 The dominant scholarly position is that the concept of race is a modern phenomenon, at least in Europe and the Americas. However, there is less agreement regarding whether racism, even absent a developed race concept, may have existed in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The influential work of classicist Frank Snowden (1970; 1983), who emphasized the lack of antiblack prejudice in the ancient world, led many scholars of race to conclude that racism did not exist in that epoch. However, later classicists have responded that Snowden’s work unnecessarily reduced all forms of racism to its peculiarly American version based on skin color and other markers of non-white identity. Benjamin Isaac (2004) and Denise McCoskey (2012) contend that the ancient Greeks and Romans did hold proto-racist views that applied to other groups which today might be considered white. Isaac persuasively argues that these views must be considered proto-racist: although they were formed without the aid of a modern race concept grounded in ideas of deterministic biology (2004, 5), they nevertheless resembled modern racism by attributing “to groups of people common characteristics considered to be unalterable because they are determined by external factors or heredity” (2004, 38). More importantly, both Isaac and McCoskey contend that ancient proto-racism influenced the development of modern racism.