>>49028921And no one has claimed this. Back when the controversy arose with the British Broadcast company short on Roman Britain with a black legionnaire alt-right types claimed that it was some conspiracy in trying to ruin their heritage. Mary Beard, a Roman historian, claimed that this wouldn't be out of place in Roman Britain.
Of course no one said it would be normal, but it certatntly isn't something that didn't happen. The Roman Empire was an empire that stretched from all corners of the Mediterranean and the people of the Mediterranean were interconnected with one another, this also included people that we would consider black today. And we do in fact find literary evidence on black legionaries. It is my understanding that the Romans rotated people all over their empire so having a black legionnaire isn't out of the question.
As I mentioned in what I study we know black people were know to the Greeks and lived in Greece as immigrants or slaves. Athens was a big trade hub with a diverse group of people living in it, we know for example there was a large community of Thracians living in Athens, and seeing a black person wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility.
For example in Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals book 1 part 18:
>Further, children are like their more remote ancestors from whom nothing has come, for the resemblances recur at an interval of many generations, as in the case of the woman in Elis who had intercourse with the Aethiop; her daughter was not an Aethiop but the son of that daughter was.Elis being an area of the Peloponnese in Greece. He also talks about a similar case found in Sicily.
Again, and I stress, no one has ever claimed that it was *normal* just that it's very much a possiblity to see a black person in those types of settings. It's white fragility and the appropriation of the past that leads to alt-rights throwing a tantrum over things like that because they believe it invades their imaginary white space.
