The ancient Greeks regarded their own language as the measure of civilization. To them, the speech of foreigners who knew no Greek sounded like meaningless stammering — "bar-bar-bar." From this bit of onomatopoeia came the word barbaros. At first it meant simply "a foreigner who cannot speak Greek," but after the Persian Wars its negative sense — "uncivilized, savage" — grew sharper. The Romans borrowed the word, calling every people other than themselves and the Greeks barbarus. In one of history's ironies, the Germanic peoples, Goths, and Vandals who brought down Rome were the very ones Rome had branded "barbarians."