The Romans didn’t have any history so they made one up.
And since they didn’t have enough imagination to come up with good stories, they copied them from their brighter neighbor, the Greeks. How could you do better than Homer’s pretty poems about the Trojan War and the struggle of Ulysses with that angry god Pluto? You couldn’t. The Greeks seemed to know more about the gods than anyone. They seemed to know more about everything. They were like a talented older brother who had invented everything before you came along. You weren’t jealous actually because he was such a funny and entertaining brother; how could you hate a boy who was so lively and funny and original? When it came time to do your own composition at school, or to imagine anything at all, you couldn’t get his stories out of your head. They were just too good. You couldn’t do half as well and you knew it. The best you could do was to write something similar and hope the teacher didn’t notice. And the truth is, those stories of your brother were so much a part of you that you didn’t know yourself when you borrowed.
In the beginning, when there weren’t Romans but only Latins and Italics and Etruscans, family stories were all anyone needed. But later on, when Rome became a city and then a local power and then a regional power and finally a world superpower, people looked back and wondered how that had come about. How the devil had they managed to do all that? What were they doing right? When had they started to do it? Who were they anyway? Some of their scholars and prophets said they had been founded by a half-god and that Rome was destined to be master of the world. They said this pretty late, of course; after Rome was master of the world.
Aeneas carries his father Anchises from Troy, as shown on a Greek vase
No one knows who first invented the Roman take-off on the Greek story. But it wasn’t written down until five-hundred years after Rome was founded. A man named Quintus Fabius Pictor wrote the first history—and he wrote it in Greek, not Latin. There was of course nothing good to read in Latin. There weren’t many readers either.
Why did Pictor write at all? What is a history for?
Rome had just managed to survive by the skin of her teeth—for the umpteenth time. She had just defeated Hannibal and driven the Carthaginian army out of Italy for good. He had been in Italy with his army for twelve years, defeating Roman armies wherever he met them. He was unbeatable, uncatchable, the old fox. Once or twice it looked like he would take Rome itself, and then that would have been the end. Finally, more because Hannibal’s army was worn out than because the Romans were superior, they had defeated him. There was a sigh of relief. Still panting and with her bloody sword in her hand, Rome looked around her and saw that she was—could it be?—the ruler of the whole Western Mediterranean. There were for once no dangerous enemies around. Soldiers and senators clapped each other on the back and cheered. We did it, by Jove! We beat them all!
Next came a wave of national pride. “You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on a Roman,” they told each other while they feasted and drank. “We are a tough people—how else could we have done what we did?” And they gloated. But to be truthful, they were a little surprised themselves. Who were they anyway? Can anyone find a historian to tell us about our brave and wise people?
Quintus Fabius Pictor came forward.
I bet you didn’t know that the founder of our dear city Rome was a hero from Troy, he said.
Troy?
Yes; he fought in the Trojan War. As you know, that was the Mother of All Wars and the one that produced genuine heroes.
You might remember a Trojan prince by the name of Aeneas. That’s him. He wasn’t Greek but he was as brave as the bravest of them.
A Trojan prince founded Rome? But how could he have founded Rome if he was from Troy?
Ah, the ways of Destiny! Remember what happened to the great Ulysses after that war? He couldn’t get home and had to wander around the Mediterranean because Pluto had a grudge against him and kept pushing his ship off course.
Well, something similar happened to Aeneas. After the war he was looking for a place to settle down but the goddess Juno had a grudge against him and made him wander all over the Mediterranean until he reached Italy.
Well, we’ll be darned. We hope the gods don’t think we’re being disrespectful if we say they can be terrible sometimes.
It took Aeneas years to make it here of course. Ulysses got hooked for awhile by a retired siren called Calypso and Aeneas got mixed up with a queen called Dido in Sicily. But they both wiggled out from those women’s arms. Aeneas headed for Italy and landed you know where: a little country called Latium, near Rome. It was just the right place to found an empire.
You better believe it was!
Since he was squatting, he got ready to fight with the people he was asking to move over. But he was so god-like (did we say his mother was Venus?) that the Latin king gave up without a fight and offered Aeneas his daughter in marriage. Aeneas’s lusty soldiers quickly followed suit and married the Latin girls, and the two clans, Trojans and Latins, became one.
Did you say Aeneas’ mother was Venus? How could that be?
She seduced his dad Anchises when he was young and she had his baby: Baby Aeneas.
