The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  They involved nothing less than extending the Roman conquest of what is now France from the strip of Mediterranean coastland already acquired as far north as the English Channel. In the east Caesar subdued territory up to the west bank of the River Rhine in what is now western Germany. Not that he saw the Channel as a definitive barrier to Roman arms either. He also made two seaborne expeditions against the southern ‘Britanni’. These took him into what is now Hertfordshire.

  Caesar used his writings to showcase his generalship and veil the self-promoting militarism that drove his conquests as accidental imperialism – the enemy were the aggressors. As for the scale of the mayhem, another ancient writer offers seeming facts and figures:

  For although it was not full ten years that he waged war in Gaul, he took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred nations, and fought pitched battles at different times with three million men, of whom he slew one million in hand to hand fighting and took as many more prisoners.

  Military ‘success’ on this scale had political repercussions back in Rome. For one thing it pushed an eclipsed Pompey into the arms of the conservative aristocrats. Alarmed about Caesar’s power and intentions, these men now threatened him with politically motivated prosecution for misconduct in office. Caesar’s response was to follow Sulla’s precedent and invade Italy with his victorious legions.

  The ensuing war took civil strife at Rome to new levels, with theatres of conflict in North Africa and Greece. Pompey now fought for both his own political life and that of the republican system that Sulla had sought to prop up a generation earlier. After following Pompey’s army into Greece, Caesar won a decisive victory at Pharsalus (48 BC). Pompey was killed in flight.

  When Caesar finally returned to Rome after the mopping-up operation, he assumed, like Sulla, the office of dictator. Caesar’s dictatorial style was far more challenging to conservative aristocrats. He acquired his own priest, a political crony called Marcus Antonius, whose duty was to supervise public worship of the dictator as a god-like being. Caesar then showed his determination to cling on to sole power by having his dictatorship extended ‘for perpetuity’. Scenting the emergence of a tyrant, a young aristocrat called Marcus Junius Brutus and his fellow conspirators, intent on restoring what they called liberty, caught Caesar unawares in the senate house and stabbed him to death (44 BC).

  Looking in my old guide book to Egypt I came across the form from Le Lotus Boat inviting comments on my cruise on one of their vessels from Luxor downstream to Dendera, back in the days when the ancient sites along the Nile seemed safe enough to visit. I never filled it in, but would have given high marks to the entertaining and well-informed guide who showed us a wall in the ancient temple at Dendera carved with purely Egyptian images of the then ruler of Egypt making offerings to the gods – the famous Cleopatra.

  This Ptolemaic queen projected a double identity in the long-standing tradition of her royal house. Alongside the image of a pious pharaoh which she carefully cultivated for her Egyptian subjects, Cleopatra was portrayed on coins meant for circulation in the world beyond Egypt in the Greek style, her hair tied back, wearing the cloth band signifying a Macedonian-style monarch in the tradition of Alexander the Great. Whether from the incompetence of the dye-cutters or because she had features – as some people do – which are hard for artists to capture, she looks unrecognizable from one coin issue to the next.

  Cleopatra, a young Roman client-ruler of some importance, not for her power but for her treasury, had been on a visit to Rome when Caesar was murdered. Slipping away by ship, she left behind a capital in uproar. Those who saw themselves as the political heirs of the dead dictator swore revenge on his killers. For one of them, this was seized on as a filial duty: Caesar, with no legitimate son to succeed him, had adopted this would-be chastiser, Octavian, his sister’s grandson, as his heir. This precociously astute nineteen-year-old was now able to raise a private army because Caesar’s veteran soldiers transferred their loyalty to the avenging son.

  An ancient biography of the son defined his political ascent in these terms:

  The civil wars which he waged were five, called by the names of Mutina, Philippi, Perusia, Sicily, and Actium; the first and last of these were against Marcus Antonius, the second against Brutus and Cassius, the third against Lucius Antonius, brother of the triumvir, and the fourth against Sextus Pompeius, son of Gnaeus.

