In Our Time - Rome and European Civilization

Episode Date: December 20, 2001

Melvyn Bragg assesses the role Rome has played in European civilization. The myths that surround the foundation of Rome are a potent brew. Romulus and Remus, the sons of Mars, raised by a she-wolf in the woods of Latium, the Sabine women raped by the Latins, Aeneas the Trojan General, wrecked off Carthage, loved by Dido and finally founding a new civilisation on the Tiber’s banks. According to William Shakespeare, after Brutus slayed his friend Caesar he claimed, “Not that I loved Caesar less but that I loved Rome more”. But what was the idea of Rome that demanded such devotion? And how was an identity forged that exported its values to the greatest Empire the world had ever seen? Rome has meant Republicanism, as well as Imperialism; it has stood for Pax Romana and also for the machinery of war, it is an eternally pagan city that still beats as the Catholic Heart of the Christian Church. With Mary Beard, Reader in Classics at Cambridge University, Catherine Edwards, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, London University; Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the myths that surround the foundation of Rome are a potent brew. Romulus and Remus, the sons of Mars, raised by a she-wolf in the woods of Latium,

the Sabine women raped by the Latins, Ineus, the Trojan general, wrecked off Carthage, loved by Dido, and finally founding a new civilization on the banks of the Tiber. According to William Shakespeare, after Brutus slayed his friend Caesar, he claimed, not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. But what was the idea of Rome that demanded such devotion? And how was an identity forge that exported its values to the greatest empire the world had ever seen? Rome has meant republicanism, as well as imperialism and tyranny.

It has stood for Pax Romana and also for the machinery of war. It's an eternally pagan city that still beats the Catholic heart of the Christian Church. With me to discuss the invention or inventions of Rome is Mary Beard, reader in classics at Cambridge University, Catherine Edwards, lecturing classics and ancient history at Birkbeck College London University, and Greg Wolf, Professor of Ancient History at St. Andrews University.

Greg Wolf, starting with you, will you outline for us the story of Romulus and Remus? Who were they, and how did they end up founding Rome? Well, the story we have, is two brothers, raised by a wolf who go on to have divine auguries about where the city should be they fall out over who has the right auguries

and it ends up with Remus jumping over the ploughed furrow that marks the sacred boundary of Romulus's city and getting murdered by his brother so Rome starts with fractricide well what evidence to have for that, Mr. Wolf? But it's all true because the Romans wrote it

That's the Romulus and Remus that we ended up with. That answer could be just a tiny bit of Edithy. I mean, there we are. We've got Romulus and Remus. You said it with great authority and sing. I approve all that. So what's the source? It's one of 67 different stories about Romulus and Remus.

Sometimes there wasn't Remus. Sometimes there were three brothers. Sometimes there's one, several others. What's weird about Rome is they choose. out of 67 alternatives, the one that ends up that way with brothers killing each other. So where does it first appear? I mean, which century does it first? We're talking, this is supposed to have happened about the 6th century BC? About the 8th century BC.

All right, 8th century BC. You see, it's as vague as that. My notes don't even know. When did this appear? When was this first written down? I think there are early versions come from the 5th century, but most of them come from a lot later. and the versions that we have come from the first century BC, the last century BC, and then get stuck in that canonical version repeated for the next few hundred years. Was there an actual King Romulus? I've no idea, and nobody has any idea. Our first Roman historians write at the very end of the third century.

Greeks weren't very interested before that. And so what we have is a long view back from past that's probably been mythologised and remithologised several times already by the time it first gets into handwriting. Okay, Mary Beard, the other great story of Rome, see how this one goes, is a tale of Enos, the son of Venus, and a Trojan noble,

who eventually finds Rome after escaping the fall of Troy. Can you give us a brief account of the journey of Enius and how he came from Troy to Rome? This one's true, of course, unlike Greg's. And can you just give us some sort of date for this. Oh, that's a trickier one. Because this is a fallout of the Trojan war.

