They saw the Greeks as being culturally superior in a great many ways. But at one and the same time, along with that view of the Greeks as culturally superior, the Romans tended to view the Greeks as soft, a little bit effeminate, tricky, deceitful, and untrustworthy. So there’s a real ambivalence in the Roman view of Greece and the Greeks. And the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC only confirmed this ambivalent attitude and made this double view all the more noticeable.
On the one hand, having conquered Greece in 146 BC, the Romans had easier and greater access to all forms of Greek culture. And at this point, we see an influx of highly educated Greek slaves into Rome, where they work as tutors for the children of well-born Roman families. There’s a real cachet in having a Greek philosopher tutor your sons, for instance.
But while the Romans are getting more exposure to Greek culture than ever before, at the same time, they had just conquered the Greeks, which seems to prove the Greeks inferiority. They lost. They must be inferior. So the ambivalent attitude of Rome towards Greece runs pretty much throughout Roman culture.
And it means, among other things, that the Roman appropriation of Greek myth is bound to contain some unresolved tensions. If we return to the definition I gave back at the beginning of the course, that myths are stories that a society tells itself about itself, encoding its worldview, its beliefs, its aspirations, its fears and so on, then we’ll see that Roman culture would have to adopt or adapt Greek myths to reflect its own values.
Even if it takes the stories over part and parcel, it’s still going to have to somehow manipulate them or mold them to reflect specifically Roman values. And of course, this is in fact what we see happening, the adaptation of Greek myth to reflect Roman views and Roman values can be seen most clearly in the Roman accounts of the Trojan War and particularly in Virgil’s treatment of the Trojan War story in his epic the Aeneid.
Now the Roman tradition out of which the Aeneid grew was that Aeneas was the ancestor of the Roman people and this tradition had its beginnings, had its origins in the Iliad, where in a rather enigmatic passage, the god Poseidon says that Aeneas cannot be killed in battle at a particular time because he, Aeneas, is fated to survive the war, go west, and found another city somewhere else.
As early as the fifth century BC, Greek writers had identified Aeneas’ new city as Rome, which makes some kind of sense. The Greeks, as we’ve talked about before, assumed that their myths reflected the way things actually had been in the time period which the myths recounted.
Poseidon says Aeneas is going to go west and found a new city somewhere, then he must have done so.
What new city could it be? Rome was a primary candidate. So as early as the 5th century BC, Greek writers had said Rome must be the city that Aeneas was prophesied to found. Virgil’s treatment of this story in the Aeneid is both the most influential and the most complete version to survive. There are many different versions about exactly how Aeneas got to Italy, what he did on the way there, how he founded his city and so forth.
What I want to focus on more here than Aeneas’ story, than how Aeneas happened to make his way to Italy, taking his father Anchises and his son Ascanius with him. What I want to focus on more is the Roman view of what the Trojan War itself meant and how they manipulated the Greek myth of the Trojan War to fit their own cultural needs.
Now, as I said, the Romans were ambivalent about the Greeks and particularly about their own cultural relationship to Greece. Greece is better than Rome. Greece is inferior to Rome. Part of this ambivalence undoubtedly sprang from Rome’s knowledge that it was in actual fact a much younger culture than Greece. Greece had myths that stretched all the way back to the origins of time itself. The Greeks took it for granted. No one ever questioned that they had been around since the very beginning.
All of the myths we’ve looked at, all of the stories that the Greeks told, stretched back from human time into the heroic age back before that so the Greeks are a very very ancient culture but the Romans knew their own native Roman tradition said that their city had been founded in 753 BC so while the Greeks have this vast pedigree stretching way back into the beginnings of time and incidentally connecting the families of modern Greece with the heroes and gods of antiquity, the Romans know that their own culture only stretches back to 753 BC.
When the Romans appropriated the Greek myth of the Trojan War, by identifying themselves with the Trojans, by saying we Romans are the descendants of Trojans, think about the implications of that. Suddenly they’ve given themselves a pedigree that stretches every bit as far back in time as the Greek pedigree. Suddenly they’ve said, well, we were there all along too.
We are as ancient as you are. We are as admirable and as venerable as you are. We’re just the Trojans, not the Greeks. So it’s a remarkably neat way of overcoming the problem, the psychological difficulty of being the new kid on the block, so to speak, and of getting rid of the inferiority that the Romans felt towards the Greeks.
It also meant that the Romans had a way of getting around the embarrassing fact that if they were the Trojans, they lost the Trojan War. That’s one problem with deciding that they were descended from the Trojans. The Greeks won that war, so that makes the Romans descended from losers. But remember, the Romans had just conquered Greece in 146 BC. And so once that happened, once Roman culture gets to that point, then that can be seen almost as a second episode in the Trojan War.
The Greeks won the first round, but we came back and beat them soundly in 146 BC. We defeated them. Now, all of this Roman reconstruction of and Roman adaptation of the Trojan War myth is almost undoubtedly completely a historical. By that I mean there is no good reason to think that any Trojan survivors actually made their way to Italy.
Even if we assume that the Trojan War itself was a historical event, as I think it probably was, there probably really was some kind of war between the peoples of Greece, of my Greece and people who lived at what we call Troy, though I would imagine it was probably over shipping rights in the Dardanelles rather than over Helen. If we assume that there was actually a war, there is still no reason to think and absolutely no evidence that survivors from that war ever made their way west to Italy. Furthermore, even if they did. So what?