The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  The ruins of Rome still convey some idea of the grandeur of these new buildings – what is left in situ of the Forum Augustum still impresses. Some scholars would say that the greatest monument nowadays to the Rome-centred civilization that Augustus seems consciously to have aimed to restore and magnify is not a building, but a poem:

  Arms and the man I sing, who first made way,

  predestined exile, from the Trojan shore

  to Italy, the blest Lavinian strand.

  Smitten of storms he was on land and sea

  by violence of Heaven, to satisfy

  stern Juno’s sleepless wrath; and much in war

  he suffered, seeking at the last to found

  the city, and bring o’er his fathers’ gods

  to safe abode in Latium; whence arose

  the Latin race, old Alba’s reverend lords,

  and from her hills wide-walled, imperial Rome.

  O Muse, the causes tell! What sacrilege,

  or vengeful sorrow, moved the heavenly Queen

  to thrust on dangers dark and endless toil

  a man whose largest honour in men’s eyes

  was serving Heaven? Can gods such anger feel?

  The United Kingdom retains a poet who is asked to write about important public occasions. Still, it can safely be said that by and large Western societies do not have the cultural habit of reading or listening to extremely long poems in a lofty idiom freshly commissioned to celebrate nationhood. So the importance for the ancient Romans of the Augustan poet Virgil’s twelve-book epic about the hero Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who crossed the sea to settle in Italy and found the Roman race, is harder for us to grasp. Latin literature had produced nothing like it before, nor would it do so again. For the Romans, Virgil’s poem the Aeneid quickly became a classic.

  In these opening lines, the ‘heavenly Queen’ is the goddess Juno. She tries to thwart Aeneas, son of a rival, the goddess Venus, by causing a storm to blow his vessel off course and into the arms of Queen Dido of Carthage – a failed attempt, it will transpire, to distract him from his destiny, since Juno’s husband, Jupiter, king of the gods, is willing him on.

  From the very beginning Virgil shows how consciously he modelled his epic poem on Homer’s Greek poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. It was not just in the subject matter – a hero who wanders the seas after the fall of Troy. It was also in the clear echoes of the structure of the poem and, in Virgil’s Latin, of Homer’s Greek. My great-great-grandfather’s copy of Pope’s translation of the Odyssey begins:

  The man, for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,

  Long exercis’d in woes, oh Muse! resound.

  Who, when his arms had wrought the destin’d fall

  Of sacred Troy, and raz’d her heaven-built wall,

  Wand’ring from clime to clime, observant stray’d,

  Their manners noted, and their states survey’d.

  On stormy seas unnumber’d toils he bore [etc.]

  Without much effort the reader can see the similarities – ‘the man’, the Muse, the fall of Troy, the suffering wanderer, the stormy seas. Educated Romans will have ‘got it’ at once. Virgil was in his fifties when he composed this poem. By means of minute comparison between this and Greek poetry, scholars now know that he must have been totally immersed not just in Homer but in a whole raft of lesser Greek poets writing in the epic genre, off all of whom he endlessly ‘riffs’.

  Poetry like this is subtle and elusive. Interpreting the poet’s own attitude to his work is not easy. It seems unlikely that Roman audiences took the Latin Aeneid’s emulation of the Greek Homer as deferential appreciation of Greece’s cultural gifts. Not least since Virgil’s patron was Augustus, the first man in the state, it is easier to imagine their competitive enjoyment of a Roman poem which seemed to measure up to, if not outclass, its Greek model.

  The political shadow of Augustus shows too. In building consensus around his unique position, Augustus deployed his own family traditions, which Virgil dutifully wove into his national epic. The poet presents Augustus as predestined to rule Rome by virtue of being a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas and so of Venus herself. Augustus could parade this ancestry thanks to his adoption by Julius Caesar, whose ancient family claimed to spring from a grandson of Aeneas named Iulus. In Virgil’s hands, it is Jupiter himself who foresees the rule of this younger ‘Iulus’:

  Of Trojan stock illustriously sprung,

  lo, Caesar comes! whose power the ocean bounds,

  whose fame, the skies. He shall receive the name

  Iulus nobly bore, great Julius, he.

