Caesar and Christ

The Senate was more horrified by these displays than by all the gossip of sexual license and perversion that ran about the palace. Nero replied that the Greek custom of confining athletic and artistic competitions to the citizen class was better than the Roman custom of leaving these to the slaves; certainly the contests should not take the form of slowly executing criminals. The young murderer decreed that so long as he ruled, no combat in the arenas should be carried to the death.⁷⁸ To restore the Greek tradition and dignify his own performances, he persuaded or compelled certain senators to compete in public as actors, musicians, athletes, gladiators, and charioteers. Some patricians, like Thrasea Paetus, showed their disapproval of his ways by absenting themselves from the Senate when Nero came to address it; some others, like Helvidius Priscus, denounced him violently in those aristocratic salons that had become the last refuge of free speech; and the Stoic philosophers in Rome spoke ever more openly against this impish epicurean on the throne. Plots were laid to depose him. His spies discovered them, and like his predecessors he countered with a reign of terror. The law of maiestas was revived (62), and accusations were brought against men whose opposition or wealth made their deaths culturally or financially desirable. For Nero, like Caligula, had now exhausted the Treasury with his extravagance, his gifts, and his games. He announced his intention to confiscate completely the estates of citizens whose wills left insufficient sums to the Emperor. He stripped many temples of their votive offerings, and melted down their images of silver or gold. When Seneca protested and privately criticized his conduct—worse, his poetry—Nero dismissed him from the court (62), and the old philosopher spent the remaining three years of his life in the seclusion of his villas. Burrus had died some months before.

Nero now surrounded himself with new aides, mostly of coarser strain. Tigellinus, urban prefect, became his chief adviser, and smoothed the Prince’s path to every indulgence. In 62 Nero divorced and dismissed Octavia on the ground of barrenness, and twelve days later married Poppaea. The people protested mutely by throwing down the statues that Nero had raised to Poppaea and crowning those of Octavia with flowers. The angry Poppaea convinced her lover that Octavia was planning to remarry, and that a revolution was being organized to replace him in power with Octavia’s new mate. If we may follow Tacitus, Nero invited Anicetus, who had killed Agrippina, to confess adultery with Octavia and implicate her in a plot to overthrow the Prince. Anicetus played his part as commanded, was banished to Sardinia, and lived out his life in ease and wealth. Octavia was exiled to Pandateria. There, a few days after her arrival, imperial agents came to murder her. She was still but twenty-two, and could not believe that life must end so soon for one so guiltless. She pleaded with her slayers, saying that she was now only Nero’s sister and could do him no harm. They cut off her head and brought it to Poppaea for their reward. The Senate, informed that Octavia was dead, thanked the gods for having again preserved the Emperor.⁷⁹

Nero himself was now a god. After the death of Agrippina a consul-elect had proposed a temple “to the deified Nero.” When, in 63, Poppaea bore him a daughter who died soon afterward, the child was voted a divinity. When Tiridates came to receive the crown of Armenia he knelt and worshipped the Emperor as Mithras. When Nero built his Golden House he prefaced it with a colossus 120 feet high, bearing the likeness of his head haloed with solar rays that identified him as Phoebus Apollo. Actually he was now, at twenty-five, a degenerate with swollen paunch, weak and slender limbs, fat face, blotched skin, curly yellow hair, and dull gray eyes.

As a god and an artist he fretted over the flaws of the palaces he had inherited, and planned to build his own. But the Palatine was crowded, and at its base were on one side the Circus Maximus, on another the Forum, and on the others slums. He mourned that Rome had grown so haphazardly, instead of being scientifically designed like Alexandria or Antioch. He dreamed of rebuilding Rome, of being its second founder, and renaming it Neropolis.

On July 18, 64, a fire broke out in the Circus Maximus, spread rapidly, burned for nine days, and razed two thirds of the city. Nero was at Antium when the conflagration started; he hurried to Rome and arrived in time to see the Palatine palaces consumed. The Domus Transitoria, which he had just built to connect his palace with the gardens of Maecenas, was one of the first structures to fall. The Forum and the Capitol escaped, and the region west of the Tiber; throughout the remainder of the city countless homes, temples, precious manuscripts, and works of art were destroyed. Thousands of people lost their lives amid falling tenements in the crowded streets; hundreds of thousands wandered shelterless through the nights, crazed with horror, and listening to rumors that Nero had ordered the fire, was scattering incendiaries to renew it, and was watching it from the tower of Maecenas while singing his lines on the sack of Troy and accompanying himself on the lyre.^* He energetically guided attempts to control or localize the flames and to provide relief; he ordered all public buildings and the imperial gardens to be thrown open to the destitute; he raised a city of tents on the Field of Mars, requisitioned food from the surrounding country, and arranged for the feeding of the people.⁸⁰ He bore without remonstrance the accusatory lampoons and inscriptions of the infuriated populace. According to Tacitus (whose Senatorial prejudice must always be remembered), he cast about for some scapegoat, and found one in

a race of men detested for their evil practices, and commonly called Chrestiani. The name was derived from Chrestus, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea. By that event the sect of which he was the founder received a blow which for a time checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigor not only in Judea . . . but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which everything infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world. Nero proceeded with his usual artifice. He found a set of profligate and abandoned wretches who were induced to confess themselves guilty; and on the evidence of such men a number of Christians were convicted, not indeed on clear evidence of having set the city on fire, but rather on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human race. They were put to death with exquisite cruelty, and to their sufferings Nero added mockery and derision. Some were covered with skins of wild beasts, and left to be devoured by dogs; others were nailed to crosses; numbers of them were burned alive; many, covered with inflammable matter, were set on fire to serve as torches during the night. . . . At length the brutality of these measures filled every breast with pity. Humanity relented in favor of the Christians.⁸¹

When the debris had been cleared away Nero undertook with visible pleasure the restoration of the city along the lines of his dream. Contributions for this purpose were solicited or elicited from every city in the Empire, and those whose homes had been destroyed were enabled to rebuild out of these funds. The new streets were made wide and straight, the new houses were required to have their façades and first stories of stone, and had to be sufficiently separated from other buildings to oppose a protective gap to the spread of fire. The springs that flowed beneath the city were channeled into a reserve water supply in case of future conflagrations. Out of the imperial Treasury Nero built porticoes along the main thoroughfares, providing a shaded porch for thousands of homes. Antiquarians and old men missed the picturesque, time-hallowed sights of the old city; but soon all agreed that a healthier, safer, and fairer Rome had risen from the fire.

Nero might have earned forgiveness for his crimes had he now molded his life as he had remade his capital. But Poppaea died in 65, in advanced pregnancy, allegedly from a kick in the stomach; rumor said this had been Nero’s answer to her reproaches for having come home late from the races.⁸² He grieved bitterly over her passing, for he had eagerly awaited an heir. He had her body embalmed with rare spices, gave her a pompous funeral, and delivered a eulogy over the corpse. Having found a youth, Sporus, who closely resembled Poppaea, he had him castrated, married him by a formal ceremony, and “used him in every way like a woman”; whereupon a wit expressed the wish that Nero’s father had had such a wife.⁸³ In the same year he began the building of his Golden House; and its extravagant decoration, cost, and extent—covering an area that once had sheltered many thousands of the poor—renewed the resentment of the aristocracy and the suspicions of the plebs.

Suddenly Nero’s spies brought him word of a widespread conspiracy to put Calpurnius Piso on the throne (65). His agents seized some minor personages in the plot, and by torture or threat drew from them confessions implicating, among others, Lucan the poet and Seneca. Bit by bit the whole plan was laid bare. Nero’s revenge was so savage that Rome credited the rumor that he had vowed to wipe out the whole Senatorial class. When Seneca received the command to kill himself he argued for a while and then complied; Lucan likewise opened his veins and died reciting his poetry. Tigellinus, jealous of Petronius’ popularity with Nero, bribed one of the epicure’s slaves to testify against his master, and induced Nero to order Petronius’ death. Petronius died leisurely, opening his veins and then closing them, conversing in his usual light manner with his friends and reading poetry to them; after a walk and a nap he opened his veins again and passed away quietly.⁸⁴ Thrasea Paetus, the leading exponent of the Stoic philosophy in the Senate, was condemned not for taking part in the plot, but on the general ground of deficient enthusiasm for the Emperor, for not enjoying Nero’s singing, and for composing a laudatory life of Cato. His son-in-law Helvidius Priscus was merely banished, but two others were put to death for writing in their praise. Musonius Rufus, Stoic philosopher, and Cassius Longinus, a great jurist, were exiled; two brothers of Seneca—Annaeus Mela, father of Lucan, and Annaeus Novatus, the Gallio who in Corinth had freed Saint Paul—were ordered to commit suicide.

Having cleared the lines in his rear, Nero left in 66 to compete in the Olympic games and make a concert tour of Greece. “The Greeks,” he remarked, “are the only ones who have an ear for music.”⁸⁵ At Olympia he drove a quadriga in the races; he was thrown from the car and was nearly crushed to death; restored to his chariot he continued the contest for a while, but gave up before the end of the course. The judges, however, knew an emperor from an athlete and awarded him the crown of victory. Overcome with happiness when the crowd applauded him, he announced that thereafter not only Athens and Sparta but all Greece should be free—i.e., exempt from any tribute to Rome. The Greek cities accommodated him by running the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games in one year; he responded by taking part in all of them as singer, harpist, actor, or athlete. He obeyed the rules of the various competitions carefully, was all courtesy to his opponents, and gave them Roman citizenship as consolation for his invariable victories. Amid his tour he received news that Judea was in revolt and that all the West was hot with rebellion. He sighed and continued his itinerary. When he sang in a theater, says Suetonius, “no one was allowed to leave, even for the most urgent reasons. And so it was that some women gave birth there, while some feigned death to be carried out.”⁸⁶ At Corinth he ordered work started on a canal to cut the Isthmus as Caesar had planned; the task was begun, but was laid aside during the turmoil of the following year. Alarmed by further reports of uprisings and plots, Nero returned to Italy (67), entered Rome in a formal triumph, and showed, as trophies, the 1808 prizes he had won in Greece.

Tragedy was rapidly catching up with his comedy. In March, 68, the Gallic governor of Lyons, Julius Vindex, announced the independence of Gaul; and when Nero offered 2,500,000 sesterces for his head, Vindex retorted, “He who brings me Nero’s head may have mine in return.”⁸⁷ Preparing to take the field against this virile antagonist, Nero’s first care was to choose wagons to carry along with him his musical instruments and theatrical effects.⁸⁸ But in April word came that Galba, commander of the Roman army in Spain, had joined fortunes with Vindex and was marching toward Rome. Hearing that the Praetorian Guard was ready to abandon Nero for proper remuneration, the Senate proclaimed Galba emperor. Nero put some poison into a small box and, so armed, fled from his Golden House to the Servilian Gardens on the road to Ostia. He asked such officers of the Guard as were in the palace to accompany him; all refused, and one quoted to him a line of Virgil: “Is it, then, so hard to die?” He could not believe that the omnipotence which had ruined him had suddenly ceased. He sent appeals for help to various friends, but none replied. He went down to the Tiber to drown himself, but his courage failed him. Phaon, one of his freedmen, offered to conceal him in his villa on the Via Salaria; Nero grasped at the proposal, and rode through the dark four miles out from the center of Rome. He spent that night in Phaon’s cellar, clad in a soiled tunic, sleepless and hungry, and trembling at every sound. Phaon’s courier brought word that the Senate had declared Nero a public enemy, had ordered his arrest, and had decreed that he should be punished “after the ancient manner.” Nero asked what this was. “The condemned man,” he was told, “is stripped, is fastened to a post by a fork passing through his neck, and is then beaten to death.” Terrified, he tried to stab himself; but he made the mistake of testing the poniard’s point first and found it disconcertingly sharp. Qualis artifex pereo! he mourned—“What an artist dies in me!”

