Albert Henrichs - Greece in Rome

Department of the Classics, Harvard University

Graecia Capta: Roman Views of Greek CultureAuthor(s): Albert HenrichsReviewed work(s):Source: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 97, Greece in Rome: Influence, Integration,Resistance (1995), pp. 243-261Published by: Department of the Classics, Harvard UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/311309 .Accessed: 05/09/2012 12:37

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GRAECIA CAPTA: ROMAN VIEWS OF GREEK CULTURE

ALBERT HENRICHS

M Y topic today is "Graecia Capta: Roman views of Greek Cul- ture." Of the subtitle's five words, two are problematic: "views"

and "culture." Now, by "views" we might mean either opinions or more casual glimpses--or both. And the word "culture" has virtually lost its depth of meaning through recent overuse, such that "culture" is now a catch-all word signifying something vague like "way-of-life." So, am I proposing to examine "Roman glimpses of the Greek way-of-life"? It would indeed be revealing to squeeze a history of Greek civilization out of Roman sources, and to see the ancient Greeks through the cultural bias of Roman eyes. Roman comedy and satire, Cicero's Letters, and the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, to mention but a few, might offer a variety of amusing material for such an approach. But these provide just brief observations and contrived caricatures, not of Greece in its greatness and of the Greeks we care most about today, but of a Greece much reduced-the Roman province of Achaea-and populated by epigones referred to by the Romans, more condescendingly than lov- ingly, as Graeculi.1 To take but one example, when Gellius talks about his student days in Athens, he describes how the young Roman would- be intellectuals celebrate the Saturnalia in the shadow of the Acropolis:

Accordingly, a number of us Romans who had come to Greece, and who attended the same lectures and devoted ourselves to the same teachers, met at the dinner table. Then the one who was giving the entertainment in his turn, offered the work of some old Greek or Roman writer and a crown woven from laurel as a prize for solving a problem, and put as many questions as there were guests present. .... Now the questions that were proposed were of

1 OLD 770 s.v.

244 Albert Henrichs

this kind: an obscure saying of some early poet, amusing rather than perplexing; some point in ancient history; the correction of some tenet of philosophy which was commonly misinterpreted, the solution of some sophistical catch, the investigation of a rare and unusual word, or of an obscure use of the tense of a verb of plain meaning.2

Happily, my project is rather different, at once more modest and more sublime. I propose to explore how some of the leading members of the Roman world-state conceived of Greece's political and intellectual past and of the contributions even a captive Greece might be able to make to Rome.3 But we must not assume that Roman opinions on the Greek achievement were unanimous: to the contrary, they varied over time and, to a lesser extent, at any given time. By some Romans, Greek contributions to artistic and intellectual life were deemed exemplary; for others, Greek intellectual and popular culture represented a compos- ite of sordid threats to solid Roman values-although by the middle of the 2nd century B.C. this latter view was surely waning. From then on, Romans tended to idolize not only Greece's past glory, but those Greeks whose creation it was, as well.

I

One of the most ferocious Roman critics of the Greeks was Cato the Censor. A novus homo born of peasant stock at Tusculum in 234 B.C., he was just about as Roman as can be imagined. Shrewd, tenacious, and

2 Gell. 18.2.2-6 ed. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Class. Libr. (trans. slightly modified) conve- niebamus autem ad eandem cenam conplusculi, qui Romani in Graeciam veneramus quique easdem auditiones eosdemque doctores colebamus. tum qui et cenulam ordine suo curabat, praemium solvendae quaestionis ponebat librum veteris scriptoris vel Graecum vel Latinum et coronam e lauro plexam, totidemque res quaerebat quot homines istic era- mus.

.... quaerebantur autem res huiuscemodi: aut sententia poetae veteris lepide

obscura, non anxie, aut historiae antiquioris requisitio, aut decreti cuiuspiam ex

philosophia perperam invulgati purgatio, aut captionis sophisticae solutio, aut inopinati rariorisque verbi indagatio, aut tempus item in verbo perspicuo obscurissimum.

3 Cf. W. Schmid, "R6mer und Griechen," in his Studien zum Verstdindnis der rimischen Literatur (Stuttgart 1924, repr. Darmstadt 1964) 1-23; E. Fraenkel, "Rome and Greek Culture" (Inaugural Lecture, Oxford 1935), in Kleine Beitriige zur klassischen

Philologie (Rome 1964) 2.583-598.

Graecia Capta: Roman Views of Greek Culture 245

conservative, he served with distinction as a military man, as a provin- cial governor, as senator and consul. As censor, he was stem and merci- less, ever determined to raise the Roman moral conscience and to reform the political elite of his nation; he was a prolific orator, a land- holder, and farmer and, almost accidentally, a towering figure in the earliest phase of Roman literature, both as the Roman patron of Ennius and as a man of letters in his own right.4 He was assigned military com- mands in Sicily, Spain, and Greece. In 152, he led the embassy to Carthage that would set the stage for the city's destruction.

Despite his ostentatious antihellenism, Cato was as thoroughly familiar with the Greeks and their culture as any Roman of his time. This paradox lies at the heart of much of the current debate about Cato's mindset and writings.5 His travels had brought him into contact with every sort of Greek. As a young officer he had seen the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily. In 191, four years after his consul- ship, he visited Athens as military tribune and negotiated with the Athe- nians through an interpreter, even though he could speak Greek.6 As usual, Cato's Latin was pithy and terse, and the Athenians noted with surprise how much more time it took the interpreter to render Cato's words in Attic Greek than it took Cato to express himself in Latin. Cato mentions Themistocles and Pericles and was familiar with Greek books, including Homer and Isocrates-whose oratory he ridicules- but he had no abiding interest in Greek literature per se.7 He despised and pilloried those members of the Roman aristocracy who in his view went too far in their emulation of the Greeks.

