The opposition to the trends was spearheaded by one of the most interesting and complex figures of the period, Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 Bc). Cato was a native of Tusculum, a small town near Rome, who through the help of a noble patron and his own considerable ability was able to win a consulship in 195 BC. His command for the year was in Spain and here he excelled himself, returning to Rome to celebrate a triumph. He was later sent to Greece with the Roman army that defeated Antiochus at Thermopylae. As a respected former consul he was elected in 184 to the prestigious post of censor and he revived the traditional role of the office as a guardian of public morals. For the next thirty-five years he stood out as the figurehead of resistance to the influx of ideas from Greece and to luxurious living and corruption. In his later years he became increasingly obsessed with the continuing survival of Carthage and it was his often-repeated pronouncement ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ which helped create the atmosphere that led to the city’s final destruction. Cato wrote the first history of Rome in Latin and the earliest surviving treatise on agriculture, De Agricultura, which despite its idealization of the rural past of Rome was supportive of the new commercial farming. His narrowness and vindictiveness on public occasions was offset to some extent by a real affection for his son, for whom he composed a history of Rome written out in large letters for easy reading and whose bath-time he never missed.
Yet Cato was not simply a narrow-minded Roman traditionalist. He had at least been to Greece even if only as a soldier. Although he showed no deep understanding ofGreek culture there are hints in his writings that he had read Homer, Demosthenes, and Xenophon. When he contributed to the building of Rome it was with a basilica, the all-purpose assembly hall used for law cases, commercial dealings, and markets which was derived from the Greek stoa. Probably it was not so much Greece itself that he feared as the loss of self-control by those who took on Greek ways.
In his Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY, 1992), Eric Gruen provides a balanced assessment of the relationship between Greek and Roman
In which he stresses how often the Romans used Greek culture to sustain their own cultural identity. Greek statues were often rededicated in Roman temples, for instance. It was the maintenance of the dignity of the Roman elite and of good public order that seems to have been behind the rejection of specific Greek customs, such as exercising naked. The same could be said of the suppression of the Bacchanalian cults in 186 bc. Their Greek origins did not offend, it was rather their frenzied music, abandoned dancing, and promiscuous mixing of men and women that challenged conventional notions of authority and threatened state control of religious affairs. So here we have an ambiguity, a conquered people who were in turn despised for their ‘softness’ but admired for their intellectual achievement. One way of coping with this was to suggest there was a distinction between the austere minds and frugal people of Attica and the sensuous Greeks of Asia who were much more corrupting!
World History
