How to be Roman

The empire’s new horizons also helped to create – or at least to define with much sharper edges and ideological significance – the image of the ‘old-fashioned Roman’. That down-to-earth, no-nonsense, hardy, warts-and-all character plays his part in our stereotype of Roman culture even now. The chances are that he was largely a creation of this period too.

Some of the most outspoken voices of the third and second centuries BCE became famous for attacking the corrupting influence on traditional Roman behaviour and morals of foreign culture in general, and Greek culture in particular; their targets ranged from literature and philosophy to naked exercise, fancy food and depilation. In the forefront of the critics was Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Elder’), a contemporary and rival of Scipio Africanus, whom Cato criticised for, among other things, cavorting in Greek gymnasia and theatres in Sicily. He is also supposed to have dubbed Socrates a ‘terrible prattler’, to have recommended a Roman medicinal regime of green vegetables, duck and pigeon (rather than anything to do with Greek doctors, who were liable to kill you) and to have warned that Roman power could be brought down by the passion for Greek literature. According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen. He was not alone in these views. In the middle of the second century BCE another prominent figure successfully argued that a Greek-style theatre being built in Rome should be demolished, as it was better and more character forming for Romans to watch plays standing up, as they had traditionally done, rather than sitting down in decadent Eastern fashion. In short, so these arguments went, what passed for Greek ‘sophistication’ was no more than insidious ‘softness’ (or mollitia in Roman jargon), which was bound to sap the strength of the Roman character.

33. Many Roman portraits in the second and first centuries BCE present their subjects as elderly, wrinkled and craggy. Now often known as the ‘veristic’ (or hyper-realistic) style, it is, in fact, a deeply ‘idealising’ form of representation, celebrating a particular version of how a Roman should look in contrast to the youthful perfection of so much Greek sculpture.

Was this a simple conservative backlash against newfangled ideas being brought into Rome from outside, a bout of ‘culture wars’ between traditionalists and modernisers? In part, perhaps, it was. But it was also more complicated, and interesting, than that. For all his huffing and puffing, Cato had taught his son Greek, and his surviving writing – notably, a technical essay on farming and agricultural management, and substantial quotations from his speeches and from his history of Italy – shows that he was well practised in the Greek rhetorical tricks that he claimed to deplore. And some of the claims being made about ‘Roman tradition’ were little short of imaginative fantasy. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that venerable old Romans had watched theatrical performances standing up. The evidence we have suggests quite the reverse.

The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions. Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbours. But the distinctive, hard-edged sense of tough Roman austerity – which later Romans eagerly projected back on to their founding fathers and which has remained a powerful vision of Romanness into the modern world – was the product of a powerful cultural clash, in this period of expansion abroad, over what it was to be Roman in this new, wider imperial world, and in the context of such an array of alternatives. To put it another way, ‘Greeknesss’ and ‘Romanness’ were as inseparably bound up as they were polar opposites.

That is exactly what we see, in a particularly vertiginous form, in the story Livy, among others, tells of how the Great Mother goddess was brought into Rome with tremendous fanfare from Asia Minor in 204 BCE, towards the end of the Second Punic War. This was a very Roman occasion. A book of Roman oracles that was supposed to go back to the reign of the Tarquins recommended that the goddess Cybele, as she was also known, be incorporated into the Roman pantheon. The range of deities worshipped in Rome was proudly elastic, and the Great Mother was the patron deity of the Romans’ ancestral home – Aeneas’ Troy – and so, in a sense, belonged in Italy. They sent a senior deputation to collect the image of the goddess and transport her back, and they chose, as the oracle had insisted, ‘the best man in the state’ to receive her in Rome – who turned out to be another Scipio. He was accompanied in the welcoming party by a noble Roman woman, in some accounts a Vestal Virgin, and the image was taken from the ship and passed from the coast to the city, hand to hand, by a long line of other women. The goddess was temporarily lodged in the shrine of Victory until her own temple was built. It would be the first building in Rome, so far as we know, constructed using that most Roman of materials, and the one on which so many of the Romans’ later architectural masterpieces relied: concrete.

34. A second-century CE memorial to a priest of the Great Mother. His image is strikingly different from the standard toga-clad priests of Rome (Fig. 61), with his long hair, heavy jewellery, ‘foreign’ musical instruments, and the hints of self-flagellation in the whips and goads.

Nothing could have pleased Cato more – except that not everything was quite as it seemed. The image of the goddess was not what the Romans could possibly have been expecting. It was a large black meteorite, not a conventional statue in human form. And the meteorite came accompanied by a retinue of priests. These were self-castrated eunuchs, with long hair, tambourines and a passion for self-flagellation. This was all about as un-Roman as you could imagine. And forever after it raised uncomfortable questions about ‘the Roman’ and ‘the foreign’, and where the boundary between them lay. If this was the kind of thing that came from Rome’s ancestral home, what did that imply about what it was to be Roman?