Before and After Alexander

by Richard A. Billows

  5. THE ROMAN CONQUEST

  In 201 BCE the Romans emerged from an epic two-war struggle with the Carthaginians, a struggle that had begun as far back as 264, as masters of the entire western Mediterranean region. They controlled all of Italy, the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and a good portion of Spain—all of Mediterranean Spain in particular. In north Africa, the Carthaginians were thoroughly submissive subject allies, and the kingdom of Numidia (much of modern Algeria) was a client state under their domination. Not surprisingly, the Romans turned their eyes eastward, to the wealthy and highly civilized Hellenistic kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean. As we have seen, Philip V of Macedonia had made the mistake of allying with the Carthaginians against Rome when it seemed as if the Romans would lose, and vengeance against Macedonia was therefore the first order of business. The Romans were slightly hampered by the peace treaty they had signed with Philip in 205, but they knew ways around the legal niceties of treaties. A roving commission of ambassadors was sent around the Greek world to collect any and all grievances against Philip, who was then given an ultimatum to redress those grievances at once or else the Romans would be “obliged” to make war on him in defense of their “friends” in the Greek world. In Roman eyes, making war in “defense” of these new-found “friends” would be a just war, treaty or no treaty.

  Over the course of the next century and a half, the Greeks of the Hellenistic world learned some hard lessons about the Romans: it was never safe for an independent state to have any dealings with the Romans, whether as friends or enemies. Enemies were made war on, defeated, and subjected; but “friends” were expected to show gratitude by being as submissive to Rome as if they had been conquered, and “friends” who failed in such submission soon found themselves being conquered. A series of epic battles early in the second century—the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 against Philip V, the Battle of Magnesia in 190 against Antiochus III, and the Battle of Pydna in 168 against Philip’s successor Perseus—established Roman dominance over the Hellenistic world. Various follow-up operations were needed to complete full Roman control: there was the Fourth Macedonian War and the Achaean War in 148–147, the subjection of the Pergamene kingdom in 132, and very difficult warfare against Mithridates VI of Pontus in the 80s BCE and again in the late 70s. In the end, it was not until the campaigns of the Roman general Pompeius Magnus in the 60s, and Caesar Octavian (later known as Augustus) annexing Egypt in 30, that full Roman rule over the entire Hellenistic world was rounded off. Thereafter, the Hellenistic world formed the eastern half of the Mediterranean-wide Roman Empire, the former kingdoms now being Roman provinces ruled by Roman governors and secured by Roman armies.

  How exactly did the Romans take over the seemingly powerful Hellenistic kingdoms with such apparent ease? The key lies in the very different military systems of the Romans and the Macedonians. The Macedonian-ruled kingdoms, as we have seen, relied for their security on professional standing armies, recruited from a military elite and carefully trained in a complex and demanding system of warfare. These professional soldiers could be complemented by allied “native” troops drawn from the peoples of Asia and/or Egypt, but the Macedonian rulers preferred not to rely heavily on such troops for reasons discussed above (section 2). While there was enough Greco-Macedonian manpower to field large armies of thirty thousand to fifty thousand men when necessary, while keeping thousands more in forts on garrison duty, if the field army were to be defeated with heavy losses the ruler in question would be forced to sue for peace: it would take years to recruit and train replacements and be able to take the field again with a credible army; in the case of Philip V, for example, we have seen that it took around fifteen years for the Macedonian army to recover from Cynoscephalae.

