The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Hieron seems systematically to have overhauled agriculture in his eastern half of the island. In doing so he had the same hard-nosed aim as the Ptolemies: to maximize the revenues from the chief source of royal taxation, the land. Eventually stored grain from Morgantina and other regional depots would have found its way to the king’s central granary on the offshore island of Ortygia, heart of ancient Syracuse. From here Hieron could dispose of it overseas, by sale or gift.

  In Syracuse a particular challenge for modern tour guides is to make sense of the ancient defences, among the most complicated and most expensive of any Greek city. Their most impressive feature today is a massive fort, built to reinforce the protection of a main gate in the ancient wall circuit. Here visitors can spot what once were state-of-the-art design features like the tower-like masonry emplacements for a battery of stone-lobbing catapults. They can wander what ancient military manuals call ‘secure passages’, underground galleries in other words, allowing defenders to move troops around unseen by besiegers – a stratagem in use in the early twenty-first century among the Islamist defenders of Mosul and Raqqa. None of this had yet been built when the Athenians laid siege to Syracuse in 413 BC. Experts nowadays tend to see the fort – Euryalus was its name – as a work of the third century BC. Hieron among others contributed to these defences. Ancient writers record his installation of a dense array of artillery on the city walls, capable of an extraordinary volume of fire. As at other royal courts of the time, Hieron protected Greek scientific research. He had one of his men of learning, a Syracusan mathematician called Archimedes, make him ‘engines accommodated to all the purposes, offensive and defensive, of a siege’.

  An ancient Greek record of octogenarians includes Hieron, said to have died aged ninety-two. Early in his career this wily survivor had made an alliance with his immediate neighbours, the Carthaginians. They had long ago made good their defeat at Himera in 480 BC, and now controlled all of western Sicily. But Hieron, as a writer of the second century AD put it, almost at once abandoned Carthage because he found himself ‘stronger, and firmer, and more reliable friends’.

  Hieron’s grain diplomacy tracks this new and enduring friendship. In 250 BC he sent grain to a Roman army besieging a Carthaginian stronghold in western Sicily. Thirteen years later, he visited Rome in person, bringing free grain for the citizens. In 216 BC, he sent another large consignment to Rome, and so on. The Roman alliance served Hieron and Syracuse well. ‘He passed most of his life free from war and as if he was holding a festival,’ as one Greek writer put it.

  Within years of his death, Syracuse’s fortunes abruptly changed. To find out why, it is time to return to the affairs of the Romans. By now, Greekness had long ceased to be a monopoly of ethnic Greeks. It had become a marker of a type of cultural civilization attractive to non-Greeks as well. As it turned out, in historical terms the Romans would be by far the most significant of the non-Greek peoples who succumbed to the allure of Greek cultural achievements.

  PART II

  THE ROMANS

  CHAPTER 13

  ‘SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS’

  Any society comprises a union, sometimes broadly consensual, sometimes far less so, of many different groups. A Hellenistic-period tomb in Rome, reopened in 2011 after restoration works, illuminates the values of one of the most powerful of these groups in Roman society during ancient Rome’s republican age. This lasted from the expulsion of the kings to the so-called ‘fall’ of the republic in 30 BC.

  The tomb is an underground complex of corridors cut into the natural tufa of a hill on ancient Rome’s main street of tombs, the via Appia. Niches in the corridors once contained an accumulation over a period of two centuries or so of at least eight sarcophagi of dead members of a single lineage. At the entrance the visitor now sees a modern replica of the earliest of these sarcophagi (the original is in a museum). The deceased’s epitaph was inscribed on the lid: ‘[Lucius Corneli]us Scipio, son of Gnaeus.’ On one of the long sides a descendant some three generations later (around 200 BC) added a fulsome poem of praise for his ancestor:

  Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, Gnaeus’ begotten son, a brave man and wise, whose fine form matched his manly virtue surpassing well, was aedile, consul and censor among you; he took Taurasia and Cisauna, in fact Samnium; he overcame all Lucana and brought hostages therefrom.

  The form of the Roman names is revealing. An Athenian citizen had just the one name. In formal naming contexts, this was coupled with his father’s: ‘Pericles, son of Xanthippus’. The official style of a Roman citizen included not just his own personal name (‘Lucius’) and that of his father (‘Gnaeus’), but also a clan name (‘Cornelius’), and sometimes a hereditary surname (‘Scipio’). This system of naming must have helped Roman males to think of themselves as successive generations of a particular male line. Aristocrats could reinforce this sense of family identity by using the same burial ground over many generations, as the Cornelii Scipiones did.

  Lucius’s epitaph addressed an imaginary readership of fellow Romans. These passers-by were meant to stop, read and value the quality of the deceased as announced here. This Scipio’s incarnation of a certain kind of masculine ethos of civic service is spelt out by some key Roman words.

  Scipio was a fine specimen physically, he was ‘brave’ and possessed ‘manly virtue’ (virtus). He had served the state in three public offices, including those of consul and censor, which were particularly esteemed and fought over. Above all, his later family emphasized his services as a successful general, naming places in central Italy that he was supposed to have captured or subjected on behalf of the state.