As a new day dawned he heard the clatter of horses: the Senate’s soldiers had tracked him down. Quoting a verse of poetry—“Hark! now strikes upon my ear the trampling of swift couriers”—he drove a dagger into his throat; his hand faltered, and his freedman Epaphroditus helped him to press the blade home. He had begged his companions to keep his corpse from being mutilated, and Galba’s agents granted the wish. His old nurses, and Acte his former mistress, buried him in the vaults of the Domitii (68). Many of the populace rejoiced at his death and ran about Rome with liberty caps on their heads. But many more mourned him, for he had been as generous to the poor as he had been recklessly cruel to the great. They lent eager hearing to the rumor that he was not really dead but was fighting his way back to Rome; and when they had reconciled themselves to his passing they came for many months to strew flowers before his tomb.⁸⁹

V. THE THREE EMPERORS

Servius Sulpicius Galba reached Rome in June of 68. He was of noble birth, for he traced his lineage on his father’s side to Jupiter, and on his mother’s to Pasiphaë, wife of Minos and the bull. In this year of his exaltation he was already bald, and his hands and feet were so crooked with gout that he could not wear a shoe or hold a book.⁹⁰ He had the usual vices, normal and abnormal, but it was not these that made his reign so brief. What shocked army and populace were his economy of the public funds and his strict administration of justice.⁹¹ When he ruled that those who had received gifts or pensions from Nero must return nine tenths to the Treasury, a thousand new enemies arose, and Galba’s days ran out.

A bankrupt senator, Marcus Otho, announced that he could pay his debts only by becoming emperor.⁹² The Guards declared for him, marched into the Forum, and met Galba riding in a litter. Galba offered his neck unresisting to their swords; they cut off his head, his arms, his lips; one of them carried the head to Otho, but as he could not hold it well by the sparse and blood-wet hair, he thrust his thumb into the mouth. The Senate hastened to accept Otho, just as Roman armies in Germany and Egypt were hailing as emperors their respective generals—Aulus Vitellius and Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Vitellius invaded Italy with his hardy legions, and swept away the weak resistance of the northern garrisons and the Praetorian Guard. Otho killed himself after a reign of ninety-five days, and Vitellius mounted the throne.

It does not speak well for the Roman military system that so senile a man as Galba should have commanded in Spain, or so slothful an epicurean as Vitellius in Germany. He was a gourmand who thought of the Principate chiefly as a feast, and made a banquet of every meal. He governed in the intervals; and as these grew shorter he left state affairs to his freedman Asiaticus, who in four months became one of the richest men in Rome. When Vitellius learned that Vespasian’s general Antonius was leading an army into Italy to dethrone him, he delegated his defense to subordinates and continued to feast. In October of 69 the troops of Antonius defeated the defenders of Vitellius at Cremona in one of the bloodiest battles of ancient times. They marched into Rome, where the remnants of Vitellius’ legions fought bravely for him while he took refuge in his palace. The populace, says Tacitus, “flocked in crowds to behold the conflict, as if a scene of carnage were no more than a public spectacle exhibited for their amusement”; while the battle raged some of them plundered shops and homes, and prostitutes plied their trade.⁹³ The soldiers of Antonius triumphed, killed without quarter, and pillaged without stint; and the mob, as ready as history to applaud the victors, helped them to ferret out their enemies. Vitellius, dragged from his concealment, was led half naked through the city with a noose around his neck, was pelted with dung, was tortured without haste, and at last, in a moment of mercy, was slain (December, 69). The corpse was drawn through the streets with a hook and flung into the Tiber.⁹⁴

VI. VESPASIAN

What a relief to meet a man of sense, ability, and honor! Vespasian, busy directing the war against Judea, took his time in coming to occupy the dangerous eminence that his soldiers had won for him, and which the Senate hurriedly confirmed. When he arrived (October, 70), he set himself with inspiring energy to restore order to a society disturbed in every aspect of its life. Perceiving that he would have to repeat the labors of Augustus, he modeled his behavior and policy upon those of that prince. He made his peace with the Senate and re-established constitutional government; he freed or recalled those who had been convicted of lèse-majesté under Nero, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; he reorganized the army, limited the number and power of the Praetorian Guard, appointed competent generals to suppress revolts in the provinces, and was soon able to close the Temple of Janus as a sign and pledge of peace.

He was sixty, but in the unimpaired vigor of his powerful frame. He was built foursquare in body and character, with a broad, bald, and massive head, coarse but commanding features, and small sharp eyes that pierced every sham. He had none of the stigmata of genius; he was merely a man of firm will and practical intelligence. He had been born in a Sabine village near Reate, of purely plebeian stock. His accession was a fourfold revolution: a commoner had reached the throne, a provincial army had overcome the Praetorians and crowned its candidate, the Flavians had succeeded the Julio-Claudians, and the simple habits and virtues of the Italian bourgeois replaced, at the court of the emperor, the epicurean wastefulness of the city-bred descendants of Augustus and Livia. Vespasian never forgot, or sought to conceal, his modest ancestry. When expectant genealogists traced his family back to a companion of Hercules he laughed them into silence. Periodically he returned to the home of his birth to enjoy its rustic ways and fare, and he would not allow anything there to be changed. He scorned luxury and laziness, ate the food of peasants, fasted one day in each month, and declared war upon extravagance. When a Roman whom he had nominated for office came to him smelling of perfume, he said, “I would rather you smelled of garlic,” and withdrew the nomination. He made himself easily accessible, talked and lived on a footing of equality with the people, enjoyed jokes at his own expense, and allowed everyone great freedom in criticizing his conduct and his character. Having discovered a conspiracy against him he forgave the plotters, saying that they were fools not to realize what a burden of cares a ruler wore. He lost his good temper in one case only. Helvidius Priscus, restored to the Senate from the exile into which Nero had sent him, demanded the restoration of the Republic, and reviled Vespasian without concealment or restraint. Vespasian asked him not to attend the Senate if he proposed to continue such abuse; Helvidius refused. Vespasian banished him and tarnished an excellent reign by ordering him put to death. He regretted the action later, and for the rest, says Suetonius, showed “the greatest patience under the frank language of his friends . . . and the impudence of philosophers.”⁹⁵ These latter were not so much Stoics as Cynics, philosophical anarchists who felt that all government was an imposition and attacked every emperor.

To get fresh blood into a Senate depleted by family limitation and civil war, Vespasian secured appointment as censor, brought to Rome a thousand distinguished families from Italy and the western provinces, enrolled them in the patrician or equestrian orders, and over many bitter protests filled out the Senate from their ranks. The new aristocracy, under the stimulus of his example, improved Roman morals and society. It was not spoiled yet by idle wealth, nor yet so removed from labor and the soil as to disdain the routine tasks of life and administration; and it had something of the Emperor’s order and decency of life. Out of it came those rulers who, after Domitian, gave Rome good government for a century. Conscious of the evils that had flowed from the use of freedmen as imperial executives, Vespasian replaced most of them with men from this provincial infiltration and from Rome’s expanding business class. With their help he accomplished in nine years a miracle of rehabilitation.

He calculated that 40,000,000,000 sesterces were needed to transform bankruptcy into solvency.^{96 *} To raise this sum he taxed almost everything, raised the provincial tribute, reimposed it upon Greece, recaptured and let public lands, sold royal palaces and estates, and insisted upon such economy that the citizens denounced him as a miserly peasant. A tax was placed even upon the use of the public urinals that adorned ancient like modern Rome; his son Titus protested against such undignified revenue, but the old Emperor held some coins of it to the youth’s nose and said, “See, my child, if they smell.”⁹⁷ Suetonious accuses him of adding to the imperial income by selling offices, and by promoting the most rapacious of his provincial appointees so that they might be swollen with spoils when he suddenly summoned them, examined their transactions, and confiscated their gains. The crafty financier, however, used none of the proceeds for himself, but poured them all into the economic recovery, architectural adornment, and cultural advancement of Rome.

It remained for this blunt soldier to establish the first system of state education in classical antiquity. He ordered that certain qualified teachers of Latin and Greek literature and rhetoric should thereafter be paid out of public funds and should receive a pension after twenty years of service. Perhaps the old skeptic felt that teachers had some share in forming public opinion and would speak better of a government that paid their way. Probably for like reasons he restored many of the ancient temples, even in rural districts. He rebuilt the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which had been burned down by the Vitellians over his soldiers’ heads; raised a majestic shrine to Pax, the goddess of peace; and began the most renowned of Roman buildings, the Colosseum. The upper classes mourned as they saw their fortunes taxed to provide public works for the state and wages for prolétaires; and the workers were not particularly grateful. He roused the people to an energetic campaign for clearing away the debris left by the recent war, and he himself carried the first load. When an inventor showed him plans for a hoisting machine that would greatly reduce the need for human labor in these enterprises of removal and construction, he refused to use it, saying, “I must feed my poor.”⁹⁸ In this moratorium on invention Vespasian recognized the problem of technological unemployment, and decided against an industrial revolution.

The provinces prospered as never before. Their wealth was now twice as great—at least in monetary terms—as under Augustus, and they bore the increased tribute without injury. Vespasian sent the able Agricola to govern Britain, and delegated to Titus the task of ending the revolt of the Jews. Titus captured Jerusalem and returned to Rome with all the honors that usually crown superior killing. A spectacular triumph led a long procession of captives and spoils through the streets, and a famous arch was raised to commemorate the victory. Vespasian was proud of his son’s success but disturbed by the fact that Titus had brought home a pretty Jewish princess, Berenice, as his mistress, and wished to marry her; again capta ferum victorem cepit. The Emperor could not see why one should marry a mistress; he himself, after the death of his wife, lived with a freedwoman without troubling to wed her; and when this Caenis died he distributed his love among several concubines.⁹⁹ He was convinced that the succession to his power must be settled before his death, as the alternative to anarchy. The Senate agreed, but demanded that he should name and adopt “the best of the best”—presumably a senator; Vespasian answered that he reckoned that Titus was the best. To ease the situation the young conqueror dismissed Berenice, and sought consolation in promiscuity.¹⁰⁰ The Emperor thereupon associated Titus with himself on the throne and delegated to him an increasing share in the government.