You know, you've got the greatest Greek myth ever. Greeks go off and bash up and destroy the city of Troy. At some place, well, let's put it, 1,200 BC, guys. We'd be happy with, we'd be happy with... Give a take a century. Give a take a century. I'd be happy to 12th.

I've read ancient history. The history I wrote, which is called modern history from 400 to 9. You had to have real dates. You said 1833 instead of 1832, you failed. And you're trading centuries. Yes, this is why we... Some kind of Middle East bazaar.

Yeah, we like it like that, you see. All right, so around the 12th century, 30th century, this might have happened. This might have happened. Anyway, the crucial thing is that one of the fallouts, a crucial thing for the whole history of the world is not the great victory over the Trojans, who then were annihilated forever, but that from this nasty burning bit of rubble

escapes this plucky, audacity character called Aeneas, who by a series of tricky and sometimes heroic fanatical adventures, manages to fetch up, after rejecting a few queens en route, fetch up with a rather depleted band on the shores of Italy, where after some more signal and not entirely pleasant fighting, establishes himself with a little proto-Rome, which a few centuries later, moving by several miles, becomes the Rome that we know.

And why did they want, now, there's probably even less evidence there is than there is for Greg Wolff's Romans and Remus, but why did they want that myth to be there? Well, I think it's a really interesting myth about the Romans view themselves, because the thing it's telling you is that, But if you buy into this myth, and it's different with Romulus and Reims,

if you buy into this one, what you're saying is Rome always existed elsewhere, right? That Rome is not a city which comes up from its native land. Romans are always foreigners. And as the Roman Empire expands and, of course, eventually comes to take over the very places from which they believe they originated, then you get an enormous amount of cultural play between Rome as being Italian and Rome is always already being Asian. So it's a version of a founding legend which is completely different

from most of the other ones we have from the ancient world. Mostly they say, look, I'm an Athenian and I was born from the soil of Athens. And my first ancestor comes up out of, you know, literally out of the furrow of this place. And the Roman Aeneas legend is saying, no, no, no, we were always already foreign. And it's a version which can be sloganised at a certain sense later into a whole set of questions about who's going to count as Roman. Catherine Hens, how, did anybody try to... No, just a second, now I'm finished.

When did this Ineus thing? We told it the third century BC. We told Romulus and Ramos began to take some sort of shape, but we really established for certain that they were the sons of Mars and that sort of thing. Now, when did the Aeneas myth take care? When did it appear in the records, if I can use such a word in ancient history,

saying this is really the way Rome was founded? Well, same problem really, because Aeneas is a kind of bit part player in the Greek legends of all this. So you can trace a figure called Aynaeus, you know, back to the Greek traditions of the Trojan War. But if you say when does this become worked up

as a Roman story about itself, well, you know, one could be happily seen this in the third century BC. But why we know it is because in the first century BC it becomes a particularly useful version to tell. And a great poem which certain people were forced to study for A-levels.

And which Roman school boys were forced to study for their version of A-levels from the moment the thing came out. Catherine, how were these two squared, these Romulus and Remus and Ears? Can you give us some idea, were they squared? How were they squared? There's a great gap between them. The around 1,200 of Catherine, sorry, of Mary ahead of me,

and the around 600 of Greg on my right. How are they squared? Well, the way they're linked up is to say that Romulus is mother, the father of Romitz and Remus is Mars, but the mother of Romulus and Remus is descended from the son of Enius. So they're sort of various generations in between. And all this is told, at least in the version we have in the Aeneid, in book 6 of the poem, Ineus goes down to the underworld and meets his dead father,

and his father gives him this kind of view forward across the century. This is Virgil's great account of the Enoch. That's right. So Ineus's father gives Ineus this account of how his descendants will include Romulus and Remus, and then he looks forward to kind of later generations of Roman rulers as well. And these are two very powerful founding myths, and there they are. Romulus and Remus, one of the things they took in, we are told in the myth, they took in immigrants and criminals, criminals even, into the city.

