The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  The vast majority of people would see the deliberate burning alive of fellow humans in today’s world as barbaric. Yet it seems futile to judge the Carthaginians of remote times by contemporary standards. The custom was part of a religion, and therefore of a morality. The practice did not mean that Greeks and Romans withheld their admiration for other aspects of Phoenician Carthage.

  There was praise for Carthaginian political stability. In the later 300s BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle thought it worthy of note that the ordinary people of Carthage seemed to be satisfied with their system of government, judging from the fact, as he claimed, that they had never resorted to mob violence or supported a tyrant. A Roman statesman, Cicero, recognized the ‘judgment and training’ of the ruling classes that steered the nearly six centuries of Carthaginian power. At all times, the influence of aristocratic dynasties seems to have been strong, not least in appointments to the command of Carthage’s military. This type of political leadership was to the liking of the upper orders in Greek and Roman society too.

  The main business of the Phoenicians who migrated westwards from their homeland was always trade. As seen, the Greeks believed that they chose places to settle for that reason – promontories and offshore islands like Motya in Sicily or Carthage itself, sites well suited to act as trading stations with local people and as stopping points for long-haul shipping. For Greeks, Carthage became a byword for riches. Much of this wealth came from the profits of commerce, whether this was the actual business of shipping and marketing goods or the land-based production of merchandise for export on territory dominated by the Carthaginians.

  Not necessarily the most valuable of the commodities traded, but certainly one of the more tangible today, was farm produce. Archaeologists find traces of this trade in the form of amphorae – those ancient clay containers mass-manufactured by hand for transporting goods by sea – and the biological remains inside them. Analysis of these shows that amphorae made in Carthage from the 600s BC onwards might carry olive oil and wine, as well as preserved fish and meat. Carthaginian amphorae have been found on the west coast of Spain, in southern France, Sardinia, Sicily and southern Italy, as well as elsewhere in North Africa. An underwater dig from the time of the Carthaginian domination of Sardinia has produced evidence for amphorae packed with cuts of sheep, goat and cattle small enough to fit into the containers.

  Archaeologists now think that the Phoenician settlers at Carthage gained control of the fertile hinterland surrounding their settlement – the countryside of modern Tunis – as early as the 600s and 500s BC. An ancient Greek writer preserves a unique description of this farmland as it looked to an invading army three centuries later (310 BC):

  The intervening country through which it was necessary for them to march was divided into gardens and plantations of every kind, since many streams of water were led in small channels and irrigated every part. There were also country houses one after another, constructed in luxurious fashion and covered with stucco, which gave evidence of the wealth of the people who possessed them. The farm buildings were filled with everything that was needful for enjoyment, seeing that the inhabitants in a long period of peace had stored up an abundant variety of products. Part of the land was planted with vines, and part yielded olives and was also planted thickly with other varieties of fruit-bearing trees. On each side herds of cattle and flocks of sheep pastured on the plain, and the neighbouring meadows were filled with grazing horses.

  The description makes clear that by this date rich Carthaginians were not only merchants but also landowners – ones who enjoyed life in their country houses. It was the agricultural wisdom driving this idyll of fertility and prosperity that the Romans sought to capture when they had the twenty-eight volumes of that Carthaginian agricultural expert translated into Latin, as seen.

  As it happens, the above description neatly matches the farm products from Carthage’s rural hinterland in 310 BC with those foodstuffs which have left biological traces in Carthaginian transport amphorae. Much of this produce must have been destined to feed the Carthaginians themselves. It was also needed to feed Carthage’s armies.

  We catch a glimpse of this aspect in 480 BC. A Greek historian relates that the Carthaginians supplied the invasion force which Gelon of Syracuse defeated at the battle of Himera with grain shipped by merchantmen, not from the mother city, but from Sardinia. The same text shows that this island by now was a Carthaginian dominion.

