Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:00:46.325Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Roman Achievement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Extract

It was in Istanbul, shortly after the anti-Greek riots of 1955, that some of us, who had met there to attend the Congress of Byzantine Studies, or some other conference, fell to talking about Rome, the Roman record, the Roman civilization. There, among the melon-carts and the Cadillacs, we thought of the darker side of Roman rule—the lack of intellectual curiosity, the indifference to technological advance, the blight of rhetoric, the cruelty, the vulgarity, and everything summed up by Haverfield as ‘the heavy inevitable atmosphere of the Roman material civilization’. And, having said all that, we began to reflect that this was perhaps a partial and an unworthy view of a people who, to mention nothing else, had preserved for our world the Greek heritage. There we were in Istanbul, Constantinople, the New Rome created by the Old Rome to be a world capital, the city which had preserved its Graeco-Roman traditions through the thousand years that separate antiquity from the modern world, and at the last had handed them back to the West and so made possible the new birth of art and science and literature.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1959

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 3 note 1 The Romanization of Roman Britain 4 (Oxford, 1923), 56.Google Scholar

page 3 note 2 The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens (Oxford, 1946), vii f.Google Scholar

page 5 note 1 See the paper reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures (London, 1932), 245–52.Google Scholar

page 5 note 2 The Failure of the Roman Republic (Cambridge, 1955), 4.Google Scholar

page 5 note 3 vii. 36. 4.

page 5 note 4 vi. 56.

page 5 note 5 ‘Moribus antiquis res stat Romana uirisque’ (Ennius ap. Aug. De Ciu. Dei ii. 21).

page 5 note 6 A Study of History (London, 19341954), ii 17.Google Scholar

page 6 note 1 By Jacks, G. V. and Whyte, R. O. (London, 1939).Google Scholar

page 6 note 2 Cicero and the Roman Republic (London, 1948), 43.Google Scholar

page 6 note 3 i. 2. 6.

page 6 note 4 A History of the Ancient World (Oxford, 1927), ii. 165.Google Scholar

page 6 note 5 iii. 894–6.

page 6 note 6 xli. 216–20.

page 6 note 7 Prop. iv. 2. 73–82.

page 9 note 1 Tusc. i. I. 2.

page 10 note 1 A History of Europe (London, 1935), i. 80.Google Scholar

page 10 note 2 Ael. Spartianus, Hadr. (Hist. Aug. i), 18. 7.

page 10 note 3 Charlesworth, M. P., The Roman Empire (London, 1951), 71Google Scholar; Lewis, N. and Reinhold, M., Roman Civilization (New York, 19511955), ii. 347–58.Google Scholar

page 11 note 1 44. I.

page 11 note 2 To Rome, 36–39.

page 11 note 3 The Ancient World (Cambridge, 1933), 323 f.Google Scholar

page 12 note 1 See SirWheeler, Mortimer, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers (London, 1954), esp. 174.Google Scholar

page 12 note 2 Or. xiv. 393–4.

page 12 note 3 ii. 5.

page 13 note 1 Mattingly, H. and Sydenham, E. A., The Roman Imperial Coinage, v. i (London, 1927), 307, 309.Google Scholar

page 13 note 2 iii. 5.

page 13 note 3 v. I.

page 13 note 4 iv. 3.