Jonathan Slonim Ancient Rome Midterm Dr.

Calvert 3/12/13 Romes Vision of Herself In seeking to understand a historical culture, it is imperative that we look at how that culture defined itself. With Ancient Rome, our work in that regard is at once simple and surprisingly complex. On the one hand, our knowledge of the history of the Republic is almost entirely founded on Roman accounts. Thus, we know what the authors thought of their culture. However, most of the accounts that we have are, in effect, secondary sources. Much of our knowledge of the republic comes through Tacitus and Plutarch, both of whom lived in the first and second centuries A.D. We can, therefore have very little idea of what Republican Romans thought of themselves in their own time, except through archeological records and more minor accounts. The alternative is to look at how our sources in the first and second centuries viewed their own history. We can then treat them as primary sources, giving us a window into Romes idealized vision of her own history and a concrete base from which to make historical claims. With this method in mind, how did the Romans attempt to set themselves apart from other cultures? What made them great? What were the latent tendencies that gradually grew by the first century B.C. to allow Julius Caesar and Augustus to finally abolish the Republican Constitution? A survey of the history of the Republic shows a continual tension between the Roman desire for republican virtue and their tendency to conquest and imperialism. Both peaceful agriculturalism and aggressive expansionism were consideredto some degreevirtues among the Ancient Romans. This tension explains much of the Roman identity as found in the Imperial writers, and (especially in their minds) presages the downfall of the Roman Republic. Plutarchs writings on

Cato the Elder and on Sulla make excellent case studies and can serve to aptly illustrate how many Romans defined their cultural challenges. Rome was largely a derivative republic. The Greeks preceded them in thought, in mythology, and (to some degree) in political forms. This idea is still almost as controversial among scholars of the ancient world as it was among the Romans themselves. To what extent was Romes culture borrowed from the Greeks, and to what extent was it peculiarly Roman? As historians, we can never separate a cultures mores from those that preceded it, making this question almost impossible to answer. However, the Romans own ideas of their origins provide a fascinating and almost schizophrenic account of their relationship to the Ancient Greeks. The Roman ideal of manhood, of virtue, and of citizenship derived from the Greek ideal of goodness and beauty. This defines the aim of Roman citizenship throughout the Republic and into Imperial times. The word itself implies a balance between thought and action, between manly war and peaceful cultivation of the land, and between politics and private life. The fact that the Romans never felt that they had achieved this goal is indicative of how significant it was to them. Had they been content with their situation, we could assume that the Romans were perhaps not fully dedicated to the pursuit of this ideal. Instead, we see orators, politicians, historians, and generals consistently seeking to return the people to the more virtuous ways of their forefathers. This mythical ideal, enacted through the mos maiorum, or way of the elders, is clearly demonstrated in their founding myths. The word rex, or king, was almost unpronounceable after the Republic was first founded. The Roman citizens saw themselves as just that: citizens who would not be subject to a tyrant. Even their fear of tyranny was likely derivative of the Greeks, who had themselves sought to avoid tyranny and placed a high value on public participation in politics. Man is by nature a political animal, Aristotle declared, and the Romans listened to him. i

In the founding myths of Ancient Rome, Romulus, the first king of Rome, began many of the customs that continued until Rome was sacked in 410 by the Visigoths. He separated the Plebians from the Patricians, recognizing that some were more suited to agricultural labor and others to administration of the state. The Patricians, or nobles, were each responsible for the welfare of a number of Plebian clients, who would in return provide political, economic, and social support to their patrons. While Romans liked to believe that this was a unique invention of their own, it was in fact very similar to the patronage of the Ancient Greeks. There, a citizen would support a Metic or foreigner, represent him in court, and generally be (protector and lord) over him.ii While the Romans believed that they had come up with this system, it was actually a modified Greek idea. However, this system was one which the Romans believed made them unique, and it continued to be an important part of their political life into the time of the emperors. Another important part of the Roman identity was their peculiar constitution. According to legend, the Republic itself was founded in 509 by a man named Brutus. He persuaded the Senate to elect two consuls to rule for a year-long term rather than a king for life.iii Under this constitution, the Senate held much of the legislative power, while the Consuls were dedicated largely to administration and to war. As early as 445 B.C., the distinction between Patricians and Plebians was breaking down. As old money became insufficient to uphold some of the old Patrician families, it no longer made political or economic sense to exclude wealthy Plebian families from public office. 445 marked the first time that Plebians and Patricians could intermarry. Thus, a plebian family, through a number of generations, could eventually claim its own seats in the Senate. When this happened, most of the new crop of Senators (new men) retained their Plebian roots as a mark of pridea sort of rags to riches story that demonstrated their superior merit in overcoming such obstacles to reach high status. Cato the Elder became perhaps the most well-known of these prominent Plebians.

