Hardly the kind of forecast to delight the portent-haunted Romans. Fortunately for their peace of mind, however, these particular verses had not been copied from their own prophetic books, which remained locked up where they had always been, secure against any leaks, in the temple of Jupiter. Instead, the bloodcurdling prediction had first begun to circulate far away from Rome, in the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The Romans, it appeared, were not the only people to have been visited by the Sibyl. In Rome her prophecies may have been kept a closely guarded secret, but those she had given to the Greeks and Jews were widely broadcast. Many of these clearly referred to the Republic: ‘An empire will rise from beyond the western sea, white and many-headed, and its sway will be measureless, bringing ruin and terror to kings, looting gold and silver from city after city.’2 Nervous of prodigies the Romans may have been, but in the eyes of the world they were a prodigy themselves. The deadliest one of all – or so the Sibyl warned.
For her vision of the Republic’s rise to greatness was dark indeed. Ancient cities, great monarchies, famous empires, all would be swept away. Mankind would acknowledge a single order. One superpower would rule supreme. But this would bring no dawning of a universal peace. Far from it. Instead, it would be the Romans’ fate to surfeit on their own greatness. ‘They will sink into a swamp of decadence: men will sleep with men, and boys will be pimped in brothels; civil tumults will engulf them, and everything will fall into confusion and disorder. The world will be filled with evils.’3
Scholars have dated these verses to around 140 BC. Rome’s supremacy was so well established by then that its description would hardly have required the powers of an authentic Sibyl. Unlike their counterparts held by the Republic, the prophetic books circulating in the Greek East never suggested that the future could be altered. Before their vision of a series of great empires succeeding each other throughout history, with Rome’s the greatest and most baneful of all, mere mortals were represented as impotent. No wonder that the poets hiding behind the pseudonym of the Sibyl, when they claimed to peer into the future, should have offered a vision of the Republic as a mother of ‘ravening beasts’, torn to shreds by her own children. It was a prophecy bred equally of wishful thinking and desperation, of an inability to imagine how else the Roman juggernaut might ever be stopped. ‘They will bring despair to humanity – and then, once they have succumbed to their savagery and pride, the fall of these men will be terrible indeed.’4
There could have been no doubt, in the 140s, as to what the Sibyl was referring when she spoke of the Romans’ savagery and pride. This was the decade when the brute fact of their power was demonstrated to the world beyond all possible doubt. Devastation shadowed the Mediterranean. First, the Republic decided to conclude unfinished business and bring the ghostly half-life of Carthage to an end. Even in Rome herself there were those who disapproved. Many argued that the Republic needed a rival who was worthy of the name. Without rivalry, they demanded, how would Rome’s greatness ever be maintained? Such a question, of course, could have been asked only in a state where ruthless competition was regarded as the basis of all civic virtue. Unsurprisingly, however, a majority of citizens refused to stomach its implications. For more than a century they had been demonising the Carthaginians’ cruelty and faithlessness. Why, most citizens wondered, should the standards of Roman life be applied to the protection of such a foe? This question was duly answered by a vote to push Carthage into war. By aiming at her complete annihilation, the Republic revealed what the logical consequence of its ideals of success might be. In such brutality, unmediated by any nexus of fellowship or duty, lay the extremes of the Roman desire to be the best.
In 149 the hapless Carthaginians were given the vindictive order to abandon their city. Rather than surrender to such a demand, they prepared to defend their homes and sacred places to the death. This, of course, was precisely what the hawks back in Rome had been hoping they would do. The legions moved in for the kill. For three years the Carthaginians held out against overwhelming odds and in the final stages of the siege the generalship of Rome’s best soldier, Scipio Aemilianus. At last, in 146, the city was stormed, gutted of its treasures and set ablaze. The inferno raged for seventeen days. On the cleared and smoking ruin, the Romans then placed a deadly interdiction, forbidding anyone ever to build upon its site again. Seven hundred years of history were wiped clean.*
Meanwhile, just in case anyone was missing the lesson, a Roman army spent the same spring of 146 rubbing it into the noses of the Greeks. That winter a ragbag of cities in southern Greece had presumed to disturb the balance of power that Rome had established in the area. Such lese-majesty could not be allowed to pass unpunished. In a war that was over almost before it had begun, a Greek army was swatted like a bothersome wasp, and the ancient city of Corinth reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. Since Corinth had long been celebrated for two things in particular – the quality of her prostitutes and the splendour of her art – the opportunities for plunder were enthusiastically embraced. The women of the slaughtered citizens were enslaved, while on the harbour quays soldiers rolled dice on priceless paintings. Jumbles of statuary stood piled all around them, ready to be auctioned off in job lots or crated back to Rome.
The obliteration of not one but two of the greatest cities of the Mediterranean was a stunning outrage. No wonder, in the face of it, that the Sibyl imagined a curse laid against Rome, one borne upon the smoke from the twin scenes of annihilation. Even the Romans themselves felt a little queasy. No longer could it be pretended that they were conquering the world in self-defence. Memories of the looting of Corinth would always be recalled by the Romans with embarrassment. Guilt over Carthage, however, provoked in them something far more. It was said that even as Scipio watched the flames lap at the crumbling walls of the great city, he had wept. In the destruction of Rome’s deadliest enemy he could see, like the Sibyl, the baneful power of the workings of Fate. At the moment when the Republic’s supremacy had been so overwhelmingly affirmed, when there was not an enemy who could hope to stand against it, when the plunder of the whole world seemed its for the taking, Scipio imagined its doom. Lines from Homer came to him.
‘
The day of the destruction of sacred Troy will arrive
,
And the slaughter of Priam and his people.
’
5
But what he imagined might bring slaughter and destruction to the Republic, Scipio, unlike the Sibyl, did not say.
Choking on Gold
Prior to the cataclysms of 146 there had been some confusion among the Greeks as to the precise definition of ‘freedom’. When the Romans claimed to be guaranteeing it, what did this mean? One could never be sure with barbarians, of course: their grasp of semantics was so woefully inadequate. All the same, it did not require a philosopher to point out that words might be slippery and dangerously dependent on perspective. And so it had proved. Roman and Greek interpretations of the word had indeed diverged. To the Romans, who tended to regard the Greeks as fractious children in need of the firm hand of a pater familias, ‘freedom’ had meant an opportunity for the city states to follow rules laid down by Roman commissioners. To the Greeks, it had meant the chance to fight each other. It was this incompatibility of viewpoints that had led directly to the tragedy of Corinth’s destruction.