In 79 Vespasian again visited Reate. While in the Sabine country he drank copiously the purgative waters of Lake Cutilia and was seized with severe diarrhea. Though confined to his bed he continued to receive embassies and perform the other duties of his office. Feeling the hand of death upon him he nevertheless kept his bluff humor. Vae! puto deus fio, he remarked—“Alas, I think I am becoming a god.”¹⁰¹ Almost fainting, he struggled to his feet with the help of attendants, saying, “An emperor should die standing.” With these words he concluded a full life of sixty-nine years and a beneficent reign of ten.

VII. TITUS

His older son, named like himself Titus Flavius Vespasianus, was the most fortunate of emperors. Titus died in the second year of his rule and the forty-second of his age, while still “the darling of mankind”; time did not suffice him for the corruptions of power or the disillusionment of desire. As a youth he had distinguished himself in ruthless war and tarnished his name with loose living; now, instead of letting omnipotence intoxicate him, he reformed his morals and made his government a model of wisdom and honor. His greatest fault was uncontrollable generosity. He counted that day lost on which he had not made someone happy with a gift; he spent too much on shows and games; and he left the replenished Treasury almost as low as his father had found it. He completed the Colosseum and built another municipal bath. No one suffered capital punishment during his brief reign; on the contrary, he had informers flogged and banished. He swore that he would rather be killed than kill. When two patricians were detected in a conspiracy to depose him he contented himself with sending them a warning; then he dispatched a courier to relieve the anxiety of a conspirator’s mother by telling her that her son was safe.

His misfortunes were disasters over which he could have little control. A three-day fire in the year 79 destroyed many important buildings, including again the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; in the same year Vesuvius buried Pompeii and thousands of Italians; and a year later Rome was stricken with a plague more deadly than any her history had yet recorded. Titus did all he could to lessen the sufferings caused by these calamities; “he showed not merely the concern of an emperor, but a father’s surpassing love.”¹⁰² He died of a fever in 81, in the same farmhouse in which his father had recently passed away. All Rome mourned him except the brother who succeeded to his throne.

VIII. DOMITIAN

Of Domitian it is harder to paint an objective portrait than even of Nero. Our chief sources for his reign are Tacitus and the younger Pliny; they prospered under him, but belonged to the senatorial party that engaged with him in a war almost of mutual extermination. To set against these hostile witnesses we have the poets Statius and Martial, who ate or sought Domitian’s bread and literally praised him to the skies. Perhaps all four were right, for the last of the Flavians, like many of the Julio-Claudians, began like Gabriel and ended like Lucifer. In this respect Domitian’s soul walked with his body: in youth he was modest, graceful, handsome, tall; in later years he had “a protruding belly, spindle legs, and a bald head”—though he had written a book On the Care of the Hair.¹⁰³ In adolescence he composed poetry; in obsolescence he distrusted his own prose and let others write his speeches and proclamations. He might have been happier had not Titus been his brother; but only the noblest spirits can bear with equanimity the success of their friends. Domitian’s jealousy soured into a taciturn gloom, then into secret machinations against his brother; Titus had to beg his father to forgive the younger son. When Vespasian died, Domitian claimed that he had been left partner in the imperial power but that the Emperor’s will had been tampered with. Titus replied by asking him to be his partner and successor; Domitian refused, and continued to plot. When Titus fell ill, says Dio Cassius, Domitian hastened his death by packing him about with snow.¹⁰⁴ We cannot assess the truth of these stories, nor of those tales of sexual license that have come down to us—that Domitian swam with prostitutes, made the daughter of Titus one of his concubines, and “was most profligate and lewd toward women and boys alike.”¹⁰⁵ All Latin historiography is present politics, a partisan blow struck for contemporary ends.

When we come to the actual policies of Domitian we find him, in his first decade, surprisingly puritan and competent. As Vespasian had modeled himself on Augustus, so Domitian seemed to take over the policies and manners of Tiberius. Having made himself censor for life, he stopped the publication of scurrilous lampoons (though he winked at the epigrams of Martial), enforced the Julian laws against adultery, tried to end child prostitution and reduce unnatural vice, forbade the performance of pantomimes because of their indecency, ordered the execution of a Vestal Virgin convicted of incest or adultery, and put an end to the practice of castration, which had spread with the rising price of eunuch slaves. He shrank from any form of bloodshed, even the ritual sacrifice of oxen. He was honorable, liberal, and free from avarice. He refused legacies from those who had children, canceled all tax arrears more than five years old, and discountenanced delation. He was a strict but impartial judge. He had freedmen secretaries, but kept them on their good behavior.

His reign was one of the great ages of Roman building. The fires of 79 and 82 having caused much destruction and destitution, Domitian organized a program of public works to provide employment and distribute wealth.¹⁰⁶ He, too, hoped to reanimate the old faith by beautifying or multiplying its shrines. He raised the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva once more, and spent $22,000,000 on its gold-plated doors and gilded roof; Rome admired the result and mourned the extravagance. When Domitian built for himself and his administrative staff an enormous palace, the Domus Flavia, the citizens reasonably complained of the cost; but they raised no voice against the expensive games with which he sought to moderate his Tiberian unpopularity. He dedicated a temple to his father and his brother; he restored the Baths and Pantheon of Agrippa, the Portico of Octavia, the temples of Isis and Serapis; he added to the Colosseum, finished the Baths of Titus, and began those that were completed by Trajan.

At the same time he did his dour best to encourage arts and letters. Flavian portrait sculpture reached its zenith in his principate; his coins are of outstanding excellence. To stimulate poetry he established in 86 the Capitoline games, which included contests in literature and music; and for these he built a stadium and a music hall in the Field of Mars. He gave modest help to the modest talent of Statius and the immodest talent of Martial. He rebuilt the public libraries, which had been destroyed by fire, and had their contents renewed by sending scribes to copy the manuscripts in Alexandria -another proof that the great library there had lost only a small part of its treasures in the fire started by Caesar.

He managed the Empire well. He had Tiberius’ grim resolution as an administrator, pounced upon peculation, and kept strict watch on all appointees and developments. As Tiberius had restrained Germanicus, so Domitian withdrew Agricola from Britain after that enterprising general had led his armies, and pushed the frontier, to Scotland; apparently Agricola wished to go farther, and Domitian demurred. The recall was attributed to jealousy, and the Emperor paid a heavy price for it when the history of his reign was written by Agricola’s son-in-law. He was equally unfortunate in war. In 86 the Dacians crossed the Danube, invaded the Roman province of Moesia, and defeated Domitian’s generals. The Prince took command, planned his campaign well, and was about to enter Dacia when Antoninus Saturninus, Roman governor of Upper Germany, persuaded two legions at Mainz to proclaim him emperor. The revolt was suppressed by Domitian’s aides, but it disconcerted his strategy by allowing the enemy time to prepare. He crossed the Danube, met the Dacians, and apparently suffered a reverse. He made peace with Decebalus, the Dacian king, sent him an annual douceur, and returned to Rome to celebrate a double triumph over the Chatti and the Dacians. He contented himself thereafter with the building of a limes, or fortified road, between the Rhine and the Danube, and another between the northward turn of the Danube and the Black Sea.

The revolt of Saturninus was the turning point in Domitian’s reign, the dividing line between his better and worse selves. He had always been coldly severe; now he slipped into cruelty. He was capable of good government, but only as an autocrat; the Senate rapidly lost power under him; and his tenacious authority as censor made that body at once subservient and vengeful. Vanity, which flourishes even in the humble, had no check in Domitian’s status: he filled the Capitol with statues of himself, announced the divinity of his father, brother, wife, and sisters as well as his own, organized a new order of priests, the Flaviales, to tend the worship of these new deities, and required officials to speak of him, in their documents, as Dominus et Deus Noster—“Our Lord and God.” He sat on a throne, encouraged visitors to embrace his knees, and established in his ornate palace the etiquette of an Oriental court. The Principate had become, through the power of the army and the decay of the Senate, an unconstitutional monarchy.

Against this new development rebellion rose not only in the aristocracy but among the philosophers and in the religions that were flowing into Rome from the East. The Jews and the Christians refused to adore the godhead of Domitian, the Cynics decried all government, and the Stoics, though they accepted kings, were pledged to oppose despots and honor tyrannicides. In 89 Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, in 95 he banished them from Italy. The earlier edict applied also to the astrologers, whose predictions of the Emperor’s death had brought new terrors to a mind empty of faith and open to superstition. In 93 Domitian executed some Christians for refusing to offer sacrifice before his image; according to tradition these included his nephew Flavius Clemens.¹⁰⁷

In the last years of his reign the Emperor’s fear of conspiracy became almost a madness. He lined with shining stone the walls of the porticoes under which he walked, so that he might see mirrored in them whatever went on behind him. He complained that the lot of rulers was miserable since no man believed them when they alleged conspiracy, unless the conspiracy succeeded. Like Tiberius he listened more readily to informers as he grew older; and as the delatores multiplied, no citizen of any prominence could feel safe from spies, even in his home. After Saturninus’ revolt indictments and convictions rapidly increased; aristocrats were exiled or killed, suspected men were tortured, even by having “fire inserted into their private parts.”¹⁰⁸ The terrified Senate, including the Tacitus who recounts these events most bitterly, was the agent of trial and condemnation; and at each execution it thanked the gods for the salvation of the Prince.

Domitian made the mistake of frightening his own household. In 96 he ordered the death of his secretary Epaphroditus because, twenty-seven years before, he had helped Nero to commit suicide. The other freedmen of the imperial household felt themselves threatened. To protect themselves they resolved to kill Domitian, and the Emperor’s wife Domitia joined in the plot. On the night before his last he leaped from his bed in fright. When the appointed moment came, Domitia’s servant struck the first blow; four others took part in the assault; and Domitian, struggling madly, met death in the forty-fifth year of his age and the fifteenth of his reign (96). When the news reached the senators they tore down and shattered all images of him in their chamber, and ordered that all statues of him, and all inscriptions mentioning his name, should be destroyed throughout the realm.

History has been unfair to this “age of despots” because it has spoken here chiefly through the most brilliant and most prejudiced of historians. It is true that the gossip of Suetonius often confirms—or follows—the invective of Tacitus; but the study of literature and inscriptions has condemned them both as mistaking the vices of ten emperors for the record of an empire and a century. There was something good in the worst of these rulers-devoted statesmanship in Tiberius, a charming gaiety in Caligula, a plodding wisdom in Claudius, an exuberant aestheticism in Nero, a stern competence in Domitian. Behind the adulteries and the murders an administrative organization had formed which provided, through all this period, a high order of provincial government. The emperors themselves were the chief victims of their power. Some disease in the blood, fired by the heat of loosed desire, had pursued the Julio-Claudians as fatally as the children of Atreus; and some flaw in the system had debased the Flavians in one generation from patient statesmanship to terrified cruelty. Seven of these ten men met a violent end; nearly all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy, dishonesty, and intrigue, trying to govern a world from the anarchy of a home. They indulged their appetites because they knew how brief was their omnipotence; they lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death. They went under because they were above the law; they became less than men because power had made them gods.

