Mary Beard: why ancient Rome matters to the modern world

Failure in Iraq, debates about freedom, expenses scandals, sex advice … the Romans seem versions of ourselves. But then there’s the slavery and the babies on rubbish heaps. We need to understand ancient Rome, but should we take lessons from it?

By the late fourth century CE the river Danube had become Rome’s Calais. What we often call the “invasions” into the Roman empire of barbarian hordes (or “swarms”, perhaps) could equally well be described as mass movements of economic migrants or political refugees from northern Europe. The Roman authorities had no better idea of how to deal with this crisis than our own authorities do, and, predictably, they were less humane. On one notorious occasion, uncomfortable even for some Roman observers, they sold dog-meat as food to the asylum-seekers who had managed to get across the river (dog was off limits for human consumption then as now). It was just one stage in a series of standoffs, compromises and military conflicts that eventually destroyed central Roman power in the western part of their empire. And it was exacerbated by the calculating policy of the Romans in the east, who by this era effectively formed a separate state. Their solution to the crisis of migration was to point the migrants firmly westwards, and try to make them someone else’s problem.
It’s tempting to imagine the ancient Romans as some version of ourselves. They launched disastrous military expeditions to those parts of the world where we too have failed. Iraq was as much a graveyard for the Romans as it has been for us. And one of their worst defeats, in 53BCE at the hands of a rival empire in the east, took place near the modern border between Syria and Turkey. In a particularly ghoulish twist, uncomfortably reminiscent of the sadistic showmanship of Islamic State, the head of the Roman commander was cut off and used by the enemy as a makeshift prop in a performance of Euripides’ play The Bacchae – in which the head of King Pentheus, horribly decapitated by his mother, takes a macabre starring role.

A history of laughter – from Cicero to The Simpsons

Read more

Back in Italy too, Roman life had a familiar side. Urban living in a capital city with a million inhabitants, the biggest conurbation in the west before the 19th century, raised all the usual questions: from traffic congestion (one law tried to keep heavy vehicles out of the city during the day, with the knock-on effect of appalling noise at night) to rudimentary planning problems (exactly how high were high-rise blocks allowed to be, and in what materials to make them safe from fire?). Meanwhile the political classes worried about everything from expenses scandals to benefits scroungers. There was endless, and largely unsuccessful, legislation aimed at preventing officials lining their own pockets out of the public purse. Even the famously upright Marcus Tullius Cicero – politician, poet, philosopher and jokester – left one overseas posting with a small fortune in his suitcase; he had apparently been “economical” with his expenses allowance.
There was also endless debate over the distribution of free or subsidised grain to citizens living in the capital, one half of the infamous pair of “bread and circuses”, which, according to a hard-nosed Roman satirist, had sapped the political energy and independence of the people. Was this a proper use of the state’s resources and a precedent to be proud of – the first time any state in the west had decided to guarantee the basic subsistence of many of its citizens? Or was it an encouragement to idleness, and an extravagance that the exchequer could not afford? One rich Roman conservative was once caught standing in line to collect this allowance of which he vehemently disapproved and certainly did not need. When asked why, he replied: “If you’re sharing out the state’s property, I’ll come and take my cut, thank you.” This is not far from the logic of the elderly modern millionaire who claims his free TV licence or bus pass.

Their sluggish image has a humorous form in the tales of plucky Astérix and his struggles with the Roman legion

Astérix is misleading when it masquerades as the answer to questions about ancient Rome. Photograph: Allstar 

