The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  This surge up and down Italy occurred in what was the single lifespan of the Macedonian Ptolemy, friend of Alexander and founder of the royal line in Egypt. Ptolemy is most unlikely to have even mentioned Rome in his history of Alexander: the great Greek minds in his contemporary Alexandria were moving on a totally different level to that of the Romans. The Roman expansion was the work of people who had no literature and as yet, no formal art of oratory. At Rome, Homer was still unknown and Aristotle would have been completely unintelligible. The great arts of the most classical Greeks, thinking, drawing and democratic voting, were not talents of the Romans. Nonetheless, plain blunt Romans reformed their army and gave up their 'hoplite' style of tactics, arguably in the 340S-330S, the years of further concessions by the noble patricians to the non-nobles.a They also broke up the political league of their Latin neighbours and imposed settlements on its member-states one by one.

  This decade (348-338 bc) is therefore of crucial importance to ancient history. In Macedonia, King Philip, Alexander's father, was balancing and training a new Macedonian army with a new type of tactics. In Italy, Romans were also undertaking a military revolution. It resulted in three main ranks of infantry being combined in a flexible formation and being equipped with heavy throwing-spears and swords. The two resulting types of army would dominate the East and West respectively, before clashing decisively in the 190s bc; the Romans' greater flexibility won the encounter, and the tactics of this time remained the backbone of her world-conquering armies for centuries. In 338 bc, a cardinal year, Philip had conquered the Athenians and their Greek allies and then imposed a 'peace and alliance' which marked a decisive limit on political freedom in Greece. In this same year, Rome imposed long-lasting settlements among the neigh­bouring Latins. She did the same elsewhere in Italy, in the towns then and later who submitted to her. The various grades of citizenship which she offered to these Italian towns were also to have a long, important future. They became a blueprint from which the Romans' relations with towns throughout their Western Empire later developed.

  These years of Roman struggle occurred outside the course of poli­tics in the Greek world, but the major themes of justice and luxury were as prominent in Romans' public life as 'freedom'. The older Roman framework of public justice had been relatively simple. Much was left to self-help and privately initiated prosecution, but according to the Twelve Tables (in 451 bc), a few major crimes, including murder and theft, would also be prosecuted before one of the magis­trates.9 In 367 bc a major change was made to the magistrates avail­able. A separate 'praetor' was introduced besides the two consuls. Thereafter Roman praetors became major overseers of justice. Their edicts while holding office were to have a fundamental impact on Roman law; praetors did not legislate, but they did grant legal actions for a far wider body of civil cases than the Tables had specified. Successive praetors took over previous praetors' edicts which thus grew by gradual additions; the edicts filled in gaps in the civil law, becoming the 'Roman equity' of later legal thinking.

  Within this growing framework, Roman justice was still heavily conditioned by social relations and by wide discrepancies of social class. In the 320s one major oppression of the poor, debt-bondage, was at least brought under legal restraints. The status itself did not disappear (as it had in Athens since Solon's reforms in 594 bc), but henceforward a Roman creditor could put a defaulting borrower into bondage only after obtaining a judgement in court. Citizens, meanwhile, did have one major resort against physical harassment and the blatant use of force by a social superior. Inside Rome itself, they could 'appeal' or call out, by the famous Roman right of provo­cation This right had begun as an informal cry for help which any citizen might make to the public at large. It acquired a new focus when tribunes of the people were established in 494 bc. These officers had the right to interpose their persons between a bully and his victim if a citizen 'called' on them inside the city; the tribunes had been declared 'sacrosanct' by oath and could not be harassed without the wrong to them being avenged. By c. 300 bc the practice of appeal became formalized further in law. It became a 'wicked crime' for someone to execute a citizen who had appealed for justice. However, no actual penalty is prescribed in our surviving evidence for anyone who was so wicked, nor were beatings or other types of harassment outlawed.

