'Claiming What Belongs to the Others': On Barbarian Rhetoric in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
'Claiming What Belongs to the Others': On Barbarian Rhetoric in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Summary/Abstract: Despite the existing scholarship on Otherness and imagining the Other, in relation to barbarians and barbarism in Ancient Greece, Rome and Medieval Europe, it seems that the perspective of “barbarian rhetoric” has been left unexplored, although separate quintessential rhetorical practices like the Anglo-Saxon beotword have received illumination by students of Germanic literature. The contrast upon which a person, a collective, a culture or a civilization builds its self-identification is the inherent task of rhetoric. To consider rhetoric through its core characteristic – namely the representation of ethos – supplies grounds to attempt a discussion on barbarian rhetoric by juxtaposing it, in its core features and messages, to its classical Greco-Roman counterpart. The present approach can therefore be seen as an essay in comparative rhetoric but, necessarily, it is also part of the debate on the image of the Other in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. So far it seems that the latter is the most typical perspective in which the interaction of “barbarism” and “civilization” has been explored. Rhetorical methodology, however, seems to be of key importance to the issue and its articulation, in my opinion, is vital for any study of the portrayal of Otherness.

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