Michael Crawford – The Roman Republic (страница 5)

Spreading outwards from the hills, partly by way of raids, but eventually with more serious intent, the peoples of the central Italian highlands were attracted by the fertile plains of Campania, just as the Volscians farther north were attracted by the plains of Latium; the Etruscan city of Capua (see below) fell in 423, the Greek city of Cumae in 421, a Greek element in the population surviving in the case of the latter. Neapolis (Naples) remained the only Greek city in Campania, though even there infiltration took place; the Greek cities of the south came similarly under pressure from the tribes of the hinterland. In the end, the hills were conquered by the plains, but at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries BC it was by no means an obvious outcome.

Of the three groups of people whom I wish to discuss, the Greeks are on the whole the most straightforward. A variety of Greek cities had planted a string of self-governing foundations along the coasts of Italy and Sicily, beginning with Pithecusae (Ischia) about 775; the earliest of these colonies, as they are rather inappropriately described, was almost certainly intended to act as an entrepot for trade with Etruria; but its own foundation on the mainland opposite, Cumae, was an agricultural community, as were the vast majority of Greek colonies both in the west and elsewhere.

Greek colonization, invariably the venture of an organized community, involved the transfer of a developed society and culture, of its political organization, religious organization, language, monetary system; the colonial experience and contact with indigenous populations might eventually lead of course to considerable transformations.

But Magna Graecia, the collective name for the Greek cities in Italy and Sicily, was very much part of the Greek world, despite alleged Athenian ignorance of Sicily prior to the mounting of the great expedition of 415; men from the west participated in the great Greek festivals and their successes were celebrated by the Greek poet Pindar in the fifth century BC. In the fourth century Timoleon of Corinth set out to rescue Sicily from Carthage and, as we shall see, a succession of Greek condottieri attempted to help Tarentum (Taranto) in her wars with the tribes of the hinterland. The last of them Pyrrhus of Epirus, fought a full-scale war against Rome, by then the major threat.

The position of a Greek city overwhelmed by its barbarian neighbours is poignantly described in the case of Poseidonia (Paestum) by the near-contemporary Aristoxenus of Tarentum:

We act like the people of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrhenian Gulf. It so happened that although they had originally been Greeks, they were completely barbarized, becoming Tuscans; they changed their speech and their other practices, but they still celebrate one festival that is Greek to this day, wherein they gather together and recall those ancient words and institutions, and after bewailing them and weeping over them in one another’s presence they depart home (quoted by Athenaeus, XIV, 632a).

For most of the cities of Italy the effective choice lay between the barbarian tribes and Rome; it is not surprising that many of them chose Rome, a civilized community and in the eyes of some contemporary Greeks a Greek city; the process began with the survivors of the original population at Capua in 343 (see here), followed by the Greeks of Neapolis (Naples) in 326.

The Etruscans are sui generis and were so regarded in classical antiquity; it was a unique characteristic of their religion that it was centred on sacred writings that had supposedly emanated from supernatural sources, and they also claimed a special ability to discover the will of the gods by a variety of processes of divination. Furthermore, Etruscan society was characterized, at any rate in its upper echelons, by the relatively high status of its female members and, as a whole, by a deep division between the governing class and a serf population.

Etruscan culture evolved from the Villanovan culture of central Italy and was from the eighth century BC onwards both extraordinarily receptive of foreign influences and extraordinarily adept at integrating them in a local framework. The Etruscans borrowed most perhaps from the Greeks, from whom they imported on an enormous scale fine pottery in exchange for metal; the origin of their language is mysterious.

By the end of the eighth century BC they occupied the area bounded by the River Arno, the Appennines, the Tiber and the sea; during the sixth and fifth centuries they established an empire in Campania, probably beginning at the coast and in due course occupying Capua, according to Cato in 470; during the fifth and fourth centuries they created another empire in the Po valley; as a by-product of this process of expansion, Rome was ruled for a time by kings who were in effect Etruscan condottieri. The process of expansion was not a single national effort, but reflected the disunity of Etruria and its division into independent city units.

The Etruscans provided Rome with early access to at any rate a form of Greek culture; they also probably provided Rome with some of her insignia of office:

The ambassadors, having received this answer, departed, and after a few days returned, not merely with words alone, but bringing the insignia of sovereignty with which they used to decorate their own kings. These were a crown of gold, an ivory throne, a sceptre with an eagle perched on its head, a purple tunic decorated with gold, and an embroidered purple robe like those the kings of Lydia and Persia used to wear, except that it was not rectangular in shape like theirs, but semicircular. This kind of robe is called toga by the Romans and tebenna by the Greeks; but I do not know where the Greeks learned the name, for it does not seem to me to be a Greek word. And according to some historians they also brought (back to Rome) the twelve axes, taking one from each city. For it seems to have been a Tyrrhenian custom for each king of the several cities to be preceded by a lictor bearing an axe together with the bundle of rods (the fasces), and, whenever the twelves cities undertook any joint military expedition, for the twelve axes to be handed over to the one man who held supreme command (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, III, 61, using the results of Roman antiquarian research;).

More fundamentally, the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva is of Etruscan origin; the Roman system of nomenclature, however, personal name (as Marcus), name of gens, or large family group (as Tullius) and cognomen, or family name (as Cicero), is Italic rather than Etruscan in origin.

The Etruscan empire in Campania was destroyed by the Samnites (see above), the empire in the Po valley by the Gauls. Etruria itself was progressively subjugated by Rome, much aided by the fragility of Etruscan social structures; the lower orders are described by Dionysius in connection with a campaign of 480 as penestai, the word used to describe the serf population of Thessaly in Greece. In return for support against the lower orders, the governing classes were only too happy to accept Roman overlordship, as at Arretium in 302 and Volsinii in 264. It was a technique that Rome never forgot.

III The Roman Governing Classes

DOWN TO 510, Rome was ruled by kings. The monarchy was in some sense elective, though the descent of a candidate from an earlier king was not an irrelevant consideration; the office of interrex, the man who presided over an interregnum and the emergence of a successor, survived the end of the monarchy with its name unchanged and its function essentially the same, to preside over a hiatus between duly elected officials of the community.

The essence of the transition from kings to pairs of officials (called by the Romans magistratus, magistrates) holding office for a year is encapsulated by Livy (11, 1, 7–8), following the common opinion of his day; the truth, if different, is irrecoverable:

One can regard the cause of freedom as lying rather in the fact that consular imperium was made annual than in any diminution in the regal power (inherited by the consuls); the first consuls retained all the rights and insignia (of the king); the only precaution taken was that they should not both hold the fasces simultaneously and thereby create a double impression of fearfulness. Brutus was the first to hold the fasces (for the first month), with the agreement of his colleague.

Two consuls instead of a king now stood each year at the head of the community; the assembly of adult males which elected them remaind the same,¹ as did the body of elders who advised them; this was the senate, composed in practice of former magistrates. Time and circumstance produced various modifications in the three elements whose interplay was the Roman political system, including notably the creation of a large number of lesser magistrates (see here and here); nothing altered the central fact of Republican government, that it was the collective rule of an aristocracy, in principle and to a varying extent in practice dependent on the will of a popular assembly. This aristocracy was in one sense self-perpetuating, but it was of course one from which many families disappeared over the centuries and to which new families were admitted, while an inner core of great families persisted (see Pl.8).