Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [138]
As one example, in the first century BC Gaulish notables were sending their children to be educated in Greek in Massalia (Marseilles). Strabo says that ‘sophists were employed, both privately and at the city’s expense, just like medical doctors’.21 Meanwhile it became usual for elite Romans of rich families to send their young people to Athens or Rhodes to finish their education. But this does not mean that knowledge of Greek was found only among the upper classes. Plautus, writing comedies in the early second century BC, puts most of his Greek loan words and slang into the mouths of slaves and low types: graphicus servus—the picture-perfect slave.22
Polybius, writing a generation later, could remark, perhaps making the best of things: ‘our men of action in Greece have been released from the pressures of political or military ambition, and so have plenty of opportunities to pursue inquiries or research’.23
A century later, the implicit compact was stated more explicitly, from the Roman point of view, by Vergil:24
others will hammer out more finely bronze that breathes
(I do not doubt), will draw from marble faces live,
will plead court cases better, and use rod to measure out
the wanderings of the sky and constellations’ rise;
you, Roman, mind to rule peoples at your command
(these arts will be yours), to impose the way of peace,
to spare the conquered, and to battle down the proud.
The world of the arts and sciences was the Greek province, par excellence. But the world of power and order belonged to Rome. The civilisation of the Mediterranean world became a stable Graeco-Roman mix.*
It is worth spending a moment to consider what was the real attraction of Greek, and its associated culture, its character or ethos (both Greek words). The Romans certainly did not believe that they had much to learn about traditional virtues, as shown in war, law and politics, from these voluble and innovative foreigners.† Greek art, which had become familiar through the army’s campaigns in southern Italy and Greece, was attractive in itself; but the Greeks also seemed to have an advantage in the pursuit of pleasure more generally: haute cuisine, wine, music, frolics with either sex. The Greeks were the masters of luxury, and it took little higher discernment to want more of this. The Latin word pergraecārī, ‘to Greek off’, meant devotion not to high thinking but to high living, feasting and drinking.25
At the same time, the sheer knowledge possessed by the Greeks impressed the Romans: Greeks knew their own history, as well as that of their neighbours, they could theorise on any topic, and provide quotations from poetry centuries old. Above all, they were fluent and convincing speakers: they had been trained in how to hold an audience, and get people to do what they wanted. This explicit skill in rhetoric was highly in demand in the civic society that the Romans had created, where people were constantly running for office at every level from village council to the republic itself, and measures were presented orally for approval by assemblies.
Above all, we can see the Romans (and hence the whole Mediterranean world) attracted by the sheer sense of savoir-faire generated by a large-scale and highly elaborated culture, self-confident to the point of solipsism. Much the same thing was to happen when Sanskrit and the wonders of classical India washed up on the shores of South-East Asia (see Chapter 5, ‘The spread of Sanskrit’, p. 201); or when French became the language of refinement throughout Europe, and especially in Russia, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 410). Something of the same charm of brash, large-scale self-confidence can be seen today powering the worldwide taste for Americana, and with it the