Ines came from Troy Valle all over the place and so and so forth. So we're talking about foreigners being, not as Mary said earlier, growing out of the soil of the particular place. What's Rome trying to tell itself and other people by, saying that? Well, I think all kinds of different things, but very importantly that you don't have to be born in Rome to be a Roman. That's

absolutely crucial to Roman identity. Which is very important when the empire develops, isn't it? Absolutely so. In fact, you don't even need to have visited Rome to become a Roman in later centuries. So to Romulus, when he's founding Rome, in order to increase the population, invites in all this

kind of rabble, who could be slaves, I could be criminals, as you say, anybody, can be made into a Roman. And that's important for, do you think that helps Rome in not only a sense of itself, but in the way develops and expands? Absolutely, that Roman citizenship in later centuries can be granted to different communities of people. They can come to see themselves as Roman to identify with Rome, even though they may not be descended from people born in the city. And even though they may live in the outward reaches.

And even though they may live in it. Another aspect that comes from this, Greg, is the, as you mentioned, is the violence. I mean, Romulus kills Riemers. There's a great deal of violence in the stories of Ineus, as Mary pointed out. What's this, and Rome is accepting this, this is how we came about. Well, myths aren't comforting. I mean, myths aren't meant to make you feel good about yourself. I wanted to know why they want to say these particular things about themselves.

Well, the versions we have written down, the versions of selected ended up in the classics, the Roman classics, were written down after 50 years, of absolutely vicious civil war. Rome's been tearing itself to pieces. Roman armies have been prowling around the Mediterranean, taking each other out. Various allies and people have been brought in. Back in the city of Rome,

politician after politicians had been assassinated. They look around, they see themselves as a pathologically, self-destructive nation. What is it about us? How did this happen? And they look back and they see a myth history of violence, that all these unions, It's not like so many Greek myths of origin Where you get a happy arrival of somebody led by a god

And here's some nice native women And they kind of hook up, Heracles goes and meets the nymph Galataea They have a knight of passion, out come the Gauls the other end Rome isn't like that, you're right. Excuse me! Right, pull yourself together. Right, sorry? I mean, the point is, surely, that it's not that these myths were pre-execis.

and then somehow Rome thought, my goodness me, how appropriate our myths are about ourselves, these myths are being constantly reformulated in reaction to how the Romans are negotiating their identity, etc. So why this myth becomes the canonical myth rather than the 66 other versions is because it's the one that's most useful for us. Until they get it stuck into literature and the literature get stuck into the education and then they've got to live with Ennis and Romulus, for centuries, whether or not that's appropriate anymore. Before he talked about God's coming out the other end, you were actually sort of saying, making a view of themselves,

it was almost like, look, we were victims, we were always like this, you can't blame us for going around, killing people all around the Mediterranean. There was that element in what you were saying, I thought, Greg. Yeah, I wasn't intending the sort of something nasty in the Roman woodshed to spin on it, really.

No, no, I wasn't tending that either. It was this sort of an excuse. Look, you were the one who said, they went around the Mediterranean, terrible civil wars, taking each other out, so, so, And then they look back and said, well, look, we were always being like this. We can't help it very much. We killed each other from the beginning.

This is what it is to be Roman. Being Roman is somebody who kills other Romans for preference. Now that's the, that we've talked about the founding myths and bringing in there. Can I just, I'm obviously sorry about this, but in your terms, this is a mere flick of an eyelid. Go fast forward to Augustus, after the civil wars which involved Caesar and so and so forth. And he sets, he is made, given, control of the armies, he's made emperor. and he wants to establish, and he sets about establishing a golden age, Eutonius says he could boast to inherit it in brick and left it marble.

