updated: 12/12/2005
Very few, if any, peoples, described themselves as barbarians. The word originated as a disparaging, if not outright abusive term (indeed racist in modern day terms though to define it as such would be anachronistic) meaning something like non-Greek speaking ‘wogs’ from the North-West.
Even the meaning of supposedly more specific terms like Celts, Huns, Vandals and Goths are elusive and the subject of present-day contention: they pose a whole series of interesting historical questions the everyday answers to which have at least as much to do with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalisms and the Romantic Revival as any reality-on-the-ground in the early years of the Common Era. Taking the Celts as an example, early writers used the term in different ways – from being a term akin to ‘wog’ to describing a group of peoples who may actually have used the term to identify themselves: what is clear is that the current Celtic peoples (eg the Welsh) have little connection geographicaly, culturally, or linguistically – nevermind through descent – to anyone who may have described themselves as Celtic at the time of Julius Caesar.
Anyway, what we have here is some examples of the depiction of the enemies, or allies, of Rome on its North-West frontiers and their immediate post-Roman successors. So very crudely European barbarians from the first century BCE through to the fifth century CE.