But we must not absolve the age or the principate of its ignominy and its crimes. It had given peace to the Empire, but terror to Rome; it had injured morals by the high example of cruelty and lust; it had torn Italy with a civil war more ferocious than that of Caesar and Pompey; it had filled the islands with exiles and had killed off the best and bravest men. It had suborned the treachery of relatives and friends by rewarding avaricious spies. It had, in Rome, replaced a government of laws with a tyranny of men. It had raised gigantic edifices by accumulating tribute, but it had dwarfed the soul by frightening talented or creative minds into servility or silence. Above all, it had made the army supreme. The power of the prince over the Senate lay not in his superior genius, nor in custom, nor in prestige; it rested upon the pikes of the Guard. When provincial armies saw how emperors were made, how rich were the donatives and spoils of the capital, they deposed the Praetorians and themselves entered upon the business of making kings. For a century yet the wisdom of great rulers chosen by adoption rather than by heredity, violence, or wealth would hold the legions in check and keep the frontiers safe. But when, through a philosopher’s love, idiocy would again reach the throne, the armies would run riot, chaos would break through the fragile film of order, and civil war would join hands with the waiting barbarians to topple down the noble and precarious structure of government that the genius of Augustus had built.

CHAPTER XIV

The Silver Age

A.D. 14-96

I. THE DILETTANTES

TRADITION has given to Latin letters from A.D. 14 to 117 the name of Silver Age, implying a fall from the cultural excellence of the Augustan Age. Tradition is the voice of time, and time is the medium of selection; a cautious mind will respect their verdict, for only youth knows better than twenty centuries. We may be permitted, however, to suspend judgment, to give Lucan, Petronius, Seneca, the elder Pliny, Celsus, Statius, Martial, Quintilian—and, in later chapters, Tacitus, Juvenal, Pliny the Younger, and Epictetus—an unbiased hearing, and enjoy them as if we had never heard that they belonged to a decadent period. In every epoch something is decaying and something is growing. In epigram, satire, the novel, history, and philosophy the Silver Age marks the zenith of Roman literature, as it represents in realistic sculpture and mass architecture the climax of Roman art.

The speech of the common man re-entered literature, diminishing inflections, relaxing syntax, and dropping final consonants with Gallic impertinence. About the middle of the first century the Latin V (which had been pronounced like our W) and B (between vowels) were both softened into a sound like the English V; so habere, to have, became in sound havere, and prepared for Italian avere and French avoir; while vinum, wine, began to approximate, by lazy slurring of the changing final consonant, the Italian vino and the French vin. The Latin language was preparing to mother Italian, Spanish, and French.

It must be admitted that rhetoric had now grown at the expense of eloquence, grammar at the expense of poetry. Able men devoted themselves beyond precedent to studying the form, evolution, and niceties of the language, editing already “classical” texts, formulating the august rules of literary composition, forensic oratory, poetic meter, and prose rhythm. Claudius tried to reform the alphabet; Nero made poetry fashionable by his almost Japanese example; and the elder Seneca wrote manuals of rhetoric on the ground that eloquence gives to every power a double power. Without eloquence only generals could rise in Rome; and even generals had to be orators. The mania for rhetoric seized all forms of literature: poetry became rhetorical, prose became poetical, and Pliny himself wrote an eloquent page in the six volumes of his Natural History. Men began to worry about the balance of their phrases and the melody of their clauses; historians wrote declamations, philosophers itched for epigrams, and every one wrote sententiae—concentrated pills of wisdom. All the polite world was writing poetry, and reading it to friends in hired halls or theaters, at table, even (Martial complained) in the bath. Poets engaged in public competitions, won prizes, were feted by municipalities and crowned by emperors; aristocrats and princes welcomed dedications or tributes and paid for them with dinners or denarii. The passion for poetry gave a pleasant aspect of amateur authorship to an age and city darkened with sexual license and periodic terror.

Terror and poetry met in the life of Lucan. The older Seneca was his grandfather, the philosopher Seneca his uncle. Born in Corduba in 39, and named Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, he was brought in infancy to Rome and grew up in aristocratic circles where poetry and philosophy rivaled amorous and political intrigues as the foci of life. At twenty-one he competed in the Neronian Games with a poem “In Praise of Nero,” and won a prize. Seneca introduced him at court, and soon the poet and the Emperor were bandying epics. Lucan made the mistake of winning first prize in a poetic contest with the Prince; Nero ordered him to publish no more, and Lucan withdrew to avenge himself in private with a vigorous but rhetorical epic, Pharsalia, which viewed the Civil War from the standpoint of the Pompeian aristocracy. Lucan is fair to Caesar, and writes of him an illuminating phrase: nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum—“thinking nothing done while anything remained to do.”¹ But the real hero of the book is the younger Cato, whom Lucan equals with the gods in a famous line: victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni—“the winning cause pleased the gods, but the lost one pleased Cato.”² Lucan too loved a lost cause and died for it. He joined in the conspiracy to replace Nero with Piso, was arrested, broke down (he was only twenty-six), and revealed the names of other conspirators, even, we are told, of his mother. When Nero confirmed his death sentence he recovered his courage, summoned his friends to a feast, ate with them heartily, opened his veins, and recited his lines against despotism as he bled to death (65).

II. PETRONIUS

We are not certain—it is only the general opinion—that the Petronius whose Satyricon still finds many readers was the Caius Petronius who died by Nero’s orders a year after Lucan. The book itself contains not a word to serve as a clue; and Tacitus, who describes the arbiter elegantiarum with pithy eloquence, makes no mention of the disreputable masterpiece. Some forty epigrams are ascribed to a Petronius, including a line that almost sums up Lucretius: primus in orbe deos fecit timor—“it was fear that first in the world made gods”;³ but these fragments too are silent about the author’s identity.

The Satyricon was a collection of satires, probably in sixteen books, of which only the last two remain, themselves incomplete. They are saturae in the Latin sense of medleys—here of prose and verse, adventure and philosophy, gastronomy and venery. The form owes something to the satires of Menippus, a Syrian Cynic who wrote in Gadara about 60 B.C., and to the “Milesian Tales,” or love romances, that had become popular in the Hellenistic world. As all extant examples of these are later than Petronius, the Satyricon has the distinction of being the oldest known novel.

It is hardly credible that an aristocratic lord of luxury, and master of fine taste, should have fathered a book so profusely vulgar as the Satyricon. All its active characters are plebeians, ex-slaves, or slaves, and all the scenes are of low life; here the Augustan preoccupation of literature with the upper classes is violently ended. Encolpius, who tells the tale, is an adulterer, a homosexual, a liar, and a thief, and takes it for granted that all sensible men are the same. “We had it understood between ourselves,” he says of himself and his friend, “that whenever opportunity came we would pilfer whatever we could lay our hands upon, for the improvement of our common treasury.”⁴ The story begins in a brothel, where Encolpius meets Ascyltos, who has taken refuge there from a lecture on philosophy. Their escapades among the towns and trolls of southern Italy form the thread of the wandering narrative; their rivalry for the handsome slave boy Giton unites and divides them in picaresque romance. At last they come to the house of the merchant Trimalchio; and the rest of the extant work is given over to describing the Cena Trimalchionis, the most astounding dinner in literature.

Trimalchio is an ex-slave who has made a fortune, has bought enormous latifundia, and lives in parvenu luxury with the appointments of a palace and the atmosphere of a stew. His estates are so vast that a daily gazette must be written to keep him abreast of his earnings. He begs his guests to drink:

If the wine don’t please you I’ll change it. I don’t have to buy it, thank the gods. Everything here that makes your mouth water was produced on one of my country places, which I’ve never yet seen; but they tell me it’s down Terracina and Tarentum way. I’ve got a notion to add Sicily to my other little holdings, so in case I want to go to Africa I’ll be able to sail along my own coasts. . . . When it comes to silver I’m a connoisseur; I have goblets as big as wine jars. ... I own a thousand bowls that Mummius left to my patron. . . . I buy cheap and sell dear; others may have different ideas.⁵

He is a kindly fellow withal; he shouts at his slaves, but he pardons them readily. He has so many that only a tenth of them know him by sight. “Slaves are men,” he says, generously remembering his origin; “they sucked the same milk that we did . . . and mine will drink the water of freedom if they live.” To prove his intentions he has his will brought in and reads it to his guests. It includes specifications for his epitaph, which is to end with the proud claim that he “grew rich from little, left 30,000,000 sesterces, and never heard a philosopher.”⁶

Forty pages describe the dinner; a few sentences will convey its aroma:

There was a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it. Ram’s vetches on Aries, beef on Taurus . . . the womb of an unfarrowed sow on Virgo ... on Libra a balance holding a tart in one pan and a cake in the other. . . . Four dancers ran in to music, and removed the upper part of the tray. Beneath it . . . stuffed capons and sows’ bellies, and in the middle a hare. At the corners four figures of Marsyas spouted from their bladders a highly spiced sauce upon fish which were swimming about. ... A tray followed on which was served a wild boar; from its tusks hung baskets loaded with dates; around it were little suckling pigs made of pastry. . . . When the carver plunged his knife into the boar’s side, thrushes flew out, one for each guest.⁷

Three white hogs walk into the room, and the guests choose which one they will have cooked for them; while they eat, the winning hog is roasted; soon it re-enters; when it is carved, sausages and meat puddings emerge from its belly. When the dessert arrives Encolpius has no stomach for it; but Trimalchio urges his guests onward by assuring them that the dessert has been made entirely out of a hog. A hoop is lowered from the ceiling, bringing to each diner an alabaster jar filled with perfume, while slaves replenish empty glasses with ancient wines. Trimalchio gets drunk and makes love to a boy; his fat wife protests, and he throws a cup at her head. “This Syrian dancing whore,” he says of her, “has a poor memory. I took her off the auction block and made her a woman, and now she puffs herself up like a frog. . . . But that’s the way it is: if you’re born in an attic you can’t sleep in a palace.”⁸ And he bids his major-domo keep her statue off his tomb, “else I’ll be nagged even after I’m dead.”

It is a powerful and savage satire; realistic only in its details, and probably true of only a small segment of Roman life. If Nero’s Petronius wrote it we must count it the merciless caricature of the nouveau riche freedman by a patrician who had never earned his keep. There is no mercy in the book, no tenderness, no ideal; immorality and corruption are taken for granted, and the life of the underworld is presented with gusto, without indignation, and without comment. Here the gutter flows directly into classic literature, bringing its own judgments and taste, its own lusty vocabulary and hilarious vitality. Sometimes the story rises to those sublime heights of nonsense, obscenity, and vituperation which crown the epic of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Apuleius’ Golden Ass would follow in its steps; Gil Blas, seventeen centuries later, would rival it; Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones would continue its meandering tradition. It is the strangest book in the literature of Rome.