Take the case of A. Postumius Albinus, consul in 151, as reported by Polybios. Steeped in Greek culture since childhood, his philhellenism

4 G. B. Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Baltimore 1994) 85-91. 5 See most recently A. E. Astin, Cato the Censor (Oxford 1978) 157-181 ("Cato and

the Greeks") and E. S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca 1992) 52-83 ("Cato and Hellenism"). According to Gruen, Cato's ambivalent role "as fierce foe of Hellenism and as learned disciple of Hellenic culture" (61) reflects a "cultural strategy" through which he "approached Greek culture not as an enemy of Hellas but as an advocate of Rome" (80 f.). In order to make his point, Gruen must downplay the vehemence and candor of Cato's most virulent attack on the Greeks (below, nn. 14-15).

6 Plut. Cat. Mai. 12.5, 7. Astin (above, n. 5) 159-161, 166-168 and Gruen (above, n. 5) 56-59 rightly reject the claim of some ancient sources-including Cic. Luc. 5, Sen. 8.26; Plut. Cat. Mai. 2.5-that Cato came to the study of Greek literature only in the leisure of his old age.

7 Plut. Cat. Mai. 8.14, 9.3, 23.2.

246 Albert Henrichs

offended the political leadership. He was ridiculed by Cato when he followed the example of Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Cincius Alimentus- both of whom had written Roman annales in Greek8-and published his own Roman history, also in Greek, while apologizing in his preface for his insufficient mastery of the language. Polybios adds that Albinus had adopted two of the worst vices of the Greeks (r •s Xpto•(t XOv 'EXX1Tvticov), namely love of pleasure and aversion to toil (waxi yp

ptwri68ovo;g v K0ai (py6nrovo;).9 In a similar vein, Livy later character- izes the Greeks as "a race more valiant in words than in deeds" (8.22.8 gens lingua magis strenua quam factis). Roman stereotypes of the Greek character are not exceptional. But one would not expect to find them spouted by a writer of Greek origin. The shifting loyalties that must have colored this formative stage of Greek and Roman acculturation were such that Polybios, himself a Greek, went so far as to ridicule his own people in order to expose Albinus' shortcomings. Clearly, Polybios had begun to identify with his captors.10 Where Scipio and Polybios are concerned, it is not the Roman past undergoing Helleniza- tion, but indeed the Roman present.

Unlike Albinus, Cato despised the Greeks and was deeply mistrust- ful of all things Greek. He was hardly alone in his rejection of Greek culture, but with the exception of his loud voice of protest, the anti- Greek current in Republican Rome perished virtually without a trace.11 In his instructions to one of his two sons, he gives vent to his suspicions in no uncertain terms:

I will tell you in the appropriate place, my son Marcus, what I found out about those Greeks in Athens, and that it is a good thing to have a taste of their literature, but not to devour it. I will drive home the point that their race is utterly vile and indocile. And believe you me, I speak as a prophet: once that race gives us its

8 Cf. E. S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley 1984) 1.253-255. Cato's own Origines was, as far as we know, the first historical work to be written in Latin.

9 Polyb. 39.1 f., Gell. 11.8, Plut. Cat. Mai. 12.6. 10 Cf. A. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge 1975)

22-49, esp. 29, 36 f., 48. 1 A generation after Cato, the graecomania of T. Albucius-a former praetor steeped

in Greek manners-was derided by Q. Mucius Scaevola and satirized by Lucilius fr. 89-95 Krenkel; cf. Gruen (above, n. 5) 257 f. and 290 f. On philhellenism in Republican Rome and its detractors see Gruen (above, n. 8) 1.250-272, esp. 260-266.


literature, it will corrupt everything, and it gets even worse if it sends us its doctors. They have taken an oath12 amongst themselves to kill all barbarians with their medicine, but they do this only for a fee so that they may be trusted and may bring ruin the more easily. They often refer to us, too, as barbarians and they defile us more foully than they do others by calling us "Opikoi."'3 I have thus forbidden you dealings with their doctors.14

Cato does not mince words. In fact his strong rhetoric suggests that his attack on Greek character and Greek medicine may have been intended for a wider Roman audience.15 His verdict is remarkable for its tone of moral superiority and its demonization of an entire foreign culture, as

12 Does iurarunt represent a Roman misinterpretation of the Hippocratic oath, render-

ing it as a sort of political coniuratio? 13 To Roman ears, 'Ontico'/Opici-the Greek term for "Oscans"-was tantamount to

"simpletons." Cf. M. Dubuisson, "Les opici: Osques, occidentaux ou barbares?" Latomus 42 (1983) 522-545.

14 Pliny HN 29.14 citing Cato Fil. 1 Jordan (echoed by Plut. Cat. Mai. 23.2 f.): dicam de istis Graecis suo loco, M. fili, quid Athenis exquisitum habeam, et quod bonum sit illo- rum litteras inspicere, non perdiscere. vincam nequissimum et indocile esse genus illo- rum, et hoc puta vatem dixisse: quandoque ista gens suas litteras dabit, omnia conrum- pet, tum etiam magis, si medicos suos hoc mittet. iurarunt inter se barbaros necare omnes medicina, sed hoc ipsum mercede faciunt, utfides iis sit et facile disperdant. nos quoque dictitant barbaros et spurcius nos quam alios Opicon appellatione foedant. interdixi tibi de medicis. At the end of the first sentence, I follow the articulation adopted long ago by H. Jordan, M. Catonis praeter librum de re rustica quae extant (Leipzig 1860) 77, and more recently by OLD 2064 s.v. uinco 4d, as well as by Gruen (above, n. 5) 80 n. 167. Less plausibly, Astin (above, n. 5) 170 f. and 334 takes vincam with the previous sentence.

