Colonizer or Colonized. Sara E. Melzer

      Introduction

      There has never been a document of culture that was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism.

      —Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

      “Our Ancestors the Gauls”

      Once upon a time, long before the birth of France, barbarians inhabited its land. These nomadic tribes, dwelling in forests and caves, were known as the Gauls. They dined on human flesh, or so Diodorus, the Greek historian of the first century B.C., recounted.¹ Then they washed down their feasts with wine or a drink they invented made out of barley, now known as beer.² Lacking any moderation, they became prey to their drunken cravings, and were driven to a state of near madness. But in their more sober moments, they aspired to some order and cleanliness: “They consistently use urine to bathe the body and wash their teeth with it,” Diodorus observed, “thinking that in this practice is constituted the care and healing of the body.”³ According to the Hellenistic Greek and Roman reports⁴ about the Gauls, their customs were above all marked by barbaric cruelty. Strabo said of the most northern tribes: “When they depart from battle they hang the heads of their enemies from the necks of their horses, and when they have brought them home, nail the spectacle to the entrances of their homes.”⁵ Such barbarism dominated all their practices. Their priests, the Druids, conducted human sacrifice and engaged in divination by striking a human being “in the back with a sabre, and from his death-struggle they divine[d]” truth.⁶ Cicero deemed this reported custom “monstrous and barbarous.”⁷ In battle, the Gauls were known to show up naked.⁸ While this practice might suggest a self-confident bravery, Diodorus saw it as a foolishness that went hand in hand with cowardice, for they would also flee the battlefield at the strangest moments. Livy viewed the Gauls as unstable in war, commenting that their “habitual practice” was to begin with a “furious attack,” but then their “physical strength melted away; in their first efforts they were more than men, in the end they were weaker than women.”⁹ Diodorus deemed their linguistic practices equally monstrous. “The Gauls are terrifying in aspect and their voices are deep and altogether harsh; when they meet together they converse with a few words and in riddles, hinting darkly at things for the most part and using one word when they mean another; and they like to talk in superlatives, to the end that they may extol themselves and depreciate all the other men. They are also boasters and threateners and are fond of pompous language, and yet they have sharp wits and are not without cleverness at learning.”¹⁰ As for their sexual practices, Diodorus reported that homosexuality was rampant. Many men did not sleep with their wives and “had very little to do with them” because they would “rage with lust” and “tumble with a catamite on each side.”¹¹ Such was the image of the Gauls that the Hellenistic Greek and Roman historiographers