In the ancient world, art, wisdom and culture originated in the East. The Greeks were strongly influenced by the Achaemenid, Assyrian and Egyptian cultures. The way Romans looked at it, after having conquered Greece they had, in turn, brought civilisation home to the previously rustic Rome, or as Horace put it: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio (Ep. 2.1.156–157). However, Empire as an institution and power also originated in the Orient, combined with wealth and abundance. What the Greeks and Romans admired and wished to emulate was therefore often to be found in the Orient. When the Greeks grew stronger and first defeated, then subdued the Persians, they began to look down on them and to emphasise the negative aspects of the ‘barbarians’: autocracy, despotism, weakness, effeminacy, decadence, corruption, greed etc. The East was frequently turned into the opposite of all virtues the Greeks and later the Romans strove for.

The development of stereotypes about the East during antiquity is clearly connected to the need of creating stronger common Hellenic and Roman identities. However, it would be wrong to believe that there existed anything like a monolithic image of the Orient. The picture of the East developed and changed continuously, and during this process many Eastern peoples were characterised interchangeably through the same motifs. There may thus be a need to define a set of different ‘repertoires’ of stereotypes used in different chronological/cultural contexts, beginning from differences between Greek and Roman strains. This is complicated by the fact that part of the stereotypes tended to turn into literary topoi that were repeated numerous times, often even with close to similar formulations. The free borrowing of the ‘Oriental’ stereotypes in the subsequent tradition, and their application to different societies – sometimes by societies which in themselves were stereotyped as ‘Oriental’ by other groups – points to the inescapable conclusion that ‘Orient’ was and has always been a moving ‘(n)everwhere’, and each society in the Western tradition has been prone to construct their own ‘Orients’ and ‘Orientals’.