Roman contact with the Greek world goes back much farther than the second century B.C. when Rome conquered Greece and made it a province. Much of Southern Italy was colonized by Greeks and the cities there, Naples, Metapontum, Locri, Tarentum, Croton and Nola were all Greek speaking. The Romans borrowed some of their gods, much of their mythology and adapted their alphabet from the Greeks early on.
Early in the third century B.C. Tarentum, fearing Roman hegemony, allied with Pyrrhus of Epirus who invaded Italy and fought the Romans. The Greeks of the time thought that the Romans were barbarians, but admitted “They don’t fight like barbarians.” Even at that point the Romans were adept at warfare.
During the Second Punic War (218–202 B.C.) the Greek speaking city of Syracuse in Sicily was conquered by the Roman general Claudius Marcellus. Marcellus then had a triumph at which he displayed a grand variety of Greek artifacts and artworks that he and his soldiers had plundered. As a result of this, Greek art became wildly popular among the Romans.
Beginning in the third century B.C. it was standard practice for aristocratic Romans to have a Greek pedagogus to tutor their children. Children in these families became fluent and literate in Greek from an early age. If one did not know Greek, one was considered uneducated. Roman literature, art and architecture were heavily influenced by the Greeks. The most famous tragic playwright of the third century B.C., Livius Andronicus, was a freed Greek slave. He was the first to translate the Iliad and the Odyssey into Latin. The comic playwright, Titus Maccius Plautus derived inspiration from Greek comic playwrights, particularly Menander.
Both Cicero and Julius Caesar traveled to Greece to study rhetoric and both were acknowledged as the most outstanding rhetoricians of their time.
While many Romans admired the art, literature, architecture, philosophy and science of the Greeks, more traditional Romans despised the Greeks as being effete and incapable of ruling themselves. The Greek historian Polybius actually blamed the Greeks themselves for their suffering at the hands of the Romans. He wrote:
The ruin of Carthage is indeed considered to have been the greatest of calamities, but when we come to think of it the fate of Greece was no less terrible and in some ways even more so. For the Carthaginians at least left to posterity some ground, however slight, for defending their cause, but the Greeks gave no plausible pretext to anyone who wished to support them and acquit them of error. And again the Carthaginians, having been utterly exterminated by the calamity which overtook them, were for the future insensible of their sufferings, but the Greeks, continuing to witness their calamities, handed on from father to son the memory of their misfortune. So that inasmuch as we consider that those who remain alive and suffer punishment are more to be pitied than those who perished in the actual struggle, we should consider the calamities that then befell Greece more worthy of pity than the fate of Carthage, unless in pronouncing on the matter we discard all notion of what is decorous and noble, and keep our eyes only on material advantage. Everyone will acknowledge the truth of what I say if he recalls what are thought to have been the greatest misfortunes that had befallen Greece and compares them with my present narrative.
So, in short, while the Romans greatly admired the classical Greek culture, they had little use for the Greeks themselves.
Speak Your Mind