GRECO-ROMAN ACCOUNTS OF the monstrous races exhibit a marked ethnocentrism which made the observer's culture, language, and physical appearance the norm by which to evaluate all other peoples. The Hellenes, like many other tightly knit cultures, tended to view outsiders as likely to be inferior and untrustworthy. From them we have inherited words like “barbarian” and “xenophobia,” which reflect their attitudes toward the world beyond Greek-speaking lands, attitudes that were often justified by experience. Yet at the same time the Greeks were an intensely curious, seafaring people whose great interest in the variety of human life often led them to venture into unknown territory. The works of Ctesias, Megasthenes, and other Hellenic travelers reveal both a fascination with the strangeness of other peoples and places and an implicit revulsion from the “other.”

Although an alien was usually defined in antiquity with respect to his legal status as a non-national who did not have the protection of the law or the freedom of the city, his legal status was only one of the ways in which he was perceived to be different. Other more intuitive indicators of foreignness were highly charged with emotional significance. Everyday cultural differences in such things as diet, speech, clothes, weapons, customs, and social organization were what truly set alien peoples apart from their observers in the classical world, and the power of these cultural traits to mark a race as monstrous persisted into the Middle Ages and beyond.

Even today these traits continue to signal whether a person is “one of us” or not. Most readers of fiction will have noticed that an instinctual indicator of social class or national difference is the food that a person eats. A char-acter in a postwar British novel of social class is defined partly by the fact that she uses “sauce” on her food. A writer evokes the cultural milieu of his boyhood by describing a typical family dinner. The epithets “frog” for a Frenchman or “kraut” for a German identify whole nations with a food known to be eaten there. Ants, sheep's eyes, wild game, wheat germ, pork—all place a distance between the people who eat them and the people who do not.