Free The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt Page B

provides a clue to the owner’s interests and illuminates the moment that brought forth Lucretius’ poem. That moment was the culmination of a lengthy process that braided together Greek and Roman high culture.
    The two cultures had not always been comfortably intertwined. Among the Greeks, Romans had long held the reputation of tough, disciplined people, with a gift for survival and a hunger for conquest. But they were also regarded as barbarians—“refined barbarians,” in the moderate view of the Alexandrian scientist Eratosthenes, crude and dangerous barbarians in the view of many others. When their independent city-states were still flourishing, Greek intellectuals collected some arcane lore about the Romans, as they did about the Carthaginians and Indians, but they did not find anything in Roman cultural life worthy of their notice.
    The Romans of the early republic might not altogether have disagreed with this assessment. Rome had traditionally been wary of poets and philosophers. It prided itself on being 13 a city of virtue and action, not of flowery words, intellectual speculation, and books. But even as Rome’s legions steadily established military dominance over Greece, Greek culture just as steadily began to colonize the minds of the conquerors. Skeptical as ever of effete intellectuals and priding themselves on their practical intelligence, Romans nonetheless acknowledged with growing enthusiasm the achievements of Greek philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists. They made fun of what they took to be the defects of the Greek character, mocking what they saw as its loquaciousness, its taste for philosophizing, and its foppishness. But ambitious Roman families sent their sons to study at the philosophical academies for which Athens was famous, and Greek intellectuals like Philodemus were brought to Rome and paid handsome salaries to teach.
    It was never quite respectable for a Roman aristocrat to admit to a boundlessly ardent Hellenism. Sophisticated Romans found it desirable to downplay a mastery of Greek language and a connoisseur’s grasp of Greek art. Yet Roman temples and public spaces were graced with splendid statues stolen from the conquered cities of the Greek mainland and the Peloponnese, while battle-hardened Roman generals adorned their villas with precious Greek vases and sculptures.
    The survival of stone and fired clay makes it easy for us to register the pervasive presence in Rome of Greek artifacts, but it was books that carried the full weight of cultural influence. In keeping with the city’s martial character, the first great collections were brought there as spoils of war. In 167 BCE the Roman general Aemilius Paulus routed King Perseus of Macedon and put an end to a dynasty that had descended from Alexander the Great and his father Philip. Perseus and his three sons were sent in chains to be paraded through the streets of Rome behind the triumphal chariot. In the tradition of national kleptocracy, Aemilius Paulus shipped back enormous plunder to deposit in the Roman treasury. But for himself and his children the conqueror reserved only a single prize: the captive monarch’s library. 14 The gesture was evidence, of course, of the aristocratic general’s personal fortune, but it was also a spectacular signal of the value of Greek books and the culture these books embodied.
    Others followed in Aemilius Paulus’ wake. It became increasingly fashionable for wealthy Romans to amass large private libraries in their town houses and country villas. (There were no bookshops in the early years in Rome, but, in addition to the collections seized as booty, books could be purchased from dealers in southern Italy and Sicily where the Greeks had founded such cities as Naples, Tarentum, and Syracuse.) The grammarian Tyrannion is reputed to have had 30,000 volumes; Serenus Sammonicus, a physician who was an expert on the use of the magical formula “Abracadabra” to ward off illness, had more