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THE CLASSICAL WORLD
'Colourful, pacey, panoramic ... a grand survey' Boyd Tonkin, Independent, Books of the Year
'A masterful canter through the Classical era . . . We are in the hands of an author who knows that an epic can only be driven by big characters . . . Here lies the author's mastery, matching a lifelong familiarity with his subject to the basic needs of a newly arrived apprentice' Nigel Spivey, Financial Times
'A stirring, authoritative and entertaining account from Homer's Iliad to Hadrian's Wall by one of Oxford's most celebrated classicists' Observer
'Witty . . . engaging . . . decidedly laddish . . . Lane Fox is an excellent storyteller' Mary Beard, Independent
'To be warmly welcomed as a stimulating survey of 1,000 years of classical history . . . always elegant, but also red-blooded, judgemental and above all, clear' Church Times
'His storytelling here is intense and engaging ... a magnificent, panoramic introduction to the ancient world' Peter Heather, Sunday Times
about the author
Robin Lane Fox is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and University Reader in Ancient History. His books include Alexander the Great, Pagans and Christians and The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, all of which are published by Penguin. He has also been the weekly gardening correspondent of the Financial Times since 1970.
ROBIN LANE FOX
The Classical World
An Epic History of Greece and Rome
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Rooks Ltd, So Strand, London WCzR orl, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2.Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 15 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Cambcrwell, Victoria 312.4, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, n Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), enr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty} Ltd, 24 Srurdec Avenue, Roscbank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
First published by Allen Lane 2005 Published with new material in Penguin Books 2006 12
Copyright © Robin Lane Fox, 2005, 2006 All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN-13: 978-0-141-02141-6
FOR MARTHA
He found his father alone in his well-ordered orchard
Digging round a plant: he was wearing a dirty tunic,
Patched and unseemly, and round his shins he had hound
Sewn leather leg-guards, keeping off scratches,
And he had gloves on his hands because of the thorns.
On his head he wore a goatskin cap, increasing his air of sorrow.
When noble, enduring Odysseus saw him
Worn by old age and with such great sadness in his heart,
He stood beneath a tall pear-tree and shed tears ...
Odysseus returns to his father: Homer, Odyssey 24.226-34
This tomb of well-sculpted metal Covers the dead body of a great hero, Zenodotus. But his soul is in heaven, where Orpheus is, Where Plato is, and has found a holy seat, fit to receive a god. For, he was a valiant cavalryman in the Emperor's service, Famous, eloquent, god-like. In his speech He was a copy of Socrates among the Italian people. Leaving to his children his sound ancestral fortune, He has died, a fit old man, leaving boundless sorrow To his well-born friends, his city and its citizens. Palatine Anthology 7.363, possibly composed by Hadrian himself
Contents
List of Maps xiii
Preface xv
Hadrian and the Classical World i
part one
The Archaic Greek World
1 Homeric Epic 13
2 The Greeks' Settlements 24
3 Aristocrats 38
4 The Immortal Gods 49
5 Tyrants and Lawgivers 58
6 Sparta 69
7 The Eastern Greeks 79
8 Towards Democracy 88
9 The Persian Wars 99
10 The Western Greeks in
part two
The Classical Greek World
11 Conquest and Empire 125
12 A Changing Greek Cultural World 137
13 Pericles and Athens 151
14 The Peloponnesian War 159
15 Socrates 169
16 Fighting for Freedom and Justice 175
17 Women and Children 185
18 Philip of Macedon 192
19 The Two Philosophers 201
20 Fourth-century Athenians 213
part three
Hellenistic Worlds
21 Alexander the Great 229
22 Alexander's Early Successors 241
23 Life in the Big Cities 252
24 Taxes and Technologies 264
25 The New World 271
26 Rome Reaches Out 281
27 The Peace of the Gods 296
28 Liberation in the South 304
29 Hannibal and Rome 312
30 Diplomacy and Dominance 322
part four
The Roman Republic
31 Luxury and Licence 333
32 Turbulence at Home and Abroad 343
33 Pompey's Triumphs 355
34 The World of Cicero 366
35 The Rise of Julius Caesar 377
36 The Spectre of Civil War 387
37 The Fatal Dictator 400
38 Liberation Betrayed 415
part five
From Republic to Empire
39 Antony and Cleopatra 427
40 The Making of the Emperor 439
41 Morals and Society 448
42 Spectator Sports 460
43 The Roman Army 471
44 The New Age 481
part six An Imperial World
45 The Julio-Claudians 497
46 Ruling the Provinces 510
47 Effects of Empire 520
48 Christianity and Roman Rule 533
49 Surviving Four Emperors 541
50 The New Dynasty 547
51 The Last Days of Pompeii 556
52A New Man in Action 568
53A Pagan and Christians 575
54 Regime Change, Home and Away 583
55Presenting the Past 590
56Hadrian: a Retrospective 597
Notes 607
Select Bibliography 63 6
Commentary on the Illustrations 671
Preface
It is a challenge to be asked to write a history of some nine hundred years, especially when the evidence is so scattered and diverse, but it is a challenge which I have enjoyed. I have not assumed a familiarity with the subject but I hope that readers who do or do not have one will be drawn in and retained by what I have had space to discuss. My hope is that they will leave it, as I have, with a sense of how this history varied but can still be made to hang together. I also hope that there will be parts which they wil
l want to pursue, especially the many which I have had to compress.
