The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Laws against luxury were not imposed in this period by the people's assemblies so as to curb an extravagant upper class. Rather, members of the Senate (not all of them) brought the proposals forward.4 One often-feared luxury was the excessive entertaining of guests at public banquets. It was indulgent, but it was also a way in which Roman holders of public positions could court too many supporters. Laws also tried to limit the consumption of excessive imports. Of course the laws were contested, or merely ignored, but they belonged in a wider context of concerns. The triumphs from the 180s onwards were occasions for big public feasts, and, as we shall see, for novel 'spectator sports' which provoked rivals' concerns: three times, between 187 and 179, senators tried to limit the money spent on circus-games. They also tried to ban the import of animals for 'hunting' in the arena: a populist tribune frustrated them. Laws also tried to limit bribery and to regulate the stages at which men could hold public offices. Like this political opportunism, luxury could intensify competition within the upper class at a time of exploding opportunities. The crisis of the aristocracies in the Greek city-states during the seventh and sixth centuries bc was being replayed at Rome, but with weapons of a vastly greater scale.

  The supreme Roman voice against luxury and the accompanying tensions was the famous Cato the Elder, fragments of whose Latin writings survive. Cato emphasized his 'parsimony and austerity' and his years of working the land among its 'Sabine' stones.5 But he was certainly no peasant or spokesman for poor farmers: he was from a well-off Italian family. Beginning in 217, Cato's career ran on into 149, peaking in 184 when he served as censor and showed a famous severity even to some of the Roman senators. Posterity would uphold him as the strictest of all traditional Romans, but Cato's traditionalism was the conservatism of an arriviste, a new man made good. The style of his household became legendary. Cato would sometimes retreat to the simple cottage which had formerly been used by the austere, exemplary Curius. There, his wife would suckle children of their slaves so that they would imbibe loyalty to the master with her milk; plain plates and cups were the dinner-service (not the silver and gold cups acquired in new shapes in Greece) and Cato had the unpleasant habit of turning sick or old slaves loose so as not to be a burden to his estate.6 Cato was not opposed to making money: it was a virtue, he believed, for someone to increase his inherited estate.7 Nor did he abhor trade, though he did think it horribly risky. What he loathed was moneylending because it was an 'unnatural' and infamous pursuit.8 He also feared the political effects of ill-gotten gains abroad. For that reason, he spoke against those senators who in 167 bc wished to attack Rome's former ally, the island of Rhodes.9

  It was not that Cato had any fondness at all for Greeks as Greeks. Memorably, his speeches and writings attacked their intellectual pur­suits, their philosophy, their poetry and their doctors. They were the 'most wretched and unruly race',10 championing nakedness and frivolity; their doctors were conspiring to kill off the 'barbarian' Romans. Romans' fashion for Greek examples, Cato said, was dis­graceful, especially as Romans and Italians had heroes in their own past who were just as great. Cato's complaints reflected Rome's increased wave of Greek contact. When the Athenians sent leaders of their philosophy schools to Rome on an embassy in 155 bc, one of them, the sceptic Carneades, pleaded on one day for justice in politics, on the next day for injustice. Cato was so disgusted that he wanted the philosophers to leave Rome at once and return to corrupt their own youth, not the youth at Rome.

  Nonetheless, Rome's youth had been very much taken with these Greeks' cleverness. What Cato opposed was a rapidly rising tide, and he himself had been buoyed up, of course, on its groundswell. He had studied in Athens: his work On Agriculture drew on Greek sources, as did his work Origins, on the beginnings of Italy's peoples and places. He had profited from a basic Greek framework, but nonetheless he detested its frills and excessive cleverness. There was also a one-sidedness in his attitude to Carthage. Cato had served in the Hannibalic War and, when the Carthaginians ceased paying their indemnity for defeat (in 151), there was debate at Rome on what to do to them next. Cato, the Hannibalic veteran, was for destroying Carthage totally. He even emphasized the danger by exhibiting a fresh fig in the Senate which had 'just' been picked in Carthage, as if the place was forty-five minutes away from Rome." But his policy of destruction was feared for a reason which ought to have swayed him: if Rome was left with no foreign enemy to fear, would not 'luxury' and softness proliferate even more? Nonetheless, Carthage was destroyed.