  As Augustus notched up a third and then a fourth decade of sole rule, for many Romans memories of the civil wars were receding into the background – but not for the ageing emperor. Another Roman poet in a different mould, Ovid, composer of risqué lines making light of adultery, found himself bundled off to the provincial purgatory of Tomis – modern Constantsa in Romania. That was in AD 8, six years before the old autocrat died.

  Over the next century and a quarter, the attitudes of Romans to the Greek civilization on their doorstep continued to be troubled. There were influential Romans who felt that Romans would no longer be ‘Roman’ enough unless they reminded themselves of the differences – minor in more and more ways though these were in fact – between being a Roman and being a Greek.

  When Augustus died in AD 14, his political bequest to Rome was a shaky succession of four interrelated emperors, about as secure on their thrones as the Romanov tsars. Nero, a great-grandson of Augustus, was the last. Every now and then historians try to rehabilitate him from the lurid tales of the ancient writers, spun after Nero’s murder when it was safe to attack him. The sheer awfulness of his alleged crimes – including matricide, fratricide and uxoricide – makes this a testing task.

  Without this bloodshed, there is a certain resemblance between Nero and Ludwig II, the Bavarian king and patron of Wagner who died mysteriously in 1886. Both were young eccentrics who pursued artistic obsessions in ways that put them on a collision course with the establishment. Both also won the affection of ordinary people and kept it after untimely deaths.

  Nero considered himself not just a patron of the arts but also a performing artist in his own right. He loved to appear on the theatre stage where the Roman plebs received him rapturously. In the eyes of the upper class, this budding stage career was undignified for a man who was emperor and head of state. Despite his apparently weak and husky voice, the field in which Nero competed was that of a Greek-style singer, accompanying himself on the lyre.

  He was also an enthusiastic actor. This Roman emperor would appear before adoring audiences in the capital in the full fig of a Greek-style tragic actor. For male roles, Nero had one actor’s mask with his own features. For the female parts that he performed, he had another, modelled on the face of his wife, Poppaea Sabina – she whose eventual death while pregnant, it was said, was caused by a kick from her imperial spouse.

  To provide a public platform for these musical and thespian activities, Nero founded a Greek-style cultural and athletic festival, a permanent one, to be celebrated on a five-yearly cycle like the Olympiads in ancient Greece. This was the first of its kind in Rome, and a landmark in the halting Roman embrace of Greek culture.

  When he was not yet thirty, Nero took his passion a step further. He sailed across the Adriatic Sea to compete in the true Olympics. Called back by the rebellion of a senior general, he was so anxious to protect his voice, the story goes, that he neglected to give rallying speeches to either the senators or – more thoughtlessly – his imperial guard. Cornered by his enemies, he committed suicide. Nero’s opponents then abolished his short-lived ‘Neronian Games’.

  As emperor, Nero had drastically misjudged. Yet he was one of many Romans who relished watching Greek cultural shows. To stand today in one of Rome’s liveliest and most elegant plazas, the Piazza Navona, is to catch faint echoes of the continuing culture wars of the Romans after Nero’s dea
th. The elongated U-shape of this mid-seventeenth-century public space preserves the footprint of an ancient athletic stadium, the ruins of which survived into Renaissance times.

  The emperor Domitian, who died in AD 96, was the donor of this popular amenity. With a seating capacity estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand, it was the first permanent stadium for Greek-style athletics in the capital. Domitian’s grandiose athletic track was a crowd-pleasing response to popular taste. Unlike Nero, however, at performances Domitian remained firmly in his spectator’s seat.

  The reign of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138) is often seen as marking the high tide of the flow of Greek culture into ancient Italy. Hadrian had come to the throne as a middle-aged man. As with Nero, there was a personal dimension to Hadrian’s enthusiasm for Greek culture. He commissioned an unknown sculptor to create the lost original behind one of the most famous Greek faces from antiquity, a handsome, downcast youth with tousled hair and a hint of a pout, celebrated in over a hundred surviving statues. This was Antinous, Hadrian’s Greek boy, who drowned during an imperial cruise on the Nile in AD 130.