I have not followed the conventional thematic presentation of classical civilization which discusses a topic ('a gendered world', 'getting a living') across a thousand years in a single chapter. For theoretical reasons, I have chosen a form with a framework of narrative. I believe that changing relations of power, sharply changed by events, changed the meaning and context of most of these themes and that these changes are lost by taking the easy thematic short-cut. My approach is shared in contemporary areas of medical thinking ('evidence based medicine'), the social sciences ('critical juncture theory') and literary studies ('discourse analysis'). I owe it, rather, to the hard old historical method of putting questions to evidence, reading with it (not against it) in order to bring out more of what it says and constantly retaining a sense of turning points and crucial decisions whose results were shaped, but not predetermined, by their context.
I have had to make hard choices and say little on areas where I feel I know most. One side of me still looks to Homer, another to the still-green orchards near Lefkadia in Macedonia where my vaulted tomb, painted with my three great horses, sixty-petalled roses,
Bactrian dancing girls and apparently mythical women awaits discovery by the skilled ephors of the Greek Archaeological Service in 2056. I have chosen to give slightly more space to narrative for one cardinal era, the years from 60 to 19 bc, not only because they are of such significance for the role of my assumed reader, the Emperor Hadrian. They are so dramatic, even to my post-Macedonian eye. They also attach initially to the letters of Cicero, the inexhaustible reward for all historians of the ancient world.
I am extremely grateful to Fiona Greenland for her expert help with illustrations. The jacket was the publisher's choice, but the descriptions of the illustrations are otherwise mostly mine. I am also very grateful to Stuart Proffitt for comments on the first part which forced me to go back over it, and to Elizabeth Stratford for expert copy-editing and correction. Above all, I am grateful to two former pupils who turned a manuscript into discs, Luke Streatfeild initially and especially Tamsin Cox whose skill and patience have been this book's essential support.
Robin Lane Fox New College, Oxford
Hadrian and the Classical World
The following was [resolved] . . . by the council and people of the citizens of Thyatira: to inscribe this decree on a stone stele and to place it on the Acropolis (at Athens) so that it may [be] evident to all the Greeks how much Thyatira has received from the greatest of kings since . . . he (Hadrian) benefited all the Greeks in common when he summoned, as a gift to one and all, a council from among them to the most brilliant city of Athens, the Benefactress . . . and when, on his proposal, the [Romans] approved [this] most venerable Panhellenion [by decree] of the Senate and individually he [gave[ the tribes and the cities a share in this most honourable Council. . .
Inscribed decree, c. ad 119/20, found at Athens, concerning Hadrian's Panhellenion
The 'classical world' is the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, some forty lifetimes before our own but still able to challenge us by a humanity shared with ours. The word 'classical' is itself of ancient origin: it derives from the Latin word classicus which referred to recruits of the 'first class', the heavy infantry in the Roman army. The 'classical', then, is 'first class', though it is no longer heavily armoured. The Greeks and Romans did borrow from many other cultures, Iranian, Levantine, Egyptian or Jewish among others. Their story connects at times with these parallel stories, but it is their own art and literature, thought, philosophy and political life which are correctly regarded as 'first class' in their world and ours.
In this world's long history, two periods and places came to be seen as particularly classical: Athens in the fifth- and fourth-century bc was one, while the other was Rome from the first century bc to ad 14, the world of Julius Caesar and then Augustus, the first Roman emperor. The ancients themselves shared this perspective. By the time of Alexander the Great they already recognized, as we still do, that particular dramatists at Athens in the fifth century bc had written 'classic' plays. In the Hellenistic age (c. 330-30 bc) artists and architects adopted a classicizing style which looked back to the classical arts of the fifth century. Then Rome, in the late first century bc, became a centre of classicizing art and taste, while classical Greek, especially Athenian Greek, was exalted as good taste against 'Eastern' excesses of style. Subsequent Roman emperors endorsed this classical taste and as time passed, added another 'classic' age: the era of the Emperor Augustus, their Empire's founding figure.