Yes, now I remember: Anchises was the old man Aeneas carried out of Troy on his back when the town was on fire.
…Hey: that means that the founder of our city had Venus to watch over him. That explains a lot of things. A lot of things.
History is the great teacher, said Pictor with his eyebrows high. And he who doesn’t know history is bound to relive it. Remember that.
..
To chump:
I thought that the Romans sent delegations to Greece to obtain copies of the law of Solon. That could be legendary, but still it is hard to believe that the Romans lapped up Greek thinking and mythology but avoided getting Greek legal concepts at the same time.
Chump: Thanks—right you are. THAT was the real greatness of Rome, wasn’t it? Snubbing the Romans because they lacked the vivid imagination of the Greeks is like putting down John for not being Joe. As it turned out John made an equally great contribution to world culture—it took just his sober, calculating make-up. The sixth-century farmer probably had no stories about the gods in his head; but he had a unique sense of duty and law. He even understood his religion as a sort of contract with the gods. I should already have posted on the Twelve Tablets—an idea that you gave me long ago.
I doubt if one could find any culture, any religion, any social tradition that was not heavily indebted to a predecessor. To push an analogy, we take the DNA we are dealt, recombine it in different ways and pass it on. But one arena where the Romans are generally credited with new habits of thought and action is law. They professed great admiration for Greek models but when it came to selling corn they took their own counsel–even while developing institutional structures for consciously incorporating desirable “foreign” elements into their legal thinking. And they certainly passed it on: every modern expression of the western legal tradition employs concepts, vocabulary and habits of mind that are demonstrably Roman in origin.
Felix: Thank you. Your tantalizing remarks each deserve a reply. But now I can’t be long.
That is good about the stories being not popular traditions but the productions of Roman artists and poets.
J. H. Breasted, an old historian I knew from school, said this: “As Rome gained control of Greece the mingling of Greek and Roman life was increasingly intimate…Familiarity with the only literature known to the Romans…aroused the impulse toward literary expression among the Romans themselves. To be sure, the Latins, like all peasant peoples, had had their folk songs and their simple forms of verse, but these natural products of the soil of Latium soon disappeared as the men of Latin speech felt the influence of an already highly finished literature. Latin literature, therefore, did not develop along its own lines from native beginnings, as did Greek literature, but grew up on the basis of a great inheritance from abroad. Indeed, as the Roman poet Horace said, Rome, the conqueror, was herself conquered by the civilization of the Greeks.” Ancient Times: a History of the Early World, p. 637
God knows what that sixth-century farmer you mentioned had in his head, but in time he picked up what the artists and poets invented. They gave shape to superstition and created tradition, as they always do. And they did it, they modeled, with Greek clay.
The Americans inherited a long culture tradition too, of course. Men like James and Eliot and Pound even felt more comfortable over here. So you are right, we shouldn’t dog the poor Romans.
Etruscan influence seem to have been the strongest in the beginning. All their kings were Etruscan. Breasted says this: “We possess no written documents of Rome for this early period. Our conclusions are based on a study of archaeological remains. If these remains had formed our only evidence, no one could ever have reached any other conclusion than that the kings of Rome were Etruscan. The later Romans themselves, however, with evident disinclination to believe that their early kings had been outsiders, cherished a tradition that their kings were native Romans. This tradition, with many picturesque and pleasing incidents, has found a place in literature and is still widely believed.” (op. cit., p.571)
As to whether the modern Greeks deserve to think of themselves as descendants of Homer et al., I’ll let you and Pavlo slug it out.
The first ancient history book I got hold of was by Breasted, the American archaeologist I quoted above. He dug at the end of the nineteenth century, mainly in Egypt. He believed and showed everywhere in his book that Egypt invented about everything except great literature. I know almost nothing about non-Western history and always wonder what my Far East readers think of all this.