Plutarchs account of Cato the Elder demonstrates the importance that the Romans placed on tradition, on virtue, and even on Romanness itself. Cato himself used to say that he was certainly new to honors and positions of authority, but that as regards deeds of valor performed by his ancestors, his name was as old as any.iv There is a sort of double-standard in Plutarchs description of Cato. On the one hand, his name is as old as any in regards to deeds of valor, as his father and grandfather had both fought bravely and been recognized for their courage in war. However, the epithet Cato meant that a man had particularly distinguished himself . There was a tense balance between family honor and individual honor and recognition. While family accomplishments were highly respected and extremely important to Romans, Plutarch shows throughout his history that the individual acts of Cato are what make him stand out. This tension between traditional mores and individual action was part of what it meant to be Roman. Cato is described as a man who ever since his youth . . . had trained himself to work with his hands, to serve as a soldier, and to follow a soldier mode of living. When he was not fighting as a citizensoldier, Cato was a lawyer who provided his services in lawsuits without demanding a fee of any kind, [and] he did not seem to regard the prestige acquired in these conflicts as the principal object of his affairs.v Cato was the quintessential Roman in many ways, balancing an active public life with personal philanthropy and manly martial valor. Plutarch is even able to brush aside Catos flaws: For my own part I regard his conduct towards his slaves in treating them like beasts of burden [and] exploiting them . . . as the mark of a thoroughly ungenerous nature, which cannot recognize any bond between man and man but that of necessity. This is not so much of a mark against the statesman, however, as it is an indication of his wholehearted devotion to law and justice, argues Plutarch.vi The republican man is a man of action, and one whose life is dedicated to public service and war. Here the Romans differed substantially from the Greeks, who considered the contemplative life to be the truly good life. Cato,

we are told, never even studied Greek until he was an old man. He was, like many traditional Romans, quite skeptical of Greek philosophy. Philosophy was too likely to corrupt youth, and it had no value in actual practice. For a civilization that saw warfare as the highest calling of each citizen, this was simply not acceptable. Rhetoric was good insofar as it could help the speaker to motivate an army or to speak in a meeting of the Senate or Centurian Assembly. If it went beyond valuable applications, philosophical rhetoric was highly suspect. However, despite the skepticism with which Republican Rome viewed Greece, they always maintained an appreciation for the influence Greek culture had on their own. Plutarch writes of Cato, once he started studying Greek, he improved his oratory somewhat by the study of Thucydides . . . his writings are often enriched by ideas and anecdotes borrowed from the Greek, and many of his maxims and proverbs are literally translated from it. Greek was, we see, a valuable source of culture, learning, and practical thought. On the other hand, in his description of Sulla, a later general, Plutarch paints us a man who was impious toward the gods, sought after illgotten gain, and had no respect for Ancient Greek traditions. Rome did not send me to study ancient history. My task is to subdue rebels, he said to a pair of diplomats sent to him by the Attic tyrant.vii He then went on to sack both Athens and the Piraeus, destroying many famous buildings and landmarks. While Cato was respectful of Greek history, he often scoffed at certain aspects of their culture. Greeks speak from the lips, but Romans speak from the heart,viii he said. The counter-examples of Cato and Sulla show that respect for traditions of Hellenic derivation was certainly a virtue to the Romans, even if they did not emulate all aspects of Greek society. This relationship with Ancient Greek Culture was also indicative of a broader Roman problem: that of what to do with conquered peoples. Governors were put in place over them, and to some extent the conquered people were assimilated into Romes imperial hegemony. As republicans, the Romans always had an inconsistent relationship with imperialism. On the one

