Greek Influence on Roman Literature and the Arts

Roman imperialism generated extensive cross-cultural contact with Greece. Roman authors and artists found inspiration in Greek literature and art. The earliest Latin poetry was a translation of Homer’s Odyssey by a Greek ex-slave, composed sometime after the First Punic War. About 200 B.C.E., the first Roman historian used Greek to write his narrative of Rome’s founding and the wars with Carthage.

Many famous early Latin authors were not native Romans but came from different regions of Italy, Sicily, and even North Africa. All found inspiration in Greek literature. Roman comedies, for example, took their plots and stock characters from Hellenistic comedy such as that of Menander, which featured jokes about family life and stereotyped personalities, such as the braggart warrior and the obsessed lover.

In the mid-second century B.C.E., Cato established Latin prose writing with his history of Rome, The Origins, and his instructions on running a large farm, On Agriculture. He predicted that if the Romans adopted Greek values, they would lose their power. In fact, early Latin literature reflected traditional Roman values. For example, the path-breaking Latin epic Annals, a poetic version of Roman history by the poet Ennius, shows the influence of the Greek epic but praises ancestral Roman traditions, as in this famous line: “The Roman state rests on the ways and the men of old.” Later Roman writers also took inspiration from Greek literature. The first-century B.C.E. poet Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things to persuade people not to fear death. His ideas reflected Greek philosophy’s “atomic theory,” which said that matter was composed of tiny, invisible particles. Dying, the poem taught, simply meant the dissolving of the union of atoms, which had come together temporarily to make up a person’s body. There could be no eternal punishment or pain after death because a person’s soul perished along with the body.

Hellenistic Greek authors inspired Catullus in the first century B.C.E. to write witty poems ridiculing prominent politicians for their sexual behavior and lamenting his own disastrous love life. His most famous love poems revealed his obsession with a married woman named Lesbia. The orator and politician Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) wrote speeches, letters, and treatises on political science, philosophy, ethics, and theology. He adapted Greek philosophy to Roman life and stressed the need to appreciate each person’s uniqueness. His doctrine of humanitas (“humaneness,” “the quality of humanity”) expressed an ideal for human life based on generous and honest treatment of others and a commitment to morality based on natural law (the rights that belong to all people because they are human beings, independent of the differing laws and customs of different societies).

Greece also influenced Rome’s art and architecture. Hellenistic sculptors had pioneered a realistic style showing the ravages of age and pain on the human body. They portrayed only stereotypes, however, such as the “old man” or the “drunken woman,” not specific people. Their portrait sculpture presented actual individuals in the best possible light, much like a digitally enhanced photograph today. By contrast, Roman artists applied Greek realism to male portraiture, as contemporary Etruscan sculptors also did. They sculpted men without hiding their unflattering features: long noses, receding chins, deep wrinkles, bald heads, and worried looks. Portraits of women, by contrast, were more idealized, probably representing the traditional vision of the bliss of family life. Because the men depicted in the portraits (or their families) paid for the busts, they may have wanted their faces sculpted realistically—showing the damage of age and effort—to emphasize how hard they had worked to serve the republic.