The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Omens and prodigies warned of the gods' ill-will; the public calen­dar of cults aimed to avert evil and encourage safety, fertility and prosperity. As in classical Athens, an individual's personal religion was unimportant for the public rites: the rites, however, assured each individual Roman's well-being as a member of the community. Again as in Greece, there were no holy books or scriptures: the gods' 'due', or ius divinum, was passed on largely by oral tradition. Male priests attended the major rituals and, to Greek eyes, were organized in unusually specialized 'colleges'. The main female officials were the six Vestal Virgins, attached to the cult of Vesta, the goddess of the Hearth, whom they served for many years as virgins (though free, eventually, to move on and marry). As in the Greek cities, Roman festivals included processions, or pompae (whence Christians' 'pomp of the Devil'), and elaborate prayers and hymns. Romans' respect for tra­dition meant that if a priest made a mistake while reciting a traditional Latin prayer the rite was invalid and had to be repeated all over again.

  As in Greece, there was a lively accompanying culture of individuals' vows, made to a god in hope of, or thanks for, a favour. Unlike the Greeks, Romans sometimes picked on human beings as the object which they vowed to offer. A general might 'vow' his enemies to the gods of the underworld (this rite was used in the siege of Carthage in 146 bc). On rare occasions he even vowed himself on behalf of his soldiers in battle. Stories were told of three such vows by Decius Mus and then by his descendants, all in the third century bc. Later, an ordinary soldier was said to be permissible as a substitute.5

  In their households and on their farms, families would also pay religious cults to the 'gods in a small way', gods of crossroads or boundaries or gods of the inner recesses of the household (the penates); the powerful father of the household conducted the rites. Publicly and in households, there were also rites for the dead and their unseen ghosts. None of this worship would have surprised a Greek, and as time passed, Roman religion had more and more of a Greek imprint anyway. For its evolution reflected the influences on the city which we have traced since the seventh century bc: the age of kings, including the Etruscan kings; the change to a Republic; the role of the plebs, or commoners; the ever-growing contact with the Greek world, especi­ally the Greek cities of Italy and Sicily. The single most important temple in Rome, Jupiter's on the Capitol, dated back to the last years of the kings. Unlike the last tyrants in Athens and their temple of Zeus, the kings had actually finished building it. In 496 bc, after the kingship had ended, an important temple to the agrarian Ceres, with Liber (Bacchus) and Libera, was founded: the cult was surely influ­enced by the cults of Demeter and Dionysus in Greek cities in Italy. It was adopted as a religious centre by the plebs.

  There was, then, never a time when Roman cults were static. Things changed, new temples arrived and, in a crisis, a new cult might be sanctioned by another 'foreign' import, the oracular Sibylline Books. This collection of written Greek oracles had entered Rome, tradition said, under the Etruscan kings. Yet beside these additions to tradition, the Romans' calendar of yearly festivals retained obvious roots in the military and agricultural year, even when the calendar-months had fallen far out of line with the underlying seasons. In March the god of war and youth, Mars, was especially honoured, as befitted the month which had marked the new military year. One distinctive March rite was the prolonged dancing of twelve young patrician nobles, chosen from those with living parents, who served as the Salii, or dancing priests. They wore distinctive dress, including red cloaks and conical helmets, and danced through the city on a traditional route, carrying twelve ancient bronze shields which were said to be modelled on a prototype fallen from heaven. Each night, they stopped at a special house and ate a sumptuous dinner. Their entire ritual lasted for more than three weeks.

  On 14 March there was a fine horse race on Rome's Field of Mars, balanced by another race in October, the month when soldiers would clean their weapons and put them away for the winter. On 15 October chariots raced in the Field of Mars and one of the winning horses (on the near side of the chariot) was sacrificed to the god. Its tail was cut off and hurried to the 'royal house' in the Forum so that its blood would drip on the hearth's sacred ashes. On the following 21 April these bloodied ashes were mixed with the ashes of cremated unborn calves and thrown onto ceremonial fires at another festival, the Patilia. The horse's head, meanwhile, had been cut off: two of the main districts of Rome competed for it, before nailing it (it seems) to the outside of the 'royal house' in the Forum.6

