The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  THE STORY OF GREECE AND ROME

  Copyright © 2018 Tony Spawforth

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939477

  ISBN 978-0-300-21711-7 (hbk)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  CONTENTS

  List of Maps and Plates

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue The Wild and the Tamed: Ancient Views of Civilization

  Part I The Greeks

  1 The Dawn of Greek Civilization

  2 The Rise of the Hellenes

  3 New Things: The First Greek City-States

  4 As Rich as Croesus: Early Greeks and the East

  5 Great Greeks: The Greek Settlement of the West

  6 Meet the (Western) Neighbours

  7 ‘Lord of All Men’? The Threat of Persia

  8 The Same but Different: Athens and Sparta

  9 ‘Unprecedented Suffering’? The Peloponnesian War

  10 Examined Lives and Golden Mouths

  11 ‘A Brilliant Flash of Lightning’: Alexander of Macedon

  12 Game of Thrones, or the World after Alexander

  Part II The Romans

  13 ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’

  14 Boots on the Ground: Building the Roman Empire

  15 Hail Caesar! The Advent of the Autocrats

  16 ‘Fierce Rome, Captive’? The Lure of Greece

  17 What Did the Romans Do for Their Empire?

  18 ‘Barbarians’ at the Gate

  19 The ‘Jesus Movement’

  20 United We Stand: The Final Century

  21 Divided We Fall: A Tale of Two Empires

  Epilogue

  Timeline

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  MAPS AND PLATES

  Maps

  1. Greece and the Aegean World.

  2. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.

  3. Italy.

  4. Central Asia.

  5. The West.

  Plates

  1. An Athenian vase depicting Demeter’s gift of agriculture to mankind, c. 470 BC. Marie-Lan Nguyen.

  2. A plaster cast of a marble statue of Hadrian. Reproduced by permission of the Museo della Civiltà Romana, Rome. Photo: John Williams.

  3. A fragment of a wall painting from the excavation of an ancient Egyptian palace at modern Tell el-Dab’a, c. 1473–1458 BC. Colours digitally restored by Clairy Palyvou. © M. Bietak, N. Marinatos, C. Palyvou/graphic work M. Negrete-Martinez.

  4. An Athenian wine jug, late 700s BC. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo: Giannis Patrikianos. © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund.

  5. A scene on a Corinthian pottery jug, c. 640 BC, depicting two Greek armies marching into battle. World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

  6. The remains of paved haulage across the Isthmus, built c. 600 BC. Erin Babnik/Alamy Stock Photo.

  7. An unfinished Greek temple, Segesta, Sicily. Alec/Public Domain.

  8. The Tomb of the Leopards at Tarquinii. Adam Eastland Art + Architecture/Alamy Stock Photo.

  9. A depiction of Xerxes I on his tomb in Naqš-i Rustam. Erich Schmidt/CC-BY-SA-3.0.

  10. A modern replica of an Athenian trireme, Piraeus, Greece. Templar52.

  11. The Ear of Dionysius, ancient quarry, Sicily. Laurel Lodged/CC-BY-SA-3.0.

  12. A depiction of two actors on an Athenian vase, c. 400 BC, Naples Archaeological Museum. © agefotostock.

  13. A cast bronze spear butt and inscription, late 300s BC. Newcastle upon Tyne, Shefton Collection 111. Photo: Andrew Agate.

  14. Stone water spout, early 100s BC, Ai-Khanoum, Afghanistan. © Livius.org.

  15. A monumental altar at Pergamum depicting Athena fighting Giants, 197–158 BC. Gryffindor/Public Domain.

  16. ‘Tomb of Scipio Barbatus’, engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, c. 1756. Giovanni Battista Piranesi/Public Domain.

  17. A scene from a monument celebrating the Roman victory over the Macedonians in 168 BC. © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

  18. A marble statue of Livia Drusilla, Madrid Archaeological Museum. Adam Eastland Art + Architecture/Alamy Stock Photo.

  19. A fragment of the Antikythera mechanism, National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo: Giannis Patrikianos. © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund.

