was open for the gradual extension of privilege, ultimately even of senatorial rank, which was to hold
the Empire together in succeeding centuries.
Hellenism at Rome
Co-operation between the Greek and Roman elites was possible because the Roman upper class, though
loyal to much of its own tradition, became very Hellenized. Indeed, there were attempts to prove that the
Romans were Greeks, descended not only from Trojan Aeneas, but from Evander the Arcadian (familiar
from the Aeneid), or from Hercules, and their followers. Some scholars held that Latin was a dialect of
Greek. The attitude of many Romans to Greeks and Greek culture was, it is true, ambiguous; they
believed in their own superiority in war and statecraft (and Cicero said other systems of civil law were
puerile). Many people suspected customs that seemed softening or apt to distract from serious matters.
Close and often unhappy experience of second-century Greeks led to these being characterized as
effeminate, time-serving, politically inept (a useful justification of Empire), loquacious, and prone to
abstract argument at the wrong time. Perhaps they had degenerated; there are some men worthy of
ancient Greece, concedes Cicero (more philhellene than most), warning his brother to be wary of
intimacies in his province. And the inhabitants of the now Greek-speaking cities of the East might be
thought inferior to 'real Greeks'. But in Athens itself, which, like Delphi, Rome had treated with respect,
Cicero expressed dismay at the arrogant treatment of the locals by his (strictly upright) suite.
Few well-off Romans, however, could resist the attractions of civilized Greek life, and some realized
that it was only from the Greeks that they could learn much that the rulers of the world needed to know.
Rome had perhaps never been wholly out of touch with the Greek world. Many of her gods had been
identified with Greek ones, her art derived from Greek art; some Romans must always have known some
Greek, and even perhaps read some Greek books. But a new epoch dawned in the mid third century,
with the first plays on the Greek model in Latin (below, pp. 438 ff), and (it seems) more formal
schooling, in both tongues. In the Hannibalic War new Greek cults (and even the Great Mother from
Asia) were introduced, to protect the city. The sack of Syracuse in 212 marked for Polybius the start of a
taste for Greek art (a pity, he thought; states should stick to their own traditions); certainly innumerable
statues and paintings were to be carried off to Rome in the next centuries. The physical face of the city
was transformed as it became a great capital, though Polybius shows that its rustic air was mocked by
cosmopolitan visitors in his day, and a truly Greek architectural style came a little later; marble was not
much used for building purposes till later still.
But the upper classes' way of life was soon transformed. Historians tended to see Roman history in terms
of moral decline, especially into avarice and luxury, and liked to mark its stages; some thought the booty
brought back from Asia in 190, including handsome furniture, initiated the process. Polybius stressed the
defeat of Macedon at Pydna and the wealth it brought: the young went mad for the worst aspects of
Greek manners, pederasty, banquets to the sound of music, and so on. Cato had tried to outlaw, and then
to tax prohibitively, various forms of luxury, and continued to inveigh against spending on handsome
slaves or imported food, and adorning one's house with statues of the gods 'as though they were
furniture'. But even Cato, as his buildings while censor and his own writings show, could not turn the
clock back.