While the 2nd century was a time of heated competition among senators, it was generally a period of quiescence of the plebs and their magistrates, the tribunes. Nevertheless, signs of the upheaval ahead are visible. For one, the long plebeian struggle against arbitrary abuse of magisterial power continued. A series of Porcian laws were passed to protect citizens from summary execution or scourging, asserting the citizen’s right of appeal to the assembly (ius provocationis). A descendant of the Porcian clan later advertised these laws on coins as a victory for freedom. Moreover, the massive annual war effort provoked occasional resistance to military service. In 193 the tribunes started to investigate complaints about overly long military service. Interpreting this as a challenge to magisterial authority, the Senate responded with a declaration of an emergency levy, and the tribunes stopped their activity. In 151 the tribunes tried to protect some citizens from the levy for the unpopular war in Spain. A confrontation between the tribunes and the recruiting consuls ensued, in which the tribunes briefly imprisoned the consuls until a compromise relieved the crisis. The scene of tribunes taking consuls to jail was repeated in 138 during a period of renewed difficulties over recruiting.
Since the Hortensian law of 287, the plebs had the constitutional power to pass laws binding on the entire state without senatorial approval. During the next century and a half few attempts were made to use the power for purposes of major reform against the Senate’s will, in part because the plebeian tribunes, as members of the senatorial order, generally shared the Senate’s interests and in part because the plebeians benefited from Rome’s great successes abroad under senatorial leadership. Yet senatorial fear of unbridled popular legislative power is perceptible in the Aelian and Fufian law of about 150. This law, imperfectly known from later passing references, provided that a magistrate holding a legislative assembly could be prevented from passing a bill on religious grounds by another magistrate claiming to have witnessed unfavourable omens in a procedure called obnuntiatio. In addition, the days of the year on which legislative assemblies could be held were reduced. As conservative senators worked to restrain the democratic element in the political processes, the plebeians sought to expand their freedom. Voting in electoral and judicial assemblies had been public, allowing powerful senators more easily to manage the votes of their clients. The Gabinian law (139) and Cassian law (137) introduced secret written ballots into the assemblies, thus loosening the control of patrons over their clients. Significantly, the reform was supported by Scipio Aemilianus, the sort of senator who stood to benefit by attracting the clients of other patrons through his personal popularity. These reforms, together with the changing composition of the electorate in the city, carried the potential, soon to be realized, for more volatile assemblies. Culture and religion
Expansion brought Rome into contact with many diverse cultures. The most important of these was the Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean with its highly refined literature and learning. Rome responded to it with ambivalence: although Greek doctrina was attractive, it was also the culture of the defeated and enslaved. Indeed, much Greek culture was brought to Rome in the aftermath of military victories, as Roman soldiers returned home not only with works of art but also with learned Greeks who had been enslaved. Despite the ambivalence, nearly every facet of Roman culture was influenced by the Greeks, and it was a Greco-Roman culture that the Roman empire bequeathed to later European civilization.
As Roman aristocrats encountered Greeks in southern Italy and in the East in the 3rd century, they learned to speak and write in Greek. Scipio Africanus and Flamininus, for example, are known to have corresponded in Greek. By the late republic it became standard for senators to be bilingual. Many were reared from infancy by Greek-speaking slaves and later tutored by Greek slaves or freedmen. Nonetheless, despite their increasing fluency in Greek, senators continued to insist on Latin as the official language of government; visiting dignitaries from the East addressing the Senate in Greek had their speeches translated—as a mark of their subordination.
Because Greek was the lingua franca of the East, Romans had to use Greek if they wished to reach a wider audience. Thus the first histories by Romans were written in Greek. The patrician Fabius Pictor, who, as noted above, founded the Roman tradition of historiography during the Second Punic War, wrote his annalistic history of Rome in Greek partly in order to influence Greek views in favour of Rome, and he emphasized Rome’s ancient ties to the Greek world by incorporating in his history the legend that the Trojan hero Aeneas had settled in Latium. Because Roman history was about politics and war, the writing of history was always judged by Romans to be a suitable pastime for men of politics—i.e., for senators such as Fabius.
Rome had had a folk tradition of poetry in the native Saturnian verse with a metre based on stress, but not a formal literature. Lucius Livius Andronicus was regarded as the father of Latin literature, a fact that illustrates to what extent the development of Roman literature was bound up with conquest and enslavement. Livius, a native Greek speaker from Tarentum, was brought as a slave to Rome, where he remained until his death (c. 204). Becoming fluent in Latin, he translated the Homeric Odyssey into Latin in Saturnian verse. Thus Latin literature began with a translation from Greek into the native metre. Livius reached wider audiences through his translations of Greek plays for public performance. Gnaeus Naevius, the next major figure (c. 270–c. 201), was again not a native Roman but an Oscan speaker from Campania. In addition to translating Greek drama, he wrote the first major original work in Latin, an epic poem about the First Punic War. Naevius’ successors, Quintus Ennius from Calabria (239–169) and Titus Maccius Plautus from Umbria (c. 254–184), transformed the Latin poetic genres by importing Greek metrical forms based on the length of syllables rather than on stress. Ennius was best known for his epic history of Rome in verse, the Annales, but he also wrote tragedies and satires. Plautus produced comedies adapted from Greek New Comedy. He is the only early author whose work is well represented in the corpus of surviving literature (21 plays judged authentic by Marcus Terentius Varro, Rome’s greatest scholar). None of the plays of his younger contemporaries, Caecilius Statius (c. 210–168) and Marcus Pacuvius (c. 220–130), survive, nor do the once highly esteemed tragedies of Lucius Accius (170–c. 86). The six extant comedies of Terence (Publius Terentius Afer; c. 190–159) provide a sense of the variation in the comic tradition of the 2nd century. These authors also were outsiders, coming from the Celtic Po valley, Brundisium, Umbria, and North Africa, respectively. Thus, while assorted foreigners, some of servile origin, established a Latin literature by adapting Greek genres, metrical forms, and content, native Roman senators began to write history in Greek.
Other forms of Greek learning were slower to take root in Rome. Later Romans remembered that a Greek doctor established a practice in Rome for the first time just before the Second Punic War, but his reputation did little to stimulate Roman interest in the subject. Like doctors, Greek philosophers of the 2nd century were regarded with interest and suspicion. In the early 3rd century Romans had erected in public a statue of Pythagoras, a 6th-century Greek philosopher who had founded communities of philosophers in southern Italy. In the mid-2nd century some senators displayed an interest in philosophy. Scipio Aemilianus, Gaius Laelius (consul 140), and Lucius Furius Philus (consul 136) were among those who listened to the lectures of the three leaders of the Athenian philosophical schools visiting Rome on a diplomatic mission in 155—the academic Carneades, the peripatetic Critolaus, and the stoic Diogenes. On an official visit to the East in 140, Scipio included in his entourage the leading stoic Panaetius. In the same period, another stoic, Blossius of Cumae, was said to have influenced the reforming tribune Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. Yet the philosophical influence should not be exaggerated; none of these senators was a philosopher or even a formal student of philosophy.