The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  This Greek idea of a cultural ascent of man from primal beginnings achieved by human capacity alone may strike us as modern. It channelled the revolutionary new ways of thinking about human nature emerging in parts of the Greek world in the 500s and 400s BC.

  Today we turn to archaeologists, along with various other experts of the kind whose disciplines start with the prefix ‘palaeo-’, to reconstruct humankind’s early steps towards cultural complexity. The ancient Greeks never developed the tools, conceptual or practical, for this kind of investigation. For centuries they lived with two essentially incompatible explanations of cultural origins. One emphasized superhuman intervention, the other humankind’s innate capacities.

  The gifts of Cecrops to the primitive Athenians included two common criteria of what we mean by civilization today: city life and writing. The Greeks had a word for this state, hēmerotēs. ‘Civilization’ is a common translation. The core sense is ‘tameness’, closely allied to notions of ‘gentle’ or ‘humane’ behaviour. To Greeks, the opposite was ‘wildness’, of raw nature but also of humans. Unlike many city dwellers today, the ancient Greeks lived close to wild nature. This was more than a matter of, say, urban foxes and seagulls. In the 300s BC lions still roamed northern Greece.

  On the cleverly conceived top floor of the Acropolis Museum in central Athens visitors can walk around the outside of the Parthenon – or rather, around a display of remnants of the marble figures once adorning the outside of this most accomplished of ancient Greek temples, begun in 447 BC. Viewing this display, you get a true sense of what, in terms of effort and cost, lies behind the textbook enumerations of the Parthenon’s vital statistics.

  A series of sculptured slabs ran right round the temple just below the guttering. Each measured roughly 4 by 4 feet and had figures carved in relief not far off a foot deep. There were ninety-two of these slabs alone – ninety-two – on the original building, quite apart from a continuous frieze of sculptured figures and massings of fully realized statues in both gables.

  For the subject matter of these ninety-two slabs, the committee of democratic citizens in charge of the project approved a choice of four stories of warring and mayhem, all set in Greek legendary time. In one story, fantastic creatures – man above, horse below – are shown trampling and throttling nude, perfectly formed Greek men who fight back to victory with bare arms and legs. One slab shows a pointy-eared horse-man carrying off a Greek girl who tries to unhand herself from her captor’s grasp. A vulnerable breast exposed by the ruffling of her dress leaves little of her predicament to the viewer’s imagination.

  To judge how ancient Athenians responded to this subject matter is hard. Possibilities range from pure visual delight to deeper reflection inspired by what they saw. Based on analysis of the larger cultural context, experts are more confident about the aims of the storytellers. Among other things, they probably meant the Athenian citizen to read a hidden meaning into these striking scenes. The popular legend of the wild horse-men served as an illustration, or symbol, of something more profound, namely, the danger to the delicate bloom of civilized Greek life from the forces of the untamed.

  By the time the builders of the Parthenon had got to work, Greeks were rethinking their ideas about civilization and its enemies in the aftermath of a real and present threat to precisely their way of life: ‘On, you men of Greece! Free your native land. Free your children, your wives, the temples of your fathers’ gods, and the tombs of your ancestors. Now you are fighting for all you have.’ This was how another, slightly earlier, Athenian play had imagined the Greek rallying call at the battle off the island of Salamis, near Athens, in which a fleet of chiefly Athenian allies won a decisive victory over a Persian armada bent on adding Greece proper to a vast empire already including the Greek settlements along the western coast of what is now Turkey.

  Premiered in the Athenian theatre just eight years later (472 BC), The Persians was an Athenian playwright’s triumphant dramatization of how the Persian court in faraway Iran received the totally unexpected news of this humiliating defeat. The playwright, called Aeschylus, offered his Athenian audience a crowd-pleasing Greek stereotype of the Persian enemy.

  Ten times he makes Persians refer to themselves as ‘barbarian’ (barbaros). In origin this Greek word denoted a speaker of a non-Greek language. Aeschylus played with a more recent Greek tendency to use it in a negative way, in the modern sense of barbarous or barbaric, as Greeks found themselves threatened by a new and unfamiliar type of non-Greek, the aggressively imperialistic Persians.