  Hadrian’s promotion of everything Greek took other forms. In particular, he devised for provincial Greece the ancient equivalent of the USA’s Marshall Plan for post-Second World War Europe – roads, bridges, public buildings, land reclamation, even a Rome-style annual dole of grain for his favourites, the Athenians. All this Hadrian poured into a run-down and strategically worthless corner of his empire. Today’s visitor who wanders through the Plaka area of central Athens, the old Turkish town in effect, finds the domes of an Ottoman bathhouse side by side with a monumental ruin faced with a row of columns in a marble veined with thick waves of green and white. This was part of a vast and luxurious cultural centre, including a library, that Hadrian gave to the Athenians.

  Back in the capital, senatorial wags had long ago had the ‘size’ of Hadrian. He was a ‘Greekling’. This insult amounted almost to a charge of un-Roman behaviour. He stoked this prejudice when he mourned ‘like a woman’. That was how one Roman historian described his grief when his beloved Antinous drowned in the Nile.

  Hadrian’s gifts to Greece suggest one way of answering the question posed by the next chapter: ‘What did the Romans do for their empire?’ In the next two chapters I shall say more about the Roman peace that Hadrian imperator was so keen to defend, as well as the mounting tally of threats to it during the second century AD.

  5. The West.

  CHAPTER 17

  WHAT DID THE ROMANS DO FOR

  THEIR EMPIRE?

  If this question replaced ‘their empire’ with ‘us’, a mischievous answer would be that the Romans gave us endless entertainment, thanks to the alleged antics of those emperors from the death of Augustus onwards deemed black sheep by the Romans, or rather by the highest echelons of Roman society, the imperial-period quasi-service aristocracy of senators and knights.

  Augustus cut the Senate down to size – six hundred – and discreetly furthered its slow transformation into a body of men drawn from the suitably rich and well born among the Roman citizens not just of Italy but also the provinces. He also nurtured a dwindling core of families from the old republican nobility. Their continuing service to the state as magistrates helped maintain the façade of constitutional business-as-usual. Augustus saw this as necessary for the consensus he sought to build around the new political reality. For the same reason he had opted for a low-key term to describe his unofficial position at the top – princeps or ‘leading citizen’.

  In 1884 construction workers in Rome stumbled on an underground tomb, since destroyed. Poorly documented at the time, the purported finds of inscriptions, marble portrait busts and sarcophagi identified the owners of what might in reality have been a group of tombs as one of these ramified houses of the old nobility.

  That fine head of Pompey the Great with the Alexander-like quiff now in Copenhagen is said to have been found here. A posthumous creation, the sculpture celebrated one of the intermarriages that knitted together descendants of Pompey with two other lineages, the Licinii Crassi and the Calpurnii Pisones. Art historians identify another bust said to be from here, this time of a young woman, as a daughter of the emperor Claudius whom her imperial parents married into this same clan.

  The historical interest of another find is even greater: a stone altar, now displayed in the patched-up ruin of a Roman bathhouse serving as the Roman National Museum. In effect an epitaph, the heirs of the man whom it commemorates had this funerary altar dedicated in finely carved Latin letters to ‘The Shades of L[ucius] Calpurnius Piso Frugi Licinianus’.

  ‘Piso was the son of Marcus Crassus and Scribonia, thus being noble on both sides; his look and manner were of the ancient school, and he had justly been called stern . . .’ This is how a Roman historian a generation or so later admiringly described the qualities recommending this Piso to an old man who had declared himself emperor in AD 68. This was at the start of a year of political chaos after Nero’s style of rule triggered a revolt among army commanders. Galba, as the new emperor was called, wanted to adopt a son and political heir. He started a practice which the serendipity of human fertility made the norm for much of the second century AD: a childless emperor adopted a meritorious fellow Roman from the senatorial elite as his ‘Caesar’.