15 Cato's attack on Greek culture and Greek doctors is conventionally assigned to his Ad Marcum filium, on which see Astin (above, n. 5) 183, 332-340 and Gruen (above, n. 5) 76-80. The title, character, and purpose of this work remain very problematic. According to Otto Jahn's hypothesis of 1850, which became the communis opinio, it was a comprehensive encyclopedia comprising agriculture, medicine, and rhetoric. Rejecting Jahn's construct, Astin 183 and 332-340 postulates an informal collection of precepts addressed by Cato to his elder son, M. Porcius Cato Licinianus, who died as a praetor- designate in 152 B.C., some three years before his father. But as Gruen points out, the work envisaged by Astin is difficult to reconcile with Plutarch's assertion (Cat. Mai. 23.2) that Cato was an old man when he warned his son to keep his distance from the Greeks. Gruen argues that Cato's "anti-Greek pronouncements" reflect deliberate posturing and do not represent "the core of Catonian thought" (80). Both Astin 332 and Gruen 77 dis- miss the possibility that Cato may have composed Adfilium as a legacy to his younger son, M. Porcius Salonianus, who was born when Cato was an octogenarian.

248 Albert Henrichs

well as for the mixed signals it sends. He condemns the Greeks because they are ignoramuses who threaten Roman mores, and he con- cedes only an evil sort of cleverness on their part. But he stops short of condemning their language or their literature. He allows that Greek literature may be useful in small quantities-regrettably his more detailed discussion of this is lost to us16-but he has absolutely no tolerance for Greek doctors.17 His xenophobia reflects anxieties similar to those expressed by the Athenians during the plague of 430 when they feared that the Peloponnesians had poisoned their wells.18

Pliny the Elder, to whom we owe this excerpt, tells us that Cato preferred the Romans' homespun cures, which he taught to his son. According to Pliny, Cato credited these cures with his own achievement of a ripe old age.19 Some specimens of Cato's prescriptions can be found in his De agricultura. His preferred treatment was cabbage (brassica). Cato thought this leafy and fibrous plant a veritable panacea, an effective remedy for a host of ills from indigestion to arthritis to tumors-"in a word, he says, it will cure all the inner organs that are suffering."20 His antidote to snakebite is instructive:

When a snake has bitten an ox or any other quadruped, grind two ounces of black cumin, which the physicians call smurneum, into half a pint of old wine. Administer it through the nostrils, and apply swine's dung to the wound itself. Treat a person in the same way if occasion arises.21

16 Cato's criticism of Socrates and Isocrates (Plut. Cat. Mai. 23) most likely derives from his treatment of Graecae litterae.

17 Cf. Astin (above, n. 5) 171 f. The doctor Archagathos, son of Lysanias, who came to Rome from the Peloponnese in 219 B.c. and was granted citizenship, earned the epithet "butcher" (carnifex) while giving Greek medicine a bad name (Cassius Hemina ap. Pliny HN 29.13). On Roman opposition to Greek doctors from Cato to Pliny the Elder see J. C.

Scarborough, "Roman Medicine to Galen," in W. Haase ed., ANRW II 37.1 (Berlin 1993) 3-48, esp. 22-29.

18 S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides 1 (Oxford 1991) 319 f. on Thuc. 2.48.2.

19 Pliny HN 29.15. On the agrarian remedies advocated by Cato see J. Ilberg, "A. Cor- nelius Celsus und die Medizin in Rom" (1907) in H. Flashar ed., Antike Medizin (Darm- stadt 1971 [Wege der Forschung 221]) 308-360, at 311-314; W. H. S. Jones, "Ancient Roman Folk Medicine," Journal of the History of Medicine 12 (1957) 459-472; S. Boscherini, "La medicina in Catone e Varrone," in ANRW II 37.1 (above, n. 17) 729-755, esp. 730-740; and Scarborough (above, n. 17) 13-22.

20 Cato Agr 157.7 uno verbo omnia sanafaciet intro quae dolitabunt. 21 Cato Agr 102 si bovem aut aliam quamvis quadrupedem serpens momorderit,


Cato's prescription sounds ghastly, but it lay well within the perimeter of the medicine of his day. The therapeutic use of animal feces was widespread in Greek medicine from the Hippocratic Corpus to Galen's time and beyond.22 Still, in the light of his condemnation it comes as a surprise that Cato refers to the medical profession, which was predomi- nantly Greek, and gives both the Latin and Greek names for the medici- nal herb in question. Herein lies a larger truth: the "medicine of the conquered" had captured Rome and was overtaking indigenous approaches to healing.23 From that moment on, medicine in Rome remained so firmly in Greek hands that the two leading Roman writers on medicine, Terentius Varro and Cornelius Celsus, wrote on medicine not as doctors but as encyclopedists.24

Cato's outlook on the Greek achievement was as pragmatic and down-to-earth as the man himself. As we have seen, Greek doctors surely piqued his ire, yet other benefits of Greek culture aroused his interest, if not his admiration. Still, Cato was the last of the detractors. The climate changed rapidly with the next generation, that of P. Cor- nelius Scipio Africanus Aemilianus, the natural son of L. Aemilius Paullus and adoptive grandson of P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major. Cato had the highest respect for Scipio Aemilianus as a military leader, but in their attitudes toward other cultures in general, and the Greeks in particular, the two men stood worlds apart.25 Let us briefly consider the case of Carthage before we return to Greece, for if Cato hated the

melanthi acetabulum, quod medici vocant zmurnaeum, conterito in vini veteris hemina. id per nares indito et ad ipsum morsum stercus suillum adponito. et idem hoc si usus venerit hominifacito.

