Vox Populi

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Classical World but Were Afraid to Ask

Peter Jones

• Verlag: Atlantic Books
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786498939
• Thema: History
• Thema: Greek Ancient History

In this compelling tour of the classical world, Peter Jones reveals how it is the power, scope and fascination of their ideas that makes the Ancient Greeks and Romans so important and influential today. For over 2, 000 years these ideas have gripped Western imagination and been instrumental in the way we think about the world. Covering everything from philosophy, history and architecture to language and grammar, Jones uncovers their astonishing intellectual, political and literary achievements.First published twenty years ago, this fully updated and revised edition is a must-read for anyone who wishes to know more about the classics - and where they came from.

I

CLASSICAL CONNECTIONS

700 BC to AD 500

THE ETRUSCANS

Ancient history is normally learned in disconnected chunks. The purpose of this chapter is to tie some of the more important chunks together. It is traditional to begin with the Greeks because they ‘came first’. I shall begin with the Romans.

It is important to distinguish at the outset between the original Romans – a small and unimportant people inhabiting a town called ‘Rome’, about 25 miles up the Tiber river from the sea, in a hilly volcanic region known as Latium (whence their language, Latin) – and the other (obviously) non-Roman tribes of Italy living elsewhere. This small town would come to rule much of the known world as far east as modern Iran, and have trade links with India and China.

Among these were the Etruscans, who in the eighth century BC were by far the most powerful people in Italy; their territory spread from Salerno (south of Rome) northwards almost as far as the Alps. The Romans called these people Tusci or Etrusci (compare their region of ‘Etruria’). They had rich commercial and cultural links with the Greeks, who had already planted colonies in the south of Italy and Sicily from the eighth century BC onwards. There was clearly Etruscan political and cultural (especially religious) influence in early Rome – the name Roma is of Etruscan origin – and Rome’s early kings (from Rome’s foundation in 753 BC) probably had Etruscan associations.

THE FOUNDING OF THE REPUBLIC

Rome’s rise to power began when they threw out the Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus (‘the arrogant’) in 509 BC after, as tradition has it, Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king, raped the Roman noblewoman Lucretia. Book 1 of the Roman historian Livy’s history of Rome is full of gripping stories of this period: the twins Romulus and Remus raised by a wolf; the rape of Lucretia; how Horatius held the bridge against the Etruscan king Lars Porsena’s attempts to restore Tarquinius; the abduction of the Sabine women from the surrounding region, and so on.

The republic (res publica ‘public property, affairs, business’) developed slowly over hundreds of years: it began (Romans believed) with top Roman tribal leaders (patricians, once consultants to the king, now forming the Senate), advising the new, top elected officials (magistratûs – consuls, etc.). The historian Livy suggested that they were not in tune with the interests of the plebs (the ordinary people), but over time full political integration was achieved: plebs had their own assemblies making laws for all Romans, could be appointed to all the executive posts, and so on.

ROMAN EXPANSION

From the fifth century BC, Rome began aggressively to expand its power outwards, south and north, making alliances with or mopping up local tribes as it went. By 270 BC it was the dominant power in Italy, and by the first century BC Latin had become the lingua franca of the whole mainland. In this period it made various alliances with, surprisingly, the North African city of Carthage, which noted Rome’s spreading power across Italy in 509 (by which time Carthage had a foothold in Sicily and Sardinia, where Greeks already had interests), 348, 306 and 279 BC. These involved mutual support, mainly to hold off Greek and Etruscan interference in maritime trade and areas like Sicily.

But it did not all go smoothly. In 390 BC Rome was sacked by the Gauls (from modern France), who had an enclave in north-eastern Italy at this time. (This much-feared tribe continued to strike fear into Romans whenever they went on the move in this region.) The Italian Samnite peoples also took a great deal of bringing to heel.

Nevertheless it was during this period that Rome developed not just a powerful citizen army but also impressive diplomatic skills in learning how to defeat peoples and then bring them onside politically, commercially and socially.

PYRRHIC VICTORIES

In 280 BC Tarentum, a Greek colony deep in south-eastern Italy, called in Greek King Pyrrhus from north-west Greece over the water to help fight Roman expansion. Pyrrhus enjoyed some success, but after one too many Pyrrhic victories (with victories like these, he lamented, who needs defeats?), he retired back to Greece. This sent out a signal that Rome was a formidable new power.

THE (PUNIC) WARS AGAINST CARTHAGE

Rome now fought the Punic Wars against Carthage in north Africa. In the course of these wars, which finished with the third war in 146 BC, Rome made its entrance onto the international stage. In modern terms, its armies had now fought in Sicily, Africa, Albania, France, Spain, Greece and Turkey and acquired its first provinces: Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and Africa. It would continue these foreign incursions over nearly two hundred more years, in the process breaking up the republic and ushering in the imperial system.

Carthage was a settlement founded by Phoenicians in the ninth century BC. The wars are called ‘Punic’, because Punici was the best Romans could do with Phoinikes, the Greek for ‘Phoenicians’. The first war was fought over possession of Sicily and won by Rome in 241 BC, Sicily becoming its first province.