hand, the republican ideal required them to stay at home, like the famed Cincinnatus, tilling the land. On the other, the fields of Mars were the proving grounds of manhood, and they feared to stray too far from that ideal or become too soft. This tension generally resolved itself in favor of imperialism, but the Roman reasons for conquest were always based on an idea of just war that implicitly had to be followed. There are several modern theories for why the Romans chose to expand, all of which provide slightly incomplete understandings of the Roman self-consciousness. One is based on the idea of the bellum iustum, or just war, which the Romans held. Each war the Republic entered on was conceived as a response to a direct threat on Rome herself. Essentially, even at the height of her empire, Republican Romans believed that their wars were fought defensively, and every expansion was brought on by the necessity of quelling a rebellion or defending against an invader. This view is, however, incomplete, and many historians have supplemented it with the view that Romes system was inherently warlike. In order to successfully be elected, politicians had to be successful in war. While this is certainly truea good politician had to be proven in battleit does not completely account for the patterns of expansion seen in the Republic. The constructivist theory assumes that the Romans had different categories for allies and enemies than we do today. They seem, as a culture, to have regarded alliances more as friendships between countries than as contracts. Thus, war was entered into to assist a friend or to claim your just deserts from a wayward friend.ix While these are all incomplete explanations for Romes imperialism, they give a sense of the knife-edge on which the Republic balanced. Self-defense was necessary, and every newly-gained province had to be defended as adamantly as the older territories. This was the only way to maintain order throughout the empire and to maintain a Republican virtue as an empire. In fact, Rome saw herself as a benefactor to the nations she conquered, and assimilated them into her fold.

It was not enough to call themselves benefactors, the Romans had to prove their beneficence through actions and words. Thus, they made sure to punish bad provincial governors extremely strictly. This served a double purpose of keeping locals happy and maintaining good order within the empire. Bad governors could wreak havoc on a large administrative state, and so incentives to careful regulation were strong. David Brand writes, Throughout, we must observe the centrality to the Roman self-image of external relations and foreign commitments. Indeed, not only at Rome but in other instances and in the borad field of national identity, it has long been recognized that self tends to be understood in terms of and by contrast with other (e.g. Smith 1991). Of course, the Roman self-image entailed not simply the conquest of others, but also the rule of others for their own good and even their inclusion within the Roman self.x The Romans, like any culture, could not define themselves without defining who they were not. They were not barbarians, first and foremost. Instead, they set themselves the mission of civilizing the barbarians whom they had conquered. This presented a significant risk to the Romans themselves, as any citizens who stayed abroad were liable to be influenced badly by their absence from Rome. Not only could local cultures lead them astray from their core Roman values, but other citizens might not be on their best behavior when away from the capital. Here again, the Romans enacted a constant balancing act between just war, imperialism, and republicanism. The ideal of republicanism was fairly nebulous, but that never stopped the Romans from striving to continuously improve its execution. In every stage of its existence, from Republic to Principate, the Roman Empires leaders were calling the people back to the virtues of their forbears. Plutarchs own writing can in many ways be seen as a jeremiad-like call to remember the meaning of Romanism. He shows his audience in the mythicized figure of Cato the Elder what it meant to be a true statesman. Cato himself, in a speech quoted by Plutarch, calls on his fellow citizens to leave their wrong ways: how can we expect to save a city, where people are prepared to

