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The Hellenization of Rome and the Question of Acculturations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Paul Veyne
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The Hellenization of ancient Rome is not a rare kind of event in history; “outer” India or the Chinese world have offered several other different examples. Roman civilization was an important part of Hellenistic culture much like present day Japan participates in Western civilization. Our purpose is not to recall this evidence nor to argue for Roman originality. (Where has an acculturation ever been total?) We shall not allow either the forest or the trees to hide thi other and shall ask ourselves rather what “ acculturation” might mean in the case of Rome. For the question of acculturation, which describes so well the present condition of the Third World, is inapplicable to other historic situations. The richness of the past is such that our sociologies or our praxeologies are often nothing other than rationalizations of a particular case in history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 27 , Issue 106 , June 1979 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 The expression is from Eduard Norden, Die römische Literatur, 5th edition, Leipzig, Teubner, 1954, p. 22.

2 For example, our current praxeology of international relations can only be applied in a world where there are nations; but nations or countries are not transhistoric objects. Roman "imperialism", this archaic isolationism, occurred in a world completely different, and Roman praxeology of war and peace was not our own. Cf. Y a-t-il eu un impérialisme romain? in Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'Ecole française de Rome, 1975, p. 847.

3 P. Demiéville, Le concile de Lhasa, Paris, Publications de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, 1952, p. 182.

4 Raymond Boudon, Effets pervers et ordre social, Paris, P.U.F., 1977, p. 172.

5 P. Akamatsu, Meiji: révolution et contre-révolution au Japon, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1968, p. 157; cf. J. Mutel, La Fin du Shôgunat et le Japon de Meiji, Paris, Hatier, 1970, p. 36.

6 R. Lane, L'Estampe japonaise, tr., Paris, 1962, p. 237; L. Hajek, Japanese Graphic Art, London, Octopus Books, 1976, fig. 42; A. Terukazu, La Peinture Japonaise, Geneva, Skira, 1961, p. 176; J. Hillier, Hokusai: Paintings, Drawings and Woodcuts, Oxford, Phaidon, 1978, p. 35; M. Narazaki, Hiroshige: Famous Views, Tokyo, Kodansha, "Masterworks of the Ukiyo-e", 1968, p. 12; J. Rewald, Histoire de l'impressionnisme, Paris, Albin Michel, 1955, p. 261; A. Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, p. 24; James A. Michener, Estampes japo naises, tr., Fribourg, 1961, p. 27 and pl. 43; L. Aubert, Les Maitres de l'estampe japonaise, Paris, 1922, p. 123 and 248; J. Hillier, The Vever Collection, Sotheby, 1976, vol. 1, fig. 31 and 59-61; vol. 3, fig. 808, 837, 940.

7 To use the expression of P. Gros, Les Premières Générations d'architectes hellénistiques à Rome, in Mélanges offerts à Jacques Heurgon, Ecole Française de Rome, 1976, p. 409.

8 A. Bach, Deutsche Namenkunde, vol. 2, Die deutschen Ortsnamen, 2 (Heidelberg, Carl Winter, 1954), p. 438 and 444; Deutsche Volkskunde, 3rd edition, Heidelberg, Quelle und Meyer, 1960, p. 529.

9 G. Devereux, Ethnopsychanalyse complémentariste, Flammarion, 1972, p. 150 and 201-231; W. E. Mühlmann, Messianismes révolutionnaires du Tiers Monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1968, p. 224, 226, 265.

10 The distinction between the two Hellenizations, the first of which goes back as far as the 6th century at least and only the second of which merits the name acculturation, was made by Eduard Fraenkel, Kleine Beiträge zur klass. Philologie, Rome, 1964, vol. 2, p. 24.

11 Caria, Sidon, Lycia, Cyprus, Egypt (the tomb of Petosiris)…

12 G. Dumézil, La Religion romaine archaique, 2nd. ed., Payot 1974, p. 659-62. On the interpretatio of foreign gods see A. D. Nock, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, Oxford, 1972, vol. 2, p. 752; James Bryce, Studies in His tory and Jurisprudence, 1901 repr. 1968, vol. I, p. 44-7; M. Nilsson, Geschichte der griech. Religion, vol. 1, p. 766, and vol. 2, p. 31.

13 J.-P. Morel, Céramiques d'Italie et Céramique hellénistique, in Hellenismus in Mittelitalien (P. Zanker, ed.), Göttingen, 1976, vol. 2, p. 495-6. On the other hand statues (honorary and funerary) were always Hellenizing products in Rome even if they were produced by very mediocre local ateliers (Zanker, Hellenismus, vol. 2, p. 601).

14 Eduard Norden, Aus altrömischen Priesterbüchern, Lund, 1939, esp. p. 129. Similarly the triumph, that barbaric ritual, a sort of scalp dance whose high point was the announcement made to the public that the conquered and imprisoned enemy chief had just been strangled in his prison (Flavius Josephus, Bell. J., VII, 5, 6; Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung, II, 585), is named from a Greek acclamation where the Greeks cried thriambe as they had cried io pean in the past. Another example of an identity of phrasing in other do mains is the archaic inscription placed on an object consecrated to a god where the object seems to speak personally to the reader. This practice is common in Greece (" I am Charos and I am a gift for Apollo " is on an archaic statue of a man offered to the god), in Etruria ("I belong to Tinia, Untel consecrated me as an ex voto") and among the Latins ("Manius made me for Numasius").

15 F. Messerschmidt, Probleme der Etrusk. Malerei des Hellenismus, in Jahrbuch des deutschen arch. Instituts, XLV, 1930, esp. p. 82.

