The Classical World (40 page)

In Egypt, within twenty-five years of his death, we can enter into a very different world of planting and gardening, organized by a grandee, Apollonius, the ‘finance minister’ of King Ptolemy II. Apollonius was one of a group of the king’s beneficiaries who were given personal estates of nearly 7,000 acres each in the Fayyum, a sandy area about 250 miles south of Alexandria. Nearby, Ptolemy II had founded a new town, Philadelphia, with a rectangular plan, a theatre and a civic gymnasium. All around, the Fayyum was vastly cultivated, irrigated and improved by new proprietors during the 260s and 250s. Apollonius’ estate-manager was another Greek immigrant into Egypt, Zenon, and his surviving papers take us into the domineering and insatiable world of a ‘projects-man’ who has turned his energies to changing nature. Letters from Apollonius order the planting of thousands of vines on his estates, some of which were grafted stock. Donkeys were to cart these plants down to the Fayyum for Zenon’s attention, although the local Egyptians were mocking the Greek newcomers’ ignorance of their hallowed ways of doing things. Once, the gardeners on the Fayyum estate threatened to run away and abandon them. But Apollonius was unstoppable: from a second estate at the old Egyptian capital of Memphis, many cuttings of olive trees, apricots and other fruits were ordered to be sent to Zenon at the Fayyum property. The Greek presence in Egypt transformed the scale of vine-growing in the country (previously Egyptians drank beer). Good olive
trees, a Greek necessity, were also unavailable in Egypt, and so oil-bearing plants were cultivated to supplement the gap, including the oily seeds of the opium poppy: opium poppies enjoyed a short-lived phase of mass production on Apollonius’ estate, but not, it seems, as narcotics. To decorate his park, there were to be second-rate wild olives (they would be sent to Zenon by the thousand), laurel bushes and masses of conifers; there were to be roses, too, for scent-making, garlands and ornament. Other ‘seven-thousand-acre’ Greek owners were doing likewise, and yet slow delivery, artificially irrigated soil and the risks of salt and sand endangered their massive experiment in new-style farming. Within twenty-five years Apollonius’ grand estate had reverted to the kings, its ultimate freeholders, and the mass poppy-crops vanished. The experiments in luxurious agriculture became fragmented and went the way of other grand gardening-schemes in history.

Among Zenon’s own papers, nonetheless, we find evidence of his literary taste, including a fine copy of Euripides’ tragedy of the young hunting man, Hippolytus. Zenon himself wrote clear and thoughtful Greek and was always searching for the apt expression; he loved dogs and the irrepressible sport of a gentleman, hunting. One of his favourite dogs was praised in two poems for saving him from a wild boar: his letters refer to gazelle-hunters who came and went in his life. While the Hellenistic kings continued to vaunt their prowess on the hunting-field, out east at Kandahar another expatriate Greek left verses and a monument in praise of a dog of his who had bravely killed a wild prey. Among these new landscapes and their new ‘big game’, the noble sport of heroes became the beloved recreation of common men in the public eye.
⁷

Naturally, these Greeks abroad observed the new and unusual peoples around them. Herodotus had anticipated them here, and Alexander’s own generals and staff had already been quick to record the oddities they observed in Indian society. There was a constant tension in this sort of writing. Was the distant East a society to be idealized, as Egypt had been idealized by Plato and the rhetorical Isocrates? After Alexander, legendary Greek utopias continued to be fathered on faraway places, whether in the North, East or on islands in the southern ‘Ocean’. Or was the East to be observed, researched and understood? Few if any of those who wrote on the new world
learned anything of its languages, but they did go and look, and either they or their informants were able to communicate a little with one another in Greek.

