by Woolf, Greg
Greek Intellectual Life in Rome
Cicero’s generation did not create either Latin literature or the idea of a distinctive Roman educational canon, but they fixed both in what would become their classical forms. Like most peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, Romans had lived for centuries in a world where culture meant Greek culture. The first works written in Latin were intended for performance—the plays of Plautus, the hymn of Livius, the speeches of Cato.14 From the beginning of the second century BC, a few historical and antiquarian works were produced in Latin: Cato led here as well. Yet many Roman authors continued to write in Greek, and philosophy and rhetoric, geography, medicine, and science were accessible only to Greek readers. We have little idea how many Romans were even interested in any of these subjects apart from philosophy before the middle of the second century BC. The creation of a comprehensive and self-sufficient Latin literary culture began in the 60s BC.15
The issue was not access to Greek knowledge. There had been Greek cities in central Italy since the archaic age, and the influence of the imports, images, and ideas they brought was in some senses ubiquitous. The ancient cities of the Aegean were also easy to reach. Pictor travelled to Delphi and Cato must have had access to many Greek books when writing his account of Italian Origins. The first Latin epic poets were well aware not only of Homer, but also of the many later Greek critical and philosophical commentaries on his work. During Polybius’ long exile in Rome and his subsequent voluntary residence there, he had used the library of the kings of Macedon, brought back as plunder by Aemilius Paullus after the battle of Pydna. The fact that Paullus brought the library home suggests an interest in Greek scholarship as early as the early second century. Probably this interest was not new.16 By the middle of the second century some Greeks seem to have realized the Roman elite was especially interested in philosophy. Athens sent an embassy to the Senate in 155 comprising the heads of the Stoic, Epicurean, and Peripatetic philosophical schools. Paullus’ son, Scipio Aemilianus, was the patron of not only Polybius but also of the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes. Both scholars spent time with him in Rome, and accompanied him on his travels. But the total number of Greek scholars actually resident in Rome remained few until the Mithridatic Wars. Perhaps the same was true of the number of Romans who were genuinely interested in what they had to offer.
Things began to change in the late second century. One sign of a new interest in things Greek is a new interest in the Bay of Naples, where the cities of Cumae and Naples were the closest Greek cities to Rome.17 Rome had created a cluster of colonies in Campania in the 190s. Anecdotes show some members of the Scipio family already had homes there in the early second century. Yet the first villas described as really spectacular date to the start of the last century BC: Marius’ Campanian retreat, built in the 90s BC, is one of the first certain examples. By the 60s and 50s the coastline was covered in those extraordinary pleasure complexes, images of which survive in Pompeian wall paintings and which have left flamboyant archaeological traces. The Emperor Augustus spent what were in effect vacations in the area, reserving for it Greek games, entertainments, and dress, in contrast to the rather sterner Roman traditionalism he displayed at home. Tiberius’ island retreat on Capri—perhaps because access was so difficult—attracted various stories of tyrannical cruelty and depravity. The Bay of Naples became imperial Rome’s Greek alter ego.
Fig 12. One of the fresco wall paintings in the cubiculum (bedroom) from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale
Young aristocrats were now regularly sent to be educated in the ancient cities of the Aegean world. Athens was the key destination but there were also many visitors to Rhodes, which had become a major centre for education in rhetoric and philosophy. Both cities already drew young men from other Greek states. Now young Romans began to join them. Cicero and his brother were both in Athens in 79 BC listening to the lectures of the great Academic philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, a client of Lucullus. They were both in their mid-twenties. They then went on to visit Rhodes and Smyrna. Julius Caesar studied on Rhodes a few years later. Some of these visits seem timed to avoid difficult political situations at home, and some probably also served to remove wealthy young men from the temptations of the city. But they left a lasting impression. Cicero’s reminiscences of his youthful discovery of Greece evoke something of the Grand Tour of classical and Renaissance sites in Italy undertaken between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries by wealthy Europeans as a final stage in their cultural education.
