Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [137]
A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes | Induit agresti Latio…
Greece, once captured, captured its wild conqueror, and instilled arts into boorish Rome…
Horace, Letters, ii. 1.156
In these two major spreads of Greek by migration and infiltration, the colonisation of Mediterranean coasts, and the results of Alexander’s lightning conquest of the east, the prestige of the language and its culture played little, if any, role. Greeks had explored and settled; Greeks had conquered and settled. But the new populations who first heard Greek in consequence had little choice in the matter. A vast expansion of the world where Greek was spoken had come about in this way; but outside Anatolia, Syria and Egypt there is little evidence for its everyday use having spread much beyond the community of Greek émigrés.
Greek was poised, however, for a major surge of spread by diffusion. All round the Mediterranean, above all among the elite of the rising power of Rome, Greek culture was about to become the centre of the educational curriculum.
Inevitably, the Greeks began with a cultural advantage on Mediterranean coasts, having brought the alphabet, and some display of what a literate society was like, Greek-style, with formal education and a curriculum based on a corpus of poetical classics (notably Homer) and active training in skills of public speaking. Then, in the third century BC, a number of political events brought the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean into active contact with the west. In 280 BC Pyrrhus (coming from Epirus, in western Greece) had tried to invade Italy and Sicily: his initial victories were proverbially pyrrhic, and within five years he was effectively seen off by dogged Roman resistance, but Roman garrisons were then placed in all the Greek cities of southern Italy. In 273 BC King Ptolemy II of Egypt entered into a treaty with Rome, sealing their new status as a coming power in the Mediterranean.
Bilingual authors began building a bridge between Greek and Roman literature. Greek plays were performed (in Latin translation) at Rome from 240 BC. Others, such as Livius Andronicus, tried adapting Greek master works such as the Odyssey for Roman audiences, but using traditional Roman language and patterns of verse. Late in the century came the tense days of the war with Hannibal: victory was followed by a vogue for Greek culture. (The victorious general, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was a notorious enthusiast for things Greek.) A leading figure was the poet Ennius, who had grown up speaking Greek in southern Italy, but learnt Latin during his army service: he brought Greek works and literary values into the heart of Latin education, beginning the refashioning of Latin literature on completely Greek lines.
Foreign policy reinforced the cultural interest, since Rome intervened decisively in Greece in the next century, famously taking advantage of one of the pan-Hellenic athletic meetings. In 196 BC the Roman general Flamininus announced to an incredulous crowd gathered for the Isthmian Games at Corinth that all the Greek cities were henceforth free, courtesy of the Roman Senate and people. There followed a complicated series of wars in which Rome was involved ever more deeply in Greek affairs, and which led to the downfall of the successors of Alexander in both Greece and Asia. By the end of the century, the whole of Greece and the west of Anatolia were under direct Roman rule.
The outcome was a total penetration of Greek into Roman culture, so that for the next five hundred years, essentially until the Greek east was split off from the Roman west of the empire, well-educated Romans could be counted on to be bilingual in Greek. Romans came to be educated basically on a Greek pattern, but with a strong emphasis on poetry and the practice of public speaking: the musical and gymnastic sides were rather neglected. The tutors and schoolmasters were typically bilinguals of Greek extraction; and one effect was a permanent demand for personable educated Greeks, who