The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  As a young knight in his twenties, he left Rome to study in the most prestigious centres of learning of the day. These were in the Greek world to the east. Cicero learnt Greek philosophy and the Greek arts of public speaking at the feet of masters in these subjects in Athens and on the island of Rhodes. Cicero would have had to learn the language. He not only spoke Greek fluently but he also could read the learned writings of the Greeks. This was a challenging task in the first century BC, by which time, as seen earlier, written Greek was increasingly remote from the living tongue.

  Preening public figure he may have been, but Cicero possessed a formidable mind. He had an intellectual’s passion for Greek higher learning. He immersed himself in Greek studies – far more so than the run of rich Roman villa owners. As a refuge from the increasing stress and dangers of Roman politics in his lifetime, he started to channel his Greek studies into learned treatises. He was a gifted writer of Latin. He used this talent to try to popularize the difficult subject of Greek philosophy for Romans of his class. The aim was not to compete in intellectual originality with the Greek masters, but to pick out the more useful and relevant bits for practical Romans. Whether this amounted to homage or appropriation is a moot point.

  Cicero captures a very Roman attitude to the cultural superiority of the Greeks. He saw a patriotic challenge in proving that Latin was up to the task of rendering the subtle ideas of Greek men of learning, despite its smaller vocabulary. He claimed that his mother tongue – at least sometimes – was actually superior. The argument – again this was typically Roman – ran on moral grounds. For instance, he pointed to the Latin word for a common meal, convivium. This placed the emphasis on sociability (hence our word ‘convivial’), whereas the Greek equivalent, symposion, meant something more lowering – a drinking party.

  In today’s age of increasing free-for-all in the matter of language, with an average of a thousand words added yearly to the Oxford English Dictionary, the idea that words intrinsically reveal a society’s morality may seem old-fashioned. In this respect Rome revealed herself as intensely moral, a characteristic that we run up against time and again, despite, or because of, ancient Rome’s modern-day reputation for stupendous excess.

  In Cicero’s education, Moses went to the mountain. The reverse was also true in this complicated picture of what was not just cultural transfer but cultural exchange. The Greek philosopher Philodemus, he of the Herculaneum library, came in person to Rome to find buyers for his expertise. Philodemus was a follower of the Greek master philosopher Epicurus. Epicurean teachings in favour of pleasure proved tempting for a young nobleman called Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. Later the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, this Piso is the preferred candidate of some scholars for the unknown proprietor of the Villa of the Papyri.

  Young Piso and Philodemus became inseparable. Once the philosopher penned a Greek poem (it survives) which invites his Roman friend to his ‘humble abode’ to share a gourmet dinner of ‘sow’s udders and wine from Chios’. Philodemus sounds rather like a pet don serving up philosophy-lite to a high-living patron. The poem also highlights the bilingual cosiness by this date – around 70 BC – of Roman grandees and the Greek intellectuals who flocked to the capital in search of their patronage.

  The Roman assimilation of Greek civilization was not just appropriation. It also provided opportunities for Greeks themselves to sell their cultural capital to their new masters. In the second and first centuries BC, not only Greek artefacts and ideas, but also Greeks themselves, were on the move to Rome. By the time of the birth of Jesus, Rome had become the new capital of Greek culture, succeeding Alexandria.

  It is hard to overestimate just how much eloquence defined Roman society. Under the republic, as we saw, the capacity to speak well was essential above all for members of the Roman political class, whether a Gracchus or a Cicero. They routinely delivered speeches before large audiences of fellow citizens at trials, at popular meetings, and in the Senate.

  As seen earlier, the ancient Greeks were the first society to believe that public speaking was teachable. Style, performance, subject matter, the state of mind of the audience and how to appeal to it: clever minds analysed these things, broke them down, produced manuals, gave classes. Romans started to think about how to apply this Greek expertise to public speaking in their own language. In the second century BC professional teachers of the Greek art of public speaking (‘rhetoric’) began to set up shop in Rome.

