The Classical World (18 page)

Since their first foundations in the 730s
BC
the Greek settlers had gone on to found yet more settlements as they gained in confidence. These sub-colonies lay on excellent farmland too, great swathes of it (about a hundred and fifty square miles) at Selinus in the south-west. The greatest modern historian of the western Greeks, T. J. Dunbabin, who was himself a New Zealander, has compared these settlers with ‘the almost complete cultural dependence… on which the colonials most pride themselves’.
⁵
Were they simply creating more of the same?

The main lines of their history down to
c.
460 are already familiar from mainland Greece. There had been wars between western Greek cities and also wars between the Greeks and the many non-Greeks on the island. There had been no new ‘Western’ military inventions and no really new political experiments: there was no common Sicilian Greek council or festival. The most pan-‘Siciliote’ occasions must have
been their horse races but we do not even know where the big meetings were held. On the mainland Greek model, there were citizen-armies of armoured hoplites and excellent cavalrymen (horses proliferated in the good river-lands, as only in Thessaly back in Greece). There were tyrants, and eventually there were democracies to replace them. The main difference was the timescale. The grandest Sicilian tyrants emerged in Syracuse and Gela
c.
505
BC
(when the Athenians had just adopted democracy). Democracies replaced Western tyrants quite often, but not until the 460s (in Asia Minor, democracy had already been motivating the eastern Greeks to revolt by
c.
500). From Sicily, we now have inscribed evidence of the reforms by which the newly strengthened city-state of Camarina adapted its social units
c.
460
BC
, but the reform was some fifty years later than Cleisthenes’ somewhat similar reforms in Attica.
⁶

In religion, too, the western Greeks were traditional. They honoured the same Greek gods and connected themselves to similar myths. A few of them have left some clear evidence for beliefs about life in the underworld, and until recently these speculations were loosely called ‘Orphic’ (after Orpheus, who escaped the underworld) and were thought to be a western Greek innovation. New evidence has shown that they were not distinctively Western but were widespread in Greece too. An important inscription, dated
c.
450
BC
, gives us some of the flavour of everyday religiosity in the big Greek settlement at Selinus: it sets out ways in which people can purify themselves from a hostile spirit-presence, whether seen or heard, by sacrificing a full-grown sheep and following other rituals.
⁷
It shows no sign of a ‘Western enlightenment’, and is not a response to a rare crisis.

The Greek cities in the West had been settled ‘top down’, by land-distributions from their leaders to their settlers. This style of settlement rested on less of an infrastructure of villages and nuclei in the countryside than many ‘bottom up’ settlements in old Greece: in the Sicilian city-territories, rich and absentee landowners may have been more frequent. Yet, this pattern was not the prime cause of political turmoil. As in old Greece, the dynamics for it were faction among a competitive upper class and greater riches in a few new hands, combined with changes in military tactics and continuing popular resentment of corrupt justice. The West’s tyrants were no more ‘populist’ than the upper
classes whom they dominated: the rulers of Syracuse were said to regard the common people as an ‘unfit object of cohabitation’.

Of course, in such a wide network of so many Greeks, there were also a few innovations. Sicilian Greeks invented the after-dinner game of
kottabos
, or wine-flicking: they began a limited form of comic drama; they were credited with a special type of cart, forerunner of the painted festival and wedding carts in later Sicilian life and opera.
⁸
To judge from vase paintings, women in ‘Great Greece’ may have worn more transparent clothing than women in Greece itself, although neither wore what we call underpants.

These innovations were not a new type of culture, but they were part of a confident and self-assertive one. Western Greeks increasingly amassed their own prized deeds and memories. They showed them off in old Greece, but not as Greece’s obsequious poor relations. In the eighth and seventh centuries dedications from Italy and the Greek West were already quite conspicuous at the great sanctuary of Olympia. They included weaponry, probably to thank the gods for victories won by western Greeks over their fellow Greeks or the surrounding non-Greeks. In the sixth century
BC
a prominent terrace at Delphi became the setting for an array of lavish ‘treasury’ buildings: five out of the ten ‘treasuries’ had been paid for by western Greeks. Westerners also proved to be great racehorse-owners and competitors on the Greek athletic circuit. It was, then, no novelty when the tyrant-rulers of Sicilian Greek cities dedicated helmets, tripods and statues at Olympia and Delphi in the 470s. They, too, were showing off their victories in games and their prowess in battle against barbarians. This same Western self-confidence greeted the mainland Greek envoys who arrived to seek help in the crisis of the Persian invasion of 480. The ruler of Syracuse demanded the command of the entire Greek force against Persia as his condition of acceptance. The Athenian envoys cited their role in Homer’s Trojan War and refused him. It was an effective retort, because at that remote time the Sicilian Greek cities had not even existed.

