Ancient Rome: An Introductory History (29 page)

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were subjugated by force, and Carthage, the threat to the Roman power, was destroyed to its very foundations; all seas and lands lay open, but Fortune grew angry and began to throw things into confusion. Those who had easily suffered labors, dangers, and matters of great stress and uncertainty, were hamstrung by peace and quiet and wealth, things usually hoped for. Therefore, for the first time in Rome there grew the longing for money and then power; from this developed all the troubles. For greed perverted trustworthiness, propriety, and other honorable ways, and instead taught arrogance, cruelty, neglect of the gods, and the habit of considering all things for sale. Ambition compelled many men to lie, and to have one thing secret in their hearts, while saying something different, to judge friendships and hatreds not according to the facts but according to expediency, and to put forth a good appearance more than a good character. (Sallust, Bellum Catilinae X)

Allowing for some exaggeration on the part of historians such as Sallust, we can safely say that prodigious amounts of money from loot, tributes and taxes from the provinces, proceeds from the sale of slaves captured in war, and bribery flowed into Roman hands; some Romans, who by now had seen in Syracuse and Asia the amenities and luxuries that money could buy, used their newfound wealth with abandon. The censors enacted legislation to curb the love of wealth and luxury, but to no avail. Cato remarked that people in his day were spending on a jar of pickled fish what they once paid for a pair of oxen (the reason was not inflation, but simple extravagance). The cook, says another ancient historian, at one time the least valuable of the domestic slaves, now became the most highly prized.

The number of slaves in Rome and Italy also increased dramatically. Rome captured approximately seventy-five thousand slaves during the First Punic War and approximately two hundred fifty thousand more from 200 to 150
B.C.
(Scullard,
History of the Roman World
, p. 358). As a point of comparison, the census of 164
B.C.
counted 337,452 adult male citizens in Rome. The slaves now were Spaniards, Greeks, Gauls, and Asiatics, whose foreign ways inevitably threatened traditional Roman ways. They also posed an internal threat to the security of Rome and the Italian countryside, for runaway slaves resorted to crime, simply to live. The avail-

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ability of slaves also decreased employment for freemen and citizens alike. The slaves from Greece and Greek Asia Minor were frequently better educated than their Roman masters, and thus became the tutors and teachers of their masters' children; this meant that the children were less likely to receive an education in the traditional Roman virtues from their mother and father.

Another area to suffer was religion. In one famous incident in 186
B.C.
, a Bacchic cult was discovered in Rome, with Roman citizens as inductees. We do not know exactly what happened in the Bacchic get-togethers, but it was sufficiently shocking for the consuls to convene an emergency meeting of the Senate to discuss what should be done. Seven thousand people in Rome are said to have been involved in the Bacchic cult; many of them were executed and some detained. Nonetheless, foreign religions continued to enter Rome. Astrologers also began appearing in Rome. In 139 the consuls expelled the astrologers from the city, but they returned; later, although they were periodically deported, they always returned.

"Graecia Capta Ferum Victorem Cepit"

This time period also saw the beginnings of Latin literature. While conquering the Greeks of mainland Greece and Sicily, the Romans also encountered the glories of Greek civilization. They were rightly overawed by the immense literary and artistic achievements of the Greeks; this occasioned the famous statement of the Roman poet Horace, "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit" (Greece, although captured, took its wild conqueror captive). The Romans were not slow to learn from the Greeks and to adapt Greek ways to fit their needs.

The first Roman poet of record is Livius Andronicus (mid-third century
B.C.
), a Greek slave from Tarentum, who translated the
Odyssey
into Latin in a rough poetic meter called the Saturnian, and adapted the content to Roman ways. His
Odyssia
became a textbook for Roman schoolboys. Other epic poets followed; one was Ennius, who first used the Greek poetic meter called the dactylic hexameter for Latin verse. Ennius' most famous poem (fragments of which survive) was the
Annales
, a history of Rome

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in verse. Soon followed, among others, Plautus (254-?184
B.C.
), who wrote comedies (another Greek genre) for the stage; he took as his models the writers of Attic New Comedy, and an ancient critic said that if the Muses spoke Latin, they would speak Plautine Latin. Twenty of his plays survive. Plautus' younger contemporary was Terence (195-?159), who had come to Rome as a slave from Africa; Terence may have been the first known black writer, as he is described as having a dark complexion (
fuscus
is the Latin adjective, which in other contexts is used to describe a crow, the wings of night, or the cloak of sleep). Six of his plays survive; Julius Caesar, himself famous for his simple and elegant writing style, praised the purity of Terence's Latin. Terence's plays were more genteel and Greek in manners than those of Plautus, which were rougher and more boisterous, and therefore more popular with the Roman spectators. Rome also had composers of tragedy (another Greek genre); the most famous were Naevius, Pacuvius, and Accius. Only fragments of their works survive. Scipio Aemilianus and his friend Laelius may have formed a group with other intellectuals interested in Greek literature and thought, and they may have become the patrons of poets. Modern scholars call the group the Scipionic Circle and believe that Polybius and Terence, among others, may have been associated with it.

