Category Archives: Rome

It was all Greek to them. No, literally.

diadochen1

I left off in my thread on the general historical backdrop to the main story in my forthcoming book with a nod to Hellenism. That is because my main characters, Hannibal (Carthage) and Scipio (Rome), clashed, with consequences for us today, during the third century BCE, the height of the so-called Hellenistic era.

This may sound weird. Hellenism is named after Hellas, Greece, but what we know about this epic clash is that it happened between the two superpowers of the day, Rome and Carthage. What does Greece have to do with this?

This is what I want to explain, briefly and simply, in this post.

“Greece” was never, in antiquity, a country. Even Homer, writing about the Trojan War that was the mythological foundation for all Greeks, never once used the word Greeks! (Instead, he called the Greeks Argives, Achaeans, Aetolians, and so on.) During the Classical era, the Greeks had independent city states (Athens, Sparta, Thebes etc) that constantly fought against, or allied with, one another.

But although they never thought of themselves as a country, they always thought of themselves as a civilization. The definition of Greekness was simple: if you were allowed to send competitors to the Olmpic Games, you were Greek. And who was allowed? Broadly, those who spoke Greek. All other languages sounded to the Greeks like “bar bar bar bar”, hence barbarian.

Then, in the fourth century BCE, something big happened: While the Greek cities kept fighting each other about rather petty things, as usual, a new power rose to the north. This was Macedonia. Whether the Macedonians were Greek was at first controversial, but might made right, and Philip, then his son Alexander, became not only Macedonian but also Greek.

Alexander, completing the dream his father had dreamt when he was murdered, then swept ferociously across the Hellespont to the east, reversing the direction of the earlier Persian invasions, and conquering most of the known world. In the process he brought Greek language, culture, philsophy, theater, art and architecture to the entire “Middle East”. His name lives on in many garbled city names, such as Kandahar.

Then Alexander died, prematurely. His generals carved up his huge empire and for the next couple of centuries, huge and powerful kingdoms with Greek aristocracies ruled the area. The two biggest were the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic empires. The last Greco-Macedonian queen was, of course, Cleopatra (who happens to be another of the characters in my book.)

What did this mean? It meant that in the whole Mediterranean and “Middle East”, there was one cosmopolitan, urban culture, which was Greek–ie, Hellenistic. There were lots and lots of other peoples–Phoenicians, Romans, Gauls, Numidians, Illyrians etc–who abutted on this Greek pond from all sides, and they each had their own culture and language. But the haute couture, the lingua franca, the aesthetic style, the entire outlook and sensibility of the era–all this was Greek.

There are no perfect parallels in history for this astonishing cultural dominance. The reach of Han Chinese culture during the Tang Dynasty and “Anglo-Saxon” culture today (from English-as-a-second-language to Hollywood films) are the two that seem to come closest.

So there. Hannibal spoke Punic, Scipio spoke Latin, but both of course also spoke Greek. Scipio, in fact, loved Greek culture so much that his political enemy, Cato the Elder, a sort of Roman Joe McCarthy, even tried to spin a scandal out of it.

It was a culturally refined and complex era. A fascinating era.

Bookmark and Share

Backdrop to the story: Hellenism

737px-dying_gaul

I’ve always been a fan of Hellenistic art, such as this sculpture of a Dying Gaul (a Roman copy of the original Greek sculpture, made during Hannibal’s lifetime). Compare the Gaul above to the sculpture below, which shows either Poseidon or Zeus and was made about two centuries earlier, during the Classical era.

469px-netuno19b

Huge difference, wouldn’t you say?

In the Classical era, art (which, as we all know, imitates life) was about depicting heroism in a stylized, idealized and static way. Even if the god is about to throw a thunderbolt, he seems frozen in time. He does not look like an individual but like a type.

In the Hellenistic era, by contrast, art is about individualized, internal, psychological and much more complex depictions of heroism. The Gaul looks ethnically like a Celt; he is struggling against death with as much turmoil on the inside as on the outside; he looks like he is actually moving on his shield. This is one man, unique, during the moment of his life’s ultimate drama.

Why am I talking about this?

Because the Dying Gaul is a great visual clue about the historical era in which the plot of the main characters in my forthcoming book unfolds. (As always, please remember that the plot and the characters are just the frame for a story that is about us today, about success and failure in our lives!) Hannibal and Scipio encountered each other during this, the Hellenistic, era.

In a coming post, let me try to begin to unravel the mystery I set up in recent posts: namely, how was it possible that Rome, an obscure Italian town that most people had never heard of, came to replace (and erase) Carthage, the Mediterranean superpower, making our own world forever Roman? Understanding these events starts, ironically, with understanding Hellenism, ie the Greeks.

Bookmark and Share

Carthage and Rome: murderous twins

Hey Dido, say we EACH had a city....