  This rite of the October Horse spanned both war and agricultural fertility, according to Roman interpreters. Nonetheless, it would have struck many Greeks as barbaric. They would have been surprised, too, by mid-February's Lupercalia, when two teams of young men met at the Lupercal cave on the Palatine hill, associated with the she-wolf who had suckled Romulus and Remus. They sacrificed a goat and a dog and had the blood rubbed on their foreheads. They feasted and drank heavily in the cave and then ran out, naked except for goatskins, following an ancient route along the Palatine hill. They would whip anyone they met with the goatskin, a rite which was thought to promote fertility. It survived, nonetheless, for centuries, becoming famous with Mark Antony in the month before Julius Caesar's murder and living on, remarkably, until ad 494 in Christian Rome, when the Pope replaced it with the festival of the Purification of the Virgin.

  In the public calendar, there were plenty of such festivals, festivals for the dead in February (the Parentalia, especially for the aged dead), or a 'carnival' festival in December, the Saturnalia, when social roles were briefly reversed and slave-masters would wait on their domestic slaves in their households. Greek cities, too, had these types of festival, just as they had festivals of release and merriment. At Rome, the main such feast was Flora's in April. Then goats and hares, highly sexed animals, were let loose on the last day of the accompanying games. Sex and fertility were part of the ritual's reference, and by the time of Julius Caesar striptease shows were being staged, too, on theatre stages in the city.7

  Traditionalism was the overwhelming self-image of Roman public religion, but the festival of Flora is an instance of the scope, nonethe­less, for additions and innovations. The festival gained a week of games only in 238 bc during a time of famine: they were sanctioned by the Sibylline Books. These books contained Greek oracular verses, supposedly spoken by a prophetic female Sibyl, and were kept by a board of fifteen respectable Romans. Plainly, the prophecies were Greek by origin, but they gave a divine sanction to the Romans' religious inno­vation. In 399 bc they had encouraged the adoption of a type of 'heavenly banquet', known in the Greek world, whereby statues of the gods were arranged for a feast on couches. In the 290s, during famine, they backed the introduction to Rome of the Greeks' god of healing, Aesculapius. In times of crisis, therefore, the Books would tend to add yet more Greek cults to the core of Roman tradition.

  Wars, naturally, were under the care of the gods, and they were treated by Romans in two distinctive ways, at their end and at their beginning. With the Senate's permission, a victorious general could be granted a 'triumph', whereby he would be allowed, uniquely, to bring his troops and booty across the sacred city-boundary and into Rome. His face was painted red for the day, like Jupiter on the Capitol; he held a sceptre and wore special dress. His troops were allowed to shout obscenities and rude remarks at him, while a slave (it was said) stood by his shoulder and whispered to him, 'Remember, you are a man.' The ceremony crossed normal social boundaries in a single day of 'festival time': just for one 'red-carpet' moment, the triumphing Roman was like a god (or, some said, like a king). He ascended the Capitol and left his wreaths of laurel in Jupiter's lap. His name was then entered in honour into the public records. The generals who went south against Tarentum would certainly be hoping for a triumph. They also believed that their war was 'justified'. For, one of the priestly colleges, the fetiales, would have declared it according to rites which were believed to go back into the mid-seventh c
entury bc. The Romans, this rite showed, did not fight except in 'self-defence': the fetial priests would traditionally send an envoy to throw a spear into the enemy's territory. At Tarentum, sufficient 'insults' were reported in the Roman tradition to 'justify' self-defence. When Tarentum was helped by King Pyrrhus from Greece, his territory was too far for an envoy to be sent all the way to cast the spear into it. So a prisoner taken from him was said to have been made to buy land at Rome so that the priests could declare a 'just war' on this nearby territory instead.8

  In the Greek world, concern for a 'justified' war had long been current, whether with the Spartans or Alexander the Great or the philosopher Aristotle. Romans were not the inventors of the doctrine of the just war: they were merely more punctilious and ceremonious about it. Their publicity was that their successes in war confirmed that the gods were indeed on their side. They would soon assert as much to the Greek cities in their conquering path. But first the gods had to cope with Tarentum's rightful opposition.

  28

  Liberation in the South

  The Roman embassy was led by Gains Fabricius ... to whom Pyrrhus was privately disposed to be kind, and so he tried to persuade him to accept gold . .. But Fabricius refused . . . and so on the next day, wanting to terrify him as he had never seen an elephant, Pyrrhus ordered the biggest of his beasts to be set just behind them while they conversed, with only a curtain drawn across. When a signal was given, the curtain was drawn and the elephant suddenly raised its trunk, held it over Fabricius' head and let out a terrifying, harsh cry. But Fabricius turned round calmly and said to Pyrrhus with a smile: 'Yesterday, your gold did not sway me; today, this beast of yours

  does not sway me, either.'

  Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 2o

  Rome's attack on the city-state of Tarentum turned out to be a military milestone. In self-defence, the men of Tarentum appealed for help to a Greek adventurer across the Adriatic Sea, for the third time in recent history. In the late 330s they had turned to Alexander the Great's brother-in-law and in 302 to an adventurous Spartan king. Now they appealed to King Pyrrhus in Epirus in north-western Greece. In spring 280 he crossed into south Italy and confronted the Romans for the first time with troops who had been trained in the world-conquering tactics of Alexander the Great. He also brought another of Alexander's novelties: war-elephants. No Italian had ever seen an elephant before. Pyrrhus' herd were real 'Indians', direct descendants of Alexander's, and he had taken them over in Macedon.

  Through Tarentum - the child of Sparta - Rome and the Hellenistic

  world thus met face to face, But King Pyrrhus was also a throwback; he was the last great rival of Homer's heroes in Greek history. Like Alexander, he matched himself with Achilles, his ancestor, and set off to fight a new Trojan War against the Romans of 'Trojan' descent. Pyrrhus shone in the front line of battle in his silver armour and crowned helmet (silver armour was later copied, a classical allusion, for the great fighter of the Italian Renaissance, the duke of Urbino, in the fifteenth century). He enjoyed single combat and claimed that once, with a single swipe, he hacked a savage Mamertine mercenary in half. But he was not just a lout. He wrote a book on tactics and a book of memoirs and was later admired for his siegecraft and diplo­macy. Nowadays, the Carthaginian general Hannibal is remembered as the famous user of war-elephants. In fact, Pyrrhus used them in far more settings, including Italy, throughout his career. In the West, he, not Hannibal, is the true 'elephant-king'.

  When Pyrrhus reached Italy in 280 bc, he was already thirty-nine, seven years older than Alexander at his death. Discontented non-Greek peoples in southern Italy started to join him and, after a bloody victory against Roman troops near Tarentum's colony, Heraclea, he even dashed north towards Rome and sent a trusted Greek diplomat, Cineas, to offer terms to the Roman Senate. It was a great meet­ing. The elderly Cineas had once studied with the master-orator, Demosthenes. For the first time Roman senators heard a real Athens-trained speaker, but, in order to understand him, they surely had to have an interpreter as very few of them knew a word of Greek. In turn, Cineas was struck by his majestic audience (the Senate, he thought, was a council of kings). He was refused bluntly, but he is also said to have reported that the Roman people were like a many-headed monster whose numbers would keep on being replenished.1 Many such comments were attributed later to Cineas by Romans who liked this connection with Greece, but if this one is true, Cineas, pupil of Demosthenes, was a shrewder judge of Roman manpower than of the Roman constitution.

  After this refusal Pyrrhus won a second hard victory in 279 in Apulia, in which his elephants played a major role. Only when a Roman foot soldier hacked the trunk off one are the Romans said to have realized that 'the beasts were mortal'.2 Nonetheless, they still terrified the enemy cavalry. The Romans are said to have mounted long spears on wagons to poke them away and to have tried to throw fire against the beasts from a height. Once again, the casualties on both sides were very heavy: 'another such victory,' Pyrrhus is said to have remarked, 'and we shall be lost'' (whence our saying, 'a Pyrrhic victory').