But it is not so simple. To study ancient Rome from the 21st century is rather like walking on a tightrope – a careful balancing act, which demands a very particular sort of imagination. If you look down on one side, everything does look reassuringly familiar, or can be made to seem so. It is not just the military escapades or the problems of urban life and migrants. There are conversations going on that we almost join, about the nature of freedom or the problems of sex. There are jokes we still “get”, buildings and monuments we recognise and family life lived out in ways we understand, with all their quarrels, divorces and troublesome adolescents. Cicero’s disappointment in the first century BCE with his son Marcus, who, at university in Athens, preferred clubbing and drinking to attending lectures on philosophy, is one that many of us can share. So too is the dilemma revealed by a surviving Roman do-it-yourself fortune-telling kit. Among the many questions it lists for anxious consulters is: “Will I get caught in adultery?” And among the many possible responses you could receive (depending on how the dice fell) was the wise and realistic: “Yes, but not yet.”
On the other side of the tightrope, however, is completely alien territory. Some of that strangeness is well recognised. The institution of slavery disrupted any clear idea of what it was to be a human being (neither Greeks nor Romans ever worked out whether slaves were things or people). The filth of the place was, in our terms, shocking. There was hardly any reliable system of refuse collection in ancient Rome, or in any ancient city, and there were revealing stories about stray dogs walking into posh dinner parties clutching in their mouths human body parts they had picked up in the street. And that’s not to mention the slaughter in the gladiatorial arena or the death from illnesses whose cure we now take for granted. More than half of the Romans ever born would have died before they were 10 years old. Childbirth was as deadly to women as battle was to men.

Cicero's dismay at his son Marcus, who preferred clubbing to going to lectures, is a feeling many of us can share

Less well known are the thousands of unwanted new‑born babies who were thrown on to rubbish heaps (or “exposed” to use the modern scholarly euphemism); the boundary between contraception and infanticide was a blurred one, and disposing of children after birth was safer than getting rid of them before. Likewise overlooked are the young Roman girls, who were not uncommonly married by the age of 13 or 14, and sometimes even earlier, into what we would have little hesitation in calling child abuse. How soon these marriages were consummated is anyone’s guess, but Cicero’s response, on the eve of his second marriage, to questions about why, in his 60s, he was taking as a bride a young virgin, a child in her mid-teens, is instructive. “Don’t worry,” he said, “she’ll be a grown-up woman tomorrow” (that is, a virgin no longer). The ancient critic who quoted this answer thought that it was a brilliantly witty way of deflecting criticism, and held it up for admiration. We are likely to put it somewhere on the spectrum between uncomfortably coarse and painfully bleak – one powerful marker of the distance between the Roman world and our own.

The truth is that Roman history offers very few direct lessons for us, and no simple list of dos and don’ts. We hardly need to read of the difficulties of the Roman legions on the Syrian borders to understand that modern military interventions in western Asia might be ill‑advised, or that feeding inedible food to refugees is likely to rebound. I am not even certain that those modern generals who boast of following the tactics of Julius Caesar or Hannibal really do so, in anything more than their own imaginations; most military victories in the ancient world were achieved by massive superiority in numbers or by some variety of “going round the back” of the enemy and capturing them in a pincer movement (“tactics”, in any more sophisticated sense, just weren’t in it). Besides, “the Romans” were no less divided about how they thought the world worked, or should work, than we are. There is no simple Roman model to follow, or reject. If only things were that easy.
Ancient Rome still matters for very different reasons – mainly because Roman debates have given us a template and a language that continue to define the way we understand our own world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy, while prompting laughter, awe, horror and admiration in more or less equal measure. Of course, western culture is not the heir of the classical past alone, nor would anyone wish it to be. There are, happily, many different influences woven into our cultural fabric: Judaism, Christianity and Islam only three of the most obvious. But since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, beauty, and even humour, have been formed, and tested, in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.
We see that in the vocabulary of modern politics, from “senators” to “dictators”, and in our own catchphrases and cliches. “Fiddling while Rome burns” is a reference to the emperor Nero playing his lyre while the city went up in flames in the great fire of 64CE (not, as is now often assumed, “fiddling” in the modern sense of fussing aimlessly). “Fearing Greeks even when bearing gifts” is how Virgil in his Aeneid scripted the warning of one of the Trojan elders at the appearance of the great “Trojan horse”, a treacherous present from their Greek enemies. And the single Latin word “plebs” is still an insult, whether actually uttered or not, that can force a government minister to resign. We see it too in the political geography of modern Europe. The main reason that London is the capital of the United Kingdom, so inconveniently located in many respects, is that the Romans made it the capital of their province Britannia – a dangerous place lying, as they saw it, beyond the great ocean that encircled the civilised world. Britain is in many ways a Roman creation.
But even more importantly, we have inherited from Rome many of the fundamental principles and symbols with which we define and debate politics and political action. The assassination of Julius Caesar on the “Ides of March” in 44BCE was in reality a bungled and slightly seedy operation. Despite Shakespeare’s glamorising recreation of the conspiracy, it was headed by the decidedly unattractive Marcus Junius Brutus, whose previous claim to fame had been to extract an almost 50% rate of interest for loans to the unfortunate people of Cyprus (when they could not come up with the repayments he had the main council chamber on the island besieged, starving five councillors to death in the process). It caught several innocent people in what we would call “friendly fire”. And in the medium term it did more to bring about one-man rule in Rome than to eradicate it as the assassins had hoped. Yet, helped no doubt by the Shakespearean version, it has provided the model and the justification for destroying “tyrants” in the name of “liberty” ever since. It is no coincidence that John Wilkes Booth used “Ides” as the code word for the day on which he planned to kill Abraham Lincoln. Almost every assassination in western politics has been seen against the background of the Ides of March.
Twenty years before Caesar’s murder there was another event that has had an equally long afterlife in western history and thought. While he held the chief office of the Roman state, the consulship, in 63BCE, Cicero uncovered what he claimed (and probably believed) to be a terrorist plot to overthrow the government and to eliminate several of its senior politicians, himself included. The mastermind was supposedly a bankrupt aristocrat by the name of Catiline, who had turned to revolution when he had failed to reach power by legitimate means. Cicero had been tipped off by his undercover agents, intelligence reports and intercept evidence, and so – displaying a breastplate under his toga (more or less the equivalent of turning up at the House of Commons with a bulletproof vest and pistol) – he denounced Catiline who quickly fled, and he rounded up the other conspirators. These he executed without trial, in the interests of homeland security. “Vixere,” he announced, in a chilling understatement, as he emerged from the prison where he had overseen their punishment: “They have lived.” That is: “They are dead.”
 
