Ancient Greek and Roman views of barbarians — peoples outside the Greek-speaking world or outside Roman citizenship — were more complex than the simple 'civilized vs. savage' opposition that the term 'barbarian' suggests.

The Greek word barbaros originally meant simply 'non-Greek-speaker' (with connotations of the sound 'bar-bar-bar' as unintelligible speech). But by the 5th century BC it had acquired the broader sense of cultural inferiority that it retains in modern languages. Herodotus' ethnographic sections are notable for their relatively non-judgmental observation of foreign customs, but even Herodotus operates within a framework that treats Greek culture as the norm against which others are measured.

The Roman attitude to barbarians is similar but nuanced by Rome's own history: Romans were not Greek, and Greek cultural supremacy could be acknowledged while insisting on Roman political and military superiority. Virgil's Aeneid constructs Roman identity partly through the rejection of Greek cultural domination — Rome's destiny is to rule, not to make art.

The barbarian who adopts Roman culture — the Romanized Gaul, the Latinized Spaniard, the Greek-educated senator — is a stock figure in Roman literature. The fluidity of Roman identity, and the possibility of becoming Roman through cultural adoption, is one of the more interesting aspects of Roman cultural politics. By the late empire, Roman armies were commanded by men of barbarian origin, and the distinction between Roman and barbarian had become almost entirely a matter of political allegiance rather than ethnic identity.