How Rome embraced and profited from
Hellenistic civilization
As a centre of power and wealth, Rome was effortlessly attracting the changing trends in philosophy and the arts well before the battle of Actium and the triumph of Augustus: this had started to happen with the arrival in the victorious city of the earliest Greek immigrants, merchants, artisans, intellectuals looking for work, political exiles or even slaves, reputedly more quick-witted than their masters. The Hellenization of Rome had been going on for hundreds of years. Greek gradually became the second language of cultivated men, as French was in Enlightenment Europe – with the difference that the primacy of Greek lasted centuries rather than a mere hundred years.
It is true that sometimes the culture transmitted by the Greeks was of such high quality that the pupil was not able to surpass the master or even to reach the same level. This was unfortunately true of science, which would advance no further than the point at which the Greeks had left it. It is also generally true of philosophy, the crowning glory of Greek thought. Rome slowly absorbed its lessons, though not without some resistance. The Roman authorities even expelled philosophers on several occasions. But under the protection of a few high-ranking families, the philosophers were finally able to bring to Rome some portion of Greek thought after the troubled years following Alexander’s death (323 BC). All the same, if Epicureanism inspired Lucretius (99-55 BC) and if Stoicism was destined for a remarkable future, culminating in Marcus Aurelius, can one really speak of an original Latin philosophy? Many historians of ideas have emphatically denied this, considering that both Cicero and Seneca simply plagiarized their predecessors.
Greek art, which had previously only reached Rome indirectly, via Etruria and Campania, truly came as a revelation in the second century BC, following the capture of the Sicilian cities, the eastern campaigns and the reduction of Greece to a Roman province (146 b c). From then on, as wealth and luxury developed in Rome, Greek culture, of which only philosophy had hitherto affected a few patrician families, transformed the very arts of living in Rome. Artists from Greece or the Greek-influenced Middle East flocked in, entering the service of a newly rich but not particularly well-informed Roman clientele, anxious to gain social advantage by collecting works of art about which it knew little, to decorate houses and villas.2 With the healthy appetite of a young civilization, Rome absorbed everything indiscriminately: the great historical compositions of Pergamum, the affected and extravagant baroque of Alexandria, the cold beauties of neo-Atticism and even the greatest masterpieces of the Greek classical era. Originals and copies of sculptures (the latter turned out at an industrial pace in Athens for the west) flowed into Italy and piled up in dealers’ yards. Cicero requested some ‘bas-reliefs for his villa in Tusculum’ from his wealthy friend Atticus in Athens, who also sent Pompey statues for his theatre, the first stone-built theatre to be constructed in Rome (5 5 b c). A few years later, when the temple of Apollo was rebuilt early in the reign of Augustus, it was on a Hellenistic model: the statues and paintings with which it was decorated, all Greek, turned it into averitable museum. In 1907, the so-called Mahdia wreck, a Roman cargo ship from about this period, was discovered off the Tunisian coast: its cargo included sixty columns (probably brand-new ones), as well as statuettes, bas-reliefs, bronze and marble sculptures, including several unquestionable masterpieces.
Such works of art were imitated of course by the Italian and Greek artisans working throughout the Italian peninsula. And even when there was a strong input of originality from Rome – in the taste for realistic detail, for lifelike portraiture, landscape and still life – the original spark must have come from the east.
Rome’s original features
But no civilization can live entirely off foreign imports. At the time it became the capital of a newly available Hellenism, which it copied with enthusiasm, Rome was already a society with deep-seated traditions of its own. Even if the Romans appeared to be abandoning their past, to Cato’s despair, their ancient taste still led them to make certain choices, the significance of which would become clearer in the long run, when Rome’s admiration for all things Greek was no longer tinged with a sense of inferiority.
Moreover, some things were a matter of necessity. After Actium, the need for buildings became urgent, new sites opening up as fast as old ones were completed. Rome began to see the arrival of a swelling stream of immigrant populations, out of all proportion to that of the Greek cities, except Alexandria. Town planning created its own problems. It is not surprising if the domain in which Rome most rapidly developed its own personality was architecture.