III. THE PHILOSOPHERS

In this loose and complex age, when freedom was so limited and life was so free, philosophy flourished alongside of sensuality, and the two were not above joining hands. The decay of the native religion had left a moral vacuum which philosophy sought to fill. Parents sent their sons, and themselves often went, to hear the lectures of men who offered to provide a rational code of civilized conduct, or a formal dress for naked desire. Those who could afford it paid philosophers to live with them, partly as educators, partly as spiritual counselors, partly as learned company; so Augustus had Areus, consulted him on almost everything, and for his sake (if we may believe a ruler) was lenient to Alexandria. When Drusus died Livia called in “her husband’s philosopher”—so Seneca phrases it—“to help her bear her grief.”⁹ Nero, Trajan, and of course Aurelius had philosophers residing with them at court, as kings have chaplains now. In their last moments men would summon philosophers to chart their passing, as centuries later they would ask for a priest.¹⁰

The public never forgave these teachers of wisdom for taking salaries or fees. Philosophy was esteemed a sufficient substitute for food and drink, and philosophers who had a less exalted opinion of their profession were the butt of popular jokes, of Quintilian’s criticism, of Lucian’s satire, and of imperial hostility. Many of them deserved it, for they put on the philosopher’s coarse cloak, and grew a profound beard, to give a learned front to gluttony, avarice, and vanity. “A short survey of life,” says a character in Lucian,

had convinced me of the absurdity and meanness . . . that pervade all worldly purposes. ... In this state of mind the best I could think of was to get at the truth of it all from the . . . philosophers. So I selected the best of them—if solemnity of visage, pallor of complexion, and length of beard are a criterion . . . I placed myself in their hands. For a considerable sum down, and more to be paid when they had perfected me in wisdom, I was to be . . . instructed in the order of the universe. Unfortunately, so far from dispelling my previous ignorance, they perplexed me more and more with their daily drenches of beginnings and ends, atoms and voids, matters and forms. My greatest difficulty was that, though they differed among themselves, and all they said was full of contradictions, they expected me to believe them, each pulling me in his own direction. . . . Often one of them could not tell you correctly the number of miles from Megara to Athens, but had no hesitation about the distance in feet from the sun to the moon.¹¹

Most of the Roman philosophers followed the Stoic creed. The epicureans were too busy pursuing wine, woman, and food to have much time for theory. Here and there in Rome were mendicant preachers of the Cynic philosophy, ignoring speculation, and calling men to a simple and soapless life; they acceded to the popular demand that philosophers should be poor, and were in consequence the least respected of the schools. Seneca, however, made one of them his intimate friend. “Why should I not hold Demetrius in high esteem?” he asked. “I have found that he lacks nothing;” and the millionaire sage marveled when the nearly naked Cynic refused a gift of 200,000 sesterces from Caligula.¹²

Since the Roman Stoic was a man of action rather than of contemplation, he eschewed metaphysics as a hopeless quest, and sought in Stoicism a philosophy of conduct that would support human decency, family unity, and social order independently of supernatural surveillance and command. The essence of his code was self-control: he would subordinate passion to reason, and train his will to desire nothing that would make his peace of soul contingent upon external goods. In politics he would recognize the universal brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God; at the same time he would love his country and hold himself ready to die at any time to avert its disgrace or his own. Life itself was always to remain within his choice; he was free to leave it whenever it should become an evil rather than a boon. A man’s conscience was to be higher than any law. Monarchy was a sad necessity for the rule of wide and diverse realms; but to kill a despot was an excellent thing.

Roman Stoicism had at first profited from the Principate; the limitations on political freedom had driven men from the forum to the study, and had inclined the finest of them to a philosophy that made the self-controlled subject more sovereign than the impassioned king. The government did not check freedom of thought or speech so long as these made no public attack upon the emperor, his family, or the official gods. But when the professors and their Senatorial patrons began to denounce tyranny, there arose between philosophy and autocracy a war that lasted till the adoptive emperors united them on the throne. When Nero ordered Thrasea to die (65), he at the same time exiled Thrasea’s friend Musonius Rufus, the most sincere and consistent of the Stoic philosophers in first-century Rome. Rufus had defined philosophy as inquiry into right conduct, and had taken his quest seriously. He denounced concubinage despite its legality, and demanded of men the same standard of sexual morality that they required of women. Sexual relations, said this ancient Tolstoian, were permissible only in marriage and for procreation. He believed in equal educational opportunities for both sexes and welcomed women to his lectures; but he bade them seek from education and philosophy the means of perfecting themselves as women.¹³ Slaves, too, attended his classes; one of them—Epictetus—honored his teacher by surpassing him. When civil war flared in Rome after Nero’s death, Musonius went out to the attacking army and lectured it on the blessings of peace and the horrors of war. Antonius’ troops laughed at him and resumed the ultimate arbitrament. Vespasian, in expelling the philosophers from Rome, excepted Rufus; but he kept his concubines.

IV. SENECA

The Stoic philosophy found its most doubtful expression in the life, its most perfect expression in the writings, of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Born at Corduba about 4 B.C., he was soon taken to Rome, and received all the education available there. He imbibed rhetoric from his father, Stoicism from Attalus, Pythagoreanism from Sotion, and practical politics from his aunt’s husband, the Roman governor of Egypt. He tried vegetarianism for a year, then gave it up, but remained always abstemious in food and drink; he was a millionaire in his surroundings rather than in his habits. He suffered so much from asthma and weak lungs that he often contemplated suicide. He practiced law, and was chosen quaestor about A.D. 33. Two years later he married Pompeia Paulina, with whom he lived in remarkable continuity until his death.

On inheriting his father’s fortune he abandoned the law and indulged himself in writing. When Cremutius Cordus was forced by Caligula to kill himself (40), Seneca addressed to Cordus’ daughter Marcia a consolatio—an essay of condolence which was a regularly practiced form in the schools of rhetoric and philosophy. Caligula wished to have him executed for his impertinence, but Seneca’s friends saved his life by arguing that he would presently die of consumption in any case. Soon afterward Claudius accused him of improper relations with Julia, daughter of Germanicus; the Senate condemned him to death, but Claudius commuted this to exile in Corsica. On that rugged isle, amid a population as primitive as in Ovid’s Tomi, the philosopher spent eight lonely years (41-49). At first he took his misfortune with true stoic calm, and comforted his mother with a touching Consolatio ad Helviam; but as the bitter years crawled on, his spirit broke, and he addressed to Claudius’ secretary a Consolatio ad Polybium in a humble appeal for pardon. When this failed he tried to dull his sufferings by composing tragedies.

These strange productions, in which almost every character is an orator, were probably intended for the study rather than the stage; we do not hear of any of them being played; at most some brilliant episodes or resounding speeches were put to music and acted by a mime. The gentle philosopher incarnadines the stage with violence, as if he would rival in the theater the blood feasts of the games. Despite these heroic efforts he is too much of a thinker to be a good dramatist: he prefers ideas to men, and loses no chance for reflection, sentiment, or epigram. His plays contain some fine lines, but for the rest they may be forgotten with impunity. It should be added, however, that many good judges have not agreed with this verdict. Scaliger, lord of Renaissance critics, preferred Seneca to Euripides. When ancient literature came back to life it was Seneca who served as model for the first dramas in modern speech; from him came the classic form and unities that marked the plays of Corneille and Racine and dominated the French stage till the nineteenth century. In England, which felt his influence less, the translation of Seneca’s dramas by Heywood (1559) gave an exemplar to the first English tragedy, Gorboduc, and left its mark on Shakespeare.

In 48 the younger Agrippina replaced Messalina in power over Claudius and Rome. Anxious to turn her eleven-year-old son Nero into an Alexander, she looked about for an Aristotle and found him in Corsica. She had Seneca recalled and restored to his seat in the Senate. For five years he tutored the youth and for five more he guided the Emperor and the state. During this decade he wrote for the edification of Nero and sundry some genial expositions of the Stoic philosophy—On Anger, On the Brevity of Life, On the Tranquillity of the Soul, On Clemency, On the Happy Life, On the Constancy of the Sage, On Benefits, On Providence. These formal treatises do not show him at his best. Like his plays they gleam with epigrams; but these, sent forth page after page in a staccato jet, at last weary the mind and lose their charm. Seneca’s public, however, read these essays at intervals, and did not resent the gay wit that displeased the austere Quintilian,¹⁴ or the “sugar plums” and “glaring patches” that would offend Fronto’s archaic taste; it was pleased that their rich premier spoke so amiably, and, like his pupil, tried so hard to win its applause. For many years Seneca was the leading author, statesman, and vinegrower of Italy.

He multiplied his patrimony by investments that apparently took full advantage of his official position and knowledge. If we may believe Dio, he lent money to provincials at such high interest that panic and insurrection broke out in Britain when he suddenly called in his loans there in the sum of 40,000,000 sesterces.¹⁵ His fortune, we are told, rose to 300,000,000 ($30,000,000).¹⁶ In 58 an old delator friend of Messalina, Publius Suilius, publicly attacked the premier as a “hypocrite, an adulterer, and a wanton; a man who denounces courtiers and never leaves the palace; who denounces luxury, and displays 500 dining tables of cedar and ivory; who denounces wealth, and sucks the provinces dry by usury.”¹⁷ Like Caesar, Seneca contented himself with a rebuttal when he might have arranged an execution. In his essay On the Happy Life he repeated the charges, and replied that the sage is not bound to poverty; if wealth comes to him honestly he may take it; but he must be capable of abandoning it at any time without serious regret.¹⁸ Meanwhile he lived ascetically amid his fine furniture, slept on a hard mattress, drank only water, and ate so sparingly that when he died his body was emaciated through undernourishment.¹⁹ “Abundance of food,” he wrote, “dulls the wits; excess of food strangles the soul.”²⁰ The charges of sexual irregularity were probably true of his youth, but he was noted for his unfailing tenderness to his wife. In truth he never made up his mind which he loved better—philosophy or power, wisdom or pleasure; and he was never convinced of their incompatibility. He admitted that he was a very imperfect sage. “I persist in praising not the life that I lead, but that which I ought to lead. I follow it at a mighty distance, crawling”²¹—of which of us is this not true? If he is not sincere in saying that “mercy becomes no man so well as the king or the prince,”²² he at least phrases the sentiment almost as well as Portia. He condemned gladiatorial combats to the death,²⁴ and Nero forbade them. He disarmed much criticism by what Tacitus calls “the grace with which he imparted wisdom.”²⁵ He did not demand, any more than he practiced, perfection.

We have seen that he ruled the Empire well, and that he tarnished his record by condoning the worst of Nero’s crimes, “letting much evil pass in order to have the power of doing a little good.”²⁷ He felt disgraced, and longed to free himself from his imperial servitude; he described the Emperor’s palace as triste ergastulum—“an unhappy prison for slaves.” He began to wish that he had devoted all his life to the study of wisdom and had shunned the dark labyrinths of power. With pleasure he would put aside, now and then, the cares of politics, and at sixty attend like an eager youth the lectures of Metronax on philosophy.²⁸ In the year 62, aged sixty-six, he begged leave to resign his reduced place in the government, but Nero would not let him go. After the great fire of 64, when Nero asked all the Empire to send contributions for the rebuilding of Rome, Seneca donated the greater part of his fortune. Gradually he succeeded in withdrawing from the court; more and more he lived in his Campanian villas, hoping by an almost monastic seclusion to escape the attentions and spies of the Emperor. For a time he lived on wild apples and running water for fear of poison in his food.

