The Romans, meanwhile, received the immense sum of 15,000 talents, to be paid in instalments. Carthage, too, was still paying them yearly sums and the 15,000 talents did not even include the copious booty from Asia. Their public finances were transformed. At the same time, their economic strength was helped by a simultaneous increase in the numbers of Romans established up and down Italy. The years from 200 to 170 saw a surge of new Roman colonies in Italy which extended up into rich northern farmland near the river Po. It has been estimated that as many as 100,000 settlers were sent out to take up to a million acres of land; great Italian sites like modern Parma or Bologna began their 'Roman' history in these years.5 The settlements were an outlet for poorer Roman citizens, who were a possible source of social tension at Rome. Once again it was a classic transformation of an ancient economy, in which war multiplied income and assets, and land-settlements changed the conquering state's social profile.
After Rome's victories in Greece, justice, of a sort, followed for Greeks in the new age of publicly declared 'freedom'. The Roman Senate and Roman commanders found that they were now a frequent resort for appeals from Greek states for impartial justice and territorial arbitration in their own internal disputes. Romans repeatedly heard these requests, but when they reached decisions, quite often they departed from what had seemed to be their previous inclinations. This inconsistency suited the Romans' new policy of profiting from Greek weaknesses and internal strife. One after another, their former Greek friends and beneficiaries became disgruntled at Romans' answers to them: Rhodes, King Eumenes of Pergamum and eventually the important Achaean League in the Peloponnese. Ominously, individual Romans began to be remembered for outbursts of 'anger' when dealing with Greeks and their business.6 There was a further shift of sympathy. Until the late third century bc democracies had been relatively widespread in the Greek cities. After 196 Romans favoured their avowed friends in the cities and reckoned that these individuals would best advance their interests against an unreliable populace. These friends were usually the richer citizens who stood for 'order', not popular rule. It is no coincidence that incteasingly dominant big 'benefactors' emerge in many of the Greek city-states, as the checks and balances of the democracies began to be set aside, first in the more recently founded Greek city-states, then in the older 'mother-cities' in Greece.7 Romans combined the role of 'policemen of the Mediterranean world' with an awareness that they were now the most powerful force and could act more or less as they thought fit. Then, too, it was a dangerous combination for their 'allies' abroad and those around them.
Between 168 and 146 Roman power was forcefully exercised against remaining 'enemies', the king of Macedon (Perseus in 168), the Seleucid king in the Near East (Antiochus IV in 165), tribes on the Dalmatian coast (156) and both the Achaean League in Greece and the remaining territory of Carthage in north Africa (146 bc). The most important of these engagements was the defeat of the Macedonians, ending the power which they had enjoyed for nearly two centuries. In 179 the kingship had passed to Perseus, a prince in his mid-thirties, whose flare and energy quickly perturbed Roman onlookers. He married a princess from the Seleucid royal house in Asia. He proclaimed favourable terms for debtors in Greece and revived the appeal of Macedon for the many Greeks whom Roman actions had increasingly helped to impoverish. Roman suspicions of him mounted during the 170s, culminating in their decision for war late in 172. One final Roman embassy only misled Perseus and delayed his preparations by suggesting, duplicitously, that he might win a settlement at Rome. Even some of the Romans criticised this cynical diplomacy.
During the next two years, Roman commanders in Greece behaved no more commendably. Greek opinion had to be smoothed over before a big Roman army arrived in 168 with the consul, Aemilius Paullus, descendant of the very consul whom Hannibal had destroyed at Cannae. On the south-east coast of Macedon, the two powers met for battle in the cramped mountainous country by mount Olympus.
Perseus' army was nearly as big as Alexander's at Gaugamela, but a Roman detachment succeeded in a brilliant flanking movement through two mountain passes to the west, dislodging two Macedonian garrisons and suddenly threatening Perseus' army with encirclement. This crucial manoeuvre was led by the son-in-law of the great Scipio: he later enhanced his success in his written account of the action.
Perseus retreated, but as Aemilius Paullus pushed after him, he was surprised to find the Macedonian army drawn up once more in a narrow plain south of Pydna. His subordinates wanted an immediate attack, but Aemilius delayed, sizing up his opponents: he would later say at dinners in Rome that the Macedonian phalanx, bristling with its long spears, was 'the most terrifying thing' he had seen in his life. Battle began on June 22, the day after an eclipse of the moon, and the Romans almost lost the field in the first central assault. The phalanx's long pikes pierced their infantry's shields and drove their centre back, but its traditional weakness then showed during the follow-up onto rough ground. Its ranks began to break, allowing the Roman infantrymen to penetrate the formation and deploy their longer swords against the short daggers which phalanx-soldiers used at close quarters. The killing was furious, accounting for 20,000 Macedonians, we are told. Meanwhile the Macedonians' cavalry-charges down the wings failed, partly because of the Romans' elephants, partly because their own elephants were truncated by a Roman anti-elephant corps.