pay more for a fish than for an ox?xi In asking this, Cato both reproves his contemporaries for their lack of foresight and suggests that agriculture has more lasting value than commercial activity. A fish is a one-time purchase, while an ox is necessary to any farm for hauling, breeding, or meat. He was a man of tradition, and he called on his fellow-citizens to follow him in the noble tradition of Romanness. By the time of Sulla, Plutarch writes, the age of pure and upright manners had passed.xii However, even Sullas contemporaries looked down on him because of his excessively lavish living. He was always organizing parties of the most imprudently outspoken characters.xiii Sulla was no longer focused on his family roots, but was instead enamored with his own personal success. He became too wealthy, forsaking the poverty out of which he had grown, and which Plutarch says is just as bad as losing your familys fortune. The fall of Rome was brought about when Romans lost their sense of balance, Plutarch implies. While Cato had always had a healthy distaste for Greek culture, Sulla was filled with some spirit of envious emulation which drove him to fight against the ancient city.xiv The fear of Greek culture which had led the Romans to seek their own identity (their rhetoric was from the heart) became dangerous when it led them to reject those parts of their own heritage that were embedded in Greek civilization. The Roman imperialism too, while necessary to their self-identity, continually strayed from their ideal. Since Roman ideology privileged the past, writers of the late Republic would look at earlier Roman imperialism as more just than that of the present. Ciceros judgment . . . was that Roman imperialism had once been more a patrocinium, a patronage: abuse had set in, he argued, when tyranny had set in at the center of power in Rome too, particularly in the aftermath of Sulla.xv The narrative the Romans paint of their decline begins in the nobility and virtue of the early Republic. By the second and first centuries B.C., that virtue had all but disappeared. Men like Cato the Elder hearkened back to a nobler day, and men like Sulla made republicans long for that

days return. But they were no longer living in the republican mean. In international affairs, they had become too open to the outside. The constant balance of beneficence and cautious separation had given way as citizenship was offered to all of Italy, and eventually to Roman subjects throughout the empire. Roman ideals were spread at the cost of their very Roman character. When impiety, corruption, and lazy living were accepted among Romes elite, Plutarch implicitly asks, how could the Republic not fall? As Rome lost the very balance and ordered virtue that made them Roman, their imperialistic tendencies ran away with them. The forms still existed. the emperors still paid lip service to the Senate and to a Republican ideal. The word king never returned to the lexicon, but the damage was done. Men like Sulla achieved power and abused it for personal gain. Men like the idealized Cato no longer existed. Thus, Plutarch, like Cato before him, called on Romans to turn from their selfish ways. He called on them to remember their past and return to it. Perhaps what most made Rome Roman was the desire to emulate the pasta past that had likely never truly existed, and which could certainly never exist again, but to which every Roman, from Cato to Plutarch, under the Republic and under the Principate, aspired. Republicanism was the ideal, but as it turned inexorably to empire and coarse living, the Romans saw that it would surely terminate in tyranny. This is the fate which Cato feared and which Plutarch sought to undo. The Republic lost its balance and finally plunged into servility.

Bibliography Aristotle, Politics, I.1253a2, trans. Simpson, Peter, Raleigh: UNC Press, 1997. Dyionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities iv, lxxxiv, 2-4, from LD,. In Roman Civilization; vol. 1, Lewis, Naphtali and Reinhold, Meyer, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, trans. Scott-Kilvert, Ian. London: Penguin Books, 1965. Plutarch, Fall of the Roman Republic, trans. Warner, Rex London: Penguin Books, 1958. David Braund, Cohors; the governor and his entourage in the self-image of the Roman Republic, in Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, eds. Laurence, Ray, and Berry, Joanne. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Endnotes
Aristotle, Politics, I.1253a2, trans. Simpson, Peter, (Raleigh: UNC Press, 1997). Rahe, Paul, in-class lecture, November 2011. Dyionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities iv, lxxxiv, 2-4, from LD,. In Roman Civilization; vol. 1, Lewis, Naphtali and Reinhold, Meyer, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Plutarch, Makers of Rome, trans. Scott-Kilvert, Ian (London: Penguin Books, 1965), 119. Ibid. 120 Ibid, 121 Plutarch, Fall of the Roman Republic, trans. Warner, Rex (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 74. Plutarch, Makers, 133 Weaire, Gavin, Lecture 3/5/13 David Braund, Cohors; the governor and his entourage in the self-image of the Roman Republic, in Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, eds. Laurence, Ray, and Berry, Joanne (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16. Plutarch, Makers, 127 Plutarch, Fall, 57 Ibid, 58. Ibid, 78 Braund, 11
i

ii
iii

iv v

vi

vii

viii ix x

xi

xii

xiii xiv xv