The objects in this case reflect a range of ways that skin color was depicted in ancient Greek and Roman art. Although we are used to skin color marking racial identity, it is rarely the case that skin color in ancient art can tell us what race the people depicted were. What race were the Greeks and Romans? This is a complicated question, without a simple or single answer.

The phrase “ancient Greece” can be misleading—it connotes a unified nation state, but there was never one in antiquity.  The Greeks lived in a number of independent city-states, like Athens, Sparta, and Thebes.  Many of these city-states were located within the borders of modern day Greece, but many were not.  There were Greek cities along the Aegean coast of Turkey and the coast of the Black Sea, on Sicily and southern Italy, in northern Africa, and even as far west as modern day Spain.  These cities traded,made alliances, and warred with each other, and occasionally larger cities like Athens and Sparta dominated others with their economic and military power.  But the Greeks were just one of many cultures around the eastern Mediterranean, and they also traded, made alliances, and warred with other non-Greek people as well. A map showing the geographic range of their settlements can be seen here.

In the fourth century BCE, Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, created a vast empire that did encompass nearly all Greek cities, and many more regions as well, including Egypt, Asia Minor, the Levant, and all the way to modern day India. This giant empire only lasted about a decade until the death of Alexander in 323 BCE caused it to fracture into a number of smaller kingdoms.  These kingdoms were run by people who considered themselves Greeks (or at least, Macedonians, who were sometimes seen as foreigners by other Greeks), who lived and interacted with the people living in the territories they conquered.  They were almost all gradually conquered in turn by the Romans. The geographic range of Alexander’s invasions can be seen here.

In contrast to ancient Greece, Rome was a unified state, one that began as a city and gradually expanded to an empire that would rival Alexander’s at its greatest extent.  The Roman Empire was a vast project and would eventually subsume most other rival economic and military powers in the region.  Most people who lived under Roman rule would have complicated senses of their identity, being both Romans and, for example, Syrians, and their first language may have been Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Punic, or many other languages. You can see a progression of the territory under Roman control here, here, here, and here.

The ancient Mediterranean and the Greek and Roman civilizations that grew there were complex and heterogeneous.  The people who lived there had multifaceted and sometimes conflicting concepts of their identity, and we should not assume they all looked alike or thought about their identity in the same way. You can read more about the plurality of racial and ethnic identities in the ancient Mediterranean region here.

Some additional bibliography on premodern race:

Heng, Geraldine. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.

Isaac, Benjamin. 2004. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton University Press.

McCoskey, D. 2012, Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Ancients and Moderns). Oxford University Press. 

A more complete bibliography of work on race in antiquity and in the field of Classics can be found here.