It was in this atmosphere of leisurely terror that he wrote (63-65) his studies in natural science (Quaestiones Naturales), and the most lovable of his works, the Epistulae Morales. They were casual, intimate causeries addressed to his friend Lucilius—rich governor of Sicily, poet, philosopher, and frank Epicurean. There are few books in Roman literature more pleasant than these urbane attempts to adapt Stoicism to the needs of a millionaire. Here begins the informal essay, which would be the favorite medium of Plutarch and Lucian, Montaigne and Voltaire, Bacon and Addison and Steele. To read these letters is to be in correspondence with an enlightened, humane, and tolerant Roman who has reached the heights and known the depths of literature, statesmanship, and philosophy. They are Zeno speaking with Epicurus’ lenience and Plato’s charm. Seneca apologizes to Lucilius for the carelessness of his style (it is nevertheless delectable Latin): “I want my letters to you to be just what my conversation would be if you and I were sitting or walking together.”³⁰ “I write this,” he adds, “not for the many but for you; each of us is sufficient audience to the other” (satis magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus)³¹—though the old diplomat doubtless hoped that posterity would eavesdrop on his talk. He describes his asthma vividly but without self-pity; he cheerfully calls it “practicing how to die” by taking “last gasps” for an hour. He is sixty-seven now, but only in body: “my mind is strong and alert; it takes issue with me on the subject of old age; it declares that old age is its period of bloom.”³² He rejoices that he has time at last to read the good books he has had so long to put aside. Apparently he now reread Epicurus, for he quotes him with a frequency and an enthusiasm scandalous in a Stoic. He is frightened by the excesses of individualism and self-indulgence in Caligula, Nero, and thousands more; he wishes to offer some counterweight to the temptations that beset minds liberated before moral maturity; and he seems resolved to confute the epicureans out of the mouth of the master whose name they abused and whose doctrine they dared not understand.

The first lesson of philosophy is that we cannot be wise about everything. We are fragments in infinity and moments in eternity; for such forked atoms to describe the universe, or the Supreme Being, must make the planets tremble with mirth. Therefore Seneca has little use for metaphysics or theology. One may prove out of his writings that he was a monotheist, a polytheist, a pantheist, a materialist, a Platonist, a monist, a dualist. Sometimes God is to him a personal Providence who watches over all, “loves good men,”³³ answers their prayers, and helps them by divine grace; ³⁴ in other passages God is the First Cause in an unbroken chain of causes and effects, and the ultimate force is Fate, “an irrevocable cause which carries along human and divine affairs equally . . . leading the willing and dragging the unwilling along.”³⁶ A like indecision obscures his conception of the soul: it is a finely material breath animating the body; but it is also “a god dwelling as a guest” in the human frame.³⁷ He speaks hopefully of a life beyond death, where knowledge and virtue will be perfected;³⁸ and again he calls immortality “a beautiful dream.”³⁹ In truth Seneca has never thought these matters out to a consistent (or public) conclusion; he talks of them with the cautious inconsistency of a politician who agrees with everybody. He has followed too successfully his father’s oratorical lessons, and expresses every point of view with irresistible eloquence.

The same hesitations mar and grace his moral philosophy. He is too Stoic to be practical, and too lenient to be Stoic. He sees about him an immorality that exhausts the body and debases the soul, never satisfying either; avarice and luxury have destroyed peace and health, and power has made man only an abler brute. How shall one free himself from this ignominious agitation?

I read in Epicurus today: “If you would enjoy real freedom you must be the slave of philosophy.” The man who submits to her is emancipated there and then. . . . The body, once cured, often ails again . . . but the mind, once healed, is healed for good and all. I shall tell you what I mean by health: if the mind is content and confident; if it understands that those things for which all men pray, all the benefits that are sought or bestowed, are of no importance in relation to a life of happiness. ... I shall give you a rule by which to measure yourself and your development: in that day you will come into your own when you realize that the successful are of all men most miserable.⁴⁰

Philosophy is the science of wisdom, and wisdom is the art of living. Happiness is the goal, but virtue, not pleasure, is the road. The old ridiculed maxims are correct and are perpetually verified by experience; in the long run honesty, justice, forbearance, kindliness, bring us more happiness than ever comes from the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is good, but only when consistent with virtue; it cannot be a wise man’s goal; those who make it their end in life are like the dog that snaps at every piece of meat thrown to it, swallows it whole, and then, instead of enjoying it, stands with jaws agape anxiously awaiting more.⁴¹

But how does one acquire wisdom? By practicing it daily, in however modest a degree; by examining your conduct of each day at its close; by being harsh to your own faults and lenient to those of others; by associating with those who excel you in wisdom and virtue; by taking some acknowledged sage as your invisible counselor and judge. You will be helped by reading the philosophers; not outline stories of philosophy, but the original works; “give over hoping that you can skim, by means of epitomes, the wisdom of distinguished men.”⁴⁴ “Every one of these men will send you away happier and more devoted, no one of them will allow you to depart empty-handed. . . . What happiness, and what a noble old age, await him who has given himself into their patronage!”⁴⁵ Read good books many times, rather than many books; travel slowly, and not too much; “the spirit cannot mature into unity unless it has checked its curiosity and its wanderings.”⁴⁶ “The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.”⁴⁷ Avoid crowds. “Men are more wicked together than separately. If you are forced to be in a crowd, then most of all you should withdraw into yourself.”⁴⁸

The final lesson of the Stoic is contempt and choice of death. Life is not always so joyful as to merit continuance; after life’s fitful fever it is well to sleep. “What is baser than to fret at the threshold of peace?”⁴⁹ If a man finds life grievous, and can leave it without serious injury to others, he should feel free to choose his own time and v/ay. Seneca preaches suicide to Lucilius as if he were Lucilius’ heir:

This is one reason why we cannot complain of life, it keeps no one against his will. . . . You have had veins cut for the purpose of reducing your weight. If you would pierce your heart, a gaping wound is not necessary; a lancet will open the way to freedom, and tranquillity can be purchased at the cost of a pinprick.⁵⁰ . . . Wherever you look, there is an end tc troubles. Do you see that precipice?—it is a descent to liberty. Do you see that river, that cistern, that sea?—freedom is in their depths.⁵¹ . . . But I am running on too long. How can a man end his life if he cannot end a letter? ⁵² . . . As for me, my dear Lucilius, I have lived long enough. I have had my fill. I await death. Farewell.⁵³

Life took him at his word. Nero sent a tribune to seek his answer to the charge that he had plotted to make Piso emperor; Seneca replied that he was no longer interested in politics, and sought nothing but peace and the opportunity to attend to “a weak and crazy constitution.” “He showed no symptom of fear,” reported the tribune, “no sign of sorrow ... his words and looks bespoke a mind serene, erect, and firm.” “Return,” said Nero, “and tell him to die.” “Seneca heard the message,” says Tacitus, “with calm composure.” He embraced his wife, and bade her be comforted by the honorableness of his life and the lessons of philosophy. But Paulina refused to outlive him; when his veins were opened she had hers opened too. He called for a secretary and dictated a letter of farewell to the Roman people. He asked and received a drink of hemlock, as if resolved to die like Socrates. As the physician placed him in a warm bath to ease his pain he sprinkled the nearest servants with the water, saying “a libation to Jove the Deliverer”, and after much suffering he passed away (65). At Nero’s command the physician forcibly bound Paulina’s wrists and stopped the flow of her blood; she survived her husband a few years, but her perpetual pallor recalled her stoic resolution.

Death glorified Seneca and made one generation forget his poses and his inconsistencies. Like all Stoics he underestimated the power and value of feeling and passion, exaggerated the worth and reliability of reason, and trusted too much to a nature in whose soil grow all the flowers of evil as well as of good. But he made Stoicism human, brought it down livably within the scope of men, and formed it into a spacious vestibule to Christianity. His pessimism, his condemnation of the immorality of his time, his counsel to return anger with kindness,⁵⁴ and his preoccupation with death⁵⁵ made Tertullian call him “ours,”⁵⁶ and led Augustine to exclaim, “What more could a Christian say than this pagan has said?”⁵⁷ He was not a Christian; but at least he asked for an end to slaughter and lechery, called men to a simple and decent life, and reduced the distinctions between freeman, freedman, and slave to “mere titles born of ambition or of wrong.”⁵⁸ It was a slave in Nero’s court, Epictetus, who profited most from his teaching. Nerva and Trajan were in some measure molded by his writings and inspired by his example to conscientious and humanitarian statesmanship. To the end of antiquity and through the Middle Ages he remained popular; and when the rebirth came Petrarch placed him next to Virgil and upon Seneca’s prose devotedly modeled his own. Montaigne’s brother-in-law translated him into French, and Montaigne quoted him as fondly as Seneca quoted Epicurus. Emerson read him again and again⁵⁹ and became an American Seneca. There are few original ideas in him; but that may be forgiven, for in philosophy all truth is old, and only error is original. With all his faults he was the greatest of Rome’s philosophers and, at least in his books, one of the wisest and kindliest of men. Next to Cicero he was the most lovable hypocrite in history.

V. ROMAN SCIENCE

Therefore we have given him too much space; nevertheless, we have not finished with him yet, for he was also a scientist. In those fertile years between his retirement and his death he amused himself with Quaestiones Naturales, and sought natural explanations of rain, hail, snow, wind, comets, rainbows, earthquakes, rivers, springs. In his drama Medea he had suggested the existence of another continent beyond the Atlantic.⁶⁰ With similar intuition, contemplating the overwhelming multitude of stars, he wrote, “How many an orb, moving in the depths of space, has never yet reached the eyes of men!”⁶¹ And he adds, clairvoyantly, “How many things our sons will learn that we cannot now suspect!—what others await centuries when our names will be forgotten! . . . Our descendants will marvel at our ignorance.”⁶² We do. Seneca, though always eloquent, adds little to Aristotle and Aratus, and borrows abundantly from Poseidonius. He believes in divination despite Cicero, lapses into ludicrous teleology despite Lucretius, and interrupts his science at every turn to inculcate morality; he passes skillfully from mussels to luxury, and from comets to degeneration. The Fathers of the Church liked this mixture of meteorology and morals, and made the Quaestiones Naturales the most popular textbook of science in the Middle Ages.