  The picture that emerges clearly enough from the remains of this family mausoleum is one of a society in which an aristocratic outlook counted for much. From generation to generation, families of men bearing the same hereditary name aspired to hold the highest magistracies of state, to command armies and to win wars. The males of these families were raised in a moral code familiar in other societies dominated by a warrior aristocracy. This emphasized reputation, glory and masculine excellence, all made manifest in public service. As in the epitaphs of the Scipios, republican Rome’s aristocrats demanded public recognition of these virtues where they had brought benefits to the state.

  The last family member to be buried in the tomb was a woman, thought to have died around 130–120 BC. Her epitaph reads as follows: ‘Paulla Cornelia, daughter of Gnaeus, wife of Hispallus.’ This Paulla Cornelia was a Roman aristocrat about whom nothing more is known. Her family chose to define her posthumously in traditional terms for ancient women of free birth, as one man’s daughter and another’s wife. This effacing style of commemoration, even for a Roman noblewoman, reflects deeply entrenched attitudes in ancient Rome.

  Later Romans celebrated another female of the family of about this time, also a Cornelia, who died around 100 BC. In widowhood, this other Cornelia raised two aristocratic sons, who both achieved a brief prominence in Roman politics. A later writer claimed that she intervened successfully behind the scenes to dissuade the younger, Gaius, to abandon a planned attack on a political enemy.

  In the heated style of Roman politics of the time, another enemy attacked this same son through his mother. We don’t know what he said, but we have the son’s supposed rejoinder: ‘Have you brought forth children as she has done? And yet all Rome knows that she has refrained from the company of men longer than you have?’

  The trading of sexual insults between competing aristocrats was quite typical of political discourse at republican Rome – as earlier it had been in Classical Athens. Here the jibe hinged, not just on the homosexual reputation of its target, but also on the ‘virtues’ of Cornelia. Not only could she vaunt wifely fertility – it is recorded that she had borne twelve children – but also she chose to remain true to her late husband’s memory by not remarrying. Her family relationships with the politically prominent gave her chances to influence public life on rare occasions. Probably it was her aust
ere embodiment of Roman matronhood that gave her the moral authority to do so, even in the eyes of her own son.

  What did these Romans look like? A newish museum in Rome, the Centrale Montemartini, uses a disused power plant to display ancient sculpture amidst the pipes and dials of the machine age. One of these statues is as jarring as the setting: a balding middle-aged man holding two heads, also of balding, middle-aged men. In fact these hand-held heads depict sculptured busts. The statue references an old custom among the Roman aristocracy of displaying realistic ‘masks’ of ancestors in the more public part of their houses. Roman writers record how old families coupled these displays with painted family trees, the names highlighted with garlands.

  Possibly the ‘masks’ were based on casts taken from the subject, in the style of the original Madame Tussaud. At any rate, the custom seems to have fed into what republican Romans of the governing class expected from the sculptors of their portraits.

  With perseverance a visitor to the website of the Museo di Antichità in Turin in northern Italy can bring up an image of its ancient portrait of a middle-aged Julius Caesar. By modern standards the wrinkled forehead, sagging cheeks and receding hairline combine with the stern expression into something unpleasing. In profile, moreover, the top of the head is shown to be anomalously shaped: it has a congenital dip, a condition nowadays called clinocephaly. There are many other examples of what was a definite taste among Rome’s republican nobility for seemingly true-to-life likenesses that relished presenting a harsh and pitilessly authentic face to the world.

  Like their counterparts in other periods and places of history, the aristocracy of the Roman republic was a mixed bag when looked at more closely. The Scipios and the Caesars belonged to a core of supposedly ancient lineages, the patricii, or patricians, who traced their ancestry to the time of the kings and, in some cases, to individual kings. The much later Roman writers of the early history of their city record traditions of social conflict between these privileged patricians and the politically excluded mass of the citizenry, the plebeians or ‘plebs’.

  In their struggle for political equality, the extreme tactic hit upon by the arms-bearing plebs was to decamp en masse from the city:

  . . . they withdrew to the Sacred Mount, which is situated across the River Anio, three miles from the City . . . There, without any leader, they fortified their camp with stockade and trench, and continued quietly, taking nothing but what they required for their subsistence, for several days, neither receiving provocation nor giving any.

  The plebs being the backbone of the early Roman army, these ‘secessions’, as the Romans called them, were something akin to going on strike – an obviously powerful weapon in the rivalry between the two groups. This first secession, dated to 494 BC, wrung from the patricians the right of the plebeians to have two magistrates of their own. The persons of these two annually elected ‘tribunes of the people’ were to be inviolable in any conflict between the plebs and the consuls.

  Ancient Romans believed that popular pressure at around this time also brought about a major change in the safeguarding of the rights of the plebs. Their ancestors in the fifth century BC lived together according to long-established customs which had acquired the character of unofficial laws. Supposedly the plebs successfully agitated for these laws to be written down and displayed in public for all to see – something said to have happened around 450 BC. According to the Roman historian Livy, writing late in the first century BC, it was the stated claim of the ten magistrates charged with this task that they had ‘equalized the rights of all, both the highest and the lowest’. This might have been a rose-tinted view of later times.

