Das Barbarenbild des Poseidonios und seine Stellung in der philosophischen Tradition

Abstract

The author gives an account of the ideas of the Greeks (Herodot, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle) about the barbarians. They hesitate between admiring some barbarians, or, on the contrary, considering them unvalued people in comparison with the Greeks, and the theory of the climate, which would be definitive on the formation of the men’s bodies and souls. Poseidonios discusses this problem in a well known fragment in which he tells how the Mariandins submitted to Heraclea because they found themselves inferior. We can come across with traces of his thought on Cicero, De re publica III and Strabo, VI. In conclusion, Poseidonios justifies the Roman world power because its superiority, and this because the climate of Italy. However, he insists that this power must be used with justice and blames the bloody actions of the Sicilian slave war.