The impact of Rome’s victories at home was, however, dramatic. Not only did vast amounts of plunder, including some hundreds of thousands of slaves, pour into Italy but the city was open now to the rich cultures of the east. Rome had always been part of a cultural matrix that included access to Greek culture either through the mediation of the Etruscans or directly via the Greek cities of southern Italy that had now been absorbed. It was the fall of Syracuse in 212 that saw the first major influx of Greek art to Rome. The historian Plutarch exaggerates when he writes, ‘Prior to this, Rome neither had nor even knew of these exquisite and refined things. . . rather it was full of barbaric weapons and bloody spoils’, but the triumphant processions of booty had an overwhelming impact and clearly marked a new phase in the relationship with Greece and her culture. The eastern wars brought the first treasures from mainland Greece, engraved plate and inlaid furniture, music girls, and the conception that cooking was an art. The victor of Pydna, Aemilius Paullus, carried off the royal library of Macedonia as a gift for his sons. He brought back so many statues and paintings that they took three days to pass in his triumphal procession.
The impact was soon felt in Rome itself. A portico set up by Quintus Metellus, the destroyer of Macedonia, in 148, was the first permanent Greek building in the city. Soon Greek artists were copying Hellenistic statues for Roman patrons. Within Rome marble replaced tufa blocks and fine metals terracotta statues. The earliest Roman temple in marble was put up in the 140s and although the Etruscan model of a high podium and decorated fa9ade was retained the decoration was now in Greek and the Greek architectural orders became common. The sack of Corinth resulted in a flood of bronze decorative objects into Rome that became favourite collectors’ pieces. In the second century Rome was transformed with three new aqueducts, a mass of new temples, and, for the first time, grand houses for the nobility. One vast warehouse, the Porticus Aemilia, on the left bank of the Tiber, south of the Aventine, was 487 metres long and 60 metres wide with 294 pillars. The ‘Aemilia’ records the patronage of the military family who restored it over generations, thus showing another way in which a noble family could keep its name before the public. (It could only have been constructed with the help of a Roman invention, opus caementicium, a mortar of lime and sand strengthened by stones, that appears for the first time about 200 Bc.)
Greek culture infiltrated Roman at many levels. Athletic games following a Greek model were staged for the first time in Rome in 186 by Scipio Africanus’ brother, the victor over Antiochus. Greek drama was introduced by Livius Andronicus at the end of the third century. The Greek elites of Sicily and southern Italy were avid theatre-goers. Livius was born Greek and had probably been brought to Rome as a boy after the sack of Tarentum in 272. The most lively adaptations were those of Plautus (c.250-184 Bc), who translated a mass of Hellenistic plays into a series of fast-moving musical comedies, full of stock characters, thwarted lovers, swaggering soldiers, and slaves with more wits than their masters.
The greatest poet of the period, Quintus Ennius (239-169 Bc), who was trilingual in Oscan, Greek, and Latin, introduced the Greek epic into Roman literature in his celebrated Annales, a verse history of Rome. Its sombre tone caught the mood of the educated classes and it became a standard text from which Roman schoolboys learnt of the exploits of their ancestors. Later Terence (c.193-159 Bc) followed Plautus in adapting Greek comedies for the Roman stage, although he kept more closely to the originals and was altogether more highbrow than Plautus.
By the middle of the second century BC, therefore, the average upper-class Roman knew a great deal about the Greek way of life and would have met Greeks in a variety of contexts. Individual Romans adopted Greek ways with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Many remained very conscious of a traditional system of Roman values that was under threat, values that were rooted in a dimly remembered past where the typical citizen lived a frugal life on a small-holding. (The archetypal and probably mythical hero was Cincinnatus, who became dictator for sixteen days during the fifth-century wars with the Aequi, returning to his plot of land as soon as the state had been saved.) In war the Roman would show virtus, unflinching courage, at home he would be marked out by his pietas, correct observance of the religious rituals by which the protection of his home and the state would be assured. To his clients he would be known for his fides, good faith, and he would never be corrupted by bribes. These virtues would combine to make up his dignitas, his status, and they would achieve their greatest value in public service. The funerals of great men were used as a means of inspiring the next generation with the ideals of the past, often with the son extolling the virtues of his deceased father. ‘He achieved the ten greatest and best things which wise men spend their whole lives seeking,’ proclaimed Quintus Caecilius of his father Lucius, the pontifex maximus, on his death in 221 Bc:
He wished to be the first of warriors, the best of orators, and the most valiant of commanders; to be in charge of the greatest affairs and held in the highest honour; to possess supreme wisdom and to be regarded as supreme within the senate; to come to great wealth by honourable means; to leave many children; and to be the most distinguished person in the state.
Many feared that these values were threatened by the influx of Greek culture. Plutarch blamed Marcellus, the victor of Syracuse, for ‘filling the Roman people, who had hitherto been accustomed to fighting or farming. . . with a life of softness and ease. . . with a taste for leisure and idle talk, affecting urbane opinions about the arts and about artists, even to wasting the better part of a day on such things.’ A famous passage from Polybius chronicles the supposed decay:
Some young men squandered their energies on love affairs with boys, others with courtesans, and others again with musical entertainments and bequests and the extravagant expenses that go with them, for in the course of the war with Perseus and the Macedonians they had quickly acquired the luxurious habits of the Greeks in this direction. So far had the taste for dissipation and debauchery spread among young men that many of them were ready to pay a talent for a male prostitute and 300 drachmae for a jar of Pontic pickled fish. (Translation: Ian Scott-Kilvert)
There were fears that physical hardiness would be undermined by these activities, that a weakness for wealth would lead to corruption, and that family fortunes would be wastefully squandered. In retaliation a number of laws curbed spending at banquets, while in a famous case in the 150s the seats of a theatre were destroyed on the insistence of a conservative senator who believed standing was more manly. (Rome was not to have a stone theatre until Pompey constructed one a hundred years later and even then he had to conceal it as a temple with a semicircle of steps below it.) A group of philosophers from Athens who arrived in 155 (Carneades the Sceptic was among them, see earlier, p. 353) were ridiculed when it appeared that philosophical arguments could be applied to destroy any justification for the Roman empire. Earlier, in 186, there had been a witch-hunt against the participants in Bacchanalian orgies, the Roman equivalents of the riotous celebrations in honour of Dionysus.
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