  The original inscription, on twelve bronze tablets, is lost, and so is the original language. Modern scholars piece together much of the content from later writings of the Romans which cite, or refer to, the provisions:

  If he has broken a bone of a free man, 300, if of a slave, 150 [asses, Roman coins] are to be the penalty.

  He is not to send to pasture on fruit on another’s land.

  Women are not to mutilate their cheeks or hold a wake for the purposes of holding a funeral.

  As this random sample suggests, these are the archaic rules and regulations of a rustic society. Even if much became obsolete over time, the Romans held great symbolic store by what they came to call the Twelve Tables. Livy could claim that ‘even now they are the fountain-head of all public and private law’.

  Over two centuries or so, the plebeians struggled successfully to win other concessions, including the right to intermarry with patricians and (367 BC) a legal requirement that at least one of the annual consuls should be a plebeian – since the fall of the kings, the consuls had been the two chief annual magistrates at Rome. As a result, the recruitment of families of rich plebeians started to change the governing class.

  By the second century BC there was nothing unusual in the marriage of the patrician Cornelia to a grandee of plebeian ancestry (called Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus). Both came from families in which members had reached the ultimate political prize of holding a consulship. It was this distinction that came to matter most. By the first century BC Romans called descendants of consuls nobiles.

  Helped by its birth rate, one particularly fecund noble family achieved six consulships in two decades (123–102 BC). A Roman playwright of the time who poked fun on stage at leading Romans, rather in the manner of Aristophanes, was said to have included this family among his targets. He insinuated that actual merit played little part in its success, which was down to the procreative power of their loins:

  Naevius long ago composed the following witty and rude verse at the expense of the Metelli. ‘By fate the Metelli are consuls at Rome.’ Then Metellus the consul responded angrily to him with a verse . . . ‘The Metelli will do a bad turn to Naevius the poet’.

  This vignette conjures up a conflicting image of free speech in republican Rome: on the one hand, the ordinary man whose satirical pen deflates the mighty in a way that sounds modern, on the other the haughty magistrate threatening violent reprisals for a personal slight, like a grand seigneur in pre-Revolutionary France.

  In the second century BC a well-informed Greek outsider produced a description of republican Rome’s political system which tries to resolve this seeming conundrum. This system was so finely balanced, he wrote, ‘that no one could say for certain, not even a native Roman, whether the system as a whole was an aristocracy or a democracy or a monarchy’.

  Polybius, the Greek historian in question (he died around 118 BC), provides an account of the system as he understood it to have been in the years shortly before his birth (around 200 BC). The two consuls of the year, he believed, were the king-like element: while in Rome they were ‘masters of everything’, and as commanders-in-chief of the legions in wartime they had power of life and death over all who were under their orders.

  On the other hand, he says, when the consuls were off campaigning (more often than not the case), the Roman constitution seemed to resemble an aristocracy. This took the form of the Senate. This deliberative body of men of property, sitting annually at first, then for life (from the late 300s BC), included many ex-magistrates. It ran the state finances, acted as a court of law for all serious crimes, and received and replied to embassies from foreign states. Modern historians emphasize how senators seem to have monopolized civil, military, judicial and religious posts, not infrequently holding posts in all these categories – so there was no separation of powers as is taken for granted as desirable in western democracies.

  Then again, Polybius states, the ‘people’ played an important part. He meant the mass of Roman citizens summoned formally by a magistrate to a public meeting. In legal cases involving the death penalty they had the final say. They deliberated on peace and war. They also – crucially – elected the executive, the annual magistrates. The haughty Metellus depended on the public vote. Even so, since Roman women, even exalted ladies like Cornelia, were by definition exclud
ed from the vote, this was never a democracy in the modern sense.

  Polybius spared his Greek readers an account of the Byzantine intricacies of these popular assemblies, as I shall spare mine. The two key points to grasp are, first, that there were different types of assembly for different types of business. Second, Roman society tended to think of itself in terms of groups rather than humans in isolation. Citizens rarely voted as individuals at these assemblies but usually in bodies, based on either property class or citizen tribe. Each of these groups voted by majority, one after the other, until an overall majority was reached. The way this system of block votes worked in practice meant that certain sections of the vote were favoured over others – the better-off over the poorer, the ‘home counties’ over the inner city.

  On the other hand, Roman elections were lively affairs in which the citizen groupings exercised choice in a manner best described as, if not necessarily democratic, then at least involving ordinary citizens. This at any rate is the impression given in a short piece of Latin writing that claims to be one man’s advice on electioneering to a brother standing for a consulship in 63 BC. Wherever he obtained his knowledge, its author seems to have found out a great deal about electoral politics at Rome in the mid-first century BC.

  What it makes clear is that rival candidates had to work hard indeed to win votes. Some of their techniques are familiar from elections of more recent times in England, before universal suffrage and modern communications media. A candidate used a network of agents to help drum up support. The importance of the personal touch could not be overstated. The candidate should make himself as accessible as he could: everyone whose vote he needed should have had the chance to meet him. With ordinary people at the hustings, he should remember names and be charming – the ancient equivalent of kissing babies.