Before augustus

The impact of Augustus on the civic religion of Greece, the subject of this chapter, must briefly be set, first of all, in the larger context of a degree of mixing of Roman and Greek religion already detectable in the republic. In the Pro Flacco Cicero includes religion (religio) among the blessings of civilisation which the Athenians originated and then gifted to the rest of the world. By the first century bc there was, then, a Roman tendency to view Athens, and Greece more generally, as a kind of religious motherland, a tendency fed by increasing Roman knowledge of – as the elder Pliny later put it – ‘all the legendary lore of Greece and likewise its glorious literature’ (omnis Graecia fabulositas sicut et litterarum claritas). As we shall see, for Romans some of the mythical stories constitutive of this fabulosity contained, or allegorised, powerful truths about mos and about the divine origins of humanitas, civilisation.

This religious convergence was encouraged by the fact that Romans of the republic already felt, as it were, ‘at home’ in Greek religion, in the sense that they lived with a traditional strand in their own religious system which they had conceptualised, at least since the third century bc, as ‘Graeca sacra’ or ‘Graecus ritus’. That is, the official religion of the Roman republic incorporated old cults, including those of Apollo, Hercules, Saturn and Ceres, which the Romans considered as partly or wholly Greek in origin and which they sometimes celebrated according to the ‘Greek rite’. This mixed Roman ritual with Greek practices such as offering tithes (decumae), wearing wreaths and uttering Greek words. There were also long-standing traditions of intermittent Roman contact with sanctuaries in Greece, including Epidaurus, where the Romans had sought out the healing god Asclepius in 291 bc, instituting a branch of his cult on the Tiber island, and the oracle of Delphi, consulted officially for the last time in 204 bc.

Roman views

If the Agrippeum was intended to provide a prestigious showcase for the Attic muse, including the new medium of public declamation, an art form to be applied inter alia to the celebration of old Greek victories, this purpose only makes sense in a climate of marked Roman interest in ancient Greek wars. Augustan ideology fostered just such a climate. Research over the last quarter-century has shown that Augustus and his regime were acutely aware of the historical parallelism between contemporary threats from the east and the struggle between Classical Greece and ‘barbarian’ Persia. This parallelism made available for imperial use a rich stock of prestigious images themed around the idea of the defence of (Greek) civilisation against the forces of barbarism. Roman artists first brought this imagery into play soon after Actium. Tonio Hölscher has argued that behind a scattered group of Roman reliefs are two lost prototypes – perhaps a pair – put on display in early-Augustan Rome. These referenced the Greek naval victory at Salamis in 480 bc by means of Athena and her snake, a trophy of captured arms including a pelta or half-moon shield of eastern type, a winged Victory holding the curved poop of a ship, and a warrior of Classical type, bearded and wearing a Corinthian helmet. These lost originals were clearly well known, since they inspired variant versions as far afield as Beirut – the Syrian region being home to provincial grandees closely attuned to Augustan values, as the case of C. Iulius Nicanor, of Hierapolis Bambyce, will show (below). The fame of these originals reflected the ‘high ideological significance’ of their subject matter: Salamis was a metaphor for Actium, the seminal victory on which the Augustan principate was founded and which Augustus now used to portray himself as the champion of civilisation against eastern barbarians.

The regime returned to this parallelism in 20 bc when Augustus visited the province of Syria to negotiate the return of the standards and Roman prisoners captured in the Parthian defeat of Crassus in 53 bc. As part of his propagandistic presentation of this diplomatic settlement as a victory for Roman arms, Augustus commissioned two identical monuments of an unmistakable Romanity, despite their incorporation of victory tripods in the manner of the famous thanks-offering which the Greeks dedicated at Delphi after the decisive victory at Plataea. Pausanias saw one of these monuments in the Olympieum at Athens: ‘There are some Persians in Phrygian stone holding up a tripod: the Persians and the tripod are both worth seeing.’ Rolf Schneider has identified the three supporting barbarians from the second monument in two figures now in Naples and a third in Copenhagen. Even without the outsize tripod which they originally supported, these figures have a spectacular quality achieved by their colossal size – although kneeling they are over 1.5 metres high without the tripod – and by the material, so-called ‘Phrygian marble’, a polychrome stone from Asia Minor employed by Roman sculptors to symbolise the eastern provenance of the barbarians themselves. Schneider argues that the original monument to which these scattered figures once belonged – second of the pair – was set up by Augustus in his new temple complex of Apollo on the Palatine: ‘not only a unique showcase for the political and religious self-representation of the imperial regime inaugurated with Augustus but equally also one of the most important centres of Augustan Rome’. If Schneider is right, the choice of the Olympieum in provincial Athens as a pendant for this prestigious locale in the capital underscores the importance of Athens for Augustus as the main locus, since Alexander's day, for the commemoration of the Greek struggle against eastern barbarism. As we shall see, Sparta had similar associations; so did Plataea. The difference was that, in choosing Athens, the regime exploited the traditional character of the city as a ‘beacon’ in order to beam its ideology to the broadest eastern audience.

This is a book about the relationship between Roman moral discourse and the cultural comportment of provincial Greeks. It argues that, during the transition at Rome from republic to monarchy (late first century bc and early first century ad), a deep-seated and, under Augustus, quasi-official concern to shore up Roman mores was communicated to the Greeks. This had the effect of reshaping local cultural profiles, most markedly in the cities and sanctuaries of Greece itself, which are the focus of this book. At the provincial end, crucial agency in this process was provided by the local notables. This elite stratum openly collaborated with Roman power in the east. Its members played a cornerstone role in the political society of the early imperial era, signalled by their possession of the civitas in increasing numbers from the triumviral age on. Their mounting exposure to cultural ‘Roman-ness’ gave rise to new forms of identity which make the blanket term ‘Greek’ too reductive as a cultural denominator, despite Greek remaining their first language. The view taken here of Greek ethnicity is avowedly non-essentialist: ‘things have no essence, no “core”’.

