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Barbarians

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Barbarians 

(Greek barbaroi, Latin barbari), an onomatopoeic word used by the ancient Greeks and later by the Romans to designate all strangers who spoke in languages incomprehensible to them and who were alien to their culture. At the beginning of the Common Era, the name “barbarians” was applied with particular frequency to the Germanic peoples. (In modern history, the invasions by Germanic and other tribes during the first centuries A.D. have come to be called the barbarian conquests; the kingdoms founded by the barbarians on the territory of the Roman Empire are known as the barbarian kingdoms, and the written record of the common law of the Germanic tribes is known as barbarian law.) The barbarian conquests played a major role in the elimination of the slave-owning system and in the formation of feudal relations in the Roman Empire.

In the figurative sense, the term “barbarians” designates ignorant, crude, cruel people, destroyers of cultural values.



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"Brave young signor," cried the tall man, throwing his arms round Alleyne, "how can we thank you enough for taking our parts against those horrible drunken barbarians.
Sir Kay told how he had en- countered me in a far land of barbarians, who all wore the same ridiculous garb that I did -- a garb that was a work of enchantment, and intended to make the wearer secure from hurt by human hands.
For the people on whom they fell these barbarians were a pitiless and terrible scourge; yet they possessed in undeveloped form the intelligence, the energy, the strength--most of the qualities of head and heart and body--which were to make of them one of the great world-races.
 
 
 
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