  Among the people, this right of 'calling out', or appeal, was a cornerstone of freedom. Among the senators, 'freedom' had a further connotation: equality within their own peer group. This ideal was sustained by a very strong tradition of the rejection of luxury. Great Roman leaders of the past were idealized as simple farmers, men like Cincinnatus (the namesake of modern Cincinnati) who left his plough only briefly in order to serve as Rome's dictator. Curius Dentatus (a consul four times, with three triumphs) lived simply in a little cottage and was believed to have rejected offers of gold from the Samnites (who were idealized as a hardy, simple people too). Curius' cottage continued to be revered, and a special 'Meadow' near Rome commem­orated Cincinnatus.11 Roman women were also supposed to behave with restraint and here too examples upheld values, in a typically Roman fashion. Continuing tales were told of the virgin Tarpeia who had been seduced by the sight of the gold bracelets on Rome's enemies, the Sabines.12 In early days a Roman wife was said to be forbidden even to drink wine. One Roman woman who tried to steal the keys to the wine cellar was actually said to have been clubbed to death by her husband, a cautionary tale to the others.

  This ideal of austerity did not exclude the use of slave-labour by its exemplary heroes and their heirs. Such labour was freely available at Rome, because captives in war and defaulting debtors became enslaved and were readily available for the richer Romans' use. As in Athens, there was never a Roman 'golden age' before slavery. Slave-owning was not, then, seen as unbridled luxury; rather, 'luxury' was ascribed to rival cities in Italy, south of slave-owning Rome, where it was cited as their undoing. The most effete were said to be Capua (near Naples), a city of Etruscan origin, and Tarentum (modern Taranto), the bastard child of her austere founder, Sparta. These cities' love of scents, baths and ornaments was said to have sapped their capacity to resist or to take wise political decisions. In fact, each city marked an important staging-point on Rome's advance southwards down Italy. In 343 Capua's appeal to Rome first brought Roman troops into the immensely fertile land behind Naples. In 284 Rome's attack on Tarentum ended by entrenching her power among the Greek cities of southern Italy.

  During this advance through Italy Roman power was not without attractions for the upper classes in the towns along her route. Men in the upper class who feared their own lower classes were much more ready to team up with these apparently sound conservative leaders in Rome. In 343 such people in Capua threw themselves on Rome's decision by opting for voluntary surrender (or deditio).u Roman troops entered the city and in the following year, an outburst of discontent among Rome's occupying garrison was blamed on the 'corrupting' luxury of 'soft' Capua. In fact, the discontent probably had political roots too. At Rome, it led on to further concessions to the plebs by their Roman superiors: one good reason for giving them was that the commoners were needed as working soldiers.

  In the 280s yet more local rivalries drew Rome even further into the south of Italy. In the south, Greek cities of considerable size and cultural distinction still regarded themselves here as 'Great Greece', but they had continued to be beset by non-Greek barbarian peoples and by deep-seated rivalries between each other. Rome did not hesitate to accept a request for help from distant Thurii, Herodotus' former refuge and the Greek city which had been founded by Pericles' Athenians. Thurii's immediate enemies were the non-Greek Lucanians, but a friendship with Thurii traditionally caused the hostility of another Greek city, Tarentum, further north. Tarentum, an ancient Spartan foundation, was by now a rich and cultured democracy.

  Siding with Thurii, Rome then turned against Tarentum and justi­fied herself later with a concerted campaign of historical spin. When Roman envoys arrived in Tarent
um they were said to have been mocked before an assembly in the city's theatre. One citizen, Philonides, was even said to have excreted on the Roman envoy and to have made fun of his barbaric Latin.14 To the Tarentines, the Romans seemed like illegal troublemakers. Some of their ships had been infringing a previous agreement that they would not sail beyond a specified point on Italy's south-east coast. For there was a long diplomatic history here in the Greek-speaking south. Fifty years before the Roman incident Tarentum had summoned the brother-in-law of Alexander the Great to help her cause locally (c. 334-331 bc) and the coastal agreement in question may go back to his short-lived intervention.15

  Instead, Rome pleaded an 'insult' by Tarentum and attacked her. Armed intervention in the south required willing soldiers and, once again, we find that important political concessions had recently been made at Rome to the common people from whom the soldiers would be drawn. Shortly before the involvement with Thurii, it was enacted that decisions of the Roman people's assembly were to be binding on all the people, nobles included. The senators, moreover, would no longer be able to vet decisions of the assemblies before agreeing to adopt them.

