Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler
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feckless content at a safe distance from what would be accepted in real life at Rome, much as Indian Bollywood films in the twentieth century long played out ideas of romantic love in luxurious surroundings for the delight of orthodox Hindu and Muslim audiences who had no place for it in their actual lives.
Comedy may have been king for the Roman in the street, but serious statesmen and intellectuals, as they increasingly looked beyond Italy, were also coming to notice and value the Greek heritage. In 228 BC, when the Romans had cleared the Adriatic of Illyrian piracy, gaining themselves a coastal strip (the coast of modern Albania) as a first base in the east, they sent embassies to Greek cities, notably the trading centres Corinth and Athens, pointing out that the new Roman policing of the seas was very much in their interests. Symbolically, Romans were then invited for the first time to compete in the Isthmian Games, held every other year near Corinth.
Much of the third century was taken up with fighting Carthage at sea or overseas (264–241), and later surviving and then retaliating against the Carthaginian invasion of Italy under Hannibal (218–203); but even interactions with this age-old and non-Greek empire (founded around 900 BC, with a maritime empire since the seventh century) would increasingly have impressed on the Romans that Greek was the language of the wider Mediterranean. Amazingly, the Carthaginian senate had once in an earlier era legislated to outlaw knowledge of Greek at home, to prevent private contacts with the enemy.9 Nonetheless, in Rome’s day Carthage’s troops, largely mercenaries, were commanded not in Punic but in Greek.* Hannibal himself had been educated in Greek and was an author in it, and in fact his old tutor Sosylus of Sparta accompanied him on his campaigns and wrote up their history in the language. Other Greeks, Silenus and Chaereas, also were involved as chroniclers.10 Phoenicians, like those who founded Carthage, might have been the ones to give the Greeks their original letters (tá phoinikḗia grámmata, as the Greeks still called them); but Carthage’s nobility had nevertheless been drawn into the cultural force-field created by the application of those letters to Greek, recognizing it as the international language par excellence—or more authentically, in Greek, kat’exokhḗn. When, during a lull in his campaign in 205, Hannibal set an altar inscribed with his achievements in the temple of Juno at Lacinia, on the point of Italy’s instep that faced the Ionian Sea, he used both Punic and Greek, but not Latin or Oscan.11
In 202 BC, with Carthage defeated, Rome can with hindsight be seen to have stood at a crossroads. It held, in principle, a score still to be settled with Philip V of Macedon, who had allied with Carthage against Rome; and Antiochus III, widely victorious Seleucid king of Asia, might have been seen as a very long-term threat to Italy—but only if he chose to pursue his conquests in a direction, and to an extent, that no Greek successor of Alexander’s ever had before. Essentially, sleeping dogs here could have been left to lie—and would probably have been so left by a less aggressive, less military society. These major Greek kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean made up a system four generations old, with endemic political problems and rivalries quite unfamiliar to Rome. To choose to enter this was an unprecedented step, whose long-term consequences were quite unpredictable. And it cannot have been popular with everyone to enter into such a new theatre, with no end in sight, two years after the deliverance from Carthage.
Furthermore, foreign wars, without any casus belli in Italy, were strictly illegal. By Rome’s IVS FETIALE, the law of the college of priests charged with opening and closing states of war, the relevant rites could only be performed if Rome was acting in defence of itself or its oath-bound SOCII ‘allies’. Rome had no such SOCII east of the Adriatic. It had treaties of AMICITIA ‘friendship’ (Greek philía) with some of the states there, notably Egypt, but this relationship was unprecedented as a basis for a war of solidarity, and not in any case very relevant to the immediate choice of adversary, Philip of Macedon.
Nevertheless the Senate did resolve to act against the great powers of the east. There is little in the written record to justify this momentous decision.* Polybius, the main near-contemporary historian and a Greek himself, placed the initiative with the Greeks. Of the conference of Naupactus in 217, which brought Philip V of Macedon and sundry Greeks into ineffectual alliance with Carthage, he wrote:
This was the time and the conference which first brought into interplay Greek, Italian, and Libyan (i.e. Carthaginian) affairs: no longer would Philip or the leading Greek statesmen, when dealing with affairs in Greece, make reference to, war on, or agreements with, each other: from now on they would all look to their aims in Italy … those disaffected with Philip and some with differences with Attalus (king of Pergamum) would no longer turn east to Antiochus (of Asia) or south to Ptolemy (of Egypt), but send missions west, either to the Carthaginians or the Romans. Similarly, the Romans sent to the Greeks, for fear of Philip’s audacity and to forestall any advantage he might take of their current predicament.12
But this merely marked the turning point as a Greek might have seen it. Rome chose to keep raising the stakes and extending its involvement until all the Greek regimes, big and small, had been deposed or incorporated into subservient alliances.
Whatever the arguments presented in the Senate, the war—if it could be decisively won—must have been financially tempting. In crude financial terms, the Punic Wars had shown Rome what the benefits of victory over a major foreign power could be: the war reparations adjudged against Carthage were two hundred talents per annum for fifty years, a grand total of ten thousand talents or 240 million sesterces (‘MHS’).†
The lesson did not go amiss, and the rewards for conquest of Greek powers turned out to be quite comparable. The 24 MHS exacted from Philip V by T. Quinctius Flamininus* in 197 (half at once, half over ten years) were a mere first fruit of what was to come. When Antiochus was forced to surrender western Asia Minor by the brothers P. and L. Cornelius Scipio† in 189, he settled for a record indemnity of fifteen thousand talents, or 360 MHS. Annual revenues to Rome at this time were running at 30 MHS. When L. Aemilius Paullus‡ returned victorious from his war against Philip’s son Perseus in 167, he brought with him at least another 120 MHS in booty. Revenues from Macedon thereafter ran at 2.4 MHS per annum. In all, in the fifty years after 201, Rome would actually receive 648 MHS in indemnity payments, principally from Carthage, Macedon, and Asia, equivalent to 13 MHS annually.13
To put this in proportion, the property qualification for a senator was a landed fortune valued at more than 0.4 MHS. Pliny observed that Rome’s treasury coffers in 157 BC held a credit balance of 100.3 MHS.14 And this sum was to be doubled in 130 BC, when the northwest Asian kingdom of Pergamum was bequeathed to Rome. Then in 63 BC, after Pompey’s conquest of Syria, the level leapt to 340 MHS.15
Flush with these windfalls of militarism, Rome was to go on a hundred-year spree. The indemnity paid by Antiochus in 189 sufficed to pay off the crippling national debt that Rome had incurred to its citizens during the war with Hannibal, equivalent to 25½ years of tax revenues (TRIBVTVM SIMPLEX).16 At the same time Livy said that the return of the army from Asia at this time saw the “first influx of foreign luxury” into Rome.17 In 167, with access to the loot from Perseus’ kingdom in Macedon, Rome ceased to levy taxes on its own citizens, a kind of “war dividend.” Meanwhile, there was a surge in public works spending: in 184, 24 MHS was spent on sewers; in 144–140 a new aqueduct, the Aqua Marcia, was built at a cost of 180 MHS; in 142 the first stone bridge across the Tiber, the Pons Aemilius, went up. Most of the major routes