My history of the classical world begins from a pre-classical classic, the epic poet Homer whom the ancients, like all modern readers, acknowledge as simply in a class of his own. His poems are the first written Greek literature to survive. From then onwards, I shall explore how classical Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries bc evolved and what it stood for, up to four hundred years after Homer's (probable) date (c. 730 bc). I then turn to Rome and the emergence of its own classical age, from Julius Caesar to Augustus (c50 bc to ad 14). My history ends with the reign of Hadrian, the Roman emperor from ad 117 to 138, just before the first surviving use of the term 'classics' to describe the best authors: it is attested in the conversation of Fronto, tutor to the children of Hadrian's successor in Rome.1
But why choose to stop with Hadrian? One reason is that 'classical literature' ends in his reign, just as it began with Homer: in Latin, the satirical poet Juvenal is its last widely recognized representative. But this reason is rather arbitrary, formed by a canon which is hard for those to share who read forward into later authors and who approach the writers of the fourth and fifth centuries ad with an open mind. A more relevant reason is that Hadrian himself was the emperor with the most evident classicizing tastes. They are seen in his plans for the city of Athens and in many of the buildings which he patronized, and in aspects of his personal style. He himself looked back selfconsciously on a classical world, although by his lifetime what we call the 'Roman world' had been pacified and greatly extended. Hadrian is a landmark, too, because he is the one emperor who acquired a first-hand view of this world, one we would dearly like to share. In the izos and early 130s he set out on several grand tours of an Empire which extended from Britain to the Red Sea. He spent time in Athens, its classical centre. He travelled by ship and on horseback, a seasoned rider in his mid-forties who revelled in local opportunities for hunting. He went far afield to lands under Roman rule which no 'classical' Athenian had ever visited. We are unusually able to follow his progress because we have the specially commissioned coins which were struck to commemorate his journeys. Even in unclassical places, they are vivid witnesses to Hadrian and his contemporaries' sense of an admired classical past.2
These coins show a personified image of each province of Hadrian's Roman Empire, whether or not it had had a classical age. They show unclassical Germany as a bare-breasted female warrior and unclassical Spain as a lady reclining on the ground: she holds a large olive-branch, symbol of Spain's excellent olive oil, with a rabbit beside her, Spanish rabbits being notoriously prolific. Most of Spain and all of Germany had been unknown to Greeks in the first classical age, but the fine pictures on these coins connect them to classical taste because they portray them in an elegant classicizing style. Behind Hadrian's taste and the 'Hadrianic School' of artists who designed these images lies a classical world which they themselves were acknowledging. It was based on the classical art of the Greeks four or five hundred years earlier, examples of which could be admired conveniently by Romans because previous Romans had plundered them and brought them back to their own homes and cities.
These grand tours to Greece or Egypt, the west coast of Asia or Sicily and Libya gave Hadrian the chance of a global, classical overview. He stopped at so many of the great sites of its past, but he was particularly respectful of Athens. He regarded it as a 'free' city and made it the spectacular beneficiary of his gifts, one
of which was a grand 'library', with a hundred pillars of rare marble. He completed its enormous temple to the Olympian god Zeus which had been begun six centuries earlier but never finished. It was surely Hadrian who encouraged the new venture of an all-Greek synod, or Panhellenion, excelling even the classical Athenian statesman Pericles.3 From all over the Greek world, delegates were to meet in Athens, and were to hold a great festival of the arts and athletics every four years. Past Athenians had been credited with Panhellenic projects, but this one was to be incomparably grand.
Those who idealize the past tend not to understand it: restoration kills it with kindness. Hadrian certainly shared the traditional pleasures of past Greek aristocrats and kings. He loved hunting as they had; he loved his horse, the gallant Borysthenes whom he honoured with verses on his death in southern Gaul;4 above all, he loved the young male Antinous, a spectacular instance of 'Greek love'. When Antinous died prematurely, Hadrian built a new city in his honour in Egypt and encouraged his cult as a god throughout his Empire. Not even Alexander the Great had done quite so much for his lifelong male love, Hephaestion. Like Hadrian's distinctive beard, these elements of Hadrian's life were rooted in previous Greek culture. But he could never be a classical Greek himself, because so much around him had changed since the Athens of the great classics, let alone since the pre-classical Homer.
The most audible change was the spread of language. Almost a thousand years earlier, in Homer's youth, Greek had been only a spoken language without an alphabet, and was only used by people from Greece and the Aegean. Latin, too, had been only a spoken language, at home in a small part of Italy, Latium, around Rome. But Hadrian spoke and read both languages, although his family traced back on both sides to southern Spain and his father's estates lay just to the north of modern Seville, miles from Athens and Latium. Hadrian's ancestors had settled in Spain as Latin-speaking Italians, rewarded for service in the Roman army nearly three hundred years before his birth. Of Latin-speaking descent, Hadrian was not 'Spanish' in any cultural sense. He himself had been brought up in Rome and favoured the archaic style of Latin prose. Like other educated Romans, he also spoke Greek: he was even known as a 'Greekling' because his passion for Greek literature was so strong. So far from being Spanish, Hadrian was proof of the common classicizing culture which now bound together the emperor's educated class. It was based on the classical homelands of the Greek and Latin language but it extended way beyond their boundaries. As Homer never could, Hadrian could pass through Syria or Egypt speaking Greek and he could also travel far away into Britain, speaking Latin.
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