The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Justinian’s military posture was not just defensive. He went on the offensive on a massive scale – his generals ‘recaptured’ North Africa from the Vandals and Italy and Sicily from the Ostrogoths. Campaigning on this scale was in the best traditions of the imperial role as defined by centuries of Roman emperors. But Justinian’s personal choices also drove his wars, especially in Africa, a risky venture which he probably launched despite the misgivings of influential advisors.

  After Justinian’s death in 565, the relentless movements of peoples reversed much of his military effort. In 568 a Germanic group, the Lombardi, migrated into Italy and rapidly established their own state in the centre and north. Over the next sixty years in Greece alone we hear of twelve barbarian raids, prelude to a much longer ‘dark age’ there. And in the lifetime of a monk born in Damascus a few years after Justinian’s death, explosive forces would change Roman rule in the east for ever.

  Years ago, when I first visited Topkapi Palace, seat of the Ottoman caliphs until the nineteenth century, I viewed the room now known as the Chamber of the Holy Relics. Here I saw a motley collection of objects supposedly linked to the Prophet Muhammad such as hair from his beard and one of his teeth, as well as his sword and his bow. If authentic, these last items presumably would be the ‘arms’ that an Islamic hadith or traditional saying states were among the Prophet’s very few possessions when he died.

  Authenticity apart, what struck me in my naïve way at the time was the contrast between this display of military memorabilia and Christ’s purported relics, with their marked focus on passive suffering – nails and wood from the Cross, the Crown of Thorns and so on. I am far from qualified to write about the religious levers that put in motion the attacks by the first Muslims on the Roman Empire. However, the militarization of Islam was certainly close to being an original feature of the new religion.

  After the Prophet’s death in Medina (632), one of his close companions emerged as his religious successor and new Muslim leader. The Anglicized version of the Arabic term for this role is ‘caliph’. The following year the first of the caliphs, Abū Bakr, had launched the determined campaigns by Muslim Arab soldiers that resulted in the capture of Jerusalem around 637.

  This rapid overthrow of Roman rule happened first in a region strategically placed between Constantinople and the Sasanian Persians. These two old enemies had recently fought a draining war. At one time (622) this saw the Persian king overrun Palestine and Egypt and lay siege to Constantinople itself, before the Romans drove him back into Mesopotamia. So it was an exhausted Roman Empire in the east that the Muslims attacked. By 642 the first caliphs had gone on to conquer Egypt, and from there they started to conquer the lands ‘reconquered’ by Justinian from the Vandals.

  The Arab armies could move rapidly. These were hardy Bedouin fighters who travelled light, dismounting from horses and camels for battle, including the archers. To follow the detail of the early Islamic conquests in the Mediterranean is not for this book. Suffice to say that within a generation the eastern Roman Empire had been shorn of some of its richest territories. What was left was now a regional power, rivalled in the Mediterranean by the burgeoning Muslim state.

  I remember once passing the time in the company of the head of Classics of a well-known independent school in England. When I nosily asked to see what it was that he was scribbling on the back of an envelope, he showed me a short poem in Ancient Greek that he was halfway through composing – ‘One of my ex-pupils asked if I’d mind penning something for him to read out at a business dinner.’

  I laboured rather fruitlessly with Greek verse composition when I was a schoolboy. It is a rare skill indeed in the early twenty-first century. Back in the early 600s, eastern Romans with a good education were still trained in the knack of composing Greek verses in a classical manner. If Arabic sources can be trusted, it was one of these amateur poets, that same Damascus monk, now the elderly bishop of Jerusalem, who discussed terms when Abū Bakr’s successor as caliph visited the newly conquered city of Jerusalem in person (637).

  Sophronius, as the bishop was called, has left behind a three-line epigram in an ancient poetic form about a holy place in Jerusalem which he revered, the Rock, otherwise known as Golgotha:

  Thrice-blessed rock, who didst receive the blood that issued from God,

  The fiery children of Heaven guard thee around,

  And Kings, inhabitants of the Earth, sing thy praise.

  This book ends with the encounter between a caliph and a Christian Roman prelate who wrote Greek verses in a tradition stretching back to the elegists of Archaic Greece. It is as good a symbol as any of two worlds, both with long futures, now meeting each other for the first time.

  EPILOGUE

  When I was twenty-one I went on my first dig, at York Minster, where the need to underpin the mediaeval foundations had given archaeologists a chance to explore deeper layers. I was handed a pick, and was gouging away, when suddenly the voice of the long-suffering director, inspecting our trench from above, cried: ‘Stop! That’s a Saxon floor you’re destroying!’

