Prima urbes inter, divum domus,
aurea Roma
(Golden Rome, first among cities, home of the gods)
Ausonius, fourth century AD.
By the time Ausonius
wrote, Rome had already become more a transcendant idea than merely the onetime
capital of the Mediterranean world. It had not always been that way, however.
Rome, oddly, has two foundation myths, stories which reflected different sides
of her character. There is the Rome founded by Romulus and Remus, marked on
the very day of her foundation, 21 April 753 BC, by Romulus’ killing
of his brother in a quarrel over the new city.
For later Romans, beset so
often by civil war which half-wrecked the state, there was a special resonance
in this fratricidal myth. But at the same time, there was the Rome founded
after the harrowing travails of the great Trojan hero Aeneas, a myth best
known from Vergil’s quite late version in the Aeneid. This
Rome is of more interest to us here, because it is the Rome which her citizens
desired above all to connect to Greece and the great heroic world embodied
in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
Rome was probably
fated to grow great, thanks to her congenial situation on easily defensible
hills and at a crucial ford of the Tiber River, making Rome master of two
vital trade routes in Italy. One of those trade routes, however, could not
but daily remind her of her position between two more developed cultures:
the Hellenizing Etruscan peoples north of the city and the Greek colonies
clustered in southern Italy and Sicily—there were so many of them, in
fact, that this region has been known ever since as Magna Graecia, “great
Greece”.
The Romans thus came into close contact with Greek culture
as early as the sixth century BC, and were, to varying degrees, under the
latter’s thrall ever after. In the beginning, Rome’s appetite
for Greek culture was seemingly satisfied by the importation of Greek myths
to vary her own fairly backward, rustic religious cosmos, and by the importation
of Greek luxury goods. The Romans acquired the Greek alphabet in modified
form from the Etruscans, but there is little evidence of a widespread interest
in, or importation of, Greek ideas or literature.
It was not until the
Romans entered into their long, successful career of conquest (c. 340-146
BC), partly pushed by events, and partly motivated by greed for war spoils,
that Roman aristocrats came into immediate, prolonged contact with Greek culture
in the Greek world. The result was fundamental and transformative; suddenly
seeing their own culture as backwards, ambitious nobles made instant use of
the highly developed Greek material culture in their internal competition
while importing Greek literature and learning Greek themselves (the wars brought
many educated Greek slaves to Rome as potential teachers).
This impulse
literally served as the midwife to the birth of a true Latin literature at
Rome at the time of the First Punic War, about 250 BC: the first literary
work was an adapted translation of Homer’s Odyssey by a Greek
captive named Livius Andronicus. Once this genie was out of the bottle, there
was no putting it back, despite continual opposition from strict conservatives
who objected to concomitant cultural baggage like Greek homosexuality, Greek
“licentiousness”, and that pesky but effective Greek rhetoric,
which they were not alone in viewing as enabling a morally weaker argument
to appear the more persuasive one: Greek philosophers and rhetoricians were
spasmodically expelled from the city down through the late period of the Roman
Republic (which lasted in all from 509-30 BC). In the end, the famous poet
Horace could characterize the relationship as “captive Greece captivating
her fierce captor”.
The history of Latin
literature is one of emulation, as the Romans made themselves masters of one
after another of the great Greek genres while priding themselves as being
the originators of just one: satire. The great Juvenal asks
himself if he is destined forever to be a listener, complaining of the multitude
of public recitations to which he was daily subjected. Juvenal, of course,
meant bad recitations; but his point is well taken: before the romantic
conception of the artist-as-hero, talent tended to be underappreciated and
follow the money patrons could bestow, and that meant a raft of talented Greeks
washed up onto Roman shores, not just as slaves, as in the great age of Roman
imperial expansion, but as hopeful philosopher-lettré parasites
(the term was not pejorative in antiquity, meaning only “one who eats
alongside”). The Greek rhetorician-cum-satirist Lucian paints a dismal
picture of the lonely and unappreciated Greek philosopher forced to amuse
an obtuse, ungrateful Roman patron, a situation immortalized by Fellini in
his Satyricon.
It is natural that there should have been tensions
between Greeks and Romans when they came into close contact, because their
cultural values were at root so different, even though there were broad areas
of agreement. In the end, however, the Greeks were the utter victors, just
as Horace foresaw. As early as the 50s BC the great epicist Lucretius was
mediating Epicureanism, with its rationalist rejection of religiously-inspired
terrors to a Roman audience; Horace set himself the task of paralleling the
Greek achievement in the realm of lyric poetry; Vergil’s Aeneid
competes on every level—while differing by being thoroughly Roman—with
its Homeric predecessors; and historians such as Sallust and Tacitus took
up the mantle of the incomparable Thucydides. By the latter half of the second
century AD Roman Emperors consciously emulated the bearded countenances of
the stereotypical Greek philosopher, and one of them, Marcus Aurelius, was
talented enough to have written a philosophically-respectable stoic treatise
called the Meditations.
Indeed, despite all
of the tensions; despite all of the expulsions of philosophers and rhetoricians,
it was Rome, and the Roman-mediated Latin of philosophical discourse which
gave form to the Christian thought of the West (Augustine, for example, knew
no Greek and used a Ciceronian vocabulary to express his ideas), and, with
the Bible of Jerome, formed the basis of religious thought until the rediscovery
of Greek in the aftermath of the sack of Constantinople and then the fall of the Byzantine Empire in
the 13th and 15th centuries, respectively. Aristotle, Plato, all of the great
Greek intellects survived in the West because of the Literary Latin translations
that had been made before the fall of the Empire. Rome may thus—despite
many other claims that may be made for her greatness—be fairly viewed
as the first beneficiary, and unwitting vehicle of transmission of the world-shaking
ideas of the Greeks as she became, even in the process of her destruction
in late antiquity, the womb from which the modern world was born.