Sulla, Pompey, Caesar and Augustus all played some part in this building programme. Agrippa rebuilt the city’s drainage system and water supply; Augustus built two or three new aqueducts, and added to Caesar’s existing forum a new one, separated by a wall from the Suburra district on the Esquiline, the haunt of actors, gladiators, hustlers and beggars. By so doing, he was separating the official city, with its marble-clad walls (imitated from the Greeks in the second century BC, and quarried in Carrara) from the old more disreputable city, built in the ancient materials of lath and plaster, and repeatedly ravaged by fire. Countless new buildings followed: fora, basilicas, baths, theatres, circuses, temples, palaces and tenements.
Roman architecture absorbed and adapted all the means and elements then known. Doric, Ionian and Corinthian columns were all present, but in modified form: the Doric, simplified and given a plinth, became known as Tuscan; the order known as composite combined the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian with the scrolls of the Ionian. But the most impressive aspect of Roman architecture was the functional art of its engineers. Using concrete as a building material, Roman engineers were responsible for building marvellous bridges and aqueducts, with arches and domes everywhere, barrel-vaulting and groynes, which freed architects from the constraints of load-bearing pillars and columns, and made possible the huge internal spaces required by the large numbers of city-dwellers. Rome’s grandiose style came into being almost of its own accord.
The Colosseum, begun by Vespasian and finished by his son Domitian, is a fitting symbol of that grandeur. It set new records for the time, measuring 188 metres by 156, with a circumference of 527; the height of the outer wall was 48 metres, and a further storey made of wood could be added; some 50-80,000 spectators could be accommodated around the vast internal arena of 80 by 54 metres. Its name came from the Colossus, a statue of Nero, over 30 metres high, depicted as the sun god. The Colossus was eventually taken down but its name remained in the Colosseum – itself a colossus of a kind. Throughout the Empire, there were numerous huge amphitheatres: at Italica in Spain (156 by 154 metres); and a whole series in France: Autun, 154 by 130; Poitiers, 138 by 115; Limoges, 137 by 113; Aries, 136 by 108; Tours, 135 by izo; Bordeaux, 132 by 103; Nimes, 131 by 100.
In the domains of painting and sculpture, Roman art slowly distinguished itself from its Greek models. Greek artists were too numerous for local taste to emerge immediately. It was easier to find outside Rome. There was indeed a popular art – R. Bianchi Bandinelli has described it as ‘plebeian’ – an art not so much Roman as south Italian, which was to contribute something distinctive to Rome. This was a sturdy, realistic kind of art, depicting people and things with verisimilitude: to make a rather far-fetched comparison, it was rather like the French art of the Loire valley before it was confronted with thesophisticated and noble art of the Renaissance. Native art would in time assert itself, one might almost say take its revenge against foreign influence, but the process would be a slow and gradual one.
Thus was created that composite art, the early ‘Roman’ style, a precocious example of which is provided by the sculptures on the altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus (between 115 and 70 BC). These combined mythological compositions of Greek inspiration with scenes treated much more realistically. However, Rome’s official art long retained traces of foreign influence. We should not forget that the Laocoon in the V
atican museum, the work of sculptors from Rhodes, excited enormous admiration among the Romans, including Pliny the Elder. The statue of Augustus, known as the Porta Prima, superimposes the emperor’s head and breastplate on to the Greek torso of Polycletes’ Doryphorus. The panels of the Ara Pads (decreed in 13 BC, this altar to peace was put up four years later on the Field of Mars) were almost entirely by Greek artists.