  In 278 bc Pyrrhus faced a choice: either to turn back to Macedon where recent events gave him a new hope of the throne, or else to turn to Sicily, in keeping with his recent marriage to a Syracusan of dynastic family. While continuing to protect Tarentum, he chose to go south into Sicily. In Italy, he had been promising 'freedom' from Rome to the Greek cities, although they were wary about accepting it. In Sicily, he now promised 'freedom' from the Carthaginians, perhaps with a new joint Sicilian-south Italian kingdom of his own in mind. For three years he showed no more of a commitment to real freedom than any true Hellenistic king and failed in his hopes. On his return journey to Italy he lost several of his war-elephants and although he won a third victory against Rome at Beneventum in 275, it was another bloody encounter, with heavy losses on his own side. In this victory, too, the elephants played a big part, until a mother-elephant ran riot to protect its calf (the pair of them are perhaps commemorated in art on a contemporary plate found in Campania). The Romans are said to have terrified the elephants by setting pigs among them, squealing because the Romans covered them in fat and set them on fire. So Pyrrhus left a garrison at Tarentum and withdrew back to Greece. He ended up fighting first in Macedon, then in Sparta and Argos. In Macedon, he replenished his elephants by a victory over the king, Antigonus, and then took them down to southern Greece. While his elephants blocked the gates of Argos in 272 bc, he was stunned by a roof-tile (thrown by the mother of an Argive opponent) and was decapitated. His head was brought to the king of Macedon who rebuked its bearer, his son, and wept with a truly Homeric sense of his past losses. It was a typical show of sympathy between Hellenistic princes. Pyrrhus' head and body were buried, but his big toe survived, a sign (men said) of its divine quality.

  When Pyrrhus left Sicily, he is said to have described it as the 'future wrestling-ground for Rome and Carthage'.4 At first, Rome and

  Carthage had reasserted their old alliance in the face of the new invader. Within fifteen years they would be locked in war, as Pyrrhus had predicted. On and off it was to last for more than sixty years.

  After Pyrrhus had left, Rome first received a remarkable new approach, from Ptolemy II, king of Egypt. Rome's victory had impressed him, perhaps because he had helped Pyrrhus in Epirus when the war began. Now he made a friendship, sealed with splendid gifts. As Rome was becoming more intertwined with affairs in the wider Greek world, events in the West increasingly intetested Greek histori­ans. The elderly Greek Hieronymus of Cardia, a hardened veteran of Alexander's Successors, digressed on the early history of Rome in his major work on the wars of Alexander's followers. He included Pyrrhus, his western battles and his death, presumably basing them on Pyrrhus' memoirs. In Athens, the exiled Sicilian Timaeus also wrote on Pyrrhus and claimed that the two cities of Rome and Carthage had been founded in the same year (which he calculated as 814/3). He was completely wrong, but the claim arose from an awareness that their twin hi
stories were about to collide, at the expense of the old Greek West.

  The Romans followed up Pyrrhus' departure by bringing the remaining Greek cities in the south of Italy into line. In 277 the town of Locri had struck silver coins on which 'Good Faith' (the Roman fides) was shown crowning the seated figure of Rome. In return, Locri would expect Roman trust and protection. In fact, the days of a free 'Great Greece' in south Italy were to be over. In 273, a colony was settled at 'Paestum', transforming the once Greek site. In 272 the Romans retook control of troublesome Tarentum. In 264 they found a pretext for a further step. Some barbarian Mamertine soldiers had seized the Greek town of Messina on the Sicilian straits, and then, very artfully, appealed to Carthage (who sent a garrison) and to Rome's 'good faith': they appealed for help from Rome against the many enemies, especially the Syracusan Greeks, whom they had made in Sicily. Despite misgivings in the Senate, the Romans accepted the Mamertine appeal and crossed into Sicily for the first time.

  This momentous act of aggression brought them an important ally and an even greater enemy. The ally was the Sicilian Greek Hiero, who had recently established himself as king of Syracuse. At first Hiero spoke the necessary truth: 'the Romans', he said, 'were publicizing the words "good faith", but they certainly should not shield murderers like the Mamertines who totally despised "good faith" and were utterly godless'. By starting a war to help them, the Romans were 'showing the world that they used "pity for those in danger" as a cover for their own greed'. In truth, 'they desired all Sicily'.' The rights, or wrongs, of this crucial war, the 'First Punic War', have never been better put. Within a year, however, Hiero changed sides to Rome and stayed loyal to her for nearly fifty years. He could show his Roman visitors a level of royal luxury which they were certainly not supposed to covet. Its crowning glory was a pleasure-boat, called the Syracusan, which Hiero sent to his allies, the Ptolemies in Egypt. On the Nile, the Ptolemies' royal cruisers resembled floating palaces, but Hiero excelled them with a gigantic show-boat on three levels. It contained a gymnasium, green gardens, stables, and mosaic floors which illustrated the whole of Homer's Iliad. It could only be winched down to the sea by a special invention of the great Archimedes, the king's retained Greek engineer.