SPQR

by Mary Beard

  At the same time, Romans poured overseas. There had been Roman travellers, traders and adventurers exploring the Mediterranean for centuries. ‘Lucius son of Gaius’, the mercenary who left his name on an inscription on Crete in the late third century BCE, cannot have been the first Roman to make his living in one of the world’s oldest professions. But from the second century BCE, thousands of Romans were spending long periods outside the Italian peninsula. There were Roman traders swarming over the eastern Mediterranean, cashing in on the commercial opportunities that followed conquest, from the slave trade and the spice trade to more mundane army supply contracts. Antiochus Epiphanes even hired a Roman architect, Decimus Cossutius, for building works in Athens, and we can track this man’s descendants and ex-slaves, still active in the construction business in Italy and the East decades later. But it was the soldiers, now serving for years on end overseas rather than just for the traditional summer campaign at Rome’s back door, who made up the majority of ordinary Romans abroad. After the Second Punic War, there were regularly more than 30,000 Roman citizens in the army outside Italy, anywhere from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean.

  This threw up a whole series of new dilemmas. In 171 BCE, for example, the senate was confronted with a deputation from Spain representing more than 4,000 men who were the sons of Roman soldiers and Spanish women. As there was no formal right of marriage between Romans and native Spaniards, these men were, in our terms, stateless. They cannot have been the only ones with this problem. When Aemilianus later came as a new broom to take over the army command in Spain, he is said to have thrown 2,000 ‘prostitutes’ out of the Roman camp (I suspect that the women might have defined themselves rather differently). But in the case before the senate, the offspring concerned had the confidence to ask the Romans for a city to call their own, and presumably for some clarification about their legal position. They were settled in the town of Carteia on the southern tip of Spain, which – with the Romans’ usual flair for improvisation – was given the status of a Latin colony and defined as ‘a colony of ex-slaves’. How many hours of discussion it took the senators to decide that the bizarre combination of ‘ex-slave’ and ‘Latin’ offered the closest match available for the civic status of these technically illegitimate Roman soldiers’ sons, we have no idea. But this certainly shows them grappling with the issues of what it was to be (partly) Roman outside Italy.

  By the mid second century BCE, well over half the adult male citizens of Rome would have seen something of the world abroad, leaving an unknown number of children where they went. To put it another way, the Roman population had suddenly become by far the most travelled of any state ever in the ancient Mediterranean, with only Alexander the Great’s Macedonians or the traders of Carthage as possible rivals. Even for those who never stepped abroad, there were new imaginative horizons, new glimpses of places overseas and new ways of understanding their place in the world.

  The triumphal processions of victorious generals offered one of the most impressive windows onto the outside. When the Roman crowds lined the streets to welcome home their conquering armies, which paraded through the city with their profits and plunder on display, it was not only the astounding wealth that impressed them – though some of it would have astounded anyone at any period. When Aemilius Paullus returned in 167 BCE from his victory over King Perseus, it took three days to trundle all the loot through the city, including 250 truckloads of sculpture and painting alone, and so much silver coin that it needed 3,000 men to carry it, in 750 huge vessels. No wonder that Rome could afford to suspend all direct taxation. But it was also the dazzling display of foreign lands and customs that captured the popular imagination. Generals commissioned elaborate paintings and models to be carried in the procession, depicting famous battles and the towns they had captured, so that the people at home could see what their armies had been doing abroad. The heads of the crowd were turned by the defeated Eastern kings in their ‘national dress’ and exotic regalia, by such curiosities as the pair of globes made by the Greek scientist Archimedes, who was killed in the Second Punic War, and by the exotic animals that sometimes became the stars of the show. The first elephant to tread the streets of Rome appeared in the parade for the victory over Pyrrhus in 275 BCE. It was all a far cry, as one later writer observed, from ‘the cattle of the Volsci and the flocks of the Sabines’, which had been the only spoils a century or so earlier.

  The comedies of Plautus and Terence offered a different kind of window, with some subtle and maybe unsettling reflections. It is true that the boy-gets-girl plots of almost all of these plays, adapted from Greek predecessors, are not now best known for their subtlety. The ‘happy ending’ to some of their rape stories can appal modern readers: ‘Good news – the rapist was her fiancé all along’, to summarise the dénouement of one. It is also clear that the original performances, in public celebrations of all kinds, from religious festivals to the ‘after-party’ of triumphs, were unruly, raucous occasions, attracting a wide cross section of the population of the city, including women and slaves. This is in sharp contrast to classical Athens, where the theatre audience, though larger than at Rome, was probably restricted to male citizens, unruly or not. Nonetheless, there was one thing that all these Roman plays demanded of those who came to watch: that they face the cultural complexity of the world in which they lived.