  20. The theatre at the Lycian city of Patara. Kamil Isik/Public Domain.

  21. A sculpture of the head of Pompey the Great. Carole Raddato.

  22. A scene from the Column of Marcus Aurelius, Rome, c. AD 185. Barosaurus Lentus.

  23. The ruins of the Roman amphitheatre at Lyon. Pymouss.

  24. The head of Constantine, from a colossal statue now in the Capitoline Museum, Rome. BibleLandPictures/Alamy Stock Photo.

  25. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo.

  26. A painted ceiling at the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, France, late 1650s. www.all-free-photos.com.

  27. François Testory performing Medea (Written in Rage), London, October 2017. Courtesy of François Testory, Neil Bartlett and Jean-René Lamoine. Photo: Manuel Vason.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For different kinds of help and opportunities which I have drawn on in writing this book I am grateful to many people and institutions over many years, and not least to: Carla Antonaccio; Josephine Balmer; Bob Barber; Richard Bidgood; Manfred Bietak; John Boardman; the British School at Athens (Chapter 11 is based on my research as a British School Visiting Fellow in 2014); the late Hector and Elizabeth Catling; Erica Davies; Esther Eidinow; Nelson Fernandez; Anastasia Gadolou; David Gill; Heinrich Hall; Paul Halstead; Andrew Hobson; Simon Hornblower; Monica Hughes; Lucia Iacono; the Joint Library of the Societies for Hellenic and Roman Studies, London, and its staff; Peter Jones; Nota Karamaouna; Marie-Christine Keith; Stephanie and Nigel Kennell; Maria Lagogianni; Jona Lendering; Chris Mann; the late Chris Mee; Michael Metcalfe; the late John Moles; Lyvia Morgan; Andrew Parkin; Derek Phillips; Chrysoula Saatsoglou-Paliadeli; Rowland Smith; Allaire Stallsmith; Ann Steiner; Lucrezia Ungaro; Manuel Vason; Rania Vassiliadou; Sally Waite; Susan Walker; Jennifer Webb; and John Wilkes.

  I owe a special thanks to Paul Cartledge, not only for helpful conversations but also for his rigorous scrutiny of a first draft. I am grateful to the wise and careful comments by Yale’s anonymous readers, which I have done my best to take on board. More broadly, I am indebted to the scholars whose writings and researches I have absorbed in my thinking and writing. They are many, many more than are identified by name in the limited references at the back of this book.

  Shortcomings that remain, of whatever kind, are mine alone.

  I was lucky to have had the chance to try out some ideas for how to write the book while a speaker on cultural tours run by the Cultural Travel Company; Martin Randall Travel; Peter Sommer Travels; and the UK Friends of the British School at Athens. I am grateful to the guests on these tours for their patience, their interest and their observations, which were more valuable than the
y sometimes seemed to think.

  At Yale I am indebted to the book’s editors, Marika Lysandrou, whose suggestions helped significantly to pull the book into better shape, and Rachael Lonsdale, who saw it through to publication. I am grateful to Heather McCallum, who invited me to write this book and who has encouraged me throughout.

  I thank Andrew Lownie for his support, moral and practical. Finally, there is my deep gratitude, as always, to Lee Stannard.

  Tony Spawforth

  January 2018

  1. The Greek goddess of grain, Demeter, despatches a demi-god in a winged chariot to teach agriculture to humankind. This scene features on an Athenian vase now in the Louvre, from around 470 BC.

  2. Emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138) defends civilization from the barbarians. This modern plaster cast in Rome is taken from a marble statue from Crete, now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

  3. A young male with Minoan-style locks leaps over a bull. This fragment of a wall painting was uncovered in the excavation of an ancient Egyptian palace at modern Tell el-Dab’a. Here, the colours have been digitally restored by Clairy Palyvou. The painting is thought to date from roughly 1473–1458 BC.

