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Race has entered the scientific lexicon of certain historians of the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Thus Greco-Roman antiquity has now found a place in the broad scientific syntheses dealing with the history of race and racism, while several historians and philologists endeavour to reveal the structuring role played by race in classical culture and society. Uprooted from the context in which it appeared— namely, the Euro-American world of the modern age—race has thus come to be seen as a universal category, susceptible to explain processes of discrimination potentially at work in all societies. This approach, which follows in the footsteps of Critical Race Theory, deserves examination. What is to be gained by promoting this generalization, which makes the concept of race available at any time in any place? Under what conditions is it pertinent to use the notion of race to describe civil societies in the ancient greek world? In order to highlight more precisely the issues surrounding this discussion, the article considers a specific period in the social and political history of classical Athens, in which certain historians have identified the birth of a “racial citizenship”.