In his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon lamented the intellectual life of the Greeks in the second century ad: ‘the name of Poet was almost forgotten, that of Orator usurped by the sophists [he uses the word in a derogatory sense, see earlier, p. 270] . . . a cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.’ This dismissive attitude has long since been overturned by a new appreciation of Greek culture in this period.
The Romans regarded the defeated Greeks with some ambivalence. Cicero, for instance, governor of Cilicia, certainly enjoyed buying Greek statues and exploring Greek philosophy but he wrote to his younger brother Quintus, just appointed governor of Asia, that the Greeks of his day were not worthy of those of fifth-century Greece; they were ‘deceptive, inconstant, and schooled by long servitude to ingratiating ways’. He admitted to putting on a false show of friendliness simply to keep relationships smooth. Provincial governors were often abusive to their subjects. Flaccus, the governor of Asia, raised special taxes to create a fleet to protect his province against pirates but it was never built. He collected taxes from Jews but never forwarded them to Jerusalem. Protests to Rome were dismissed by Flaccus’ supporters there. No wonder the Greeks hesitated to embrace Roman rule.
It took some time for this mutual distrust to dissolve. Stable administration by Augustus helped restore confidence but far-seeing Greek cities, among them Aph-rodisias (see Interlude 8), saw the advantage of winning Roman support and patronage. When Tiberius wished to build a new temple to the imperial cult in the province of Asia, eleven cities competed to be its home, each one stressing its loyalty to Rome. (Smyrna won.) The visits of Nero to Greece, though ludicrous in the emperor’s attempts to compete in Greek festivals, may have had some positive impact. It took an enthusiast such as Hadrian to cement the relationship between emperors and Greece. In 124 Hadrian was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries and a year later he launched a major building programme in Athens. He finished the vast temple to Olympian Zeus begun by Peisistratus in the sixth century Bc. He donated a magnificent library that was graced with a hundred columns of Phrygian marble. A new aqueduct brought water into Athens from Mount Parnes. Then when the temple to Zeus was ready for dedication Hadrian inaugurated a new festival, the Panhellenion. Cities with an ancient Greek heritage, most of them from the mainland, met every four years within the sanctuary of the temple and participated in
Games modelled on those of Olympia. For the first time in this period Greeks were among those achieving consular rank.
The peoples of the Near East used a mass of languages. Aramaic was widespread but its dialects were so distinctive that they could count as separate languages, Syriac in Osrhoene (modern south-eastern Turkey), Palmyrene at Palmyra on the far eastern border of the empire, and Nabataean for the Nabataeans. The Jews spoke in Hebrew and Aramaic. The Egyptians used demotic Egyptian, and, from the second century, Coptic appears. Lycian had died out as a written language by 300 bc although Phrygian survived along the northern coast of modern Turkey. It was written down in Greek script. Greek gradually became more pervasive. After the conquests of Alexander it was the language of the conquerors and administration. The Jews who had dispersed during the diaspora were translating their Hebrew scriptures into Greek by the end of the third century bc. When the Nabataeans (see earlier, p. 488) were still a client kingdom of Rome, they posted their inscriptions in both Nabataean and Greek. By the time they were formally made a province of the Roman empire in ad 106 they used only Greek while retaining Nabataean for their rituals. By this period anyone with an ambition to succeed had to be able to speak and write Greek. Evidence from Egyptian school texts show that Homer and other Greek writers were on the curriculum. The word koine (‘common’) is used to describe the everyday Greek that emerged in these centuries. Koine was the language of the historian Polybius and of the Gospels and the letters of Paul. It was also the language of Hellenistic science. (See J. N. Adams, Mark Janse, and Simon Swain, Bilingualism in Ancient Society, Oxford, 2010, for a full survey of this fascinating area.)
World History
