FIVE

THE IDEA OF THE SAVAGE AND THE RISE OF ROMAN IMPERIAL CIVILIZATION

“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.”¹ One of the most famous opening lines in all of Western literature, even if it is written in Latin, a dead language, translates as “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” But what comes next in Julius Caesar’s (100–44 B.C.) Commentaries on the Gallic Wars indicates that the famous Roman military general knew a bit of Greek in addition to his famously precise Latin. He goes on to describe the three groups of barbarian tribes that inhabit Gaul: the Belgae, the Aquitani, and the Celts, each differing from the other in “language, customs and laws.” Then Caesar uses a language of savagery clearly borrowed from the Greeks to describe these three tribal peoples.

Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest, because they are farthest from the civilisation and refinement of [our] Province, and merchants least frequently resort to them and import those things which tend to effeminate the mind; and they are the nearest to the Germans, who dwell beyond the Rhine, with whom they are continually waging war; for which reason the Helvetii also surpass the rest of the Gauls in valour, as they contend with the Germans in almost daily battles, when they either repel them from their own territories, or themselves wage war on their frontiers.

Rome had absorbed Greece and Hellenistic East Asia into its empire a century prior to Caesar’s military invasions of Gaul. Romans, particularly those from elite, aristocratic families with long-established records of service in the Senate, quickly began to colonize Greek learning, literature, art, architecture, mechanical and engineering science, and many other aspects of Hellenic civilization as well.

Well-educated slaves who could teach the Greeks’ language, literature, and skills in rhetoric and oratory to sons of the nobility were regarded as prized captives in Rome’s foreign wars of empire. In his youth, Caesar had been tutored by Marcus Antonius Gnipho, believed to be a former slave from either Gaul or the Hellenistic East who taught in Rome. We know little of Gnipho; he is reported to have been educated in Alexandria, the Harvard on the Mediterranean of the Roman world. His students included Cicero, six years older than Caesar.

Caesar’s precisely declaimed account of the military situation on Rome’s northern barbarian frontier indicates that he had been immersed in a language of savagery derived from Greek Classical sources. His opening paragraph in the Gallic Wars efficiently utilizes the same basic organizing categories, familiar stereotypes, and identifying markers invented by Greek writers like Herodotus in describing Rome’s barbarian enemies as distant and fierce, war-loving savages.

Caesar’s Gallic Wars represents one of the most influential and enduring examples of the Romans’ appropriation of the Greeks’ idea of the savage. The genius of the Romans is reflected in the many ways they reinvented the concept to serve the purposes of their own highly urbanized, expansion-minded, luxury-consuming form of imperial civilization.

THE TOURISTS’ VIEW OF THE SAVAGE IN MODERN-DAY ROME

We can get a pretty good sense of what the idea of the savage looked like to Romans in the glory days of their empire by walking around the Eternal City with a decent guidebook in hand. The savage, particularly in its dehumanized, barbarian form, was an all-pervasive presence in the Roman imperial era. Depictions of the barbarian enemies conquered by Rome can be seen with their dejected faces, uncouth dress, and hairy heads and beards (the Romans had adopted Greek preferences for shorter hairstyles and clean-shaven faces) on public monuments, buildings, and works of art throughout the city today. Invariably, if we dig into the history of many of these iconic works, a strong Greek influence can be found.

The Romans were particularly fond of using the idea of the savage to commemorate their military triumphs over the barbarian tribes on the northern European frontiers of the empire by constructing towering monuments in the city. The repeated stereotypes and identifying markers on these structures suggest a fairly stabilized mental image of the barbarian in imperial Rome. Trajan’s Column is located on the site of Emperor Trajan’s Forum near the Quirinal Hill, north of the Roman Forum. Completed in A.D. 113, it is believed to be the first monument of its type constructed in Rome. Built to commemorate Trajan’s victory in the wars against the Dacian tribes (A.D. 101–102 and 105–106), its construction has been credited to the famous Greek architect Apollodorus of Damascus (second century A.D.), who is believed also to have designed the Pantheon in Rome.

The Dacians were well known as extreme examples of barbarian savagery in the literature and ancient folklore of the Greeks. They were called the Getae by Herodotus, and ancient reports associated them with werewolves in what is now Romania. The upwardly spiraling bas-reliefs on the column depict Roman soldiers defeating the barbarously dressed and primitively armed Dacian warriors. The laborious construction of forts, roads, bridges, and the familiar infrastructure of Roman imperial civilization is also depicted on the column. Dacian men are always shown as unkempt, hairy, and unshaven. Dacian women are depicted torturing Roman soldiers. Heads of several Dacian warriors are hoisted upon pikes—such is the fate of those who resist the empire. As Trajan’s Column illustrated for the citizens of Rome, the empire treated them like the barbarian savages they were.

Following Trajan’s successful campaigns, the Dacians’ territory was colonized and integrated into the empire. So was the practice of commemorating Rome’s victories over the barbarian tribes of Europe on colossal public monuments in the Eternal City. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, modeled after Trajan’s Column, was constructed toward the end of the second century A.D. Commemorating the emperor’s victory over the Danubian tribes in the Marcomannic Wars from A.D. 166 to 180, the column looms over the Piazza Colonna. The defeated barbarians, easily identified by their rough dress and bearded, unkempt, hairy heads, are depicted in various stages of disarray, despair, and defeat. Their villages are torched and their women and children are marched off into slavery as the sculpture winds its way up the column’s façade. All the while, Emperor Marcus Aurelius (author of the influential Stoic philosophical text the Meditations) is shown watching over the conquest, in total command of the decimation of a people regarded by the Roman Empire as barbarian savages.

Trajan’s Column, Rome (photograph by R. Williams)

Trajan’s Column, Rome (detail) (photograph by R. Williams)

One of the most interesting adaptations of the idea of the savage on a Roman triumphal monument is found on the Arch of Constantine, located between the Coliseum and the Palatine Hill in Rome. The great arch was dedicated in A.D. 315 to commemorate Constantine I’s victory over the Roman emperor Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. The towering structure incorporates sculptures of defeated barbarian savages taken from older Roman monuments in an effort to rehabilitate Constantine’s image after his victory in what was essentially a civil war. The arch is a jumbled pastiche of scenes and pieces carved out from other monuments commemorating military victories won by Rome’s “good emperors” (a phrase coined by Machiavelli) over various barbarian tribes. The attic of the arch shows the effort to associate what we today would call Constantine’s brand with the valiant deeds of those notable barbarian killers. It is decorated with battle scenes and surrenders of barbarian prisoners taken from earlier monuments commemorating the deeds of Marcus Aurelius’s victory over the German tribes and Trajan’s conquest over the Dacians.

Arch of Constantine, Rome (photograph by R. Williams)

These hyperrealistic depictions of vanquished barbarian savages on public monuments and buildings were complemented by innumerable Greek-inspired (or sometimes simply copied) works of art that can be seen in many of Rome’s most famous museums. For example, featured in the center of a gallery in the Capitoline Museum, a Roman copy of a lost Greek statue, the famous “Dying Gaul,” mournfully evokes the theme of the noble savage in its depiction of a wounded Gallic warrior. The original statue is thought to have been commissioned sometime in the early decades of the third century B.C. by Attalus I of Pergamon, an Ionian city-state in Asia Minor. Attalus, a loyal ally of Rome’s empire, had defeated a group of Celts that had invaded Asia Minor from Thrace, spreading terror across the land.

Arch of Constantine, Rome (detail) (photograph by R. Williams)

The “Dying Gaul” draws on familiar Greek stereotypes and clichéd markers of the barbarian savage, particularly in its nakedness. Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century B.C., describes Gallic warriors who fought naked. Polybius (ca. 200–118 B.C.), another Greek historian, describes the battle dress of one particular tribe of Gauls in his account of the Battle of Telamon of 225 in this way: “[T]he Gaesatae, in their love of glory and defiant spirit, had thrown off their garments and taken up their position in front of the whole army naked and wearing nothing but their arms. . . . The appearance of these naked warriors was a terrifying spectacle, for they were all men of splendid physique and in the prime of life.”²

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ca. 60 B.C.–after 7 B.C.), a Greek historian who went to Rome to teach rhetoric during the reign of Augustus Caesar, lists the stereotypical attributes of the Gallic warrior in dismissing their effectiveness on the battlefield: “Our enemies fight naked. What injury could their long hair, their fierce looks, their clashing arms do us? These are mere symbols of barbarian boastfulness.”³

“Dying Gaul,” Capitoline Museum, Rome (photograph by R. Williams)

The large hands and feet, mustache, and especially the collar, or torc, around the neck of the “Dying Gaul” all project popular Greek stereotypes of the way a barbarian should look and dress—or not dress. The torc, the telltale mark of the barbarian to the Romans, was worn by the Scythians, Thracians, Celts, and other tribal groups considered fierce, savage warriors by the Greeks.

The statue has been greatly admired throughout the course of Western history. Napoleon liked it so much that he took it with him to Paris in 1797 after invading Italy. Lord Byron celebrated its pathos and emotive power in his famous poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in the early nineteenth century:

     He leans upon his hand—his manly brow

     Consents to death, but conquers agony,

     And his drooped head sinks gradually low—

     And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow

     From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one.⁴

The noted art historian F. B. Tarbell, quoting Byron, described the “savage heroism” of the “Dying Gaul” in this way: He “ ‘consents to death,’ and conquers agony. Here, then, a powerful realism is united to a tragic idea, and amid all vicissitudes of taste this work has never ceased to command a profound admiration.”⁵

Roman appropriations of more fanciful versions of the Greeks’ idea of the savage are represented by the frescoes and sculpted figures of centaurs, fauns, and satyrs favored by the aristocratic elites of the imperial era. The famous wall paintings of Pompeii featuring Pan and other Roman gods borrowed many of their themes and ideas from the Greeks. Intricate mosaics of Theseus defeating the Minotaur and famous mythic battle scenes between immortal Greek warrior-heroes and monstrous savages graced the vacation homes and villas of Rome’s wealthiest and most powerful families.

The Romans even carried the idea of the savage with them to their graves, literally speaking. Roman sarcophagi decorated with bas-relief carvings of famous Greek myths and legends such as the Amazonomachy or intricate renderings of famous Roman battles and triumphs over barbarian tribes can be found on display in the museums of modern-day Rome.

With these sarcophagi as well, the influence of the Greeks lies submerged, just beneath the surface. Prior to the first century B.C., the Romans probably did not use sarcophagi for burials. The practice was adopted from the Greeks. One of the most famous Roman battle sarcophagi, the Grande Ludovisi from the third century A.D., is on display at the Palazzo Altemps in Rome. Discovered in 1621, the front of the sarcophagus depicts clean-shaven Roman soldiers and abject Germans defeated in battle, stereotyped by their distinctive clothing, beards, and unkempt heads. Roman soldiers tower over the defeated barbarians, checking their teeth to determine their suitability as slaves. The noble-looking Roman on the horse in the center top of the sarcophagus has been identified as Hostilian, son of the emperor Decius, who died in 252.

A tour of modern-day Rome will show that the Romans did not lack for their own indigenous myths and legends of the savage. The famous statue of the “Capitoline Wolf” in the Museo Nuovo in the Palazzo dei Conservatori shows Romulus and Remus, Rome’s legendary founders, being suckled by a wolf. But even this foundation myth was most famously told by a Greek, the historian Plutarch (ca. A.D. 46–120), who related the legend in the first chapter of his best-known book, Parallel Lives, a compilation of detailed biographies pairing famous Greeks and Romans to show their common virtues and vices.

“Grande Ludovisi,” Palazzo Altemps, Rome (photograph by R. Williams)

Even from this brief tour of Roman imperial-era art and architecture, we can begin to sense how the idea of the savage was a pervasive presence in everyday Roman life, habitually turned to in celebrating the achievements of an empire that sought to bring civilization to the barbarian world. Told as part of their foundation myth, taken to their graves, chiseled in bas-relief on the great public monuments of their empire, and painted on the walls of their baths and vacation retreats, the idea of the savage as found reflected throughout the great public monuments and enduring works of art reveals the true genius of the Romans. Even the casual tourist who walks through the Eternal City today can appreciate how the Romans invented the Western world’s greatest imperial civilization by conquering the barbarian tribes of Europe and then using the Greeks’ language of savagery to memorialize their triumphant deeds.

THE GENIUS OF THE ROMANS IN USING THE IDEA OF THE SAVAGE

As our brief tour of the sights of modern-day Rome suggests, the genius of the Romans is found in their ability to take the ideas and knowledge from the peoples they conquered and put them to good use in service to their own imperial ambitions. The process of Rome’s absorption of the Greeks began relatively early in the history of the Republic (509–31 B.C.) and the city’s rise as the preeminent imperial power in the Mediterranean world. The Hellenizing process was initiated first through contacts with the long-established Greek colonies of Magna Graecia (or “Great Greece”) on the southern Italian peninsula. The independent Hellenic city-states that had been established as colonies in the early Greek Renaissance period were all eventually annexed as part of Rome’s unification of the Italian peninsula into its expanding empire in the mid-third century B.C.

