What are the political implications of universalizing projects like that of Polybius? This was one of the questions I considered in my paper at our September conference.

Polybius’ central assumption is that the rise of Roman power has resulted in a fundamental change of the very structure of the world. This new design of the world he calls the “symploke”, the weaving together of all regions of the world and their individual local histories into the new fabric of Roman power, like a net all the individual threads of which are connected and interrelated. Polybius introduces his concept of the ‘symploke’ through an image of the unity of the body. At 1.4.6-11 he says (Paton’s Loeb translation adapted):

6 We can no more hope to have a comprehensive view of this [the new, symploke structure of the world] from histories dealing with particular events than to get at once a notion of the form of the whole world, its disposition and order, by beholding, each in turn, the most famous cities, or indeed by looking at separate plans of each: a result by no means likely. 7 He indeed who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a fairly comprehensive view of the whole, is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one, who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of a body once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in its accomplished design and beauty. 8 For could anyone put the creature together on the spot, restoring its form and the comeliness of life, and then show it to the same man, I think he would quickly avow that he was formerly very far away from the truth and more like one in a dream. 9 For we can get some idea of a whole from a part, but never knowledge or exact opinion. 10 Special histories therefore contribute very little to the knowledge of the whole and conviction of its truth. 11 It is only indeed by study of the interconnection of all the particulars, their resemblances and differences, that we are enabled to achieve a general perspective, and thus derive both benefit and pleasure from history.

The association of Polybius’ concept of the unity of the world and the beauty of complete, functioning body is essential for persuading his readers of the validity of this interpretation of the world under Roman rule. We must not forget that the symploke is not an objectively verifiable description of what the world looks like, but an interpretive concept of understanding the world under Rome in a certain, distinctly positive, way that Polybius wants his reader to adopt.

The body metaphor plays a crucial role in this process, as it associates Polybius’ vision of the unified Roman world with beauty, while conceptualizing the pre-Roman state of the diversity of many autonomous Greek city states in terms of severed limbs and, hence, undesirable. The image of the unified body invests the idea of the unification of the Greek world under Rome with distinctly pleasing aesthetic properties, something to desire and appreciate.

There is no reason to suppose that this is only a cheap trick to advertise the benefits of Roman power to the reader. I think we can safely assume that Polybius did, indeed, find the idea of a unified world aesthetically pleasing and inherently preferable to a world split up into a multitude of autonomous little states. The point I want to stress here is that we do not go deep enough if we approach the question of Polybius’ attitude towards Roman imperialism on an entirely rational basis, collecting all the passages where he either says something positive or something negative about the Romans and then calculating the sum total of each. This will not get us any closer towards Polybius’ attitude towards Roman power because Roman power as an idea, a concept, is much more than concrete examples of individual Romans exerting their power in a good or a bad way. People can still like communism as a concept but reject, even condemn, the attempts to realize it in, say, the Soviet Union or the GDR. Roman power is more than the sum of its parts, and understanding Polybius’ attitude towards Roman power is more than calculating that sum.

This is where the body metaphor comes into play, because it conceptualizes the very idea of the world under Roman rule, independent of the failure of some Roman officials to use their political power as they should, and this idea – to Polybius – is beautiful. Polybius does not (at least initially) like Roman power because its concrete material or cultural advantages; Polybius likes Roman power because he the idea of an organic, body-like unity of the world appeals to him. In the image of the world under Roman rule as a body, the political and the aesthetic form an inseparable unity.

At this point it becomes clear how deeply imperialistic Polybius’ own historical project is. His aim is to translate the new unity of the world into literature, his Histories mirroring in their very structure and design the symploke (see 3.1.4-6) In the symploke, literary aesthetics and historical explanation overlap. In order to achieve this aesthetically pleasing representation of the world under Rome, Polybius is happy to sacrifice the individual and local for the sake of the greater good (29.12.3-9):

[W]hen dealing with a subject which is simple and uniform they [‘local’ historians] wish to be thought historians not because of what they accomplish, but because of the multitude of their books, and to make such an impression as I have described, they are compelled to magnify small matters, to touch up and elaborate brief statements of fact and to convert quite incidental occurrences of no moment into momentous events and actions, describing engagements and pitched battles in which the infantry losses were at times ten men or it may be a few more and the cavalry losses still fewer. 4 As for sieges, descriptions of places, and such matters, it would be hard to describe adequately how they work them up for lack of real matter. 5 But writers of universal history act in just the opposite manner. 6 I should not therefore be condemned for slurring over events, when I sometimes omit and sometimes briefly report things to which others have devoted much space and elaborate descriptions; but I should rather be credited with treating each event as it deserves. 7 For those authors, when in the course of their work they describe, for instance, the sieges of Phanotea, Coronea, and Haliartus, find it necessary to place before their readers all the devices, all the daring strokes, and in addition to this describe at length the capture of Tarentum, the sieges of Corinth, Sardis, Gaza, Bactra, and above all Carthage, adding inventions of their own; and they by no means approve of me, when I simply give a true and unvarnished account of such matters. 9 The same remarks apply to descriptions of battles, the reports of speeches, and the other parts of my history.

Compared to the greatness of unity through Roman power, who cares about what happens at Phanotea, Coronea, and Haliartus? The people who live in these places and whose friends and family members have died in these battles, one obvious answer would be. Looking at Greek inscriptions provides an excellent corrective to the all-too-tempting idea of simply adopting Polybius’ pleasant unifying point of view: local history mattered, it was written down and remembered, and it defined local identities. The ‘truth’ that Polybius is trying to sell to his readers, by contrast, is a global and, as such, deeply Roman one: accepting it is tantamount to accepting Roman power – not because everything the Romans do is good, beneficial and advantageous, but because a unified world under Roman rule is just such an appealing idea.

This entry is getting much longer than I ha planned, and I should probably stop here. I should like to add, though, that this is only one half of the story: in a move that is unique in what remains of ancient historiography, Polybius deliberately throws the unity of his own work, and with it the concept of the beauty of the world unified under Rome, over board by adding another ten books to the original design of his work. I will talk about this in my next entry.

Our project was off to a great start with the planning workshop on 13 June. In preparation for the big conference in September, we were eager to discuss some key aspects of the project with our colleagues in St A. Many of them work on different texts of the period(s) we are interested in and we wanted to draw on their experience to clarify some important aspects of our project. Some of our key questions were the starting and ending point of the project; which texts to cover; and whether (and how) to integrate the Latin side. We had a great turn out and heard fascinating papers by Alex Long, Myles Lavan, Rebecca Sweetman, and Alice König, all of which were followed by stimulating discussion. We hope to develop further many of the points made then in the blog entries of the following months; in particular, we are looking forward to bringing the results of the workshop in dialogue with the papers at the conference.

We started with a brief overview of what we want to do in the project. The main focus was on where to begin and end. Periodization is always arbitrary, and as much as it appeals to think of a ‘Hellenistic period’ that is somehow distinctly different from the classical and the imperial periods, all these ‘periods’ develop from each other. Bound up with this question are ancient models of periodization which were often used as the basis for our modern ones. The idea, for example, that something new begins with the death of Alexander the Great goes back at least as far as Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Preface to On the Ancient Orators), and the whole concept of the “Second Sophistic” is based on Philostratus. Consequently, Dionysius and Philostratus were two of the authors we chose to discuss in our introduction.

‘External’ markers of periods such as the death of Alexander are, in the last instance, of little help because the Hellenistic world is so variegated and comprises so many individual ‘micro-cultures’ that differ from kingdom to kingdom and from city state to city state. Rebecca Sweetman’s talk fleshed out these general concerns by discussing archaeological evidence from Crete, Athens, Sparta and the Cyclades alongside each other. What goes for periods also holds true for the generalizing concepts of “Greek” and “Roman”: the key word here, too, is “diversity”. If we are dealing with a plethora of local identities and an equally variegated range of ways of negotiating Greek and Roman cultural and political concepts (not to mention local influences…), how does one approach a question like ours, the development of Greek cultural identity in the Hellenistic und imperial periods? In any case we will have to be wary of trying to produce a homogeneous narrative, as appealing as that might be. The Hellenistic world was, much like ours, fragmented; this does not mean that there are no common factors at play. But these shouldn’t be taken for granted and need to be identified carefully first. Scholarship that seeks to understand the cultural processes of these ‘periods’ will have to reflect, to a certain extent, the diversity and variety of the material that we are dealing with.

If we look at Greek literature, Polybius’ Histories would appear to be a good starting point for our inquiry. As far as we can tell, his work provides the first testimony to a deep impact of the Roman presence on a Greek’s outlook on and understanding of the world. Polybius conceives of the rise of Roman power as a paradigm change in world history: the way in which Roman power became the point of reference for all the individual realms and city states in the Mediterranean and ‘wove’ them together (Polybius calls this the symploke) had no precedent in history, and he is probably right. This is more than the claim, familiar from Herodotus and Thucydides and many other authors, that their subject is greater than anything that has ever happened before: the rise of the Romans in Polybius’ view resulted in a fundamentally new structure of the entire Mediterranean world. The Persian Wars, one could argue, had the potential of bringing about a similarly profound change; yet the decisive point is that they did not, but the Romans did.

One way to trace this impact of the Romans both in Greek literature and on the level of the micro-cultures, is the inclusion of inscriptions alongside literary texts. Myles Lavan discussed the letter of L. Cornelius Scipio and his brother to Herakleia in Karia from 190BCE (SIG(3rd edn.) 618; RDGE 35). The letter shows nicely how the Romans adopted the language of the negotiation of power that characterizes the communication between city states and the Hellenistic kings (see John Ma, Antiochus III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor. Oxford 1999). Hellenistic city states had developed this language as an incredibly effective tool to negotiate their own interests with the demands of the rulers. ‘Power’, as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill put it (PCPS 216 (n.s. 36), 1990, 143–81, at 147), ‘does not exist without the language in which it is conceived and presented and argued over.’ The language of the Greek inscriptions which allowed city states and rulers to negotiate their respective interest, had created an infrastructure of power, as it were, which the city states continued to use for the Romans and which the Romans fit into with remarkable ease. Tracing the development of this language of power in Greek inscriptions seems a promising way to understand the impact of Roman power on the micro-level and the level of local cultures throughout the empire; it will also help us avoid the ‘literature trap’ which privileges literary over other texts and thus creates a too narrow and undifferentiated narrative of the impact of Roman power on Greek culture.

Alex Long provided fascinating insights into another important aspect of Hellenistic and imperial culture, the development of philosophical thought. His paper on Posidonius raised many questions about how philosophical school create their own distinctive profile by engaging with the thoughts of their predecessors, representatives of other schools and the canonical figures of philosophy, in particular Plato. Strategies of traditionalization here often go hand-in-hand with the creation of distinction, as different branches of philosophical thought develop when philosophers are looking for affinity with the ideas of the great predecessors and fill in the gaps they perceive in the latters’ works, each in their own characteristic way.

This dovetails nicely with the dynamics observable in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ classicist writings: Dionysius models his community of ‘classicists’ along the lines of the prominent philosophical schools, often drawing on aesthetic and philosophical concepts developed there; and like them, he seeks to claim the great classical philosophers Plato and Aristotle as the forebears of his particular kind of aesthetic thought.

Similar strategies of distinction can be seen in the work of Vitruvius, as Alice König demonstrated. In Vitruvius’ thought aesthetic concepts are integrated with different ideas from philosophical traditions, and the whole complex is closely tied back to political power. Vitruvius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the Augustan principate all converge in their interest in the conjunction of aesthetics, morals and power, be it in literary style, paintings, statues or architecture. It would be promising, we think, to follow this line of thought through imperial Greek culture and see whether and how the concept of an interrelation of morals, aesthetics and power changes over time.

Alice’s paper has taken us into the early stages of the Roman empire; this, in turn, brings us back to one of the crucial questions of Jason’s and mine introductory paper: the question of where to end. Philostratus seems an obvious choice, but in the discussion it also became clear that we might want to consider Plutarch as an alternative, because of his role as a catalyst linking Hellenistic and imperial Greek culture.

Jason demonstrated how fruitful it is to read Philostratus’ concept of periodization alongside that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Interestingly, as much as modern scholars like to think of Dionysius as the beginning of the Atticism that is characteristic of the ‘Long Second Century’, it would appear that it is precisely the classicism of the first century BCE that Philostratus dismisses as irrelevant. In stark contrast, he places strong emphasis on the literary development that Dionysius condemns as ‘Asianism’. But this will be the subject of our next blog post…