Barbarians, slaves, and prisoners

Michael Gilleland, in his observations at the gym, informs us - and he's got citations from Xenophon, Seneca, Plato, as well as the classicist C.P. Jones - that in the ancient world, only "three classes of persons wore tattoos in ancient times — barbarians, slaves, and prisoners." He writes:

It's curious how at the gym one can observe people, in their pastimes and their adornments, voluntarily adopting practices that used to be visited on prisoners as punishments.

The ancients, so far as one can tell from these writers, considered it as a given that only those three classes of people would have tattoos. No reasons are given. And in our wonderful modern world, only a generation ago, the only people with tattoos were prisoners, bikers, and military men, which might be said to represent a certain form of barbarism.

Can reasons be given? Most younger people nowadays seem to consider them merely a form of decoration, while those of us from my generation - I was born in the same year Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein died - are appalled.

Before one can consider tattoos to be in the realm of those classes, one has to believe that there is a distinction to be made between barbarism and civilization. When prisoners and bikers inscribe tattoos on themselves, they are clearly imitating barbarians, specifically their bellicosity and antinomianism. The ancients must have associated those qualities with barbarians, hence anything specifically associated with them, such as tattoos, were barbarous. And slaves did not, of course, have any choice in the matter.

Barbarian societies are relatively egalitarian. Their leaders rule by consensus, and every able-bodied man is a warrior. Since no one has more money than any other, they cannot use wealth to display status, like the Romans or Greeks would. In this the barbarians resemble prisoners and bikers, and their tattoos functioned to make the individual stand out as big and bad.

However, since the distinction between civilized and barbarian has attenuated, and only reactionaries would dare to think one society better than another, tattoos have proliferated. They're a form of display for the barbarous.