literature their immense impact on the other societies with whom they came into contact. The formal perfection
of Greek architecture and town planning, the self-conscious precision of the statues, the strict and exacting
requirements which were felt to be appropriate to each genre of literature: all these trained in the audience a
demanding and knowledgeable taste. Those who acquired that taste-Etruscans, Lydians, Lycians, Sicels, Messa-
pians-found their own native productions by contrast embarrassingly crude and provincial. Only works in the
Greek style would do, and literature in the Greek language. The other languages failed to produce literature and
(with the exception of Hebrew) were marked for disappearance. Only in Rome was the heroic decision taken to
avoid the easy option of writing in Greek, and to embark on the enormous task of creating in Latin a literature
which could be judged by the most exacting Greek standards. This aesthetic precision must also explain in large
part the failure of the Greeks to achieve more technical progress. Even such simple devices as the windmill and
the screw were invented late and exploited little by a people ingenious enough to devise machines powered by
steam. The existence of slavery does not account for this: slaves were a small part of the work-force in Greece.
There was a general preference for aesthetic perfection rather than innovation-a thought-provoking contrast with
our own age. We could take as symbolic the riders on the Parthenon frieze, controlling their mounts without
stirrups: their beauty is marvelous, and the absence of gear increases it, but the early mediaeval invention of the
stirrup would transform the power of cavalry.
In Rome, too, the Indo-European inheritance was strongly modified. The influence of the Etruscans was great
enough to leave Rome, for instance, with a triad of gods worshipped on the Capitol-Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva-
which makes sense only in Etruscan terms, and with elaborate systems for discovering the divine purposes by
omens, which were officially practised by Roman magistrates. Even their own names came to follow an alien
pattern, the Indo-European single name (Menelaus, Siegfried) giving place to a complex style (Marcus Tullius
Cicero). Etruria also transmitted the influence of Greece, especially in the visual arts.
Early Rome was characterized by a powerful public opinion, a strong public spirit, and a marked distaste for
eccentricity and individualism. The 'way of the ancestors' (mos maiorum) possessed a great moral force, and
within the family the father enjoyed a degree of power over his sons, even when they were grown men, which
astonished the Greeks, and which is reflected in many stories of fathers who put their own sons to death and were
admired for doing so. It is not difficult to imagine the stress produced in Romans by such pressures, and it is
tempting to connect with it the double Roman obsession, on the one hand with parricide, and on the other hand
with pietas, dutiful behaviour to parents, the archetype of which was the figure of Aeneas, founder of Rome,
carrying his old father on his shoulders out of burning Troy. The anxiety engendered by such conflicts within the
psyche, issuing in restless energy, might be part of the explanation for that astonishing fact, which seemed to the
Romans themselves to be explicable only by constant divine favour: the fact that this city, not particularly well
sited or obviously well endowed, conquered the world.
Roman art and literature alike present the men of the Republic as tight-lipped, tight-fisted, and resolute. Such
qualities as parsimonia, severitas, frugalitas, simplicitas, constantly praised, tell their own story; as does the
moral ascendancy of a man like Cato, the quintessential peasant farmer magnified into a senator and consul. The
names of many Roman grandees poignantly reveal their peasant origin. Cincinnatus and Calvus ('Curly' and
'Baldy'), Capito and Naso ('Big-head' and 'Nosey'), Crassus and Macer ('Fatty' and 'Skinny'), Flaccus and Bibulus
('Floppy' and 'The Drinker'), are the names of Roman consuls and poets, the inheritors of Etruscan kingly regalia
and Greek aesthetic refinement.
Our richest and clearest evidence is for the late Republic, when the system was visibly breaking down, and when
the old safeguards could no longer restrain the magnates from looting the provinces and even marching with