The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  His classicizing mind surveyed a world of quite a different scale to Homer's. In the first classical age, Athens, at its height, had contained perhaps 300,000 residents in its Attic territory, including slaves. By Hadrian's day, the Roman Empire is estimated (no more) to have had a population of about 60 million, extending from Scotland to Spain, from Spain to Armenia. No other empire, before or since, has ruled this great span of territory, but, on our modern scale, its total popu­lation was no greater than modern Britain's. It was concentrated in patches, maybe as many as 8 million in Egypt,5 where the river Nile and the grain harvest supported such a density, and at least a million, perhaps, in the mega-city of Rome which was also fed and supported by Egypt's harvests and its exported grain. Outside these two points, whole swathes of Hadrian's Empire were very thinly populated by our standards. Nonetheless, they required, in every province, detach­ments of the Roman army to keep the peace. Hadrian favoured many cities on his travels, but he also had to rule large areas which only had villages, not classicizing towns at all. Where necessary, he ordered large stretches of walling to regulate peoples beyond the Empire, a most unclassical project. The most famous is Hadrian's Wall, in north­ern Britain, running from Wallsend near Newcastle westwards to Bowness. A massive barrier, it was ten feet thick and fourteen feet high, partly faced in stone with 'intercastles' every mile, two signalling turrets between them and a ditch on the north side, ten feet deep and thirty feet wide. There were other 'Hadrian's walls' too, though nowadays they are less famous. In north Africa, beyond the Aures mountains of modern Tunisia, Hadrian approved stretches of walling and ditching which were to control contacts with the nomadic peoples of the desert along a frontier of some 150 miles. In north-west Europe, in upper Germany, he well understood the danger: here, he 'shut off the barbarians by tall stakes fixed deeply into the ground and fastened together like a palisade'.6

  Global walling had never been part of the classical past. In the age of Athens' greatness, let alone of Homer's, there had never been a single ruler like Hadrian, an emperor, nor a standing army, like Rome's, of some 500,000 soldiers throughout the Empire. In the classical age of Rome, the mid-first century bc, there had not yet been an emperor or standing army, either. Hadrian was heir to historical changes which had transformed Roman history. Hadrian respected the classical Greek and Roman past and, wherever he went, he visited great relics of it, but did he understand the context in which it had once belonged, how it had evolved and how his own role as emperor had come about?

  Certainly, Hadrian was famous for a love of 'curiosities' and an exploration of them.7 On his travels, he climbed volcanic Etna in Sicily and other conspicuous mountains; he consulted ancient oracles of the gods; he visited the tourist wonders of long-dead ancient Egypt. With a tourist's mind, he was also a cultural magpie who stored and imitated what he saw. Back in Italy, near Tivoli, he built himself an enormous, straggling villa whose features alluded explicitly to great cultural monuments of the ancient Greek past. Hadrian's villa was a vast theme-park which included buildings evocative of Alexandria and classical Athens.8

  At this villa, after his beloved Antinous' death, he turned to writing his own autobiography. Almost nothing of it survives, but we can guess that it would have combined affectionate tributes to his male lover with a furtherance of his own urbane self-image. Hadrian was interested by philosophy and perhaps, in an Epicurean manner, he would have consoled himself against the fear of death.9 What he would not have done was to analyse the historical changes behind all that he had seen on his travels, from Homer to classical Athens, from Alexander the Great's great Alexandria to the former splendours of Carthage (a city which he renamed Hadrianopolis after himself). Hadrian took the first emperor, Augustus, as his role-model, but he never seems to have wondered how Augustus' one-man rule had imposed itself on Rome after more than four hundred years of highly prized liberty.