Hey Dido, say we EACH had a city....

I left off in this thread on the historical background of the main characters in my forthcoming book by asking you to savor a certain sense of mystery:

At the beginning of the so-called Hellenistic era (ie, the death of Alexander), Carthage was a superpower and Rome all but unknown. 177 years later, Rome was the superpower, and Carthage was completely razed. And our world would forever after be Roman. What happened in those 177 years?

Before I go on, please, remember that my book will not be a history lesson; it is a story of characters, from Hannibal and Scipio to modern people you know, who illustrate a theme that you, I hope, will recognize in your own life.

That said, in these posts I’m amusing myself with a bit of history. And so back to the mystery. It actually gets more mysterious for a while, because Carthage and Rome were … friends.

That might be overstating things, but they were a) extremely alike in some ways and b) entirely tolerant of each other for many centuries.

If you believe Roman legends, the two cities were founded almost at the same time–Carthage in 814 BCE by the beautiful and wily queen Dido, and Rome a few generations later by the descendants of Aeneas, a Trojan survivor and Dido’s erstwhile lover. Dido and Aeneas are pictured together above. (The lewd version is here.)

Rome and Carthage then evolved almost as twins: two polytheistic city-states that shook off tyrants and became proud republics, with popular assemblies, councils of elders, and two annually-elected presidents–the Romans called them consuls, the Carthaginians suffetes.

Carthaginian empire

Carthaginian empire

To the extent that they were also different, this actually helped them to get along. Rome was agrarian, provincial and essentially land-locked in central Italy. It had no navy at all! When it had to fight, it drafted all male citizens. Carthage, by contrast, was maritime, controlled a vast sea empire and made profits from trading. When it had to fight, it hired mercenaries to do the fighting on the citizens’ behalf.

So for centuries the Romans worried about their neighbors in Italy, and the Carthaginians about their profits and sea routes, and both sides were happy. They had treaties of friendship. There seemed to be no problem.

To be continued.

Bookmark and Share

Our Roman world, 2009

450px-mta_station_wall450px-us_treasury_07110005

What’s that peeking through the urban thicket of New York? Why, the New York Stock Exchange, where your savings are currently being lost. And what about that patriotic-looking edifice on the right? That’s the US Treasury, where your savings are also currently being lost. But I digress. What’s my point?

By now I shouldn’t even have to make it explicit. It is that those buildings, like thousands of libraries and state capitols and what not, are explicitly and intentionally built to look … Roman!

And what would America look like if Hannibal, ie Carthage, had won? Exactly. We have no idea. We don’t know what Carthaginian columns and buildings looked like because the Romans were too thorough in wiping it off the map.

And what do we speak? English, a Germanic tongue, admittedly, but one that got half its vocabulary from Norman French, an offshoot of Latin. To our north and south in this hemisphere, they speak French, Spanish and Portuguese, other offshoots of Latin.

And what would the Americas sound like if Hannibal had won? Exactly. We have no idea. Perhaps remotely like Hebrew or Arabic, since Punic was a Semitic language, but we can’t say because it’s been dead so long.

We could go on and on. We have Senators because our founding fathers wanted to model themselves after the Rome that Polybius described, the one that survived and overcame Hannibal. Toga parties, Caesar’s Palace, …. Please don’t expect me to go there.

The point of all this, of course, is to instill in you a retroactive sense of wonderment about the mysterious events between, roughly, the death of Alexander and the Roman double-sack of Carthage and Corinth. Recall that Alexander had never heard of Rome but had Carthage in his sights, because it was the superpower of its region. Recall that, 177 years later, those Romans of whom he had not heard razed Carthage and Corinth to the ground and began to turn the world into what we know today.

Those epic and mysterious events that explain the mystery are the backdrop–the context or scene–for the astonishing individual and human stories of the main characters in my book, who proved with their own lives that triumph and disaster are impostors.

Bookmark and Share

A tale of two cities’ disappearing

What is the following description about?

… they threw timbers from one [house] to another over the narrow passageways, and crossed as on bridges. While war was raging in this way on the roofs, another fight was going on among those who met each other in the streets below. All places were filled with groans, shrieks, shouts, and every kind of agony. Some were stabbed, others were hurled alive from the roofs to the pavement … No one dared to set fire to the houses on account of those who were still on the roofs, until [the commander showed up]. Then he set fire to the three streets all together, and gave orders to keep the passageways clear of burning material so that the army might move back and forth freely.

Then came new scenes of horror. As the fire spread and carried everything down, the soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries. Still others, thrust out and falling from such a height with the stones, timbers, and fire, were torn asunder in all shapes of horror, crushed and mangled.