Perseus fled, but was duly captured and brought before Aemilius who lectured him before his young Romans on the instability of fortune in terms which Herodotus would have approved. The Macedonian palaces were plundered, yielding a huge quantity of ivory tusks, which remind us how elephants had long been kept in the once-marshy plain around Pella. Perseus and his children were taken back to Rome and made to process as humble captives in the triumph which marked the end of Macedonian royal power: Aemilius Paullus took the contents of the royal Greek library. The kingdom had been split into its four underlying districts, but the Macedonians were not used to even a slight degree of democracy. Before long they rebelled under one more royal pretender.
The following years, from 168 to 146, were regarded by a sharp
Greek observer, the historian Polybius, as real 'times of trouble'.8 Certainly, the Romans showed no quarter to those whom they declared to be enemies. In 149 they announced their decision to dismember the long-established Achaean League in Greece, and in 146 they duly did so and destroyed the ancient city of Corinth. In the same year, they utterly destroyed what remained of Carthage (its years of paying reparations had recently ended). Already in 168 their victor at Pydna, Aemilius Paullus, had taken fearful reprisals against the peoples of Epirus in north-west Greece, who had aided adjacent Macedon. The Senate ruled that seventy towns in Epirus were to be plundered and, as a result, as many as 150,000 people were brutally sold into slavery. Masses of Greek works of art were also shipped back to Rome with huge quantities of gold and silver objects. After that horror, it is hard to accept that Rome somehow deteriorated.9
Within seventy years, from the disaster at Cannae in 216 to the ruination of Carthage in 146, the Romans had become the one superpower in the Mediterranean. The results are instructive. Romans now expected 'obedience' to orders which they issued of their own accord; Roman commanders were used to exercising 'command' (imperium) as magistrates at Rome. When they declared war (as in 156 bc) they were careful to give out a 'just' pretext for public consumption, although the real reasons lay elsewhere. By following these pretexts, modern historians have sometimes argued that Rome was only drawn step by step into Greek affairs, that her attacks were usually in self-defence and that, as she did not immediately form her conquests into new provinces, she began with no fixed aim of exploiting them. Fascinating problems of chronology and evidence can be brought against this interpretation, quite apart from the reported views of contemporaries. They also overlook important elements in the Roman mentality and the interrelated complex of glory and gain in Roman society; there was an urge among aspiring commanders to liv
e up to family-ancestors who had aspired to the same achievements, and the goals were booty and a public triumph. It is more cogent to credit Romans with bold designs and decreasing scruples about duplicity and frank aggression in attaining them. Some of the Romans did pick out a 'new-style wisdom' among their politicians in the 170s bc which involved telling outright lies and assuming that 'might is right'.10
Arguably, the 'new wisdom' was only an intensification of pre-existing practice. Rome's success in Greece and western Asia rested above all on her vastly superior manpower and the flexible military tactics which had been adopted before the 320s and had already been proven against Carthage. Her behaviour to her enemies in Greece in these grim years is less of a surprise to those who begin by studying her previous behaviour in Greek Sicily in 212/11. To exploit her conquests, she did not need to class them into territorially defined provinces. Her dominance could be less direct, even if we hesitate to call much of it an outright 'empire' as yet, in our understanding of the word.
PART FOUR
The Roman Republic
Rome, from the third to the second century before our era, was the most aristocratically governed city that existed in Italy or Greece . . . If the Senate was obliged to manage the multitude on domestic questions, it was absolute master so far as concerned foreign affairs. It was the Senate that received
ambassadors, that concluded alliances, that distributed the provinces and the legions, that ratified the acts of the generals, that determined the conditions allowed to the conquered – all acts which everywhere else belonged to the popular assembly.
Foreigners, in their relations with Rome, had therefore nothing to do with the people. The Senate alone spoke, and the idea was held out that the people had no power. This was the opinion which a Greek expressed to Flamininus, 'In your country,' he said, 'riches alone govern, and everything else submits to
them.' N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City
(1864, English translation 1956)
I reiterate that in this system (the Roman political system of the late Republic), public office could only be gained by direct election in which all (adult male) citizens, including freed slaves, had the right to vote, and all legislation was by definition the subject of direct popular voting. That being so, it is difficult to see why the Roman Republic should not deserve serious consideration not just as one type of ancient city-state, but as one of a relatively small group of historical examples of political systems that might deserve the label 'democracy'. Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (2002)
31
Luxury and Licence
'I have neither a building nor a vase nor a costly robe nor a high-priced slave or slave-girl. If there is something I have to use, I use it. If there is not, I do without. Anyone may use and enjoy what is theirs, and that is fine by me.' But then Cato goes on, 'They blame me because I do without so many things. But I blame them because they are unable to do without.'
Cato the Censor, in Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.24
The Romans' conquests in Italy, then in Greece, were due partly to their military skill and values, partly to their superior and ever-increasing manpower and their appeal to local upper classes or factions within them. Obedience to Rome seemed the lesser of political evils to people whose standing and property were at risk from their own lower classes or from surrounding barbarian enemies. 'Freedom', by contrast, was late to emerge as a Roman offer to states in Greece.
