Blameless Ethiopians and Others

Abstract

There is general agreement that from Homer onwards references in Classical writers to Ethiopia and the Ethiopians are almost never to modern Ethiopia or to the highland peoples who were the ancestors or predecessors of present-day inhabitants of the Ethiopian plateau. Homer's Ethiopians are indeed almost in the realm of Märchen; gods visit them, or are reported among them when they absent themselves from Olympus; they are ἔσχατοι ἀνδρν, and without fault or blame; and their only human visitor is Mene-laus. But they are not perhaps wholly fairy-tale. Some Ethiopians fought on the Trojan side in die war (under their king Memnon, son of Tithonus and Eos), and the lost Aethiopis, from the Epic Cycle, will have dealt with this. The notorious disjunction of Eastern and Western Ethiopians has a factual ring about it; and Ethiopians might be found in West Africa as well as in East, as Hanno discovered in his voyage in the early fifth century B.c., and in India as well as Africa; for the name, it seems, may be applied to dark-skinned people generally.