IN 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic, thus marking the genesis of Roman Greece, and in 86 BC, the Roman ex-consul and general Lucius Cornelius Sulla sacked Athens after it had unwisely allied itself with Mithridates VI, an independent king who had claimed he would liberate it from Roman hegemony – laying to waste the city of Socrates and Plato and destroying the famous Lyceum academy where Aristotle had studied.
Nonetheless, the centuries of occupation which were to follow wouldn’t deter the heterogeneous customs of Greek cultural life to continue bourgeoning – a reality contextualized by the poet Horace through this remark: “Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror.”
For all the conqueror’s military credential, the subjugates’ civilized ways, based on past and present reputation, would become the basis of the sort of envy put into perspective by the Roman statesman, Cicero thus: “Even as we govern that race of men in which civilization is to be found, we should certainly offer to them what we have received from them . . . for we appear to owe them a special debt.”
The educated amongst the Romans simply couldn’t deny the lure of ‘imperial Hellenism’ (as a standalone word, Hellenism is defined as the study or imitation of ancient Greek culture)!
The forefront of such a state of being was helmed by Greek thinkers of erudite minds who hailed from wealthy backgrounds and who could pick and choose from a rich array of academic disciplines founded by Greeks themselves, referred to as the ‘children of Athena’ (the Greek goddess of wisdom who can be traced back to the second millennium BC).
Greeks, who prided themselves on their superiority and made it difficult for outsiders to be welcome into their culture, deemed the Romans as boorish and uncultured. They exuded cultural arrogance, particularly regarding their subtle language which was difficult to translate into Latin, the Romans’ language, which in comparison was impoverished – so much so that overall, there were many more speakers of Greek than Latin throughout the Roman empire!
The prevailing attitude among them revolved around condescension and snobbery, with one in the second century AD, a physician named Galen, insinuating that words used by other people (non-Greeks) in their languages resembled a miasma of cacophony ranging from the wailing of pigs to the call of the woodpecker, and another, a sham teacher of rhetoric, advising a student to “pull together fifteen but no more than twenty Attic words and practice them well and have them on the tip of your tongue and in every speech, drizzle on a few as a sweetener.”
(The Attic referenced here was a dialect of classic Athens which the educated elite of the period around 140 AD distinguished itself by from Koine, the Greek of the streets.)
The lives of the writers and thinkers – who shared a common educational background and inherited tradition – are brought together pending an epoch regarded as classical. These were the historian Polybius, the geographer Strabo, the philosopher Plutarch, the politician Arrian of Nicomedia, the satirist Lucian of Samosata, the astronomer Ptolemy, et al. – scholars referred to by the Greek word, pepaideumenoi (men of culture) capable of understanding materials across the disciplines of astronomy, medicine, geography, mathematics, poetry, et cetera, who contemptuously labelled those without their elite class as idiotai (singular, idiotes – a word which in Greek means a person who does not involve themselves in public affairs, and which the Latin adopted as idiota to mean an ignorant person, as it eventually emerged into English).
Yet, notwithstanding their braggadocio, the most alluring of the figures scrutinized in this tome, viz Plutarch, cautioned against the advantage of being a privileged elite in his essay On Inoffensive Self- Praise, by counselling: ‘empty self-glorification is the opposite of glory’.
A well-read Platonist (follower of Plato) renowned for his tome, Parallel Lives, in which he’s quoted as saying that ‘our souls are by nature possessed of great fondness for learning and fondness for seeing’, he also provided the best description of paideia as an understanding of fundamental virtues such as ‘what is honourable and what is shameful . . . how a man must bear himself in his interactions with the gods, his parents, with his elders, with the laws, with strangers, with those in authority, with friends, with women, with children and with servants.’
Their lives existed against a backdrop of magnificent settings the very essence of Greek architectural heritage such as the centuries-old buildings of the Acropolis (a UNESCO World Heritage site which include the still standing tourist attraction, the Parthenon – a temple dedicated to Athena – located upon a hill in Athens) which dominated the city of Athens then as now! Classical Greece buildings would be found not only in Athens but also in Alexandria (Egypt), Delphi and Olympia.
Nowhere among the civilized cities of the period was there evidence of Greek erudition than at the library in Alexandria which had the acquisition of a copy of every published Greek work and which included a bibliographical catalogue of the library in 120 rolls – at the time deemed a remarkable feat of textual expertise! Such was the library’s sophistication that its exacting chief librarian, Aristarchus of Samothrace, marked duplicates of the Homeric epics with asterikos (a star sign * which has survived as a marker in printing to this day).
It abetted aplenty that the Romans kept their administration’s intervention to a minimal – mostly restricting it to applying their technical expertise towards the construction of aqueducts, sewers and road paving – thus allowing for Greek expression to thrive unhindered in Athens and other Greek cities.
Following is an excerpt from the prologue by one of the featured protagonists, viz the Hellenized Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata, gleaned from A Feast of Lapithae, describing what occurred at a reek wedding banquet in the middle of the second century AD: Alkidamas (a gate-crasher identifying as a Cynic) is offered the lowest seat of all but he refuses to sit down and wanders about, helping himself to the delicacies being served while criticizing the gold and silver plates they are offered on.
The only way the other guests can shut him up is to give him a large glass of wine. He makes as if to sit down but then gets up again and taunts the bride that she is incapable of bearing a son with as fine a body as his.
Now, as the wine goes round, things really start to get out of hand. Next a slave comes in bearing a letter for the host Aristainetos from another Stoic who hasn’t been invited and is furious that Zenothemis has been. The slave reads out the long, pompous letter which includes an insinuation that Zeno is having a relationship with his teacher, Diphilos. The guests, by now half-drunk, greet its contents with derision.
Now the main course arrives and everyone sits down to eat. The Stoic Zenothemis has been positioned next to the Epicurean Hermon and they have to share a plate of meat. Already at odds over the table placing, they disagree over which one of two roast birds is fatter than the other, and soon they are pulling each other’s beards and fighting.
Such satire, albeit sidesplitting, demonstrates the diversity of the main schools of philosophy (Stoics, Peripatetics, Platonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans and Cynics), and how lively philosophical engagement thrived during that era.
The tome features tableaus of ruins such as the Athens-located Odeion built in the middle of the second century AD and still in use to this day, as well as the statue of the orator Aelius Aristides (which can be seen inside the Vatican Museums) and a thirteenth century edition of Ptolemy’s Geographike. It narrates the story of intellectual inquiry across a period of more than five hundred years – one which would shape the Middle Ages and beyond!
The tome’s author, Charles P. Freeman, is an English historian specialising in the history of ancient Greece and Rome. An acclaimed classicist, he is the author of numerous books on the ancient world including The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason.
A trade paperback, The Children of Athena: Greek Writers and Thinkers in the Age of Rome, is published by Bloomsbury and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R335.
