Europe: A History (32 page)

The fall of Syracuse had immediate consequences. On the cultural front, it underlined Rome’s obsession with everything Greek. The artistic loot, wrote Livy, was
no less than if Carthage itself had been sacked. It created the fashion for Greek artefacts and Greek ideas which henceforth became the norm for all educated Romans. It was probably the single most powerful stimulus in the growth of a shared Graeco-Roman culture. On the strategic front, it completed the Roman hold on Sicily. It cut off Carthage from a major source of trade and food, and deprived Hannibal of his principal source of logistical support. Before Syracuse, Rome was an equal player in the three-sided Greek–Carthaginian–Roman power game. After Syracuse, Rome held the initiative in all directions.

In the longer term, the Romans’ success in Sicily encouraged their further embroilment in Greek affairs. During the siege of Syracuse, Rome had just opened an alliance with the Aetolian League in central Greece, in order to outflank Carthage’s other ally, Macedonia. From then on, Rome had Greek clients to be satisfied and interests to be protected. Three Macedonian Wars (215–205, 200–197, and 171–168), and the struggle against Macedonia’s chief associate, Antiochus III of Syria, brought the Romans into Greece with a vengeance. In the end, as in Sicily, Rome decided to terminate the complications by turning the whole of Macedonia and the Peloponnese into Roman provinces.

At the time, the fall of Syracuse must have been soon forgotten, even by the Syracusans. They were lucky to escape the fate of other defeated cities, where the whole of the surviving population was habitually sold into slavery. After all, it was just one event in the endless series of campaigns and battles that accompanied the rise of Rome and the demise of Greece. On consideration, however, it may be seen to be symptomatic of shifts and changes that were to affect a much wider constituency than that of central Mediterranean politics.

Historians who look back at Rome’s triumphant expansion are locked into the knowledge of subsequent developments. They are fully aware that the resultant Graeco-Roman culture was destined to dominate the whole of the classical world, and to exert a lasting influence as one of the pillars of ‘Western civilization’. Their antennae are less sensitive to other trends and prospects which existed alongside it. Equally, fully equipped with a knowledge of Greek and Latin, the standard vehicles of higher education in modern Europe, they have sometimes been slow to relate the growth of the Graeco-Roman sphere to the full panorama of contemporary events. No one could fairly deny that the fusion of the Greek and Roman worlds, in which the fall of Syracuse was a signal moment, was a process of capital importance. The difficulty is to see what other perspectives were in the offing.

No record has survived of Syracusan reflections at the time of the siege. But many of the citizens of a merchant city must have travelled widely. They lived on an island which had long been contested between Greeks and Carthaginians and only recently invaded by Romans. As a result, whatever side they favoured in the Punic Wars, they must surely have seen the Carthaginians, like themselves, as members of an ancient order challenged by Roman upstarts. Indeed, as a seagoing commercial nation they would probably have felt a deeper affinity with Carthage
than with Rome. Certainly, living more than a century after Alexander put the Greeks into intimate contact with Persia and India, they must surely have felt themselves to be part of that Graeco-oriental world of Hellenism than of a Graeco-Roman world which had not yet been delivered. For them, the centre of the world was undoubtedly neither Carthage nor Rome, but Alexandria.

Modern perspectives have often placed Syracuse as a Greek and therefore a European city whose new bond with European Rome was a natural, if not an inevitable, development. They instinctively avoid the suggestion that the Greeks were more Asiatic than European at this juncture, or that they might well have maintained their oriental connections indefinitely. Few courses on Western civilization which honour Archimedes would point out that the great mathematical genius gave his life opposing the union of his Greek city with Rome.

Four years after the battle of Cannae (see p. 155) Rome’s position was still extremely precarious. It would have been entirely reasonable for the Carthaginian party to calculate that Marcellus lacked the strength to take Syracuse by assault; that Roman failure at Syracuse would give heart to Carthage’s other allies; that the reassertion of Carthaginian power in Sicily would guarantee proper logistical support for Hannibal; that Hannibal, effectively supplied, would break the stalemate in Italy, that Rome, in other words, had every chance of being defeated. There was no Cato in Syracuse; but the razing of troublesome cities was an established practice. In the long watches on the Syracusan walls, it was entirely possible that some of Archimedes’ men, if not Archimedes himself, could have realistically mused:
Roma delenda est
—that is, until the plague struck and Moeriscus opened the gate.

The Syracusans’ knowledge of the world would have been largely confined to the Great Sea, and to the countries of the East. The science of geography had made great advances in classical Greece, although the frontiers of the world directly known to the ancients had not radically changed. A contemporary of Archimedes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–196), librarian at Alexandria, had concluded that the world was a sphere; and his work was known to Ptolemy and Strabo. But, apart from the Phoenician route to the Tin Islands, little progress was made in practical exploration. No known contact was ever made with West Africa, with the Americas, or with the more distant parts of northern Europe. The rigid division between the ‘civilized’ world of the Mediterranean shoreline and the ‘barbarian’ wilderness beyond was not overcome.