22 H. von Staden, "Women and Dirt," Helios 19 (1992) 7-30, esp. 7-13. Black cumin (Nigella sativa) as an antidote for snakebite is also mentioned by Nic. Ther 43 and Pliny HN 20.182. On melanthion and smurneum (cgupveov), which makes better sense than zmurnaeum/C.opvacov, as active ingredients in Cato's cure see S. Boscherini, Lingua e scienza greca nel "de agri cultura" di Catone (Rome 1970 [Ricerche di storia della lingua latina 8]) 51-58.

23 On the Hellenization of Roman medicine see the exemplary study by V. Nutton, "Roman Medicine: Tradition, Confrontation, Assimilation," in ANRW II 37.1 (above, n. 17) 49-78 (quotation on p. 75).

24 F. Stok, "La medicina nell'enciclopedia latina e nei sistemi di classificazione delle artes nell'eta romana," in ANRW II 37.1 (above, n. 17) 393-444. On Celsus' De medicina in particular see the contributions of Alf Onnerfors, Philippe Mudry, and Werner Deuse in the same volume. The fragments of Varro's treatment of medicine in Book 8 of his Disciplinae are discussed by Boscherini (above, n. 19) 740-751.

25 Polyb. 36.8.7, Plut. Cat. Mai. 27.6; Astin (above, n. 5) 280 f.

250 Albert Henrichs

Greeks, he feared the Carthaginians. Indeed, during the last years of his life he kept reminding the Roman Senate that "Carthage must be destroyed."26

II

A Roman army led by Scipio Aemilianus finally captured Carthage in the spring of 146, almost three years after Cato's death. The Senate ordered the city destroyed, its walls razed, and its ruins plowed over. As a member of Scipio's entourage, Polybios was at hand to commem- orate the strange scene that unfolded as the city lay in ashes. Here is Polybios' recollection as preserved by Appian:

Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being long wrapped in thought, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Ilium, once a prosperous city, to the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately or the verses escaping him, he said (Iliad 6.448 f.): "A day will come when sacred Ilion shall perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear." And when Polybios, speaking with freedom to him for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without hesitation he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human.27

26 Diod. 34/35.33.3; Plut. Cat. Mai. 27.2; Pliny HN 15.74; Florus 1.31.4. Cato's famous verdict is unattested in the form in which it is usually quoted (ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam). Cf. Astin (above, n. 5) 127 n. 71.

27 App. Pun. 132 = Polyb. 38.22 ed. W. R. Paton, Loeb Class. Libr. (trans. modified) 6

8, Icnioev I6Xtv 6pi(ov ... 6.re ip8nrlv teXtrcoGav ;q niavoXE0piv EdxrIv lyV•eat gyv Sa p?Goat Kcai pavepb; yevEoOat XcXao)v rInep

no.leio)v s EIi ioXo-) 8' vvoug •p'

aCuroi) yev6pgevd; 'e cal ovi8C&Ov 8 t Kcai ,6EXt K; ici AOvrl Kcai &Ppx; &idoa; Sei8 ge'rcpalXcv l6onrep &vOptrnou; 8aigova Kcai t2ol0O' iEaOE gEv "IXIov, e i)XTS; note nt6Xt;, 'na8Oe F i' 'Aoiopiov icai Mi"8ov icai H epov i'n' inei-vot; &pylPi TlLGT•lor yevo-

Ji~VT cai 7i ji6oXarra ijVayxo; iao a i MaICe56vow, (EiV i V) ... EitTE d1CCV EiTE

tpoqVuy6vTo; airzbv Tzo•6 to3 Enou-; " ooGeat LAgap z'av nozr' 6t Xhrlt"IXto; ipil / Icai

Hpi-ago; ca Xabo ggai eXio HI-ptadoto." HI-loXioi 8' ab'btv pogjivov oGOv nappiloia (Icai y&p Av abro3 cai ta6GICaho;) 0 zt poA•otoro 6 06yo' 0paoiv o1 qp

a•.adagevov


It is hard to imagine Scipio Aemilianus in tears, especially in his hour of glory; it is perhaps even harder to assume that Polybios fabricated the scene out of whole cloth. In his delightful discussion of Scipio's tears, Arnaldo Momigliano compares other illustrious tears preserved by Polybios and Plutarch--the tears shed by Antiochus III, by the Elder Scipio, and especially by Aemilius Paullus, who had tears in his eyes and Fortune's vicissitudes on his mind when Perseus surrendered. Although we are clearly witnessing a literary motif at work, Momigliano concludes that "Scipio did cry" and that "classical scholars are therefore entitled to ask how many tears he shed."28

Regardless of its historicity, the episode certainly serves as a moving Roman epitaph for Carthage. But exactly how Roman are the sentiments revealed by this passage and ascribed to Scipio? There can be little doubt that Polybios' portrayal of Carthage's final hour also stands as a deliberate monument to a side of Scipio's that transcended this historical moment and struck a more familiar chord with Greeks and Romans alike, namely his deep and pervasive Hellenism that could on occasion efface his more Roman traits.29 In this particular instance, the effects of Scipio's Hellenism almost appear to be on a collision course with his stature as supreme military commander and his public image as ex- consul and scion of one of Rome's leading families. How un-Roman, especially in the eyes of a Cato, would have been the sight of a victori- ous Roman general, at the end of a long and intense bellum iustum, shedding tears over the destruction of the enemy's capital while at the same time contemplating the mutability of human affairs and quoting

6vo'oait zYlv irt•zpi~a oyt, ( ntp ol d pa zcc &vC ptiEt - &pop v 8F-8iet. Two addi-

tional summaries of Polybios' lost text are preserved in the Excerpta de sententiis of Codex Vaticanus 73. In the shorter of the two--a fragment of Diodorus' lost account of the fall of Carthage (Diod. 32.24)-Scipio also sheds tears and quotes the same Homeric lines. The longer passage, known as Polyb. 38.21.1-3 (4.501 Buettner-Wobst), preserves the essence of Scipio's dictum but omits his tears as well as the Homeric quotation. All three texts are reprinted as dicta Scipionis nos. 9a-c in A. E. Astin, Scipio Aemilianus (Oxford 1967) 251 f. and discussed by him on pages 282-287 ("Scipio's Tears at Carthage").

