The Classical World (49 page)

Rebuffs received from Rome could even touch off secondary culture-clashes farther afield. In spring 168 the Seleucid King Antiochus IV at last broke into the rival territoryof Egypt’s Ptolemies, onlyto be confronted and halted there byan imperious Roman envoy. Obliged to withdraw, Antiochus staged a festival of his own in Antioch, in deliberate rivalry of the Roman generals’ contemporary celebrations of
their victory over Macedon. In the new Roman fashion, Antiochus staged a show of wild beasts in combat, but then baffled his guests by waiting on them personally in an ostentatious show of affability during his gigantic royal banquet.
¹³
A year later, he stopped in Judaea, where he heeded the request of a faction of Jews in Jerusalem; they wished to subdue their opponents and adopt Greek customs while abandoning traditional Jewish practices. Antiochus supported them, as if to work off his anger after his recent rebuff in Egypt by Rome.
¹⁴
The result was a nationalist uprising by outraged fellow Jews and a bitter war (the ‘Maccabean Revolt’). It resulted in a newly powerful Jewish state and a new theology of martyrdom for those Jews who died in the course of it. They were said to have gone directly to Paradise, the first mention of this historically fertile idea.
¹⁵

Above all, a culture-clash was lived out by the man to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of Rome’s advance from 220 to 146, the last of the great Greek historians, Polybius, a Greek from Megalopolis. He was born into a prominent political family in the Achaean League, but in 167 he was deported to Rome with a thousand others, as a hostage suspected of hostility to the Romans. While a hostage, he befriended important Romans, including the young Scipios (hunting was one important bond with them). Later he travelled widelyin Spain and the West, even down the coast of west Africa. Yet again, a fine Greek history was to be written by an exile. Polybius’ original plan was to write a historydown to 167
BC
but he prolonged it because he lived to see the ‘troubled times’ of Rome’s years of domination.
¹⁶
He himself played a part in them, by assisting in the very settlement which was imposed by Rome on Greece in 146
BC
, after the ruthless destruction of Corinth. Polybius had a difficult role to explain: he had been a ‘fellow traveller’ and a participator in Roman actions which otherwise he would be expected to have opposed.

Polybius is the historian in antiquity with the most explicit view of what historians should be and do. While attacking his predecessors (much to the benefit of our knowledge of them) he emphasizes the value of ‘pragmatic history’.
¹⁷
It is the history of events and actions as theyaffect cities, peoples and individuals, and it must be written by a ‘pragmatic’ individual, someone who travels to the sites in question, interviews participants and personally studies documents. Polybius is
the declared enemy of library-worms like his learned predecessor Timaeus. There is much of Thucydides in his aims, except that, once again, Thucydides’ exclusion of the gods as an explanation of history proved to be too austere for an admirer’s simpler mind. In Polybius’ view, the defeats of the kings of Macedon and Antiochus IV in one and the same year (168) were a revenge for their predecessors’ beastly decision to combine in a pact in
c.
200
BC
and meddle against Ptolemy V of Egypt, a child-king at the time. Thucydides would have enjoyed pointing out that this ‘revenge’ was only a coincidence and that the ‘pact’ which it supposedly avenged was almost certainly a fiction publicized by the Romans.

Nonetheless, Polybius searches for explanations of change and is explicit about formulating them. Admittedly, what he makes explicit is less penetrating than what is implicit in Thucydides. It also confronts us in his turgid sort of polytechnic Greek. But his vision across the entire Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria, is wholly to his credit and his accounts of other peoples, landscapes, myths and resources are a fine testimony to a Hellenistic Greek mind.