Summers in Campania and educational trips to Greece cast Rome in a new light. Roman writers of Cicero’s age were acutely aware that when they entered a library almost all the books were in Greek. Most of the best libraries in Rome had once belonged to Hellenistic kings. Cicero and many others used the library set up by Lucullus in his retreat in the hill town of Tusculum.18 Greek scholars as well as Roman ones made use of his collections. Mudslides from the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 69 buried one elegant Herculaneum mansion, now known as the Villa of the Papyri after a great collection of philosophical works recovered there. The villa probably belonged to Calpurnius Piso, Caesar’s father-in-law, who was consul in 58 with Gabinius as a colleague. The long lines of its ornamental ponds flanked by bronzes, and its lavish marble architecture, were reproduced by J. Paul Getty in Malibu in the 1970s, and have now been recreated again with loving digital reconstruction.19 Its library of philosophical works was a relic of the long residence there of the Greek polymath Philodemus of Gadara, who wrote on aesthetics and literary criticism as well as Epicureanism.20
Vitruvius’ manual On Architecture confirms what the Vesuvian villas suggest, that the Roman rich deliberately incorporated in their residences spaces designed to evoke Greek culture and these were often designated by Greek names: the oecus was a Greek dining room, the peristylum a Greek garden, the bibliotheke the regular term for library. Many of these rooms and terms did not correspond very closely to what archaeology shows actually existed in contemporary eastern Mediterranean cities such as Athens and Ephesus. Romans were not trying to recreate a contemporary Greek world in Italy. Cicero’s retreat in Tusculum included two areas he called gymnasia, adapting the terms from a characteristic Greek institution dedicated to exercise and the education of elite males. One he named the Lyceum after Aristotle’s school, the other the Academy after Plato’s. A series of letters survives in which he asks his friend Atticus to try and obtain suitable Greek statuary to decorate these spaces.21 No doubt his villa near Puteoli had many Greek spaces too. But there was also the sternly Roman domus on the Palatine, and probably the Tusculan villa had more Roman spaces for other aspects of his life. He and his peers were not trying to become Greek so much as to incorporate a carefully selected portion of Greek culture into their own lives.22
Cicero’s correspondence mentions many other Greek writers who lived for decades in Italy as guests of the Roman aristocracy. They came not only from great eastern centres like Athens and Rhodes and Alexandria, but also from Greek cities in Bithynia and Asia and even Syria. From wherever, in fact, Roman generals had passed by. A few taught, but many were resident scholars, creating for their Roman patrons an air of culture, in the same way as did the laid-out gardens with their covered walks for philosophical discussion among bronzes images of gods, mythological figures, philosophers, and kings. Greeks in Rome accommodated themselves to this selective appropriation of their culture. The prefaces of a number of Greek works composed in this period praise the generosity of their Roman friends. The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus presented himself as an admirer of the Romans: he regarded the similarities between some Roman and Greek institutions and between the Latin and Greek languages as a sign that Romans were Greek in origin. Gabinius brought Timagenes of Alexandria to Rome as a captive in 55 BC. Freed and honoured he became for a while the house guest of Augustus himself, but had a reputation as a ferocious critic of Rome. He was reported to have said that the only thing to regret about the man
y fires suffered by the city was that damaged buildings were always replaced on an even more lavish scale. Eventually he moved on to the home of Asinius Pollio, creator of one of the first public libraries in the capital. Other kidnapped Greeks seem to have adapted more easily. Tyrannio of Amisos, brought back as a captive by Lucullus, was freed and patronized by Pompey. He became a friend and intellectual mentor of Cicero, Caesar, and Atticus and taught grammar and criticism in Rome. Greeks as well as Romans came to study with him, as they did with the medic Asclepiades of Prusias. Poetry was transformed as well as prose. Parthenius of Nicaea, captured in 73 BC during a war against Mithridates, was fêted in Rome and inspired a new generation of Latin poets including Cornelius Gallus and Catullus. Latin poetics would remain preoccupied with love poetry and mythological themes throughout the reign of Augustus and beyond. Then there were the visitors, some at least celebrity academics on lecture tours. Poseidonius of Apamea and Artemidorus of Ephesus visited Rome and some of the western provinces giving lectures and gathering material for their histories and geographies. The cumulative influence on Roman culture was enormous.
