My first witness is Richard Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb: ‘If we think of the culture of ancient Greece and the Hellenistic and Roman periods that followed, it seems very odd that the scientific revolution should not have happened there and then’. By ‘scientific revolution’ we should understand a full-scale industrial revolution, which did not of course occur until two thousand years later, in the late eighteenth century, starting in England. Were the elements of such a revolution present in Alexandria?
The debate centres on an engineer of genius, Heron of Alexandria, who was active in about ioo BC. He was the inventor of hundreds of devices and complicated mechanisms, such as a water-bottle with a siphon which could be made to pour or not at will, gearing mechanisms, cogwheels, screws, and a rotating machine powered by steam from a miniature boiler. He also invented an authentic theodolite (called a diopter), and any reader who has ever had to take topographical bearings will recognize the profound simplicity of this invention.
Was there not in all this the promise of a future applied science} We can recognize that the use of steam, even to power a toy, was a significant step. But then the steam-engine devised by Denis Papin (ad 1681) did not spark off an industrial revolution either: it would take another hundred years before that happened. The technical discovery in itself does not necessarily lead to an industrial revolution. Neither am I convinced by the kind of ‘endogenic’ explanation which suggests that the Alexandrian engineers were frivolous. Louis Rougier has described Heron as ‘the Vaucanson of Antiquity and not the James Watt’. But Vaucanson did more than invent toys: he worked on improvements to techniques of weaving. It has also been suggested (and there is perhaps more truth in this) that the rich ‘patrons’ of Alexandria asked engineers not to perfect working machines, even for use in war (at which, incidentally, they do not seem to have had much success), but rather to provide miraculous tricks to dazzle the faithful in the Graeco-Egyptian cult of Serapis: putting official state science at the service of official state religion, as one historian remarks. Well, possibly: but is that enough to explain the stagnation of technology throughout all the centuries of the Roman period?
Historians have often advanced another answer, taken up by philosophers and experts on technology. Every technological revolution has always been undermined by the existence of slavery, a scourge which spread throughout the ancient world. Athens in the third century became a kind of dormitory town with its great landowners, its workshops, and its slaves who worked both in the fields and the city. From about 166 BC, Delos became an immense slave market for the entire Orient – a strange destiny for a sacred island. ‘If Heron of Alexandria did not think of building a steam engine to ease the labour of men’, writes Louis Rougier, ‘it was because slavery existed.’ This then was ‘Spartacus’ revenge’.
No one will deny that a society may be slow to perfect and adopt technologies (even if they are known about) as long as there is no real need for them. This is really the heart of the problem. Was it then the slave-owning mentality, the indifference to the toil of humans working like beasts of burden, that was to blame? It is unlikely that the English and then European industrial revolution, which led to decade upon decade of marked decline in the conditions of the workers, was really inspired by the desire to ‘relieve human toil’. Perhaps on the contrary it had become ‘profitable’ for a given society or group to provide men with the assistance of a machine so that they should produce more, not necessarily by working less or in any better conditions.
Of course, since our views on this are not those of the past, we canhardly avoid feeling rather pleased at ‘Spartacus’ revenge’, a sort of restrospective moral victory. Slavery was not only a crime but also a mistake, since it meant that humans were doomed to economic stagnation. But why did the industrial revolution that had not taken place in antiquity not happen in the seventeenth century, in Papin’s day? Or perhaps in Renaissance Italy, in Lombardy, where all the scientific conditions seem to have been united? There were no slaves in that society. When in England in the 1780s there really was ‘take-off’, to use the expression popularized by W. W. Rostow, the experience had been preceded by a long-term economic and demographic upturn. The economic fuse was no doubt one of the indispensable factors. Can we imagine retrospectively that this was the missing element in 100 bc?
Hellenistic civilization as a whole
In the preceding pages, I have given prominence to science, which was an essential feature of Hellenistic civilization. But its other features interest us too, for many reasons, among them that Rome was to imitate this late flowering of Greek culture and prolong it by absorbing it into its own civilization.