  In the course of the play actors assigned Persians a range of unenviable traits including cruelty, excessive luxury, over-emotionalism and servility, as shown by their autocratic king and his abject subjects from whom he demanded absolute obedience. As that rallying call implies, Aeschylus meant Greeks to see themselves as the opposites – and of course superiors – of the Persians. They were free: Persians were slaves. This idea of freedom also crops up in today’s narratives and debates about what we mean by civilization. As well as (for instance) writing and cities, some commentators also see the presence of the idea of freedom as a ‘criterion of civilized modernity’.

  Among the ancient Greeks, ‘barbarian’ by the mid-400s BC was well on its way to acquiring the meanings of its modern derivatives, ‘barbaric’ and ‘barbarism’. The Athenian builders of the Parthenon had in their minds this growing Greek sense of superiority to non-Greeks, especially Persians. They seem to have commissioned the temple partly as a victory trophy to celebrate Greek military successes against the Persians. They asked sculptors to depict not real battles but parables expressing the grand idea that victory over Persia was also victory over a barbarian threat to the (civilized) Greek way of life. Such narratives helped to promote a sense of sameness, not just among Athenians, but Greeks more generally: despite their myriad differences among themselves, victory over Persia brought them a shared sense of what they were not.

  As masons and sculptors laboured on the Parthenon, another work of art, more than its equal in novelty and lasting impact, was taking shape in the mind of a Greek storyteller. The writer Herodotus hailed from the ancient Greek city of Halicarnassus. The port city of Bodrum on the south-western coast of Turkey now occupies the site. Herodotus lived through the middle 400s BC and he wrote a long work of historical narrative in continuous prose – the earliest of its kind to survive from anywhere in the world.

  Herodotus described the cultural diversity of Greece’s non-Greek neighbours with respect and dispassion. He recognized that every human society has a natural tendency to think its ways best.

  For if it were proposed to all peoples to choose which seemed best of all customs, each, after examination, would place its own first; so well is each convinced that its own are by far the best. It is not therefore to be supposed that anyone, except a madman, would turn such things to ridicule.

  The cultural relativity and pluralism of this kind of thinking make Herodotus sound, once again, almost modern. He carefully recorded traditions asserting that Greeks were indebted to non-Greeks for features of their civilization. He states that the letters of the Greek alphabet were introduced to Greeks by a migrant from the world of the Phoenicians (Greeks gave this name to the population inhabiting the Mediterranean coastline from modern Syria into northern Israel). Language experts confirm the Phoenician origin of the Greek alphabet. Thus the Greek letter beta (‘b’) not only looks similar to but also derived its name from its Phoenician equivalent, bēt.

  This openness to foreign cultures was a hallmark of the ancient Greeks, along with the technology transfers it allowed. Even during the wars between Greeks and Persians of the early 400s BC, Greek attitudes to ‘barbarians’ were more open-minded than might be expected. The British Museum displays another product of the Athenian potteries, a storage jar made around 480 BC. One side depicts a young man playing the pipes. Over his full-length tunic he wears a sleeveless jerkin intricately woven with a chequer pattern and borderi
ng. This luxurious overgarment was of Persian inspiration. It seems that Athenian citizens accepted eastern fashions even as they fought their way to victory over the Persian invasion force.

  It follows that how the ancient Athenians saw the world was not entirely consistent. Many people today are capable of this kind of doublethink, depending on where they are and who they are communicating with: on context, in other words. In that case, it might seem risky for historians to generalize about the characteristics, attitudes or values of ‘ancient Greeks’ as a whole. Yet the ancient Greeks themselves did: they came to see themselves as an ethnic group sharing certain cultural traits. Some Greeks had acquired this sense of a collective identity by the time of, once more, Herodotus. He preserves the earliest surviving definition of what he calls ‘Greekness’: ‘the kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech, and the shrines of gods and the sacrifices that we have in common, and the likeness of our way of life.’ Herodotus does not reveal what, in his view, gave rise to this sense of a broader community of Greekness. Nor does he claim that Greeks were Greeks because they belonged to a single political entity. In his day, the 400s BC, Greeks lived in hundreds of different, and usually warring, states. Greek civilization was not defined by large-scale political organization.