  This fateful rule, the Hortensian Law, was passed with a back­ground of continuing resentment by debtors and probably did not seem an unduly dangerous concession in the eyes of the governing class at the time. From the 340s onwards magistracies at Rome had progressively been opened to non-nobles, and so a broader class of former office-holders had been gradually built up. As these same office-holders became senators, a like-minded governing class had been formed from the nobles and the rich newcomers. In the eyes of this class, there was not too much danger in giving 'popular' decisions the form of law. The 'tribal' assembly which approved them was heavily weighted against the city-dwelling poor, the majority. It only met when magistrates summoned it, and only voted when they put proposals to it. The magistrates were usually reliable members of the governing class.

  Spurred on nonetheless, Roman soldiers would fight decisively against old, civilized Tarentum. Their ally, 'Athenian' Thurii, was no longer a democracy, whereas their enemy, 'Spartan' Tarentum, was now the democracy instead. The age-old rivalry of Sparta and Athens was thus played out again, but this time in the presence of Romans, and Roman troops proved to be the decisive military force.

  27

  The Peace of the Gods

  When the Roman legate arrives at the frontier . . . he covers his head with a band of wool and says, 'Hear, Jupiter: hear, boundaries of this people; let the divine law hear. I am the official herald of the Roman people; I come lawfully and piously commissioned; let there be trust in my words.' Then he sets out his demands and calls on Jupiter as a witness. 'If I unjustly and impiously demand that these men and these goods be surrendered to me, then let me never be a full citizen of my fatherland.' He recites these words when he crosses the boundary, again to the first person he meets, again when proceeding through the town gate and again when he enters the market-place . . . If his demands are not met, at the end of thirty-three days . . . he declares war as follows: 'Hear, Jupiter and you too, Janus Quirinus and all you gods of heaven and you gods of earth and you gods below, hear! I call you to witness that this people [naming them] is unjust and does not render just reparation. But we will consult the elders in our fatherland about these things, as to how we may requite what is our due.'

  Livy, 1.32.6, on the Romans' early ritual for declaring war

  Romans' ever closer encounters with the Greek world were not to be a simple meeting of minds. Romans regarded Greeks as essentially frivolous, people who talked too much and were too clever by half. They were duplicitous, and quite unreliable with money, especially their own public funds. Among the Greeks, free male citizens had sexual relations with one another; Roman males were only supposed to do so with male slaves and non-Roman inferiors. Greeks even exercised and competed at games in the nude. Greeks' tunics left the body free, whereas Romans were wrapped up in their solemn, inhibiting togas. Greek drinking-parties, or symposia, were also very different. Romans gave dinners at which the food was the central item and free-born women, including wives, were present. At Greek parties, the only women were slave-girls and the point was to drink wine after dinner: the free-born guests were all men, and sex was a possibility, with a slave-girl or with one another. During the third century bc a new Latin word was coined, pergraecari, to 'have a thoroughly Greek time': it meant the lazy feasting and debauching which Greek drinking-parties encouraged. Romans' conversation was prosaic and factual: 'repeating Greek verses was for a Roman something like telling dirty stories."

  Greeks loved beauty and (except the Spartans) brains. They also loved their invention, celebrities. None of these distinctions was a hallmark of the Romans' ancestors. They stood for solid, serious 'gravity', gravitas, which Cicero regarded as a Roman particularity.2 When the traditionalist Cato wrote his history of the origins of Italy, he was so opposed to celebrities that he left out all the major players' personal names. Our first long surviving appraisal of Roman customs by a Greek visitor, the historian Polybius (writing c. 150 bc), empha­sizes the solemnity of two special Roman features. At funerals of prominent Romans, the dead man was brought into the Forum and a fine memorial speech was spoken before an admiring crowd. Families brought with him the lifelike wax funerary masks of their dead relations which were set on robes of honour or worn by participating actors. These masks were a privilege given to men who had held one of the higher magistracies and made them publicly 'known' or nobiles (our 'nobles'). Crowds gazed on the splendour of these family pro­cessions and then a wax mask of the dead man was added to the masks which the family kept in their halls. They were an encourage­ment, Polybius rightly believed, to the young family members to rival their ancestors in glory.3

