Cicero: The Britons Are too Stupid to Make Good Slaves
6/29/09 11:56 AM
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Cicero: The Britons Are too Stupid to Make Good Slaves I have been looking for this quote for years! Caesar, in writing home, said of the Britons, “They are the most ignorant people I have ever conquered. They cannot be taught music.” Cicero, in writing to his friend Atticus, advised him not to buy slaves in England, “because,” said he, “they cannot be taught to read, and are the ugliest and most stupid race I ever saw.” http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/06/cicero-the-britons-are-too-stupid-to-make-good-slaves.html
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Cicero: The Britons Are too Stupid to Make Good Slaves
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“they cannot be taught to read, and are the ugliest and most stupid race I ever saw.� William Wells Brown (1863), The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (Boston: James Redpath), pp. 33-4; quoted on p. 92 by Mia Bay (2000), The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas About White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 019510045X). Now where in Caesar's Commentaries and Cicero's Letters to Atticus are the originals?
UPDATE: The internet to the rescue (actually the UVA Classics Department)! Gregory Hays: I think one of the quotations in Brown is a very vague paraphrase of Cicero, Letters to Atticus 4.16.7. Here's D.R. Shackleton Bailey's English rendering: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/06/cicero-the-britons-are-too-stupid-to-make-good-slaves.html
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Cicero: The Britons Are too Stupid to Make Good Slaves
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... The Paccius letter having been answered, let me tell you the rest of my news. A letter from my brother contains some quite extraordinary things about Caesar's warm feelings towards me, and is corroborated by a very copious letter from Caesar himself. The result of the war against Britain is eagerly awaited, for the approaches to the island are known to be 'warded with wondrous massy walls.' It is also now ascertained that there isn't a grain of silver on the island nor any prospect of booty apart from captives, and I fancy you won't expect any of them to be highly qualified in literature or music! Best, Greg Hays Ah. There appears to be some confusion in the text--does the passage follow "Paccianae epistulae respondi" (I have responded to the letter brought by Paccius) in 4.16 (Scr. Romae ex. m. Iun. aut in. Quint. a. 700) or does it follow "in illis quidem tribus libris, quos tu dilaudas, nihil reperio" (no report in those three books which you praise) in 4.17 (Scr. Romae K. Oct a. 700)? Ah. Here it is:
I am, Zeus Pater knows, no Classics scholar. But from context--we are talking about profit for the res publica from imperialism here--I would be more inclined to translate "litteris aut musicis eruditos" as something like "taught to read or play" rather than Shackleton Bailey's "highly qualified in literature or music." The point appears to be that Caesar is engaged in folly: raiding an island where (a) there is no silver to be stolen, and (b) the slaves he will capture won't be worth much. By what process Brown gets "ugliest and most stupid race" I do not know... rated 3.29 by you and 9 others [? ] You loved this post (
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Cicero: The Britons Are too Stupid to Make Good Slaves
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Comments Uh - Cicero lived from 106 to 43 BC. The Anglo-Saxons arrived in England about 600 years later, give or take a few odd decades. [Hate to break it to you, but the Britons of today look a lot more like Kelts than like Swedes. The language changed with Hengist, Horsa, and Alfred... the gene pool not so much.] Minor quibble, I know, but W.W. Brown seems to have been anticipating "BLAZING SADDLES." And, damn it, Cicero's talking about some of my ancestors. Thank god for 2000 years of intervening natural selection.