  Even so, Greek civilization ‘spread’. At the time of writing, a perpetually travelling exhibition is making its way around the world: Europe, North America, Australia, Japan . . . It keeps moving because to return the ancient objects which it showcases to their ultimate country of origin would be to expose them to Islamist vandalism.

  Among these objects is a stone fitting once forming part of a public fountain. The sculptor has carved it in the form of a grotesque mask, of the characteristic kind – covering the whole head – worn by actors in ancient Greek comedies. In this case, out of the gaping mouth would once have sprung not words but a cooling jet of water.

  This object must have served its intended function in an ancient community embracing two features of Greek civilization: a public water supply and an appetite for watching Greek-style plays. If this water jet came from Athens, it would be a rather commonplace find. Remarkably, French excavators dug it up on the northern frontier of what is now Afghanistan, at an archaeological site known locally as Ai-Khanoum.

  Dating from the early 100s BC, the carved spout indicates that people living the ancient Greek way of life must once have inhabited this rugged part of central Asia. To judge from other finds, Greek settlers arrived here around 300 BC, in the wake of the Asian conquests of Alexander of Macedon (died 323 BC), bringing with them their own customs. Their descendants maintained themselves in this remote spot until nomads from the north destroyed their settlement around 150 BC.

  Ancient Greeks, then, were migrants and emigrants. They celebrated this trait in their many stories (not always factually true) about ancestors leading expeditions to found cities in all three continents known to, and named by, Greeks: Europe, Asia and ‘Libya’, as they styled North Africa. They called these foundations ‘settlements away from home’. Ai-Khanoum is one of the most far flung. They were one way in which Greek civilization ‘spread’.

  There was another way as well. In modern Sicily a favourite on the tourist trail is a well-preserved Greek-style temple serving an ancient city called Egesta or Segesta. Begun in the 400s BC and never finished, the temple’s Doric colonnades now stand in splendid isolation amid a scenic landscape of hills and fields. Apart from its beauty, the ruin is remarkable because its builders were not ethnic Greeks but a native people.

  The Egestans had become attracted to aspects of the Greek way of life because they had Greek settlers as neighbours in this part of Sicily. Some of what they saw they liked enough to adapt for their own purposes – like the earlier Greek takeover of Phoenician letters. Greek settlers in Sicily had not necessarily gone out of their way to ‘spread’ their way of life. The Egestans evidently opted to absorb those Greek cultural novelties because they found them appealing.

  Nearby societies unrelated to the ancient Greeks by ethnicity or ‘heritage’ (as we might say today) ended up taking on board major aspects of the Greek way of life, including the Greek language. The ‘spread’ of Greek civilization in this way depended on choices made by non-Greek communities. In these choices, the originality and technological accomplishment of the ancient Greek brand of cultural creativity must have played a large part in its appeal.

  Some academics see a degree of resemblance between the ‘spread’ of Greek civilization in this way and modern globalization, a word used to describe the way in which cultural exchanges promote a more interconnected world. Some also see the capacity to become a ‘super-culture’, with a geographical reach extending well beyond the originating people, as a marker of a true civilization.

  The Sorbonne University in Paris is one of the oldest universities in the world. Among its offerings are courses on ‘French civilization’. These include instruction in ‘various aspects of French culture’. Given this identifying by French people of their national culture as a ‘civilization’, it is perhaps no surprise that the word itself is the fairly recent invention of a Frenchman. The eighteenth-century writer who coined civilisation had in mind a related group of words in Latin, the language of the ancient Romans. These hinged on the Roman concept of the citizen (civis) and his responsibility to society (civilitas).