  The Romans operated very differently. It was not that Roman soldiers were man for man better than the Macedonians and other Greeks: they were not. It was not that their tactical formations and style of fighting were superior: well led and fighting on the right terrain the Macedonians were very much a match for the Romans. Nor were Roman generals better than the Macedonian kings: not a few Roman generals of this era were in fact distinctly incompetent. It was that rather than using a professional standing army, the Romans relied on a citizen militia army. Every Roman citizen who owned more than a certain minimum amount of property was liable for military service, and was actually required to put in from ten to fifteen years of active service in the legions, at times indeed even more. These citizens were expected to equip themselves, and to some degree see to their own training, but they were in no way disorganized or poorly trained. Constant Roman warfare (the Roman state was in effect never at peace) meant constant military service, and constant military service saw to it that Roman citizens were thoroughly trained, experienced, and battle-hardened soldiers. And there were literally hundreds of thousands of these soldier-citizens. Because the Romans constantly renewed and expanded their citizen body by Romanizing allies and granting them Roman citizenship, the number of Roman citizens by the late third century had reached nearly three hundred thousand. Some two-thirds of these citizens were eligible for military service. In addition, the other Italian peoples, as subject allies of the Romans, were required to send troops to assist the Romans: and these allied Italian troops were as numerous as the Romans, and trained and equipped very similarly. A Roman army of forty thousand men, therefore, would consist of around twenty thousand Roman soldiers and twenty thousand Italian allies.

  The upshot was that the Romans simply out-manned their enemies. Defeat a Roman army, as the Macedonian king Perseus did in 171 at the Battle of Callinicus near Larissa, and the Romans would simply send more troops and a different general. But once a Macedonian king—such as Philip V, Antiochus III, and eventually Perseus himself—suffered a defeat he was done for. The Carthaginians had learned this lesson the hard way: numerous major victories over the Romans counted for little when the Romans could simply keep on fighting with more and more soldiers thanks to their seemingly inexhaustible supply of manpower. The Romans made up heavy losses by enfranchising more Italians as Romans, and their citizen militia armies just kept on coming. In the end, no professional standing army could stand up to the pressure: there simply were not enough trained professional soldiers. It was not any inherent weakness in the Hellenistic world, its kingdoms, and its armies that saw them crumble under Roman pressure, therefore: it was simply the extraordinary effectiveness of the Roman citizen militia system at mobilizing resources of manpower that could not be matched by Rome’s opponents.

  Thus it was that Rome took control of the Hellenistic world and made it part of the Roman Empire. But beyond the switch of Macedonian rulers for Roman ones, little changed. The urban civilization with its distinctive Hellenistic culture and way of life continued under new management. Greek remained the dominant language of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, and the Greek cities in fact thrived as never before under the aegis of Roman security: the pax Romana or Roman peace gave the Hellenistic world centuries of security and prosperity. The crucial point here is that the Romans had no high civilization and culture of their own with which to replace Hellenistic culture and civilization. On the contrary, Roman high culture only developed in the second century BCE and after, and it developed by copying Hellenistic Greek models. Great Roman poets such as Catullus, Horace, and Vergil modeled themselves on great Greek poets such as Callimachus, Alcaeus, Sappho, and Homer. Great Roman orators such as Cicero modeled themselves on Greek orators such as Isocrates and Demosthenes. Great Roman historians such as Sallust, Livy, or Tacitus learned from Herodotus and Thucydides. The Romans could and did crush Hellenistic armies and rule the Hellenistic world, but in the face of Hellenistic civilization all they could do was accept and imitate. As the Roman poet Horace famously put it: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio—conquered Greece captivated her savage victor and brought her arts to rustic Latium.

  6. HELLENISTIC CIVILIZATION UNDER ROMAN
RULE

  The city of Nicomedia, my lord, has spent 3,329,000 sesterces on an aqueduct, which was abandoned unfinished and has even been torn down. Again they spent 200,000 sesterces on another aqueduct which has also been abandoned. So now, after wasting all that money, they must make a new expenditure in order to have water. I personally have visited a very pure spring from which in my opinion water should be brought on arches, as was tried in the first place, so that it will not reach only the level and low lying parts of the city. A few arches are still standing and some can be erected from the cut stone which was torn down from the previous structure; some part, I think, will have to be built of brick, since that is cheaper and easier. But first of all it is necessary for you to send here an inspector of aqueducts or an engineer, so that what happened before will not occur again. This I am certain of, that the usefulness and beauty of the structure will be entirely worthy of your era (Pliny Letters 10.27).

  So wrote the Roman governor of Bithynia in north west Asia Minor, Pliny the Younger, a noted man of letters, to his boss the emperor Trajan, who approved of the project. Pliny’s letters to Trajan about his activities as governor, along with Trajan’s replies, make a fascinating little archive of insider documents about Roman rule in the Hellenistic world. Pliny had more to say about public services in the city of Nicomedia.