  Perhaps I was not quite as blameworthy as might be supposed. The floors of Roman York had been made of opus signinum, small pieces of tile mixed with concrete to give a hard, smooth finish which even my pick could not have ignored. The inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon York made do with beaten earth. Archaeologists think that living standards, not just in Britain, but in other parts of the post-Roman west, saw a definite material decline.

  Even so, there were glimmerings. In this impoverished world a few people still tried to read the writings of ancient Rome. A municipal library in a town in north-east France possesses the earliest example of an English dictionary. Made in the AD 700s, this rare manuscript lists difficult Latin words in one column, and next to them a Latin or Old English equivalent. By studying the Latin words carefully experts can work out the Latin works that the original compilers – probably British monks – were reading, or trying to: mainly, it turns out, the Christian learning of the sub-Roman Mediterranean world, but also the pagan pleasure of Virgil, the great poet of Augustan Rome.

  The mediaeval world never ceased to connect with ancient Greece and Rome. The labours of its scribes and scholars, their copies and their translations, preserved at least a fraction of the fragile writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans for us. In the west this achievement owed much to the monastic communities of the post-Roman successor kingdoms. Far away to the east, in ninth-century Baghdad, an open-minded caliph called Ma’mūn gathered the best translators into Arabic to put the writings of Greek philosophy and science at the disposal of the world of Islam. This great transfer of knowledge also helped to save these writings, some known today only from the Arabic translations.

  Among the Greek-speaking ‘Romans’ of mediaeval Constantinople, also known as Byzantium, classical Greek authors remained a staple of a higher education down to the fall of the city to the Ottoman Turks (1453). Preserved in this way, these ancient authors found their way to Renaissance Italy as manuscripts in the baggage of Byzantine refugees. Only by this means were giants of such stature as Homer, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Euripides and Plato preserved for today’s world.

  The Renaissance was a cultural movement led by the curiosity, the talent and the patronage of enlightened men (and women) in the republics and principalities of central and northern Italy. It was marked by a new sense of wonder at, and openness towards, the pagan civilizations of the ancient Romans and Greeks. Recently I stood under the painted ceilings of Vaux-le-Vicomte, a stately French château built in the 1650s. This experience brought home to me just how far-reaching the influence of this rediscovery of the ancient world was.

  The original builder was an overambitious finance minister of the French crown. When he wanted to see himself and his services to the king glorified in the décor of his new house, he naturally turned to the only possible source of inspiration in that era. So in one ceiling we see the hero Hercules (but really Nicolas Fouqu
et, seigneur of Vaux) ascending by chariot to heaven, where his labours will earn him deification, while Glory crowns him and Renown blasts her trumpet before reciting his great deeds. On the front of his chariot can be read a Latin word, ascendet, hinting at the owner’s boastful motto, ‘Quo non ascendet?’, or ‘How far will he not climb?’

  Other visitors, like me, may find it well-nigh impossible to grasp the cultural trends of those times producing this kind of image. In seventeenth-century Europe, educated people were obsessed – an advisedly strong word – by the Greek and Roman myths: ‘Intellectually, men of the seventeenth century lived in a mythological world. Their imagination was haunted by the divinities whom they saw everywhere in the residences and gardens of the time’.

  How and why the flotsam and jetsam of classical civilization has inspired the societies of mediaeval and early modern times is a story for another time. Suffice to say here that, since the Renaissance, the rediscovery of the artistic legacy of Greece and Rome has served the needs of timeless grandeur well, as shown by a place like Vaux and by the exteriors and interiors of countless churches, palaces, stately homes and public buildings in Europe, North America and elsewhere.

  What of today? I remember the piteous state of the plaster casts of famous classical sculpture at my old university, no longer used by lecturers in the art department and left out to be vandalized by boisterous students. Despite such changes in western taste arising from the swerve towards modernism at the start of the twentieth century, the image-making abilities of ancient artists and the classical harmonies of ancient architects still seem to please a wide public.

  The coaches filling the car parks make clear the popularity of famous ancient wonders such as the dazzling mosaics in the great Roman villa near Piazza Armerina in Sicily. In a world of selfies and self-fashioning, ancient Greek and Roman bodies perfectly crafted in marble and bronze have a marked appeal, to judge from the admiring crowds gathered round, say, the naked Zeus of Artemisium in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. As a bystander over the years pondering these popular responses on sites and in museums, I have come to wonder if a measure of the achievements of a great civilization is a quality of irresistibility.

  For the benefit of theatregoers, today’s writers, directors and performers continue to draw on the treasure house of ancient Greek and Roman literature. In 2017 I was present at the opening night of a thought-provoking one-man show in a London theatre. It explored the grim subject of what nowadays is called maternal filicide – when a mother kills her children, a crime all too well known in modern times.

