I was on the wikipedia article for classicist Frank M. Snowden and came across this unsourced paragraph:
Snowden was largely known for his studies of black people in the ancient world. He documented that in ancient Rome and Greece racial prejudice was not an issue. Much of this, according to Snowden, is because most of the blacks they encountered were not slaves. Most slaves in the Roman Empire were white. Most of the blacks they met were warriors, statesmen, and mercenaries. Therefore, blacks were not subjected to the racism of modern civilization. He studied ancient art and literature, and he found evidence that blacks were able to co-exist with the Greeks and Romans.
Any classics peeps have background on this claim?
I was a classics major, but I didn't do any specific study on this subject. However, it's been 12 hours, so I think my incomplete answer (though I hope not incorrect!) will be good enough.
Specific instances where race or something similar crops up that I can think of: Ethiopia was known of in Greek myth, even before they started colonizing the Mediterranean. They thought that Ethiopians lived both to the far east and to the far west, closest to where the sun met the horizon, which explained why they were so dark. In the Trojan cycle, Troy doesn't fall immediately after the events of the Iliad- after Hektor dies, Memnon, an Ethiopian hero/king, shows up to protect Troy from the Greeks. (Memnon is the son of Eos, goddess of the dawn- again the link between Ethiopia and the sun). Memnon is almost as good as Achilles, but is killed by Achilles in revenge for a fallen comrade (identical to Hektor's death) and is granted immortality. In some accounts, Memnon is in fact the progenitor of all Africans (a much more noble line than the Bible's account of Ham, the bastard!) Andromeda and Cassiopeia are also Ethiopian royalty, though I believe they are explicitly white, not just in depictions, but in written accounts as well. I don't remember why that is, possibly descent from the gods.
The Greeks and Phoenicians conquered and colonized much or all of North Africa. Carthage was a Phoenician settlement (which is why the wars against them were Punic). The legend of them buying the land from the native Berbers reads almost like Europeans in the Americas- they tricked them by buying as much land as could be covered by a cow (?) skin, and then cutting the skin into an incredibly fine single loop large enough to encompass the city. This was very much a Phoenician city- they had to have interaction with the local tribes, but they weren't part of the government of this nascent empire in any way.
In Egypt, Alexander had conquered in 332 BC, and nearly 300 years later, Cleopatra was being praised for being the first (and therefore only) in her dynasty to learn to speak like the natives did. This is strong evidence that the conquering Greeks did not do much mingling with the native Egyptians. 400 years after that, Augustine of Hippo was raised as a Roman citizen living in what's now Algeria, and was notable for learning the language of the natives of the town where he was Bishop. So there wasn't much mingling of peoples over the nearly 1000 years of southern Europe's ancient control of northern Africa.
There are several other points that might be worth commenting on by someone more qualified than I, notably the Jugurthine War and the late Roman Empire's problems with Berber raids in north Africa.
So I guess my point is that they certainly didn't have the pseudoscientific views of race that have been such a problem for us in the last few centuries, and it's true that slavery tended to be an economic or martial thing, and wasn't at all like the chattel ownership of an entire people. But that doesn't mean that the conquered people got along all hunky-dory with their subjects. I hope that's enough to give you a good idea.