  The ancient Greeks believed that Carthage intervened to direct the activities of farmers in lands under its sway. Scholars know this only thanks to an anonymous Greek writer in much later antiquity who compiled a collection of ‘marvellous things heard’. Meant to entertain as much as to inform, this unlikely format preserves the following scrap of information:

  At the present day, [Sardinia] is no longer fertile, because when ruled by the Carthaginians it had all its fruits that were useful for food destroyed, and death was fixed as the penalty for the inhabitants if anyone should plant anything of the kind.

  Were this a reliable ancient source, it might suggest that Carthage had once tried to promote grain production in Sardinia at the expense of other crops – and with a heavy hand. However, archaeologists who survey the surface of modern Sardinia’s countryside for signs of human activity in ancient times – mostly in the form of potsherds – have not been able to corroborate this picture.

  The distribution of ancient sherds on the ground points to diversity, not sameness, in the agricultural regime – a more manorial set-up in one part of the island, centred on a ‘big house’; elsewhere, lots of middling and small freeholders. So the idea that Carthage went in for Soviet-style central planning of the farming economy so as to obtain the resources it needed – remarkable if true – as yet remains unproven.

  To protect their trading interests, the Carthaginians made formal agreements with other Mediterranean powers. The Latin text of an early example (508 BC) of this kind of diplomacy could still be seen at Rome in the 100s BC, when ‘the difference between [its] ancient language and that of the Romans today’ was a potential obstacle to comprehension according to a Greek writer called Polybius.

  His history preserves a paraphrase of this treaty of friendship which shows that the Carthaginians wanted to protect the places in which they traded from foreign – Roman in this case – encroachment. Among other stipulations, they banned Roman navigation further west along the African coast than an enigmatic ‘Fair Promontory’ – perhaps Cape Bon, some 75 miles north-east of Carthage.

  The other weapon the Carthaginians developed was a navy. The Greek historian Herodotus describes an early appearance of one of their war fleets in a battle fought off the island of Corsica. The Carthaginians had been provoked by Greeks who had settled on the island and then used their ships to ‘harass and plunder’ the Carthaginian merchantmen plying this part of the Mediterranean. As a result of this action, the Greek settlers and their families abandoned Corsica, falling back on the toe of Italy.

  Historians see this battle, thought to have taken place around 535 BC, as an important step in the creation of a Carthaginian sea empire in the western Mediterranean. The Carthaginians had not acted alone, however. Showing again their early aptitude for ‘international’ relations, they had made common cause with another seafaring people with a grievance against the Greek pirates of Corsica. These people fought alongside the Carthaginians with sixty ships of their own. It is time to turn to the Italic people best known today by their Roman name: Etrusci, or Etruscans.

  From where I write on the south coast of England, the nearest ‘Etruscans’ are about 220 miles away – and to the north. Before being swallowed up by the suburbs of the city of Stoke-on-Trent, there once was a village in Staffordshire called Etruria. On the spot there is still an Etruscan Primary School, an Etruria Hall and even an Etruscan Street. This outbreak of ‘Etruscomania’ in the heart of the Midlands resulted from the fashionable enthusiasms of an English manufacturer of earthenware, Jose
ph Wedgwood. He built his new manufactory here and housed its workers in the new model village.

  This was in 1770, just as an Italian antiquarian was publishing, tome by tome, a great learned work called (in Latin) ‘Etruscan Vase Painting’. These ancient wares with their painted images were being found in large numbers by eighteenth-century investigators of archaeological sites in what was now Tuscany, the region extending roughly from Rome to Florence, once the homeland of the ancient Etruscans. For Europeans who could afford them, these vases became hugely collectible. For those who could not, Wedgwood’s factory offered modern versions imitating the ancient shapes and decoration. His business model was summed up by the Latin motto of the new works, which translates as ‘The Arts of Etruria are Reborn’.

