Karel Lodewijk De Kesel (Belgian, 1849-1922) The Roman Invasion of Gaul, 1894 Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent Regarding the Hellenes and the Barbarians; Greeks called themselves Hellenes, and thus historians use the term Hellenistic to describe the complex cosmopolitan civilization, based on that of Greece, that developed in the wake of Alexander's conquests. Greek culture became the standard by which civilized people identified themselves. Convinced of their intellectual and cultural superiority over inferior people--an idea promoted by the philosophy of Aristotle, Alexander the Great's tutor--civilized people referred to those who did not speak Greek as barbarians, a term derived from the Greeks' description of these people's language as "ba-ba," meaning unintelligible to Greeks. Aristotle also contended that the Greeks were an ideal people because they possessed a medium skin-tone, in contrast to pale northerners. The Greek and Roman people considered the Germanic and some Celtic peoples to be wild, red haired barbarians.