As Romans and Greeks were thrown into new, closer relationships, a conflict of cultures was necessarily involved. Greeks evidently interpreted offers of 'freedom' in a spirit which Romans, expecting loyalty and obligation, did not. At Rome, meanwhile, increasing exposure to Greek customs greatly enlivened 'traditional' Roman life. By c. 200 bc there were quite a few senators who would have spoken and understood Greek: some modern historians reckon that as many as half were capable of it, though, in my view, that is an overestimate. Rome had been exposed to Greek artists, Greek cults and Greek-speakers for centuries now and her conquests in south Italy had long brought her up against Greek culture. But there are many levels of knowing a language and many degrees of what we call 'Hellenization'. Owning Greek objects and Greek slaves is one thing; thinking in Greek and admiring the heart of Greek culture (wherever we place it) is another.
Certainly, Greek culture had started to make a transforming mark on Latin. From the 240s the Latin language had begun to acquire its own literature, directly modelled on Greek (beginning with the Odyssey).' The first Latin authors reflect the results of Rome's military progress southwards through Italy and beyond: the first Latin playwrights come from the Greek-speaking south including Tarentum; the first historian, the senator Fabius Pictor, was moved to write a history in order to explain the war with Carthage, and he wrote it in Greek, purely for a Greek audience. The great Latin comic dramatist Plautus originated from central Italy (Umbria) and also followed Greek models. Above all, the first Latin epic poet, Ennius, came from the toe of Italy and spoke two languages besides Latin. He wrote in erudite Greek poetic forms and produced a remarkable epic poem, the Annals, which ran from the Trojan War to the triumph of his Roman senatorial patron, Fulvius Nobilior. The triumph was given to Nobilior for conquering Rome's former allies, the Greeks of Aetolia. Ennius could no doubt elaborate on the triumph's occurrence a thousand years after the supposed fall of Troy, which was dated with misplaced learning to the 1180s bc.2
Nonetheless, this poetic literature was all in Latin. The most widely enjoyed, Plautus' comedies, had a strong Latin tone in their settings, even their food, and their roles for freed slaves, which were much more pronounced than in Greece. What sort of 'Greekness' would a Roman senator most relate to? Not to the classical Greekness of an Athenian democrat, philosophizing about difficult questions of knowledge and necessity, accepting equal votes from the peasantry and sighing for the beauty of a young male athlete. Nor to the splendour of a Hellenistic king: Roman ideals could relate more readily to the Spartan ideals of austerity and a 'peer group', but their own formation and pursuit of riches were not at all those of a good Spartiate. There was no neat overlap with any one sort of Greek life. What mattered in Rome's so-called 'Hellenization' was the social and moral context in which Greek ways were received: Romans could collect art, poets and skilled slaves, but they were not made into true Greeks merely by being philhellenes, any more than the francophile Russian nobles of Tolstoy's War and Peace were fundamentally French. In Roman circles, the master-exponents of Greekness were kept socially in their place. Greek poets became only the clients of the Roman rich; the 'talent' from the Greek world brought yet more skills, arts and luxuries to Rome, but they arrived as slaves and war-captives. In this respect, the Roman triumph over Macedon in 167 was seen as a turning point which brought anything from Greek musicians to Greek cooks and skilled prostitutes into Roman society. After the 160s the utilitarian brothels of Plautus' plays (c. 200 bc) would have seemed a poor second to the skills of the new Greek-style courtesans at Rome. Homoerotic 'Greek' sex became more fashionable for Romans, although it was still not to be conducted between free citizens. These years of cultural awakening are fascinating because the new Roman context imposed such challenges on the immigrant Greek artists. In February 166, at games for a victory over the Illyrians, famous Greek flute-players and a chorus of dancers were put up on a temporary stage in the Roman circus. As their artistic routine seemed boring to the Roman spectators, they were told to liven it up by starting a mock battle. The chorus split into two and obliged, whereupon four boxers climbed up onto the stage with trumpeters and horn-players. The waiting tragic actors, brought from Greece, had to change their performance, so much so that the Greek historian Polybius, probably one of the crowd, could not even bring himself to describe it for his serious Greek readership.3
Inevitably, the new fashions and new imports activated traditional Roman fears of 'luxury'. Several laws to limit it are attested within fifty years, altho
ugh they were not the first in Roman history. They fitted with deeper Roman attitudes. Austerity and parsimony were admired in the stories which were told about the receding seventh to fourth centuries bc. Roman fathers were expected to emulate them and educate their sons in restrained conduct. The censors, two magistrates, had acquired the duty of supervising public morals: when the lists of Roman citizens were periodically drawn up, they could place a 'black mark' against anyone whose behaviour had been disgraceful. In the new age of eastern conquest there was so much more to reprehend. 'Luxury' was attacked as 'Asian' and 'eastern', picking up the old stereotypes applied by Greek thinkers and historians from Herodotus onwards. But there was also truth in the stereotypes. The art and architecture, metalwork and cultural skills of the Macedonian and 'Asian' Greek monarchies were vastly more advanced than the crude levels of art and culture which had prevailed at Rome before the 180s. There was also the continuing example of the Ptolemies in Egypt, the luxury of whose kings had a quality of Dionysiac fantasy and royal splendour. At Rome, so hostile to one-man rule, such extravagance was wholly unacceptable.
The Classical World Page 37