In the late third century Mediterranean civilization was still made up of three major spheres of influence: Carthaginian in the West, Romano-Italic in the centre, Greek-Hellenic in the East. Thanks to Alexander’s conquests, it was more closely tied than previously to the oriental empires from Egypt to India. Along the fragile tracks of Central Asia, it had some slight link with the Empire of China which at that very moment had begun to construct its Great Wall against nomadic incursions.

Over the previous centuries, the barbarian wilderness of northern and central
Europe had begun the slow transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age. It had been strongly marked by the dominant influence of the Celts, whose culture had taken hold, whether by migration or osmosis, at most points from the middle Vistula to Iberia, Gaul, and Britain. The Celts had stormed Rome in 387, and had moved in force into northern Italy. Celtic hill-forts had created a permanent network of urban stations, and their commercial activities formed an important intermediary for the Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic tribes further afield. In the late third century one branch of the Celts, the Galatians, who were established in their kingdom of Tyle in Thrace (on the territory of modern Bulgaria), were facing revolt by their Thracian subjects and preparing the move to neighbouring Asia Minor, where they lingered until medieval times. Their sojourn in Thrace has been confirmed by the recent discovery of inscriptions at Seuthopolis and Messembria (Nesebar).
²⁷

In the third century
BC,
however, many historians would consider that the European Peninsula was at least 1,000 years away from anything recognizable as European civilization. In particular, the Europeanness of ancient Greece is being questioned as an anachronistic, intellectual construction of latter-day Europeans. Which is all very proper.

Yet the two most striking processes of that age—the fusion of Graeco-Roman civilization in the Mediterranean and the supremacy of the Celts across much of the interior—put two essential building-blocks into place for the developments of the future. There was little trace of a common culture or common ideology, though both Graeco-Romans and Celts were Indo-Europeans (see Chapter IV). There was absolutely no inkling of a common identity. None the less, one has to concede that these were the peoples whose descendants and traditions were to find themselves at the core of later European history. It is one thing to correct the excessively Eurocentric interpretations of the ancient world, which have prevailed for too long. It is quite another to go to the other extreme, and to maintain that Greeks and Romans hold little or no relevance to the later European story.

There are certain events which happened, and whose consequences are still with us. One cannot pretend otherwise. If Moeriscus had
not
opened the gate; if Syracuse had resisted the Romans as it once resisted the Athenians; if Hannibal had destroyed Rome as Rome would soon destroy Carthage; if, as a result, the Greek world had eventually fused with Semitic Carthage, then history would have been rather different. The point is: Moeriscus
did
open the gate.

Map 8. The Roman Empire, 1st Century
AD

*
The Tauric Peninsula’s modern name,
Krym
or
Crimea
, derives from the Turkish word
kerim
meaning ‘fortress’, and dates only from the 15th century.

ROMA

Ancient Rome, 753
BC–AD
337

T
HERE
is a quality of cohesiveness about the Roman world which applied neither to Greece nor perhaps to any other civilization, ancient or modern. Like the stones of a Roman wall, which were held together both by the regularity of the design and by that peculiarly powerful Roman cement, so the various parts of the Roman realm were bonded into a massive, monolithic entity by physical, organizational, and psychological controls. The physical bonds included the network of military garrisons which were stationed in every province, and the network of stone-built roads which linked the provinces with Rome. The organizational bonds were based on the common principles of law and administration, and on the universal army of officials who enforced common standards of conduct. The psychological controls were built on fear and punishment—on the absolute certainty that anyone or anything that threatened the authority of Rome would be utterly destroyed.

The source of the Roman obsession with unity and cohesion may well have lain in the pattern of Rome’s early development. Whereas Greece had grown from scores of scattered cities, Rome grew from one single organism. Whilst the Greek world had expanded along the Mediterranean sea lanes, the Roman world was assembled by territorial conquest. Of course, the contrast is not quite so stark: in Alexander the Great the Greeks had found the greatest territorial conqueror of all time; and the Romans, once they moved outside Italy, did not fail to learn the lessons of sea power. Yet the essential difference is undeniable. The key to the Greek world lay in its high-prowed ships; the key to Roman power lay in its marching legions. The Greeks were wedded to the sea, the Romans to the land. The Greek was a sailor at heart, the Roman a landsman.

Certainly, in trying to explain the Roman phenomenon, one would have to place great emphasis on this almost animal instinct for the ‘territorial imperative’. Roman priorities lay in the organization, exploitation, and defence of their territory. In all probability it was the fertile plain of Latium that created the habits and
skills of landed settlement, landed property, landed economy, landed administration, and a land-based society. From this arose the Roman genius for military organization and orderly government. In turn, a deep attachment to the land, and to the stability which rural life engenders, fostered the Roman virtues:
gravitas
, a sense of responsibility,
pietas
, a sense of devotion to family and country, and
iusti-tia
, a sense of the natural order. ‘Tillers of the soil make the strongest men and the bravest soldiers,’ wrote the Elder Cato.
¹