The Roman Debt to Greece

[M. Caecilius]

For some reason, this reminds me of Life of Brian, but set in Rome. I can already see Cato the Censor rise up in the Senate and ask: "What have the Greeks ever done for us?" :mrgreen:

Seriously, though: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio as Horace says: "Greece took her wild captor captive, and introduced the arts into rustic Latium". However, it's an extremely complex issue.

First, the chronology of this hellenisation is much, much earlier than the Roman conquest of even the Greek cities on Italian soil, never mind the conquest of Greece proper. The connection to the Trojan War was made first in the 5th century, by Hellanicus of Lesbos and Damastes of Sigeum), long before the Romans got around to write their own histories. Finds from the Volcanal show the myth of Hephaistos (and thus the syncretism Vulcan-Hephaistos) as early as 570 B.C. It can be difficult throughout to separate the Greek from a purely Roman culture almost right down to the mythical 753 B.C.

Other introductions - such as the first wound doctor in Rome, in the late 3rd century B.C. - were later (although this one backfired, as the Romans, who flocked to him at first, came to regard him as a butcher - carnifex - soon afterwards). Matters get confusing in the 2nd century, when people became increasingly conscious of the Greek "infiltration" and the period produced extreme hellenophiles (Scipio) and hellenophobes (Cato Maior).

Second, thanks to this confused chronology, it becomes very difficult to say which elements of a particular topic are Roman, which are Greek, and which are from yet another culture - Etruscan, for instance - which may itself have been influenced by Greece. Rome owes a lot to Greece, but not all of it directly: much of the engineering seems to have been adopted from the Etruscans, for instance. They may have got it partly from the Greeks, of course. It's a truism that one of Rome's formulae of success was to adopt and adapt whatever they found elsewhere and worked, be it Gallic shields, Spanish swords or Greek medicine and religious rites. Of course, since the Greeks were so advanced, there was a lot to adopt from them.

Apart from those features already mentioned, one could add that the Romans claimed that their XII Tables, the earliest written laws of Rome (450 B.C.) were based on fact-finding missions in Athens. This may be a myth, as the Romans had many peculiar laws of their own, but still goes to show the influence of Greece on Rome.

The earliest Roman history was written in Greek, on the Greek model, although soon Rome developed her own take and style. Plautus remodeled Greek plays for his comedies, but again managed to bring in peculiar Roman elements.

So, yes: Rome was, probably already in the regal period, a heavily Greek-influenced city which managed an exceptional mixture between outside influences, native traditions, and improvements on both. Although they never lost a feeling of inferiority to Greek culture, compounded by a tendency to despise the luxury and decadence of the Graeculi to whom they admitted themselves owing so much.