The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Before the Roman supremacy, the power of the Etruscans was widely extended both by sea and land. How far it extended over the two seas by which Italy is surrounded like an island is proved by the names, for the nations of Italy call the one the ‘Tuscan Sea,’ from the general designation of the people, and the other the ‘Atriatic,’ from Atria, a Tuscan colony.

  These are the words of the Roman historian Livy, whose writings date from late in the first century BC. The nature of this Etruscan hegemony is hazy to say the least. It was certainly not an empire as such, since the Etruscans themselves were never a centralized power. They remained a federation of twelve small states, albeit one capable of concerted decision-making in ‘foreign affairs’.

  Even if there was no Etruscan ‘empire’ as such, Etruscan warships based on the coastal centres such as Tarquinii were a real threat, and not just to those Greek settlers on Corsica. A bronze helmet found among the ruins of Olympia in 1817 and now on display in the British Museum turns out to be Etruscan-made. The three-line inscription on one side, however, is in Ancient Greek: ‘Hieron [son] of Deinomenes and the Syracusans, [dedicated me] to Zeus, [spoils] of the Tyrrheni [Etruscans] from Cumae.’ Cumae was a Greek settlement on the Bay of Naples. Harassed by Etruscan warships, its people sent envoys appealing for help to the most powerful man in Greek Sicily at this time, Hieron of Syracuse, a brother of Gelon. Hieron agreed, sailed north with his fleet and defeated the Etruscans in a sea-battle off Cumae. This placing of the captured helmet before Greek eyes at Olympia was all of a piece with his family’s other acts of self-advertisement in the religious centres of the Greek mainland. The exact year is known thanks to a later Greek historian: 474 BC.

  With historical hindsight Hieron’s helmet offering signals one of the moments when the candlelight of Etruscan power began to flicker. The River Tiber separated the Etruscans from another people in the patchwork of pre-Greek populations in ancient Italy. Like the Etruscans, these Italic Latini, or Latins, had archaeological roots in the early Iron Age and by the 500s BC had come to see themselves as sharing a common ethnicity. Unlike the Etruscans, however, one of these Latin settlements, some 15 miles upstream, was already lording it over others at the time of Hieron’s helmet offering.

  The jumbled ruins of ancient Rome can dazzle the modern visitor to the Eternal City. They can also baffle, as might be expected of structures piled one on top of another over the twelve centuries or so of classical antiquity. One of the most bewildering corners of the ancient site is the hill that evolved into the Park Avenue of the ancient city, where Roman aristocrats, followed by the emperors, built their residences. Just to look at a modern plan of the ruins is almost to induce dizziness, nowhere more so than on the side of this so-called Palatine Hill – the south-east – overlooking the Colosseum.

  An unassuming modern shelter now protects what archaeologists found here in 1946. The find itself is not even a structure, just a set of man-made holes for wooden posts dug into the bedrock. This is all that is left of a dwelling hut built of twigs and clay, architecturally the diametrical opposite of the much later palaces and temples high above it. It dates from the 700s BC and it excites archaeologists because the much later Romans are known to have carefully preserved several huts like this as tangible links to the stories they told about the origins of their community.

  According to a Greek writer living in Rome shortly before the birth of Christ, he saw one of these huts in what would have been the same general vicinity as the findspot of the post-holes:

  Romulus and Remus lived the life of herdsmen and earned their living with their hands. They lived for the most part on the hills, building huts entirely out of wooden poles and reeds. One of these huts survives even to my own day, preserved on the slope of the Palatine facing the Circus and called the Hut of Romulus. Those in charge of its care preserve its sanctity and resist improvements that would make it more stately. When the hut gets damaged by storm or routine wear, they replicate its earlier appearance as closely as possible.

  Archaeologically the actual hut in question did not survive the 600s BC. But the Romans seem to have retained a memory that their earliest ancestors settled this spot. It is not inconceivable that another such Iron Age abode, patched up so often as to be more a replica than the real thing, was remembered by later Romans as the ‘hut of Romulus’ himself.

  It emerges from this early exercise in heritage management that the Romans cared deeply about their origins. So the particular form taken by the legend of Romulus can come as a surprise. The exposure of Romulus and his twin at birth, and their suckling by a she-wolf: these episodes might seem to have a fittingly legendary flavour. Less so the fratricide and baseness that were to follow.

  After Romulus kills his own brother Remus and founds his new city on the Tiber, he peoples his settlement by proclaiming it an inviolate refuge for anyone on the run. In this way he attracts all the ‘obscure and lowly’ types of the neighbourhood, ‘whether free man or slave’. The Spartan upper crust claimed descent from Heracles, the Athenians from Apollo. The Roman statesman Cicero could characterize the Romans en masse as the ‘dregs of Romulus’. The story is significant because it hard-wired Romans into associating their origins with a tradition of embracing outsiders, as well as giving these origins a populist tinge.

  Another foundation story has a disturbing topicality in the early twenty-first century, since it involved a mass abduction of unmarried girls. Romulus, having attracted males to people Rome, now needed females to ensure the settlement’s biological future. At his instigation, the young males took advantage of the presence in Rome for a religious festival of many families of Sabini, a neighbouring people, to seize their maidens. The girls were then subjected to forced marriage. Once more the Roman historian Livy gives details. Their ‘husbands’, he writes, sought to mitigate this act of mass rape by ‘pleading the irresistible force of their passion – a plea effective beyond all others in appealing to a woman’s nature’.

  Today’s historian needs to ask what purpose was served when Livy chose to dwell on this episode. To a modern mind it might seem to portend the violence and, indeed, misogyny of ancient Roman society. To later Romans themselves listening to Livy’s account read aloud, the treatment of the Sabine girls might have offered another example of how open Romans were to sharing the benefits of their way of life with foreigners. Livy relates how the Roman husbands sought to win over their brides by promising that they would share Roman ‘citizenship’. And more: ‘dearest of all to human nature, they would be the mothers of free men’.

  Not all was ignoble about Rome’s self-confessed origins. Romulus himself was of royal birth, with an ancestry giving the first Romans a very different kind of pedigree. When his forebear – yet again an outsider – arrived on Latin soil with his men, the local ruler was ‘filled with wonder at the renown of the race and the hero’. This was because the newcomer, who settles in Italy, was Aeneas of Troy, an illustrious figure in Homer’s Iliad where he appears as a valiant warrior and a prince of Troy’s ruling house. The Romans, then, could also present themselves as Trojan stock. This lineage shows that the Romans imagined ancient Italy as always having had eastern connections.

  The Romans came to writing their own history late. Livy wrote in the late first century BC, and his Latin narrative is the earliest surviving account by a Roman of Rome’s elder days. The actual first Roman historian, his account now lost, wrote only two centuries earlier. Scholars cannot really say what the Romans knew about their own history when they first cobbled it together: how much they drew on their own oral traditions, how much they borrowed from ancient Greek writers – who had been taking an interest in the Romans since the fifth century BC – and how much they simply made up.

  Some of the earliest details have folkloric elements, such as the exposure of Romulus in a floating basket, Moses-style, and his being suckled by a female animal (a common ancient Near Eastern tale). Others point to the later creation of a backstory against a dearth
of actual fact, such as the founder figure (‘Romulus’) whose name is given to the city that he founds (‘Rome’).

  The later Romans also believed that at first they elected kings to rule them, starting with Romulus, who was followed by a further six. Two of these kings were said to be, again, outsiders, this time Etruscans from nearby Tarquinii. The last, Tarquin the Proud, was banished after his son’s rape of a Roman matron triggered a popular uprising.

  The Romans now opted for republican rule and replaced the king, a monarch, with two annually elected officials, the consuls. In the first century BC the Romans got round to putting dates on these founding events, working backwards from the records of the annual consuls to date Tarquin’s fall, and then guessing – the only word for it – the chronology of the kings and Romulus’s foundation of Rome. The dates arrived at translate into our time-reckoning as 509 BC for the end of Tarquin and 753 BC for the city’s founding.

  The Etruscan connection is interesting. Tarquinii was only 56 miles away. Whatever the truth behind these traditions about Etruscan kings of Rome, it is safe to assume political and cultural contact between the Etruscans in their glory days (the 500s BC) and their Roman neighbours, mediated by the muddy waters of the Tiber.

  A further 12 miles north of Tarquinii are the ruins of Vulci, another Etruscan city. This was the findspot of an imported Athenian pottery jar now in a Munich museum. Dating from the later 500s BC, it shows the Trojan Aeneas in flight from Troy. Archaeologists also find Archaic Greek potsherds, if not complete pots, in Rome’s subsoil. So the Archaic Romans, like their Etruscan neighbours, were exposed to Greek goods and perhaps to Greek ideas.

  As seen, the Romans were important enough by 508 BC for the powerful Carthaginians far away in Africa to bother making a treaty with them. On their side, the Romans aimed to protect what was already a regional dominance. The Carthaginians were to do ‘no wrong’ to the ‘Latins who are [Roman] subjects’. Looking far ahead, here is the germ of the future Roman Empire. Long before, the political self-determination of the Aegean Greek world was threatened by an earlier empire, to which I now turn.

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘LORD OF ALL MEN’?

  THE THREAT OF PERSIA

  Walking in Sultan Ahmet Square, today’s visitor to Istanbul can still admire a monument that was already an antique when Constantine I transferred it from the Greek sanctuary of Delphi to Constantinople, as Istanbul was formerly called. Surviving the city’s long and tumultuous history since, this dusty bronze pillar has remained ever since exactly where the first Christian emperor of Rome placed it seventeen centuries ago.

  When it was first erected at Delphi in about 479 BC, the column was associated with a boastful Greek inscription probably added, illicitly, to the base. This was so self-aggrandizing, in fact, that Greeks of the time erased it almost at once:

  Leader of the Greeks when he conquered the Medes,

  Pausanias set up this monument to Phoebus [Apollo].

  Who were these ‘Medes’? In the Jewish Bible, the ‘real’ ancient Medes turn up in a prophecy as terrifying agents of God’s wrath against the Babylonians:

  Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it. Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb, their eye shall not spare children. And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms . . . shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

  These Medes of the Bible inhabited lands in what is now north-west Iran. Perhaps their fearsome reputation had reached Greeks in early Archaic times. This might explain why ancient Greeks generally tended to merge the Medes with a neighbouring Iranian people who supplanted them in the mid-500s BC as the chief military threat to the Greek world from the east. Greeks knew perfectly well who these Persian newcomers were, but they persisted in diminishing them by calling them ‘Medes’, as in the inscription above.

  In doing so, the Greeks launched a long tradition of viewing the ancient Persians through a veil of unreality. The Hollywood movie 300, released in 2006, portrayed King Xerxes of Persia as beardless, effeminate and decadent, while turning his Spartan adversaries into brawny (and bearded) studs. Here the film-maker’s adaptation of the facts is more than just a matter of names. It denies modern beard-lovers some particularly splendid precursors. Xerxes and other kings of his dynasty sported strikingly long, luxuriant and well-groomed beards in Persian art.

  Ultimately the film channels a negative image of the Persian enemy which the Greeks themselves created after the Persian Wars – or, as they called this conflict, ‘the Median things’. One reason why this great contest between Greeks and Persians deserves its own chapter is because it triggered a ‘Western’ way of seeing ‘the East’ that is still influential today.

  From around 540 BC the Persians under their first three kings, Cyrus the Great, Cambyses and Darius I, built up a huge land empire. The first Chinese emperor would not solder together the unitary state of ‘Chin’ for another three centuries. Stretching from modern Bulgaria to today’s Pakistan, in its heyday the new Persian state had no territorial peer. To create it the Persians used naked aggression. Their aim, to put it bluntly, was to take by force what belonged to others – not just movable property, but the profits that accrued from the permanent subjection of peoples and lands.

