Project Report. Voluntary and Forced Migrants in the Transfer of Greek Language and Literature towards Rome (240 BCE – 27 BCE)

In the 3rd century BCE, Rome began expanding into areas of Southern Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean which were inhabited by a Greek-speaking population. In the centuries that followed, a great number of migrants from these newly conquered territories arrived in the capital as a result of this expansion, who brought with them new forms of thought, art, and culture. The biographical record illuminates the lives of many people responsible for this transit of ideas: historians, philosophers, and poets, who visited Rome and settled there for a number of different reasons. However, not all migrants arrived in the same conditions. Some moved freely, attracted by the promise of a growing capital, often after being in contact with Romans even before leaving their places of origin. Others were taken by force, enslaved in the many military conflicts of the time. The initial premise of my research at the CHS stems from this divergence in migrants’ conditions: how did the difference between freeborn and enslaved migrants reflect in their lives and work? And how did the coexistence of two simultaneous, but radically different patterns of mobility affect the development of Greek and Latin literature in Republican Rome?

The idea for this research project stems from the reading of Casper de Jonge’s article, “Greek Migrant Literature in the Early Roman Empire” and the subsequent conversations about it with my thesis director, Prof. Kostas Vlassopoulos. In the article, de Jonge argues that literature from the early Empire written by migrants from the Eastern Mediterranean with a Greek cultural background presents characteristics typical of migrant literature from the postcolonial world, such as polyphony, ambivalence, and in-betweenness. However, the article does not take into account differences in the status of migrants. This led to the questions that I set out to address during my fellowship at the CHS.

Research began with the collection of all biographies of intellectual migrants to Rome during this period. For enslaved migrants, I used the catalog of my PhD thesis, which contains all biographical details of enslaved people in literary production across Greek and Roman antiquity, together with the SLaVEgents database, which records all enslaved people from antiquity. For freeborn migrants, I drew on the abundant work of previous scholars. There is a large corpus of scholarship on the topic, but the usefulness of one particular work must be acknowledged. This is Jared Secord’s 2012 PhD thesis, Elites and Outsiders: The Greek-Speaking Scholars of Rome, 100 BCE – 200 CE. Also, Mark Edwards’ concept of “the biographic” was very helpful in making sense of fragmentary pieces of biographical information. The concept responds to the fact that texts about people’s lives exist in a range of literary genres, not only in biography proper. In my work, the life of Livius Andronicus serves as an instance of the challenges presented by biographical details of antiquity. His biography makes a good introductory example because of its historical and literary relevance and because of the many debates to which it has been subject in modern scholarship.

After collecting the biographies of freeborn and enslaved intellectual migrants, the process of comparing the data followed. Not only were their lives compared, but also their literary output when relevant and possible. Due to the different stages in the contacts between Rome and the Greek-speaking world, I settled on a chronological backdrop to the comparison, which begins with the first migrants and the early stages of literary culture in Rome, through the four Macedonian Wars and their major inflection points in 168 and 146 BCE, followed by the early 1st century BCE and the Mithridatic Wars, and lastly the civil conflicts at the end of the Republic. In each of these phases, I have attempted to highlight different aspects of the migrations of Greek-speaking intellectuals, interwoven with comparisons between the conditions of enslaved and free migrants.

The first intellectual migrants, such as Livius Andronicus and Ennius, who are credited with the creation of the earliest forms of Latin literature, are viewed in my work through the lens of their reception by Cicero and Suetonius. While for Suetonius their foreignness is just a matter of fact biographical detail, for Cicero it becomes part of a wider agenda that aims to stress the continuity between Greek and Latin literature and to explain the prevalence of Roman aristocrats in the field of philosophy. In other genres, such as comedy, we see a decline in political content between the works of Plautus and those of Terence, which is possibly owed to Terence’s status as a freedman. During the campaigns of the first half of the 2nd century BCE, the figure of the Greek-speaking intellectual became widespread in Rome. In the decades that followed, freeborn migrants were involved both in local culture and in politics: diplomatic missions, such as that of Carneades, introduced new schools of thought and literary genres, and foreign philosophers, like Blossius of Cumae, became the ideologues of social reform. Meanwhile, as we may glean from a joke in Plautus’ Cap`tives 274–275, enslaved migrants were sold in the marketplace as philosophers.

Next, my work focuses on the introduction of migrants into the Roman system of patronage and the households of influential aristocrats. This is true of both freeborn and of enslaved migrants. Therefore, there seems to be no ground for the widespread assumption that enslaved migrants had a networking advantage over their freeborn counterparts due to their place in aristocratic households. The complex relationship between enslavement and patronage is illustrated by the case of Tyrannio of Amisus, whose capture and manumission were disapproved of by the general who captured him, Lucullus. Lucullus likely deemed an informal form of liberation more appropriate than manumission, since this had marked Tyrannio with the lifelong stigma of slavery, which carried with it social and legal constraints. Finally, the life of Publilius Syrus shows that enslaved migrants could adopt and integrate into Roman culture and the biography of Timagenes of Alexandria demonstrates that enslaved migrants gradually became more influent in Roman politics, of which—unlike freeborn migrants—they had been excluded up until the last decades of the Republic.

All in all, both free and enslaved migrants played important roles in the transmission of Greek language and literature towards Rome. When examining their lives and work, there are similarities and differences. Similarities include participation in the Roman system of patronage and the kind of tasks performed for patrons. Also, their literary output is quite similar prima facie. However, a nuanced reading shows the differences between the two groups. In the Roman patronage system, former slaves had a different social and legal status than freeborn clients. Certain literary genres, such as theater and grammar, seem to have been more accessible to formerly enslaved migrants than others, like rhetoric and philosophy. Lastly, freeborn migrants played a prominent role in Roman politics during the whole duration of the late Republic, whereas formerly enslaved migrants only started to intervene at the very end of the Republic, and only in exceptional cases.

This work would have been impossible without the financial support from the CHS Pre-doctoral Fellowship, remote access to Harvard’s library resources, and the collaboration of the Center for Hellenic Studies’ community. Academic advisor Prof. Efimia Karakantza showed a great interest in the project from the start, helping me define ideas and terminology that would have remained a lot more vague without her insight. Invitations to the Sport and Education Program at Ancient Olympia and the 2025 Annual Research Workshop in Nafplio provided great opportunities to meet other scholars and students and to discuss research with them, engaging in conversations which helped polish out some of the first draft’s roughness. Evan Katsarelis was very helpful throughout the whole fellowship, and his guidance through the writing and submission process was especially remarkable. After the writing phase came a ten-day stay at the CHS in Washington, DC. There, I was fortunate to enjoy the company of the other pre-doctoral fellows, Giorgos Athanasiadis and Panagiota Bantavanou, from whom I have learned not only countless things about life (and death!) in Hellenistic and Roman Thessaloniki, but have also gained precious knowledge on different methodologies to study the ancient world. As a group, we visited Georgetown University’s Department of Classics, Dumbarton Oaks, and the U.S. Library of Congress, all of which made for extraordinary educational and aesthetic experiences. And, of course, the Center’s wonderful library supplied many resources that have proven essential for the completion of this research project. Presenting the final version of my work to the rest of the CHS community was one of the highlights of the visit, and I am grateful to the other fellows for their interest in my work and their edifying comments on it. Finally, I would like to thank all the wonderful staff at the CHS for this unforgettable experience, which has been an extremely valuable contribution to my academic—and personal—development.