BARBARIAN. The Greek term Me /Japes (barbaros) appears originally to have been applied to language, signifying a mode of speech which was waintelli Bible to the Greeks ; and it was perhaps an imitative word intended to represent a confused and indistinct sound. (Iliad, 867; and Strabo, cited and illustrated in the Philological Museum, vol. i. p. 611.) Barbaros, it will be observed, is formed by a repetition of the same syllable, bar Afterwards, however, when all the races and states of Greek origin ob tained a common name, it obtained a ge neral negative sense, and expressed all persons who were not Greeks. (Thu cydides, i. 3.) At the same time as the Greeks made much greater advances in civilization, and were much superior in natural capacity to their neighbours, the word barbarus obtained an accessary sense of inferiority both in cultivation and in native faculty, and thus implied some thing more than the term tstuSs, or fo reigner. At first the Romans were in cluded among the barbarians; then bar bari signified all who were not Romans or Greeks. In the middle ages, after the
fall of the Western empire, it was applied to the Teutonic races who overran the countries of western Europe, who did not consider it as a term of reproach, since they adopted it themselves, and used it in their own codes of law as an appellation of the Germans as opposed to the Romans. At a later period it was applied to the Moors, and thus an extensive tract on the north of Africa obtained the name of Barbary.
Barbarian, in modern languages, means a person in a low state of civilization, without any reference to the place of his birth, so that the native of any country might be said to be in a state of bar barism. The word has thus entirely lost its primitive and proper meaning of non Grecian, or and is used ex clusively in that which was once its ac cessary and subordinate sense of rude and uncivilized.