  These sorts of contradiction continued to be posed to traditional Roman ways of thinking by the spread of Roman power abroad. Friendly Greek cities instituted cults of Rome as a goddess and even approached Roman magistrates as if they were like the courtiers or princes whom they knew in their own Greek world of kings. Such personal honours ran flatly against the freedom and equality which the senatorial class prized among its members. As Romans became more imperious, their own social structure was even played back to them by a reluctant subordinate, King Prusias of Bithynia.12 In the 170s Roman envoys came to Prusias' court in north-west Asia, but he cleverly parodied the realities of the situation by dressing and pre­senting himself as a freed ex-slave, a truly Roman sort of dependant. 'You see your freedman, myself,' he told them, 'who wishes to gratify you in everything and imitate what happens among you.' Prusias then travelled to Rome and, brilliantly, went a stage further on entering the Senate. 'Hail, saviour gods,' he greeted them while grovelling in adoration both to the threshold and to the senior senators inside the building. He seemed so utterly despicable that he was given a friendly response. Arguably, the laugh was with Prusias who was ironically parodying the self-image of his arrogant new Roman masters.

  Rebuffs received from Rome could even touch off secondary cul­ture-clashes farther afield. In spring 168 the Seleucid King Antiochus IV at last broke into the rival territory of Egypt's Ptolemies, only to be confronted and halted there by an imperious Roman envoy. Obliged to withdraw, Antiochus staged a festival of his own in Antioch, in delib­erate rivalry of the Roman generals' contemporary celebrations of

  their victory over Macedon. In the new Roman fashion, Antiochus staged a show of wild beasts in combat, but then baffled his guests by waiting on them personally in an ostentatious show of affability dur­ing his gigantic royal banquet.13 A year later, he stopped in Judaea, where he heeded the request of a faction of Jews in Jerusalem; they wished to subdue their opponents and adopt Greek customs while abandoning traditional Jewish practices. Antiochus supported them, as if to work off his anger after his recent rebuff in Egypt by Rome.14 The result was a nationalist uprising by outraged fellow Jews and a bitter war (the 'Maccabean Revolt'). It resulted in a newly powerful Jewish state and a new theology of martyrdom for those Jews who died in the course of it. They were said to have gone directly to Paradise, the first mention of this historically fertile idea.15

  Above all, a culture-clash was lived out by the man to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of Rome's advance from 220 to 146, the last of the great Greek historians, Polybius, a Greek from Megalopolis. He was born into a prominent political family in the Achaean League, but in 167 he was deported to Rome with a thousand others, as a hostage suspected of hostility to the Romans. While a hostage, he befriended important Romans, including the young Scipios (hunting was one important bond with them). Later he travelled widely in Spain and the West, even down the coast of west Africa. Yet again, a fine Greek history was to be written by an exile. Polybius' original plan was to write a history down to 167 bc but he prolonged it because he lived to see the 'troubled times' of Rome's years of domination." He himself played a part in them, by assisting in the very settlement which was imposed by Rome on Greece in 146 bc, after the ruthless destruction of Corinth. Polybius had a difficult role to explain: he had been a 'fellow traveller' and a participator in Roman actions which otherwise he would be expected to have opposed.

  Polybius is the historian in antiquity with the most explicit view of
what historians should be and do. While attacking his predecessors (much to the benefit of our knowledge of them) he emphasizes the value of 'pragmatic history'.17 It is the history of events and actions as they affect cities, peoples and individuals, and it must be written by a 'pragmatic' individual, someone who travels to the sites in question, interviews participants and personally studies documents. Polybius is the declared enemy of library-worms like his learned predecessor Timaeus. There is much of Thucydides in his aims, except that, once again, Thucydides' exclusion of the gods as an explanation of history proved to be too austere for an admirer's simpler mind. In Polybius' view, the defeats of the kings of Macedon and Antiochus IV in one and the same year (168) were a revenge for their predecessors' beastly decision to combine in a pact in c. 2oo bc and meddle against Ptolemy V of Egypt, a child-king at the time. Thucydides would have enjoyed pointing out that this 'revenge' was only a coincidence and that the 'pact' which it supposedly avenged was almost certainly a fiction publicized by the Romans.