  The other distinctive feature, he thought, was Roman religion. It was so much more elaborate and more prominent in public and private

  life than in any other society. Polybius believed that the Roman upper classes had emphasized it so as to terrorize the lower classes with religious fear. Roman nobles would not have seen religion in that detached way. For them, their religious rites honoured and appeased the gods so as to maintain the all-important 'peace of the gods' and avert their anger. They were kept up as the proven tradition of their ancestors, a tradition which had worked across the ages and could not be lightly abandoned. It kept Rome and the Romans safe. Ancestral tradition had 'authority', an element in Roman religiousness which has been argued to be still surviving in the 'authority' of tradition in the Roman Catholic Church.

  Greek religion teemed with stories, or 'myths', about the gods, but the Romans' own myths had been very few during their earlier history. Art, especially statues, shaped the Greeks' ideas of their superhuman gods, but the learned Roman scholar Varro reckoned that there had been no Roman statues of their gods until as late as c. 570 bc. Nonetheless, many underlying principles of Roman religion were simi­lar to the Greeks' own. Like the Greeks, the Romans were polytheists who worshipped many different gods. Important divinities had Latin names (Jupiter, Juno, Mars or Minerva), but they could be equated with Greek ones easily enough (Zeus, Hera, Ares, Athena). There were also many other gods, as if anything which might go wrong had a divine power to explain it: diseases of the crops ('Robigo', or blight) or the opening and shutting of doors (Janus, in various aspects). Yet, behind the big gods of Greek literature, similar divinities can be found in the calendars of the local demes, or villages, in classical Attica.

  As in a Greek city, the main aim of religious cult was to aid worldly success, not to save citizens from sin. Romans' own ideas of a future life were as shadowy and ghostly as those of the Greeks with which they later enhanced them. The purpose of religious worship was honour and appeasement, pursued by pouring libations, giving ani­mals or offering first-fruits at country altars. In Virgil's superb poem of country life, the Georgics, we glimpse the simplest of all offerings, garlands of 'Michaelmas daisies' on turf altars.4 As in Greece, the
main act of public religious cult was the killing of an animal, parts of whose meat were eaten afterwards. Priests attended, but in Rome they were almost always male priests and, distinctively, their heads were covered during the ceremony. As in Greece, too, there was an active art of divination so as to infer the gods' will. The entrails of sacrificed animals, the flight of birds, omens and oddities were all studied closely. At Rome, these arts were especially technical, because of the Etrus­cans' legacy to Roman culture. On military campaigns or before public meetings, a presiding magistrate would 'take the auspices', or look for signs of the gods' wishes, and a priestly augur would be consulted too. Romans were particularly concerned by 'prodigies', odd things and events which seemed to be signs of the gods' communication. A prodigy might be a deformed child at birth, a mole (reportedly) with teeth or an apparent shower of blood from heaven. Soothsayers and a priest stood by to list prodigies and interpret them.

  Divination, then, was particularly elaborate at Rome and bad omens could be used even to interrupt a public assembly. On their way through Italy in the fourth and third centuries bc, Roman com­manders would have paid close attention for any signs from the gods that relations with them were amiss. When Romans became aware of Greek philosophical theories a few of them did begin to reflect on the validity of this pseudoscience: there were a very few sceptics, including Cicero, but even Cicero was delighted to be chosen to be an augur and to uphold tradition, although the thinking half of his personality knew that divination was false. Every important Roman, whether Sulla, Pompey or Augustus, lived with a sense of the potential presence of the gods. In the 50s and 40s Julius Caesar's career was punctuated by omens, by escaping animals who were about to be sacrificed (twice in the Civil Wars, in 49 and 48) and by animals whose entrails were defective (in Spain, in 45, and in February 44, a month before his murder). He reinterpreted some of these signs so as to encourage his troops, but he never denied that they were signs.