In Bactria and north-east Iran, many of the new Greek settlers proved to be tenacious even when they found that Alexander’s death was not their cue to return home to Greece. Up at Ai Khanum, near the river Oxus, settlers continued to use the Macedonian calendar for more than a hundred and fifty years; in Iran, the old city of Susa was given a new Macedonian name; lines from Euripides, the same few, were copied out as a school-exercise both in Egypt and Armenia. In Egypt, the Ptolemies spoke Macedonian Greek, but not Egyptian, and subsidized the teaching of Greek from the proceeds of their tax on salt in order to encourage the Greek-speakers on whom so much of their government depended. Yet scholars’ old idea of a blinkered Greek attitude to the ‘East’, close to apartheid, is too extreme. The Ptolemies and Seleucids never forgot their Macedonian origins, but in Egypt it was not possible to rule in the narrow strip of territory south of Alexandria without a certain openness to the long-established local culture. After all, the Egyptians’ big temples and priesthoods were still active. In the Seleucid kingdom, from Syria to eastern Iran, there was much more space, and the upper ranks of the court, army and governorships remained overwhelmingly in Greek hands. In Mesopotamia, however, the Seleucid kings did take on some of the ancient royal titles and profess a respect for some of the local temples: Alexander had already done the same. Overall, though, there was no new ‘multi-cultural’ openness about the Seleucids’ style of monarchy. In Iran, Alexander had ended the Persians’ complex system of food-rations and court-customs and the Seleucids never tried to bring them back. In Egypt, by contrast, a lively ideal of Egyptian kingship did survive with the local priesthood. It associated the ruling Pharaoh with eternal well-being and the ordered fertility of the land. Arguably, the Ptolemies did address this Egyptian culture which they found to be running in parallel to their own. They themselves were open to one or two Egyptian traditions, and it has been argued, perhaps correctly, that the Ptolemies imitated the ancient practice of the Pharaohs and subsidized doctors, free to all patients, by levying a special ‘doctors’ tax’. In Greek cities elsewhere, the council might interview and
appoint a ‘civic doctor’, but all of his patients then had to pay him. There was no concern outside Egypt for subsidized ‘national health’.

In Egypt, the central role of Egyptian culture in the world’s civilization was emphasized very early by a most remarkable Greek mind, Hecataeus, an immigrant to Egypt from Abdera, who arrived in the early years of Ptolemy I. While following Herodotus, Hecataeus claimed to have exceeded his great predecessor and to have consulted actual Egyptian records. His descriptions of ancient Pharaonic buildings are notably precise and his accounts of ancient Egyptian laws and customs are not always fictional. He even praised the ancient Pharaohs for their obedience to law and justice and their moderation of personal luxury. The prejudice in him shows through when he praises them for having kept craftsmen out of political life: Hecataeus’ view of old Egypt was not at all the view of a democrat.
⁸

Hecataeus is also a witness, probably the first in Greek, to a new discovery: the Jews. After Alexander’s death, Ptolemy’s troops had encountered Jews during their campaigns in Syria, and Hecataeus presents them as an offshoot of Egyptian civilization. They had merely been corrupted, he thought, by their ill-advised lawgiver Moses. Yet his picture is not a hostile or anti-Semitic one. When describing their idealized priestly society, Hecataeus appears to allude to a sentence in the biblical book of Deuteronomy. Within a hundred years, his successors in Alexandria would not be so tolerant: some of their literature marks the beginning of Western anti-Semitism.

To the east, meanwhile, the great new fascination was India. During their invasion of 327–325
BC
, Alexander’s officers had seen and noted so much which Greeks had never previously encountered. In their histories, they described Indian dress, Indian cotton, the broad banyan trees and the elephants. At this level, they were capable of exact observation. But when they tried to explain Indian societies or teachings, they were hampered by their ignorance of the language and the stereotypes they brought with them. One Indian wise man did follow Alexander’s army and is also said to have lectured to them: we may even have evidence of his teaching on the stars and seasons. The officers called him by the name ‘Calanos’, but it was not his true Indian name. They gave it to him for the word of greeting (
kal
ē
) which he liked to utter. Some of them thought it was an Indian word, but he
is much more likely to have been showing off his one bit of Greek (‘
kal
ē
’, for ‘very nice’). So, he acquired the name of ‘Mr Nicely’.
⁹

On the slightest evidence, traces were ‘discovered’ locally of an invasion of India by the gods Dionysus and Heracles. Fanciful Greek minds also saw traces of an idealized Sparta in the customs of some of the Indian kingdoms. Others, more bluntly, explained things by their own male sexism. Some of the Indians were found to practise suttee (the burning of a man’s wives with him on a funeral pyre). The invaders ascribed it to the infidelity and wickedness of Indian wives. Indian men were seen to marry much younger women, and so these women, they presumed, would soon want to poison their ageing husband and go off with a younger lover. Suttee, therefore, was the husband’s deterrent: if a husband was poisoned, his wife would be burned to death with him. So the women were kept in check. The explanation is probably the free invention of men with Alexander, without any Indian supporting story.
¹⁰