There were a few men of scientific mind and interest in Rome, like Varro, Agrippa, Pomponius Mela, and Celsus; but they were scarce outside of geography, horticulture, and medicine. For the rest, science had not yet detached itself from magic, superstition, theology, and philosophy; it consisted of collected observations and traditions, seldom of fresh inquiry into facts, and rarely of experiment. Astronomy remained as Babylonia and Greece had left it. Time was still told by water clocks and sundials, and by the great obelisk that Augustus had stolen from Egypt and set up in the Field of Mars; its shadow, falling upon a pavement marked off in brass, indicated both the hour and the season.⁶³ Day and night were variably defined by the rising and setting of the sun; each had twelve hours, so that an hour of the day was longer, and an hour of the night shorter, in summer than in winter. Astrology was almost universally accepted. Pliny noted that in his time (A.D. 70) both learned and simple believed that a man’s destiny was determined by the star under which he was born.⁶⁴ They argued plausibly that vegetation, and perhaps the mating season in animals, depend upon the sun;^* that the physical and moral qualities of people are affected by climatic factors themselves determined by the sun; and that individual character and fate, like these general phenomena, are the result of celestial conditions inadequately known. Astrology was rejected only by the skeptics of the later Academy, who denied its pretended knowledge, and by the Christians, who scorned it as idolatry. Geography was studied more realistically, for navigation’s sake. Pomponius Mela (A.D. 43) published maps on which the surface of the globe was divided into a central torrid zone and north and south temperate zones. Roman geographers knew Europe, southwestern and southern Asia, and northern Africa; of the remainder they had vague ideas and fantastic legends. Spanish and African skippers reached Madeira and the Canary Islands,⁶⁵ but no Columbus rose to test Seneca’s dream.

The most extensive, industrious, and unscientific product of Italian science was the Historia Naturalis (77) of Caius Plinius Secundus. Though busy nearly all his life as soldier, lawyer, traveler, administrator, and head of the western Roman fleet, he wrote treatises on oratory, grammar, and the javelin, a history of Rome, another of Rome’s wars in Germany, and—sole survivor of this flood—thirty-seven “books” of natural history. How he managed all this in fifty-five years is explained in a letter of his nephew’s:

He had a quick apprehension, incredible zeal, and an unequaled capacity to go without sleep. He would rise at midnight or at one, and never later than two in the morning, and begin his literary work. . . . Before daybreak he used to wait upon Vespasian, who likewise chose that season to transact business. When he had finished the affairs which the Emperor committed to his charge, he returned home to his studies. After a short light repast at noon ... he would frequently, in the summer, repose in the sun; but during that time some author was read to him, from whom he made extracts and notes ... as was his method with whatever he read. . . . Thereafter he generally went into a cold bath, took a light refreshment, and rested for a while. Then, as if it were a new day, he resumed his studies till dinner, when again a book was read to him, and he made notes. . . . Such was his manner of life amid the noise and hurry of the town. But in the country his whole time was devoted to study, except when he was actually bathing; all the while he was being rubbed and wiped he was employed in hearing some book read to him, or in dictating. In his journeys a stenographer constantly attended him in his chariot or sedan chair. ... He once reproved me for walking; “you need not have lost those hours,” he said, for he counted all time lost that was not given to study.⁶⁶

His book, so sheared and sewn, was a one-man encyclopedia summarizing the science and errors of his age. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give a general description of everything that is known to exist throughout the earth.”⁶⁷ He deals with 20,000 topics and apologizes for omitting others; he refers to 2000 volumes by 473 authors, and admits his indebtedness by name with a candor exceptional in ancient literature; he notes, in passing, that he found many authors transcribing their predecessors word for word without acknowledgment. His style is dull, though sometimes purple, but we must not expect encyclopedias to be fascinating.

Pliny begins by rejecting the gods; they are, he thinks, merely natural phenomena, or planets, or services, personified and deified. The sole god is Nature, i.e., the sum of natural forces; and this god apparently pays no special attention to mundane affairs.⁶⁸ Pliny modestly refuses to measure the universe. His astronomy is a galaxy of absurdities (e.g., “In the war of Octavian against Antony the sun remained dim for almost a year”⁶⁹); but he notes the aurora borealis,⁷⁰ states with approximate modernity the orbital period of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn as respectively two, twelve, and thirty years, and argues for the spherical form of the earth.⁷¹ He tells of islands rising from the Mediterranean in his time, and surmises that Sicily and Italy, Boeotia and Euboea, Cyprus and Syria, were gradually sundered by the patience of the sea.⁷² He treats of the laborious and servile mining of precious metals and regrets that “many hands are worn down that one little joint may be adorned.”⁷³ He wishes that iron had never been found, since it has made war more terrible; “as if to bring death upon man more swiftly, we have given wings to iron and taught it to fly”⁷⁴—referring to iron missiles equipped with leather feathers to help them keep their course. Following Theophrastus, he mentions under the name of anthracitis a “stone that burns,”⁷⁵ but says no more about coal. He speaks of “an incombustible linen,” called by the Greeks asbestinon, “which is used to embalm the cadavers of kings.”⁷⁶ He describes or lists many animals, lauds their sagacity, and tells how to predetermine their sex: “If you wish to have females, let the dams face north while being covered.”⁷⁷ He has twelve wondrous books on medicine—i.e., on the curative value of various minerals and plants. Books xx-xxv are a Roman herbal, which the Middle Ages passed down to form the initial plant lore of modern medicine. He offers cures for everything from intoxication and halitosis⁷⁸ to “a pain in the neck”;⁷⁹ he provides “stimulants for the sexual passion,”⁸⁰ and warns women against sneezing after coitus, lest they abort there and then.⁸¹ He recommends coitus for physical weariness, hoarseness, pains in the loins, dim eyesight, melancholy, and “alienation of the mental faculties”;⁸² here is a panacea rivaling Bishop Berkeley’s tar water. Amid such nonsense occurs much useful information, especially about ancient industry, manners, or drugs; with interesting references to atavism, petroleum, and change of sex after birth. “Mucianus informs us that he once saw at Argos a person whose name was then Arescon, but had formerly been Arescusa; that this person had been married to a man, but that shortly afterward he developed a beard and other male characteristics, upon which he took a wife.”⁸³ Here and there valuable hints occur; e.g., Himly (1800) was led to investigate the action of jusquiamus and belladonna on the pupil by reading in Pliny a passage⁸⁴ about the use of anagallis juice before operations for cataract.⁸⁵ There are precious chapters on painting and sculpture, which constitute our oldest and principal account of ancient art.

Pliny was not content with natural history; he wished also to be a philosopher; and throughout his pages he scatters comments on mankind. The life of animals, he thinks, is preferable to man’s, for “they never think about glory, money, ambition, or death”;⁸⁶ they can learn without being taught and never have to dress; and they do not make war upon their own species. The invention of money was fatal to human happiness; it made interest possible, by which some could live in idleness while others worked”;⁸⁷ hence the rise of great estates owned by absentee landlords, and the ruinous replacement of tillage with pasturage. Life, in Pliny’s estimate, gives us much more grief and pain than happiness, and death is our supreme boon.⁸⁸ After death there is nothing.⁸⁹

The Natural History is a lasting monument to Roman ignorance. Pliny gathers superstitions, portents, love charms, and magic cures as assiduously as anything else, and apparently believes in most of them. He thinks that a man, especially if fasting, can kill a snake by spitting into its mouth.⁹⁰ “It is well known that in Lusitania the mares become impregnated by the west wind”⁹¹—a point missed in Shelley’s ode. Pliny condemns magic; but “on the approach of a menstruating woman,” he informs us, “must will sour and seeds touched by her will become sterile; and fruit will fall from the tree under which she sits. Her look will blunt the edge of steel and take the polish from ivory; if it falls upon a swarm of bees they will die at once.”⁹² Pliny rejects astrology and then fills pages with “prognostics” derived from the behavior of the sun and the moon.⁹³ “In the consulship of M. Acilius, and frequently at other times, it rained milk and blood.”⁹⁴ When we reflect that this book, and Seneca’s Quaestiones, were the chief legacy of Roman natural science to the Middle Ages, and compare them with the corresponding works and temper of Aristotle and Theophrastus four hundred years earlier, we begin to feel the slow tragedy of a dying culture. The Romans had conquered the Greek world, but they had already lost the most precious part of its heritage.

VI. ROMAN MEDICINE

They did better in medicine. Medical science too they borrowed from the Greeks, but they formulated it well, and applied it ably to personal and public hygiene. Rome, almost surrounded by marshes, and subject to mephitic floods, had particular need of public sanitation. About the second century B.C. we hear of malaria in Rome; the anopheles mosquito had settled down in the Pontine swamps.⁹⁵ Gout spread as luxury increased; the younger Pliny tells how his friend Corellius Rufus suffered its pains from his thirty-third to his sixty-seventh year before committing suicide, just to have the pleasure of outliving by one day “that brigand Domitian.”⁹⁶ Some passages in the Roman satirists suggest the appearance of syphilis in the first century A.D.⁹⁷ Great epidemics swept central Italy in 23 B.C., A.D. 65, 79, and 166.

The people had of old tried to meet disease and plague with magic and prayer; even now they begged the skeptical but complaisant Vespasian to heal their blindness with his spittle and their lameness with the touch of his foot.⁹⁸ They brought their illnesses and votive offerings to the temples of Aesculapius and Minerva and many left gifts in gratitude for cures. But in the first century B.C. they turned more and more to secular medicine. There was as yet no state regulation of medical practice; shoemakers, barbers, carpenters, added it to their operations as they pleased, called in magic to their aid, and compounded, touted, and sold their own drugs.⁹⁹ There were the usual satires and complaints. Pliny repeated old Cato’s imprecations upon Greek physicians who “seduce our wives, grow rich by feeding us poisons, learn by our suffering, and experiment by putting us to death.”¹⁰⁰ Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal joined in the assault; and a century later Lucian would score incompetent practitioners who hide their incapacity under the elegance of their apparatus.¹⁰¹

Nevertheless, medicine, as we shall see, had made great progress in Alexandria, Cos, Tralles, Miletus, Ephesus, and Pergamum; and from these centers came Greek physicians who so raised the level of Roman practice that Caesar enfranchised the profession in Rome, and Augustus exempted it from taxation. Asclepiades of Prusa won the friendship of Caesar, Crassus, and Antony. He declared that the heart pumps blood and air through the body; rarely prescribed drugs or drastic purges; and accomplished impressive cures by hydrotherapy (baths, fomentations, enemas), massage, sunshine, exercise (walking, horseback riding), diet, fasting, and abstinence from meat. He was distinguished for his treatment of malaria, his operations on the throat, and his humane handling of the insane.¹⁰² He gathered pupils about him and took some of them with him on his rounds. After his death they and similar students formed themselves into collegia and built for themselves a meeting place, on the Esquiline, called Schola Medicorum.

