Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler
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of Horace’s and Ovid’s, and Sulpicia, the only extant woman poet of the classical era, whose poems have been preserved along with those of Tibullus. With these, the roll call of accepted Golden Age writers is essentially complete.†
Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Latin’s great epic poet. His apparent prophecy of a new age brought in by a virgin and child assured his later reputation among Christians.
In their separate ways, all but Catullus (who died too soon) needed to come to terms with the new dominance of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. They were then amply rewarded for their optimistic view of the new regime: only Ovid fell foul of the government, but apparently because of a social or personal faux pas, rather than a false move in the political sphere.
More important for the history of Latin, they were all consciously following, imitating, and sometimes even translating Greek originals—inevitably the best they knew of, with greater ambition as their confidence ripened.
So Virgil started with Theocritus, a Syracusan of the third century who had made his name at Alexandria (then the Greek cultural centre) with the invention of highly mannered poetry about the lives of country bumpkins, so-called bucolic (“ox-herding”) verse. Virgil then moved on to Hesiod, whose archaic Works and Days is a guide to farming, but allowed Virgil (in the Georgics, Greek for ‘land-workings’) to express a Roman’s traditional joy in growing things in Italy, while never forgetting the contemporary crisis in land ownership there from a century of civil wars and veterans’ demands for settlement. At last he attempted the ultimate challenge, to measure himself (and Latin) against Homer himself, the author of the universal founding texts of Greek culture. In the Aeneid, by taking the mythical theme of Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy (via Carthage), he was able to address a resonantly Roman theme, but still have the freedom given by writing about the mythical past—and since the story contained sea adventures followed by a war, he could neatly draw on, and invite comparison with, both the Odyssey and the Iliad.
Although Virgil is a universal example of Latin literature being built out of Greek, the other authors recognized as great were no less explicit about their models. Horace drew on Archilochus of Paros (mid-seventh century) and Hipponax of Ephesus (late sixth) for his iambics, Sappho and Alcaeus (Lesbos, late seventh century) for his lyrical odes. Even his Ars Poetica is based on the prescriptions of an otherwise obscure Neoptolemus of Parium. Both Catullus and Propertius drew much from the learned Alexandrian poet Callimachus (mid-third century), and Propertius even claimed to be carrying on his inspiration in Roman form. Ovid was less clearly imitating Greeks than trying to outdo some of his illustrious Latin forebears, notably Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, while consciously exploring new territory. Nonetheless his Ars Amatoria ‘Lover’s Art’ is supposed to be indebted to the explicit prose manual Aphrodisia by Philaenis;* his Fasti ‘Calendar’ was influenced by Phaenomena, an astronomical and meteorological poem by Aratus (early third century, Asia); and his masterpiece, the mythological Metamorphoses, has Callimachus’ Aetia ‘Causes’ in the background, a mélange of mythological stories in verse, united only in that they sketch the origins of rites and cities.
In Livy’s field, Roman history, the first works, even by Romans, had actually been written in Greek. † And Romans were not the only ones interested to write it: one of Livy’s major sources was the Greek Polybius (of the midsecond century BC). On occasion, Livy paid fulsome homage to Greek learning, calling Greeks “the most erudite race of all, who brought many arts to us for the cultivation of mind and body.”29 The ground rules for history had largely been set by Greeks, and these were never challenged by their Roman students and successors. Strikingly for moderns, these included a general practice of inventing long speeches to put in the mouths of the protagonists, dramatizing and analyzing their motivation. This was very much in the tradition of Greek and Roman education, where schoolwork was largely oral. Pupils were encouraged to develop their understanding not through essays, but by working up speeches to examine the strengths and weaknesses of famous past situations.* And modern analysts of Livy30 tend to emphasize how incidents in early Rome were recast in the light of episodes from Greek history. So the tale of the rape of Lucretia, which led to the downfall of the Etruscan king Tarquinius, is adapted to mirror the story of the homosexual love affair that was the undoing of the Athenian tyrants Hippias and Hipparchus; and the entry of Gauls into Rome, followed by a massacre of senators, echoes Herodotus’ classic account of the Persian sack of Athens and destruction of the diehards who held the Acropolis. History was all about telling a good story, and the old (Greek) ones were the good ones.
Titus Livius (Livy) dramatized Rome’s past, from the city’s foundation to the present, firmly establishing Latin as a language for history.
So keen were the Romans to be seen as successors to the Greeks (but transcending them, of course) that they had elaborated the origin of Rome as something close to a Greek city: so they had adopted the story of Aeneas the noble Trojan as their foundation myth. Some Greeks had (for unknown reasons) reciprocated early on: both the fourth-century Academic philosopher Heraclides Ponticus and the third-century Macedonian warlord Demetrius the Besieger characterized Rome as a Greek city (pólis Hellēnís) in Italy—strange when we consider how little Rome had in common with real Greek foundations such as Cumae, Syracuse, or Tarentum.31 Pyrrhus, another Greek warlord (and enemy of Demetrius’), had seen a different significance in the foundation myth: if Rome was the new Troy, it was a fitting target for a Greek crusade.32 But in the next century, Rome, now with military control of Greece, assimilated itself subjectively to the Greek view of the world as a whole. This was not so much a process of trying to win Greek “hearts and minds”; we have seen that, if there ever was such a process, it did not last beyond the first generation of Roman control. Rather, it was that Romans saw themselves as insiders, in a civilized world, where the Greeks had seen all but Greeks as inferiors and outsiders. Hence the Romans’ appropriation of the unappetizing Greek term for ‘foreigner’, bárbaros (about as respectful as calling aliens “bowwows”).
The first large-scale user of this word in the Latin tradition was Plautus, at the beginning of the Roman wars in Greece, and for him it referred to what was non-Greek, and quite often Roman. It often has a decidedly negative charge: BARBARVM HOSPITEM MI IN AEDEM NIL MOROR ‘I can’t abide a barbar guest in my house,’ says a Greek slave to and of an apparent down-and-out, who is as Greek as he is.33 Still, Plautus could have been a key influence in changing its meaning from “non-Greek” to “neither Roman nor Greek”: when watching a Plautine play, the Roman audience had to identify with Greeks and so see the rest of the world as barbarous.
One hundred and fifty years later, the word had become, for Romans, the standard one to characterize those lacking in that Graeco-Roman speciality, civilization: Cicero could routinely contrast HVMANVS, DOCTVS ‘humane and cultivated’ with IMMANIS, BARBARVS ‘savage and barbarous’.34 The quasiracial claim that only Greeks and Romans enjoyed full humanity and civilization is clear, since Cicero was also happy to cast as BARBARI Syrians and even learned Egyptian priests, whose title to learning and literacy was well-known to predate the Romans certainly, and probably the Greeks, by many centuries.35 Julius Caesar, about the same time, naturally calls BARBARI not only all the peoples he challenged outside the Roman Empire, but his non-Roman “native troops”