The Bar-Bars

"Bar bar bar bar bar. Bar bar bar! Bar bar bar bar bar bar."

With these words, the Greek soldier mimicked the foreign tongues heard beyond the boundaries of the familiar Hellenic world. To his ears, the speech of distant lands melded into a chorus of “bar bar bar.”

Who were these Bar-Bars? Why weren’t they civilized like the Greeks?

"That's all they sound like - 'Bar bar bar bar...,'" he repeated, a hint of derision lacing his tone as he recounted his experiences amid non-Greek settlements. These places lacked the sophisticated democratic government of Athens, or the administrative efficiency of Sparta, and their art and culture were… well, foreign. Inferior.

Barbaric, even.

What is it about culture that makes us so certain that what we’re doing is civilized, or morally right, or somehow better than what the other has going on out there?

The Greeks came up with the word "barbaros” to describe literally anyone who wasn’t Greek. If you didn’t speak the language, you sounded funny to them, a…