  Nonetheless, Polybius searches for explanations of change and is explicit about formulating them. Admittedly, what he makes explicit is less penetrating than what is implicit in Thucydides. It also confronts us in his turgid sort of polytechnic Greek. But his vision across the entire Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria, is wholly to his credit and his accounts of other peoples, landscapes, myths and resources are a fine testimony to a Hellenistic Greek mind.

  His observations of the Romans are particularly important. Here, at last, survive the impressions of an educated Greek who lived at Rome, learned a little Latin and formed friendships with individual upper-class Romans during these fascinating years. In Polybius' his­tories, Greek speakers do castigate Romans and their behaviour as 'barbarian'.18 They are not just 'barbarians' because they are foreign speakers. Polybius also presents Roman customs as foreign, 'theirs', not 'our' Greek way. Romans could be exceptionally savage: 'one can often see,' Polybius wrote, 'in cities taken by the Romans not only the bodies of human beings but dogs cut in half and the severed limbs of other animals.'1'' But Romans were deliberate in their ruthlessness, unlike the stereotype of the 'irrational' barbarian, someone who com­bined savagery and panic. When comparing Romans with peoples other than Greeks, Polybius does not call them barbarians at all.

  Most suggestively, he shares perceptions of contemporary Roman behaviour which were expressed by stern Cato. For Polybius, too, most Romans were madly keen to make money, just as Cato's com­plaints and maxims confirm. Through his Greek education, Polybius prized restraint, patriotism and austere self-control, qualities which were supported by his distorted image of ancient Sparta. In his Roman context, Cato trumpeted the same values. The two men knew each other personally, but the similarity of their professed values was not the result of Polybius' greater intelligence shaping what Cato thought. It was the result of a similar outlook, independently formed. A bridge between their shared values was their fondness for the simple Greek of the classical Athenian, Xenophon, the enemy of luxury, the admirer of bravery and military prowess and the champion of 'moral' life, including the common bond of hunting.

  For Polybius, too, the year 167 was a turning point because of the new wave of 'luxury' which the conquests in Greece released into Rome. The young, he complained, would now pay 'more than a talent' for a boy-lover; similarly, Cato warned the Roman people that they would 'see the change for the worse' in their constitution when 'good-looking boys were being sold for more than the price of fields'.2" Polybius and Cato shared a disapproval of the new 'luxury' and a view that it would contribute to political decline: in his histories, Polybius is concerned to give the gist, where possible, of what his speakers actually said. But unlike Cato, Polybius had a predictive, explanatory theory, the idea that one constitution follows another in a necessary cyclical pattern which is repeated through time. In the year of Cannae, Polybius believed that the Roman constitution had been at its peak. It was not a 'mixed' constitution in his view, one which was blended from the differing elements of oligarchy, democ­racy and so forth. Rather, it was in an oligarchic phase, but held in balance by elements of monarchy and democracy which served as checks against change and degeneration.2' According to Polybius' theory, such change would inevitably occur, linked to changes in the citizens' 'customs' and behaviour: oligarchy would change to democracy, democracy to degenerate mob-rule and then back to mon­archy, the starting point. Polybius continued writing as a very old man: he was said to have died aged eighty-two, in the mid-i20S therefore, from a fall off a horse. His simple theory of Rome's consti­tutional elements owed more to his Greek education and its frame­work than to the Roman reality. Were the Roman consuls really so 'king-like' and where was a democratic role for the 'people' in a full-blooded Greek sense? Like a Greek in India, he allowed his theory to distort his understanding of what he saw and heard. But his predic­tions were to have a particular resonance in the next hundred years for the Rome which he knew as a resident.

  32

  Turbulence at Home and Abroad

  Someone cut off the head of Gaius Gracchus, we are told, and was carrying it, but a friend of Opimius took it off him: he was called Septimuleius. At the beginning of the fighting a proclamation had been made that anyone who brought in Gaius' head . . . would receive its equal weight in gold. So

  Septimuleius stuck Gaius' head on a spear and brought it in to Opimius, and when it was placed on the scales it weighed in at seventeen and two-thirds pounds, for Septimuleius had shown himself a scoundrel in this too and had acted like a rascal: he had taken out Gracchus' brain and filled the head

  with lead. Plutarch, Life of Gaius Gracchus

  Sulla's memorial stands on the Campus Martius and the inscription on it, they say, is one he wrote himself, and the gist of it is that 'none of his friends surpassed him in doing good and none of his enemies in doing harm'.