  4. One of the earliest texts in the new script which the ancient Greeks adapted from the Phoenicians. Scratched onto the shoulder of a wine jug from Athens, late 700s BC, it reads: ‘He who of all the dancers now performs most daintily…’

  5. Two armies of Greek heavy infantrymen about to collide as they march into battle to the sound of pipes. This scene is from a pottery jug made in Corinth about 640 BC, showing what at the time was a new style of group fighting in tight formation.

  6. The remains of the paved haulage across the Isthmus which the Corinthians built around 600 BC to facilitate, and profit from, east–west trade.

  7. An unfinished Greek-style temple (late 400s BC) commissioned by the city of Segesta, or Egesta, a pre-Greek community in Sicily which went on to adopt (and adapt) cultural traits from neighbouring Greek settlers.

  8. The so-called Tomb of the Leopards at Tarquinii: an Etruscan tomb-chamber of about 480 BC showing men and women sharing couches as they recline at a banquet.

  9. In the depiction on his tomb, Xerxes I, bearded and carrying a bow, stands on a platform-like throne supported by two rows of figures representing different groups of imperial subjects.

  10. A modern lifesize replica of an ancient Athenian war galley with three banks of oarsmen per side (a trireme). Trialled at sea in the 1980s, the Olympias belongs to the Hellenic Navy and is now in a dry dock in Piraeus, Greece.

  11. The so-called Ear of Dionysius, the most spectacular of the ancient quarries of Syracuse. The Syracusans kept Athenian prisoners of war in cruel conditions in one of these quarries after the failure of an Athenian expedition to Sicily in 413 BC.

  12. A depiction of two actors holding their performance masks on an Athenian vase of about 400 BC. The club and the lion’s head show that the left-hand figure took the role of Heracles.

  13. A rare butt of cast bronze, all that survives from a spear made in the late 300s BC. The Ancient Greek inscription, MAK, identifies it as probably Mac(edonian) and perhaps state issue.

  14. A stone water spout in the form of the type of mask worn by ancient comic actors, from Ai-Khanoum, an ancient Greek settlement in Afghanistan, early 100s BC.

  15. Athena fights in a battle between the Greek gods and a primitive race of super-strong monsters, the Giants. This is probably an allegory of the threat to Greek civilization posed by invading Celts in the 200s BC. This depiction is from a monumental altar at Pergamum of 197–158 BC, now in Berlin.

  16. The Tomb of the Scipios. Shown here are the sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus, consul in 298 BC, with its two inscriptions, and the plaque with the epitaph of Paulla Cornelia, who was buried behind.

  17. A rare scene of fighting between Roman troops with flat oval shields and Macedonians with round shields, under one of which slumps a dead infantryman (bottom right). This features on a monument celebrating a decisive Roman victory over the last Macedonian king in 168 BC and is now in Delphi Museum.

  18. A marble statue of Livia Drusilla, the influential wife of Augustus and an exemplar of old-fashioned Roman morals. Here she is enfolded in the demure uniform of the Roman matron: a cloak which could be used as a partial veil, an undergarment reaching to the ground and a loose overgarment with sleeves for added modesty.

  19. The largest fragment of an ingenious Greek-made mechanical calculator, the so-called Antikythera mechanism, which sank around 60 BC in a vessel laden with Greek artworks probably destined for the Roman luxury market.

  20. The theatre at the Lycian city of Patara (south-west Turkey) which a local benefactress, Vilia Procla, repaired and provided with awnings around AD 147.

  21. A posthumous head of Pompey the Great (died 48 BC) now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. It was probably commissioned for the family tomb in Rome by his aristocratic descendants, who included Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi Licinianus, a claimant to the throne killed in AD 69.

  22. A god with water flowing from his outstretched arms rescues a parched Roman army fighting Germanic invaders by miraculously sending rain, probably in AD 172. This scene features on the Column of Marcus Aurelius, Rome (about AD 185).