Seen from old Greece and the Aegean, the West was simply a convenient refuge for a ‘new start’ when all else failed. Losers in old Greece’s headlong political upheavals went west to found or take over a community. Greek refugees from the Persian conquest of Ionia took
their gift for philosophy to south Italy and founded a settlement, Elea (about forty miles south of Paestum), which became famous for its subtle approach to questions of truth and knowledge. In the Bay of Naples,
c.
521
BC
, aristocratic refugees from Samos founded a place called ‘Just Government’ in explicit contrast to their tyranny at home (it later became the important port of Puteoli). Followers of the philosopher Pythagoras had preceded them,
c.
530
BC
, in south Italy, especially at Croton. Nonetheless, not every migrant was as just as the admirable Cadmus, who came to Sicily having renounced his tyranny on the island of Cos ‘out of justice’.
⁹
In
c.
514 one of the two Spartan kings, Dorieus, was ousted by his brother and arrived in the West with a small band of adventurers. First, they tried to help in an inter-city battle in south Italy; then they invaded the Carthaginian end of Sicily in the belief that they were ‘reclaiming the heritage of the hero Heracles’. Dorieus died and a few of his followers withdrew to the south coast where they founded a consolation prize, another ‘Heraclea’, on the site, however, of an existing Greek city-state.

As these Greek exiles arrived and the existing Greeks in the West remained confident, neighbouring non-Greeks were not left in peace. In
c.
570 the Greek settlers at Cyrene in Libya won a spectacular victory over Libyans and Egyptians and cleared the way for a further wave of Greek settlement in north Africa. However, in
c.
560 the non-Greeks then won something of their own back and thereafter, the Greeks in the West did not carry all before them. From
c.
560 to
c.
510 attempts at further western Greek settlements failed, on Corsica, in western Sicily and close to Phoenician settlement in northern Libya. In the West, there were few entirely empty spaces for people to fill up. Carthage, too, had grown in confidence in the centuries since her foundation from the Levant: in the late sixth century Carthage’s surviving treaty with Rome shows Carthage trying to limit Romans’ access to her coastlines. The western Greeks, therefore, remained only one ‘ethnicity’ in a wider crowd. Like others, they travelled up the west coast of Italy, but the sanctuaries outside the coastal settlements there were already being frequented by quite other visitors and traders: Phoenicians and Etruscans were prominent, and these peoples were already concerned with their own inter-relations.

For the sixth century
BC
was a particular age of splendour for the
ruling families in Etruscan settlements. As at Tarquinia, they liked to drink from painted Greek pottery, to patronize Greek sculptors and painters and even to imitate the Greek style of hoplites and, probably, cavalrymen. But they were not passive debtors to the Greeks so much as self-aware choosers and adaptors of what they were offered. They were also aggressive. In the Bay of Naples, in the 470s, the Greek ‘tyrants’ of Syracuse had to intervene to protect the local Greek cities from a major barbarian invasion, headed by Etruscans. Soon afterwards Sicilian Greeks helped in the founding of a local ‘New City’ (called Neapolis, modern Naples). Its regular layout of streets is still visible, even in the jungle of the modern city. ‘New City’ was not so very far south of another famous site, Rome: how far, if at all, was the future ‘eternal city’ integrated into this western Greek melting pot around her?

