger was the person in the dream.
This is a difficult question to interpret and answer. First, let’s concede there were probably Romans in the ancient world who judged others to be inferior based on race, and that the Romans (like most ancient societies) were clannish and therefore naturally biased against the “barbarians” (i.e. non-Romans). And certainly conquered peoples were routinely enslaved by right of conquest. If any of this meets your definition of “racism”, then the Romans were racist, though I’d say most any society from the ancient world would fall under similar classification.
But on the other side of the ledger, the Romans were much more liberal than other ancient conquerors. Provincial government, for example, was usually a local matter, and numerous important government figures came from conquered territories. Some of there (e.g. the senator Domitius Afer) came within a generation of the conquest, long before the universal extension of Roman citizenship. Seneca’s epistles offer an illustration of at least one prominent Roman’s hopeful moral vision regarding topics like genocide–the natural end to racist policies: “We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?” And I have read Roman and Greek writers in extensio, and while the Romans can be accused of nationalism and a clear bias in favor of their own morals and virtues, there are plenty of examples showing an admiration toward a conquered or opposing people (e.g. Tacitius’ Germania, where the author uses the customs of the “barbaric” Germans to cast light on decadent Roman society), and none which I could compare to, say, Mein Kampf.
Roman social beliefs IMO were that conquered peoples would benefit from the civilization the Romans offered, and in practice that is exactly what happened in many cases. Yes, this itself is recognized today as a potential form of subtle racism, but I really wonder if that’s a fair standard to apply (IMO it would be difficult to even express this thought in ancient terms/values, much less argue against it), and again it would apply to every society in existence prior to (and including) the Middle Ages.
Were the Romans racists? I’d have to say absolutely not, at least in no distinctive way from other ancient civilizations, and there is much that survives from Roman culture that argues in favor of them promoting some universal ideas regarding the equality of man. I would be too easy to overstate this–the Romans were by no means champions of diversity–but they certainly don’t deserve to be thought of a racists.