Barbarian. Supposed to be originally a descriptive word of those who uttered harsh, rude accents - bar bar. Homer calls the Carians, barbarofwnoi barbar-voiced, harsh-speaking ("Illiad," 2, 867). Later, applied to all who did not speak Greek. Socrates, speaking of the way in which the Greeks divide up mankind, says: "Here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable and have no connection or common language, they include under the single name of barbarians" (Plato, "Statesman," 262). So Clytaemnestra of the captive Cassandra: "Like a swallow, endowed with an unintelligible barbaric voice" (Aeschylus, "Agamemnon," 1051). Prodicus in Plato's "Protagoras" says: "Simonides is twitting Pittacus with ignorance of the use of terms, which, in a Lesbian, who has been accustomed to speak in a barbarous language, is natural" (341).

Aristophanes calls the birds barbarians because they sing inarticulately ("Birds," 199); and Sophocles calls a foreign land aglwssov without a tongue. "Neither Hellas nor a tongueless land" ("Trachiniae," 1060). Later, the word took the sense of outlandish or rude.

Robertson's NT Word Studies