Roman Empire and Greek states were actually very civilized places to live in
Sure. If you were male and had either merchant status or elite status.
In Rome especially, elite status didn't just mean you had money and power, but that you usually had a villa and/or some dwelling place apart from the average city arrangement. This was important for several reasons: families lived in something like a one room apartment, and these were stacked and clustered to maximize population density. Thus several risks were constant, serious, and ubiquitous:
1) Disease. Just like parents with kids who all run around in a school transmitting bacteria and viruses, the population density for the non-elite city dwellers meant rapid spread of pretty much any transmittable disease. Also, sanitation was a serious problem despite the ingenious aqueducts of Rome.
2) Fires. Like disease, the clustering of housing allowed fires to spread rapidly and cause massive structural damage, numerous deaths or serious injuries, and the loss of housing (and possessions).
3) The legal systems of Greece and Rome differed, most of their respective legal problems are relatable if not equivalent. There were no prisons (jails, yes; but these were designed for short term stays awaiting sentencing). There were no police. If someone killed your child, friend, father, brother, sister, etc., and they weren't allowed to (see below) to, then you had to file a suit and present evidence. In Greece and during the Roman republic, this was an easier process which made it slightly more equitable. There weren't as many people to file suits, so the political/criminal authorities were able to hear more cases rather than simply having someone killed because it was easier than a trial. Importantly, and especially in the cities of the Roman empire, the population density and a lack of any police force meant it was often easy to get away with murder, theft, etc., because nobody could stop it, frequently nobody who mattered enough to ensure a trial actually cared to do so.
Related to housing were households, where extended families and (for the wealthy) slaves lived. In both ancient Greece and Rome, the male head of the household had complete control over it. This meant more than the ability to beat a slave to death because of some minor error or just out of irritation (we have descriptions of this in our literary evidence). Sons, daughters, wives, etc., could "officially" be killed on a whim by the male head of the household, but in practice having a certain status, having a wife whose family did, etc., were often mitigating factors. Still, leaving children out to die was common (the issue of how often this was simply because the child was female is debated).
Of course, there was also the rural areas and farming:
"the two subjects [farming and fighting] have become divorced and have gone off in separate directions. This is a pity, since men in ancient Greece probably
spent more time fighting and farming than in any other activities."
Foxhall, L. (1993). Farming and fighting in ancient Greece in J. Rich & G. Shipley (eds.)
War and Society in the Greek World (Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society)
Farming in Greece was worse than in Rome, mainly because farmable land had to be created by removing lots of rocks from the soil.
Plutarch tells us a pretty detailed account of a particular kind of pervasive violence:
"The power of the pirates first commenced in Cilicia, having in truth but a precarious and obscure beginning, but gained life and boldness afterwards in the wars of Mithridates, where they hired themselves out and took employment in the king's service. Afterwards, whilst the Romans were embroiled in their civil wars, being engaged against one another even before the very gates of Rome, the seas lay waste and unguarded, and by degrees enticed and drew them on not only to seize upon and spoil the merchants and ships upon the seas, but also to lay waste the islands and seaport towns. So that now there embarked with these pirates men of wealth and noble birth and superior abilities, as if it had been a natural occupation to gain distinction in. They had divers arsenals, or piratic harbours, as likewise watch-towers and beacons, all along the sea-coast; and fleets were here received that were well manned with the finest mariners, and well served with the expertest pilots, and composed of swift-sailing and light-built vessels adapted for their special purpose....This piratic power having got the dominion and control of all the Mediterranean, there was left no place for navigation or commerce" (
source)
Both the Roman republic and empire did have one advantage over the Greek world: a larger administration in outposts where soldiers could sometimes serve as a kind of police. In the Odyssey, when our heroes are trapped by the Cyclops, the real crime here was a violation of the
xenia, the guest-friendship cultural practice. If a stranger showed up at your door, you had to do certain things and in particular not sell the guest into slavery. Xenophon gives us a nice description as it ties in more generally with violence:
"Want prompts a thousand crimes, you must admit. Why do men steal? why break burglariously into houses? why hale men and women captive and make slaves of them? Is it not from want? Nay, there are monarchs who at one fell swoop destroy whole houses, make wholesale massacre, and oftentimes reduce entire states to slavery, and all for the sake of wealth." (
source)
Warfare was a constant, massive numbers of slaves from conquered regions supported both Greek and Roman economies, and violence was everywhere. Almost everybody was poor, and although living conditions for peasants/villagers were not really any different from those of the dark ages and early medieval period, at least there the village had both internal structure stabilizing it and one local lord to answer to. If he was too harsh, they could revolt. Although this was a last resort, because it meant high death tolls, the households of lords depended upon the villages they rules for sustenance. Meanwhile, in ancient Greece complete slaughter like that of the people of Milos by the Athenians was far more prevalent. Instead of a local lord who ruled over but also protected his little fiefdom, we have Roman troops posted across the empire that would ensure the
pax romana remained by simply slaughtering an entire region (as was done more than once with Jerusalem and the surrounding areas).
So I don't really see how you can say either Greece or Rome were "were actually very civilized places to live in".
Death sentences are still around.
True. But it has been a very, very, long time since execution for a majority of the population didn't require any trial or even a crime. That was the case in both ancient Greece and Rome.
Especially when the modern western republic model and democracy both stem pretty straightforward from the ancient world.
More like an idealized world that never existed. For those like Locke, Jefferson, Rousseau, etc., what Greece and Rome were in terms of political structure was based on a small selection of texts written by the great orators, politicians, and philosophers. The founders of the modern republic/democratic systems were more interested in Plato's fictional debates about politics than in e.g., Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian war.
Moreover, with every single age when Europeans started to admire ancient era again, the innovation was abundant: renaissance, for instance.
The problem is that the origins of the university and of modern science are more the product of Scholasticism than the Renaissance, and much which is credited to the Renaissance is really due to Scholastic influence. Science at that time was natural philosophy (which is what it was for the Greeks). But for Europe, "Natural philosophy was, after all, the study of the created world, in which God (the great artificer) and the Christian message were held to be revealed". from Colclough's "Scientific Writing" in the vol. 1 of
A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. It wasn't until some time after Newton that natural philosophy/science was completely divorced from Christian beliefs, rather than a product of it. Humanism too originated from Scholasticism. We have a rather unbroken chain of learning (although often much was lost and/or little gained) from the late Roman theologians through the Carolingian Renaissance to the scholastics.
The universities that began before the Renaissance as places of learning for the Church. Thus it was religion, not admiration for Greco-Roman thought, that motivated perhaps the greatest development in human history.
Also, while the art and writing of the Renaissance is distinctive and was unequaled, this was also a period where anti-intellectualism began to triumph as Luther and Calvin and doctrines like
sola scriptura and
sola fide replaced the emphasis on reason by those like Thomas Aquinas. It was the birth of fundamentalism.
Hesiod speaks of a golden age, European intellectuals glorified Greco-Roman civilization, and the "Noble Savage" myth developed and remained up through the 19th century. Humans have a tendency to romanticize the past.