  For Roman men, much was at stake here. ‘There is no index of character so sure as the voice.’ Modern research supports this dictum of Benjamin Disraeli: consciously or not, listeners today judge speech for trustworthiness, competence, masculinity and so on. Long before, the Romans developed their own approach to speech personality.

  An orator embarking on the grave business of persuasion in the civic arena should be a ‘good man’ in the Roman moral sense. This ideal had the considerable weight behind it of a stern Roman statesman called Cato the Elder (died 149 BC). His phrase, ‘the good man skilled in speaking’, resonated with Romans for centuries to come. How the Roman orator spoke showed both his ‘goodness’ and so – since the two were inextricably linked in Roman thinking – his ‘manliness’.

  An outstanding speaker himself, Cicero took up his pen on behalf of Roman oratory as well. In his high-minded Roman way he wanted to promote the moral dimension to public utterance in Latin. He believed that a good speaker needed to be something of a philosopher too, since philosophy – in the absence of religious teachings on morality – offered Romans, like Greeks, the best self-help to becoming a better person.

  Cicero became embroiled in a debate at Rome about the best Greek models of speaking technique. The Greek civilization of Asia Minor – modern Turkey – dominated Greek oratory in the second and for much of the first century BC. As seen, Rome’s most dangerous enemy in the first century BC, king Mithradates, also held court in Asia Minor, where he found anti-Roman allies among the Greek-speaking citizenry of the cities on the west coast. It was no coincidence that by the mid-first century BC, in the bear pit of Roman politics, orating in an ‘Asian’ style had become a stick with which to attack an opponent. The great Cicero himself was not immune from this charge.

  In reaction, a group of well-bred young Romans took to calling themselves Attics or ‘men of Attica’, as the countryside surrounding Athens is still known. Seeking to distance themselves from the ‘Asian’ technique, these oratorical enthusiasts claimed to be modelling their speech on the speakers of ancient Athens. Critics dismissed the rhetoric of the ‘Asians’ as flowery; Cicero found the manner of the ‘Attics’ rather dry. With no voice recordings, it is well nigh impossible to judge the essence of these contrasting styles. As today, their impact on listeners must have depended on cultural attitudes as well as on technique.

  One thing is clear. In the end, Romans favoured the idea that the best public speaking should be modelled on the ancient Athenians. At the close of the first century AD, the oratory professor who tutored the young men of the emperor Domitian’s family opined that ‘to speak [Latin] in the Attic way is to speak in the best way’.

  Romans harboured negative stereotypes about contemporary Greeks considered en masse: they talked too much, they were unwarlike, they were pederasts, they were wedded to luxury; they were not real men. Such stereotyping of subject peoples is not uncommon in the relations of dominance and submission at the heart of many empires.

  Romans found it easier to admire long-dead Greeks, especially the high-achieving citizens of ancient Athens and Sparta. These were states, after all, which, like Rome, were not just Europe-based but had won glory on the battlefield (the Persian Wars) and imposed their rule on others (the Athenian and Spartan empires). Many Romans could relate to this Greek achievement of ‘glory in war and command over others’, as Cicero once put it.

  Roman public speakers particularly revered the oratory of Demosthenes (died 322 BC). As seen, he was the Athenian statesman who made spee
ch after speech urging his countrymen to resist Philip of Macedon. More than fifty Roman-period portraits of Demosthenes attest to his popularity with Romans. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes its own example as showing the great man in a ‘characteristically harsh, unhappy yet determined expression’. This portrait perhaps captures something of the ‘mood music’ of upper-class Romans when they gave speeches in what they thought was the ‘Attic’ manner.

  Contradictory attitudes among Romans towards Greek culture made leanings in that direction something of a guilty pleasure among republican Rome’s upper class. Romans from the great families preferred to indulge this pleasure privately. Away from prying eyes in a suburban villa, surrounded by Greek-speaking attendants and Greek luxuries, they might even energize their ‘inner Greek’ by throwing on a Greek-style mantle. For public appearances in the capital, however, they took care to envelop themselves in the national costume of the Roman male, the voluminous toga.