Posted by: jazzbumpa | June 27, 2009 at 07:55 PM I can't find that passage in Caesar (and he never said "I"). Cicero, To Atticus, 4.17.6 actually reads: "(...) it has been ascertained too that there is not a scarp of silver in the island, nor any hope of booty except from slaves; but I don't fancy you will find any with literary or musical talents among them." (transl. E.O. Winstedt.=) Cicero kinda, sorta indicates he got the information from a letter of Caesar. Posted by: Geiseric | June 27, 2009 at 08:12 PM Remind me to look over that passage when I take Latin 100: Republican Prose. Posted by: glory | June 27, 2009 at 11:30 PM First of all, the use of the term Anglo-Saxon is an anachronism, there were few, if any, Germanic tribes in Britain in Ceaser's time. Secondly, what is the point of this analysis? This is how ancient/classical conquerors tended to speak about their Barbarian conquests. Particularly one as distant and alien as the British Celts. It's like justifying the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia using something the Pharaoh wrote in 2000 B.C. What's next; Melanin Theory? Posted by: Shmoe | June 28, 2009 at 07:15 AM Not to mention the contrary opinion of Saint Augustine (of Canterbury, not Augustine "City of God" of Hippo) concerning the actual (post-conquest) Anglo-Saxons. Not to mention that the incompetent Britons managed to take the place back as soon as Rome had its back turned, requiring a second invasion. I fear that Brown provides another example of the bad effects that centuries of oppression, including the effort to deny education, can have on people. They can even get as careless with the facts as their masters. Posted by: porlockjr | June 28, 2009 at 12:01 PM I rather think 'eruditos' expects a level of competence above mere 'instructos, doctos, praeceptos,' etc. Given the Roman propensity for employing Greek (or Greek-speaking) slaves as paedagogi and Greeks, both slaves and freedmen, as teachers generally, I think Cicero is making the point that Caesar's (very temporary) conquest of Britain isn't going to drive down the price of an education in Rome. Of course, if he had discovered the legendary Island of the Adjuncts far over the Western ocean... Posted by: Davis X. Machina | June 28, 2009 at 02:18 PM The quotation above reminds me more of the sort of thing George Bernard Shaw satirically puts in his "Caesar and Cleopatra". Pointing out that "England" is an anachronism is not a quibble about ethnicity but internal evidence that it is either a very poor translation or quotation, or a fake. Although the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages didn't completely replace the ethnic stock in the British Isles, they made enough of a difference that a keen eye can often - far from always - tell a person's origins from his or her physique. Of course, that may well reflect a pre-existing grouping within the British Isles, maybe Gaels, Brythons and Belgae. Many years ago a British newspaper published some composite photographs of men and women from each of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, made by superimposing photographs of many people. The difference was notable (and confirmed by experts), with the first pair and the last pair of countries falling closer together. I don't know if readers have been following the British TV series "Merlin", but in that the actors portraying Arthur and Merlin are stereotypically Anglo-Saxon and Celtic respectively (whether they actually are, of course I cannot say). http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/06/cicero-the-britons-are-too-stupid-to-make-good-slaves.html
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cannot say). Posted by: P.M.Lawrence | June 28, 2009 at 05:34 PM If you look at the OLD article on eruditus, it seems pretty clear that Mr. X Machina is right about the sense indicating a higher level of skill than doctus or whatever. I don't, however, think that Cicero meant anything about driving down price levels. By the way, the construction with puto usually means he's being ironic or joking -- Atticus' interest in educated slaves was more personal than economic. I wouldn't say the passage indicates that there was nothing of value -- mancipia were, after all, the key to the Roman economy. The key word is probably praeda -- and that may indicate just what Quintus Cicero was looking for on Caesar's staff, which is pretty much what Catullus was looking for from Memmius in Bithynia. Not to go all Mommsen, but there may an indication that Cicero didn't have the economic foresight to see the value of what was in Britain, wood and fish, to name two things. Posted by: Gene O'Grady | June 28, 2009 at 07:55 PM [Hate to break it to you, but the Britons of today look a lot more like Kelts than like Swedes. The language changed with Hengist, Horsa, and Alfred... the gene pool not so much.] Whatever the English are, they are almost certainly not Kelts. One view: "Genetic research has revealed the country's gene pool contains between 50 and 100% Germanic Y-chromosomes... "An initially small invading Anglo-Saxon elite could have quickly established themselves by having more children who survived to adulthood, thanks to their military power and economic advantage... "This is exactly what we see today - a population of largely Germanic genetic origin, speaking a principally German language." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5192634.stm A different view: "Orthodox history has long taught that the Romans found a uniformly Celtic population throughout the British Isles, but that the peoples of the English heartland fell victim to genocide by the Anglo-Saxon hordes during the fifth and sixth centuries... In fact, three quarters of English people can trace an unbroken line of genetic descent through their parental genes from settlers arriving long before the introduction of farming... [L]ong-term Scandinavian trade and immigration contributed the remaining quarter – mostly before the arrival of the AngloSaxons... And what of the Celts we know – the Irish, Scots and Welsh? Scholars have traditionally placed their origins in Iron Age Central Europe, but Oppenheimer’s new data clearly show that the Welsh, Irish and other Atlanticfringe peoples derive from Ice Age refuges in the Basque country and Spain.They came by an Atlantic coastal route many thousands of years ago, though the Celtic languages we know of today were brought in by later migrations, following the same route, during Neolithic times." http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stephenoppenheimer/origins_of_the_british.html These views really aren't necessarily contradictory: if the Saxon invaders were predominantly men, if they enslaved the native population, and if they practiced polygamy or sex slavery, then the presence of Germanic Y chromosomes in half or more of the population wouldn't be in contradiction with the finding that almost all the English are also descended from the pre-Saxon population. But it appears that the English are genetically distinct from the Keltish-speaking people of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. As an aside, if the English are descended from male masters and female slaves, they would not be unique - the population of modern Iceland is descended from Viking men and Irish women taken in slaving raids along coastal Ireland. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090116073205.htm Posted by: Bloix | June 28, 2009 at 10:52 PM
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/06/cicero-the-britons-are-too-stupid-to-make-good-slaves.html
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