  That was partly because the plays are set in Greece. The assumption was that the audience had some sense of places outside Italy, or at least some name recognition of them. The plots often turn on decidedly diverse themes. One comedy of Plautus brings a Carthaginian onto the stage, who babbles some possibly accurate, but still incomprehensible, Punic. Another features a couple of characters disguised as Persians – and to laugh at actors who are meant to be badly disguised as Persians is a much more knowing response than to laugh at actors who are simply meant to be Persians. But, with a sophistication that is startling at such an early stage in the history of Roman literature, Plautus exploits even further the hybrid character of his work, and of his world.

  One of his favourite gags, which he repeats in the prologue to a number of plays, is some version of ‘Demophilus wrote this, Plautus barbarised it’, referring to his Latin (‘barbaric’) translation of a comedy by the Greek playwright Demophilus. This apparently throwaway line was, in fact, a clever challenge to the audience. For those of Greek origin, it no doubt gave the opportunity for a quiet snigger at the expense of the new, barbaric rulers of the world. For the others, it demanded the conceptual leap of imagining what they might look like from the outside. To enjoy the laugh, they had to understand, even if only as a joke, that to Greek eyes, Romans might appear to be barbarians.

  The widening horizons of empire, in other words, disturbed the simple hierarchy of ‘us over them’, the ‘civilised over the barbarous’, which had underpinned classical Greek culture. Romans were certainly capable of scornfully dismissing conquered barbarians, of contrasting their own civilised, sophisticated selves with the crude, long-haired, woad-painted Gauls, or other supposedly inferior species. Indeed, they often did just that. But from this point on, there was always another strand of Roman writing, which reflected more subversively on the relative position of the Romans in the wider world and on how the balance of virtue was to be set between insiders and outsiders. When, three centuries later, the historian Tacitus insinuated that true ‘Roman’ virtue was to be found in the ‘barbarians’ of Scotland and not in Rome itself, he was developing a tradition of argument that went right back to these early days of empire, and of literature.

  How to be Roman

  The empire’s new horizons also helped to create – or at least to define with much sharper edges and ideological significance – the image of the ‘old-fashioned Roman’. That down-to-earth, no-nonsense, hardy, warts-and-all character plays his part in our stereotype of Roman culture even now. The chances are that he was largely a creation of this period too.

  Some of the most outspoken voices
of the third and second centuries BCE became famous for attacking the corrupting influence on traditional Roman behaviour and morals of foreign culture in general, and Greek culture in particular; their targets ranged from literature and philosophy to naked exercise, fancy food and depilation. In the forefront of the critics was Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Elder’), a contemporary and rival of Scipio Africanus, whom Cato criticised for, among other things, cavorting in Greek gymnasia and theatres in Sicily. He is also supposed to have dubbed Socrates a ‘terrible prattler’, to have recommended a Roman medicinal regime of green vegetables, duck and pigeon (rather than anything to do with Greek doctors, who were liable to kill you) and to have warned that Roman power could be brought down by the passion for Greek literature. According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen. He was not alone in these views. In the middle of the second century BCE another prominent figure successfully argued that a Greek-style theatre being built in Rome should be demolished, as it was better and more character forming for Romans to watch plays standing up, as they had traditionally done, rather than sitting down in decadent Eastern fashion. In short, so these arguments went, what passed for Greek ‘sophistication’ was no more than insidious ‘softness’ (or mollitia in Roman jargon), which was bound to sap the strength of the Roman character.

  33. Many Roman portraits in the second and first centuries BCE present their subjects as elderly, wrinkled and craggy. Now often known as the ‘veristic’ (or hyper-realistic) style, it is, in fact, a deeply ‘idealising’ form of representation, celebrating a particular version of how a Roman should look in contrast to the youthful perfection of so much Greek sculpture.

  Was this a simple conservative backlash against newfangled ideas being brought into Rome from outside, a bout of ‘culture wars’ between traditionalists and modernisers? In part, perhaps, it was. But it was also more complicated, and interesting, than that. For all his huffing and puffing, Cato had taught his son Greek, and his surviving writing – notably, a technical essay on farming and agricultural management, and substantial quotations from his speeches and from his history of Italy – shows that he was well practised in the Greek rhetorical tricks that he claimed to deplore. And some of the claims being made about ‘Roman tradition’ were little short of imaginative fantasy. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that venerable old Romans had watched theatrical performances standing up. The evidence we have suggests quite the reverse.

  The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions. Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbours. But the distinctive, hard-edged sense of tough Roman austerity – which later Romans eagerly projected back on to their founding fathers and which has remained a powerful vision of Romanness into the modern world – was the product of a powerful cultural clash, in this period of expansion abroad, over what it was to be Roman in this new, wider imperial world, and in the context of such an array of alternatives. To put it another way, ‘Greeknesss’ and ‘Romanness’ were as inseparably bound up as they were polar opposites.