28 Momigliano (above, n. 10) 22 f., in response to Astin (above, n. 27) 285 f., who tries to limit Scipio's tears.

29 Fraenkel (above, n. 3) 597 comments on Scipio's quoting Hektor's prediction of the fall of Troy: "It is a Greek outlook on life and a Greek conception of history, the theory of the necessary vicissitudes of human fate and of the cycle in the life of nations."

252 Albert Henrichs

the lines from the Iliad in which Hektor predicts the fall of Troy? The high drama of a tearful Scipio fearing for the future of Rome when he is at the height of his power doubtless contains an important kernel of truth, but it is a truth veiled in artifice.

Scipio's paradoxical behavior is strongly reminiscent of Herodotos' Xerxes, the Persian king of kings, who breaks into tears when he reviews his troops on the plain of Abydos.30 When asked by Artabanos why his mood changed so suddenly from joy to sadness, he replied that he was reminded of the brevity of human life, adding that "of these innumerable men not one will be alive in a hundred years' time" (7.46). The two occasions are different as are the two men, Xerxes and Sci- pio-although in Greek eyes they both ranked as barbarians, that is as non-Greeks-but the sentiments expressed are very similar indeed. What is more, the tears as well as the thoughts that brought forth those tears are essentially heroic, tragic, and Greek. In a departure from the gender codes of ordinary life, Homeric heroes such as Achilleus and Odysseus could shed tears without the risk of being considered effemi- nate, and many heroes of tragedy follow suit, even though their tears tend to be more delicate, and more costly.31 The Sophoclean Ajax does not weep, but he bewails his tragic error, and, what is more, in the so- called deception speech he speculates on the mutability of all things and seems ready to admit that former enemies could become friends.32 Ajax's train of thought ultimately propels him into suicide. Xerxes' moment of gloom foreshadows the eventual destruction of his army, and his own defeat. For Scipio, too, the Roman victory casts a dark shadow and triggers thoughts of Rome's inevitable fall. Such attention to the pride that goes before the fall is the stuff tragedies are made of.

30 Other Herodotean characters weep for similar reasons (see 3.14.7ff, and 9.16.3ff.). Cf. S. Flory, "Laughter, Tears and Wisdom in Herodotus," AJP 99 (1978) 145-153, who compares Hdt. 7.46 and comments (146, n. 2): "If Polyb. had not read Hdt., Scipio had." True enough, but the psychology of Scipio's tears is ultimately more interesting than the question of their historicity.

31 On male tears in Homeric epic and Attic tragedy see C. Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba (Durham 1993) 62-67, and "The Female Voice and Its Contradictions: From Homer to Tragedy," Grazer Beitriige, Supplementband V (1993) 57-75, esp. 59 f.

32 Soph. Aj. 317-322, 646-692. Cf. Segal, "The Female Voice" (previous note) 65 f.; O. Taplin, "Yielding to Forethought: Sophocles' Ajax," in G. W. Bowersock et al. eds., Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to Bernard M. W Knox on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Berlin 1979) 122-129.


A similar concern lies behind the tragic reading of history that begins with Herodotos.

Any attempt to disentangle the complex web of Scipio's genuine feelings and Polybios' embellishments, of Greek and Roman sentiment, of statesmanship and human compassion in the episode of Scipio at Carthage is problematic. Polybios himself, of course, speculates at length on the lifespan of governments. He compares the constitutions of Carthage and Rome, observing that "every organism, every form of government (inoXhtria) and every action undergoes a natural cycle of growth, reaches its acme, and finally decays" (6.51).33 Prior to the events at Carthage, he had spent seventeen years of his life, from 167 to 150, in virtual captivity in Rome as one of the 1,000 Achaean hostages. He was in his early to mid-thirties when he arrived in Rome and met the young Scipio, who was only eighteen but had already distinguished himself the year before at Pydna under the command of his natural father, Aemilius Paullus.34 Paullus' victory at Pydna had brought Mace- donia under Roman rule and had opened the door for the Roman conquest of Greece. The defeated king Perseus and his family were paraded as captives through the streets of Rome. Of the enormous Macedonian spoils Paullus kept only Perseus' library-the first in what would become a long succession of Greek libraries captured in war and shipped to Rome.35

But more than Perseus' books, which were available to Scipio, this first encounter between Polybios and Scipio inaugurated a prolonged meeting of minds that allowed Greek culture to take root in the heart of Rome. As a Greek hostage in Rome, the figure of Polybios embodies the spirit of the Greek contribution to Roman life in the middle of the second century and personifies the paradox expressed so poignantly in Horace's Epistle to Augustus (156 f.): "Greece the captive captured her wild victor and brought her arts into rustic Latium" (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes / intulit agresti Latio). When reading these lines, it is hard for us to avoid imagining Polybios. A Graecus captus in the most literal sense, he captivated Aemilius Paullus, the victor of Pydna, and Scipio Africanus, the victor of Carthage, with his Greek

33 Polyb. 6.51.4. 34 K. Ziegler, "Polybios," RE 21.2 (1952) 1450 f.; Astin (above, n. 27) 14 f. 35 Paullus gave the Macedonian royal library to his two sons-a gift that fostered the

friendship between Scipio Aemilianus and Polybios (Plut. Aem. 28.11; Polyb. 31.23.4).