The Macedonian Wars of 205 to 148 B.C. increased Roman contacts with the Greek mainland city-states and the eastern Greek world in Asia Minor. With the decisive victory over the Achaean League in the Battle of Corinth in 146 B.C., Rome completed its imperial absorption of virtually all the Greeks.

This remarkable and unprecedented series of imperial conquests, annexations, and encounters resulted in the extensive penetration of Greek-inspired ideas and systems of knowledge into virtually all aspects of Roman life. As we have seen with Caesar’s early education, Roman elites preferred Greek-educated tutors or slaves to instruct their sons in the skills regarded as indispensable for a career and advancement in public life.

Typically, the young Roman student would read and memorize the best-known and respected works of Greek literature: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, of course; Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days; and the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. The major Greek philosophers and their schools—Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno of Elea (founder of the Stoic school)—would also be studied. Well-known historical works by Herodotus and Thucydides would likely be assigned. In order to serve capably in the Senate, the best and brightest young sons of the Roman nobility were trained in oratory and rhetoric, typically by Greeks or Latin scholars adapting Greek methods or teaching from Greek texts.

The effect of this Hellenizing influence was a source of controversy in the Republic from the outset of Rome’s contacts with the Greeks. Cato the Elder (234–149 B.C.), Roman consul and censor during the Republican period, warned his fellow citizens to beware of the influence of the degraded Hellenistic world. Seeking to reclaim Rome from its descent into debilitating luxury and vice, Cato himself, however, was apparently unable to avoid echoing the familiar refrains of the Greek protest poets. Sounding much like Hesiod, he preached to the Romans about the need to return to the simpler virtues of an agrarian way of life, leaving others alone in their homelands to do the same. Identifying colonial wars, homosexuality, and the “mixture of elements” that they inevitably brought into the imperial capital as a source of moral decline, Cato sternly warned his fellow Roman citizens to beware: The reception of Greek culture would mean ruin for the Roman state.⁶

In violating his own censorious prescriptions against Greek influences while railing against them at the same time, Cato, like many of Rome’s ruling class, was simply drawing on the lessons of his youth. As Plutarch notes, Cato’s books and writings were full of citations to Greek authorities; at times he translates them word for word into Latin. As a young man, Cato had developed a close relationship with the Greek Pythagorean philosopher Nearchus, taking great pleasure in hearing him talk of philosophy.

The censor Cato apparently could not control himself when it came to relying on the Greeks in expressing his grave concerns over the deterioration of the Republic—caused, in his opinion, by too much exposure to the Greeks. Nor could his fellow Romans ignore the temptation. From the very beginning of their contacts, the Romans borrowed, stole, and plundered from the Greeks anything of value or insight they could take from that failed imperial civilization, in hopes of perfecting their own.

THE GERMANS AND THE IDEA OF THE SAVAGE IN CAESAR AND TACITUS

As Cato’s failed attempts at censorship demonstrate, Greek ideas and modes of seeing and reflecting on the world were a pervasive presence in Roman imperial civilization and its rise to ascendancy over the ancient Mediterranean world. As mentioned, one of the most important ways that the Romans used the Greeks’ language of savagery is reflected in their basic understanding of the European barbarian world and the peoples in it. Recall Caesar’s statement about the Belgians: “The Belgae are the bravest, because they are farthest from the civilisation and refinement of [our] Province, and merchants least frequently resort to them, and import those things which tend to effeminate the mind.” Caesar’s use of distance from Roman civilization to explain the degree of the barbarian savage’s divergence from civilized norms and values was one of Herodotus’s organizing principles in the Histories and a popular convention of imperial-era Roman writers.

Similarly, Caesar’s conclusion that a luxury-consuming civilization was fundamentally at odds with the nobler virtues of the barbarian’s “hard” way of life was also a familiar cliché among Roman writers, inherited from the Greeks and the literature of social protest associated with the Hesiodic Legend of the Golden Age. Caesar reveals the full scope and extent of his Greek-inspired geopolitical strategic vision of the world when he explains exactly why the Belgians are so brave and fierce: They have to defend themselves from the German tribes to the north, who, being even farther removed from civilization, are naturally more savage in their manners and customs.

