In 449 c.e., the Greek sophist and historian Priscus of Panium was invited by his friend and mentor Maximinus to join him on an official delegation to the ‘court’ of Attila. During the visit he was surprised by someone ‘whom I took to be a barbarian from his Scythian dress’ but who greeted him in Greek: ‘χαῖρε’ (Hello!). It turned out that the Greek-speaker was not a captured Roman soldier but a merchant who, after the fall of Viminacium in 442, was assigned to the household of Hunnic chieftain Onegesius and had served his new master well by fighting valiantly for the Huns (Frag. 2). This story highlights many of the problems and fascinations in the depiction or stigmatisation of the stereotypical ‘other’ in Classical historiography. The volume under review tackles the subject on a grand scale by comparing Greco-Roman and Chinese ethnographic traditions and how they manifested themselves in two major historical sources. Ford's work is not built on comparison of generalisations but is an experiment in parallel research in depth and as such the volume demands to be taken seriously by scholars of both Classical and Sinological studies.

One would expect a comparative study of alterity in two cultures with long civilising influences to begin at the fountain-head, viz. by comparing the depiction of the foreigner in Herodotus with that of Sima Qian 司馬遷 — the fathers of historical writing in Greece and China respectively, but this task has to a large extent been undertaken by the seminal work of Hyun Jin-Kim, Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China (2009). Ford bases his comparison on two historiographical sources, the De Bellis of the Greek historian Procopius from the Early Byzantine period (500–565) and the Jinshu 晉書 (hereafter JS), the Official History of the Jin Dynasty (266–420).

Procopius wrote in the tradition of Thucydides in the mid sixth century c.e. when Greek was beginning to take over as the main language of Roman historiography. He also inaugurated a near unbroken tradition which would continue to the end of the Byzantine Empire with classicising historians like Laonicus Chalcocondylas. To examine how much Procopius owes to earlier writers, both Greek and Latin, in the field of ethnography, Ford has to go back to the pre-Ciceronian era as the attitude of the Romans towards the Greeks has to be assessed along with those towards Sabines, Samnites and Gauls. This Ford does by citing a number of key texts, some well known and some less so. Ford, however, pays little attention to the parts of the Roman Empire which continued to espouse non-Greco-Roman cultures such as Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The important and highly relevant work of N. J. Andrade (Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World, 2013) is conspicuous by its absence from the bibliography of Ford's work. Malalas, a contemporary of Procopius, interestingly describes the Mesopotamian city of Edessa as of ‘mixed-barbarian’ heritage (μιξοβάρβαρος) — there is certainly more than one shade of grey in using the term ‘barbarian’.

Ford's survey of pre-Late Antique Greek and Latin sources on ethnography is paralleled by a detailed examination of similar material in Chinese sources, drawn mainly from the Chinese Classics and Han historians. The introductory discussion is exhaustive and could have been more succinct for the sake of the non-specialist reader. The latter is confronted from the outset by a plethora of names for different types of barbarians and how they were stereotypically depicted but with little explanation as to whether they were ‘othered’ because they were unassimilable or seen as culturally inferior or as existential threats.

E. A. Thompson once said that for every reader of the work of Ammianus Marcellinus ‘there are a thousand readers of Sallust, Livy or Tacitus’ (The Historical Work of Ammianus Marcellinus (1969), vii). The same would have been true ten times over of readers of the JS compared to those of the better known Shiji (Historical Records) of Sima Qian. The JS is a work of no special literary merit and is read mainly by specialists on the three centuries after the fall of the Han Dynasty. The JS was commissioned by Emperor Tang Taizong 唐太宗 (r. 626–49 c.e.) who was partly descended from the Särbi (Xianbe 鮮卑) Huns (probably identical with the Sabiri Huns of Procopius’ time). Hence there was a paramount need to show that the Tang rulers were culturally Han-Chinese. The members of the Tang Bureau of Historiography resorted to established ethno-genealogical tropes and literary devices to vilify the non-Han-Chinese rulers and blamed their misrule, uncivilised behaviour and inevitable dynastic decline on their racial origin with predictable regularity, as Ford well demonstrates from numerous passages cited from the JS (238–56).

Procopius, who used the words βάρβαρος 634 times and βαρβαρικός ten times in his extant works, did not hesitate to label Persians as ‘barbarians’, although they were always seen as the equal of Romans in civility and military prowess. However, the complete absence of any discussion of Procopius's depiction of the Sasanian Persians to which the first two books of the De Bellis were devoted deprives F.'s study of an obvious historical and literary connection with Herodotus and Thucydides. In the passages of the De Bellis cited by F. from the Vandalic and Gothic Wars, we have a historian who espouses a view of foreign rulers which is vastly different from that of the Confucian compilers of the JS and also from the Graeco-Roman ethnographic tradition which would have been part of Procopius's rhetorical training. F. is at pains to point out that Procopius was not interested in their ancestral origins and showed that in some cases they were capable of moral improvement through ‘Roman’ education. For Procopius, the foreign kings who ruled the Western Empire were illegitimate because they were usurpers and not because they were ‘barbarian’ or uncivilised invaders.

Ford's main observation also highlights a problem of comparative ancient historiography. Procopius was a contemporary to the events he wrote about as he was ‘embedded’ in Belisarius’ army of re-conquest between 533 and 540. He would have had first-hand knowledge of events and was most probably on familiar terms with some of the Vandalic and Gothic kings and chieftains mentioned in his work. As an admirer and imitator of Thucydides, Machtpolitik would have dominated his reasoning rather than ethnography. The compilers of the JS, on the other hand, undertook their task a century and a half after the events described in the work they were compiling and they were unlikely to have any personal knowledge of non-Han Chinese rulers.

Ford has done the Sinological reader a great service by providing Chinese characters along with their Pinyin transcriptions. However, the famous historical work Zouzhuan 左傳 (lit. ‘The Left Chronicle’) from the Chinese Classics is given quite wrongly as zuozhuan 左轉 (lit. ‘a left turn’) (1; see also 116 and 337). The character for the title of the Sui 隋 Dynasty (581–618 c.e.) is rendered by the homophone sui 隨 (‘to follow’) throughout the main text (11, 138, etc.). At 246, line 25, the personal name ‘Shi Hu’ should be given as ‘Shi Jilong 石季龍’ as per the Chinese text.