Nor was this the end of their miseries, for the street cleaners, who were removing the rubbish with axes, mattocks, and forks, and making the roads passable, tossed with these instruments the dead and the living together into holes in the ground, dragging them along like sticks and stones and turning them over with their iron tools. Trenches were filled with men. Some who were thrown in head foremost, with their legs sticking out of the ground, writhed a long time. Others fell with their feet downward and their heads above ground. [Army transports] ran over them, crushing their faces and skulls, not purposely on the part of the riders, but in their headlong haste. …

The Americans taking Fallujah in 2003? Street fighting in World War II? Nope. It’s the Romans wiping Carthage off the map, as described by Appian here.

The year was 146 BCE, and in that same year the Romans also destroyed Corinth in Greece. One city gone in the west, one in the east. A very Roman gesture.

In the previous post in this thread, I talked about Alexander looking west from his deathbed in 323 BCE and seeing a mighty city, Carthage, but not seeing a city called Rome, because there was nothing much to see yet. In this scene, 177 years later, that nation of which Alexander had not heard, Rome, was laying waste and subjugating the two great Mediterranean civilizations that Alexander had known, the Carthaginian-Punic and his own, the Greek.

Clearly, a lot had happened in those intervening years. Events that we today see all around us–by what we see, speak and think, and by what we do not see, speak and think. I will explain that in the next post.

And just as a reminder: The story of what happened between those dates–Alexander’s death and Rome’s domination of west and east–has, of course, everything to do with the main characters in my book: Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio.

Bookmark and Share

The view west from Alexander’s death bed

You're next, Carthage

You're next, Carthage

One month before his 33rd birthday, on June 11th, 323 BCE, Alexander died in a sumptuous palace in Babylon, in today’s Iraq. He had been drinking with his friends and might have been poisoned. Or he might have had malaria, or typhoid fever, or any number of other ailments.

In twelve short years–during his twenties (what were you doing in your twenties?)–this young man had completely changed the world. Indeed, you might say that he had unified the world for possibly the first and only time. (I’m talking about the world known to him). Recall that the Greeks had had, for at least a century and a half, a keen sense of East (alien, soft, depraved) and West (Greek, civilized), with assorted barbarians living on the periphery. Alexander brought East and West and its major civilizations together into one realm, with a remarkably cosmopolitan vision of governing by including rather than oppressing the non-Greeks.

But that is not the subject of today’s post. Instead, I want to choose June 11th, 323 BCE as the date with which to begin a new thread on The Hannibal Blog: In the next series of posts I want to “set the scene”, the historical context, for the main plot and main characters in my forthcoming book.

What did Alexander not see to his west when he died?

This is the question of today’s post. The answer should be surprising. If it is not, I will help you to be surprised in the coming posts.

First, a map of what we think he should have seen (click to enlarge):

800px-alexander-empire_323bc

What Alexander saw was Carthage. This man, who was said to have cried once when he thought he had run out of countries to conquer, was apparently planning to conquer the entire western Mediterranean when death intervened, and the western Mediterranean, as far as Alexander knew, was a pond with two main cultures: 1) His own (Hellenistic) and 2) the Carthaginian-Punic one. So he was planning to take on Carthage, that mighty and wealthy port on the tip of northern Africa, settled by Phoenicians whose mother country (in today’s Lebanon) already belonged to Alexander’s empire. Once he had Carthage, Alexander would truly be able to say that ruled the whole world.

And here is what he did not see: Rome! Alexander had apparently never even heard of the place. Rome may have been among a few Italian towns that sent representatives to his court, but he personally seems never to have taken note of the place. And why should he have? It was a sleepy town in the middle of Italy. Clearly not of any consequence. More in the next post.

Bookmark and Share

Lavinia and Aeneas

Ursula LeGuin

Ursula LeGuin

You’ve heard of Dido and Aeneas (and Purcell, Virgil and all that). Well, a well-known author named Ursula LeGuin decided to pick one of the most obscure but potentially interesting characters of the whole Aeneid and give you Lavinia and Aeneas. The novel is called Lavinia, and I just finished it.

The book came to my attention through my wife. Her book club, having heard that NPR considers the book one of last year’s best, decided to read it. So my wife read it. “You would get more out of this,” she kept saying to me, since there was all this, you know, ancient and Roman stuff in it. I was intrigued.

But when she finished it she and her book club weren’t so convinced. My wife’s verdict: “Sloooow start, but she made the Aeneid accessible to me.”

So I picked it up. And this came to mind:

464px-alfred_hitchcock_nywts

Always avoid cliché.

So I remember Alfred Hitchcock saying in some interview I once saw. The Hannibal Blog has of late been exploring what makes good storytelling good. But I haven’t said much about the enemies of good stories. I think cliché is the most dangerous of them.

And this is the dilemma of Lavinia: Fantastic conceit for a novel! Really. Exactly the sort of idea that I have time for; indeed not that far away conceptually from the book idea that I myself had. But what a shame about the corny bits.

