Dividing the World[1]

David Konstan

Recently, while I was hunting down a Latin passage, I turned to The Oxford Book of Latin Verse, selected by H.W. Garrod and originally published in 1912, though my edition was a reprint dating to 1952. As I flipped aimlessly through the editor's introduction, I soon forgot whatever it was I was investigating. It was Garrod himself who seized my attention, a man with the suave authority of a professorial anthologizer. Garrod was addressing the Aeneid, and, more specifically, the tragic character of Dido, so reminiscent of heroines like Euripides' Phaedra. "Yet observe," he admonishes us. "Vergil has not hardness enough. He has not the unbending righteousness of the tragic manner . . . . Something melting and subduing, something neither Greek nor Roman, has come in." I was, needless to say, all agog to discover what this might be. And so I read: "Aeneas was a brute. There is nobody who does not feel that." This was reassuring, since I've long felt something of the sort, though it's a view not much in fashion these days. "Yet," Garrod continues, "nobody was meant to feel that. We were meant to feel that Aeneas was what Vergil so often calls him, pius. But the Celtic spirit -- for that is what it is -- is overmastering." The what? Garrod explains: "It is its characteristic that it constantly girds a man -- or a poet -- and carries him whither he would not. The fourth Aeneid is the triumph of an unconscionable Celticism over the whole moral plan of Vergil's epic" (p. xix).

There is much we could say about this. The easy condescension toward Celts on the part of an Englishman is not without a history, or an aftermath. The attribution to Rome and, by implication, I think, to England as well of a masculine hardness is an example of a familiar crossing of imperialist with sexist categories that serves to naturalize both. We may also want to observe a certain tension in Garrod's imagery: the soft and bending, "melting and subduing" quality of the Celtic spirit has a curious power to overmaster and gird the masculine temper of the Romans. Whence this virile energy in a disposition so enervating? Finally, we may well wonder how Garrod knows what is Roman and what is not, when, by his own reckoning, there is not a major Latin poet whose strain is pure. Certainly not Horace or Propertius, for example; nor Catullus: "I will not mention Lesbia by the side of Dido. The Celtic spirit too often descends into hell."

Real Roman poetry, for Garrod, is combative: "The Roman knew of himself that sonnets are a kind of soldiering," he says without irony. During the Punic wars, he explains, a leisured class devoted to literary studies came to perceive the true character of its cultural mission. "The Punic Wars not only quickened but they deepened and purified Roman patriotism. They put the history of the world in a new light to the educated Roman. The antagonism of Greek and Roman dropped away. The wars with Pyrrhus were forgotten. The issue now was no longer as between Greece and Rome, but as between East and West. The Roman saw in himself the last guardian of the ideals of Western civilization" (p. xxviii). One is tempted to fill out the expression, "of Western civilization as we know it," just to give the cliché its full effect. I cannot help suspecting that Garrod may have seen himself in very much the same relation to "the ideals of Western civilization" as the Roman he so fancifully imagines.

Let us consider for a moment Garrod's geography. "The wars with Pyrrhus were forgotten." The struggle between Greece and Rome was displaced by that between Rome and Carthage. Very well, but as the reader may recollect, Pyrrhus' country and Greece are due east of Italy, while Carthage is due south. Garrod would appear to have got his map sideways, that the conflict with Carthage should seem to have pitted East against West, rather than North and South. But of course, Garrod knew his geography as well as we do. By East (with a big "E"), he does not mean east (with a small "e"). What he means is, The East, that East that is a moral territory, not a geographical one.

To be sure, the Carthaginians were descended from Phoenician colonists, and perhaps in this respect they can be thought of as deriving from the east. Thebans too were thought of in antiquity as descended from Phoenician colonists, that is, from Cadmus and his associates.[2] For that matter, Troy had no little part in the founding of Rome, according to the Romans' own idea of their ancestry. It is not a question of origins at all. We know in what sense Carthage is East and Greece West: it is a matter of blood, of race, that same mysterious substance that rendered virile Virgil soft.

It is not just Garrod's geography that is hazy when he reflects on the grand theme of Western civilization. His chronology is none too precise either. Whether or not they had forgotten Pyrrhus in the course of the Punic wars, the Romans had certainly not forgotten Macedon. In 215 B.C., Philip V, at the head of the Hellenic League, entered into an alliance with Hannibal. I shall not rehearse the battles that ensued, save to recall the coincidence by which the Romans finally destroyed both Carthage and Corinth in the same year, 146, in the aftermath of the troubles with the Achaean League. I cannot refrain from citing Michael Cary's dry epitome in his History of Rome (MacMillan, 1960): "In the other Greek towns they [the Romans] restored the rule of the wealthier classes, and they made Corinth safe against social revolution by razing it to the ground and selling its inhabitants into slavery."

It is by twisting space and stretching time that Garrod produces his vision of a Roman race that, after the war with Pyrrhus, buried its rivalry with Greece and undertook the mission of upholding the West -- the Greco-Roman West -- against the menace of the East. I do not doubt that Roman history looked this way to Garrod, though it is very much to be doubted that it wore this aspect to Romans of the third century B.C. Garrod was evidently reading into the period of the Punic Wars an opposition between East and West that acquired paradigmatic force in another era. But which? When did the world acquire so simple a structure in the minds of historians as to present itself as a cosmic struggle between two quarters of the earth? How did it come into being as a concept to shape the sense of history, and why? I shall not, of course, attempt to answer so large a question in the few pages at my disposal here, but I would like to cast a glance at a moment in Roman history when the view might seem to have some plausibility. I am thinking of the final struggle for supremacy between Octavian and Marc Antony, who, with Cleopatra at his side, raised Egypt as the mortal antagonist of Rome.

Egypt: it was a name to conjure with. Here is Virgil, describing the shield that Vulcan wrought and Venus carried down from heaven to her son Aeneas:

Then you could see as centerpiece the battle
Of Actium and the brazen-armored fleets,
All Leucate was clear as it throbbed with warwork,
And the waves gleamed with gold. There was Augustus
Leading the Italians into battle, the whole Senate
And people behind him, and the small household Gods,
And the Great of Heaven -- he stood on the high stern:
Twin flames played round his joyous brow, the Star
Of his Fathers dawned above his head....
Opposing them was Antony backed by the riches
Of all the East [big "E"] and various nations' arms,
A conquerer from the far East [ditto] and the shores
Of the Red Sea, enlisting with him Egypt
And the strength of the Orient [big "O"] and the farthest limits
Of Bactria and -- shame! -- his Egyptian spouse.

Now comes the battle itself:
In the midst the Queen
Rallied her forces with her native timbrel
Nor did she give us yet a glance at the pair
Of asps in wait for her. Here were her gods,
Monsters of every kind, to the baying dogheaded Anubis,
With weapons poised against Neptune, against Venus,
Against Minerva.

Everyone knows how it ends. Back in Rome,
conquered races
Filed past in a long line, as various
In dress and form of weapon as in speech.
Here Vulcan had portrayed a tribe of Numidians
And mincing Africans, here Lelegeians and Carians,
And Gelonians with their quivers; the river Euphrates
Already flowed more quietly . . . .
(VIII.675-726, excerpted, tr. Patric Dickinson
[New American Library, 1961] pp. 189-90)

Here is East versus West, with the classic features of the genre. Augustus stands tall and firm, favored by paternal gods. Antony's troops are heterogeneous, their courage stirred by exotic tambourines; for gods they have monsters, half-animal half-human; at Antony's side, a woman, and foreign to boot. She is soft but overmastering; maybe she has girded the man a bit. The feminine and the bestial, the native drapery, hellish deities: in a word, the Big E.
Virgil is not alone in this strain. Perhaps the most familiar verse of Horace is Nunc est bibendum -- "Now let us drink" -- and far be it from me to disparage such salubrious advice. What he was celebrating, however, was the victory at Actium:

Till now it was wrong to break out the vintage
From the old cellars, while that Queen was launching
Crazy ruin and destruction upon the Capitol
With a hybrid herd of men [i.e., eunuchs] fouled with disease,
Reckless in hopes of everything and drunk
On favoring fortune.
(Odes 1.37.5-12)

Propertius is more violent still.
And so that whore
Queen of Canopus city of vice
the one and only scar we bear
From Philip's blood
Presumed to set her baying god on Jupiter,
Subject the Tiber to the Nile's abuse,
Silence the Roman trumpet with rattling castanets,
Chase Liburnian battleships with barge poles,
Spread out her filthy canopies on the Tarpeian rock,
And sit in judgment
Amidst the busts and arms of Marius.
(III.11.39-46, tr. John Warden [Bobbs Merrill,
1972], p. 160)

The poets were responding to the mood encouraged by Augustus, in what has been called the first offical propaganda campaign in recorded history.[3] After Egypt was conquered, Dio Cassius tells us, Augustus, "in view of the populousness of both the cities and country, the facile, fickle character of the inhabitants, and the extent of the grain-supply and of the wealth, so far from daring to entrust the land to any senator, would not even grant a senator permission to live in it, except as he personally made concession to him by name. On the other hand, he did not allow the Egyptians to be senators in Rome, but whereas he made various dispositions as regards the several cities, he commanded the Alexandrians to conduct their government without senators; with such capacity for revolution, I suppose, did he credit them" (51.17.1-2, tr. Earnest Cary). Augustus, that is to say, entertained a healthy fear of the dangers posed by Egypt as a rallying point of opposition.

But a practical anxiety over Egypt as a possible rival to Roman power, based on its population, natural resources, prestige, and form of government, is one thing, and a Manichaean struggle between Orient and Occident -- "The War of the East Against the West," to adopt the title of Chapter III in the 10th volume of the Cambridge Ancient History (1966) -- is quite another. The sources for such a view reach back into classical Greek traditions, which left their mark upon many aspects of Roman culture. The experience of the Persian invasion of the Greek mainland contributed to a differentiation in the Greek imagination between themselves and Asians, which is evident, for example, in Herodotus' Histories. Much of this ideological production was undoubtedly stimulated by tensions internal to the Greek cities. The Athenians sought to present themselves as the saviors of Hellas and bearers of Greek ideals as they consolidated their control over the Delian League and converted it into an Athenian empire.[4] Many texts come to mind in this connection, but the most powerful concentration of the relevant imagery was perhaps the carvings that adorned the new temple on the Acropolis dedicated to Athena in 438 B.C. The metopes that ran round the four sides of the Parthenon depicted the wars of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, the Greeks and the Amazons, the Gods and the Giants, and finally the Greeks and the Trojans. There are the lineaments of the enemy: half-beasts, warrior women, monstrous deities and Orientals. All the pieces are in place for Virgil's sinister picture of Cleopatra's armies.

Did Virgil draw his inspiration directly from the Parthenon? There is no need to assume so; the associations between the feminine, the bestial, the monstrous, and the Asiatic were not unique to this monument. They are pre sent, for example, in Euripides' Medea, produced on the very eve of the Peloponnesian War and extraordinarily influential with Hellenistic and Roman poets. But who knows? No less an authority than Eduard Fraenkel imagined that Horace drew upon the sculptures of the Parthenon in composing the fourth of his Roman Odes: "I like to think that in the happy days when Horace lived as a student in Athens he would every now and then walk up to the Acropolis, enter the Parthenon, and gaze at Pheidias' statue of the goddess, whose shield 'was decorated inside with a gigantomachy, outside with an amazonomachy, and the sandals with Lapiths fighting Centaurs, all three symbolic of the triumph of the higher over the lower breed.'"[5] I shall leave the matter moot. Suffice it to say that this particular complex of notions seems very powerful, and other contributions in this volume indicate that it has not yet entirely lost its vigor.

However, the chauvinistic denigration of the East was by no means a uniform or universal tradition among the Greeks. Sometimes, Greek writers were content to note differences between themselves and other nations, without importing a derogatory tone.[6] In Menander's Shield, an old man plans to claim in marriage his young niece, who is in love with another, because she has fallen heir to a substantial amount of property. He is nervous enough about the propriety of this, however, to consult a slave on the matter. Cannily, the slave replies: "I am a Phrygian; many of the things that seem fine to you are dreadful to me and vice versa" (206-08). Not that he really means it, of course. He knows quite well that the old fellow is greedy and nasty, and he is using a hackneyed appeal to the variety of customs in different cultures in order to avoid contradicting the man openly. Phrygian the slave may be, but his moral standards are higher than those of a free Athenian in this particular case, and Menander has no qualms about showing it.

One of my favorite passages in Menander is a brief fragment from an unknown play, quoted by the anthologist Stobaeus (anthologists do have their uses).

Family will be the death of me. Mom, if you love me,
Don't mention everybody's family. People who have
No good in them at all thanks to their natural capacities
Take refuge in their heirlooms and their family,
And count up the number of their ancestors.
But you can't see or name anybody who doesn't have
Ancestors. How could they ever have been born, otherwise?
If they aren't able to cite them because they've
Moved around or haven't got good connections,
Why are they any worse-born than those who can?
Whoever is naturally well-disposed toward what is good,
Even if he's an Ethiopian, Mom, is noble.
A Scythian? "Horrors!" Yet wasn't Anacharsis a Scythian?
(Fr. 612 Koerte-Thierfelder [Leipzig, 1959])

Egypt in particular was the object of an all but reverential attitude on the part of some ancient thinkers. Herodotus, we may recall, derived virtually all of Greek religion from Egyptian practices, and comparable accounts of Egypt as the cradle of civilized values circulated widely in Rome: I mention only the first two books of Diodorus Siculus' Library of History, published in the thirties B.C. There was no fixed way of representing foreigners. Rather, there was what we may call a cultural repertoire, on which poets and politicians alike could draw in time of need. We have seen the fount to which Virgil, Horace, and Propertius brought their vessels; in fairness, I should mention that Tibullus, in the year 27 B.C., took draughts from a different spring.[7]

We are familiar with cultural chauvinism. In times of conflict, the enemy is painted in darkest colors. If they can be made to look strange or foreign, so much the better. Literary license is only to be expected. In a "War of the East against the West," there is no room for fine distinctions. It may seem odd that Mr. Garrod, in the twentieth century, should still believe the propaganda manufactured in Italy two millenia ago; but the cast of nineteenth-century imperial ideology was hospitable to Augustan propaganda, and European philology was for the most part a willing collaborator in producing the image of a divided world.

Mr. Garrod's mistake, however, goes deeper than that. For the Egypt that Octavian fought at Actium was not the timeless land of the Pharaohs, an ancient and continuous culture separate and distinct from the world around it. Everything that happened since the conquests of Alexander the Great seems also to have slipped Garrod's mind. The dominant class in Egypt was entirely Greek. It is surprising how many cultivated people believe that Cleopatra is an Egyptian name. They are in good company. Shakespeare, after all, referred to her as the gypsy queen. But her name is Greek, of course. It turns up as early as the Iliad, where it is the name of Meleager's wife. As we learn from the Cambridge Ancient History, "Romans called her an Egyptian simply as a term of abuse, like Dago [!], for she had no Egyptian blood" (x.35). Whatever the views that the classical Greeks may have entertained of Egyptian culture, it was for them a different place from the province which was absorbed into the Roman Empire. Garrod's mistake is like confusing the Zulu empire with the modern regime in South Africa, except that proportionately the native Egyptians outnumbered their Greek rulers by a ratio far larger than that which obtains between blacks and whites in South Africa today. This is the oddest thing of all about Garrod's claim that, with the Punic wars, the Romans forgot their conflicts with Greece and henceforward saw their mission as the preservation of Western, that is, Hellenic civilization. The core of the Egyptian army was precisely Greek.

But that is not all. If the east was not so indelibly East as Garrod believed, neither, for that matter, was Rome so undilutably West. I quote again from the tenth volume of the Cambridge Ancient History: "The steady flow of slaves into Italy and their prolific unions meant that the country was in no danger of desolation; and the frequency of manumission was a guarantee that the total number of the free inhabitants would not decline." One might suppose that this was the good news. It is not. Our author continues: "If the population of Italy was only maintained by immigration, it must soon become a nondescript farrago, with the Roman element too weak to leaven the whole lump. The traditions which were to be the foundation of Italian nationality were the traditions of the Latin stock, and they would not readily be communicated to the rest of Italy if the free population of the country were penetrated by heirs of the Hellenistic culture who affected to regard Italy as barbarian . . . . [Augustus] must mark off the material which he was to mould into an imperial people . . . . By setting limits to the numbers of those Greeks and Orientals who, coming to Italy as slaves, were merged on manumission into the general body of Roman citizens, [he] would preserve that material from uncontrolled contamination" (p. 429).

The logic of this passage will not bear too close a scrutiny. What is "controlled contamination"? At what precise point would the population of Italy become a "nondescript farrago"? The word "farrago" here may be a tip-off; it is the very term that Juvenal applied to his own satirical compositions (1.1.86), which were a mixture or mélange of topics of every sort. To this same Juvenal we owe the most sublime statement of Roman xenophobia to have reached us from antiquity. In one way, Hugh Last, the author of the above insights, is faithful to his model. Juvenal made no distinction between Greeks and Orientals in general. In fact, it was precisely Greeks who were the object of his fiercest diatribes, those clever Greeks who were up to any deception whatsoever, poseurs who insinuated themselves into cheap professions such as magicians, actors, musicians, flatterers, doctors, and teachers, both elementary and advanced. Omnia novit Graeculus esuriens: "the hungry little Greek knows it all" (3.77-78). When Juvenal mentions places further east, it is still Greeks he has in mind. "The Syrian Orontes has long since flowed into the Tiber" (1.3.62); yes, but is Syrian Greeks that Juvenal means. For Juvenal, the East began at Epirus, just as for Englishmen it is often said to commence at Calais.

In another way, however, Last has imported into his description of racial contamination at Rome an anxiety that is quite foreign to Juvenal. Juvenal is not concerned with the national or racial composition of the Roman population. The problem for him is one of unfair competition for the favors of the rich. It is like being indignant over the importation of French governesses, or British philologists. Fears for the purity of the national stock are modern, not Roman. I cannot help citing, in this connection, a headline in the "Week in Review" section of the Sunday edition of the New York Times, dated February 14, 1988: "Old World Fearful of Third World's 'Silent Invasion'" (p. E2). This appears under the leader, "Contrasting Birthrates" (compare the "prolific unions" in Last's account of slave families). Here are the opening sentences of this article, under the byline of James M. Markham: "' We are obsessed by the East,' said an advisor to President François Mitterand, referring to the menace of the Soviet bloc. 'But the threat of destabilization comes from the South.'

"By 'the South,'" the journalist continues, "he meant the exploding Arab populations of the Mediterranean basin and, by extension, the peoples of Africa and Asia who are knocking on the doors of a graying Western Europe, in search of work and sustenance." Needless to say, the social consequences of modern imperialism upon the metropolitan capitalist countries are a far cry from importation of slaves into Italy in the aftermath of Rome's wars of conquest. But the imagery of a divided world lives on, even as the compass turns.

The division of the world into East and West, with Greece and Rome as the source of Western civilization, is scarcely true to the realities of history. There was no East and West in terms such as these for classical antiquity. The war that Octavian, with the help of Rome's greatest poets, represented as a conflict between Egypt and Italy was in the last analysis not a foreign war at all. It was a civil war, but, as R.G.M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard remark in their comments (Oxford, 1970) on Nunc est bibendum, "it was not recognized as such: instead war was declared on Cleopatra with antique formality. By a brilliant manoeuvre ... Antony was not treated as a principal; he was simply deemed to have adhered to the nation's enemies" (p. 407).

The East was Greek; the diversity of peoples in the Empire was reflected in the demography of the city of Rome; the "War of East against the West" was a civil war. "The Roman saw in himself the last guardian of the ideals of Western civilization." At a time when the study of the classics is being pushed as a way of reasserting the values of the West, perhaps one of its real advantages is that it may help us to recognize a myth when we see one.

[1] I have preserved in this paper the oral and somewhat informal tone of the original communication at the conference on Civilization and its Others. While I have inserted a few references to recent literature in the notes, the paper stands essentially as it was presented in April 1988, a moment at which the appearance of several important books was to stimulate a new and profound interest in the questions I address here.

[2] The effacement of Phoenician, along with Egyptian, influence on Greece in nineteenth-century classical scholarship is entertainingly documented by Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, volume 1: The Fabrication of Greece 1785-1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

[3] For a full discussion of the representation of Antony and its effects on public opinion in Rome, see Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, transl. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), pp. 57-65.

[4] This is the theme of Edith Hall's excellent book, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

[5] Horace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 282, quoting John Beazley in J.D. Beazley and Bernard Ashmole, Greek Sculpture and Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 48.

[6] Martin Bernal (above, note 2) conjures up what he calls an "ancient model" of relations between Greece and its neighbors that stresses the continuities between the several cultures.

[7] See poem I.7, on the birthday of his patron Messalla. I have discussed Tibullus' treatment of Egypt in this poem in "The Politics of Tibullus I.7," Rivista di Studi Classici 26 (1978) 173-85.