  For the student of the ancient world, this episode in the more recent history of European taste is chiefly interesting for capturing the cultural proclivities of ancient Etruscan grandees of the 500s and 400s BC. Discerning scholars in the eighteenth century were already starting to question the assumption that, because these ancient earthenware vases were found in the rich tombs of ancient Etruria, the ancient Etruscans must therefore have made them.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, experts had shown beyond any real doubt that the vases were ancient imports to Etruria. Their style and technique meant that they had to have been made in the potteries of ancient Greece. The aristocrats of Archaic Etruria could not get enough of these black and orange wares.

  To understand why outsiders like the Greeks wanted to trade with the ancient Etruscans, today’s historically inclined visitor to Tuscany could do worse than visit the scenic Tuscan Mining Park. This conservation area of some 420 square miles protects a mineral-rich Italian landscape of metal-bearing hills yielding a whole list of different ores including lead, zinc, copper, silver and iron. There are many traces of mining activity, recent and less so.

  The ancient Etruscans are the earliest inhabitants of this part of Italy to have entered history as miners, as is recounted by that same ancient writer ‘on marvellous things heard’:

  In Etruria there is said to be a certain island called Aethalia [modern Elba], in which out of a certain mine in former days copper was dug, from which they say that all the copper vessels among them have been wrought; that afterwards it could no longer be found: but, when a long interval of time had elapsed, from the same mine iron was produced, which the Etrurians, who inhabit the town called Populonium, still use.

  In actual fact, there are only hints at best as to what foreign merchants exchanged for the products of Greece once they reached the Etruscan coast. As seen, the early Greeks established a settlement much further south on the island of Ischia, ancient Pithecusae. Here archaeologists have found traces of imported iron ore in the Greek settlement.

  The just-mentioned Populonia (the usual ancient spelling) was an Etruscan port city in what is now north-west Tuscany. Today the archaeological park here, set in rolling fields reaching down to a wooded bay, allows visitors to contemplate an ancient metalworkers’ quarter. That Archaic Greek traders visited this coastline received confirmation from a startling find at another Etruscan emporium.

  In 1970 archaeologists were digging a sanctuary area at the port of the most important of the Etruscan cities, ancient Tarquinii. Here they found a tapering lump of stone which turned out to be an ancient anchor, left by its owner as an offering in the sanctuary after he had added an inscription. The Greek letters of around 500 BC say ‘I belong to Apollo of Aegina. Sostratus son of [—] had me made’.

  It was natural for experts to identify this Archaic Greek shipowner with a successful trader of the same name hailing precisely from Aegina, a Greek island on the doorstep of Piraeus, the port of Athens. The historian Herodotus, the source for this man, records that he made the greatest profit on his merchandise of all Greeks of that time: ‘no one could compete with him’.

  Control of access to minerals seems to have played a large part in the economic system producing the wealth of the Etruscans. The detailed picture is a case of seeing through a glass darkly, as so often with the economic life of ancient peoples. How the Etruscans spent their riches is easier to track, thanks mainly to their burial customs, which produced the elaborate grave-goods now displayed in a number of museums around the world.

  A highlight of Berlin’s Altes Museum are the cases of finds from what archaeologists have come to call the Tomb of the Warrior at Tarquinii. These include a splendid panoply of arms and armour. Taken together, the objects show that the dead man enjoyed a high rank in a militaristic society topped by figures such as this, members of a fighting elite. One suggestion is that such ‘warrior-princes’ at this time – the later 700s BC – grew rich from ‘protection money’ paid by foreigners seeking out the metal sources of the region.

  In the 600s and 500s BC the stimulus of overseas contact, along with wealth from metals, seems somehow to have galvanized the Etruscans into developing proper civic communities comparable in some ways to the young city-states of the Archaic Greeks – from whom the Etruscan leaders conceivably took the idea. Experts read the social changes marking this transformation once more from burial customs.

  On the ground, the most impressive remains of the Etruscans are the cemeteries of the rich oligarchies dominating most aspects of life in these Etruscan cities. At modern Cerveteri, the ancient Etruscan city of Caere, the visitor can walk down streets of the dead past mausolea built to accommodate several generations of the same family. The atmosphere here put me in mind of the socially exclusive cemetery of Picpus in modern-day Paris. Here the paths are lined with the family tombs of the high French aristocracy.