The early history of Rome remains a vivid arena of dispute, scepticism and scholarly ingenuity. The Latin sources have obviously been elaborated, or invented, many centuries later and so modern scholars rely heavily on local archaeology. On questions of political change and ethnic variety, its evidence is often ambiguous or irrelevant. What we need to stress here is that from the eighth century
BC
, the age of Homer onwards, Rome was not an odd community, isolated from surrounding fashions. Archaeological finds do show that Levantine ‘Phoenicians’ and Greeks (probably Euboeans) had visited the site up the river Tiber. For the Romans were not sufficiently supplied to remain quietly inland: it has been brilliantly observed that Rome had no nearby source of that animal and human necessity, salt. Salt-fields, the only ones in west Italy, lay at the river Tiber’s mouth on the north bank. In due course a ‘salt road’ (the Via Salaria) ran down from Rome and Ostia was founded at the river-mouth, traditionally in the mid-seventh century
BC
, no doubt with an eye on the salt-assets.
¹⁰
Up at Rome, meanwhile, the local huts were being replaced by houses; there was a public space, or ‘Forum’, which was paved; by
c.
620
BC
archaeologists detect an ‘urban transformation’, in which the cultural influence of Etruscans was extremely important, accompanied by migrants from Etruscan towns. Then (as strong tradition said) it was followed by the rule of a sequence of Etruscan kings, the Tarquins (traditionally, 616–509
BC
).

Western Greek visitors to the Roman community in this period would have found a society which was not wholly unfamiliar. Until the late sixth century
BC
it was being ruled by kings, although their line was not hereditary. Clans (or
gentes
) and ‘tribes’ helped to organize society. There was an array of male priesthoods, although they had unusually specialized functions by Greek standards. During the sixth and early fifth centuries the social organization also changed in ways which are broadly familiar from Greek communities. The number of Rome’s tribes was increased and the army was reorganized. At the end of the sixth century kingship was overthrown (like tyrannies in the Greek world) and annual magistrates assumed the leadership of the resulting state. Within decades there was to be popular agitation over indebtedness and access to land; concessions had to be made to what Greeks would call the
d
ē
mos
, or ‘people’. In the 450s there was even the publication of a body of laws (Rome’s famous Twelve Tables), just as laws were sometimes published in early Greek city-states. The Roman laws included a ban on intermarriage between the noble patricians and non-patricians (many Greek aristocrats would have applauded). They addressed the problems of debt and adoption, marriage and inheritance which were important in Greek communities too. According to these laws, badly deformed children should be rapidly killed (Spartans would have agreed), but what was unique (as Greeks later observed) was the exceptional power granted to the male head of a Roman household over all its members, including children. So long as a Roman father lived, his sons had no right to own anything: they could simply be killed by their father, the
paterfamilias
. This extreme power for the father was evaded in practice, but it remained an important element in later Roman respect for tradition.

In the stories which were told later about this period, Rome’s connections with the wider world were drawn even closer. The last three kings of Rome were said to have begun (in 616
BC
) with a migrant, Tarquinius, from the Etruscan city of Tarquinia: his father had been an aristocrat from Greek Corinth. This Greek, Demaratus, had been ejected by the first tyranny at Corinth (
c.
657) and obliged to seek a new life in Italy. The second of Rome’s Etruscan kings was the celebrated Servius Tullius (in tradition, 578–535
BC
) who became remembered for a lowly origin (the son of a slave), and a special
relationship with the gods; he was probably an Etruscan warrior, called Mastarna in Etruscan. It was he who introduced a fundamental reform of the tribes and connected ‘centuries’ of the Roman people to their public assembly. Servius’ reforms had a definite similarity to those of the early Greek reformers who had changed the structure of ‘tribes’ in their city-states during the sixth century
BC
. Even the first publication of Roman law was connected to the Greeks. Ambassadors are said in later tradition to have been sent out from Rome in the late 450s to study the laws of Greek cities, specifically those of Athens, the ‘laws of Solon’.
¹¹
Certainly, the Twelve Tables’ word for ‘punishment’ (
poena
) was derived from Greek (
poin
ē
); the reason was not, surely, contact with Athens, but Roman contact with some of the newer Greek communities in south Italy. It was, however, a particular Roman precision to specify that a debtor who defaulted when owing debts to several people should be divided into pieces and distributed to each of his creditors.