  23. The ruins of the Roman amphitheatre at Lyon, where Christians were punished by exposure to wild animals in AD 177.

  24. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, gazes heavenwards. This is part of a colossal statue now in the Capitoline Museum, Rome.

  25. The sparkling mosaic dome of the fifth-century AD Christian church in Ravenna, Italy, now known as the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (died 450).

  26. Louis XIV’s finance minister Nicolas Fouquet had himself painted as Hercules on a ceiling in his château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, France, late 1650s.

  27. François Testory performing Medea (Written in Rage) at The Place, London, October 2017.

  PROLOGUE

  THE WILD AND THE TAMED: ANCIENT VIEWS

  OF CIVILIZATION

  Over two and a half thousand years ago, perhaps in the later 700s BC, a poet told of events which took place during a ten-year siege of the city of Troy. This poem – the Iliad – marked the start of one of the world’s greatest and oldest storytelling traditions, still influential today. Like the word ‘story’ itself, this tradition is a gift to us from the ancient Greeks.

  This book offers the reader a story of my own. Its ambition is to provide between one set of covers an accessible account of the enormous sweep of ancient history which has to be considered not only in order to appreciate the remote ancient society which gave us the poet Homer and so much else, but also the later centuries of antiquity when a new and seemingly unstoppable force – the Romans – embraced and perpetuated the cultural legacy of Classical Greece.

  For centuries, well into the Christian era, the ancient Greeks, their way of life and their cultural traditions, took shelter behind the booted legionaries guarding the Roman Empire. Thanks to the Romans, all sorts of debris from ancient Greek culture survived into the mediaeval world. Some of it has come down to us.

  This is a book that tells a story about a ‘civilization’. In my view, two millennia or so later, when it comes to ancient Greece and Rome it is their civilization that is the real basis for wonder today. My story is about the building of this civilization by many hands, and, like all stories, it has a beginning.

  In the years around 440 BC, an artisan at work in the potteries of Athens decorated a cup with the figure of a snake-man. Now in a Berlin museum, the pot depicts a bearded figure who holds a staff. So far so normal: but below the waist he has serpent-coils instead of legs. Greeks called this kind of supernatural creature a ‘dragon’, or drakōn: whence ‘Draco’ Malfoy, Harry Potter’s Slytherin arch-foe. In decorating this cup, the pot painter had in mind a particular ‘dragon’. He made this clear by adding in paint, for those who could read the Greek letters, the name ‘Cecrops’.

 
Ancient writers called Cecrops a legendary king of Athens. In the stories they told, they credited him with civilizing the ancestors of the ancient Athenians by inventing the institution of marriage – earlier Athenians had indulged in free love, it was said. He also introduced them to writing, to burial of the dead and to city building. In gratitude for his gifts, Athenians founded a shrine of this serpent-king on the Acropolis. Here, a stone’s throw from the Parthenon, their descendants still worshipped him with religious rites into the first Christian centuries.

  But this was not the only way in which the Greeks imagined their journey from savagery to civilization. In the same period, some Greeks were telling a new and radical story. One spring day, also around 440 BC, an audience of up to twelve thousand Athenians crowded into a special building made of wood on the slopes of the Acropolis. They had come to enjoy a newish art form, one that, in a modern definition, ‘repeated human experiences, with small changes’: or as we say today, dramatic performances, plays.

  At one point the audience heard a chorus of male performers impersonating old men sing out this verse: ‘Wonders are many, and none is more formidable than humankind.’ Even in translation from Ancient Greek, these words of the playwright, the Athenian Sophocles, seem extraordinary. In a world full of superhumans, the dramatist’s line concedes nothing to the powers of legendary figures or to gods. Instead its author understands civilization as a human creation. As the chorus next explained, humans had taught themselves how to hunt and fish, how to tame wild animals and yoke them in order to till the soil and grow crops, how to sail the seas, communicate by speech, build homes, live in communities and ward off at least some diseases.