Graecia Capta: Roman Views of Greek Culture

Abstract

M Y topic today is Graecia Capta: of Greek Culture. Of the subtitle's five words, two are problematic: views and culture. Now, by views we might mean either opinions or more casual glimpses--or both. And the word culture has virtually lost its depth of meaning through recent overuse, such that culture is now a catch-all word signifying something vague like way-of-life. So, am I proposing to examine Roman glimpses of the Greek way-of-life? It would indeed be revealing to squeeze a history of Greek civilization out of sources, and to see the ancient Greeks through the cultural bias of eyes. comedy and satire, Cicero's Letters, and the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, to mention but a few, might offer a variety of amusing material for such an approach. But these provide just brief observations and contrived caricatures, not of Greece in its greatness and of the Greeks we care most about today, but of a Greece much reduced-the province of Achaea-and populated by epigones referred to by the Romans, more condescendingly than lovingly, as Graeculi.1 To take but one example, when Gellius talks about his student days in Athens, he describes how the young wouldbe intellectuals celebrate the Saturnalia in the shadow of the Acropolis: