The Story of Greece and Rome
Page 23
Apollonius was what now might be called a technocrat, a member of a technically skilled elite. As well as ordinary soldiers, this was the other type of migrant from Greek lands whom the Ptolemies and Seleucids sought to attract. These Greeks had the education and know-how to manage an economy, as well as to supervise production of strategic necessities, especially the paraphernalia of war. To help entice such Greeks to emigrate, in turn these early kings sought to present a cultured face to the old Aegean world. As rivals, as it were, for the same hands, each royal lineage sought to create the most brilliant royal capital.
Alexander founded only one city in the eastern Mediterranean, Alexandria in Egypt. This is now a rather dilapidated place of faded glories since Egypt’s General Nasser ‘encouraged’ its Greek population to leave after 1952. Those Greeks were the remnants of a Greek presence in the city stretching back to the first settlers under Alexander, whose statue still adorned the forlorn premises of the old Greek school when I visited in 1995. The second and third Ptolemies deliberately promoted what was then still a young city as a capital of culture, of the Greek – meaning more or less the Athenian – kind.
Like that of Roman London, Alexandria’s ancient past is buried beneath centuries of continuous occupation. There is little now to see apart from underground cemeteries. I remember in one of these tombs being struck by a Greek wall painting of an olive tree, its fruit a staple of Greek life which the incomers must have yearned to cultivate in their new home. In choosing the site, Alexander may have mainly had in mind the potential for a major Mediterranean harbour, one linked by natural waterways to the Egyptian interior. He would have had imports and exports in mind, and the duties that he could levy on these goods.
For the ancient city’s lost architectural splendours we rely now mainly on Greek writings. A Greek geographical writer from the Black Sea region who lived in Alexandria just after the death of the last Ptolemaic ruler in 30 BC has this to say:
And the city contains most beautiful public precincts and also the royal palaces, which constitute one-fourth or even one-third of the whole circuit of the city; for just as each of the kings, from love of splendour, was wont to add some adornment to the public monuments, so also he would invest himself at his own expense with a residence, in addition to those already built.
The early Ptolemies also invested heavily in intellectual capital. Ptolemy I, Alexander’s friend, established what is best described as a state-funded institute for advanced studies: ‘The Museum is also a part of the royal palaces; it has a public walk, a portico with seats, and a large house, in which is the common mess-hall of the men of learning who share the Museum.’
To complement this institution of the ‘Museum’ the Ptolemies started to amass a library which aspired to contain the best of Greek writings up to that time. In the mid-200s BC one of Alexandria’s Greek men of learning, Callimachus, produced what must have been one of the first-ever works of its kind, a catalogue of this library.
In 120 books, this was a pioneering exercise in what nowadays is called bibliography, the systematic description of books, arranged by subject matter. The overall heading gives in effect the mission statement of the library: ‘Tables of Those Who Were Outstanding in Every Phase of Culture and Their Writings’. An academic myself, I cannot resist quoting this tetchy fault-finding by a Greek scholar two centuries later:
Seeing at once that neither Callimachus nor the grammarians of Pergamum [a rival library] had written accurately about him [Dinarchus, an Athenian orator and speechwriter], moreover that they had done no research on him and had missed the mark in reference to his most outstanding works.
With such facilities, the Alexandrian scholars produced groundbreaking research, with outcomes still with us today. They produced the first standard editions of Homer. The scholars compared different written versions of the two poems, evaluated the divergences, and produced corrected editions. Copied and recopied over the centuries, these form the basis for today’s canonical texts of the original Homeric Greek.
There was also a dark side to the inquiries of the Alexandrian intelligentsia, to judge from this claim by a Roman doctor:
Herophilus and Erasistratus did this [anatomical study of human bodies] in by far the best way when they cut open live criminals they received out of prison from the kings and, while breath still remained in these bodies, they inspected those parts which nature had previously kept enclosed.
These two Greeks worked under royal patronage at Alexandria as doctors and medical researchers. Apologists for the ancient Greeks have naturally disliked this unwelcome evidence for the inhumane practice of human vivisection. If true, as is generally accepted nowadays, the criminals handed over by the Ptolemies to their scientists would certainly have been non-Greek and most probably native Egyptians, whom at least some of the Graeco-Macedonian settler class tended to see, and treat, as inferiors.
The existence of such colonial attitudes is suggested in a Greek letter preserved on a papyrus from Egypt. In it an indigenous employee in royal service complains of maltreatment:
They have treated me with contempt because I am a barbarian. I therefore request you, if you please, to order them to let me have what is owed to me and in future to pay me regularly, so that I do not die of hunger because I do not speak (or act) like a Greek.
Of course this might be a false charge of racism by a vexatious complainant and a single document, revelatory though this one is, hardly does justice to a complicated story of social and cultural interaction between settlers and settled, which modern experts are still trying to piece together. As in Asia there were mixed marriages, enough of them for a Roman writer of the later first century BC to record a claim that ‘the Macedonians who hold Alexandria in Egypt . . . have degenerated into . . . Egyptians’. Clearly, this is not an unprejudiced opinion.
In 2001 the British Museum put on temporary display a colossal granite statue found in the shallow seas off modern Alexandria. It shows a second-century BC ruler of the Ptolemaic lineage in the traditional pose and costume of a pharaoh, complete with a headdress of the kind worn by Tutankhamun in the famous gold mask from his tomb.
So, in time, cultural interaction between the royal court and Egyptian culture hybridized the Ptolemaic royal image, once purely Greek. Presumably some contemporary viewers might have seen this statue as a Ptolemaic homage to the ancient civilization of Egypt. Archaeologists think that it stood in front of the lighthouse at the entrance to Alexandria’s port: in full view of everyone coming or going by sea.
That complaint of maltreatment dates about a decade before the end of the long reign of the second Ptolemy (282–246 BC), the son who succeeded Alexander’s childhood friend, Ptolemy I, in a successful transmission of regal power from the founder to his progeny. A striking feature of the son’s rule was his queen. Five centuries later, for one Greek writer, she had still not shaken off her aura of scandal: ‘Ptolemy was in love with his sister Arsinoe, and married her, flat contrary to the traditions of Macedonia, but agreeably to those of his Egyptian subjects.’
This marriage turned out to be the first of a series of full-sibling marriages among the Ptolemies. Greek writers thought that the Ptolemies were copying the Egyptian pharaohs of old. Ptolemy and Arsinoe consummated their incestuous marriage; their son succeeded his father as king. The Ptolemies like all ruling lineages gave prominence to royal women, in the last analysis because the transmission of hereditary power depended on the female womb. Since a sister’s children were potential heirs, Ptolemy had kept his inheritance united by marrying Arsinoe. This, rather than the supposed practices of Egypt’s former rulers, may be the real reason for the incestuous matches of the Ptolemies.
Arsinoe is a significant historical figure in her own right. Another text in the treasure trove of ancient documents on stone that is the Epigraphical Museum in Athens makes an extraordinary reference to her political influence over her brother-husband. It records a motion passed by the Athenian citizen assembly in
266 BC. This mentions that Ptolemy in the treatment of mainland Greece ‘followed the policies of his ancestors and of his sister’.
What lay behind this reference is not really understood, but it makes history as the first open acknowledgement in a public document of the power of a Macedonian princess to influence state policy. In Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, Charmian describes her royal mistress’s suicide in 30 BC as a deed ‘well done and fitting for a princess descended of so many royal kings’. She might have added ‘and royal queens’. These included Arsinoe and, very probably, the mother of this Cleopatra, the famous queen who was the last of the Ptolemaic lineage to rule in Egypt.
The royal palaces of Alexandria sank beneath the sea in the early Middle Ages, along with other ancient traces of Ptolemaic Alexandria’s glories. To get an impression of the dazzling effects that Hellenistic rulers sought to create when they adorned their capitals, today’s most rewarding archaeological site is in north-western Turkey.