  Plutarch, Life of Sulla 38

  With Carthage destroyed and Greece cowed, we might have expected the Romans to settle down to a steady domination of the Mediter­ranean. They had removed kings from Macedon for ever; their con­quests in western Asia had left a large hole in the largest Hellenistic empire, that of the Seleucids. They had intrigued decisively in the affairs of the Ptolemaic kings in Egypt: in 155 the young Ptolemy VIII had even drawn up a will bequeathing the entire kingdom to Rome if he failed to produce a legitimate heir. As he was still hardly thirty years old, the 'bequest' was rather hypothetical, and was probably meant only to scare his enemies in Egypt. But it was the first example of a practice which would have a significant future and which later worked to Rome's benefit. The main problem in view was still Spain: in the late 150s a series of campaigns were needed here against insurgents.

  A system of control over Rome's conquests was also forming. Dur­ing the second century bc Romans developed their rule over con­quered peoples by sending out magistrates as governors with standing armies to help them. These individuals became focal points for their subjects' petitions and disputes. As always, many cases gravitated to a new source of justice which had suddenly become accessible in their midst. On the other side, however, the individual governors saw new possibilities of enrichment, and their misconduct was still very loosely regulated. Until the 120s the most they might suffer for 'rapacity' ('extortion') was a ruling that they should repay what they had taken. The new scope for gain abroad would have crucial implications for individuals' capacity to compete for pre-eminence back at Rome.

  Most Roman warfare abroad in the third and second centuries bc had already had economic motives: one obvious result of victory for Roman individuals was ever more slaves and plunder. There was also subsequent access (albeit sometimes through active middlemen) to land, moneylending and assets overseas. Collectively, too, Romans began to receive regular yearly tribute from their conquests. It had begun in Sicily, from 210 onwards, where they had taken over the taxation of previous kings. Then annual tribute was imposed in Spain in the 190s; payments were spread to Greece, Asia a
nd north Africa. After 167 the newly won control of Macedon and its rich mines enabled Romans to abolish the direct tax which had previously been levied on individual Roman citizens in Rome and Italy (the indirect taxes continued). No single uniform system of tax was imposed as yet on all provinces, but from 146 onwards Rome's subjects in north Africa are known to have had to pay a tax on 'land' and also a poll tax. Those two taxes would become the mainstays of Roman taxation in the early Empire: they were mainstays under Hadrian too.

  This new financial strength was confirmed by receipts of booty, fines and war-reparations: surely these gains would allow the Romans

  to sort out some of their social injustices at home? In fact, the years from 146 to 80 bc were to see outbursts of extreme social and political tension in Rome and Italy. The historian Sallust later looked back on the year 146 as the start of a wave of 'disturbances and riots', com­bined with corruption.1 The removal of the external fear of Carthage (he thought) had made things worse. It is also important that the settlement of new colonies in Italy had all but ceased since the 170s: poorer citizens were no longer being sent off from Rome to a new home.

  From the later vantage point of the Emperor Hadrian, the tensions of these years would have seemed only a prelude to others which were even more important, the emergence of Pompey and Julius Caesar in the 70s and 60s, the resulting Civil War and the eventual ending of the free Republic. The later crises therefore will feature at more length here, but for historians, these forerunners (as we now see them) are a fascinating kaleidoscope. Political combinations which would later prove so dangerous are already in evidence, and yet are somehow surmounted. Conquering generals started to enjoy prolonged com­mands abroad and to link up with tribunes in Rome so as to protect their interests at home. In 147 bc the charismatic Scipio Aemilianus was elected directly to a consulship without any previous job as a magistrate and was then elected to a second consulship, of dubious legality. Populists started to take proposals directly to the people to turn them straight into law without approval from the Senate; in reply, political reformers were killed by senatorial opponents in the centre of Rome. In the 80s there was to be civil war for the first time in Italy and a disgruntled patrician would actually march on Rome.