Athens during this period was certainly not plunged in darkness. It was still a place where one could find the same subtle and delicate sensibility, the same humanization of the countryside, the same monumental splendours, and the same activity in the port of Piraeus. As a university city, Athens attracted plenty of rich young men, and it remained the undeniable capital of philosophical thought. The Academy and the Lyceum still had their scholarchs. As we saw, Theophrastus (322-287) and Straton (387-269) succeeded Aristotle at the Lyceum. Theophrastus’ Characters achieved lasting popularity, and new and energetic schools of philosophy emerged with Zeno, Epicurus and Pyrrho.
But classical tragedy with its choruses and singing had seen its last days. Travelling players no doubt still performed the plays of Euripides up and down the European and Asiatic regions of Greece. But tragedy was no longer a creative force. The theatre now consisted largely of comedy, which had embarked on a new career, based on everyday stories of Athenian folk. Menander (c. 342.~c.z92), who remained faithful to Athens and resisted the blandishments of Ptolemy Soter, was the acknowledged master of this genre. For a long time all we knew of his writings were a few fragments, or the versions of his plays produced by Plautus and Terence; then in 1959 a complete play, Diskobolos, was discovered – a sort of rustic version of Molidre’s Misanthrope.
But Athens was no longer the centre of the Greek universe, which had been hugely expanded by Alexander’s conquests. Pergamum, Rhodes, Tarsus, Antioch and above all Alexandria, were its triumphant rivals. In the end, what vanished with the ancient glory of Athens was the predominance of the polis, with its popular ‘open air’ literature, intended for the mass of citizens sitting on the steps of the theatre. From now on intellectual life would be dominated by princely courts, libraries and scholars, deliberately restricted circles of specialists, the growing numbers of schools, all anxious to follow new trends, and even a kind of ‘bourgeoisie’ whose existence is explained by the growth of the economy. It was a world with many and various structures.
Greek thought had, however, to confront the native culture of these colonized regions, which remained foreign to it. It was caught up in an imperial mission which obliged it to assert its unity in the face of the other. Thus a common language, a lingua franca or koiney tended to replace the dialects. The koine was chiefly but not entirely of Attic origin. It was the language of teachers, the virtually unchallenged language of prose writing.
There were other changes too: with the end of public freedoms, eloquence disappeared, logically enough, since there were no crowds to convince by strategems or the power of the word. At most, men were free to offer discreet praise of their masters, or to taste the delights of literary escapism. They could escape into scholarship, history, the imaginary tales which were almost a prototype for the novel, or into the frequently allusive and caricatural playlets known as mimes. Those of the Syracusan Herondas were famous: written in racy verse, they presented sketches of everyday life: a slave-trader explains the irregularity of his accounts to a tribunal, a mother asks the schoolmaster to bring her son into line, a matchmaker bustles about or a shoemaker does the honours of his establishment. The plot doesn’t matter: everything is in the skilful dialogue, punctuated with jokes.
Another form of escapism perhaps were the Epigrams, Idylls or lovesongs of Theocritus
(born in about 300 BC, probably in Syracuse, before moving to Cos and eventually Alexandria). He imagines a life far from the city’s clutches, among magical landscapes and flute-playing shepherds, poets themselves, who ask the poet as he wanders through the island of Cos: ‘Where are you going, Similchidas, in the heat of the noonday sun, when even the lizard is sleeping in the dry stone walls and the crested larks, friends of the tombs, have ceased their play?’ Another form of escapism was the stylistic originality of the Alexandrian poets, searching for the recondite word, the sibylline allusion known only to initiates within the magic circle.
In art too, this period revealed a new Greece, both romantic and baroque, eager for novelty. The pursuit of the new led in Alexandria, as it did in Pergamum or Rhodes, either to a preference for naturalism (the denial of academic beauty or even of any beauty at all), or to a grandiloquent emotionalism which is reminiscent of what we would call the baroque, or to a rather sugary or precious elegance. The great Greek painting of the late classical era, known to us, alas, only through commentators, and which had already inspired the school of Sicyon and the sculptor Lysippus in about 350, was probably the source of this movement. Indeed, painting continued to enjoy greater prestige than sculpture, and innovation in pictorial composition was as passionate and sophisticated as the stylistic experimentation of the Alexandrian poets. One would like to see some examples of these efforts: a table or a stone floor with a three-dimensional representation of a meal for instance: they may be the origin of some of the fine still lives one finds in Pompeii.
