Europe: A History (35 page)
Within this overall strategy, political arrangements could be extremely flexible. The introduction of uniform administration was not an immediate priority. Peninsular Italy, which was united under Roman rule at the end of the third century
BC,
had to wait 200 years for its reorganization into regular provinces. Local rulers were frequently left in place. Those who resisted, or rebelled, risked annihilation. In Greece, for example, resistance was undermined when in 146
BC
the Roman general appeared at the Isthmian Games and announced that the city-states would be allowed to retain their autonomy. Corinth, which declined the offer, suffered the same fate as Carthage (and in the same year).
Roman religious life was amazingly eclectic. Over the centuries the Romans came into contact with virtually all the gods of the Mediterranean, each of whose cults they added to their collection. In the early days, the devotion of a Roman family was centred on the household deities of hearth and barn. Civic life centred on a series of guardian cults, such as that of the Vestal Virgins, who tended the eternal flame, and on a complicated calendar of festivals presided over by the Pontifex Maximus. Later, the proximity of Magna Graecia led to the wholesale adoption of the Olympian pantheon. The first temple of Apollo was consecrated in Rome in 431
BC.
The Epicureans, and especially the Stoics, also found many adherents. In late republican times, oriental mystery cults were popularized—among them that of Atargatis from Syria, of Cybele, the ‘Magna Mater’ of Asia Minor, and of Egyptian Isis. In imperial times, official religion shifted to the obligatory cult of recent or reigning emperors. Christianity took hold at a time when the Persian sun-god Mithras was increasingly cultivated, especially in the army. The gospel of love had to contend with the dualist doctrine of light and darkness, whose initiates bathed in bull’s blood and celebrated the birth of their god on 25 December. Their subterranean oblations are imagined in the ‘Hymn of the XXX Legion’:
Mithras, God of the Morning, our trumpets waken the Wall!
Rome is above the nations, but Thou art over all!
Now as the names are answered, and the guards are marched away,
Mithras, also a soldier, give us strength for this day!
Mithras, God of the Sunset, low on the western main—
Thou descending immortal, immortal to rise again!
Now when the watch is ended, now when the wine is drawn,
Mithras, also a soldier, keep us pure till the dawn!
Mithras, God of the Midnight, here where the great Bull dies,
Look on Thy children in darkness. O take our sacrifice!
Many roads Thou hast fashioned—all of them lead to the Light!
Mithras, also a soldier, teach us to die aright!
6
[ARICIA]
The Roman economy combined a large measure of self-sufficiency in the inland areas with extensive trade and commerce in the Mediterranean. Overland transport costs were high, despite the main roads, so provincial cities did not look beyond the surrounding districts for most commodities. But the seaborne traffic, first developed by Greeks and Phoenicians, was increased still further. Wine, oil, furs, pottery, metals, slaves, and corn were the standard cargoes,
[CEDROS]
ARICIA
A
DOZEN
miles to the south of Rome, in a crater amidst the Alban hills, lies Lake Nemi, the ‘lake of the grove’. In imperial times, the nearby village of Nemi was called Aricia; and throughout the Roman era the woods beside the lake sheltered the sacred Arician Grove, home of
Diana nemorensis
, ‘The Diana of the Grove’.
The Arician cult is known both from the writings of Strabo and from modern archaeology. In many ways, it was unremarkable. It involved the worship of a sacred oak, whose boughs were not to be broken, and a sanctuary of perpetual fire. Apart from Diana, it addressed two minor deities— Egeria, a water nymph, and Virbius, a fugitive from the wrath of Zeus. As shown by the surviving mounds of votive offerings, its main devotees were women who hoped to conceive. On the day of the annual summer festival, the grove was lit up by myriad torches, and women all over Italy burned fires in gratitude.
In one respect, however, the cult was exceptional. The Chief Priest of Aricia, who bore the title of
Rex Nemorensis
or ‘King of the Grove’, was obliged to win his position by slaying his predecessor. At one and the same time he was priest, murderer, and prospective murder victim. Stalking the grove with drawn sword, even at dead of night, he awaited the hour when the next contestant would appear, break off a twig of the Oak, and challenge him to mortal combat.
In recent times, the Arician Grove is notable as the starting-point of James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
(1890), one of the founding works of modern anthropology. Frazer ranks alongside Marx, Freud, and Einstein as a pioneer who changed the thinking of the world. Frazer posed himself two simple questions: ‘Why had the priest to slay his predecessor?’ and ‘Why, before he slew him, had he first to pluck the Golden Bough?’