  After Caesar’s death there was no return to senatorial business as usual, whatever his assassins might have hoped, but instead a complete breakdown of the old order. Octavian found himself in immediate rivalry and conflict with the consul Marcus Antonius, Mark Antony as he is better known. The two men then allied in order to pursue Caesar’s assassins, whom they brought to battle and roundly defeated at Philippi in what is now northern Greece (42 BC).

  Together with Caesar’s official deputy at the time of his death, Octavian and Antony now filled the political vacuum by having themselves legally constituted as a three-man junta of so-called ‘triumvirs’. Two and a half centuries later, a Roman historian had this to say about the new horrors that followed:

  Those murders by proscription which Sulla had once indulged in were once more resorted to and the whole city was filled with corpses. Many were killed in their houses, many even in the streets and here and there in the forums and around the temples; the heads of the victims were once more set up on the speaker’s platform and their bodies either allowed to lie where they were, to be devoured by dogs and birds, or else cast into the river.

  Among the victims of this new purge was Cicero, a believer to the end in the old way of politics, and a fiery critic of Antony. Next the triumvirs carved up the empire between them. Antony took the east, which is how he formed what at first was a purely political relationship with the Ptolemaic queen, or rather her treasury. Aided by Cleopatra’s adroitness and personal charms, this developed into a Romano-Egyptian co-rulership based on Alexandria. While she dreamt of reviving the old Ptolemaic greatness in the east, Antony signed over Roman provinces to the queen and tried but failed to win military glory against a hostile empire based in Mesopotamia, the Parthians.

  Back home, Antony’s eastern politics handed Octavian in Italy a propaganda coup. Painting his behaviour as un-Roman, Octavian garnered enough support in Italy to declare war on the Ptolemaic queen. As the powerful ‘Egyptian woman’, she provided plenty of misogynistic ammunition for Antony’s Roman enemies. In 31 BC Octavian’s fleet decisively defeated Antony and Cleopatra’s off the promontory of Actium in north-west Greece. Returning to Alexandria, her Roman lover, followed by the queen, committed suicide. Octavian added Egypt to Rome’s empire, before returning home.

  It could not have been foreseen, but Octavian, a delicate young man, lived for another forty-five years. Chance was therefore one of the historical factors allowing him after his victory to convert Rome from a broken republican system to what was a de facto monarchy. He did this step by step over a long lifetime. How much he made up as he went along, how much he planned from the outset: these are interesting questions and hard to answer.

  More than entrenching himself in a position of supreme power unparalleled in Roman history, he died in his bed and succeeded in passing on his unofficial supremacy to a kinsman, Tiberius. Tiberius did the same on his death. This approach to the problem of how to arrange the transmission of power in an autocracy meant that Octavian had managed to found, in effect, a lineage of rulers. He was one of those individual leaders in history whom luck and personal qualities allowed to fashion a system of power not only new but also lasting. And if it lasted, this must have been because in many ways it went with the grain of the times. Key groups in Roman society were ready for hereditary monarchy.

  For us, a stroke of luck is that Octavian composed a document in middle age which gives his own version of his political career and achievements. To say that this kind of contemporary testament from a ruler is rare in Roman history is an understatement. In of all places
Ankara, modern Turkey’s capital, which sits on top of what was the Roman town of Ancyra, a ruined wall preserves line after line of a long Latin inscription. After the heading, this is how it begins: ‘At the age of nineteen on my own responsibility and at my own expense I raised an army, with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the dominance of a faction.’

  Couched in plain and factual-sounding language, the very first sentence shows that the author is embarking on a self-serving, albeit broadly truthful, version of events. The threatening ‘faction’ was his enemy Antony. In opposing him Octavian claims to be acting to save the republican system. His position throughout the document is to present himself as the servant of the republic rather than a warlord with an appetite for one-man rule.