We know about this incident almost wholly from Cicero’s side; in fact, four speeches that he delivered accusing Catiline of treason and revealing what he knew of the plot went on to the Roman school curriculum almost immediately, as models of persuasive oratory, and have been read and studied ever since. The speeches still have their foothold in the modern western school curriculum, albeit a considerably more tenuous one. But we also know that there was another side to the debate. Whatever Catiline was really up to (and there is still disagreement about how far the “reds under the bed” were a figment of Cicero’s conservative imagination or paranoia), every Roman citizen had the fundamental right to due process and fair trial; summary execution contravened the most basic of civil liberties, then as now. Cicero did not escape scot-free. He was shortly sent into exile, his house in Rome was demolished, and a shrine to the goddess Liberty was pointedly constructed on its site.

Advertisement

The exile was unpleasant for Cicero, and copies of his unattractively self-pitying letters, sent back to his family and friends, still survive. Roman men did not often have the stiff upper lips of popular imagination, and Cicero wallowed in his tears. But the crying did not last long, for in a year he was recalled – in his account again – to a hero’s welcome and to the rebuilding of his house. His career, however, never fully recovered and the basic clash between, on the one hand, the obligation on the elected officials of the state to ensure its security and, on the other, the civil liberties of every citizen, no matter how criminal, continued to be debated – as it still is, whether in relation to detention without trial, Guantánamo Bay or British drone strikes against British citizens in Syria.
Over the centuries Cicero and Catiline have hovered in the background of these and other political debates, and have sometimes provided an explicit template for them. Writing a play on the subject in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Ben Jonson turned Catiline into a sadistic anti-hero (though his Cicero was an almost equally unattractive droning bore), while from the other side of the political spectrum Henrik Ibsen, in the fallout of the European revolutions of the 1840s, imagined a highly principled Catiline pitted against the corruption of the world in which he lived. Even now, the very words that Cicero used in his speeches against Catiline – and especially the first line of the first speech “Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?” (“How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience”) – get replayed as a signal of fundamental and principled political opposition. That goes from the hard-line Republican senator for Texas, Ted Cruz, who just last year started his attack on Barack Obama’s immigration plans with the words, “When, President Obama, do you mean to cease abusing our patience?”, to protesters against the government in Hungary a couple of years before who emblazoned banners with just the words Quousque tandem. No more needed to be said.