american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 165later, the concept was elaborated and refined until it was held that "notonly the populations of different continents constituted different races, butevery tribe or nation had its racial characteristics which were the productof hereditary factors, climate, diet, training and traditions." As a consequenceof this, Posidonius contended, the behavior of individuals and groupswas attributable to a variety of factors, one of which was their "racialcharacter." 49 Moreover, as Orlando Patterson has shown, "strong racialantipathy was not uncommon in Rome," and in particular, "Negro featureswere not an asset in the slave-holding societies of the Greco-Romanworld." 50Long before this era, however, at least as early as the late eighth centuryB.C., Homer and Hesiod and other Greek poets were describing atime, as A. Bartlett Giamatti puts it, "when Cronos reigned and the worldwas young, the age of the Golden race, and said it still existed to the northin the land of the Scythians and Hyperboreans." The poets were not alonein speaking and writing of these Fortunate Islands of delight, repose, andphysical bliss, for "as poets sang of this happy place, ancient geographersand historians charted and described it-sight unseen, save with the mind'seye."stUnseen, perhaps, but there was no doubt that the earthly paradise wasan actual place situated in a distant realm, a group of islands or a peacefulplain at the end of the earth. As Menelaus was promised in the Odyssey:[l]t is not your fate to die in Argos, to meet your end in the grazing-land ofhorses. The Deathless Ones will waft you instead to the world's end, theElysian fields where yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is. There indeed men liveunlaborious days. Snow and tempest and thunderstorms never enter there,but for men's refreshment Ocean sends out continually the high-singing breezesof the west. 5 2In other traditions the Elysian Fields were in the Islands of the Blest where,according to Hesiod, there lived the fourth age of men, the "godly raceof the heroes who are called demigods," to whom Zeus had "granted alife and home apart from men, and settled them at the ends of the earth."And still today, says Hesiod, there they "dwell with carefree heart inthe Isles of the Blessed Ones, beside deep-swirling Oceanus: fortunateHeroes, for whom the grain-giving soil bears its honey-sweet fruits thricea year." 53These were demigods because they were half god, half human, descendedfrom unions between gods and mortal women. Their existencehad been preceded by that of three other races. First, there were the "Goldenrace" of people who "lived like gods, with carefree heart, remote from toiland misery" and who, at the end of their reign, were transformed into"divine spirits ... watchers over mortal men, bestowers of wealth." Then