It is in the domestic art of the portrait that one finds Roman art par excellence. This has often been traced to Rome’s Etruscan origins and it is true that a certain verismo is to be found in the bronze and terracotta statues of ancient Etruria. But it is even more closely linked to the Roman tradition of the jus imaginis, a privilege of the patrician families. Polybius noted in some detail the sight, strange to his eyes, of the funeral rites of the nobilitas and the role played in them by the imago, the wax mask of the departed which rich families preserved, a tradition linked to ancestor worship. ‘When an illustrious relative dies, the masks are carried in procession to the funeral. Selected individuals who in height and external appearance most closely resemble the originals put them on their faces, and wear ‘pretextual’ togas if the dead man was a consol or praetor, purple togas if he was a censor, and gold-embroidered togas if he was awarded a triumph.’ These fragile wax death-masks were later replaced by stone or bronze busts of remarkable realism. Greek influence occasionally introduced a more pretentious note, but the Roman portrait, whether sculpted or painted, retained from its age-old tradition a very great expressive force and was always comparatively sober in style. There was a marked contrast in Augustus’ day between this simple beauty and the virtuoso examples of official art, based on imitation of Greek models.
It would be some time before imperial art no longer consisted of ‘cultural borrowing, but of assimilated features transformed into a new culture’. R. Bianchi Bandinelli has contrasted the age of Augustus with an ‘age of Trajan’, roughly from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, marked by passion and romanticism. For the first time, foreign borrowings and the native spirit of Rome were combined and balanced. Pergamum was a precursor of the sculptures on Trajan’s column, but one can detect a new style, spirit and themes in the countless details incorporated into the frieze, two hundred metres long, which runs round the whole length of the column, telling the long story of Trajan’s two victorious campaigns against the Dacians in ad 101-2 and 106-7. The scenes depicted are realistic, even gruesome in places. War is shown with its many dead, while the enemy is nevertheless treated with respect and shown to be scoring blows as well. Other novelties were the recognition (though can we be sure of this?) of the atrocities committed, and the entry into a work of art of the everyday actors in a great adventure: the soldiers, carters and bridge-builders. For the first time in Roman history, its anonymous heroes were being honoured.
From Augustus to Marcus Aurelius: literary renown
The visual arts travel with ease from one civilization or country to another. Europe might have been divided into two by the Reformation but it was united by one artistic movement, the baroque. Literature on the other hand is tied to particular nations and therefore cannot avoid being sui generis.
Rome had a literary tradition well before Augustus. It seems to have had a sudden flowering then, but on closer inspection, writes Pierre Grimal, ‘the literary maturity of the Augustans can be seen to date rather from the crisis which preceded his reign’. Nevertheless, Augustus and in particular the patron and eques Maecenas strongly influenced the literature of their time, both by their politics and in their personal taste. Maecenas was himself a poet, tempted by hermeticism and preciosity; Augustus’ intellectual enthusiasm is undeniable. It might also be argued that literary consciousness identified itself with the new regime: the Augustan age saw the end of the civil wars, and a new sense of security and confidence in Roman ‘virtue’. During these years,Rome witnessed a revolution of the mind that could, despite the anachronism, be described as nationalist. Mutatis mutandis, this was not unlike a stronger version of the French Renaissance as represented by Du Bellay and Ronsard. As opposed to the Hellenistic east, attractive yet unsettling, which had still been the model of the young poets of the Neoteroi circle in the days of Catullus (87-54 BC), there was now a reassertion of western values, those of Rome and traditional Italy. Careful preparation of public opinion also played a part: Rome, having acquired material superiority, now aspired to other kinds of greatness.