It was during this war that Romans learned military mastery of the sea against a far more experienced maritime opponent. When the first Punic War broke out, Romans had very little experience of fighting at sea, particularly against Carthage’s huge oared quinqueremes, with five decks of oars either side. One of these enemy vessels ran aground and fell into Roman hands, so the Romans used this as a model to build a fleet of 100 quinqueremes and twenty triremes (three decks of oars) in an incredible sixty days (later they built a fleet of 220 ships in forty-five days!). The rowers trained on benches set out on dry land to resemble the deck. Unable to match the Carthaginians for skill, they developed a tactic of ramming the enemy ships, locking the two together with a spiked gangway rammed down into the enemy ship, allowing Roman soldiers to pour over the gangway and fight a land battle at sea.

The second Punic War began in 218 BC when the Carthaginian general Hannibal, bent on revenge, established a base in Spain and famously took his army, complete with elephants, over the Alps and down into Italy from the north. His aim was to destroy Roman power by encouraging the Italian tribes to shake off the yoke of Rome. But he could not drive home his initial stunning successes at battles like Trasimene (217 BC) and Cannae (216 BC). The Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio ‘Africanus’ then took the battle first to Spain and in 205 BC to Africa. Hannibal was forced to return to north Africa and was defeated at Zama in 202 BC. In 197 BC, Spain was divided into two Roman provinces.

Rome looked back on the defeat of Hannibal as its ‘finest hour’. It also learned the lesson of Hannibal. It had fielded massive citizen armies to keep Hannibal at bay, and it maintained those armies from now on as it began its rise to absolute dominance in the Mediterranean. It now turned its attention to the western Balkan area (229–219) BC, which had been interfering with Roman shipping in the Adriatic: providentially, for this area would prove useful in the ensuing war against Macedon (northern Greece), whose king, Philip V, realizing the power of Rome on his doorstep, had been an enthusiastic supporter of Hannibal. The Roman emperor Trajan would complete the job in the Balkans AD 109.

Here one point is worth making: Rome had a reputation for utter ruthlessness in battle, and that was the key to its success. But there was nothing pathological about it. Every enemy it met brought exactly the same mentality into battle. The Romans’ success was down to the experience of their army, the sheer numbers they could call on and the loyalty of their allied states, who knew a winner when they saw one. Inflict a massive defeat on Rome, and you would guarantee a massive response.

Our narrative now turns to early Greece.

PRE-ROMAN GREECE: COLONIZING THE MEDITERRANEAN

The Bronze Age Greek world was a palace civilization, with well-walled cities and powerful strongholds like Mycenae and Pylos. It ended, for reasons still not fully understood, c. 1100 BC. Around that time, many Greeks migrated eastwards from the mainland to the Aegean islands and the west coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey).

Then in the eighth century BC migration from the Greek mainland spread Greek speakers westwards: first to Corcyra (Corfu), then on to the south of Italy starting around Naples and down to Sicily (where, as we have seen, Carthage already had a foothold). Land shortage or a desire to set up trading posts or find better agricultural land might have been among the reasons. Later, this whole area was known as Magna Graecia (‘Great Greece’). In about 700 BC the poet Homer composed his mighty epics of a Trojan War (Iliad) and Odysseus’ return to his homeland after it (Odyssey), both looking back to that ‘palace’ civilization half a millennium earlier, though with what historical accuracy it is very hard to tell.

About 630 BC Greeks migrated to Cyrene in North Africa, and from 600 BC onwards to Marseille (Massilia) in modern France and Emporiae (‘Tradersville’) in north-eastern Spain. Slightly later, existing Greek settlements in Asia Minor sent out settlements north to Byzantium and on through the Dardanelles strait into the Black Sea (Crimea in the north and Trebizond in the south). So by 580 BC, there were Greek speakers all round the Mediterranean and Black Sea, ‘like frogs around a pond’, in Plato’s vivid phrase.

THE NEAR EAST AND THE GREEK ACHIEVEMENT

During this period, the foundations of the Greek intellectual, artistic and literary achievement were laid – not on the Greek mainland so much as around the Aegean Sea on the Greek-occupied islands and the coast of Asia Minor, and Magna Graecia. Homer (c. 700 BC) came from the coastal region of western Asia Minor, and the poet Sappho (c. 600 BC) from the island of Lesbos. Of the philosophers, Thales (c. 585 BC) came from Miletus on the western coast of modern Turkey; Heraclitus (c. 500 BC) from Ephesus, also on the west coast of Turkey; Pythagoras (c. 510 BC) from the island of Samos; Parmenides (c. 460 BC) and Zeno (c. 450 BC) from Elea (southern Italy); Empedocles from Acragas (c. 450 BC), modern Agrigento in Sicily, and so on.

It cannot be insignificant that the great civilizations of the Near East exerted a strong influence on the thinking of these Eastern Greeks. Indeed, in the eighth century BC the Greeks developed from the Phoenicians (inhabiting roughly modern Lebanon) the world’s first vowel and consonant alphabet, from which the Latin alphabet, and so the English alphabet and most of the world’s alphabets, are derived. This enabled the Homeric epics to be written down and the West’s first lyric poetry – Sappho, in particular – to be recorded: a moment of enormous significance.

Further, there are literary as well as philosophical connections between Greece and the East at this time (see M.L. West’s monumental work on the subject, The East Face of Helicon). The associations between the epic of the ancient Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh (c. 2600 BC) and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are well documented. One of Sappho’s most famous poems is the one in which she listed the physical symptoms she experienced when she looked at a certain woman:

Speech fails me,

my tongue is crippled, a subtle fire

is straightway running beneath my skin,

with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears buzz,

the sweat pours down me, a trembling

seizes my whole body, I am ...