As at Pompeii, painting and mosaic were the preferred form of decoration in the households of the rich. Alongside traditional religious architecture which drew on both the Ionic and the Doric (though a softened and mellowed kind of Doric), private architecture also developed, as can be seen in the great houses excavated on Delos, with their colonnaded central courtyards, their marble statues, fountains and precious mosaics, and their painted stuccoes. Town planning had also come into being as a conscious art in the fifth century and indeed it was Hippodamus of Miletus, the classical architect of Piraeus, who was claimed as the inspiration of Hellenistic town planning. But the great cities which sprang up so quickly, such as Alexandria, Antioch or Pergamum, helped to set the pattern for an urban order at once functional and aesthetically pleasing.
From our distant vantage point, this rich, teeming civilization of the Hellenistic world seems like a civilization perched on the shoulders of conquered and enslaved peoples – a civilization only precariously balanced. That men should travel from the east to sample this dominant civilization was a sign of its success. People would also come from Africa to Rome, as in later centuries they did to France. But such conquests could not conceal the fact that beneath the surface the languages of the vanquished were still alive: Aramaic for instance was increasingly widely used. And religious life was even more successful at protecting its originality. It even took over some of the Greek cults, which after the disappearance of the religion of the polis, were more open than ever to sects and rituals from the east. Perhaps this explains the power of the obstacle against which the effort of the conquerors’ civilization, though prolonged over many centuries, would in the end exhaust itself.
8
The Roman Takeover of the
Greater Mediterranean
In its broad outline, the destiny of Rome is devastatingly simple. Viewed from close up, people, events and details complicate the story.
One should above all avoid assuming that this mighty empire came about by some automatic process. The Mediterranean did indeed operate as a mechanism tending to bring together the countries scattered round its immense perimeter. But the sea did not itself spin the web in which it was captured alive.
Rome achieved that particular feat. And Rome might have been well advised to settle for the Mediterranean alone, for the expanse of blue water and the fringe of countries around its shores – to settle for the sun, the vine and the olive-tree. Instead, Rome embarked on a very different course. First Caesar conquered Gaul, then Germanicus took on the great forests of Germania – and subsequently Europe was to lament with him the losses of his legions. Agricola completed the conquest of Britain in ad 77-84, and his son-in-law Tacitus set about describing his triumphs. Trajan went in pursuit of Dacian gold and in turn discovered on the banks of the Euphrates how powerless Rome was when faced with the mysterious Asia of the Parthians.
The Roman provinces, where the benefits of the Pax Romana soon became evident, in fact remained fairly remote from the politics of the Capitol, and from the tragedies played out in Rome itself or on the Empire’s distant frontiers. The praetorian guard might slaughter one another, the sentries might be facing dramatic alarms along the limes> the imperial frontier, but none of that greatly perturbed the stay-at-home provincial. Distance provided him with a comfortable buffer of complacency. But the very fact that the Mediterranean, while in thrall to Rome, was still a living entity with a healthy pulse of its own, meant that all its cultural goods continued to circulate, mingling ideas and beliefs, and bringing about a uniformity in material civilization which has left traces still visible today. The Roman Empire was an area shaped by exchange, a huge echo chamber in which every sound was amplified worldwide; an ‘accumulation’ which would one day turn into a legacy.
The Romanization of the Ancient World, its military and cultural conquest by Rome, is the central focus of Roman history within the Mediterranean. What interests us at this point is the moment when its successes first created the pattern for an universal empire around the shores of the Mare nostrum.