  In central Asia, on an ancient and modern route linking the Mesopotamian plain with the highlands of western Iran, the third of these kings, Darius, created a monument to his own glory. Cut into the face of a cliff, for all to see, there was a large relief sculpture of bound captives being either paraded before, or in one case trodden on by, the monarch. Not everyone could have read the long inscription captioning the image, if only because the script is over 300 feet above ground level.

  Although these writings are in three ancient languages of the region, as if communication mattered, this high-up monument has more the feel of a proclamation to eternity. Here is the opening:

  I am Darius, the Great King, king of kings, king of Persia, king of lands, the son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsames, an Achaemenid.

  Darius the King says: ‘My father is Hystaspes; the father of Hystaspes is Arsames; the father of Arsames is Ariaramnes; the father of Ariaramnes is Teispes, the father of Teispes is Achaemenes.’

  Darius the King says: ‘For that reason we are called Achaemenids. From ancient times we are noble men. From ancient times our family has been royal.’

  Darius, one of the greatest of ancient Persia’s kings (ruled 522–486 BC), here emphatically justified his right to the kingship in terms of his membership of a long-established sovereign house with a collective name derived from its notional ancestor: the ‘Achaemenids’. The inscription is an early instance in history of an individual claiming one-man rule on the basis of belonging to a very special family – a dynasty, in modern terms.

  Experts debate whether Darius was in actual fact a born Achaemenid, or whether this vaunted ancestry was a fictional cover-up of what might in fact have been his usurpation of power in the murky years after the death of Cambyses, who had been the legitimate son and heir of Cyrus. Be that as it may, only his male-line descendants, also ‘Achaemenids’, would succeed him. They did so for another 150 years, down to the fall of the empire. So the effort of Darius to ram home the dynastic principle seems to have helped to give stability to the Persian Empire.

  The Persian kings had their own way of imagining this empire. This way was alien to the political thinking of the ancient Greeks. It is on display in the royal burial ground of the Achaemenids in the south-west of modern Iran. At a place called Naqš-i Rustam, three Achaemenid kings commissioned tombs cut into, once more, a steep cliff-face. Each has a sculptured façade repeating the same image, copied from the earliest of these tombs, that of Darius himself.

  Each king stands on a piece of furniture with legs, a platform-like throne. Underneath, as if lifting and moving the throne with the monarch on to
p, are two rows of human figures, with a further two supporting the legs. Each figure is identified by an inscription in Old Persian: ‘This is the Persian’, ‘This is the Armenian’, and so on. Each figure represented a whole people over whom the king claimed to rule.

  Another caption reads: ‘This is the Yauna’. The Persians derived their word for ‘Greeks’ from ‘Ionians’, meaning the Greeks of Asia Minor, who were now Persian subjects. It is hard to imagine a more explicit image of the relationship of dominance claimed by an absolute ruler over his subjects. No wonder that the Greeks thought of the Persian king’s subjects as his ‘slaves’.

  A little over 7 miles south of his eventual resting place, the same Darius started to build a great palace, around which grew up a city. One ancient Greek writer called this city ‘the richest under the sun’. Since excavations on the site and the partial restoration of the palace in modern times, this place has become emblematic of the greatness of ancient Persia.

  When the ill-fated shah of Iran chose to throw a lavish party in 1971, he summoned his guests to a specially constructed tent city here at ruined Persepolis, this being its ancient Greek name: ‘City of the Persians’. Heads of state were wined and dined by a culinary team from Maxim’s, a top Parisian restaurant of the time, and entertained by a pageant comprising thousands of modern Iranian troops dressed up as members of the Achaemenid Empire.

  This ancient royal centre offered ancient visitors further displays of what is best described as a Persian ideology of royal power. Sculptured panels showing bearers of gifts from the peoples of the empire to their ruler adorn processional staircases leading up to what must have been a focal point of the palace. A computer-generated visualization in the British Museum’s Iranian gallery conjures up this palace hub in its ancient pomp: gilded rafters supported by elaborately worked capitals in turn held up by a lofty forest of columns brightly painted in pink and blue.