Here is the genius of the conceit: Aeneas survives the sack of Troy and escapes with his father and son (but not his wife, who perishes in Troy) to wander the Mediterranean. He has a torrid affair with Dido, the wily queen of Carthage, but leaves her and she burns herself (presaging, I might add, what Scipio’s–and Aeneas’–heir will one day do to all of Carthage). Aeneas ends up in Italy, Latium, where his destiny is to found a people, later to become Rome. But it’s not easy. He has to make alliances and fight local wars first. Enter Lavinia. She becomes his second wife (after Creusa in Troy), with whom he will sire the Roman race.

Virgil only mentions her in a line or two. So does Livy. And yet she seems to be so important. A Rutulian king named Turnus had the hots for her and felt upstaged when Aeneas swooped in, and that–ie, she–is what set off the bloody wars. (Shades of Helen?) Oh, and Lavinia is implicitly the mother of the Roman race.

So LeGuin bravely sets out to make Lavinia come alive. And she succeeds in part, but only after page 100 or so. For the first 100 pages LeGuin colors in this woman about whom we know nothing by making her the eternal damsel in distress, slightly hippie, slightly dreamy, chaste but yearning, right out of a B movie. Everything about this Lavinia is a cliché.

Once Aeneas arrives on the scene and we finally have some mythological material to work with (Virgil’s), it gets good. But what gets good is, in effect, the last part of the old Aeneid.

More accessible, yes, as my wife said. In fact, she recommends the book, and so do I, by a hair.

Still, the last word that wants to roll of the tongue of the reviewer is the one that is so devilishly hard for the storyteller to avoid, the one that no storyteller wants to hear said: cliché.

Bookmark and Share

Traveling again, but thinking of Hannibal ….

And I’m on the road again. But I’ll try to keep posting. In particular, I’m trying to think of ways to get back on message, the main “message” being the book that I’ve just delivered to my editor at Riverhead.

You recall that my dilemma is the following: I’m not ready yet to start giving away parts of the book as such. (I don’t have a publication date yet and want to start doing that closer to the time.) But I love the story and topic so much that I started an entire blog with the intention of discussing it, not just ahead of but forever after the book launch.

So maybe I’ll start by setting the scene, in a more cerebral and less narrative way, for the main plot and the main characters. The main plot, you recall, takes place during the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, and the main characters are Hannibal and Scipio. (For some of the more modern characters that appear inside the individual chapters, browse my tags.)

Since the Punic Wars are not exactly common knowledge nowadays (I was born in the wrong generation, by the way), I might start by setting those in context on The Hannibal Blog. What were they? Why were they? How are they still visible all around us today?

Would that be fun?

PS: One of you has let me know via email that he is working on a graphic book about Hannibal. How cool is that? Whenever you’re ready (I don’t “out” people who contact me via email), please share the excitement here on The Hannibal Blog. I’d be honored and want to be the first to link to you…
Bookmark and Share

Livy and Polybius

I got an email from Fabrizio Dinatale, who is writing a dissertation at the University of Reading (UK) on Polybius and Livy. He asked my opinion on the “qualities/defects” attributed to each of them.

Fabrizio, I replied to your email but I keep getting error messages. (“550 550 unrouteable address (state 14)”)

Here is what I said:

Hi Fabrizio,

your dissertation sounds fascinating. Send me a link once it’s finished and I might link to it. You will be the expert on the topic. I am, as you may have picked up from the blog, not a historian, just a writer who’s having fun with Hannibal and Scipio as the main characters in a book about, well, you and me.

That said, Livy and Polybius are my main ancient sources, so I do have some impressions, as I said here and here.

Polybius took Thucydides as his model, Livy Herodotus. Which is to say: Polybius believed in thorough research, fact-checking, original reporting, less embellishment. He personally interviewed eye witnesses and traveled the routes that Hannibal took, even over the Alps. He had a personal connection in that he was the tutor and friend of Scipio Aemilianus (Scipio Africanus’ adoptive grandson) and stood next to him when the Romans burnt Carthage to the ground.

Polybius was writing for his fellow Greeks to explain how the most momentous event in history up to that time–Rome’s rise to superpower status–could have happened. And the biggest step in that rise was Rome’s near-death experience but ultimate victory over Hannibal.

Livy was completely different: somewhat lazy (he did not travel), and unconcerned about originality (ie, he plagiarized Polybius freely). He embellished liberally. Above all, he was writing less a history than propaganda, as you said. And for Romans, in Latin. His mission was to narrate the past, mythical and actual, in a coherent way that appeared inexorably to lead to … Augustus! Rome as the chosen people, you might say.

In that sense, he was not unlike Virgil, who went one step further in the Aeneid and implicitly tied Augustus to Aeneas as though everything had all been preordained all along.

Have fun. Again, i’ll be interested in what you end up concluding in your dissertation.

Bookmark and Share