The Romans also started writing history during this time; while they had always recorded the year's events on linen sheets stored in the
aerarium
, now they began to write history as a literary genre, again following a Greek model. The first Roman historian, Q. Fabius Pictor (fl. 225), actually wrote in Greek, supposedly to justify Roman policy to the Greek world. During this time period a purely Roman type of literature arose, called satire. Satire fit Rome perfectly, for in it the poet could poke fun at faults and vices and thereby spur people to moral improvement. The first Roman satirist we know of is Lucilius (d. 102/1).

The Romans were not yet writing philosophy, but they were reading it, for the Romans by this time were receiving a Greek education in philosophy, logic, and rhetoric. The Roman mind was not much given to the kind of abstract thought that forms a large part of philosophy. The philosophy the Romans liked most was Stoicism, which emphasized values and a strong sense of duty to

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community, family, and gods. Romans tended to be suspicious of other schools of philosophy. For example, Epicureanism, which advocated that one withdraw from society to lead the quiet, stress-free life of contemplation, conflicted with a Roman's love of Rome and pursuit of glory. But it was a Roman poet, Lucretius (94-55
B.C.
) who wrote the longest surviving document on Epicureanism, a poem entitled
De rerum natura
(On the Nature of Things). The Greek philosophy called Cynicism, which held that governments and norms were evil, was simply incomprehensible to Romans.

Perhaps the Roman fear and distrust of philosophers can best be seen in the case of the second-century philosopher Carneades. In 155
B.C.
he made a series of speeches in Rome, and all the Roman young men in attendance were deeply impressed by them. To the traditional Roman ways of thinking, however, Carneades must have embodied all that was evil about Greek philosophy: On one day Carneades spoke on behalf of an issue, and on the next day, to show his dexterity, he spoke against the very same issue, with equal effect. To traditional Romans this was undoubtedly very dangerous cleverness, allowing one to "make the worse cause appear the better"which could only lead to agnosticism or atheism, dishonesty, and moral confusion.

Cato Vs. Scipio

The social turmoil of the times can be summed up in the dispute between M. Porcius Cato and Scipio Africanus. Cato (234-149
B.C.
) was born to a peasant family in Tusculum, a city long allied to Rome that had been the first Latin city granted Roman citizenship. Despite his lack of training in rhetoric, Cato was very gifted at public speaking, and represented in court whoever needed his services (he did this for free, since Roman advocates were prohibited by law from receiving pay for legal services). He was also a formidable soldier, seeing his first action in 217. He later fought at Metaurus and served as consul in 195, governor in Spain in 194 (where he won many battles and later celebrated a triumph), and censor in 184.

Early on Cato dedicated himself to a life of simplicity and self-discipline. He worked among his slaves in the fields, ate the same

Page 139

bread and drank the same wine, and lived in a simple cottage. He wore simple clothes; once he was bequeathed an embroidered Babylonian robe, but immediately sold it. When governor in Sardinia, he did not milk his expense account (which was paid for by the provincial peoples) for all that he could, but imposed an unheard-of economy on his staff. When his army won loot from the enemy, Cato says he never took any of it for himself, but let his soldiers have it all. A good summary of his way of thinking is this: The Romans had won their territory by means of virtue and self-restraint, not self-indulgence and vice, which tended to destroy empires. Which path should one then take?

Cato worried, seeing the Romans being swept up in wealth, luxury, and the rush of all things Greek. It all threatened
mos maiorum
and the moral simplicity of earlier times. So while other Romans employed Greek slaves to tutor their children and sent their young men to learn Greek rhetoric and philosophy, Cato himself undertook the education of his son, teaching him to read and to understand Roman law, to throw the javelin, to fight in armor, to ride a horse, box, and swim. Seeing a lack of good literature in Latin that dealt with Roman topics, Cato wrote his
Origines
(Beginnings), a history of Rome, including its various myths and legends.

When Cato was a candidate for the censorship in 184, most of the nobles were frightened and vehemently opposed his candidature. He promised them that he would be a harsh doctor to their sickness of vice and luxury. Not only did they see the austerity and asceticism of his personal life, they also remembered that as consul in 195 he had spoken against the repeal of the Lex Oppia, which forbade women to own more than a half-ounce of gold, to wear multicolored dresses, and to ride in two-horse carriages (the law had been passed during the war with Hannibal). What would he do as censor?

The Roman populace, with the exception of the corrupt nobles, gladly elected Cato, thinking that they needed a harsh physician. Once elected censor, he put heavy taxes on luxury items, expelled Lucius Scipio (brother of Africanus) from the knights, and expelled another man for embracing his wife during the day in the presence of their daughter. He also concerned himself with Rome's

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