16 Strabon, V, p. 232 C.

17 G. E. von Grünebaum, L'Identité culturelle de l'Islam, tr., Paris, Gallimard, 1973, p. 195.

18 E. Bikermann in Mélanges syriens Dussaud, vol. 1, p. 95; see for example Anthologie grecque, VII, 417.

19 Second Maccabees, chap. 4.

20 Démocratie en Amérique, ed. Oeuvres complètes, vol. I. p. 346.

21 Seneca, De beneficiis, VI, 34, in reference to Caius Gracchus; Scipio Afri canus distributed rings with his portrait engraved on them (M. L. Vollenweider in Museum Helveticum, XV, 1958, p. 27) and Roman emperors did the same (Pliny, Naturalis historia, XXXIII, 41); no doubt this was a Hellenistic custom (Athénée, V, p. 212 D-E).

22 It is surprising to find the name of Ben Jonson, completely mangled, in Albion, caprice héroï-comique of Saint-Amant.

23 On the notion of profession and the accumulation of excellences see P. Veyne, Le Pain et le Cirque, Paris, Seuil, 1976, p. 117-38.

24 Our ideas on Cato were restored by D. Kienast, Cato der Zensor, Heidel berg 1954, p. 101-116 and 135.

25 All of this is based on the method and the present research of M. Foucault at the Collège de France. The idea of Foucault, it seems to me, is not at all that the little powers count for more than the great power of the State (as Amer ican sociologists have already said), or that power is relative, but that there is no horizon of rationality called politics. Behind these declamations against softness we should not look for an eternal rationality which we would have to find in order to "understand" these people and their obscure language; nor should we think that this language is an ideological cover or superstition, error, childishness or false science; or that it is an intrusion of snobbism, depth psychology, obsessional characterology or puritanism, etc. To thus distinguish between true and erroneous politics, between that which is truly politics and that which is not serious or between an ideological cover and reality, it would be necessary that politics actually exist. Let us suppose that instead of an eternal essence, more or less broadly fixed, in truth we had only a succession of narrow and twisted practices, then true politics would not have existed through history. It would follow also that true politics do not exist now either. The distinction between politics and that which one calls religion, morality, character impulses or millenarist movements, varies from one era to another, for religion or morality are no more essences than are politics. This renders moot the problem of heresies and millenarist movements as a cover for more "serious" movements, social or national. It is in this sense, I think, that Nietzsche said that the wars of the future would perhaps be philosophical wars. Roman fear of softness is neither an intrusion of morality in politics nor a psychological reaction nor the "eternal truth" that a society can only function if its people do not scandalize one another. It is simply an active part of a certain structure which we call political. If Rome had at this time a Christian king, we would have called her instead religious and pastoral.

26 P. Boyancé, Etudes sur la religion romaine, p. 263.

27 The example is taken from the novel by Mishima, Shôsai.

28 Horace, ode I, 7, who can do no better than to end his poem with an enraptured quotation of an admirable verse of Archilochus (cras ingens iterabimus aequor). Again in Japan under the Tokugawa if one wished to praise a native landscape, one said it was as beautiful as a Chinese landscape.

29 The author grew up in a family where his parents spoke French and his grandparents spoke Provençal. To my childish mind, French and Provençal were one and the same language since the meanings were the same. Only that Provençal was French which had grown old like the faces of those who spoke it.

30 Eduard Fraenkel, Elementi plautini in Plauto, p. 378 and 441; Journal of Roman Studies, XLV, 1955, p. 7; Gordon Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry, Oxford, 1968, p. 302 and 38.

31 A. Koyré, La Philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 237.

32 Se also P. Koschaker, L'Europa e il diritto romano, Milan, Sansoni, 1962, p. 267. When Roman law was received into the Holy Roman Empire, jurists hardly felt they were imposing a foreign law on their compatriots. The idea that acculturation is denationalization is an invention of the 19th century with Savigny.

33 Le Gai Savoir, § 83; cfr. Par-delà le bien et le mal, § 224.

34 Fourier cites Elizabeth, Catherine II, Maria Teresa (Théorie des quatre mouvements, Anthropos, p. 129).

35 See the conclusions of the book by Chr. Goudineau, Recherches sur la romanisation de Vaison-la-Romaine, Paris, Editions du C.N.R.S., 1979, p. 312, and the remarkable article of a young historian, Y. Thébert, "La Romanisation de l'Afrique" in Annales, économies, sociétés, 1978, p. 64.

36 Nietzsche, Wille zur Macht, n. 70 (Kröner).

37 Horace, Odes, I, 7; Propertius, Elegies, III, 22. A striking example of the abyss which separates the awareness of national originality and reality is the De natura rerum. Lucretius, as we saw above, lived in a Hellenized cultural world and his national culture, if we dare call it such, is Greek. He knows it, except that to him this is the only culture which exists. Moreover Lucretius is a patriot like every good Roman; not that he was interested in politics (few Romans were less political than he who lived in a world of ideas). His patriotism was like the faith of a simple man. We are as astonished by him as a modern Western intellectual is astonished by a Soviet or Japanese intellectual; for these the most advanced ideas or the most sophisticated attitudes can all be harmonized with an indestructible and naive patriotism. A Hellenized patriot without the least discomfort, Lucretius wrote with the zeal of a reformer and his cultural universalism is in harmony with his Roman ethnocentricity. He recom mends the philosophy of Epicurus to the Romans since this philosophy is true. There is no need to adapt it to Roman circumstances or to interpret the dogmas of Epicurus, as has been supposed in an unprovable, hardly plausible and useless manner. Epicureanism, just as it is, is perfect in the eyes of Lucretius who is anxious to introduce this useful plant into Italy. Since Epicureanism is excellent, it will be excellent for Rome. Epicureanism is worthy of Rome, and for Lucretius there is no greater praise.