Meet the people the ancient Romans and Greeks desperately tried to hide

“The way we look at ancient history is a bit like going to New York and thinking we've seen America,” says Rees.

He explains that what’s missing from the general understanding of the ancient world are the stories of those living far from imperial capitals – on the borders and fringes of the Greco-Roman cultures, where dividing lines were blurred and the rules of citizenship, identity and power were far less defined.

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These citizens on the border weren’t emperors, generals or city elites, but the millions whose lives unfolded on the loose boundaries between cultures.

In the podcast episode, Rees explains that he’s drawn to studying the lives that don’t survive easily in existing texts – because they weren’t written down, or because they were deliberately ignored.

The evidence that has been preserved, however, suggests a world far more diverse than textbooks often demonstrate, says Rees.

Ordinary lives in extraordinary places

“When you're far away from the judgmental eyes of the centre,” Rees explains, “rules stop applying so vehemently and fastidiously.” Therefore, on the edges of ancient empires, cultural expectations softened.

What tangible outcomes does that translate to? Social and cultural flexibility, for one.

Across borders and on the frontier, Rees says that the evidence points to people “just living normal lives and getting on with their normal days,” without being dominated by the cultural expectations of the social elites.

That includes soldiers, merchants, travellers and administrators who spoke multiple languages. There is also evidence of marriage between Greeks and foreign, so-called ‘barbarian’ groups. Rather than being confined within various power structures, they would have had the freedom to worship different gods and operate between cultural powers.

But while the reality of the frontier was largely one of exchange and accommodation, the stories told in imperial capitals were often the opposite.

Rees describes a phenomenon where Greco-Roman writers, uncomfortable with what they didn’t control, turned these spaces into fantasy as a tactic for spreading fear and suspicion of the frontier. Those writers included Herodotus, the Greek historian who famously described tribes of werewolves, Amazons and Hyperboreans (a mythical people who lived beyond the north wind and never aged).

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“He starts to move from historical culture to fantasy myth,” Rees says. “That’s where we end up with the werewolves and the Hyperboreans who never grow old.”

Meanwhile, the term ‘barbarian’ became a label for all that was ungoverned and unknowable. Women who defied gender expectations were reimagined as entire cultures of female warriors, living apart from men.

It was “a problem” for these Roman writers that a woman would be good at fighting, Rees explains. “So, you turn that into a culture that’s entirely like that – that’s the only way to rationalise it.”

Rees explains how the further one gets from the centre, the more supposedly monstrous the inhabitants of these border areas become – at least on paper.

Why turn strangers into monsters?

These portrayals served a political function, helping to justify expansion and conquest, as to conquer was to civilise these ‘terrifying’ borderlands.

But the archaeological record tells a different story from lands rich with monsters. In reality, these areas on the frontier were hubs of cultural and intellectual exchange, as well as rich trading zones.

“What we see at the periphery is where cultures and influences cross and meet with each other,” says Rees. “You see this amazing blend of ideas and intellectualism, but also artistic trends.”

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The physical evidence for this attitude of exchange is widespread. Roman artefacts have been found in Vietnam; Eastern deities appear in inscriptions in Britain; at Hadrian’s Wall, border communities left offerings to gods from multiple pantheons.

But as they didn’t fit easily within the Greco-Roman narratives that justified conquest, these stories rarely made it into official histories.

To truly understand the ancient world, then, Rees argues in favour of moving beyond the marble columns and military triumphs and mighty individuals – and towards the people who didn’t belong within the centre of ancient society.

In short, Rees says, we should look toward the people the Greeks and Romans were terrified of, and didn’t want you to see.

Owen Rees was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.