Soon after Alexander’s death, yet more of India was visited by an intrepid Greek envoy, Megasthenes. He, too, combined observation with idealizing theory. He did visit the Indian royal city of Palimbothra on the river Ganges, a site which had eluded even Alexander, and he gave a credible account of its appearance, wooden architecture and all. He also distinguished seven orders of Indian society which were sustained by close intermarriage. He was presumably trying to describe the Indian castes. He made them seven (not four, the usual number) because he was influenced by his knowledge of Herodotus who had supposed there to be seven classes in ancient Egypt. Megasthenes also wrote about someone called ‘Boudyas’, a companion, he believed, of Dionysus when he invaded India, and later a king. He had heard, surely, of Buddha and misunderstood him. He does, however, describe some of the Indians’ funerary customs, but not the big Buddhist stupas which were to become so famous. Perhaps we should trust him, and conclude that stupas did not yet exist.

By the end of the fourth century
BC
Alexander’s conquests in India had been given away to the warrior Chandragupta. Yet the horizon which he had opened did not shut. A literate Greek-speaking population still existed in the Alexandrias and the Successors’ cities which lay in the territories near the Punjab. For their sake, the Indian king
Asoka had his royal Buddhist edicts translated into Greek and inscribed in the mid-third century
BC
in this region. Asoka could also name all the Hellenistic Greek kings as far west as Libya and refer to ‘the world, my children’.
¹¹
From the 240s onwards, the Successor rulers in Bactria became independent Greek kings, and in due course, they took up Alexander’s example and conquered again in north-west India. Under their remarkable king Menander (
c.
150–130
BC
), they went even further east than Alexander, conquered more Indian territory and reached the river Ganges. Greek sculptures had begun to influence the newly devised Indian representations of Buddha: King Menander himself, a strikingly handsome man, was remembered in Buddhist tradition and may even have become a Buddhist.

As in Egypt, Greek authors on India described a foreign world mostly in terms of the Greek customs, myths and laws which they knew at home. It was not so much imperialism as a rather heartening belief, implicit in Homer, that, in general, these other people were really quite like Greeks. Greeks did not persecute them or try to ‘cleanse’ them as lesser beings. In early 323
BC
embassies had come to Alexander in Babylon, including, some said, ambassadors from the Romans. However, Alexander’s court historians appear to have ignored these Roman visitors. So far as Rome was even discussed by Greek contemporaries, it tended to be seen as a ‘Greek city’, one more point of Greek contact along the western coast of Italy.
¹²
The most important people of the future, therefore, could have been investigated by Alexander’s early followers, but were understood the least.

Rome Reaches Out

Lucius Veratius was an extremely wicked man of immense brutality. He used to consider it very amusing to slap the face of a free man with the palm of his hand. A slave used to follow him, carrying a purse full of small change and whenever he had slapped someone, he would order twenty-five small coins (asses) to be counted out, as prescribed by the Twelve Tables. As a result, the praetors later decided that this law in the Tables was obsolete and defunct, and declared by edict that they would appoint assessors to estimate personal damages instead.

Favorinus (
c.
AD
120–50), in Aulus Gellius,
Attic Nights
20.1.13, on a change in the
early law-code of Rome

We left Rome in 451
BC
at the time of its early laws, the Twelve Tables, and looked at it mainly in the context of the surrounding Etruscans and western Greeks. The site of Rome had long been inhabited, but, like so many of the towns in the Greek-speaking world, by the fifth century
BC
Rome traced her origin back to a founding hero. In fact, she looked back to both a founder and a visitor, and they were a remarkable contrast. One was Romulus, who was believed to have been suckled by a she-wolf and brought up by the wife of a simple shepherd. As a ‘once and future king’ he began as an outcast, a type of story which is quite frequent for founders and leaders in many societies. In due course, Romulus killed his brother Remus, a less usual turn to the story.