His observations of the Romans are particularly important. Here, at last, survive the impressions of an educated Greek who lived at Rome, learned a little Latin and formed friendships with individual upper-class Romans during these fascinating years. In Polybius’ histories, Greek speakers do castigate Romans and their behaviour as ‘barbarian’.
¹⁸
They are not just ‘barbarians’ because they are foreign speakers. Polybius also presents Roman customs as foreign, ‘theirs’, not ‘our’ Greek way. Romans could be exceptionally savage: ‘one can often see,’ Polybius wrote, ‘in cities taken by the Romans not only the bodies of human beings but dogs cut in half and the severed limbs of other animals.’
¹⁹
But Romans were deliberate in their ruthlessness, unlike the stereotype of the ‘irrational’ barbarian, someone who combined savagery and panic. When comparing Romans with peoples other than Greeks, Polybius does not call them barbarians at all.

Most suggestively, he shares perceptions of contemporary Roman behaviour which were expressed by stern Cato. For Polybius, too, most Romans were madly keen to make money, just as Cato’s complaints and maxims confirm. Through his Greek education, Polybius prized restraint, patriotism and austere self-control, qualities which
were supported byhis distorted image of ancient Sparta. In his Roman context, Cato trumpeted the same values. The two men knew each other personally, but the similarity of their professed values was not the result of Polybius’ greater intelligence shaping what Cato thought. It was the result of a similar outlook, independentlyformed. A bridge between their shared values was their fondness for the simple Greek of the classical Athenian, Xenophon, the enemyof luxury, the admirer of bravery and military prowess and the champion of ‘moral’ life, including the common bond of hunting.

For Polybius, too, the year 167 was a turning point because of the new wave of ‘luxury’ which the conquests in Greece released into Rome. The young, he complained, would now pay ‘more than a talent’ for a boy-lover; similarly, Cato warned the Roman people that they would ‘see the change for the worse’ in their constitution when ‘good-looking boys were being sold for more than the price of fields’.
²⁰
Polybius and Cato shared a disapproval of the new ‘luxury’ and a view that it would contribute to political decline: in his histories, Polybius is concerned to give the gist, where possible, of what his speakers actually said. But unlike Cato, Polybius had a predictive, explanatory theory, the idea that one constitution follows another in a necessary cyclical pattern which is repeated through time. In the year of Cannae, Polybius believed that the Roman constitution had been at its peak. It was not a ‘mixed’ constitution in his view, one which was blended from the differing elements of oligarchy, democracy and so forth. Rather, it was in an oligarchic phase, but held in balance by elements of monarchy and democracy which served as checks against change and degeneration.
²¹
According to Polybius’ theory, such change would inevitably occur, linked to changes in the citizens’ ‘customs’ and behaviour: oligarchy would change to democracy, democracy to degenerate mob-rule and then back to monarchy, the starting point. Polybius continued writing as a very old man: he was said to have died aged eighty-two, in the mid-120s therefore, from a fall off a horse. His simple theoryof Rome’s constitutional elements owed more to his Greek education and its framework than to the Roman reality. Were the Roman consuls really so ‘king-like’ and where was a democratic role for the ‘people’ in a full-blooded Greek sense? Like a Greek in India, he allowed his theory
to distort his understanding of what he saw and heard. But his predictions were to have a particular resonance in the next hundred years for the Rome which he knew as a resident.

Turbulence at Home and Abroad

Someone cut off the head of Gaius Gracchus, we are told, and was carrying it, but a friend of Opimius took it off him: he was called Septimuleius. At the beginning of the fighting a proclamation had been made that anyone who brought in Gaius’ head… would receive its equal weight in gold. So Septimuleius stuck Gaius’ head on a spear and brought it in to Opimius, and when it was placed on the scales it weighed in at seventeen and two-thirds pounds, for Septimuleius had shown himself a scoundrel in this too and had acted like a rascal: he had taken out Gracchus’ brain and filled the head with lead.

Plutarch,
Life of Gaius Gracchus
17

Sulla’s memorial stands on the Campus Martius and the inscription on it, they say, is one he wrote himself, and the gist of it is that ‘none of his friends surpassed him in doing good and none of his enemies in doing harm’.

