Brief Remarks on Roman Originality and Greek Exceptionalism

A response to centuries of sentimental scholarship

A few weeks ago, I saw a blogpost retweeted (by a large classics account), quite old, and I’m sure quite unpolished, by an anonymous classics major (the degree left unknown), premised on the claim that Romans and Rome were deaf and unappreciative to music. Given that this was patently false, and easily demonstrated so, and was not exactly scholarly, I will not spend any time refuting each erring claim therein. Instead, I would like to examine, if only briefly, how any such student could arrive at any such conclusion; for I contend that it is surely no fault of their own.

It’s hardly worth saying that music was an important component of Roman society. All manner of music could be heard in the temples, especially when ritual sacrifice was taking place, and sycophants of various “eastern” (though the easternness of their Roman cults may be easily called into question) gods (ie. Isis, Cybele etc., cf. Apuleius Metamorphoses  VIII.24-27ff, also XI.10f) , would march through the streets with small cymbals or flutes. It has been proven that in Roman comedy, a flutist would be playing for the vast majority of scenes, keeping the actors in rhythm and setting the light mood. "Exibo, non ero vobis morae; / tibicen vos interibi hic delectaverit" (Plautus, Pseudolus 573-573a [Lindsay] "I will leave the stage. For you, I will not be long. In the meantime, this piper will have entertained you."). Horace devotes ll. 202-219 of his Ars Poetica towards music. I could of course go on, but I think the point is adequately demonstrated for our purposes.

How can it be, then, that far too frequently we find an ignorance of these things among those who claim to study classics? Anyone who has explored this territory knows that the blogger here is not alone in their confusion. The answer is quite clear when we consider the history of the study of classics itself, and especially its development as Greek learning became an essential of a proper education. Homer’s folk history and Hesiod’s hymns, exploding out of the darkness of sub-historic Hellas, excited with their mystery and archaism. They were “first” (or the first that we may hope to have) in endless modes, as were a great deal of other Greek grammata, such as Attica’s fine tragedies or the didactics of the colonies.

The reintegration of Greek literature into the European canon required the reconstitution of the study of all ancient literature, which then was in all cases Latin. Once known dimly from internal Latin sources, suddenly known in color through bilingual critique: much Latin literature was inspired, more often directly than indirectly, by some earlier Greek text. The originality and poetically sudden appearance of Homer from (what was thought to be) a brutal primitivism fascinated as the Renaissance elapsed. In phases, Ancient Greek literature (and culture) accreted mystical and mythical connotation as being uniquely proximate to that primitive age before letters, and therefore nearest to Nature and those natural country Gods, to the seeds of Civilization, and all other such elements of Eden.

While such a connotation was almost predictable purely from within Latin alone (the Romans seemed to hold the same romances of Greek. Eg. Lucretius’ patrii sermonis egestas), it grew monstrously in the Romantic period with the notion of an exclusive proximity to Nature and the Universal possessed by Greek (eg. Shelley’s “We are all Greeks”), and surprisingly, maintained momentum well into the Modern, a time when we ought to have known better. This notion existed almost purely in contrast to Latin; A student of both may daily compare the strict legalism of Cicero with the enigmatic wisdom of Plato. We soon would find W. B. Yeats writing to his son’s teacher “My son is now between nine and ten and should begin Greek at once[.] … Do not teach him a word of Latin. The Roman people were the classic decadence.” and Virginia Woolf writing an essay entitled “The Perfect Language” about Greek. Farrell (who I am relying on heavily here, especially 2001) attributes this phenomenon to the fact that Greek was more inaccessible and less well known than Latin, creating something of a mystique and indeed an alluring opacity: the unfamiliar script (untainted by the fonts of modern typesetting), the unfamiliar words – far more unfamiliar than wide-contaminating Latin, which might be seen to have spread over the lexicons of Europe like the Black Death...

What was lost in all of this were the unseen elements of Romanity. That, which, well-sewn by the Italo-Etruscan Villanova Kulturbund, persisted even under the heaviest of Hellenistic pressures. The “ramshackle” religion of Rome and the Roman state did not grow out of nothing, and was certainly not seeded by mimicry alone (Feeney 1998 esp. the introduction). One is reminded of Italic deities such as Minerva or Faunus, who, without an immediate Greek counterpart, were made by Imperial literature or earlier to fit the form and spirit of something Greek: in this case, respectively Athena and the satyr.

The satyr comes up again, in a similar function, when we examine the word “satire”. The lanx satura (“richly fed platter”, sometimes translated “medley”), or according to Ullman (1913), just satura (same meaning) was a form of strictly Italic literature characterized by, earlier, saturnine, and, later, dactylic hexameter, humorous verse on any topic or topics. The very earliest known Latin authors, such as Ennius and especially Lucilius, are known to have produced some of these, and surviving are the later saturae of Horace, Perius, and Juvenal. Some conjecture links them to an Italic spoken form, the “Fescennina Carmina”, though any such relationship is hard to prove. In any case, this was certainly a strictly Roman form, and yet by the Late Latin and Early Medieval periods, we find the spelling “satyra”, by a perceived link between these saturae and the satyr plays of Greek drama. It was only until in the 17th century Casaubon’s genius and tenacity restored the true etymology. Indeed, even today, the paranoiac tendency to seek for a Greek origin in all things Latin has now produced tenuous claims that in fact these saturae are imitative of or may be grouped with Sophocles and the old comedy. Their metrical constraints and composition, however, are not at all comparable, and despite Quintillian’s slavish worship of Greek, even he places satura as a firmly Roman form, “satura quidem tota nostra est” (Quint. Inst. 10 1.93). It is tempting to attempt to interpret this passage with a post-classical conception of what “satire” might be. G. L. Hendrickson produced a great discussion (1927) of this passage, but made this very mistake – he asks what we would consider satire, while acknowledging that Quintillian must have had a quite different conception.

This neurosis of classical philology can be found in many different places other than those which I have already excoriated. For every Latin poem, there is a scholar (or two) waiting to tell you what lost Greek poem was its model, and what miserly scrap of Greek papyrus proves this. Granted, there has been a degree of genius invested in these exercises, and where genius is applied, success often follows. But one must recognize that there has been a degree of mass romance (some would say hysteria) in some of these claims, and especially in the thinly-veiled and widely-held belief of Greek supremacy over Latin (take for instance the prejudices of Basil Gildersleeve, founder of the American Philological Society, on ethnonationalist grounds, as described in Habinek 1998), for reasons which are hardly philological or even vaguely scientific.