In antiquity, Memnon, one of the greatest heroes of the Trojan War, was an Ethiopian; Julius Caesar and later Octavian adopted a North African, Juba II, who went on to become a distinguished scholar and soldier, and married a Greek princess, Cleopatra; and Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was a Phoenician, yet virtually worshipped by the Athenians.
Shakespeare clearly saw nothing innately wrong in interracial marriage. He wrote the play "Othello," which portrayed the titular hero, a black man, as an entirely noble and worthy person, married to a white woman of consummate virtue, and the racialist Iago as an absolute villain. Iago attempts and fails to stir up prejudices against Othello by calling him "black Moor," "thick lips," and "old black ram." A few people try to claim that Othello was not a negro, but the racial aspects of the play would make no sense if he was an Arab, since then he would then be too little distinct from a southern Italian. Othello has been interpreted as a negro by critics from the earliest criticism of the play, see e. g. Thomas Rymer.
In the 18th century you had such eminent coloured men as the Chevalier de St-Georges, champion fencer, classical composer, virtuoso violinist, and conductor of the leading symphony orchestra in Paris. He served as a colonel of the Légion St.-Georges, and is sometimes called the "Black Mozart."
Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence, also known as "il Moro," the son of an African slave, was ruling over Florence, the most cultured city in Europe, in the 16th century.
The full-blacks Ignatius Sancho and Phyllis Wheatley wrote prose and poetry of a very high order, and mixed-race blacks like Alexandre Dumas or Machado de Assis are considered among the greatest writers of Western literature.
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