While the previous chapter examined the different conceptual frameworks within which foreign peoples could be represented, rationalized, and understood in Chinese and Greco-Roman antiquity, a study of ancient ethnography must also consider the concept of the “barbarian” itself. In particular, the notion of a “barbarian antithesis,” a dichotomous division of mankind in Greco-Roman thought that places Greeks and then Romans on one side of an ethno-cultural barrier and everyone else – the uncivilized, ungoverned, immoderate, bestial portion of humanity – on the other is a commonplace in modern scholarship. In some ways, the notion of a binary division of humanity into civilized and barbarian categories may be understood as an interpretative or rationalizing framework in its own right, on a par with those considered in Chapter 1. It differs, however, in that it is not only a far more simplistic response to the realities of human diversity but also to the extent that it has been identified by many scholars as a fundamental principle in Greek and Roman worldviews and attitudes. The same notion has been exported to the study of ancient China, as several scholars have identified a comparable bipartite schema that developed in ancient Chinese philosophical and political thinking. Therefore, a discussion of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the Greco-Roman and Chinese classical periods is essential before moving on to consider texts of a later period, when the geographical and cultural distance between these two categories, the civilized Self and the barbarian Other, had narrowed considerably.