  While I was touring another part of the province, a great fire at Nicomedia destroyed many private houses and two public buildings—an old men’s shelter and the temple of Isis—though they stood on opposite sides of the street. It spread so far first due to the strength of the wind, and secondly due to the inactivity of the people, who evidently stood idle and motionless spectators of this terrible calamity; but in any case the city possessed not a single pump or fire bucket or any equipment at all for fighting fires. These will now be procured, as I have already ordered. Do you, my lord, consider whether you think it right to organize an association of firemen, not to exceed 150 men. I will make sure that only firemen are admitted into it, and that the privileges granted are not abused for other purposes; since they would be few in number, it would not be difficult to keep them under surveillance (Pliny Letters 10.26).

  In this case, Trajan approved of the provision of firefighting equipment, but—worried that any association of men allowed to hold regular meetings would become political and be tempted to activities outside their remit—disallowed the association of firemen, instructing that property-owners and the general populace should use the equipment and do the firefighting. The point is that the infrastructure, amenities, and services characteristic of Hellenistic urban life were maintained and even expanded under Roman rule. Not only do we see careful thought given to an adequate drinking water supply; we learn that Nicomedia had a shelter for the elderly maintained at public expense, and that public funds were now also expended on firefighting equipment. That these examples drawn from Pliny’s letters are not exceptional is attested by a host of inscriptions from all around the Hellenistic world, documenting the upkeep of the Hellenistic urban way of life as it had existed for centuries before the advent of Roman rule, and even the expansion of certain aspects of it. One is reminded of a famous passage in Monty Python’s comic masterpiece The Life of Brian, when the Judaean revolutionary leader “Reg” asks rhetorically what the Romans have ever done “for us,” only to get some unexpected answers.

  Reg: All right … all right … but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order … what have the Romans done for us?

  But if the Romans as rulers saw to the upkeep and even expansion of public services in the Hellenistic world, what of cultural life? The lifestyle of Greeks did not just revolve around drinking water, public baths, and worship of the gods: it involved watching plays, attending lectures and concerts, and reading books. It is during the period of Roman rule, in fact, that we get clear evidence of the spread of public libraries beyond the old royal centers. Inscriptions inform us of public libraries set up in the cities of Rhodes and Cos, for example. When the emperor Hadrian refurbished the city of Athens, he arranged for a new public library to be established in his new “forum of Hadrian” that expanded the old Athenian agora. A wealthy private citizen paid for the creation of a public library at the great Asklepieion, the sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius (in effect, a hospital) just outside the city of Pergamon. The most famous public library of this era, though, is no doubt the Library of Celsus at Ephesus, the facade of which was magnificently rebuilt by Austrian archaeologists in the 1970s (see ill. 25). This library, paid for by a wealthy citizen of Ephesus, had space for twelve thousand book scrolls in its great reading room, making it a fabulous addition to the cultural amenities available to Ephesus’ citizens. As an interesting sidelight on the urban lifestyle of the educated Greek citizen, the library also offered an underground passageway leading from the reading room, under the great “Street of Marble” on which the library stood, to a public lavatory (see ill. 26) and a high-class brothel on the other side of the street. When tired of reading, the citizen could unobtrusively take care of other more physical needs.

  25. Façade of the Library of Celcus at Ephesus

  (Wikimedia Commons photo by Benh Lieu Song, CC BY-SA 3.0)

  26. Public toilets, Ephesus

  (Wikimedia Commons public domain image by Mykenik~commonswiki)

