WeeklySA_AdminHISTORY: An illuminating portrait of the intellectual tradition of Greek writers and thinkers during the Age of Rome…
By Jacob Mawela
In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic, thus marking the genesis of Roman Greece. And, in 86 BC, the Roman ex-consul and general Lucius Cornelius Sulla sacked Athens after it had unwisely allied itself with Mithridates VI, an independent king who had claimed he would liberate it from Roman hegemony – laying to waste the city of Socrates and Plato and destroying the famous Lyceum academy, where Aristotle had studied.
Nonetheless, the centuries of occupation which were to follow wouldn’t deter the heterogeneous customs of Greek cultural life from burgeoning – a reality contextualised by the poet Horace through this remark: “Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror.”
For all the conqueror’s military credential, the subjugates’ civilised ways, based on past and present reputation, would become the basis of the sort of envy put into perspective by the Roman statesman, Cicero thus: “Even as we govern that race of men in which civilisation is to be found, we should certainly offer to them what we have received from them . . . for we appear to owe them a special debt.”
The educated among the Romans simply couldn’t deny the lure of ‘imperial Hellenism’ (Hellenism defined as the study or imitation of ancient Greek culture)!
The forefront of such a state of being was helmed by Greek thinkers who hailed from wealthy backgrounds and who could pick and choose from a rich array of academic disciplines founded by Greeks themselves, referred to as the ‘children of Athena’ (the Greek goddess of wisdom who can be traced back to the second millennium BC).
Greeks, who prided themselves on their superiority and made it difficult for outsiders to be welcomed into their culture, deemed the Romans as boorish and uncultured.
They exuded cultural arrogance, particularly regarding their subtle language which was difficult to translate into Latin, the Romans’ language, which they believed was in comparison impoverished – so much so that, overall, there were many more speakers of Greek than Latin throughout the Roman empire!
The prevailing attitude among them revolved around condescension and snobbery, with one in the second century AD, a physician named Galen, insinuating that words used by other people (non-Greeks) in their languages resembled a miasma of cacophony, ranging from the wailing of pigs to the call of the woodpecker. And another, a sham teacher of rhetoric, advising a student to “pull together fifteen but no more than twenty Attic words and practice them well and have them on the tip of your tongue and in every speech, drizzle on a few as a sweetener”.
The lives of the writers and thinkers – who shared a common educational background and inherited tradition – are brought together pending an epoch regarded as classical. These were the historian Polybius, the geographer Strabo, the philosopher Plutarch, the politician Arrian of Nicomedia, the satirist Lucian of Samosata, the astronomer Ptolemy – scholars referred to by the Greek word, pepaideumenoi (men of culture) capable of understanding materials across the disciplines of astronomy, medicine, geography, mathematics, poetry, et cetera, who contemptuously labelled those without their elite class as idiotai.
The tome features tableaus of ruins such as the Athens-located Odeion built in the middle of the second century AD, and still in use to this day, as well as the statue of the orator Aelius Aristides (which can be seen inside the Vatican Museums) and a 13th century edition of Ptolemy’s Geographike.
It narrates the story of intellectual inquiry across a period of more than 500 years – one which would shape the Middle Ages and beyond! The author, Charles P Freeman, is an English historian specialising in the history of ancient Greece and Rome.
An acclaimed classicist, he is the author of numerous books on the ancient world, including The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason.
* A trade paperback, The Children of Athena: Greek Writers and Thinkers in the Age of Rome, is published by Bloomsbury and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers. Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R335