  The epitaph for Piso gives no hint of the fate awaiting both him and his new father. Aged thirty-one at the time, he had been Caesar for just four days when the soldiers of a rival to Galba killed them both. They stuck the two heads on poles ‘side by side with the eagle of the legion’. This episode showed clearly enough that the professional army bequeathed by the republic was now the real ‘king-maker’ in the imperial system devised by Augustus.

  The senator Tacitus, the historian in question, wrote historical works in the years around 100. With a biting irony he gave his version of the reigns of the four emperors who succeeded Augustus, and also of this so-called Year of the Four Emperors following the suicide of Nero, the last descendant of Augustus to rule.

  A mournful theme of Tacitus inspired the title of my favourite chapter in a book that was required reading for my Ancient History exam at pre-university level in England: ‘The Doom of the Nobiles’. Savouring the names of the old families with a Proustian relish, Tacitus tracked what he depicts as their ceaseless persecution by the successors of Augustus who saw them in some ways as equals – emperors intermarried with them after all – and therefore feared them as rivals. The eligibility of Piso in AD 68, fatal for Piso though it turned out to be, shows that these early emperors were right – up to a point.

  The imperial elites might contemplate an alternative emperor-in-waiting who seemed to incarnate the ‘old school’ as Piso did. Unfortunately for him, troopers were unimpressed with historic names. Modestly paid professionals, they wanted incentives in cash, as we have seen before. On this point Galba had shown himself to be mean, even towards the crack bodyguard of the emperor, the praetorians. They ended up conniving in his murder. Tacitus gave Piso an obituary, adding him to Piso’s close family’s tally of violent deaths: ‘His brother Magnus had been put to death by Claudius, his brother Crassus by Nero.’

  The suspicion in which emperors held the top layers of Roman society, senators and the most prominent knights, was mutual. On the one hand, each needed the other to fulfil the possibilities of their allotted roles in Roman society. The emperor was now the fount of patronage. He also depended on officials recruited from both senators and knights in the running of the state. On the other hand, the inequality of the power relationship turned senators – whose best hope for retaining or improving their status lay in flattery – into courtiers. The emperor in turn might action his suspicions by murderous crackdowns, as happened to Piso’s brothers. Or he might use his stupendous purchasing power in effect to buy loyalty, of the already rich and powerful too, not just of troops. Apart from disobedience with all its risks, the elite of senators and knights had little defence against an emperor
who erred too far in repressing their class.

  One option was to die philosophically. The emperor Nero suspected his tutor, Seneca, a rich senator, of complicity in a plot against him and decided to have him summarily killed. Seneca, like many upper-class Romans of his time, was an adherent of a philosophical doctrine which the ancients called the Stoa, after the stoa, or roofed colonnade, in central Athens where its Cypriot Greek founder used to teach in the years after 313 BC.

  At the real risk of doing an injustice here to a complicated set of tenets, the Stoics believed that humans alone among animals were endowed with reason, that the exercise of reason in the right way conferred mental well-being derived from living virtuously, and that emotions, triggered by things which were not valuable to this way of thinking, were bad – even grief for the loss of one’s child.

  Nero sent troops who surrounded Seneca’s house. A centurion went inside, where Seneca was dining in company, including his wife. Refused a request to write his will before dying, he told tearful friends that his greatest bequest to them would be their memory of the moral pattern of his life, and rebuked them for forgetting the preparation of so many years of philosophical study against ‘evils to come’. Seneca and his impressive wife there and then entered a suicide pact, opening their veins with daggers.

  Taking too long to die and retaining an extraordinary presence of mind, Seneca then recalled the death of Socrates and tried for an assisted death:

  Seneca . . . begged Statius Annæus, whom he had long esteemed for his faithful friendship and medical skill, to produce a poison with which he had some time before provided himself, the same drug which extinguished the life of those who were condemned by a public sentence of the people of Athens. It was brought to him and he drank it in vain, chilled as he was throughout his limbs, and his frame closed against the efficacy of the poison . . . He was then carried into a bath, with the steam of which he was suffocated.