A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate. A. H. J. Greenidge
man. Works of art must once have been cheap on the Roman market; for, even if we refuse to credit the story of Mummius' estimate of the prize which fallen Corinth had delivered into his hands,[48] yet the transhipment of cargoes of the priceless treasures to Rome is at least an historic fact, and the Gracchi must themselves have seen the trains of wagons bearing their precious freight along the Via Sacra to the Capitol. The spoils of the generous conqueror were lent to adorn the triumphs, the public buildings and even the private houses, of others; but much that had been yielded by Corinth had become the property neither of the general nor of the State. Polybius had seen the Roman legionaries playing at draughts on the Dionysus of Aristeides and many another famous canvas which had been torn from its place and thrown as a carpet upon the ground;[49] but many a camp follower must have had a better estimate of the material value of the paintings of the Hellenic masters, and the cupidity of the Roman collector must often have been satisfied at no great cost to his resources. The extent to which a returning army could disseminate its acquired tastes and distribute its captured goods had been shown some forty years before the fall of Corinth when Manlius brought his legions back from the first exploration of the rich cities of Asia. Things and names, of which the Roman had never dreamed, soon gratified the eye and struck the ear with a familiar sound. He learnt to love the bronze couches meant for the dining hall, the slender side tables with the strange foreign name, the delicate tissues woven to form the hangings of the bed or litter, the notes struck from the psalter and the harp by the fingers of the dancing-women of the East.[50] This was the first irruption of the efflorescent luxury of Eastern Hellenism; but some five-and-twenty years before this date Rome had received her first experience of the purer taste of the Greek genius in the West. The whole series of the acts of artistic vandalism which marked the footsteps of the conquering state could be traced back to the measures taken by Claudius Marcellus after the fall of Syracuse. The systematic plunder of works of art was for the first time given an official sanction, and the public edifices of Rome were by no means the sole beneficiaries of this new interpretation of the rights of war. Much of the valuable plunder had found its way into private houses,[51] to stimulate the envious cupidity of many a future governor who, cursed with the taste of a collector and unblessed by the opportunity of a war, would make subtle raids on the artistic treasures of his province a secret article of his administration. When the ruling classes of a nation have been familiarised for the larger part of a century with the easy acquisition of the best material treasures of the world, things that have once seemed luxuries come to fill an easy place in the category of accepted wants. But the sudden supply has stopped; the market value, which plunder has destroyed or lessened, has risen to its normal level; another burden has been added to life, there is one further stimulus to wealth and, so pressing is the social need, that the means to its satisfaction are not likely to be too diligently scrutinised before they are adopted.
More pardonable were the tastes that were associated with the more purely intellectual elements in Hellenic culture—with the influence which the Greek rhetor or philosopher exercised in his converse with the stern but receptive minds of Rome, the love of books, the new lessons which were to be taught as to the rhythmic flow of language and the rhythmic movement of the limbs. The Greek adventurer was one of the most striking features of the epoch which immediately followed the close of the great wars. Later thinkers, generally of the resentfully national, academic and pseudo-historical type, who repudiated the amenities of life which they continued to enjoy, and cherished the pleasing fiction of the exemplary mores of the ancient times, could see little in him but a source of unmixed evil;[52] and indeed the Oriental Greek of the commoner type, let loose upon the society of the poorer quarters, or worming his way into the confidence of some rich but uneducated master, must often have been the vehicle of lessons that would better have been unlearnt. But Italy also saw the advent of the best professors of the age, golden-mouthed men who spoke in the language of poetry, rhetoric and philosophy, and who turned from the wearisome competition of their own circles and the barren fields of their former labours to find a flattering attention, a pleasing dignity, and the means of enjoying a full, peaceful and leisured life in the homes of Roman aristocrats, thirsting for knowledge and thirsting still more for the mastery of the unrivalled forms in which their own deeds might be preserved and through which their own political and forensic triumphs might be won. Soon towns of Italy—especially those of the Hellenic South—would be vying with each other to grant the freedom of their cities and other honours in their gift to a young emigrant poet who hailed from Antioch, and members of the noblest houses would be competing for the honour of his friendship and for the privilege of receiving him under their roof.[53] The stream of Greek learning was broad and strong;[54] it bore on its bosom every man and woman who aimed at a reputation for elegance, for wit or for the deadly thrust in verbal fence which played so large a part in the game of politics; every one that refused to float was either an outcast from the best society, or was striving to win an eccentric reputation for national obscurantism and its imaginary accompaniment of honest rustic strength.
Acquaintance with professors and poets led to a knowledge of books; and it was as necessary to store the latter as the former under the fashionable roof. The first private library in Rome was established by Aemilius Paulus, when he brought home the books that had belonged to the vanquished Perseus;[55] and it became as much a feature of conquest amongst the highly cultured to bring home a goodly store of literature as to gather objects of art which might merely please the sensuous taste and touch only the outer surface of the mind.[56]
But it was deemed by no means desirable to limit the influences of the new culture to the minds of the mature. There was, indeed, a school of cautious Hellenists that might have preferred this view, and would at any rate have exercised a careful discrimination between those elements of the Greek training which would strengthen the young mind by giving it a wider range of vision and a new gallery of noble lives and those which would lead to mere display, to effeminacy, nay (who could tell?) to positive depravity. But this could not be the point of view of society as a whole. If the elegant Roman was to be half a Greek, he must learn during the tender and impressionable age to move his limbs and modulate his voice in true Hellenic wise. Hence the picture which Scipio Aemilianus, sane Hellenist and stout Roman, gazed at with astonished eyes and described in the vigorous and uncompromising language suited to a former censor. "I was told," he said, "that free-born boys and girls went to a dancing school and moved amidst disreputable professors of the art. I could not bring my mind to believe it; but I was taken to such a school myself, and Good Heavens! What did I see there! More than fifty boys and girls, one of them, I am ashamed to say, the son of a candidate for office, a boy wearing the golden boss, a lad not less than twelve years of age. He was jingling a pair of castanets and dancing a step which an immodest slave could not dance with decency." [57] Such might have been the reflections of a puritan had he entered a modern dancing-academy. We may be permitted to question the immorality of the exhibition thus displayed, but there can be no doubt as to the social ambition which it reveals—an ambition which would be perpetuated throughout the whole of the life of the boy with the castanets, which would lead him to set a high value on the polish of everything he called his own—a polish determined by certain rigid external standards and to be attained at any hazard, whether by the ruinous concealment of honest poverty, or the struggle for affluence even by the most questionable means.
But the burdens on the wealth of the great were by no means limited to those imposed by merely social canons. Political life at Rome had always been expensive in so far as office was unpaid and its tenure implied leisure and a considerable degree of neglect of his own domestic concerns in the patriot who was willing to accept it. But the State had lately taken on itself to increase the financial expenditure which was due to the people without professing to meet the bill from the public funds. The 'State' at Rome did not mean what it would have meant in such a context amongst the peoples of the Hellenic world. It did not mean that the masses were preying on the richer classes, but that the richer classes were preying on themselves; and this particular form of voluntary self-sacrifice amongst the influential families in the senate was equivalent to the confession that Rome was ceasing to be an Aristocracy and becoming an Oligarchy, was voluntarily placing the claims of wealth on a par with those of birth and merit, or rather was insisting that the latter should not be valid unless they were accompanied by the former. The chief sign of the confession that political advancement might be purchased from the people in a legitimate way, was the adoption of a rule, which was established about the time