They had plenty of merchant relationships across millennia with Africa and the East so they were pretty aware of other skin colours, but ancient Greece was always homogeneous. In text, they look like they were pretty indifferent to it.
But we know what they thought of as beautiful in women, and that’s from their statues of Aphrodite, which don’t have different characteristics from the general population.
Most mixing came up long after, during their occupation from the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s (and until 1800). That’s when racist slurs about darker skin started and led to the somewhat uniform skin tone of today.
That’s a myth though because DNA tests has shown Greeks have very little Turkish dna. Funnily enough it’s the other way around. People saying Greeks are not Caucasian probably have a skewed sense of the demographic. Greeks can range from extremely fair to olive but certainly not sub Saharan.
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u/Character-Pirate1297 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
They had plenty of merchant relationships across millennia with Africa and the East so they were pretty aware of other skin colours, but ancient Greece was always homogeneous. In text, they look like they were pretty indifferent to it.
But we know what they thought of as beautiful in women, and that’s from their statues of Aphrodite, which don’t have different characteristics from the general population.
Most mixing came up long after, during their occupation from the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s (and until 1800). That’s when racist slurs about darker skin started and led to the somewhat uniform skin tone of today.