Plutarch,
Life of Sulla
38

With Carthage destroyed and Greece cowed, we might have expected the Romans to settle down to a steady domination of the Mediterranean. They had removed kings from Macedon for ever; their conquests in western Asia had left a large hole in the largest Hellenistic empire, that of the Seleucids. They had intrigued decisively in the affairs of the Ptolemaic kings in Egypt: in 155 the young Ptolemy VIII had even drawn up a will bequeathing the entire kingdom to Rome if he failed to produce a legitimate heir. As he was still hardly thirty
years old, the ‘bequest’ was rather hypothetical, and was probably meant only to scare his enemies in Egypt. But it was the first example of a practice which would have a significant future and which later worked to Rome’s benefit. The main problem in view was still Spain: in the late 150s a series of campaigns were needed here against insurgents.

A system of control over Rome’s conquests was also forming. During the second century
BC
Romans developed their rule over conquered peoples bysending out magistrates as governors with standing armies to help them. These individuals became focal points for their subjects’ petitions and disputes. As always, many cases gravitated to a new source of justice which had suddenlybecome accessible in their midst. On the other side, however, the individual governors saw new possibilities of enrichment, and their misconduct was still veryloosely regulated. Until the 120s the most they might suffer for ‘rapacity’ (‘extortion’) was a ruling that theyshould repaywhat theyhad taken. The new scope for gain abroad would have crucial implications for individuals’ capacity to compete for pre-eminence back at Rome.

Most Roman warfare abroad in the third and second centuries
BC
had already had economic motives: one obvious result of victory for Roman individuals was ever more slaves and plunder. There was also subsequent access (albeit sometimes through active middlemen) to land, moneylending and assets overseas. Collectively, too, Romans began to receive regular yearly tribute from their conquests. It had begun in Sicily, from 210 onwards, where they had taken over the taxation of previous kings. Then annual tribute was imposed in Spain in the 190s; payments were spread to Greece, Asia and north Africa. After 167 the newly won control of Macedon and its rich mines enabled Romans to abolish the direct tax which had previously been levied on individual Roman citizens in Rome and Italy (the indirect taxes continued). No single uniform system of tax was imposed as yet on all provinces, but from 146 onwards Rome’s subjects in north Africa are known to have had to pay a tax on ‘land’ and also a poll tax. Those two taxes would become the mainstays of Roman taxation in the early Empire: they were mainstays under Hadrian too.

This new financial strength was confirmed by receipts of booty, fines and war-reparations: surelythese gains would allow the Romans

to sort out some of their social injustices at home? In fact, the years from 146 to 80
BC
were to see outbursts of extreme social and political tension in Rome and Italy. The historian Sallust later looked back on the year 146 as the start of a wave of ‘disturbances and riots’, combined with corruption.
¹
The removal of the external fear of Carthage (he thought) had made things worse. It is also important that the settlement of new colonies in Italy had all but ceased since the 170s: poorer citizens were no longer being sent off from Rome to a new home.

From the later vantage point of the Emperor Hadrian, the tensions of these years would have seemed only a prelude to others which were even more important, the emergence of Pompey and Julius Caesar in the 70s and 60s, the resulting Civil War and the eventual ending of the free Republic. The later crises therefore will feature at more length here, but for historians, these forerunners (as we now see them) are a fascinating kaleidoscope. Political combinations which would later prove so dangerous are already in evidence, and yet are somehow surmounted. Conquering generals started to enjoy prolonged commands abroad and to link up with tribunes in Rome so as to protect their interests at home. In 147
BC
the charismatic Scipio Aemilianus was elected directly to a consulship without any previous job as a magistrate and was then elected to a second consulship, of dubious legality. Populists started to take proposals directly to the people to turn them straight into law without approval from the Senate; in reply, political reformers were killed by senatorial opponents in the centre of Rome. In the 80s there was to be civil war for the first time in Italy and a disgruntled patrician would actually march on Rome.