People
The Greeks had a general tendency to divide the world into pairs of things, one opposed to the other. They saw everything as divided into two
parts, which fought with each other all the time.So they tended to divide
people into two groups too. There are a lot of different ways to divide people. One important way is to divide people from animals:
the Greeks said that people were different from animals because animals ate their food raw, and people ate theirs cooked (that is, people know how to use fire). And people have rational thought, but animals do not. People are also divided from gods.People eat food, and gods don't.People die,but gods
don't.
Another way of looking at these divisions is to divide Greek people from barbarians, people who are not Greek. The Greeks called all foreigners barbarians, even if they were very civilized like the Egyptians or the
Persians. Or you can divide men from women. The Greeks did feel that men and women were very different, and naturally opposed to each other. Men, in the
Greek view, were rational, thinking, stable, normal creatures, while women were irrational, hysterical, and dangerous. If you had to take sides (and the Greeks always took sides), men were more like gods, while women were more like animals