Caesar’s Commentaries were designed and written as propaganda pieces to promote his political career back in Rome. As tallied by Plutarch, Caesar’s armies killed one million barbarian enemies of Rome, enslaved another million or so along the way, subjugated some three hundred–odd tribes of savages, and destroyed eight hundred of their towns and cities during his seven-year-long campaign. His victories over the barbarian tribes situated on Rome’s vulnerable northern frontier, as documented in his year-by-year chronicle, made him extremely popular among the urban mob that controlled the Roman Assembly. Like Caesar, they opposed the aristocratic rule of the Senate.

Caesar’s contemporaries greatly admired the Commentaries for their simplicity and precision in phrasing and grammar. Cicero, for example, remarked that Caesar’s Commentaries merit the highest approbation: “for they are plain, correct, and graceful, and divested of all the ornaments of language.” There is nothing more pleasing, Cicero wrote, “than a correct and elegant brevity of expression,” and Caesar had mastered the skill in the exact and lucid phrasings of his prose.⁷

Caesar’s terse, unexaggerated prose writing style reflected the influences of his Greek-styled education. As mentioned, he had initially been instructed by the former slave and grammarian, Marcus Antonius Gnipho. As a young man with political aspirations, Caesar then sought out the famous Greek orator Apollonius Molon of Rhodes, who also instructed Cicero. From what we know of his teaching methods, Appollonius emphasized the famous “three Ds” of the Greek statesman, orator, and one-time professional speech writer Demosthenes (384–322 B.C.): “Delivery, delivery, delivery.”⁸

What Caesar delivers throughout his Commentaries is a concise recapitulation of the familiar stereotypes and categorical markers of barbarian primitivity handed down from the Greeks to describe the major tribal groups of Europe who opposed Rome’s imperial authority. The Germans, as he describes them in his opening paragraph, being the furthest tribe from the Romans, are naturally the most warlike and uncivilized in their manners. Caesar runs down in checklist fashion all of the familiar markers and indicia of barbarian backwardness used by the Greeks. Living the “hard” life of the primitive savage described by Greek writers and philosophers, the Germans, Caesar reports, have no priests and do not sacrifice to the gods. They subsist on a simple diet determined by their nomadic, cattle-herding way of life. They eat mostly milk, cheese, and meat. They have no single king or ruler in times of war, “but the chiefs of provinces and cantons administer justice and determine controversies among their own people.” Dishonest to the core, robbing any foreigner they might come across, their entire life, Caesar informs us, “is occupied in hunting and in the pursuits of the military art; from childhood they devote themselves to fatigue and hardships.”

Like other Roman writers during the era of imperial conquests and acquisitions, Caesar notes that the Germans do have a few noble qualities that are worthy of emulation. Unlike the Romans who, Caesar seems to suggest, indulge themselves too much in bodily pleasures and sensuous luxuries, the Germans avoid all sexual relations until their twentieth birthday. The most honored among them are those who remain chaste for the longest period, believing that “by this the physical powers are increased and the sinews are strengthened. And to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth year they reckon among the most disgraceful acts.” They freely open their houses to their welcomed guests, treating them with the utmost respect and gladly sharing their food. They refuse to recognize private property in land, holding it communally for several reasons. As Caesar explains, the Germans fear being ensnared by the steady habits of the farmers’ life that might make them change their “ardor in the waging of war for agriculture.” Believing that the accumulation of wealth incites jealousy and feuds among them, they maintain “a contented state of mind” by having each see his own possessions “placed on an equality with [those of] the most powerful.” They live in simple huts, fearing that the construction of elaborate houses would make them less able to deal with the cold and heat.

Roman writers following Caesar continue to draw on the familiar categories and identifying markers of the Classical language of savagery handed down from the Greeks to describe the fierce and ennobled qualities of the “hard” life of the Germans and other barbarian tribes of northern and central Europe. A good deal of what we know about the German tribes during Rome’s imperial era comes from Tacitus (ca. A.D. 56–120), a renowned historian and the son of a Roman knight. Tacitus served Rome as a senator, consul, and governor of Asia. He was a staunch Republican throwback at heart, who had witnessed in his time both the madness of Nero and the noble deeds of “good emperors” like Vespasian. What is clear from his works is that Tacitus longed for the stability and peace of the good old days of the Republic that prevailed prior to Caesar’s overthrow of the Senate in 49 B.C. Interestingly, he uses the same basic language of familiar clichés and stereotypes as Caesar in describing the barbarian tribes of Germany to make his preferences for the virtues and glories of Republican Rome felt.