  The traditional elite – the senators in Rome – enjoyed the lion’s share of all this imported Greek culture in the last two centuries BC. As so often with expensive luxuries, in time the nouveaux riches lower down the Roman social pyramid started to want these symbols of wealth and status too. One of Cicero’s surviving courtroom speeches depicts an ex-slave of the dictator Sulla (died 78 BC) living in a house crammed with costly Greek goods, including some of the renowned bronzes originating from the lately destroyed Greek city of Corinth.

  Rome’s upwardly mobile had a particular penchant for these bronze totems of conspicuous consumption, prized for the distinctive pale hue of their metal alloy. A miniature donkey of Corinthian bronze, with panniers holding olives, graced the table of the most famous Roman parvenu of them all, the Gatsby-like ex-slave Trimalchio, one of the colourful characters in the Roman novel usually known as the Satyricon, authored in the mid-first century AD.

  The urban poor of republican Rome may only have seen such Greek collectibles from afar, when they craned their necks at the parade of booty in the triumph of a Roman general back from the east, such as that of Flamininus. The Greek civilization of southern Italy and the eastern Mediterranean also seeped into their lives in other types of Roman show.

  Broadly speaking, the Romans learnt how to write and stage plays from the Greeks. The first Roman playwright to make a Latin adaptation of a Greek play lived in the third century BC. For the next century or so Romans flocked to watch popular comedies based on Greek originals which Roman magistrates commissioned for performance on festival days. The texts of some twenty-six of these plays survive. They are Greek-style situation comedies full of songs – so musicals, really. Or panto even, if they really did deploy – as one scholar suggests – the painfully obvious joke which gets the audience laughing, or rather groaning.

  In the surviving plays the humorous plots can seem harmless and even familiar to a modern ear, until, that is, they become desperately inappropriate. So (in one play) a youth disguises himself as a eunuch in order to befriend a girl he adores from afar . . . then rapes her. This particular twist cannot be blamed on the Roman adaptor. The ancients assigned the invention of comic ‘rapes of maidens’ to a playwright of two centuries earlier – a Greek.

  Roman theatregoers sat and watched these crowd-pleasers, as well as tragedies based on Greek myths, from temporary wooden stands. The presiding magistrate would have these specially erected; afterwards, he would have them taken down. In the heyday of the comic playwrights (second century BC), the aristocrats whose fierce rivalries drove public building in Rome did not provide their city with what at that date was standard civic kit in even a middling Greek town: a fine stone theatre.

  In the mid-century workmen did actually start to build a stone theatre in the city of Rome. An influential nobleman – a member of the Scipio family – then stood up in the Senate and denounced Greek-style theatregoing as immoral, and therefore un-Roman. He carried the day: the masons ended up having to demolish their own handiwork. Roman attitudes to Greek cultural sophistication never entirely lost this ambivalent edge.

  In the second century BC the urban centre of the expanding Roman Empire did not yet look the part. Over in the southern Balkans the anti-Roman courtiers of Philip V of Macedon, who died in 179 BC, sneered that the city of Rome lacked fine buildings. On Rome’s doorstep, the cities of her Italian allies could look far more impressive, as with lofty Praeneste, modern Palestrina.

  Rome would have to wait a long time for anything like this. The rivalries among the senators discouraged cooperation around grands projets. Individual nobles were keen to gain credit with gods and voters for public buildings in a Hellenistic Greek style, like the marble rotunda in the cattle market encountered in an earlier chapter. However, such fine buildings were put up piecemeal. There was no master plan, as there was in the planned cities of the Greek world.

  Ordinary Romans watched their urban space become more Greek in other ways. A generation after Philip V’s death, Romans could inspect at their leisure what had once been the most famous artwork in Macedonia – now displayed in Rome. Around 146 BC, the Roman general whose job it was to mop up after Rome’s toppling of Philip’s dynasty had hauled off as booty a group of at least twenty-five bronze figures set up by the great Alexander himself in the Macedonian ‘national’ sanctuary. Back in the capital, the general built two new temples and put the statues on permanent public view there.

