nomads
nomadsGreek (followed by Roman) writers lumped together as nomads (nomades, formed on nomos, ‘pasture’) all pastoral groups for whom wandering was a way of life, without distinguishing (as does the modern concept of nomadism) between semi-nomads—including those practising transhumance—and fully nomadic societies of no fixed abode, such as the ancients met on the desert fringes of Libya and Arabia and in Scythia. Homer's portrayal of the pastoral Cyclopes as uncivilized and savage (Odyssey 9) inaugurates a persistent hostility in Greek literature to nomads, whose lifestyle as ‘cultivators of living fields’ (Aristotle Politica 1256a34–5), in particular their different diet (in particular their drinking of milk) and their desert habitat, set them apart from the sedentary communities of Greek farmers and encouraged a stereotyping taken to extremes in Herodotus'...
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