  That is exactly what we see, in a particularly vertiginous form, in the story Livy, among others, tells of how the Great Mother goddess was brought into Rome with tremendous fanfare from Asia Minor in 204 BCE, towards the end of the Second Punic War. This was a very Roman occasion. A book of Roman oracles that was supposed to go back to the reign of the Tarquins recommended that the goddess Cybele, as she was also known, be incorporated into the Roman pantheon. The range of deities worshipped in Rome was proudly elastic, and the Great Mother was the patron deity of the Romans’ ancestral home – Aeneas’ Troy – and so, in a sense, belonged in Italy. They sent a senior deputation to collect the image of the goddess and transport her back, and they chose, as the oracle had insisted, ‘the best man in the state’ to receive her in Rome – who turned out to be another Scipio. He was accompanied in the welcoming party by a noble Roman woman, in some accounts a Vestal Virgin, and the image was taken from the ship and passed from the coast to the city, hand to hand, by a long line of other women. The goddess was temporarily lodged in the shrine of Victory until her own temple was built. It would be the first building in Rome, so far as we know, constructed using that most Roman of materials, and the one on which so many of the Romans’ later architectural masterpieces relied: concrete.

  34. A second-century CE memorial to a priest of the Great Mother. His image is strikingly different from the standard toga-clad priests of Rome (Fig. 61), with his long hair, heavy jewellery, ‘foreign’ musical instruments, and the hints of self-flagellation in the whips and goads.

  Nothing could have pleased Cato more – except that not everything was quite as it seemed. The image of the goddess was not what the Romans could possibly have been expecting. It was a large black meteorite, not a conventional statue in human form. And the meteorite came accompanied by a retinue of priests. These were self-castrated eunuchs, with long hair, tambourines and a passion for self-flagellation. This was all about as un-Roman as you could imagine. And forever after it raised uncomfortable questions about ‘the Roman’ and ‘the foreign’, and where the boundary between them lay. If this was the kind of thing that came from Rome’s ancestral home, what did that imply about what it was to be Roman?

  CHAPTER SIX

  ·

  NEW POLITICS

  Destruction

  THE LONG SIEGE, and final destruction, of Carthage in 146 BCE was gruesome even by ancient standards, with atrocities reported on both sides. The losers could be as spectacularly cruel as the victors. On one occasion, the Carthaginians were supposed to have paraded Roman prisoners on the city walls, flayed them alive and dismembered them in full view of their comrades.

  Carthage lay on the Mediterranean coast near modern Tunis and was defended by a massive circuit of walls almost 20 miles in perimeter (the walls of Rome constructed after the invasion of the Gauls were well under half that length). It was only when Scipio Aemilianus had cut the town off from the sea, and so from its access to supplies, that after two years of siege operations the Romans managed to starve the enemy into submission and storm the place. The one surviving ancient description of these final moments includes plenty of lurid exaggeration but also a shrewd sense of how difficult it must have been to destroy a city as solidly built as Carthage – and a few probably realistic glimpses of the carnage that went with defeat. In the assault, the Roman soldiers fought their way up streets lined with multistorey buildings; they jumped from rooftop to rooftop, throwing the occupants down on to the pavements and toppling and setting fire to the structures as they went, until the debris they had made blocked their path. The rubbish clearers followed, opening up a space for the next wave of assault by blasting their way through the mixture of building material and human remains, in which it was said that the legs of the dying could be seen visibly writhing above the debris, their heads and bodies buried beneath. The bones that archaeologists have found in these layers of destruction, not to mention the thousands of deadly stone and clay sling bullets that have been unearthed, suggest that this description may not be as wide of the mark as we might hope.

  There was the usual rush for plunder, and not just precious gold and silver. Aemilianus made sure that the famous agricultural encyclopaedia by the Carthaginian Mago was rescued from the flames; back in Rome, the senate gave a committee of Roman linguists the unenviable task of translating into Latin its twenty-eight volumes on everything from how to preserve pomegranates to how to choose bullocks. There were mythical resonances too. Aemilianus’ rueful quotation from Homer as he watched the destruction had its poignant side. But it was also a boast. Rome was now claiming its place in the cycle of great powers and great con
flicts that started with the Trojan War. Carthage, meanwhile, was supposed to have ended as it had begun, with a man abandoning his lover in favour of Rome. One story told that, just as Virgil’s hero Aeneas deserted Dido as the city was being built, so amid its destruction Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander, finally went over to the Romans, leaving his wife behind. She is supposed to have denounced him when, like Dido, she threw herself onto a funeral pyre.

  Almost as devastating, a few months later, was the sack of Corinth, nearly 1,000 miles from Carthage, and the richest city in Greece. It had made a fortune from its prime trading position, with harbours on each side of the narrow strip of land separating the Peloponnese from the rest of Greece. Under the command of Lucius Mummius Achaicus, as he was later known from his victory over these ‘Achaeans’, the Roman legions took the place apart, looted its fabulous works of art, enslaved the people and set it ablaze. This was such a vast conflagration that the mixture of molten metal it produced was supposed to be the origin of a prized, and extremely expensive, material known as Corinthian bronze. Ancient experts did not believe a word of this particular story, but the image of the intense heat of the destruction melting first the precious bronze, then the silver and finally the gold, until they all streamed together, is a powerful one – and a vivid example of the close link in Roman imagination between art and conquest.