  As an earlier chapter noted, in the last two centuries BC many victorious generals decorated the city of Rome in this way. Did contemplation of these objects teach the Roman plebs to appreciate Greek art? It is easier to believe that sight of them promoted ‘national’ pride. As for the overpowered, there is the poignant tale of Greek visitors in the early first century BC who recognized some of their stolen statues on show in the Roman Forum. They promptly burst into tears.

  After the civil wars and his capture of autocratic power, the victorious Octavian, soon to be Augustus, took on a huge task of ‘national’ restoration. In this exceptional political atmosphere, Augustus and his political helpers turned to what the twentieth century would call ‘hidden persuaders’ on a scale unprecedented in Roman politics.

  This technique may sound, and indeed was, rather modern. Techniques of manipulation formed the core of the rhetoric lessons that upper-class Romans learnt as young men. Like other ancient societies, Romans also understood, somehow, the power of symbols: otherwise, why all those phallic plaques and amulets protecting Roman homes and persons?

  As the Romans themselves observed, an absolute monarch makes his decisions in secret. We can only guess why Augustus commissioned a crowd of fifty statues of mythical Greek women to stand in his new shrine of Apollo on Rome’s Palatine Hill. In the legend a Greek king called Danaus married his fifty daughters to the fifty sons of his mortal enemy with instructions to the brides to kill their husbands on the wedding night. The Palatine group included the king, his sword drawn, instigating the slaughter.

  Augustus decorated his lavish new forum in Rome with another host of marble women. These so-called Caryatids represented all the wives of a Greek town called Caryae. So the story went, they were forced to endure perpetual punishment for the treachery of their husbands, who sided with the enemy when the Persians invaded Greece in the far-off days of the Persian Wars.

  These spectacular public displays of miscreant wives on the gleaming new buildings of Augustan Rome seem to express the mood of moral rearmament which Augustus and Livia tried to promote by example, despite the origins of their own union – the young Octavian had forced a pregnant Livia to divorce and then marry him. Determined – notwithstanding – to return Roman society to supposedly traditional Roman values, an older Augustus passed harsh laws against Roman wives who committed adultery, almost as if he was trying to pin at least some of the blame for Rome’s recent ills on ‘misbehaving’ women.

  This conservative aspect of the politics of Augustus was divisive – we hear of resistance to this legislation. But it is unlike
ly that the pragmatic Augustus took these steps unless he thought that there was also public support for them. What is striking is how a Roman leader and his advisers opted unreflectively for the cultural idiom of Greece when offering citizens – as it seems – marble parables of bad wives.

  In his political testament, the so-called Res gestae, Augustus made much of the wide-ranging makeover that he gave the city of Rome:

  In my sixth consulship [28 BC] I restored eighty-two temples of the gods in the city on the authority of the senate, neglecting none that required restoration at that time.

  I built the temple of Mars the Avenger and the Forum Augustum on private ground from the proceeds of booty. I built the theatre adjacent to the temple of Apollo on ground in large part bought from private owners, and provided that it should be called after Marcus Marcellus, my son-in-law.

  What must have been a vast building programme involved both the repair of existing buildings and the construction of new ones. The urban agenda of Augustus dwarfed the comparable programmes of earlier states that we have already come across: Pergamum notably, or, before that, Athens.

  Augustus turned Rome into a far more Greek-looking city. Rome now caught up with and far surpassed Italian neighbours such as Praeneste. To do so he relied heavily on architects and artists who were either Italian adaptors of Greek ideas or actual Greeks. The sculptor of the female figures for his new forum was probably an Athenian.

  On the surface, this dependence on Greek talent does indeed look like the ‘capture’ of Rome by her Greek subjects. A Roman poet of the time, Horace, sang lines to this effect which probably made some in his Roman audience wince on their Greek-style couches. On the other hand, in a way that a visiting Greek might have found disconcerting, the total effect of this new Rome was un-Greek. The visual messages projected concerns that were distinctly Roman.