Europe: A History (30 page)
The Ptolemies were noted for their love and patronage of the arts and learning, even when, occasionally, as with Ptolemy VII Physcon (‘The Paunch’), they were also noted for the most disgusting perversions. Through a series of matrimonial contortions, Physcon contrived to marry his sister, who was also his brother’s widow (and who thereby became simultaneously sister, wife, and sister-in-law); to divorce her in favour of her daughter by a previous marriage (who thereby became simultaneously his second wife, niece and stepdaughter); and to murder his son (who was also a nephew). Incest, to protect the purity of royal blood, was a tradition of the Pharaohs which other cultures have called decadence.
Yet Therme (Thessalonika), Antioch, Pergamum, Palmyra, and above all Alexandria of Egypt became major cultural, economic, and political centres. The blending of Greek and oriental influences, which fermented alongside the decadent dynasties, created that inimitable hellenistic culture which eventually triumphed over its Western, Latin masters. After all, the ‘Romans’ of Byzantium, who upheld the Roman Empire for a thousand years beyond the fall of Rome, were heirs to the hellenistic Greeks, and in a very real sense the last successors of Alexander. In the words of Horace,
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit
, ‘Captured Greece captured its fierce conqueror’.
Hellenistic culture, therefore, acquired a much broader base than did its hellenic progenitor. According to Isocrates (436–338), the last of the Attic Orators, ‘Athens has brought it to pass that the name of Greek should no longer be thought of as a matter of race, but a matter of intelligence’. As a result, the quantity of Greek writers actually increased. There was a gang of geographers, from Strabo (
c
.63
BC
to
AD
21) to Pausanias (
fl. c
.
AD
150). There was a profusion of poets: Apollonius, Aratus, and Bion, author of
The Lament for Adonis;
Hermesaniax; Moschus, Meleager, and Musaeus; Oppian, Timon, and Theocritus. There was a host of historians: Manetho of Egypt, inventor of the chronological system of kingdoms and dynasties, and Berosus (Bar-Osea) of Babylon; Polybius of Megalopolis (204–122
BC),
the Greek apologist for Rome, and Josephus (b.
AD
36),
Governor of Judaea and author of
The Jewish War
, Appian, Arrian, Herodian, Eusebius. Galenus (129–99) wrote a shelf of medical textbooks, Hermogenes (
fl c
AD
170) the standard treatise on rhetoric. Among philosophers the Neostoics, such as Epictetus of Hierapolis
(AD
55–135), vied with the Neoplatonists: Plotinus (205–70), Porphyry (232–305), Proclus (412–88). The
Enchiridion
or ‘Manual’ of Stoicism, written by Epictetus, has been called the guidebook to the morality of the later classical world. Plutarch (
c
.46–126), the biographer and essayist, Lucian of Samosata (
c
.120–80), the satirist and the novelists Longus (late 2nd century) and Heliodorus (3rd century) exemplify the continuing diversity of the Greek prose tradition under Roman rule.
[PAPYRUS]
Among the writers of the hellenistic period, many wrote Greek as their second language. Josephus, Lucian, and Marcus Aurelius fit into this category, as do the Christian evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and above all St Paul.
Within the Hellenistic world, Alexandria in Egypt soon gained the preeminence that Athens had enjoyed in Greece. Under the rule of the Ptolemies, it grew into the largest and most cultured city of the East, second only to Rome in wealth and splendour. Its multinational and multilingual population consisted of ‘Macedonians’, Jews, and Egyptians. The decree inscribed on the Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, provided the trilingual text which permitted Champollion to decipher its hieroglyphics. The fabulous
Museum
or ‘College of the Muses’, with its library of 700,000 volumes, was dedicated to the collection, preservation, and study of ancient Greek culture. It was a beacon of learning, illuminating the intellectual life of the later classical world as surely as the great Pharos illuminated the sea lanes of the harbour. Aristophanes of Byzantium (
c
.257–180
BC),
one of the early librarians at Alexandria, was responsible both for the first annotated editions of Greek literature and for the first systematic analysis of Greek grammar and orthography. Aristarchus of Samothrace
(fl. c
.150
BC)
established the text of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. Philon or Philo Judaeus (30
BC–AD
45), a leader of Alexandria’s thriving Jewish community, attempted to reconcile Greek philosophy with traditional Judaic theology. Heron, an Alexandrian engineer of uncertain date, is reputed to have invented, among other things, the steam-engine, the syphon, and a drachma-in-the-slot machine.
Specially important in the history of cultural transmission were the so-called Hermetic Writings. Long attributed to an otherwise unknown author, Hermes Trismegistus (the ‘thrice greatest Hermes’, scribe of the Gods), this huge collection of Greek texts from Alexandria purports in effect to be an encyclopedia of ancient Egypt. Forty-two sacred books summarize the laws of the Pharaohs, their deities, rituals, beliefs, cosmography, astrology, medicine. Other books dating from the third century contain a strange mixture of Neoplatonic and cabbalistic texts apparently directed against the rise of Christianity,
[BLACK ATHENA]
In the long run, however, it is not surprising that Greece’s ‘shoreline civilization’ proved unequal to the massed battalions of the neighbouring land-based powers.
PAPYRUS
I
n
1963 a carbonized papyrus from the fourth century
BC
was unearthed at Derveni near Thessaloniki in Macedonia. It had either been burned as part of a funeral rite or had possibly been used as a firelighter. But it was still readable. Deciphered by Dr Faekelmann of Vienna, who separated the layers of the reheated roll with static electricity, it was shown to carry a commentary on the Orphic poems. It replaced the papyrus of Timotheus’
Persae
(P. Berol. 9875), unearthed at Abusir in Egypt, as the oldest Greek papyrological discovery.
1
In 1964 a similar papyrus roll was found in the hand of a man buried in the fourth century
BC
at Callatis on the Black Sea coast of Romania. But it crumbled to dust on discovery.
The
Cyperus papyrus
plant had been used for writing in Egypt since 3,000 BC. It was laid out in horizontal and vertical strips, which were then pressed flat to form a long
volumen
or scroll. A thick black ink made from soot was applied either by the tip of a sliced reed or by a quill. Papyrus continued to be used in Greek and Roman times, especially in lands close to the source of supply in the Nile delta. The largest find of classical papyri, some 800 in number, was extracted from the lava-sealed ruins of Herculaneum.
Papyrology—the science of papyri—has made an immense contribution to classical studies. Since very few other forms of writing have survived over two millennia, it has greatly advanced knowledge of ancient Palaeography; and it has helped bridge the philological chasm between ancient and medieval Greek. It has supplied many texts from the lost repertoire of classical literature, including Aristotle’s
Constitution of Athens
, Sophocles’
Trackers
, and Menander’s
The Discontented Man
. It has also played a key role in Biblical studies. Some 7,000 early Greek MSS of various fragments of the Bible are now extant. The Dead Sea Scrolls contained a few Christian as well as Jewish texts. There are two pre-Christian papyrus rolls containing segments of Deuteronomy. A papyrus from
AD
125 carrying the Gospel of St John is significantly older than any version on parchment. Some of the oldest papal bulls to survive have done so on papyrus.
2
As papyrus gave way to parchment, to vellum, and eventually to paper, so too did the roll give way, to the folded pages of the codex. The passing of papyrus, and the advent of the codex, combined to launch the birth of the book.
[BIBLIA] [XATIVAH]
BLACK ATHENA
N
O
thesis has divided the world of classics more profoundly than that associated with the title of
Black Athena
. The traditionalists regard it as freakish; others maintain that it deserves close attention.
1
The thesis has two separate aspects—one critical, the other propositional. The critical part argues with some force that classical studies were moulded by the self-centred assumptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, and that the cultural debt of Greece and Rome to the older civilizations of the Near East was systematically ignored. The critic’s purpose, ‘to lessen European cultural arrogance’, would seem to be fruitful, though talk of ‘the Aryan model of Greek civilization’ is provocative.
The main propositions of the thesis centre on the twin notions of Greek civilization being specifically rooted in Egypt and of ancient Egyptian civilization being ‘fundamentally African’ and created by ‘blacks’. This line stands on shakier ground. The Coptic contribution to Greek vocabulary is at best marginal. The skin-colour of the Pharaohs, as portrayed on tomb-paintings, is usually much fairer than that of their frequently negroid servants. Egyptian men were tanned, the women pale. A Nubian dynasty of the seventh century
BC
is the only one out of thirty-one that can realistically be categorized as ‘black’. Sceptics might suspect that scholarship has been hijacked by the racial politics of the USA.
