No Bacon family trip to London would be complete without a visit to the British Museum, which has one of the greatest collections of antiquities in the world. And no visit to the British Museum would be permissible without a couple of hours devoted to the Greco-Roman section.
I learned two things from my visit First, I came away with a better understanding of how Greek culture was transmitted to Rome. I had always assumed that Rome absorbed Greek mythology, art and other cultural attributes when it conquered the Greek-speaking Macedonians, Seleucids and Ptolemies (Cleopatra, anyone?) with their great cities of Athens, Antioch and Alexandria. In fact, the Greek influence had begun far earlier — when Rome conquered the Greek city states of Taranto (on the mainland) and Syracuse (in Sicily) two centuries before. The Greeks had colonized southern Italy long before the Romans had gotten around to conquering it. The term “Phyrric victory” comes from the Greek General Phyrrus of Epirus (in Greece proper) who aligned himself with the Greeks on the Italian peninsula and whose tactical military victories were so costly that he lost the war. Later, when Hannibal crossed the Alps and hoped to conquer Rome, he allied himself with the recently conquered Gauls in the north of the Italian peninsula and with the old Greek city-states in the south. It took the Romans twenty years to chase him out. Anyway, the Romans ended up borrowing much of their culture from their conquered Greek holdings.
The second thing I learned was that some of the Roman emperors were serious bad-asses. The British Museum didn’t put it that way. But you can just tell by looking at their marble busts.
The portrait at top is of Septimius Severus, generally regarded as one of Rome’s five “good” emperors in the late 2nd/early 3rd century — at the peak of the empire. I forgot to take down the names of the other two, but they both rose to power through the military. You could not climb to the top of the heap of the Roman army and defeat two or three rival generals for the emperor slot in a bloody civil war without being a serious bad-ass. And the dude above looks like he could have chewed up modern American leaders like George Bush or Barack Obama and picked his teeth with their bones.
This fellow doesn’t look like he takes a lot of guff either.
I’ll tell you this, Rome spent spilled a lot of blood and treasure fighting the Iranians (back then, they were called the Parthians). If the Parthians had been working on a nuclear bomb (or whatever the equivalent would have been in the 2nd century A.D., like a catapult that hurled two-ton rocks), I have no doubt they would have marched right over there and kicked some serious butt. Whether they would have marched back alive or not is another question.
— JAB
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