Can you just tell us, Catherine, what Augustus set out to do and when? It's the turn of BC AD, isn't it right? That's right. Well, the exact moment when Augustus comes to power is in a way quite hard to pinpoint. I mean, the civil war going on through the 30s. He finally defeats Anthony in third. 31 BC and from that point it's kind of consolidating his power. You mentioned the way in which he inherits Rome a city of brick

and turns it into a city of marble. The city of Rome was notorious in the late years of the Republic for being very scruffy and it commanded this enormous empire but the public buildings were in a shocking state. There were some really spectacular ones put up by individual generals trying to make their mark on the city, but the overall effect of the city was supposed to be rather disappointing. But Augustus turns it.

into a capital that's worthy of an empire, as Swatonius also emphasises. So that was one way in which he's presenting his own authority. Another way was actually almost to employ, maybe that's too severe a term, and you'll correct me, writers to write up the history of Rome. This is where we get the beginning of the writing of Rome and the history of Rome, do we? Well, that's right. And we're talking about Livy. Well, Livy and Virgil.

Now the term employ is a very tricky one. And Augustus isn't kind of pushing them on the payroll and saying, you know, this is what you should be saying. The process by which people like Livy and Virgil are responding to the preoccupations of the Augustan regime is quite hard to pin down. Nevertheless, the kinds of things they come up with do seem to mesh very nicely with the way in which Augustus is trying to present himself. Greg, what Augustus is doing is turning away from the great, although it was full of civil wars and so on, the great idea. idea of the Roman Republic. And how does he square that with what he is doing? Because people are still extremely attached to the idea of the public in spirit, if not in practice.

Well, he keeps slogans. He keeps certain bits of the city retain their associations. He accumulates priesthoods, but they're the traditional priesthoods. He declares that the raised publicer has been restored, that the state has been put back, if you like, on a solid footing. there's a sense in which he's much more revolutionary than he allows it to appear. For instance?

Well, for instance, he does centralise taxation, control of the armies, all those things into one person's hands. There's no doubt at all that the empire is run from the private house of Augustus. At his death, Suetonia says a document was left, giving a list of what money the empire had, where the armies were,

and what slaves and freedmen, ex-lays in Augusta's house could supply further details if needed. In other words, the whole thing's run as an extension of an aristocratic household. Nevertheless, throughout his reign, it's presented as the Senate and people of Rome, passing laws, passing decrees, sending out ex-magislatures, just like they'd always done in the Republic. The idea that they were all kind of looking back to this with, you know, a glowing nostalgia is also not entirely kind of correct.

I mean, we think of the Republic as being, you know, Rome's greatest time. But if you reckon that they'd been, you know, getting on for 100 years of civil war, which was civil war of the nastiest and most brutal kind. I mean, people's bodies and body parts were nailed up in the Central Forum at Rome, you know, on a regular basis. You know, heads were kind of knocked around the forum. So it was really, you know, nasty, disgusting, foul stuff. And for most people, the Republic had, in memory, had been...

Not an era of freedom. I mean, there was a few big guys who lost out when Augustus came to power. But for most people, at least it meant, you know, you could walk through the city centre without coming across dead bodies. Can I ask you? Virgil in the innered wrote around this period, O Romans, be it your care to rule the nations with imperial sway. These shall be your arts to impose the rule of peace, to spare the humbled and crush the proud.

Now, was that civilising zeal, part of Augustus' mission, it's very high-minded? Was it carried out? Can you talk about that? I think it's very much like the sense of empire that the British have in the late Victorian period, finally get into the point where you understand that you've accidentally created an empire and has these civilising impacts. I think that there are people perhaps all the way through who are justifying Roman imperialism. in terms of its product, but it's maybe only right at the end of its expansion. August's the last great imperialist,

that they begin to see a pattern. Julius Caesar, Augustus's father who adopted Augustus, when he justified his war, still felt he had to justify individual wars against people on the basis that they'd somehow attack Roman allies or whatever. By Augustus time, you could simply say that gods want us to conquer the world, the gods would grant us limitless power. So the divine mandate comes at the end, the process. Was there then emerging the idea of what it was to be a Roman, have Roman virtues? And if so, what were they?