It’s too easy to dog on the Romans for incorporating Greek myth into their history and religion. One problem here is the misunderstanding of ancient religion. The stories about the gods we study in mythology classes are almost entirely LITERARY productions. These were written by artists who were trying to be inspiring and poetic (same thing with vase-painting). It is, I think, ridiculous to think that if you asked a Greek farmer in 500BC where the seasons come from he would tell you the story about Demeter’s sadness at Persephone’s being confined to the underworld a few months out of the year. Ancient religion was NOT a matter of BELIEVING that certain stories are true. But when you say “Oh the Romans just took over the Greek stories for their religion, how pathetic” you fail to understand that, again, what they took over was a literary tradition. They worshiped their own Gods: Jupiter, Juno, Venus, etc; however in the tolerant views of their time they came to believe the Greeks called Jupiter Zeus, Juno Hera, Venus Aphrodite, etc. It’s not as if the Romans had no religion and were ‘converted’ to Greek religion. As ‘Westerners’ how can we fault them for incorporating another group’s religion into their own sense of identity? We have incorporated the ancient Jewish God as ‘our own’.
Modern Greece, Pavlo, is quite a paradox. It is an Orthodox nation. To be Greek is to be Orthodox, not necessarily in belief of course, but in identity. But “Oh the Romans are so unoriginal, borrowing another country’s religion.” Wake up. Also, I’d hate to shatter your self-image, but the idea that the (modern) Greeks are the sons of the Greeks is laughable. Greece did not even really exist as a country 400 years ago. The Byzantine intellectuals and priests who travel to Athens to tread the earth their heroes walked express their disappointment that it is just a bunch of illiterate shepherds living in ruins of a once great civilization. Ethnically you are probably just as much Turkish as ‘Greek’. It was only religious differences that caused any distinction to be made at all. Also, the western Renaissance gave modern Greece the impetus to claim ownership of its own classical past. “Yes! Those people you’re reading about and respect: that’s us! descendants of Homer, Themistocles, Sophocles, Plato. It’s in our blood.”
All history is constructed. Yours, mine, and the Romans’. Were the Romans stupid enough to believe that their founder was a half-God (Romulus) descendant of the Trojan Aeneas son of a goddess? Well, some probably were; just as you are silly enough to believe in the authenticity of your ‘history’.
Virgil had reasons for writing the Aeneid the way he did. Fabius Pictor had reasons for writing his history the way he did (and everything we say about it is almost guess work because we have none of it left and only impressions of what it was about from other authors. The author of this page, you’ll note, cites nothing) And the connection of Aeneas and Rome may even have dated back to a Hellenistic (Greek) historian Timaeus. He might have had reasons for assuring the Romans they were related to Greek/Trojan heroes, and they weren’t shallow patriotism because he wasn’t Roman.
The Romans got a lot from the Greeks. Sure. Why is that a bad thing? You reach too far, LOL, when you say the Greeks copied everything from Egypt. (though Herodotus does suggest this about some things (EVEN RELIGION) in book 2 of his histories) But the Greeks got plenty from other cultures. Sometimes the birth of philosophy is dated to 585 BC because this Ionian Greek was able to show that there was a rational order to the cosmos (and not just the whim of arbitrary, anthropomorphic divinities) when he predicted the coming of an eclipse. However, Herodotus even says he predicted not the day, but the year, in which it would happen (not as accurate as always claimed). And more importantly the Egyptians and Babylonians were already ahead in astronomy – THAT’S WHERE HE LEARNED IT. A great many aspects of Homer and Hesdiod’s poems have precursors in Eastern cultures (Hittite, Babylonian)
Were the Greeks original? Sure. But I bet if we had more remains of other ancient cultures they’d be shown to be less so.
Greeks copied Egytians?
thats funny… The greeks crafted their gods after men, not men whith birds heads, I dont see any Pyrimids in Hellas. and i dont see any Dorian Collums or parthenons in Egypt.
Truth be told If it wasnt for Greece Rome wouldnt exist.
Julius Ceaser Recognised this, He himself made all of Rome speak Greek, Romans worshiped Greek gods, Greek Heroes, some even thought they were Desendant from Spartans.
…but of all you said the part that was the most interesting : “We are all the sons of Greece”
I’ve read that before, Its not true.
Some Historians believe that when Alexander conquerd he left Greeks all over the lands he swept throug (which he did) but Alexander only took over the east…not the west.
If anything you may be a son of Rome, but as a Greek myself I laugh when i hear that.
Buddy Greeks are the son of Greece,
lol
Romans were copycat?
LOL
Greek gods came from Egypt and Phoeniacians,greek alphabet was phoenician too.
Of course greeks were great anyway but romans created arch,coliseum,they brought engineering to a level never seen before.
We are all the sons of Greece and Rome is the main son.
Nordics anyway never created anything in all their history if not hiajacked from Rome.