Augustus, like the Greek rulers, was a ‘providential prince’. He may truly have imagined that he could rival Pericles and Athens, possessing as he did a quasi-religious sense of the grandeur and mission of Rome. It is this, more even than the influence of Maecenas, which gives its special character to the works of Virgil, Livy, Horace, possibly even Propertius. Virgil, who had always been a ‘Caesarist’, naturally enlisted on the side of the young Octavian. He was simply continuing his lifelong itinerary then, rather than flattering the emperor, when in 29 BC he began the Aeneid. This work was still unfinished when he died, ten years later: in Virgil’s own eyes it was imperfect and he begged in vain that it should be destroyed after his death. Rome now had its own Homeric epic, a monument to its glory and to that of Augustus who, since he claimed descent via the Julian line from Aeneas himself and therefore from Venus, was marked out by destiny to rule the Empire. There would also soon be a history of the city of Rome, from the pen of Livy (59 BC–ad 17) whose whole-hearted patriotism delivered even more than had been asked of him. His history, despite an honest attempt to look critically at his sources, remains a hymn to the grandeur of Rome. The teachers in the schools of the Empire nevertheless long preferred to these paeans of praise the more dry and terse prose of Sallust (85-35 BC)> author of the Jugurthan War and the Catiline Conspiracy
The other writers mentioned were not so committed to the state. Like Catullus and Tibullus, Propertius was mainly known for the poems addressed to his beloved Cynthia. But his Elegies written at the end of his life draw on the old legends of Rome: Tarpeia and the Trojan ancestors of the gens Julia appear, as well as young Roman women who conformed more closely than Cynthia to the reform in morals which Augustus sought to impose. Horace too followed a cautious line. Sensitive about his origins (he was the son of a freed slave) he was no less so about his past: in 42 BC, in Macedonia, he had served in the army of the republican rebels, Brutus and Cassius. And he also valued his independence, living on his Sabine estate near Tibur, aloof from the temptations if not the rewards of the great. But he too received official commissions, writing the words of the hymn sung to celebrate the Secular Games in 17 BC. When he died, aged 57, a few weeks after Maecenas (in 8 BC), he was buried alongside his friend.
Other writers were frankly recalcitrant towards the powers that be. They included the writer of elegies Tibullus, and most notably Ovid (43 BC–ad 17), who consciously returned to the Alexandrian inspiration of the Neoteroi. His daring poetry, humour and erotic verse, which made him the favourite poet of the courtesans and idlers of Rome, led to his banishment by Augustus. He composed his Tristia and Pontics at Tomes in Mesia on the distant shores of the Black Sea, and it was there that he died, still in exile.
It would be difficult to claim for literature what Bandinelli claims for the visual arts, namely that the age of Trajan was a time of greatness. Instead of the giants of the Augustan age, one would have to champion those of the next century: Quintilian, Lucan, Persius, Martial – which seems paradoxical – but also Tacitus, Seneca and Petronius, which is defensible enough. If we were to listen to the brilliant essayist Emil Ludwig, however, ‘everything that made the Romans great had already been produced by the Republic’. And that would mean going back to Cicero and Terence or to Plautus (whom Horace detested). Historical judgements depend on individual taste.
From Commodus (180-92) to Septimius Severus (193-211)
Troubles were on the horizon well before the death of Marcus Aurelius; they were to punctuate the long and war-tormented reign of this philosopher-emperor. Frontier
security, internal peace and the balance of power between the different provinces had all started to deteriorate. Prey to economic recession and monetary turmoil, Rome was ceasing to be the centre of the universe. The east was acquiring its liberty: itsreligions and ways of thought were encroaching violently upon the Roman tradition. The principate, as Augustus and the Antonines had conceived of it, was looking like an outdated form of prudent government. Bureaucracy had increased and the imperial power was sliding towards ‘the practices of oriental despotism’: in his cruel folly, Commodus tried to have himself venerated as the god Hercules. He was the first emperor to call himself ‘king of the world and servant of divinity’. Septimius Severus, of African and possibly Carthaginian origin, carried this transformation even further.
This mutation of society and civilization under the last of the Antonines was reflected in the arts. The change is clear, though not easy to interpret. It can be traced in the sudden, almost total disappearance of mural painting and in the striking contrast between the bas-reliefs on Trajan’s column and those on the column of Marcus Aurelius. While the former obey a unitary conception and chronological order, the latter carvings present events in a confusing melange, with different styles of workmanship: the battles against the Marcomanni, the Dacians, the Cottians and the Quadi are shown as the scenes of various miracles – thunderbolts, or torrential rain which saved the legionaries from thirst while drowning their enemies. This was an art which set out to make an impression rather than to record, and in so doing appealed to popular taste. Amedeo Mauri, the art historian, has suggested that the freedom of a certain kind of painting in Pompeii and elsewhere at the same time is not unlike the advertising hoardings of today.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 43