A decisive role in what was, in effect, a process of Greek acculturation to Roman values is attributed here to two Roman emperors: firstly Augustus, founder of the Roman imperial system, whose rule – it is argued – constructed an ‘official’ Roman narrative of Hellenism based on an ideological favouring of ‘old’ Greece and the traditions of Athens and Sparta; and, secondly, Hadrian, who powerfully reinforced this narrative in the course of his cultural politics on an unprecedented scale in the Greek east.

‘Every state has its peculiar glory. Athens is famous for eloquence, Thebes for religion, Sparta for arms.’ This Roman stereotype of the ‘true Greece’ comes in the form of a sententia or ‘pointed saying’ from a declamation on the theme of Leonidas and Thermopylae performed in Augustan Rome by the rhetor Cestius Pius, of whom more in due course. This chapter explores two interventions in Greece by, respectively, Augustus and his son-in-law Agrippa which responded to, and consolidated, these Roman images of an idealised Athens and Sparta. Recent scholarship, repeatedly drawn on in this book, offers valuable interpretations of Augustan activity in Greece, and Athens in particular, much of it based on archaeological and art-historical evidence. These two episodes, however, provide the only really firm basis for the historical reconstruction of Augustan cultural initiatives in the two most famous cities of contemporary Greece.

Athens: the agrippeum

Augustus is sometimes credited with a ‘building programme’ in Athens. In fact, the only Athenian monuments which can be attributed to his regime with complete confidence are, firstly, the so-called Roman Agora, a complex begun with funds from Julius Caesar and therefore not, strictly speaking, an Augustan initiative, and, secondly, the performance space known to Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists as the Agrippeum. American archaeologists have firmly identified this structure with a massive building of Augustan date in the centre of the Athenian agora proper.

Under Augustus parts of Greece experienced what can best be described as a building boom. In broadest terms the trigger for this wave of investment in public works was Octavian's victory at Actium: ‘a turning point in the history of the Greek world and of the Greek city which was at least as significant as the reign of Alexander’. What follows is not a general survey but an attempt to capture something of the ideological impulse behind this activity. Despite its image of poverty among ancients and moderns alike (see the end of this chapter), Augustan Greece experienced its own version of the transformations in the built environment marking the advent of the principate elsewhere in the empire. In the case of Greece a striking component of this activity was architectural restoration, so important in Roman times that ‘archaeology scarcely reveals anything but rebuilt cities’.

To put Greek developments in an ideological context, urbanism constituted a keynote of Augustan culture. In the Res gestae, in effect his political testament, Augustus goes out of his way to stress his role as a patron of public works in Rome and Italy. As an aspect of his pietas, he restores eighty-two templa deorum in 28 bc alone, along with the Capitol, and builds from scratch a further thirteen. His other restorations and new builds embrace a range of public buildings and amenities, among them bridges, aqueducts, a trunk road, theatres, administrative buildings and a forum. This huge programme – to which must be added the works of his son-in-law Agrippa and other members of the imperial family – was ideological as well as utilitarian in its motivation. As Vitruvius says, through the ‘eminent dignity’ of the new buildings was displayed ‘the majesty of the empire’. His own authorial project has been characterised as ‘the rebuilding of Roman identity through architecture’.

In the previous chapter we examined the big picture of Greek democratic expansion in the fifth and fourth centuries, recognizing its extent and assessing its causes. This final chapter will tackle another large issue: how might we describe the functioning of democracy outside Athens in the Classical period? While other scholars have occasionally touched upon this issue in broad studies of Greek politics or democracy, none have addressed it in detail. The fifty-four cases of demokratia examined in Chapters 1 through 3 provide a greater variety and quantity of material to work with than previous scholars had available, and they will enable us to attain a better understanding of the nature of democracy as it applied across the Greek world than earlier studies.

The task is complicated by the nature of the material. Not without reason have scholars mostly avoided comparison of different Classical democracies: beyond Athens, the source material declines alarmingly in quantity. But it is not just an issue of quantity. The bits and pieces of testimony that survive vary in type from place to place. Syracuse, for example, has a fair amount of ancient historical narrative concerning major political events, but no inscriptions to help us understand its day-to-day institutional procedures. Meanwhile, at Iasus and similar places, inscriptions detail valuable information about the routine function of the democratic government there, but we lack any narrative accounts concerning political attitudes or political change over time. And for no city other than Athens do we have a wealth of material from genres of literature such as forensic oratory or comedy. Nevertheless, as we shall see, by putting what we have all together one can arrive at some useful conclusions about the commonalities and variations in Greek democratic practice. Many democratic institutions, especially those attested epigraphically, can be broadly compared. And we can glean much about political attitudes too, as we have already seen in a number of cases from Chapters 1–3. One must remain realistic about what we can know about any given case: we make the most progress in the overall picture.

This chapter discusses the appearance and nature of democracies to be found outside Athens on the Greek mainland from 480 to 323 bc. Each state considered separately below either certainly or probably experienced at least one episode of democratic government during this time period. While it is always possible – indeed, it is likely – that further examples of demokratia cropped up on occasion in these or other communities of the mainland, the following represent the only cases for which we have compelling evidence.

With the exception of a few of the better-attested examples, treatments are brief. The primary purpose here is to come to an understanding of how democracies arose in these places and, at least generally, how they functioned. Usually more can be said about the former than the latter. This chapter engages in very little comparison or synthesis: the fourth and fifth chapters of the book, drawing on the previous sections including this one, will pursue these goals.