Well, that's also up for grabs in the Augustan period, really. That's why it's interesting. And so our kind of image of Roman virtues as being, you know, solid guys who, you know, no nonsense, blokes. Chop people's heads off and built straight roads. Shot people's heads off, build straight roads. But when the going gets tough, they'll kill themselves rather than, render to the enemy, that's also a version which comes out of the Augustine myth-making process.

One of the things Augustus does is he builds his enormous forum, a great temple in it. But down every side, he's got the heroes of the republic, statues of them, with their deeds inscribed underneath. Now, we have some idea of what these said, and they were glorifying text saying, this is a model for you guys. Now, actually, we know that many of these were pretty revolting, you know, massacring bastards, really. But they become a Roman image, you know, such as we've got in the movies, I think. And it happens then.

There's no sign of that in the Republic. Was there any criticism of Augustus' plan at the time, his mission, his zeal? Were there poets people at the time saying this isn't so? Or did he just, did his power take? him through. The mission that he was on there was so much lust for peace. He was turning this, plenty of work for everybody, turning it into a marvelled city

and so on and so forth. Was there much opposition to what he was trying to do? Well, he was good at silencing it, and he who controls the past, controls the future, as all well put it. We don't have un-Augustan histories of Rome to any significant extent. We know there were books burnt in the forum. Poets were

persecuted. But we also, we also consume in the text that survive, a greater degree of wry irony than some interpreters might think. So there's a huge debate. When you look at these apparently panegyric poems about Augustus' conquest, there's always a debate about quite how undercut these are,

quite how far is the joke on Augustus. I was reaching out for Ovid, if any of you were going to mention it. Yes, in a way, I mean, Ovid, of course, is the poet he actually gets sent into exile by Augustus. Ovid teases him, doesn't he, and criticises him? Yes, and I mean, in some ways, it's not entirely clear exactly why it was that Ovid was sent into exile.

He says it's for an error and a poem, and people generally identify the poem with Ovid's Ars Amatoria, his art of love, which goes on about, you know, the best way to seduce the girl of your choice or indeed the man of your choice, and which could be read as running rather counter to the strongly moral thrust of the Augustan regime. Augustus had passed laws making adultery a criminal off, for instance,

and set himself up as a great kind of pillar of moral authority. This was ostensibly going back to the morality of the early Romans. Romulus was supposed to have been very hot on pursuing adulterers as well. Greg, can I ask, what's the Roman view of the Greeks throughout the time of Gus as well? Did they suffer from, Steve Jones keeps talking about biologists, suffering from physics envy? Did they suffer from Greek envy? And were they worried that these people had been so brilliant centuries before them,

and they didn't have to have silly old myths, they got great scientists, great thinkers, great philosophers, great playwrights, standing there? I would get indisputably magnificent. Was there that feeling that they had to... What did they do about the Greeks? Did they have to take them on? Did they feel like to take them on in some way? They sometimes claim they did.

I mean, sometimes you can read these statements about the Greeks being civilized and the Romans not, as if it's a sign of inferiority. But sometimes something else is happening. For example, Horace will look at early Roman poetry, say this was all rough, useless stuff. My stuff is better because I've gone back to the Greeks. So the Greeks become a charter for one group of Roman poets to depose another group of Roman poets.

They're so involved in Greek culture. Greek culture has been there in Rome since the very beginning. The earliest archaeology at the site of Rome shows that they knew about Greek myths, Greek art, Greek heroes, Greek gods. there's never a pre-Greek Rome. There's never a Rome without the Greeks.