  This book aims to answer these questions for Hadrian and the many who are heirs to his sort of engagement, who travel in the classical world, who look at classical sites and who like to acknowl­edge that a 'classical age' existed, even among the competing claims of ever more cultures around the world. It is a choice of highlights and it has least to say on subjects which would have concerned Hadrian least: the range of Greek kingdoms after Alexander the Great and, above all, the years of the Roman Republic between its sack of Carthage (146 bc) and the reforms of the dictator Sulla (81 bc). By contrast, the Athens of Pericles and Socrates and the Rome of Caesar and Augustus claim the limelight, as 'classical' points in the past to which Hadrian attached himself.

  Historians in Hadrian's own Empire were not unaware of the changes since these eras. Some of them tried to explain them, and their answers did not simply list military victories and members of Rome's imperial family. Part of the story of the classical world is the invention and development of history-writing itself. Nowadays, historians try to apply sophisticated theories to the understanding of these changes, economics and sociology, geography and ecology, theories of class and gender, the power of symbols or demographic models for populations and their age groups. In antiquity, these theories of ours were not explicit, or did not even exist. Instead, historians had favourite themes of their own, of which three were particularly prominent: freedom, justice and luxury. Our modern theories can deepen these ancient explanatory themes, but they do not entirely supplant them. I have chosen to emphasize these three because they were in the minds of the actors at the time and a part of the way in which events were seen, even when they do not suffice for our understanding of historical change.

  Each of them is a flexible concept whose scope varies. Freedom, for us, entails choice and, for many people nowadays, implies autonomy or a power of independent decision. 'Autonomy' is a word invented by the ancient Greeks, but for them it had a clear political context: it began as the word for a community's self-government, a protected degree of freedom in the face of an outside power which was strong enough to infringe it. Its first surviving application to an individual is to a woman, Antigone, in drama.'" Freedom, too, was a political value, but it was sharpened everywhere by its opposite status, slavery. From Homer onwards, communities valued freedom in the face of enemies who would otherwise enslave them. Within a community, freedom then became a value of political constitutions: alternatives were denounced as 'slavery'. Above all, freedom was the prized status of individuals, marking them off from slaves who were to be bought and sold. But, outside slavery, in what did an individual's freedom consist? Did it require freedom of speech or freedom to worship whatever gods one chose? Was it the freedom to live as one pleased, or simply a freedom from interference? When did 'liberty' become wicked 'licence'? These questions had all been discussed by the time of Hadrian, who was hailed both as a liberator and as a god by Greeks among his subjects.

  The concept of justice had been no less contested. It was claimed by rulers, including Hadrian, and even in the age of Homer it was ascribed to idealized 'just' communities. Did the gods care for it or was the hard truth that justice was not a value which shaped their dealings with mortals? What was justice, philosophers had long won­dered; was it 'giving each his due' or was it receiving one's deserts, perhaps because of behaviour in a previous life? Was equality just, and if so, what sort of equality? The 'same for one and all' or a 'proportional equality', which varied according to each person's riches or social class?" What system guaranteed it, one of laws applied by juries of randomly chosen citizens or one of laws applied and created by a single judge, a governor perhaps or the emperor himself? Much of Hadrian's own energy was spent on judging and answering pet­itions, the process through which we know him best. His answers to cities and subjects in his Empire sometimes survive where recipients inscribed them on stone.12 Others of his rulings survive in Latin collec­tions of legal opinions. There is even a separate collection of Hadrian's own 'opinions' which were his answers to petitioners and were pre­served as school exercises for translation into Greek.13 In the
classical Greek age, no Pericles or Demosthenes had answered petitions or given responses with the force of law.

  Like justice and freedom, luxury was a term with a very flexible history. Where exactly does luxury begin? According to the novelist Edith Wharton, luxury is the acquisition of something which one does not need, but where do 'needs' end? For the fashion-designer Coco Chanel, luxury was a more positive value, whose opposite, she used to say, is not poverty, but vulgarity; in her view, 'luxury is not showy'. Certainly, it invites double standards. Throughout history, from

  Homer to Hadrian, laws were passed to limit it and thinkers saw it as soft or corrupting or even as socially subversive. But the range of luxury and the demands for it went on multiplying despite the voices attacking it. Around luxury we can write a history of cultural change, enhanced by archaeology which gives us proofs of its extent, whether the bits of blue lapis lazuli imported in the pre-Homeric world (by origin, all from north-east Afghanistan) or rubies in the Near East imported after Alexander (they are shown, by analysis, to have come ultimately from unknown Burma).