Greek scholars always needed patrons. During the third and second centuries they found them in the royal courts of Alexandria, Pergamum, and Syracuse, but in the first century they came to Rome. A key part was played by the generation of Romans born in the last years of the second century BC. They were the first to make the Bay of Naples their playground—half Las Vegas and half the Left Bank of the Seine—and the first to have travelled in their youth in the Aegean world to study in the ancient cities of Greece. A few even lived there for long periods. Cicero’s friend Titus Pomponius lived in Athens for so long he acquired the nicknamed ‘Atticus’, and Verres fled Cicero’s prosecution to live in exile in Greek Marseilles. Tiberius would spend years on Rhodes during a period when he was out of favour at the court of Augustus. When campaigns in the east, or simply their own wealth, gave them the chance to bring Greek intellectuals to Rome, they grasped the opportunity, just as they filled their boats with Greek bronzes and hunted down copies of rare Greek books. They knew Greek philosophy well enough to identify themselves by school: Cicero the Academic, Caesar the Epicurean, Brutus the Stoic, and so on.23 They dropped Greek quotations and words into their private letters and conversations.24 But the clearest sign of their engagement with Greek culture is the determination of some of that generation to create a matching intellectual culture in Latin.
New Classics for a New Empire
Cicero, in his introduction to the Tusculan Disputations, is quite explicit that his philosophical works formed part of a conscious project to supply a set of Latin classics in each of the major genres invented by Greeks.25
Those subjects which deal with the correct way to live—the theory and practice of knowledge—are all part of that body of wisdom that is called philosophy. This I have decided to explain in a work written in the Latin language. Philosophy, to be sure, may be learned from books in Greek, or indeed from Greek scholars themselves. I have always thought that our writers have always proved themselves better than the Greeks, either by finding things out for themselves, or by improving what they have borrowed from them. Obviously this applies only to those fields of study we have decided are worthy of our efforts.26
The Tusculan Disputations form a part of a mass of mainly philosophical writing Cicero produced under the dictatorship of Caesar, when he felt he could neither support nor oppose the man who had enslaved the Republic but spared his own life. Tusculum was the site of Cicero’s philosophically themed retreat; there he entertained younger senators who shared his political and cultural interests. Many of the works he produced are dramatized as dialogues, recalling Plato’s accounts of Socrates debating with his students, but also presenting the Roman elite at their ethical and cultured best. The Disputations is in fact dedicated to the same Brutus whose ethics would have such a bloody outcome. Cicero opens by praising the practical morality of the Romans, relative to that of the Greeks, and goes on to argue that although the Greeks may have preceded Romans in many fields, once Romans took up the same pursuits they invariably eclipsed them. Discussion of various genres of Roman poetry moves on to oratory. Cicero’s own work on oratory is presented as a key stage in the creation of a Roman intellectual universe. Now, he says, he will move on to philosophy.
The preface is tendentious in all sorts of ways, and Cicero’s history of Latin scholarship, like Horace’s history of Latin literature contained in a letter ostensibly written for Augustus, has sometimes been taken too seriously. But it is perfectly true that this generation seem to have seen themselves as filling in the gaps in Latin writing and Roman knowledge. Cicero was not the only Latin philosopher. Lucretius’ great Epicurean epic On the Nature of Things was nearly complete when he died in 55 BC. Cornelius Nepos and Atticus were engaged in historical research, trying to establish an absolute chronology for the Roman past, one that would allow key dates in Roman history to be coordinated with world (i.e.: Greek) history. Then there were Varro’s researches into religious antiquities, Roman institutions, the Latin language, and much else. Nigidius Figulus wrote on grammar, on the gods, and science. Nepos wrote biographies of famous Romans. Roman intellectuals seemed sometimes to figure themselves as counterparts of the great figures of classical Greek literature. Cicero presented himself as the new Demosthenes, and thought of writing a Roman version of the Geography of Eratosthenes.