1
In search of possible answers, he set off on an investigation of supernatural beliefs in every conceivable culture, ancient or modern. He examines rain-making in China; priest-kings from the Pharaohs to Dalai Lama; tree-spirits from New Guinea to the Cedar of Gilgit, corn-spirits from the Isle of Skye to the Gardens of Adonis; May-Day festivals, summer Fire Festivals, and harvest Festivals. He describes belief in the internal Soul among the Hawaiians and in the external Soul among the Samoyeds of Siberia: in the transference of evil and the expulsion of spirits. He outlines a great range of sacrificial ceremonies from sacrifices among the Khonds of Bengal, to ‘eating the God’ in Lithuania and ‘crying the neck’ by the reapers of Devon.
Frazer was making two assumptions, which in his own day were revolutionary. On one hand, he insisted that so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ practices were based on serious ideas, and hence, despite their grotesque appearances, were worthy of respect. At the same time, he showed that the supposedly advanced religions of the civilized world, including Christianity, owed much to their pagan predecessors. ‘The life of the old kings and priests teems with instruction’ he wrote. ‘In it, was summed up all that passed for wisdom when the world was young’.
2
Or again:
Our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences…. We are like heirs to a fortune which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those who built it up has been lost… . Their errors were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity…. We shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth and to give them the benefit for that indulgence which we may one day stand in need of ourselves:
cum exclusione itaque veteres audiendi sunt.
3
Frazer’s universal tolerance was one of the principal means whereby the European humanities were able to escape from their narrow Christian strait-jacket, and open themselves up to all times and all peoples. His demonstration that many of the customs of Christian peoples had their roots in pagan practices was particularly shocking:
At the approach of Easter, Sicilian women sow wheat, lentils and canary-seed in plates which are kept in the dark and watered… The plants soon shoot up: the stalks are tied together with red ribbons and the plates containing them are placed on the sepulchres which with effigies of the dead Christ, are made up in … churches on Good Friday…. The whole custom—sepulchres as well as plates of sprouting grain—is probably nothing but a continuation, under another name, of Adonis worship.
4
Returning to the Arician Grove, Frazer concluded that the King of the Grove personified the tree with the Golden Bough, and that the rite of his death had parallels among many European peoples from Gaul to Norway. The Golden Bough, he claimed, was none other than the mistletoe, whose name he derived from the Welsh, meaning ‘tree of pure gold’. ‘The King of the Wood lived and died as an incarnation of the supreme Aryan God, whose life was in the mistletoe or Golden Bough.’
5
To be safe, he added a final paragraph saying that nowadays the visitor to Nemi’s woods can hear the church bells of Rome ‘which chime out from the distant city, and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes…. le
Roi est mort, vive le roí!’
6
In other words, the pagan King of the Grove has gone; the Christian ‘King of Heaven’ reigns supreme. He didn’t care to mention that the Christian King, too, was born to be slain.
The growing population of Rome was fed on state-supplied corn, the
frumen-tum publicum
, which was imported initially from Latium and later from Sicily and North Africa. But the Romans were also wedded to luxuries, and were able to pay for them. The ‘silk route’ was opened to China, and the ‘spice lanes’ to India. Roman traders, the notorious
negotiators
, moved freely round the Empire after the armies, taking valuables, styles, and expectations with them,
[
SAMOS
]
A common currency was introduced in Italy in 269
BC
and in Roman territories as a whole in 49
BC.
In the imperial period there were gold, silver, brass, and copper coins. The brass
sestertius
became the basic unit of currency. The gold
aureus
was worth 100s., the silver
denarius
4, the copper
as
one quarter. Local currencies continued alongside, however, and the right to mint was an important mark of status,
[NOMISMA]
CEDROS
T
HE
fact that the Greeks and Romans had only one word—either
kedros
or
cedros
—to describe the two different species of juniper and cedar merits a nine-page appendix. On the scale of scholarship demanded by a genuine specialist, a subject such as
Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World
needs a volume as large as the one you are reading.
