![]() ![]() The vitality of the spoken word, in the very distinctive hexametrical pattern of the poems, was the single way they had of indicating authoritative utterance.” This wasn’t a world of scripture it wasn’t primarily one of the written word at all. “Actually, it was central to their sense of how the world operated. “In the modern West, we often get Greek epic wrong by thinking about it as a repository for ripping yarns,” he says. Whitmarsh thinks its purpose has been misunderstood. Greek communities therefore found themselves linked closely to their past, while also coming to terms with a fast-metamorphosing future.Įpic poetry, which many associate with Homer’s tales of heroic adventure, seems an odd choice of lens through which to examine the transformation. Greek remained the primary medium of cultural transmission through which these changes were expressed. Greek-speaking peoples were subordinate in one sense, but their language continued to dominate the eastern Empire – increasingly so as it became a separate entity centred on Byzantium, as Christianity emerged and as the Latin-speaking west declined. Yet the relationship between the two cultures was ambiguous. In the period when this poetry was written, from the first to the sixth centuries CE, the Greek world had been annexed by the Romans. In political terms, Ancient Greek history arguably climaxed with the empires established in the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE). His interest in the Greek experience stems partly from the fact that few cultures under Roman rule can have felt more keenly the fissure it wrought between present and past. To tell the story of an Empire which remains the model for so many forms of international power is to tell the story of what we became, and what we are.” “This is perhaps the most important period for thinking about where European culture comes from,” says Whitmarsh. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge, who is the principal investigator on a project that has examined Greek epic poetry during this period. ![]() This is certainly closer to the view of Tim Whitmarsh, the A. So perhaps another way to characterise the Roman Empire is as one of cultures colliding – a swirling melting pot of ideas and beliefs from which concepts that would define western civilisation took form. ![]() ![]() As Professor Mary Beard put it in her book SPQR: “there is no single story of Rome, especially when the Roman world had expanded far outside Italy.” Not only did the Empire frequently endure assorted forms of severely uncultured political disarray, but for the kaleidoscope of peoples under its dominion, Roman rule was a varied experience that often represented an unsettling rupture with the past. The reputation, of course, has more than a grain of truth to it – but the real story is also more complex. It is especially strong for an Empire that has been battered by close historical scrutiny for almost 2,000 years. Whatever the Romans did for us, their reputation as a civilising force who brought order to the western world has, in the public imagination, stood the test of time remarkably well. Maybe it was the language, architecture, codified legal system, regulated economy, military discipline – or maybe it really was public safety and aqueducts. ![]()
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