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paideia and converted the rustics of Republican Rome, including the likes of Cato, to Greek culture.

III

But, of course, the Hellenization of Republican Rome was not so simple a process. It had begun before Polybios arrived on the scene and continued long after his return to Greece. If read as an historical comment on Greek and Roman cultural relations, Horace's Graecia capta must be viewed as more complex, and more elusive, than its literal simplicity might suggest. Horace goes on to describe the gradual disappearance of the native Saturnian verse and the eventual Helleniza- tion of Latin letters, with emphasis on the Roman adaptation of Greek drama.36 As a poetic sketch of the beginnings of Latin literature these lines pose several problems. Horace's suppression of the names of any early Latin poets is one problem, the vagueness of the implied chronol-

ogy is another. "Not until late," says Horace, did the wild victor "apply his shrewdness to Greek texts, and only in the peaceful days after the Punic wars did he begin to inquire what service Sophocles could render, and Thespis and Aeschylus."

The various chronological difficulties converge in the striking expression with which the passage begins-Graecia capta. Niall Rudd comments: "The phrase takes a very long view, telescoping events from the capture of Greek cities in Sicily during the first Punic war (264-241) to the sack of Corinth in 146."37 If Graecia capta does indeed take the long view, which is surely the most natural interpreta- tion, it follows that Graecia refers to the Greek cities of Magna Graecia such as Tarentum, the home of Livius Andronicus, as well as to the cities of Greece proper such as Corinth and certainly Athens-the home of the three tragedians mentioned by Horace. But, as Rudd

points out, if the following lines describe the beginnings of Roman drama, the period defined as post Punica bella must antedate the third Punic war as well as the events that culminated in the sack of Corinth. He concludes that "Horace is talking about the years following the end

36 Hor. Epist. 2.1.157-163 sic horridus ille / defluxit numerus Saturnius, et graue uirus

/ munditiae pepulere; sed in longum tamen aevum / manserunt hodieque manent vestigia ruris. / serus enim Graecis admovit acumina chartis, / et post Punica bella quietus quaerere coepit, /quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile ferrent.

37 N. Rudd, Horace, Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (Cambridge 1989) 101.


of the second Punic war in 201 B.C."38 This would mean, however, that far from taking the long view, Horace is describing a more circum- scribed period prior to the Roman conquest of Macedonia and Greece and that Graecia capta should refer primarily, if not exclusively, to the Greek cities of southern Italy and to the earliest phase of Greek and Roman acculturation.

Horace was a poet, not a historian of Latin literature, and it would be risky business indeed to demand documentary accuracy from him. We must not press him too hard on such matters. Yet the ambivalence of Graecia capta is instructive in ways that go much beyond the Horace passage. As Glen Bowersock and John Scheid point out in this volume, the Greek world was far from uniform, not only from a Roman Repub- lican point of view, but also for Greeks like Aristoxenos of Tarentum and Strabo of Amaseia in Pontus. We must never forget that "Greek- ness" was polyvalent and meant different things to different people. Different categories of Greekness also implied different degrees of Hel- lenization and foreign influence: according to Strabo, the Greek cities of Magna Graecia---except for Tarentum, Rhegium, and Naples-never recovered from extreme exposure to "barbarization" (KsPEPapPa-

poo0at), that is Romanization; and Albinus was considered insuffer- ably Greek by his Roman countrymen and perversely Greek by Polybios.39

Horace's letter to Augustus is about literature and the cultivation of literary taste, an art he says the Romans learned from the Greeks. Where Horace's concern is with the Greek influences on Roman literature, Virgil has a separate agenda and takes a broader view. In what has been styled "the most famous sustained passage in the whole Aeneid,"40 Virgil compares the two cultures more broadly, but surprisingly he does so without the slightest reference to literature and his own art.

Others will forge more supplely breathing bronzes -this, I believe-and draw from marble lifelike faces, plead their cases better, and with a pointer mark

38 Rudd (above, n. 37) 102. 39 Strab. 6.1.2, 253 C.; Ath. 14.31, 632 = Aristoxenos fr. 124 uses the same verb to

make a similar point about the inhabitants of Poseidonia (Paestum). On Postumius Albi- nus' philhellenism see above, section I.

40 R. G. Austin, P Vergili Maronis Aeneidos liber sextus (Oxford 1977) 260 on lines 847-853.

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the movements of the heavens and declare the rising stars: you, Roman, remember to rule peoples by imperium -these will be your arts-and to impose order upon peace, to spare the conquered and to vanquish the proud.41

While I will not pretend to say anything new about these well-studied lines, I would like to draw attention to several features that have a direct bearing on Roman attitudes toward the Greeks, or at least on Virgil's representation of these attitudes.

First, we must consider the prophetic context of this passage and its setting in the underworld. The lines are spoken by the shade of Anchises as an epilogue to his vision of Rome's future greatness and the long line of Roman heroes to come. Prophets usually admonish those in the here and now while talking about the future. Anchises, too, shifts from the future tense to the imperative mood. The emphatic form of address-Romane-is paralleled by other Roman oracles,42 but here Virgil merges the prediction of the oracular utterance with the instruction of father to son. In this self-definition of the Roman nation, the Romans are identified by name, while the Greeks appear allusively and anonymously as the cultural Other. The Greeks' namelessness is in keeping with the rhetoric of the priamel43 as well as with oracular style-after all, the various arts that distinguish the Greek culture of the classical and Hellenistic period were, in Anchises' day, still waiting to be discovered. The categorical otherness supplied by alii is also a dis- tancing device that draws the line between the two cultures, and in so doing sharpens the comparison. Virgil's Anchises presents Greece and Rome not as "two complementary cultures," as a recent commentator has put it,44 but rather as two distinct cultural realms whose preoccupa- tions and accomplishments are different and which, in fact, compete with each other.

41 Aen. 6.847-853 excudent alii spirantia mollius aera / (credo equidem), uiuos ducent de marmore uultus, / orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus / describent radio et sur-

gentia sidera dicent: / tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento / (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem, /parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

42 E. Norden, P Vergilius Maro, Aeneis Buch VI 3 (Leipzig 1927, rep. Darmstadt 1957) 338 on line 851.

43 See Norden (above, n. 42) 335 on alii ... tu ... memento. 44 Austin (above, n. 40).


This emphasis on otherness must be a deliberate archaism, as if Vir- gil sought to turn back the clock in order to evoke a distant time, a pris- tine state, in which the two cultures pursued their separate paths and when Romanness represented a way-of-life more concerned with military conquest than with the arts. In the world of Augustus, Greeks and Romans, far from being separate, were blended in a melting pot. I can think of no- better illustration than the story about Augustus on Capri reported by Suetonius. Elated by the sight of an Alexandrian ship whose passengers bestowed lavish praise on the emperor, Augustus dis- tributed Roman togas and Greek himatia while stipulating "that the Romans should use the Greek dress and language and the Greeks the Roman."45

Cultural comparisons inevitably embrace a particular point of view. Herodotos believes that Greeks are more clever than barbarians, and that the Athenians reportedly surpass all the other Greeks in wisdom (1.60.3). In a Hellenistic praise of Athens, an unknown devotee of Isis expresses the desire "to visit in Greece Athens, and in Athens Eleusis," adding that he "considers Athens the glory of Europe, and the sanctuary of Demeter the glory of Athens."46 Caesar wrote his excursus on Celtic customs to illustrate the cultural superiority of the Celts over the Germans.47 Virgil, too, makes a point, and he does so emphatically. He casts Anchises' prophecy in the literary form of the priamel. In Martin West's definition, the priamel is a figure of speech "in which a series of three (occasionally more) paratactic statements of similar form serves to emphasize the last."48 This literary device is eminently suitable for comparisons in which the speaker rejects or belittles one viewpoint in favor of another. Indeed, while Virgil allows that there are certain endeavours-sculpture, rhetoric, and astronomy, to be precise-in which Romans have made an effort but have failed to reach the superior level of Greek practitioners, this poet's immediate concern is with the comparatively grander and more useful Roman skill of defeating and pacifying other cultures. Thus the concessionary catalog of the

45 Suet. Aug. 98.3 lege proposita ut Romani Graeco, Graeci Romano habitu et sermone uterentur. Cf. G. W. Bowersock "The Barbarism of the Greeks," in this volume.

46 Y. Grandjean, Une nouvelle aritalogie d'Isis a Maronde (Leiden 1975) 17 f., lines 39-41.

47 Caes. BGall. 6.11-24. 48 M. L. West, Hesiod, Works & Days (Oxford 1978) 269 on lines 435-436.

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various Greek artes serves as an elegant prelude to Anchises' paternal admonitions.

IV

Anchises' vision of Rome's mission was shared by many Romans, including Cicero. In De officiis, he relates his view of justice toward the vanquished:

Our forefathers admitted to full rights of citizenship the Tusculans, Aequians, Volscians, Sabines, and Hernicians, but they razed Carthage and Numantia to the ground. I wish they had not destroyed Corinth; but I believe they had some special reason for what they did-its convenient situation, probably.

.... Not only

must we show consideration for those whom we have conquered by force of arms but we must also ensure protection to those who lay down their arms and throw themselves upon the mercy of our generals, even though the battering-ram has hammered at their walls.49

It is significant that Cicero entertains anxieties about the destruction of Corinth, "the bright star of Hellas"o5 in the words of an unknown Greek poet, while having no such qualms about Carthage. Corinth was sacked, burned, and razed by Lucius Mummius, who perpetrated an enormous art heist in the process.5' In 44 B.C., the city was refounded as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar.

By 146 B.C.-the year in which Mummius plundered Corinth and Scipio reduced Carthage to the rubble it remained until Julius Caesar

49 Cic. Off 1.35 (ed. W. Miller, Loeb Class. Libr.; cf. Off. 3.46, Verr. 2.55) maiores

nostri Tusculanos Aequos Volscos Sabinos Hernicos in civitatem etiam acceperunt, at

Carthaginem et Numantiam funditus sustulerunt; nollem Corinthum, sed credo aliquid secutos, opportunitatem loci maxime.... et cum iis, quos vi deviceris, consulendum est, tum ii, qui armis positis ad imperatorum Jidem confugient, quamvis murum aries per- cusserit, recipiendi.

50oDiod. 32.27.1 = TrGF vol. 2, fr. adesp. 128; cf. Cic. De Imp. Cn. Pomp. 5.11 Corinthum patres vestri totius Graeciae lumen exstinctum esse voluerunt.

51 Strab. 8.6.23, 381 C. = Polyb. 39.2; Livy Epit. 52; Paus. 2.1.2 and 7.16.7 f. Cf. M. Pape, Griechische Kunstwerke aus Kriegsbeute und ihre bffentliche Aufstellung in Rom (diss. Hamburg 1975) 16-19. K. W. Arafat, Pausanias' Greece: Ancient Artists and Roman Rulers (Cambridge 1996) 89-97. For the most valiant attempt to rehabilitate Mummius' tarnished image see Gruen (above, n. 5) 123-129.


established a colony on the site of that destroyed city as well52-Athens had ceased to be the center of Mediterranean and pan-Hellenic culture. The creative and intellectual energy of fifth- and fourth-century Athens had long since dissipated. The Hellenistic period had witnessed the rise of Alexandria, Pergamon, and Antioch as centers of learning and com- merce, while the cities of the Greek mainland had been subjected to virtually unceasing internal and external strife from which the expanding Roman Republic understandably took enormous comfort. With so little left of Carthaginian power in 146, and with genuine resistance to Roman expansion evident among the Greeks, why did Rome choose to annihilate Carthage and to save so little of its culture-Mago's treatise on farming, for example-while, at the same time, preserving that of the Greeks?