And I think Greeks are a convenient device for thinking with. It's a convenient other. You can bring in when you're, you needed a bit of repair on your own culture. You need to change it, update it, add new things, attack things. You go back to the Greeks. And sometimes you can say the Greeks are immoral and hopeless. And sometimes you say the Greeks taught us everything we knew. And sometimes you say the ancient Greeks were great but the modern ones are no use at all.

Like Sulla, attacking Rome, stops the siege of... Attacking Athens, stops the siege of Athens and says, I spare the few for the sake of the many, I spare the living for the sake of the dead. But ancient Greece isn't there anymore. It's Roman times now. So what are we saying? At this stage, Romans just used the Greeks to reinforce their Romanness.

Yes, that's right. But they also have all these other kind of wonderful virtues that the Greeks never really had. Cicero, in one of his philosophical treatises, talks about how the Romans have always been better at discipline, and they've always been better at morality, they've always been better at fighting. But it's true that the Greeks have been rather good at philosophy.

And we've been catching up with the Greeks, and we're about to go beyond them. It's a colossal scam, isn't it? Because, I mean, if you look, who are the really literary ancient people? It's the Romans. The Romans woke up one day in the third century and decided to create a literature from scratch.

The aristocrats went out, commissioned people, come in, write these things in Latin, the genre. If you look back at the great Greek figures, Greeks were fighters first of all. Athenians thought themselves a militaristic power. Now look, why was Rome that so powerful? You could pick out, as it were, Roman elements

in the great Catholic Church in the great British Empire, in the great American Empire. Hitler has an eagle and Mussolini has the fasciers and so on and so forth. Where was its great power? I know I'm asking you to generalise and simplify it, but that's what you seem to do in ancient history, some of the course.

Surely not. No, my evidence this morning. Chose the wrong people. I didn't show. I chose the right people.

I didn't choose them. Charlie did the producer but they're right people. Okay. Great. Rome manufactures a huge batch of symbols of images,

the fascist uses their symbol, eagles, columns, great big complexes of temples and so on. These things are all around and,

when the Roman Empire folds, they're available for the first Islamic societies, for Byzantium, for early medieval societies in the West to reuse. And it gets passed on like a baton, except it's not going forwards, it's people from the present reaching back to the past and taking these symbols because they're there and powerful. As they keep getting reused, more and more connotations surround them. Yeah, I mean, it's the complexity, isn't it? It isn't that Rome's a thing.

It's that it's an enormously complex set of ideas which you can latch into at any point you like. I mean, I think, you know, we tend to think that people want simple symbols for their cultural ancestors. Actually, what's most useful is really complicated ones. Really? Why is that? Because you need to be able to turn it to your own advantage and you need to be able to let everybody play the game.

Can you give me an example of a complicated Roman simple, then? Symbol. Well, I think most of the things have been talking about. you know, Roman mythology is fine, it's a very clear ancestry for Augustus is put out, but of course it inevitably involves thinking about adultery. You know, there isn't a symbol that doesn't have its anti-symbol built into it. And so I think what Rome's doing, why Rome is so great,

is that not only is it extremely complex, but Romans have always got there first with all this chat about it. You can always find a Roman saying what you want them to say. That's right. I think Rome can be anything, and it's very important that Rome, can be empire and can also be Republic, so that

on the one hand, the American founding father that's denounced Britain as sort of, you know, like the Roman Empire for having all these dreadful vices of corruption and luxury. And yet they also wanted to be like Rome themselves because they wanted to identify with the mixed constitution of the Roman Republic and to identify

with the virtues of those early heroes of Rome. So George Washington wanted to be thought of as Cato or Sinanatus, these people who sacrificed themselves for the public. good. Well, thank you all very much. I'm much enlightened. I enjoyed that too. Thank you, Mary Bair. Thank you, Catherine Edwards. Thank you, Greg.

Well, for next week, I'll be talking about the history of food with Ivan Day, Rebecca Spang, and Felipe Fernandez Amesto. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.