In which case, it is perhaps necessary to re-state the obvious. If one cares to go back far enough, there is no doubt that the origins both of Europeans and of European civilization lie far beyond Europe. The point is: how far back, and to what starting-point, do prehistorians have to go? [
CADMUS
] [
CAUCASIA
]
[DASA]
[EPIC]
Aristotle’s simile of mankind living ‘like ants milling on the shore’ underlines the strategic problem of concentrating Greek manpower and resources. The thin, extended lines of communication were effective for purposes of economic and cultural expansion, but vulnerable to military attack. In the fifth century
BC
the Persian challenge had been repulsed with the greatest difficulty. In the fourth century the Macedonians overran the whole of Greece and Persia in the space of thirty years. From the third century onwards, the advance of the Roman legions was unstoppable. At no time could the Greeks ever put more than 50,000 hoplites into the field; yet once the Roman Republic was able to conscript the manpower of the populous Italian peninsula, it had more than half a million soldiers at its disposal. The military contest between Greece and Rome was heavily weighted from the start. The Roman conquest of Magna Graecia was completed at the end of the Pyrrhic Wars in 266
BC.
Sicily was annexed following the spirited defence of Syracuse in 212. Macedonia was defeated at the Battle of Pydna in 168.
Mainland Greece, which under the Achaean League had reasserted its independence from Macedonian rule, was subdued by the Consul L. Mummius in 146, and turned into the Roman province of Achaia.
Thereafter, Rome successively reduced all the Greek successor states of the former Macedonian empire. The dramatic end occurred in 30
BC,
when Cleopatra, daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes and the last Queen of Egypt, terminated both a political tradition and her own life by ‘pressing the asp to her snow-white breast’. As the lover of both Caesar and Antony, she had done her utmost to control the relentless advance, and advances, of the Romans. But Pascal’s
bon mot
that ‘the face of the earth would have been different if Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter’ was hardly to the point. The political and military strength of the Greek world was exhausted; the absolute supremacy of Rome was already an established fact.
The resultant fusion of the hellenistic and the Roman world, and the emergence of the hybrid Graeco-Roman civilization, makes it impossible to put a precise date on the death of ancient Greece. But hellenic and hellenistic traditions persisted much longer than is usually supposed. The Delphic Oracle continued to operate until destroyed by marauding barbarians in
AD
267. The Olympic Games continued to be held every four years until the 292nd Olympiad in
AD
392. The Academy continued to teach its pupils in Athens until closed by the Christian Emperor Justinian in
AD
529. The library of Alexandria, though badly burned during Caesar’s siege, was not finally closed until the arrival of the Muslim Caliphate in
AD
641. By then twenty centuries, or two whole millennia, had passed since the twilight of Crete and the dawn at Mycenae.
Much of Greek civilization was lost. Much was absorbed by the Romans, to be passed by them into the Christian and the Byzantine traditions. Much had to await rediscovery during the Renaissance and after. Yet, one way or another, enough has survived for that one small East European country to be regularly acclaimed as ‘the Mother of Europe’, the ‘Source of the West’, a vital ingredient if not the sole fountain-head of Europe.
Syracuse, Sicily, Year 1 of the 141st Olympiad
. In the late summer of the sixth year of the Second Punic War, the epic struggle between the Italian city of Rome and the African city of Carthage was balanced on the knife-edge of fate. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, having annihilated a number of Roman armies sent to halt him, had marched the length of Italy and was campaigning strongly in the south. He had just seized the port and fortress of Tarentum (see Chapter III, p. 155). The Romans, unable to tame him directly, were straining to hold off his allies—the Celts of northern Italy, Philip V of Macedon, who had invaded Illyria, and the Greek city of Syracuse. They were specially eager to subdue Syracuse, since Syracuse held the key both to Hannibal’s supply lines from Africa and to their own intentions of re-conquering Sicily. As a result, Syracuse was enduring the second season of a determined siege from a Roman force under M. Claudius Marcellus.