All this activity is sometimes presented as sign of cultural insecurity, but it might just as well be understood as fantastic ambition. Rome had surpassed the Greeks in warfare, why not in literature too? But when Cicero and his collaborators are read carefully it is clear they were not trying to create an alternative, parallel, and self-sufficient intellectual universe. They advocated an eclectic bi-culturalism, a cultivated familiarity with both languages (utraque lingua ‘in either language’ became almost a catchphrase), and when they described the moral and cultural superiority they sought it was not a Romanitas modelled on Hellenism, but humanitas, a term that embraces the sense of civilization and common humanity. Roman culture, in other words, had a universalizing mission. Just as Roman houses had Greek and Roman rooms and Roman religion had space for domestic and foreign gods, so the values that the last generation of the Republic proclaimed were bigger than either national culture. That made Roman culture, at least in aspiration, a truly imperial civilization.
Further Reading
A fascinating impression of the curiosity and energy of the Roman elite is conveyed by Elizabeth Rawson’s Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (London, 1985). Rawson also wrote what remains the best and most rounded biography of Cicero, Cicero: A Portrait (London, 1975). Many of the studies she produced while working on these two books are gathered in her collected papers, Roman Culture and Society (Oxford, 1991). Ingo Gildenhard’s Paideia Romana (Cambridge, 2007) offers a careful exploration of Cicero’s engagement with the Greeks.
The material setting of Roman Italy is brilliantly evoked in Tim Potter’s Roman Italy (London, 1987) and the special culture of the Bay of Naples in John D’Arms’s Romans on the Bay of Naples (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). The cultural history of Rome is now the subject of Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s amazingly wide-ranging Roman Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2008). At its heart is an examination of how Romans constantly referred to Greek and Italian models as they grew into an imperial culture. Emma Dench’s Romulus’ Asylum (Oxford, 2005) explores some of the same terrain, showing the many different routes through which Roman identity was reformulated.
Map 4. The Roman empire at its greatest extent in the second century AD
KEY DATES IN CHAPTER XI
31 BC
Octavian emerges from the Actium campaign as victor of civil wars
27 BC
Octavian given the title Augustus by the Senate
AD 14
Death of Augustus. The succession of Tiberius
AD 41
Assassination of Caius (Caligula
). Praetorian Guard impose Claudius as new princeps
AD 68
Suicide of Nero leaves no Julio-Claudian heirs
AD 69
Year of the Four Emperors, ends with Vespasian establishing the Flavian dynasty
AD 96
Assassination of Domitian, succeeded by Nerva
AD 98–117
The reign of Trajan. Major wars against the Dacians and then the Parthians, spectacular building in Rome
AD 117–38
Reign of Hadrian, withdrawal from Mesopotamia
AD 138–61
Reign of Antoninus Pius
AD 161–80
Reign of Marcus Aurelius (jointly with Lucius Verus until 169). Beginnings of increased pressure on northern frontier
AD 165–80
Antonine plague sweeps westwards across empire
AD 180–92
Reign of Commodus
AD 192
Assassination of Commodus provokes short civil war, ending in victory of Severus
AD 235
Death of Alexander Severus marks the end of Severan dynasty and the beginning of the military crisis of the third century
XI
EMPERORS
In the beginning the City of Rome was ruled by kings. Lucius Brutus established freedom and the consulship. Dictatorships were taken up from time to time, the power of the decemviri endured for only a couple of years, the consular power of the military tribunes did not last much longer. The tyrannies of Cinna and Sulla were shortlived, the power of Pompey and Crassus quickly passed to Caesar, and the armies of Lepidus and Antony surrendered to Augustus who took control of the whole state, worn out as it was by civil war, with the title First Citizen (Princeps).