I Roman imperialism
Imperialism is not a word to be uttered lightly. It implies a conscious desire to conquer, and if it is to carry weight in the historical balance, it must lead to some spectacular and enduring achievement. That the word should be applied to Rome – and in antiquity to Rome alone – is the argument of the opening lines of Jerome Carcopino’s magnificent book The Stages of Roman Imperialism (1934). One cannot speak in the same way of Athenian or Macedonian imperialism, since both were so short-lived. Athens collapsed in 404 BC, while Alexander’s empire, created almost overnight, fragmented on the conqueror’s death. One can however speak of Persian imperialism; and the British Empire can also be clearly identified – both before and after Palmerston, the man who so proudly if anachronistically proclaimed ‘Civis romanus sum’.
If we accept these definitions, there was no Roman imperialism to speak of until perhaps the first or even the second Punic war (218-204 BC). The latter marked the critical turning-point, after a series of conquests which were certainly large in scale (covering the whole of Italy!) but not as intentional as might appear in retrospect. It was not until later that Rome assumed its true identity, and embarked on its chosen route.
The first unification of Italy
In the early days of Rome’s career, nothing seemed to single out for greatness a town which long lay dormant. There was nothing to distinguish it from the other towns in Latium: Alba Longa (of which it would later be said that it was Rome’s alma mater)-, Ardea; Preneste; Lanuvium; Tibur (Tivoli), on its very fertile site; or Lavinium (today Pratica di Mare), a town which according to Roman legend had been founded by Aeneas during his flight from the flames of Troy. In the last-named town, possibly on the archaic altars discovered during the 1960s, ‘the people venerated the Penates, carried there from Troy, as well as Vesta, goddess of fire and the hearth, a cult of Greek origin, as was that of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux’.
So we must look beyond the original town, although it is tempting for the historian faced with the Rome of today, a sea of buildings and bustling city life, to imagine the primitive villages which once existed on its sacred hills. It is hard not to feel some tug at the heart when one pictures those first long-ago settlements, consisting of a few hundred shepherds and their families. We must then imagine a town taking shape, founded (or perhaps re-founded) by the Etruscans, when they set out to control the
best crossing-place on the Tiber, commanded by the Insula Tiberina. Traditionally the last three kings of Rome were Etruscan: Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius Superbus.
According to tradition too, Rome rebelled against the latter in 509 BC. This revolt, which created the Roman Republic, governed by consuls, the Senate and the great patrician families, the patriarchal gentes, may in fact have occurred somewhat later, in about 470 BC. Its significance is still not clear. Did Rome have its own ‘fifth century’ as the historian Jacques Heurgon wondered? The pious fictions of traditional history recount as if they were epic conflicts what were probably minor skirmishes between neighbouring towns, fought with derisory forces. In these obscure times, Rome was allied with the other towns in Latium in the Latin confederation, and the battles, which took place regularly every campaigning season, were little more than internal squabbles over cattle rustling, the ownership of a water source, or a few fields.
The invasion by the Gauls in 390 or 387 BC was another matter. But this violent confrontation was also short-lived. Defeated on the banks of the Allia, the Romans were unable to save their city, which fell into the hands of the Senones under Brennus. But the Capitol stood firm, the conquerors retreated and it was soon business as usual in the Latin confederation. The key date must be the collapse of the confederation under pressure from Rome in 338. The Latin cities were subjugated and Rome, now unfettered, was to become ruler of Italy within seventy years, the last date in this sequence being either the fall of Tarentum in 272, or possibly that of Rhegium, another Greek city, in 270. At this point, the conquest of Etruria was complete. Volsinii fell in 265.
The early stages of this irresistible rise to power may perhaps be explained by Rome’s association with Campania, in particular with the large city of Capua. This partnership encircled Latium. Capua, the focal point of immigration from the mountains and the countryside, placed at Rome’s service a pool of adventurers whose contribution was not negligible. Having a foothold in Campania meant making contact with the Greeks, reaching the sea and benefiting from trade (as some of the earliest coins attest). Even more certainly, it meant a confrontation with the Samnites, the warlike tribes of the Apennines who for more than a hundred years had been terrorizing the rich lowlands.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 38