Well educated in rhetoric and law by the famous rhetorician Quintilian, Tacitus describes the Germans as fierce but noble warriors whose hard way of life could teach his fellow Romans a thing or two about virtue. As depicted by Tacitus, the Germans are a hodge-podge collection of primitive stereotypes and rude behaviors. They place little value on gold, reject the luxuries of civilized life, and know nothing of the security of private property. They are prone to drunkenness and blood feuds, dress like bums, and govern themselves according to primitive laws and exotic customs. As for their attitudes toward farming, they are, as Tacitus concedes, your basic barbarian, war-loving savages: “A German is not so easily prevailed upon to plough the land and wait patiently for harvest as to challenge a foe and earn wounds for his reward. He thinks it tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be got quickly by the loss of a little blood.”⁹

But, according to Tacitus, the Germans do have their good points. Like Caesar and other Roman writers who attempt realistic accounts of the barbarian tribes of Europe, Tacitus calls on the familiar themes of ennobled savagery associated with the Legend of the Golden Age in favorably remarking on the righteousness of the remote Chauci tribe:

They are the noblest people of Germany, and one that prefers to maintain its greatness by righteous dealing. Untouched by greed or lawless ambition, they dwell in quiet seclusion, never provoking a war, never robbing or plundering their neighbours. It is conspicuous proof of their valour and strength that their superiority does not rest on aggression. Yet every man of them has arms ready to his hand, and if occasion demands it they have vast reserves of men and horses. So their reputation stands as high in peace as in war.

Tacitus also follows Caesar in adopting the Greeks’ organizing principle of the barbarian savage’s distance from Rome as determining the degree of cultural divergence from civilized norms and values. The most distant tribes, he writes, live on the shores or in the vicinity of the Suebian Sea (Baltic Sea). This body of water, he tells us, is “believed to be the boundary that girdles the earth.” The tribes of this distant and remote region are among the most savage encountered anywhere in the world, according to Tacitus.

In the Germania, Tacitus describes the Fenni, for example, as being among the northernmost tribes of this region. Scholars surmise that he may have been writing about the ancient ancestors of the Sami or proto-Finns, or perhaps a group of indigenous Scandinavians.¹⁰ According to Tacitus, the Fenni live a very “hard” life, perhaps the hardest of all the barbarian tribes of Europe, since they are at the ends of the earth. They are “astonishingly savage and disgustingly poor,” with no horses or household goods. They lack iron and therefore sophisticated armaments. Their arrows are made out of bone. “They eat wild herbs, dress in skins, and sleep on the ground,” surviving by the hunt. These miserable savages take refuge “from wild beasts or bad weather” by hiding “under a makeshift covering of interlaced branches.”

Yet the Fenni too, as savage as they are, can teach the Romans something about what it means to be truly happy and virtuous. They refuse “to groan over field labour, sweat over house-building or hazard their own and other men’s fortunes in the hope of profit and the fear of loss.” They have no gods or religion, but that is fine as far as Tacitus is concerned; the Fenni “have reached a state that few human beings can attain: for these men are so well content that they do not even need to pray for anything.”

Tacitus concedes that he had little knowledge, direct or indirect, of the tribes beyond the Fenni. Referring to the ancient legends and myths, he writes: “What comes after them is the stuff of fables,” animals with the “faces and features of men, the bodies and limbs of animals. On such unverifiable stories I shall express no opinion.” He really does not have to; he has written down everything he thinks the Romans need to know about the Germans. As defined by the familiar stereotypes and cultural markers appropriated from the Greeks’ language of savagery, they are fierce but noble barbarian warriors irreconcilably opposed to the imperial civilization of Rome.

THE IDEA OF THE SAVAGE IN STRABO AND PLINY THE ELDER

Tacitus’s last sentence in the Germania about his complete lack of knowledge of what lies beyond the “boundary that girds the earth” underscores an important point about the Romans’ geographical understanding of the world. Beyond the barbarian tribes of Europe and the great trading civilizations of Asia and Africa brought into Rome’s imperial orbit, Roman knowledge of the outer world was heavily dependent on Greek sources.

The two most influential geographers of the Roman imperial era, Strabo (64–63 B.C.–ca. A.D. 24) and Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79), maintained complete fidelity to their Greek sources and legends, placing the location of the Fortunate and Blessed Islands, for example, to the far west and associating these distant lands with the Homeric myth of Elysium. Their works tend simply to repeat the familiar stereotypes and fanciful accounts of distant tribal peoples encountered throughout the ancient Greek myths, legends, and travelers’ tales. In reading their Greek-inspired geographical works, we are still on the lookout for noble Ethiopians, milk-drinking Scythians, and just Hyperboreans.

Strabo himself was Greek, from a prominent family in Amaseia in Asia Minor, which had been incorporated into the Roman Empire. He traveled around the Mediterranean world, seeing Egypt and Kush, coastal Tuscany, and good parts of Asia Minor. This type of scholarly travel was popular during the era of relative peace that characterized the reign of the emperor Augustus (27 B.C.–A.D. 14), Caesar’s great-nephew and heir who succeeded him after his assassination. Strabo settled in Rome in 44 B.C. to study and write, finishing his most famous surviving work, the Geography, before he died.

Strabo’s influential treatise on world geography, dutifully cited and faithfully relied on down through the European Renaissance era, sometimes just repeats or embellishes on Homer’s well-worn accounts and clichéd stereotypes of distant tribal peoples, strange lands, and exotic customs. Strabo, in fact, regards Homer as the founder of geography. He habitually draws on the Greeks’ language of savagery to theorize about the differences in the modes of subsistence displayed by different barbarian tribes in comparison to the Greeks and Romans. The Albanians, a Scythian tribe, “are more pastoral and more like the nomadic tribes except that they are not savage. And therefore they are only moderately warlike.”¹¹ Fusing the literary traditions of the Hesiodic Legend of the Golden Age with Homer’s famous description of the land of Cyclopes in the Odyssey, Strabo explains why “a people of this kind has no need of the sea. Nor do they use the land to the full extent of its value, the land which bears every kind of fruit, even the cultivated, and every kind of plant. For it bears ever-blooming plants. Nor does it require the slightest attention, ‘but all things grow there untilled and unsoiled,’ as the soldiers say, living a Cyclopean life.”¹²

Pliny the Elder is another influential geographical writer who freely and copiously relied on Greek sources to describe things he knew absolutely nothing about, such as the far edges of the world. In his well-regarded encyclopedic text, Natural History (which served as the model for all similar works in the West), he cites a long list of Greek authorities that includes Herodotus, Aristotle, Ctesias, Eudoxus, Artemidorus, Hippocrates, Asclepius, Hesiod, Ephorus, Xenophon, Democritus, and Thucydides, along with Strabo. His account of the most distant parts of India is a typical example of his thorough grounding in the Greeks’ language of savagery and total lack of incredulity about anything his Greek sources might say to him:

There are satyrs in the easternmost mountains of India (in the region said to belong to the Catarcludi); this is a very fast-moving creature, going at times on all fours and at other times upright, in human fashion; because of their speed only the older and sick members of the tribe can be caught. Tauron says that the Choromandi tribe are forest-dwellers, have no power of speech yet shriek horribly, have shaggy bodies, grey eyes, and dog-like teeth. Eudoxus says that in southern India there are men with feet as long as a cubit, and women with feet so small that they are called Sparrowfeet. Megasthenes says that among the Nomad Indians is a tribe called the Sciritae, who have only holes instead of nostrils, like snakes; they are also club-footed.¹³

Like the great monuments and works of art that celebrated the triumphs of Rome’s Empire over the barbarian tribes of Europe, the works by this small sample of Roman writers—Caesar, Tacitus, Strabo, and Pliny—can only begin to suggest the broad, pervasive influence of the Greeks and their idea of the savage on Roman imperial civilization. The language of savagery that the Romans inherited from the Greeks provided form, content, meaning, and coherence to the way distant tribal peoples were described and perceived as barbarian enemies to a higher form of civilization. In their acts of cultural appropriation, the Romans perpetuated a vital, civilization-defining legacy for the West: a language of anciently derived stereotypes, categories, and cultural markers that identified those barbarian peoples whose way of life was regarded as irreconcilably opposed to an expansion-minded form of civilization and its fated rise to empire.