Here a late-coming ruling family of Greek-speaking generalissimos took advantage of Seleucid difficulties in the mid-200s BC to establish themselves as independent rulers. They based themselves on a spectacular natural feature – a rearing massif of andesite rock which very obviously makes a natural fortress to anyone who sets eyes on it. Pergamum was the ancient name of this place.
The ancients called this nouveau lineage the Attalidae, after Attalus I, who ruled from 241 to 197 BC. For security the rulers established their palace quarter on the summit of the massif. This contained not just royal buildings, but sacred precincts, a library and a group of well-built granaries. Today’s visitor walking through the debris of huge man-made terraces and the monuments that stood on them can sense the scale of this ancient undertaking, and enjoy the commanding views which made the pristine architecture visible from far and wide.
The museums in Berlin where many finds by the German excavators are housed hint at the stylish luxury of the royal court here. From one of the palaces, now reduced to stubs of walls, comes a fragment from a floor surface made of cubes of coloured stone. A skilled artist has handled them like paint to produce a brightly coloured image of a screeching bird from a species nowadays as familiar to Londoners, thanks to escaped pets, as it was once to Alexander’s troops as they marched through Central Asia. In all the brilliance of its green, blue and red plumage, here we have a mosaic of an Asian parakeet.
Another archaeological find, of an altogether different order, has been hailed as ‘one of the finest works in the history of world art’. On site you can still visit its huge footprint of 380 square feet or so. With permission from the then Ottoman sultan, the German archaeologists crated up the marble remnants for partial reassembly in a Berlin museum. Here visitors see something extravagant, fantastic even: a majestic flight of steps mounting a podium, round the outside of which runs a sculptured frieze over 7 feet high writhing with men and women in combat.
The latest theory is that this dramatic structure was meant to represent the heavenly palace of the king of the gods, Zeus. As you mounted the steps, flanked on both sides by the mêlée, the fighting would have seemed to continue to heaven’s very portals. This battle was a mythical near-catastrophe, the assault on Zeus and his fellow Olympians by a primitive race of super-strong monsters, the Giants. In the end Zeus the almighty, here a magnificent figure who floors his assailants, prevails.
For the Pergamene people of the time, the meaning of the allegory was probably not in doubt. The bestial assailants stood for a strange people from the north who threatened the Aegean Greeks for a century or so. An ancient account of their attack on a town in central Greece in 279 BC conveys the terror inspired by this new foe: ‘every male they put to the sword, and there were butchered old men equally with children at their mothers’ breast. The more plump of these . . . babes the Gauls killed, drinking their blood and eating their flesh . . .’
Greek and Roman writers called the highly mobile peoples in central Europe by various names. A year after the descent on mainland Greece, a large group of these Gauls or Celts managed to cross the Dardanelles into Asia Minor. Much later, contained in what is now the region around Ankara and abandoning their marauding lifestyle, their descendants became the Galatians of the New Testament.
In earlier days, Attalus I and his son and successor, Eumenes II, had earned the gratitude of the settled populations of ancient Turkey’s western seaboard by meeting, and defeating, these Gauls in battle. In fact it was his share of these victories which gave Attalus I the confidence to assume the Greek title of king, with its implied parity of status with the pre-existing kings of Macedonian stock. Eumenes II (ruled 197–158 BC) commissioned the great monument, which functioned as a giant open-air altar. Viewers could draw their own conclusions about who among the sculptured combatants stood for the Pergamene king.
Some scholars think that the Pergamene kings sought to pose as protectors from ‘barbarians’, not just of their region, but of a more generalized ‘Greek identity’. Either the father or the son set up an offering of statues of defeated Gauls on the Athenian Acropolis. This is sometimes read as an attempt by an Attalid king to make the analogy between Attalid victories against the Celts and the famous Greek successes against the Persians. The Acropolis already displayed various mementoes of these Persian Wars, such as the supposed chair from which an incredulous Xerxes had watched the destruction of his fleet at Salamis.
It seems unlikely that either the Attalids or the older royal lineages, any more than Alexander himself, tried to spread the Greek way of life for its own sake in their domains. Be that as it may, in this Hellenistic world, dominated politically and culturally by Greek-speaking royal courts, an Egyptian or Asiatic who wanted to get on in life could see for himself the direction of cultural travel.
Learning to speak Greek was the key starting point of any attempt to claim a Greek identity. Some ethnic Greeks were now coming to think that the essence of Greekness was a Greek education. To pass as culturally Greek meant mastering the language. In turn the language itself slowly evolved in a way that eased its spread among an increasingly diverse population. A standard Greek, simpler to use in real life, now started to overtake the old dialects.
The pace of change was slow and uneven. To judge from their inscriptions, the Spartans held on to some of their Doric brogue as late as the first century BC. In the next century, the educated Greek-speakers of Near Eastern origin who composed the Christian Gospels couched them in the so-called ‘common language’.
As well as a Hellenistic East, there was a Hellenistic West. In 2015 I found myself on an archaeological site in northern Sicily paying close attention to an information panel explaining the mysterious design on an ancient mosaic floor in front of me. It turned out that the criss-crossing curves framing a much smaller sphere at the centre are a unique ancient depiction of a Greek astronomical instrument.
The armillary sphere was a three-dimensional model of the heavens. As here, it had a ball at its centre standing for the earth, encased by a framework of bronze rings representing the main motions of the heavenly bodies around it (as we now know but the Greeks did not, these in fact rotate around the sun).
The Greek astronomers who invented the prototype lived and worked in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BC. Nothing could show more directly the fascination of the post-Alexander Greek world with scientific gadgets, or the advances of Greek astronomers of the time, or the learned culture that the Hellenistic Sicilians shared in common with the kingdom of the Ptolemies. As ever, these two regions were netted together by ancient mariners plying the coast whenever they could, the open sea if needs must.
The ancient house where I came across this mosaic was built in the Greek manner – rooms arranged round all four sides of a square courtyard framed by colonnades of Ionic columns. Running the length of one of these colonnades beneath the floor, archaeologists found an elongated, bath-shaped, cistern. This was a Phoenician, not a Greek, type of water-tank.
By then the last great flowering of ancient Sicily had already been and gone. In the previous century, a Greek royal court flourished on the island, one to rival those of the east in riches and cultural patronage. Hieron II of Syracuse (about 271 to 216 BC) was the latest of Greek Sicily’s many strongmen. His kingship was typically Hellenistic in its military origins. A successful general, he used the prestige of his victory over a rampaging band of Italian mercenaries to have himself declared king by a grateful population.
In Syracuse itself, Hieron’s memory is perhaps most tangible in the Greek theatre. This magnet for today’s tourists already existed in Hieron’s time, but the king enlarged the seating capacity – what you see today is thought to be his work. On the back of the horizontal gangway halfway up the auditorium, a series of inscriptions in large Greek letters preserves the royal names which he gave to the different wedges of the upper level of seats. Still clearly legible is the labelling for the wedge ‘of Queen Philistis’. She was a Syracusan noblewoman who brought Hieron the support of the city’s old Greek families.
Major public works of this sort presuppose a well-supplied treasury. Some 75 miles away, on the western edge of Hieron’s former domain, is the archaeological site of ancient Morgantina, met with already. Here the American excavators have identified two granaries erected in Hieron’s time. The better preserved is a massive structure over 300 feet long, built of sturdy masonry and with buttresses as if to withstand the pressure of grain piled against the walls.
Archaeologists suspect that Hieron built these granaries to stockpile local grain levied as a tax in kind from his subjects here. They base these suspicions on the allusions in much later Roman writings to something called the Law of Hieron. This lost document seems to have laid down Hieron’s rules for collecting taxes levied on agriculture. Hieron demanded a tenth of the harvest. At the threshing floor, piled with the harvested sheaves, tax collector and farmer reached, according to one scholar’s perhaps rather rosy picture, a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ over how much the government could take.