  Like any other era of western culture, the Hellenistic world of the high Roman Empire had its cultural icons and stars. Highly paid public speakers traveled from city to city giving public orations for high fees. Dio Chrysostom (Dio “the golden-tongued”) spoke to large audiences of enraptured Greek citizens on topics such as ideal kingship, virtue, the attractions of a life of poverty (which he himself carefully avoided), and so on in the late first century CE. In the next century, Aelius Aristides did likewise, in between visits to the great Asclepius sanctuaries (public hospitals/health spas) to take care of his perpetually failing health. These public orators, and others like them, modeled their style of speaking on the precepts of the fourth-century classical Athenian teacher of rhetoric, Isocrates, and on the example of Isocrates’ much younger contemporary, the orator Demosthenes. Scholars of various sorts studied and praised the works, style, and ideas of classical Greek writers: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, wrote essays on the historians Herodotus and Thucydides; Longinus wrote on how to compose literary works in the “sublime” style of the classical greats; Harpocration produced a lexicon of the words used by the “ten great orators” of classical Greece; and so on. The second-century CE historian Arrian wrote a widely read and admired history of, tellingly, Alexander the Great, known as the Anabasis and still our best source of knowledge about Alexander. Arrian modeled his language and prose style on the fourth-century BCE Athenian historian Xenophon, going so far as to advertize himself as a second Xenophon.

  In other words, the cultural stars of the Hellenistic world in the Roman era went to great lengths to keep alive the cultural works and ideas of the Greek past, to maintain alive the traditions of their fifth-, fourth-, and third-century BCE forebears. The learned man of letters Plutarch, a wealthy Greek from Tanagra in Boeotia who lived in the late first century CE and wrote on almost every topic under the sun, expended a great deal of effort in assuring his Greek and Roman contemporaries that the Greeks were in every way as great as the Romans, if not greater. The project by which he demonstrated this was a huge collection of parallel biographies. Each pair of biographies consisted of a great Roman leader and a comparably great Greek leader: if Rome had its Caesar, the Greeks had their Alexander; for the Roman Cicero, there was the Greek Demosthenes; the great Roman commander Scipio Africanus was no greater than the Greek general Epaminondas; if the Roman Cato the younger was an example of upright moral fortitude, so was the fourth-century Athenian leader Phocion, and so on. The surviving collection runs to twenty-two sets of biographies, though several are lost, including those
of Scipio and Epaminondas just mentioned.

  One of the most engaging writers of this Roman era was Lucian, who came from the city of Samosata in northern Mesopotamia (southern Turkey today), near the border of the Roman and Parthian empires. Lucian wrote humorous essays on a wide range of topics. For example, his True Stories, parodying the exaggerated accounts of explorers and certain kinds of historians, included narratives of his visits to the Moon and to “Cloudcuckooland.” To truly appreciate the latter, the reader needed to be familiar with the play The Birds by the fifth-century Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes, where the notion of Cloudcuckooland originated. Lucian liked to debunk the self-important, the pompous, and the fakers of contemporary society. He wrote exposés of the false prophet Alexander of Abounoteichus and his splendid new cult of the god Glaucon, and of the pseudo-philosopher and fake Christian prophet Peregrinus. As an admirer of the Athenian philosopher Epicurus, Lucian was highly skeptical of religion in general, and pretensions to sacred revelations struck him as too often merely tools to exploit the gullible, such as the Christian community that funded Peregrinus’ lifestyle for several years. For true learning, Lucian had the greatest admiration, and as a man well educated in the Hellenistic manner true learning meant a proper familiarity with and understanding of the writings of the “classical” Greeks.

  This is illustrated by a highly characteristic essay of Lucian’s called “The Ignorant Book-Collector.” In this essay we read of the sort of man who made a display of learning by collecting books and forming a personal library, but without actually having the least notion which books were worth buying and why. Buying books for the look of them is not the mark of an educated man. One must know which authors are worth reading and collecting, and one must know how to read the best works. To aid in understanding the classics, there were commentaries and lexica. The ignorant book-collector knows nothing of all this, but goes by price and look. But the educated reader, reading the right books in the right way, learns how to think and behave and write properly from the great example set by the classic authors of earlier Greek times. But how true to life, how typical of the education and reading habits of Greek citizens of the Roman Empire, were the ideas and outlook of cultural leaders such as Lucian, Plutarch, Arrian, and the others mentioned here? To gauge that we must turn to a provincial Greek city in the heart of Roman Egypt: Oxyrhynchus.