  By the time of the classicizing Hadrian, the political freedoms of the past classical age had diminished. Justice, to our eyes, had become much less fair, but luxuries, from foods to furnishings, had prolifer­ated. How did these changes occur and how, if at all, do they inter­relate? Their setting had been intensely political, as the context of power and political rights changed tumultuously across the generations, to a degree which sets this era apart from the centuries of monarchy or oligarchy in so much subsequent history. If this era is studied thematic-ally, through chapters on 'sex' or 'armies' or 'the city-state', it is reduced to a false, static unity and 'culture' is detached from its formative con­text, the contested, changing relations of power. So this history follows the threads of a changing story, within which its three main themes have a changing resonance. Sometimes it is a history of great decisions, taken by (male) individuals but always in a setting of thousands of individual lives. Some of these lives, off the 'grand narrative', are known to us from words which people inscribed on durable materials, the lives of victorious athletes or fond owners of named racehorses, the lady in Alexander the Great's home town who had a curse written out against her hoped-for lover and his preferred Thetima ('may he marry nobody except me'), or the sad owner of a piglet which had trotted by his chariot all the way down the road to Thessalonica, only to be run over at Edessa and killed in an accident at the crossroads.14 Scores of these individuals surface yearly in newly studied Greek and Latin inscriptions whose surviving fragments stretch scholars' skills, but whose contents enhance the diversity of the ancient world. From Homer to Hadrian, our knowledge of the classical world is not stand­ing still, and this book is an attempt to follow its highways as Hadrian, its great global traveller, never did.

  PART ONE

  The Archaic Greek World

  In Mainland Greece, the Archaic Age was a time of extreme personal insecurity. The tiny overpopulated states were just beginning to struggle up out of the misery and impoverishment left behind by the Dorian invasions when fresh trouble arose: whole classes tvere ruined by the great economic crisis of the seventh century, and this in turn was followed by the great political conflicts of the sixth, which translated the economic crisis into terms of murderous class warfare . . . Nor is it accidental that in this age the doom overhanging the rich and powerful becomes so popular a theme with the poets . ..

  E. R. Dodds, The Creeks and the Irrational (1951), 54-5

  The close personal association of the upper classes at this time was a tremendous force in promoting the lightning swiftness of contemporary change; in intellectual outlook the upper classes seem scarcely to have boggled at any novelty. With remarkable openness of mind and lack of prejudice they sup­ported the cultural expansion which underlay classical achieve­ments and much of later western civilization. Great masses of superstition and magic trailed down into historic times from the primitive Dark Ages . . . That past, as exemplified in the epics, was not dismissed in its most fundamental aspects, but writers, artists and thinkers felt free to explore and enlarge their horizons. The proximate cause, without doubt, was the aristocratic domination of life.

  Chester G. Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece, 800-500 bc (1977), 144

  Homeric Epic

  So Priam spoke, and he roused in Achilles the desire to lament

  his father: Achilles took his hand, and pushed the old man

  gently aiuay. And the two of them remembered: one wept

  aloud for Hector slayer of men, crouched before the feet of

  Achilles, but Achilles wept for his own father and then, too,

  for Patroclus . . . Homer, Iliad 14.507-11

  Travelling in Greece, Hadrian stopped at its most famous oracle, Delphi, in the year ad 125, and asked its god the most difficult question: where was Homer born and who were his parents? The ancients themselves would say, 'let us begin from Homer', and there are excellent reasons why a history of the classical world should begin with him too.