  Two aspects of Etruscan society which the tombs highlight are the luxurious living of these great families and the ‘freedoms’ of their womenfolk. The ancient Greeks, whose social values were far more conservative, condemned this relative licence by the familiar device of exaggerating it. Here one (male) Greek author cites an earlier Greek author (fourth century BC, also male) as his authority:

  [so-and-so states that] it is a law among the Etruscans that all their women should be in common: and that the women pay the greatest attention to their persons, and often practise gymnastic exercises, naked, among the men, and sometimes with one another; for that it is not accounted shameful for them to be seen naked. And that they sup not with their own husbands, but with any one who happens to be present; and they pledge whoever they please in their cups: and that they are wonderful women to drink, and very handsome.

  Some of the truth can be retrieved from the tombs. The creators of the Etruscan necropolis of Tarquinii went in for wall paintings reminiscent of the tombs of ancient Egypt, in that they too depict images informative of Etruscan lifestyles. One, dubbed the Tomb of the Leopards, dating from around 480 BC, is a gorgeous affair, with bright paintwork covering all the surfaces of the main chamber. Around the walls runs a frieze which shows couples sharing couches as they recline at a banquet.

  With its accompanying musicians and naked serving boys, this scene superficially resembles a Greek drinking party. Yet these are not male couples, as they would be if this were the work of an Athenian vase painter on a piece of pottery destined for use in a Greek symposium. The Etruscan couples are male and female. The women are fully clothed – so not obviously prostitutes by the canons of Greek art at least – and they seem to partake equally in the pleasure of the moment. The modern viewer is left guessing as to who exactly they are: the wives of the men, or free women ‘supping not with their own husbands’?

  As this example suggests, the Etruscans interacted with foreign cultures, but what they took they adapted to suit themselves, whether a social practice or an art form. The same was true of their alphabet. Another Etruscan item on display in the Altes Museum looks a bit like a clay roof tile, except that it is covered with incised writing. This is one of the longest preserved examples of the Etruscan language written in a script which the Etruscans took over from one of the early local alphabets of
the Greeks, who in turn, as seen, had adapted the alphabet of the Phoenicians. Scholars have partly deciphered Etruscan. They know that this text on clay, dating from around 470 BC, records the annual calendar of rituals to be performed by the priests of an Etruscan sanctuary.

  Etruscan religion with its pantheon of divinities, its sanctuaries with their temples reminiscent of (but not identical to) those of the Greeks, and with its routines of animal sacrifice, bears resemblances to the religious cultures of the Greeks and Romans. Ideas, practices and divinities certainly changed hands between neighbours over the centuries. However, a chance find from 1877 near Piacenza in northern Italy, and now in the town’s archaeological museum, leads the puzzled viewer directly into a weird and wonderful aspect of ancient religious ritual for which the Etruscans became renowned.

  This strange object is a bronze sheep’s liver, and it does indeed resemble the real thing, complete with protruding gall bladder. Divided up by incised lines into forty sections, each inscribed in Etruscan, it provided a soothsayer with an initial guide to the interpretation of anomalies on an actual liver. This was an internal organ that an Etruscan diviner would be confronted with when reading the signs of the god in the entrails of a sacrificed animal. The diviner would also prepare himself by immersion in the Etruscan books of sacred lore which the old families in charge of these matters were still compiling in the decades before the birth of Christ.

  I mention here the ancient skill today known as extispicy (from the Latin for the inspection of exta, entrails) because it was one of the most obvious legacies of the Etruscans to their immediate neighbours, the Romans. For centuries, the Roman state used Etruscan-style diviners called haruspices, whether actual Etruscans or Romans trained up in the knowledge, to help interpret worrisome omens. In general the Romans remembered the Etruscans as a great Italian power: