The impact of empire

It was also an empire of communication, mobility, misunderstanding and changing perspectives, as a closer look at that story of the delegation from Teos vividly reveals. It is easy enough to sympathise with the predicament of the underdog. The two men had sailed across half the Mediterranean on a journey that would have taken anything between two and five weeks, depending on the season of the year, the quality of the ship and whether they were prepared to sail after dark (night sailing could take a week off the journey but was fraught with added danger). When they arrived in Rome, they would have been faced with a city that was larger, but considerably less elegant, than some they had passed through on the journey. One unfortunate Greek ambassador at about the same time is known to have fallen into an open Roman sewer and broken his leg – and made the most of his convalescence by giving introductory lectures on literary theory to a curious audience.

Rome had strange, foreign customs too. Interestingly, whoever at Abdera composed the text on the stone did not even try to translate some distinctively Roman terms (such as atria and patronus, ‘patron’) but merely transcribed them in Greek script. When they did venture a translation, it could be decidedly odd. The envoys were said, for example, to have offered daily ‘obeisance’ to the Romans. The Greek word here, proskynesis, literally means ‘bowing and scraping’ or ‘kissing the feet’. This presumably refers to the Roman practice of salutatio, which involved clients and dependants paying a morning call on their patrons but no kissing of feet at all – though maybe these foreign visitors saw the practice for the humiliation it was. We can only guess how they made contacts or put their case. Many wealthy Romans spoke some Greek, better than the Teans would have known Latin, but not always very well. Real Greeks were known to have made wicked fun of the terrible Roman accent.

Yet when this pair of Teans turned up in the city, some Romans may have felt unease too. For even if the attention and the recognition of Roman power was flattering, this was a new world, maybe almost as perplexing for them as for their visitors. What must it have felt like to be confronted with a stream of foreigners from as far away as it was possible to imagine, speaking too quickly in a language you only just understood, apparently extremely bothered about a small piece of land of which you knew nothing, and dangerously liable to bow down and kiss your feet? If, as Polybius put it, the Romans had conquered almost the whole of the known world in the fifty-three years up to 168 BCE, then over that same period Rome, and Roman culture, had been transformed too by those vastly expanded horizons.

This transformation involved movements of people, into and out of Rome, on a scale never before seen in the ancient world. When slaves from all over the Mediterranean poured into Italy and into Rome itself, it was certainly a story of exploitation; but it was also one of massive forced migration. The figures that ancient writers give for the captives taken by Romans in particular wars may well be exaggerations (100,000 in the First Punic War, for example, or 150,000 taken by Aemilius Paullus from just one part of Perseus’ territory), and anyway many of them would not have been transported directly back to Rome but would have been sold to middlemen much closer to the point of capture. But it is a fair estimate that in the early second century BCE the numbers of new slaves arriving in the peninsula as a direct result of victories overseas averaged out at more than 8,000 per year, at a time when the total number of adult male Roman citizens, inside and outside the city, was in the order of 300,000. In due course, a significant proportion of these would have been freed and become new Roman citizens. The impact not only on the Roman economy but also on the cultural and ethnic diversity of the citizen body was enormous; the division between Romans and outsiders was increasingly blurred.

At the same time, Romans poured overseas. There had been Roman travellers, traders and adventurers exploring the Mediterranean for centuries. ‘Lucius son of Gaius’, the mercenary who left his name on an inscription on Crete in the late third century BCE, cannot have been the first Roman to make his living in one of the world’s oldest professions. But from the second century BCE, thousands of Romans were spending long periods outside the Italian peninsula. There were Roman traders swarming over the eastern Mediterranean, cashing in on the commercial opportunities that followed conquest, from the slave trade and the spice trade to more mundane army supply contracts. Antiochus Epiphanes even hired a Roman architect, Decimus Cossutius, for building works in Athens, and we can track this man’s descendants and ex-slaves, still active in the construction business in Italy and the East decades later. But it was the soldiers, now serving for years on end overseas rather than just for the traditional summer campaign at Rome’s back door, who made up the majority of ordinary Romans abroad. After the Second Punic War, there were regularly more than 30,000 Roman citizens in the army outside Italy, anywhere from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean.

This threw up a whole series of new dilemmas. In 171 BCE, for example, the senate was confronted with a deputation from Spain representing more than 4,000 men who were the sons of Roman soldiers and Spanish women. As there was no formal right of marriage between Romans and native Spaniards, these men were, in our terms, stateless. They cannot have been the only ones with this problem. When Aemilianus later came as a new broom to take over the army command in Spain, he is said to have thrown 2,000 ‘prostitutes’ out of the Roman camp (I suspect that the women might have defined themselves rather differently). But in the case before the senate, the offspring concerned had the confidence to ask the Romans for a city to call their own, and presumably for some clarification about their legal position. They were settled in the town of Carteia on the southern tip of Spain, which – with the Romans’ usual flair for improvisation – was given the status of a Latin colony and defined as ‘a colony of ex-slaves’. How many hours of discussion it took the senators to decide that the bizarre combination of ‘ex-slave’ and ‘Latin’ offered the closest match available for the civic status of these technically illegitimate Roman soldiers’ sons, we have no idea. But this certainly shows them grappling with the issues of what it was to be (partly) Roman outside Italy.

By the mid second century BCE, well over half the adult male citizens of Rome would have seen something of the world abroad, leaving an unknown number of children where they went. To put it another way, the Roman population had suddenly become by far the most travelled of any state ever in the ancient Mediterranean, with only Alexander the Great’s Macedonians or the traders of Carthage as possible rivals. Even for those who never stepped abroad, there were new imaginative horizons, new glimpses of places overseas and new ways of understanding their place in the world.

The triumphal processions of victorious generals offered one of the most impressive windows onto the outside. When the Roman crowds lined the streets to welcome home their conquering armies, which paraded through the city with their profits and plunder on display, it was not only the astounding wealth that impressed them – though some of it would have astounded anyone at any period. When Aemilius Paullus returned in 167 BCE from his victory over King Perseus, it took three days to trundle all the loot through the city, including 250 truckloads of sculpture and painting alone, and so much silver coin that it needed 3,000 men to carry it, in 750 huge vessels. No wonder that Rome could afford to suspend all direct taxation. But it was also the dazzling display of foreign lands and customs that captured the popular imagination. Generals commissioned elaborate paintings and models to be carried in the procession, depicting famous battles and the towns they had captured, so that the people at home could see what their armies had been doing abroad. The heads of the crowd were turned by the defeated Eastern kings in their ‘national dress’ and exotic regalia, by such curiosities as the pair of globes made by the Greek scientist Archimedes, who was killed in the Second Punic War, and by the exotic animals that sometimes became the stars of the show. The first elephant to tread the streets of Rome appeared in the parade for the victory over Pyrrhus in 275 BCE. It was all a far cry, as one later writer observed, from ‘the cattle of the Volsci and the flocks of the Sabines’, which had been the only spoils a century or so earlier.

The comedies of Plautus and Terence offered a different kind of window, with some subtle and maybe unsettling reflections. It is true that the boy-gets-girl plots of almost all of these plays, adapted from Greek predecessors, are not now best known for their subtlety. The ‘happy ending’ to some of their rape stories can appal modern readers: ‘Good news – the rapist was her fiancé all along’, to summarise the dénouement of one. It is also clear that the original performances, in public celebrations of all kinds, from religious festivals to the ‘after-party’ of triumphs, were unruly, raucous occasions, attracting a wide cross section of the population of the city, including women and slaves. This is in sharp contrast to classical Athens, where the theatre audience, though larger than at Rome, was probably restricted to male citizens, unruly or not. Nonetheless, there was one thing that all these Roman plays demanded of those who came to watch: that they face the cultural complexity of the world in which they lived.

That was partly because the plays are set in Greece. The assumption was that the audience had some sense of places outside Italy, or at least some name recognition of them. The plots often turn on decidedly diverse themes. One comedy of Plautus brings a Carthaginian onto the stage, who babbles some possibly accurate, but still incomprehensible, Punic. Another features a couple of characters disguised as Persians – and to laugh at actors who are meant to be badly disguised as Persians is a much more knowing response than to laugh at actors who are simply meant to bePersians. But, with a sophistication that is startling at such an early stage in the history of Roman literature, Plautus exploits even further the hybrid character of his work, and of his world.

One of his favourite gags, which he repeats in the prologue to a number of plays, is some version of ‘Demophilus wrote this, Plautus barbarised it’, referring to his Latin (‘barbaric’) translation of a comedy by the Greek playwright Demophilus. This apparently throwaway line was, in fact, a clever challenge to the audience. For those of Greek origin, it no doubt gave the opportunity for a quiet snigger at the expense of the new, barbaric rulers of the world. For the others, it demanded the conceptual leap of imagining what they might look like from the outside. To enjoy the laugh, they had to understand, even if only as a joke, that to Greek eyes, Romans might appear to be barbarians.

The widening horizons of empire, in other words, disturbed the simple hierarchy of ‘us over them’, the ‘civilised over the barbarous’, which had underpinned classical Greek culture. Romans were certainly capable of scornfully dismissing conquered barbarians, of contrasting their own civilised, sophisticated selves with the crude, long-haired, woad-painted Gauls, or other supposedly inferior species. Indeed, they often did just that. But from this point on, there was always another strand of Roman writing, which reflected more subversively on the relative position of the Romans in the wider world and on how the balance of virtue was to be set between insiders and outsiders. When, three centuries later, the historian Tacitus insinuated that true ‘Roman’ virtue was to be found in the ‘barbarians’ of Scotland and not in Rome itself, he was developing a tradition of argument that went right back to these early days of empire, and of literature.