1
And it is worth every page. It shows what a dedicated scholar can do by applying a very narrow instrument to a very broad front—in other words, if one is permitted the only appropriate metaphor, to saw a cross-section through the trunk of the classical world. Like other such works, it starts with a meticulous examination of the different sources of evidence: archaeology, literary references, inscriptions, temple commissioners’ accounts and reports, dendrochronology. It then surveys the subject-matter—from the cedar floorbeams at Cnossos to the ash spear of Achilles, from the 220 Roman ships built in 45 days for the First Punic War to the bridge over the Rhine built in ten days for Julius Caesar.
Greece and Rome were not timber-based civilizations, like those of the far north.
[NOVGOROD]
But their knowledge of timber was renowned, and the timber trade well developed. After reading up on the subject, one can never see a fir tree without thinking of the Athenian fleet at Salamis, nor pass a larch without imagining the 100-foot mast of a Roman trireme. Every bare hillside is a reminder of the Romans’ deforestation of southern Italy and of northern Africa,
[ECO]
History demands sympathetic historians. There has never been a finer dovetail than that which joined classical trees and timber to the son of a timber merchant from New York State.
SAMOS
S
AMIAN
ware, the everyday ‘red-gloss pottery’ of the Roman Empire, probably originated on the island of Samos, but the great mass of it was not manufactured there. From an important factory at Arretium (Arezzo), which was most active
AD
30–40, its production was moved to a number of large-scale potteries in Gaul. Forty-five main centres are known; but the major ones from the first century were located at sites at La Graufesenque (Aveyron) and Banassac (Lozére), from the second century at Les Martres de Veyre and Lezoux (Puy-de-Dôme), and from the third century at Trier and at
Tabernae Rhenanae
(Rheinzabern) in Germany. The full geographical range stretches from Spain and North Africa to Colchester and Upchurch in England and Westerndorff on the River Inn in Austria.
1
Ceramology seeks the triumph of ingenuity and pedantry over the remains of millions of archaeologists’ pots and shards; and Samian ware has offered the most extensive challenge. Since studies began in 1879, over 160 kilns have been identified, together with over 3,000 individual potters’ marks. Hans Dragendorff (1895) classified 55 standard forms of vessel (D1-D55). Others have catalogued standard decorative motifs, analysed technical aspects such as the gloss, the clay, and the texture of the
terra sigillata
, or established the colour spectrum from the characteristic orange-pink of Banassac to the deep orange-brown of Les Martres de Veyre. Pioneer collections at the British Museum and the , Musée Carnavalet led the way for numerous studies from Toronto to Ljubljana.
2
Potters’ marks are specially revealing. Often preceded by the letter
f(= fecit
, made by),
m
(=
manu
, by the hand of), or
of {-officina
, by the factory of), they bring to life the craftsmen who fed the most widespread commodity of imperial trade. The working lives of 51 central Gaulish potters have been exactly charted. Cocatus Idenalis and Ranto worked throughout the reign of Trajan (98–117); Cinnamus of Lezoux was active c.150–90; Banuus, Casurius, and Divixtus spanned the five reigns from Antoninus Pius (138–61) to Albinus (193–7).
3
The net result is a corpus of information that is so sophisticated that the date and provenance of the smallest fragment of Samian ware can be precisely established. For archaeologists, it is a research aid of inestimable value. A crate of Samian ware from Gaul was found, unopened, at Pompeii. Similar consignments were sent to every town and settlement of the Empire.
Roman society was built on fundamental legal distinctions between the citizen and the non-citizen and, among the non-citizens, between the free and the unfree. It was a strict system of hereditary social ‘orders’ or estates. Practices which began in ancient Latium were modified over the centuries until they encompassed the vast and variegated populations of all the Empire’s provinces. In early republican Rome, the
patres
or city fathers were set apart from the
plebs
or common people, with whom they were forbidden to intermarry. The patrician clans dominated both the political life of the city in the Senate and economic life through their hold on the distribution of land; and they fought a long rearguard action against the plebeian challenge. But eventually their privileges were undermined. In 296
BC,
by the
Lex Ogulnia
, the plebs were to be admitted to the sacred colleges of pontífices and augurs. In 287
BC,
by the
Lex Hortensia
, the laws of the plebeian assembly became binding on all citizens. The plebs had become part of the Establishment. In the so-called ‘Social War’ of 90–89
BC,
Rome’s Italian allies successfully claimed the rights of full citizenship. But it was not until
AD
212 that the
Constitutio Antoniniana
gave citizenship to all free-born male subjects of the Empire.
