As was only natural. The Republic, in the eyes of its citizens, was something much more than a mere constitution, a political order to be toppled or repealed. Instead, hallowed by that most sacred of Roman concepts, tradition, it provided a complete pattern of existence for all those who shared in it. To be a citizen was to know that one was free – ‘and that the Roman people should ever not be free is contrary to all the laws of heaven’.* Such certainty suffused every citizen’s sense of himself. Far from expiring with Sulla’s march on Rome, respect for the Republic’s laws and institutions endured because they were expressions of the Romans’ profoundest sense of their own identity. Yes, a general had turned on his own city, but even he had claimed to be doing so in defence of the traditional order. There had certainly been no revolution. For all the trauma of Sulla’s march on Rome, no one could imagine that the Republic itself might be overthrown, because no one could conceive what might possibly replace it.
So it was that, even after the shocks of 88, life went on. The new year of 87 dawned with an appearance of normality. Two consuls, elected by the Roman people, sat in their chairs of state. The Senate met to advise them. The streets were empty of soldiers. Meanwhile, the man who had dared to march on Rome was disembarking in Greece. His ferocious talents, no longer turned against his own countrymen, could at last be deployed in a fitting manner. There was a war, sternest of all the Romans’ traditions, to be won; enemies of the Republic to overthrow and chastise.
Sulla was marching east.
Missing the Joke
Six years earlier, in 93 BC, a Roman commissioner had paused in Athens on his way to Asia. Gellius Publicola was a man who combined a taste for Greek culture with the sensibility of a joker. Wishing to meet the philosophers for which Athens was still celebrated, he had summoned the various representatives of the squabbling philosophical schools and urged them, with a perfectly straight face, to resolve their differences. If this proved beyond their abilities, he added, then he was very graciously prepared to step in and settle their controversies for them. Forty years later, Gellius’ proposal to the Athenian philosophers would still be remembered by his friends as a prize example of wit. ‘How everyone roared!’6
Quite when the philosophers realised that Gellius was joking we are not told. Nor whether they found the joke quite so rib-tickling as Gellius himself seems to have done. One suspects that they did not. Philosophy was still a serious business in Athens. The very idea of being lectured by a bumptious Roman prankster must surely have struck the heirs of Socrates as a humiliating indignity. All the same, they no doubt laughed politely, if hollowly: Roman offers to settle squabbles had a certain ominous resonance in Greece.
And anyway, in Athens servility and arrogance had long been sides of the same coin. More than anywhere else in Greece, the sanctity of history clung to the city. The Athenians never forgot – nor let anyone else forget – that it was they who had saved Greece at the Battle of Marathon, and had once been the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean. Resplendent still upon the Acropolis, the Parthenon stood as a permanent memorial to the years of Athenian supremacy. All gone, though; long gone. In the list of the Seven Wonders of the World, composed in the century after Alexander’s death, the Parthenon was conspicuous by its absence. It was too small, too out-of-date, reflecting the presumptions of an age in which empires as well as monuments had grown gigantic. Compared to the super-state of Rome, Athens was a provincial backwater. Her memories of empire were nostalgia, nothing more. Any ideas above their station, any hints that the Athenians still imagined themselves a great power, were regarded by the Romans with hilarity. During the Republic’s campaigns against Macedon Athens had presumed to give her support, declaring war with a masterpiece of rhetorical invective. The Romans were not impressed. ‘This was the Athenians’ war against the King of Macedon, a war of words,’ they sniffed. ‘Words are the only weapon that the Athenians have left.’7
Gellius’ joke was cruel because it suggested that even this last weapon might be taken away from them. As, in truth, it already had been. Whether they cared to admit it or not, philosophers, like every other legacy of the Athenian golden age, had become mere adjuncts to the service industry. Those who did particularly well out of Roman patronage had long since learned to cut the cloth of their speculations accordingly. Typical was the age’s most celebrated polymath, Posidonius. Although he had studied in Athens, Posidonius was widely travelled, and rationalised what he observed in Rome’s provinces – rather optimistically – as a commonwealth of man. He was a close associate of Rutilius Rufus, that upright defender of his province’s interests, and evidently believed that his friend was a truer face of Rome than the publicani who had destroyed him. In the new order that the Republic was bringing into the world, Posidonius somehow managed to catch a reflection of the order of the universe. He argued that it was the moral duty of Rome’s subjects to accept such a dispensation. Differences of culture and geography would soon dissolve. History was coming to an end.
Posidonius may have been expressing himself in high-flown terms, but he was only putting a gloss on what was evident enough anyway. The coming of Rome had indeed shrunk the world. It did not take a philosopher to recognise this – or to turn it to profit. The Athenian ruling classes may privately have regarded their Roman masters as bullying philistines, but they knew better than to voice such an opinion publicly. While the Romans had few compunctions about beggaring their defeated enemies, they had always been careful to reward their friends, and Athens had benefited accordingly. The juiciest prize of all had come in 165, following the final war against Macedon, during which the island republic of Rhodes had been less than full-blooded in her backing for Rome. This had been duly noted by the Senate. Rhodes had long been the major trading entrepôt in the eastern Mediterranean, and in punishing her the Romans had demonstrated that they could toy with economies to the same devastating effect that they fought on the battlefield. A toll-free harbour had been opened on the island of Delos, and presented to Athens. Rhodes had consequently seen her revenues collapse; Athens had grown rich. By the start of the first century, so prosperous had the Athenians become that their currency, with Roman encouragement, had established itself as legal tender throughout the Greek world. Parallel measures synchronised the different systems of weights used in Italy and Athens. It was not only Rome that benefited from the resulting trade boom. Ships crammed with Italian commodities began to throng the harbours of Athens and Delos. The Athenian upper classes, their eyes now firmly fixed on the world beyond their city, concentrated on the only measure of achievement left to them – that of becoming millionaires.