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Barbarian was a word which the Romans adopted from the Greeks and meant foreigner. For the Greeks it referred to anyone who did not speak Greek.

Originally the Roman use of the term barbarian referred to non-Romans. When Roman citizenship was extended to all freemen in the Roman Empire by the emperor Caracalla in 215, and all the conquered peoples became Romans, barbarian came to refer to the peoples who lived outside the Roman Empire. Therefore, the barbarians came to be the peoples who lived on the other side of the frontiers of the Roman Empire: north-Western Europe, eastern Europe, Persia, Arabia and Africans who lived south of the border of the empire.

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12y ago

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