  It is not that Homer belongs at the 'dawn' of the Greeks' presence in Greece or at the beginnings of the Greek language. But for us, he is a beginning because his two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are the first long texts in Greek which survive. During the eighth century bc (when most scholars date his life), we have our first evi­dence of the use of the Greek alphabet, the convenient system of writing in which his epic poems were preserved. The earliest example at present is dated to the 770s bc and, with small variations, this alphabet is still being used for writing modern Greek. Before Homer, much had happened in Greece and the Aegean, but for the previous four centuries nothing had been written down (except, in a small way, on Cyprus). Archaeology is our one source of knowledge about this period, a 'dark age' to us, though it was not 'dark' to those who lived

  in it. Archaeologists have greatly advanced what we know about it, but literacy, based on the alphabet, gives historians a new range of evidence.

  Nonetheless, Homer's poems were not histories and were not about his own times. They are about mythical heroes and their doings in and after the Trojan War which the Greeks were represented as fighting in Asia. There had certainly been a great city of Troy ('Ilion') and perhaps there really had been some such war, but Homer's Hector, Achilles and Odysseus are not historical persons. For historians, the value in these great poems is rather different: they show knowledge of a real world, their springboard from which to imagine the grander epic world of legend, and they are evidence of values which are implied as well as stated. They make us think about the values of their first Greek audiences, wherever and whoever they may have been. They also lead us on into the values and mentalities of so many people afterwards in what becomes our 'classical' world. For the two Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, remained the supreme masterpieces. They were admired from their author's own era to Hadrian's and on to the end of antiquity, without interruption. The Iliad's stories of the Trojan War, the anger of Achilles, his love for Patroclus (not openly said to be sexual) and the death of Hector are still among the most famous myths in the world, while the Odyssey's tales of Odysseus' homecom­ing, his wife Penelope, the Cyclops, Circe and the Sirens are a lasting part of many people's early years. The Iliad culminates in a great moment of shared human loss and sorrow in the meeting of Achilles and old Priam whose son he has killed. The Odyssey is the first known representation of nostalgia, through Odysseus' longing to return home. Near its end it too brings us an encounter with pitiable old age when Odysseus comes back to his aged father Laertes, tenaciously at work among his orchard of trees, and unwilling to believe that his son is still alive.

  The poems describe a world of heroes who are 'not as mortal men nowadays'. Unlike Greeks in Homer's own age, Homer's heroes wear fabulous armour, keep open company with gods in human form, use weapons of bronze (not iron, like Homer's contemporaries) and drive in chariots to battle, where they then fight on foot. When Ho
mer describes a town, he includes a palace and a temple together, although they never coexisted in the world of the poet and his audience. He and his hearers certainly did not take his epic 'world' as essentially their own, but slightly grander. Nonetheless, its social customs and settings, particularly those in the Odyssey, seem to be too coherent to be the hazy invention of one poet only. An underlying reality has been upheld by comparing the poems' 'world' with more recent pre-literate societies, whether in pre-Islamic Arabia or in tribal life in Nuristan in north-east Afghanistan. There are similarities of practice, but such global comparisons are hard to control, and the more convincing method is to argue for the epics' use of reality by comparing aspects of them with Greek contexts after Homer. The comparisons here are plentiful, from customs of gift-giving which are still prominent in Herodotus' histories (c. 430 bc) to patterns of prayer or offerings to the gods which persist in Greek religious practice throughout its his­tory or the values and ideals which shape the Greek tragic dramas composed in fifth-century Athens. As a result, to read Homer is not only to be swept away by pathos and eloquence, irony and nobility: it is to enter into a social and ethical world which was known to major Greek figures after him, whether the poet Sophocles or that great lover of Homer, Alexander the Great. In classical Athens in the late fifth century bc, the rich and politically conservative general Nicias obliged his son to learn the Homeric epics off by heart. No doubt he was one of several such learners in his social class: the heroes' noble disdain for the masses would not have been lost on such young men.