The answer lies to some extent in a view of Greek culture that idol- ized the Greek achievement and the intellectual accomplishments- which had their epicenter at Athens-mentioned by Horace and Virgil. When Sulla took Athens in 86 B.C., he killed off the population, yet spared most of the city, which survived as an artifact, a memorial to its own past greatness.53 Cicero's concern, however, was not only with Greece's cultural past, but also with the Greek cities of his day. In a letter to his brother Quintus, who was assuming the governorship of Asia in 59, he again draws a distinction between Greeks and others under Roman rule whom he terms "barbarians." He praises the Greeks with terms Pliny would later echo in a similar situation:

If chance had put you in charge of brutal and barbarous peoples in Africa or Spain or Gaul, as a civilized man, you would still take thought for their needs and you would protect their interests and safety. But, since we are governing not only the very people in whom civilization resides, but the people from whom civilization is thought to have spread to others, surely above all we must share its

52 The nearly simultaneous destruction of the two cities-Polybios witnessed both events-inevitably invited comparison of their different fates: see Polyb. 38.1.3-9, echoed by Diod. 32.26.1-2. On the total destruction of Carthage see R. T. Ridley, "To be Taken with a Grain of Salt: the Destruction of Carthage," CP 81 (1986) 140-146 and S. T. Stevens, "A Legend of the Destruction of Carthage," CP 83 (1988) 39-41.

53 Plut. Sull. 14.5 ff.; cf. App. Mith. 38, Paus. 1.20.4-7. See Arafat (above, n. 51) 99-102, C. Habicht, Athen: Die Geschichte der Stadt in hellenistischer Zeit (Munich 1995) 304-310.

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benefits with those from whom they were received. I say this now without shame, as surely in my life and my accomplishments there resides no suspicion of laziness or triviality: that which I have achieved, I owe to those pursuits and skills that have been handed down to us through the works and teachings of the Greeks.54

In Cicero, we see how far the two cultures have come since Anchises' mythical prophecy. Cicero identifies himself-and indeed all Rome-as beneficiary of Greek greatness: the blessings of civilization are shared by all Romans and even by others now governed from Rome, and his own achievements, indeed not small ones for a novus homo, he credits to the inspiration and instruction of Greek thought and practice. In Pro Flacco, which dates from the same period, Cicero shifts the emphasis from Greece to Athens itself for reasons that have to do with the special circumstances of the speech:

Present are men from Athens, whence, it is thought, arose the civilization, learning, religion, fruits of the earth, rights, and laws that have been spread through all lands. As the story goes, on account of its beauty, even the gods contended for possession of that city, which is of such antiquity that its citizens are said to have been produced by its very soil. The same earth is called "parent," "nurse," and "fatherland." Athens has, moreover, such dignity that the name of Greece-now weakened and virtually broken-is sup- ported by the reputation of that city.55

54 Cic. QFr 1.1.27 f. quod si te sors Afris aut Hispanis aut Gallis praefecisset, immanibus ac barbaris nationibus, tamen esset humanitatis tuae consulere eorum com- modis et utilitati salutique servire; cum vero ei generi hominum praesimus non modo in quo ipsa sit sed etiam a quo ad alios pervenisse putetur humanitas, certe iis eam potissi- mum tribuere debemus, a quibus accepimus. non enim me hoc iam dicere pudebit, prae- sertim in ea vita atque iis rebus gestis in quibus non potest residere inertiae aut levitatis ulla suspicio, nos ea quae consecuti simus iis studiis et artibus esse adeptos quae sint nobis Graeciae monumentis disciplinisque tradita. Cf. Pliny Ep. 8.24.2-4.

55 Cic. Flac. 62 adsunt Athenienses, unde humanitas doctrina religio fruges iura leges ortae atque in omnes terras distributae putantur; de quorum urbis possessione propter pulchritudinem etiam inter deos certamen fuisse proditum est; quae vetustate ea est, ut ipsa ex sese suos cives genuisse dicatur et eorum eadem terra parens altrix patria dicatur; auctoritate autem tanta est, ut iam fractum prope ac debilitatum Graeciae nomen huius urbis laude nitatur. Cf. Isoc. Paneg. 24 f., 28 f.


In this instance, even more than in the letter to his brother, Cicero con- structs a mythical image of Athens that is as artificial as it is sublime. By referring to "the weakened name of Greece," debilitatum Graeciae nomen, he acknowledges the wide gap that separates his ideal Greece from the Greeks of his own time. In doing so, he reminds us of the dis- parity between the Greek past and the Greek present of his day, between Athenians and other Greeks, as well as between conflicting articulations of Greekness-a topic that has been at the heart of this conference.56

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

561 am extremely grateful to my colleagues Christopher Jones and Richard Thomas, who organized the conference on Greece and Rome, for affording me, as a Hellenist, the opportunity to think and talk about things Roman, and to read Latin aloud in Boylston Auditorium; to Ernst Badian, Zeph Stewart as well as other participants in the conference for valuable comments; and to Maura Giles for her last-minute editing of the original pre- sentation as well as for her numerous improvements in the final version.

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Albert Henrichs - Greece in Rome