  The Romans conquered much of the Greek-speaking world in the last two centuries BC. In the process, they encountered the heartlands of Greek civilization. They absorbed, appropriated and adapted what they found. It was the Romans who did most to turn Greek civilization into an ancient ‘super-culture’, as just defined.

  This process of cultural transfer was extraordinary in historical terms. After all, the Romans were the political masters of the Greeks and proud of what they saw as Roman military superiority, proved time and again on the battlefield. None of the other subject peoples of their multi-ethnic empire had cultural traditions that the Romans found even remotely as seductive, let alone that they wanted to emulate – or better. Without its fateful attraction to the Romans in the early centuries of the Christian era, the cultural legacy of Greece would not have been preserved and cultivated to anything like the extent that it was.

  Unlike the Greeks, who explored their idea of hēmerotēs through the many stories they told, the Romans did not have a regular term equating to ‘civilization’. So their attitudes to the subject are hard to pin down. A room in the archaeological museum in Istanbul offers a handle on the evolution of their thinking. It provides visitors with a visual statement of what important people within the ruling stratum of the Roman Empire, at a particular moment, thought civilization was, and its relationship to the Roman emperor.

  A marble man, larger than life-size, kitted out in the dress armour of an imperial commander-in-chief, stands with one foot on a subdued enemy who wears trousers, sign of the barbarian. The intended meaning of the statue is linked to the scene that decorates this Roman emperor’s breastplate. In an archaic style suggesting great antiquity, it shows a figure of a standing goddess, herself armed. The snake on one side of her and the owl on the other were the attributes of Athena, the patron-goddess of Athens. It is she who must be shown here. This Athena’s feet hover above more figures, a she-wolf who suckles two young children.

  Here the unknown sculptor has created an image that, like the Parthenon sculptures, has a layer of meaning that is hidden, or at least veiled, from us. The wolf is the creature of Roman legend that suckled the infant twins Romulus and Remus. The twins were the mythical founders of Rome. Athena here seems to be a symbol of Athens. She stands for the Greek city that the Romans saw, above all others, as the originator of both the basics of civilized life such as agriculture and the rule of law, as well as the finest flowering of Greek civilization in what we would call the humanities and the sciences.

  The cowed figure with trousers beneath the imperial foot shows that the Romans had also absorbed the negative Gree
k stereotype of the ‘barbarian’. In this Roman imperial world of the early second century AD (the bearded emperor is Hadrian, who ruled AD 117–138), the threatening barbarians still lived beyond the edges of the Empire.

  Modern narratives about civilization are reluctant to arrange peoples into a hierarchy of the more and the less ‘civilized’. The Romans, following the Greeks, had no such qualms. Consciously or not, their rulers found in the idea of the barbarian a way of promoting a sense of identity among the multi-cultural subjects of Rome by emphasizing what all of them were not. The statue is a piece of propaganda. Its ‘message’ seems to have been aimed at the educated classes, especially those people who saw themselves as the cultural heirs of the Athens of the 400s and 300s BC.

  The statue was meant to reassure such individuals that the Roman emperor identified with their cultural values. His aggressive posture insinuated that he would use force to defend these values against external attack. This image offered a justification for taxes, legionaries and imperial rule. The statue type is perhaps the closest the Romans ever came to identifying the state with the defence of civilization. But the image itself is warlike, violent, even a touch ‘barbaric’.

  Hadrian himself came from a rich family of Italian migrants settled in Spain. As was the norm for his social class in Roman society, an expensive education had immersed him in Greek civilization. His personal enthusiasm for Greek culture and its values is conveyed by this passage from a much later Roman writer, presenting Hadrian in flattering terms as an intellectual and artistic prodigy:

  He immersed himself in the studies and customs of the Athenians, mastering not just their tongue, but also the other disciplines: singing, lyre-playing and medicine, music and geometry; he was a painter and sculptor in bronze or marble, almost equalling the Polyclituses and the Euphranors. Thus in all respects he had such accomplishment in these areas, that human nature had rarely managed to produce work of such distinction.