  He also suggests where much of his political support lay. ‘All Italy’, meaning essentially the descendants of the new citizens of the 80s BC, had supported him against Antony and Cleopatra. He details how he provided for the retirement of his troops and his generous gifts in the established tradition of ‘bread and circuses’ to the proletarian citizens living in Rome – now a world city of over four million, as the author himself records here.

  As he states of one of these staged hunts to the death of wild animals imported from Africa, ‘about 3,500 beasts were destroyed’. He could afford to take these popular liberalities to unprecedented heights thanks to a huge personal fortune swollen by Egyptian booty.

  It is unlikely that these groups cared much if anything about the ‘liberty’ of the republic. For those members of the old aristocracy that did, he claims to have ‘restored’ the republic, and studiedly refuses the office of ‘dictator’, his adoptive father’s undoing. In a nostalgic appeal to the traditional values that Romans associated with their ancestors, he also claims to be leading the way in a ‘back to basics’ campaign: ‘By new laws passed on my proposal I brought back into use many exemplary practices of our ancestors which were disappearing in our time, and in many ways I myself transmitted exemplary practices to posterity for their imitation.’

  In projecting this moral conservatism Octavian (a name he dropped) drew a veil over his own rickety youth (more on this later). He also found a support in his second wife, an aristocrat of old-fashioned virtue. Madrid’s archaeological museum displays a marble statue of a seated Livia Drusilla in the traditional dress of the upper-class Roman wife. Without entirely disguising her biological sex, it has the effect of enveloping her in voluminous fabric from veiled head to feet that peep from beneath floor-length drapes. After the shocking violence and unpredictability of the civil wars, it is almost as if Octavian and Livia sought to embody this much more recent definition of civilization:

  The essence of civilization, as we know, is dullness. In an ultimate analysis, it is only an elaborate invention, or series of inventions for abolishing the fierce passions, the unchastened enjoyments, the awakening dangers, the desperate conflicts, to say all in one word, the excitements of a barbarous age.

  This same Victorian writer also wrote of the ‘magic’ of monarchy, that element of mystery hedging the ruler onto which ‘daylight’ should not be let. In Octavian’s case, the turn towards magic came from the aura of sanctity which he colluded with the Romans themselves in drawing to himself. This began with his acceptance of a title not arrogated but bestowed, as he carefully records, ‘by decree of the senate’. ‘Augustus’ was a Latin adjective connoting someone with a touch of ‘holiness’. In the more forthright Greek world, the Athenians were not alone when they now appointed one of their citizens as ‘priest of the God Augustus’.

  In his moral crusade, Augustus also chose to make a stand on the question – morally vexed for many Romans – about their interaction with the civilization of the Greeks, their neighbours and now their subjects. This process of interaction was pivotal in ensuring that Greek civilization not only survived but flourished under the ensuing centuries of Roman rule. Indeed, Greek civilization made its mark on the cultural life of the Romans on a scale not remotely matched by any of the other cultures of Rome’s multi-cultural empire, to the extent that imperial Rome can be thought of as an amalgam of the two cultures. The next chapter examines more fully the emergence of this ‘Graeco-Roman’ civilization.

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘FIERCE ROME, CAPTIVE’?

  THE LURE OF GREECE

  Around 60 BC an ancient freighter foundered in the treacherous waters off the south-eastern tip of mainland Greece. Two millennia later, fishermen happened upon remnants of its cargo still strewn on the seabed. Divers to the wreck site brought up ancient objects barely recognizable after their long immersion underwater. Only after restorers had done their painstaking work did the nature of the cargo become clearer. This was a treasure-ship of Greek luxury artefacts.

  Divers found many marble statues. They include a fine figure of a boy in a wrestling position. One side of him is a delicate, almost translucent white. Walk round to his other side, and he is grotesquely deformed by centuries of attack from stone-eating organisms. Sculpturally the pièce de resistance is a luminous bronze of a young man, larger than life-size. The style is three centuries older than the date of the shipwreck. When it was loaded on board, this figure was already a prized antique.

  Artworks ancient and modern were not the only cargo. Computer geeks as well as archaeologists have become enthusiastic about the find of a hand-sized lump of corroded bronze with a cogwheel embedded in it. Using twenty-first-century scanning tools, researchers have shown that inside the lump is a mass of interlocking gears. These once controlled dials and pointers on the two faces of an instrument housed in a wooden box.

  This contraption would have faintly resembled an upright mantle clock. Despite modern media hype, it was not a ‘computer’, more a mechanical calculator. When the ancient operator turned its handle, dials and pointers on each face did a job not unlike the printed tables in a modern almanac. They gave out astronomical data along with information about the calendar, such as the day of the year, future eclipses and the position of heavenly bodies in the sky.

  Whoever he was, the maker of this ingenious instrument would have needed great skill and precision to fashion the parts and fit them together. Equally unidentifiable is the Greek mastermind who designed the prototype – a scientific astronomer who could also invent machines. We have already encountered the most famous inventor of this type in Hellenistic Greek times, Archimedes, from the rich city of Syracuse.

  One of his most renowned devices was an astronomical instrument in the form of a celestial sphere with moving parts. When the Romans captured Syracuse in 211 BC, the general in charge supposedly selected for himself this one object from all the available booty. At the time that our ship sank off the island of Antikythera, the other mechanism, this sphere, remained a precious heirloom of the general’s descendants, the noble family of the Claudii Marcelli. They kept it in their town house in Rome, where they would show it to curious visitors.

  The fate of Archimedes’ sphere gives a strong hint as to the destination of our wrecked ship. Before the vessel foundered, the Antikythera mechanism was almost certainly bound for Rome.

  The wreck site offers a watery window into a vast process of cultural transfer. It says much about what the Romans liked about Greek civilization: its arts, but also its scientific know-how, since both these instruments just mentioned modelled the scientific findings of Greek astronomers. By this date, the Greeks knew a great deal about the astronomical observations of the ancient Babylonians. For the first time in the history of classical civilization, we can follow how such a vast and prolonged process of cultural transfer worked in the detail.

  As an imperial race the Romans could, and did, help themselves to the cultural goods of the conquered Greeks. Another archaeological site, this time in Italy itself, suggests what could happen to a cargo like this if it reached the safety of an Italian quayside. This site confirms that the rich and powerful at the topmost level of the Roman
republic held a privileged position in the Roman acquisition and consumption of Greek culture.

  In the years around 40 BC an unknown Roman plutocrat built a palatial villa halfway up the slopes of Mount Vesuvius just outside the town of Herculaneum, in what was then a chic resort area for the Roman super-rich. During the long hot Italian summer, successive owners could enjoy sea views along a vast terraced frontage overlooking the bright blue of the Bay of Naples. They could take their ease in a grand walled garden shaded by colonnades and cooled by a miniature canal. They could enjoy a superb collection of Greek statues dotted about the property, their quality a match for those from the Antikythera wreck. They could order a slave to read to them from one of the Greek scrolls in the villa’s library.

  The eighteenth-century excavators of the site came across hundreds of charred lumps, which at first they mistook for charcoal or wood. They turned out to be two thousand or so papyrus scrolls, preserved by a flow of superheated gas, steam and mud which poured over Herculaneum during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. More so than the sculpture and the architecture, this is the true treasure of the so-called Villa of the Papyri today: the only ancient library to have survived from classical antiquity.

  The library includes what are thought to be the personal books of a Greek philosopher called Philodemus, who hailed from an ancient city in what is now Jordan. He migrated to Rome in the early first century BC in the hope of finding a rich Roman patron (which he did). It is a mystery exactly how his books ended up in the villa. At any rate, one of its Roman owners was clearly an enthusiastic collector of books on Greek philosophy.

  The best way of finding out more about how Romans from this elevated social stratum responded to Greek learning in the second and first centuries BC is to take a further look at the Roman statesman Cicero. His huge legacy of writings – over nine hundred letters alone survive – allows us to reconstruct his education into all things Greek in detail.