  For eighty minutes with no interval, the performer, a man dressed in an extravagant gown and unfeasible platform shoes, threw himself into the role of Medea. In Greek mythology Medea was a witch and, as we might now say, a wronged woman. In the fifth century BC the Athenian dramatist Euripides wrote a tragedy named after her in which Medea – a man would also have played her in the original staging – avenges herself by slaughtering her two children by the husband who has abandoned her for a younger woman. What I saw was a contemporary reimagining ultimately inspired by the ancient story. The unsettling performance left me haunted by something I’d not really grasped before – the extreme explosiveness to which jealousy can drive a human being.

  Reflecting on the ancient Greeks and Romans while writing this book, I have neither minimized nor dwelt unduly on the obviously disturbing features of those societies, although ancient slavery and ancient attitudes to women and to sexuality seem to me as good a starting point as any for putting changing human behaviour into a historical perspective. In general, it seems dubious to me to shun the pleasures bequeathed by the contemplation of a great civilization, just because this civilization was founded on human weaknesses as well as strengths.

  There remain for sure the beauty and, yes, the humanity: the aesthetic fineness which allowed Greek and Roman artists to capture images and effects – the bright plumage of a mosaic bird, or the cool curve of a marble limb – which arrest us still; the human understanding of the ancient writers, their clear-eyed reckoning of what constitutes our short human lives. These are things which suspend despair about the shortcomings of human nature. They bring joy, and hope.

  TIMELINE

  The East

  The West

  BC

  BC

  c. 7000–3000 Neolithic Greece

  c. 3200–2000 Cycladic culture

  c. 2000 Oldest Mesopotamian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh

  c. 2000–?1370 Minoan ‘palaces’ in Crete

  c. 1575–1200 Mycenaean civilization in Greece

  c. 1473–1458 Hatshepsut reigns in Egypt

  c. 1550 Gold death mask ‘of Agamemnon’

  c. 1500 Warrior tomb in Pylos

  c. 1300 Uluburun shipwreck

  c. 1200 Hittite capital destroyed

  1183 Ancient date for the ‘fall of Troy’

  c. 1050–700 Geometric pottery in Greece

  c. 1000 Lefkandi burials

  c. 825–730 First Greek settlements in the west

  814/3 Ancient date for the Phoenician foundation of Carthage (modern Tunisia)

  776–491 Greek ‘Archaic’ period

  776 First Olympic games

  753 Ancient date for the foundation of Rome

  c. 740 New Greek alphabet based on Phoenician script

  c. 720 ‘Nestor’s Cup’, Pithecusae (modern Ischia)

  c. 700–500 Etruscan civilization flourishes in Italy

  c. 700 Phoenicians found settlement at Motya in Sicily

  664–610 Foundation of a Greek trading station, Naucratis, in Egypt

  c. 650 Dreros inscribed law

  c. 610–575 Sappho active

  594/3 Solon’s reforms at Athens

  c. 570–c. 549 Reign of Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas

  565 Thales predicts an eclipse of the sun

  c. 560–510 Tyranny of Pisistratus and his sons at Athens

  c. 560–546 Reign of Croesus, king of Lydia

  c. 557–530 Cyrus the Great founds the Persian Empire

  c. 510 Red figure pottery technique invented in Athens

  509 Expulsion of the last king of Rome

  508 Political reforms of Cleisthenes at Athens

  499 Ionian Greeks revolt against Persian rule

  c. 499–458 Aeschylus active

  494 First secession of the Roman plebs

  493 Treaty between Rome and the Latins

  490–336 Greek ‘Classical’ period

  490 Persian invasion of Greece; Battle of Marathon

  480 Second Persian invasion of Greece; Battles of Thermopylae and Salamis

  480 Battle of Himera, Sicilian Greeks defeat the Carthaginians

  479 Battle of Plataea

  479/8 Athens founds a Greek naval alliance against Persia

  474 Battle of Cumae, victory of Hieron of Syracuse over an Etruscan fleet

  c. 468–406 Sophocles active

  c. 460–430 Herodotus active

  c. 455–408 Euripides active

  454 Athens moves treasury of the Greek naval alliance from Delos to Athens

  c. 450 Publication of the Twelve Tables, Rome’s first law code

  447–432 Building of the Parthenon, Athens

  431 Peloponnesian War begins; Funeral Oration of Pericles

  c. 431–400 Thucydides active

  c. 427–388 Aristophanes active

  415 Athens captures and punishes the islanders of Melos

  415–413 Athenian expedition to Sicily

  404 Athens surrenders to Sparta

  399 Trial and execution of Socrates

  390 Gauls attack Rome

  371 Battle of Leuctra, the Boeotians under Thebes defeat Sparta

  360/359–336 Reign of Philip II, king of Macedon

  347 Death of Plato