224 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Natural History that are concerned with differentiating Roman knowledge from
Greek knowledge employ the language of nos versus Graeci , (‘us’ versus ‘the Greeks’),
and more often appeal to universal notions of civilization ( humanitas ) (Veyne 1993).
Increasingly the Roman empire is seen less as a set of institutions imposing or
disseminating one or more high cultures and more as a social fi eld within which
political and cultural activity intersected in complex ways.
Emperors and the cultural activity of the court and the metropolis provide a case
in point. The economic and political leverage of emperors cannot be doubted,
whether it was exercised in the patronage of poets or in the funding of immense
monumental complexes like the imperial fora in Rome and events staged in them,
such as imperial triumphs and the saecular games. Yet it is more and more clear
that emperors were constrained by the expectations of their audiences and by the
capacities of the artists and architects they commissioned (Hölscher 1984, Elsner
2007). The classicism of Augustan monuments provides a good example (Zanker
1988). It is diffi cult to imagine the emperor or his advisors deciding positively on the
use of the Corinthian capital or particular conventions of statuary, or even deciding
which Hellenistic innovations to appropriate and which to reject ostentatiously.
Equally we can hardly imagine Augustus or Maecenas advising Horace on his choice
of metres or Virgil on his deployment of epic intertexts. Patrons were largely subject
to talents they sought to marshall. And just as Augustus was unable to end grain
distributions to the urban plebs, so he and future emperors were compelled to fund
a range of games. Indeed, the further from the court we look, the more spaces there
were for cultural activity that was generated by and for popular elements in society,
beyond the control and sometimes knowledge of Rome’s elite (Horsfall 2003, Toner
2009). Texts like the Satyricon sometimes offer versions of how the literary elite
imagined the low- life of the city: non- literary texts sometimes illuminate just how
complex activities like gambling could be at all levels of society (Purcell 1995b,
Toner 1995).
In any case, some of the cultural activity that took place in the immediate vicinity
of the emperors was clearly developed by intellectuals and aristocrats as a means of
controlling their ruler’s behaviour. Orators, biographers and philosophers all
conspired to elaborate a model of the Good Emperor that suited their interests, and
emperors that failed to live up to the new imperial virtues knew they would be
criticized for it (Edwards 1993). The evolution of the Roman imperial court followed
a different pattern to that of Hellenistic kingdoms in part because the Roman
aristocracy remained successful in representing emperors as their kinsmen and
friends, and persuading them to display civic virtue ( civilitas ) (Wallace-Hadrill
1996). Only when emperors (from Hadrian on) spent less and less time in Rome
were they able to develop a more explicitly autocratic style. Emperors were important
cultural actors, to be sure, but they did not control Roman cultural activity.
The career of Nero shows how risky cultural innovation could be in the capital
(Elsner and Masters 1994).
The broad contours of cultural variation across the empire described in
Chapter 12 remain valid. Linguistically, Latin was the public language in areas west
of the Adriatic and north of a line that divided the Balkans from the militarized
provinces of the Danube. Greek fulfi lled a similar function in the remainder of the
empire. The army and Roman law used Latin everywhere, which probably meant
most of those who dealt with them understood it, and literary life in the West aspired
to a cultural bilingualism (Adams 2003, Adams, Janse, and Swain 2002, Adams