Under Vespasian auditoria were opened for the teaching of medicine, and recognized professors were paid by the state. Greek was the language of instruction, as Latin is now the language of prescription, and for a like reason-its intelligibility to persons of diverse tongues. Graduates of these state schools received the title of medicus a republica, and after Vespasian they alone could legally practice medicine in Rome.¹⁰³ The lex Aquilia provided for state supervision of physicians, and held them responsible for negligence; and the lex Cornelia severely punished practitioners whose carelessness or culpable ignorance caused the death of a patient.¹⁰⁴ Quacks continued, but sound practice increased. Midwives saw most Romans into the world, but many of these women were well trained.¹⁰⁵ About A.D. 100 military medicine reached its ancient zenith: every legion had twenty-four surgeons, first-aid and field-ambulance service were well organized, and hospitals were maintained near every important encampment.¹⁰⁶ Private hospitals (valetudinaria) were opened by physicians; from these evolved the public hospitals of the Middle Ages. Doctors were appointed and paid by the state to give free treatment to the poor.¹⁰⁷ Rich men kept their own physicians, and well-paid archiatri (“chief healers”) took care of the emperor, his family, his servants, and his aides. Sometimes families would contract with a doctor to attend to their health and illnesses for a period of time; in this way Quintus Stertinius made 600,000 sesterces a year.¹⁰⁸ The surgeon Alcon, fined 10,000,000 sesterces by Claudius, paid it with a few years’ fees.¹⁰⁹

The profession now reached a high degree of specialization. There were urologists, gynecologists, obstetricians, ophthalmologists, eye and ear specialists, veterinarians, dentists. Romans could have gold teeth, wired teeth, false teeth, bridgework, and plates.¹¹⁰ There were many women physicians; some of them wrote manuals of abortion, which were popular among great ladies and prostitutes. Surgeons were divided into further specialities and seldom engaged in general practice. Mandragora juice or atropin was used as an anesthetic.¹¹¹ Over 200 different surgical instruments have been found in the ruins of Pompeii. Dissection was illegal, but the examination of wounded or dying gladiators offered a frequent substitute. Hydrotherapy was popular; in a measure the great thermae were hydrotherapeutic institutes. Charmis of Marseilles made a fortune by administering cold baths. Consumptives were sent to Egypt or north Africa. Sulphur was used as a skin specific and to fumigate rooms after an infectious disease.¹¹² Drugs were a final but frequent resort. Physicians made then by processes kept secret from the public and charged for them all that patients could be persuaded to pay.¹¹³ Repulsive drugs were held in high honor: the offal of lizards was used as a purgative, human entrails were sometimes prescribed, Antonius Musa recommended the excreta of dogs for angina, Galen applied a boy’s dung to swellings of the throat.¹¹⁴ In compensation for all this a cheerful quack offered to cure almost any ailment with wine.¹¹⁵

Of the known medical writers in this age only one was a Roman, and he was not a physician. Aurelius Cornelius Celsus was an aristocrat who about A.D. 30 gathered into an encyclopedia De Artibus his studies in agriculture, war, oratory, law, philosophy, and medicine; only the section De Medicina survives. It is the greatest work on medicine that has come down to us from the six centuries between Hippocrates and Galen; it has also the distinction of being written in such pure and classical Latin that Celsus was dubbed Cicero medicorum. The Latin terms into which he translated the nomenclature of Greek medicine have ruled the science ever since. The sixth book shows considerable knowledge, in antiquity, of venereal disease. The seventh is an illuminating description of surgical methods; it contains the earliest known account of ligature, and describes tonsillectomy, lateral lithotomy, plastic surgery, and operations for cataract. Altogether this is the soundest achievement in Roman scientific literature, and suggests that we might have a better opinion of Roman science if Pliny had not been preserved. It is a pity that scholarship has concluded that Celsus’ treatise is largely a compilation or paraphrase of Greek texts.¹¹⁶ Lost in the Middle Ages, it was rediscovered in the fifteenth century, was printed before Hippocrates or Galen, and took a leading part in stimulating the reconstruction of medicine in modern times.

VII. QUINTILIAN

When Vespasian established a state professorship of rhetoric in Rome he appointed to it a man who, like so many authors of this Silver Age, was of Spanish birth. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was born at Calagurris (A.D. 35?), went to Rome to study oratory, and opened a school of rhetoric there which numbered Tacitus and the younger Pliny among its pupils. Juvenal describes him in his prime as handsome, noble, wise, well bred, with a fine voice and delivery, and a senatorial dignity. In old age he retired to write for the guidance of his son the classic treatment of his subject, the Institutio Oratoria (96).

I thought that this work would be the most precious part of the inheritance of my son, whose ability was so remarkable that it called for the most anxious cultivation on the part of his father. . . . Night and day I pursued this design, and hastened its completion in the fear that death might cut me off with my task unfinished. Then misfortune overwhelmed me with such suddenness that the success of my labors now interests no one less than myself. ... I have lost him of whom I had formed the highest expectations, and in whom I reposed all the hopes that should solace my old age.¹¹⁷

His wife had died at nineteen, leaving him two sons; one of these had died at the age of five, “robbing me, as it were, of one of my two eyes”; now the other went, leaving the old teacher “to outlive all my nearest and dearest.”

He defines rhetoric as the science of speaking well. The training of the orator should begin before birth: it is desirable that he should come of educated parents, so that he may receive correct speech and good manners from the very air he breathes; it is impossible to become both educated and a gentleman in one generation. The future orator should study music, to give him an ear for harmony;, the dance, to give him grace and rhythm; drama, to animate his eloquence with gesture and action; gymnastics, to keep him in health and strength; literature, to form his style, train his memory, and arm him with a treasury of great thoughts; science, to acquaint him with some understanding of nature; and philosophy, to mold his character on the dictates of reason and the precepts of wise men. For all preparations will be of no avail unless integrity of conduct and nobility of spirit are present to generate an irresistible sincerity of speech. Then the student must write as much as possible and with the utmost care. It is a hard training, and “I trust,” says Quintilian, “that no one among my readers would think of calculating its monetary value.”¹¹⁸

The oration itself has five phases: conception, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Having chosen his subject and clearly conceived his purpose, let the orator gather his material, from observation, inquiry, and books, and arrange it both logically and psychologically—so that each part will be in its proper place and lead as naturally to the next as in geometry.¹¹⁹ A well-organized address will consist of introduction (exordium), proposition, proof, refutation, and peroration. The speech should be written out only if it is to be fully memorized; otherwise fragmentary memories of the written form will obstruct and confuse an extempore style. If it is written it must be with care. “Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly”; shun the lazy “luxury of dictation now so fashionable among writers.”¹²⁰ “Clearness is the first essential,” then brevity, beauty, and vigor. Correct repeatedly and stoically:

Erasure is as important as writing. Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute. . . . The best method of correction is to put aside for a time what we have written, so that when we come to it again it may have an aspect of novelty, as of being another man’s work; in this way we may preserve ourselves from regarding our writings with the affection that we lavish upon a newborn child.¹²¹

Delivery, like composition, should touch the emotions, but avoid exuberant gesticulation. “It is feeling and force of imagination that makes us eloquent,” but “shout and bellow with uplifted hand, pant, wag your head, smite your hands together, slap your thigh, your breast, your forehead, and you will go straight to the heart of the dingier members of your audience.”¹²²

To all this excellent counsel Quintilian adds, in his twelfth book, the best literary criticism that has survived from antiquity. He enters with zest into the ancient and modern war between the ancients and the moderns, and finds truth precariously in the middle. He does not, like Fronto, wish to return to the rude simplicity of Cato and Ennius, but still more he would shun the “voluptuous and affected” fluency of Seneca; he prefers, as a model for students, the virile yet polished speech of Cicero, the one Roman writer who had in his line surpassed the Greeks.¹²³ Quintilian’s own style is often that of a schoolmaster, moribund with definitions, classification, and distinctions, and rising to eloquence only in denouncing Seneca; but it is a vigorous style, whose dignity is lightened now and then with touches of humanity and wit. Behind the good sense of the words we feel always the quiet goodness of the man; it is a moral stimulus to read him. Perhaps the Romans who had the privilege of his instruction took from it some part of the moral renovation that, more than any brilliance of letters, ennobled the age of the younger Pliny and Tacitus.

VIII. STATIUS AND MARTIAL

We have left to the last two poets who belonged to the same epoch, sought the favor of the same emperor and the same patrons, and yet never mention each other: one the purest, the other the coarsest, poet in the history of imperial Rome. Publius Papinius Statius was the son of a Neapolitan poet and grammarian; his environment and his education gave him everything but money and genius. He lisped in numbers, startled salons with poetical improvisations, and wrote an epic, the Thebaid, on the war of the Seven against Thebes. We cannot read it today, for its movement is obstructed with dead gods, and its smooth verses have an overpowering virtus dormitiva. But his contemporaries liked it; crowds gathered to hear him recite it in a Naples theater; they understood his mythological machinery, welcomed the delicacy of his sentiment, and found that his lines ran trippingly on the tongue. The judges in the Alban poetry contest gave him the first prize; rich men became his friends and helped him stave off penury;¹²⁴ Domitian himself invited him to dinner in the domus Flavia, and Statius repaid him by describing the palace as heaven and the Emperor as god.

To Domitian and other patrons, to his father and his friends, he addressed the most pleasing of his poems, the Silvae, modest idyls and eulogies in light and happy verse. In the Capitoline games, however, another poet won the crown, Statius’ star waned in fickle Rome, and he persuaded his reluctant wife to return with him to his boyhood home. In Naples he began another epic, the Achilleid; then suddenly, in 96, he died, a youth of thirty-five. He was not a great poet; but he struck a welcome note of kindliness and tenderness amid a literature too often sarcastic and bitter, and a society corrupt and coarse beyond any precedent. He would have been as famous as Martial if he had been as obscene.

Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Bilbilis in Spain in the fortieth year of our era. At twenty-four he came to Rome and won the friendship of Lucan and Seneca. Quintilian advised him to butter his bread by practicing law, but Martial preferred to starve on poetry. His friends were suddenly swept away in the conspiracy of Piso, and he was reduced to addressing his poems to rich men who might give him a dinner for an epigram. He lived in a third-floor garret, probably alone; for though he indites two poems to a woman whom he calls his wife, they are so foul that she must have been an invention or a bawd.¹²⁶

His poems, he lets us know, were read throughout the Empire, even among the Goths; he rejoices to learn that he was almost as famous as a racehorse, but he fretted to see his publisher enriched while he himself received nothing from the sale of his books. He descended to suggesting, in an epigram, that he badly needed a toga; the Emperor’s rich freedman Parthenius sent him one; he replied in two stanzas, one of which celebrated the newness of the garment, the other its cheap worthlessness. In time he found some more generous patrons; one gave him a little farm at Nomentum, and somehow he raised funds to buy a simple home on the Quirinal hill. He became a “client” or retainer to one rich man after another, waited upon them in the morning, and received an occasional gift; but he felt the shame of his situation and mourned that he did not have the courage to be contentedly poor and therefore free.¹²⁷ He could not afford to be poor, for he had to mingle in the society of men who could reward his verse. He showered Domitian with lauds and announced that if Jupiter and Domitian were to invite him to dinner on the same day he would turn down the god; but the Emperor preferred Statius. Martial became jealous of the younger poet and suggested that a live epigram was worth more than a dead epic.¹²⁸

The epigram had till now been a pretty conceit on any passing subject, sometimes a dedication, a compliment, an epitaph; Martial molded it into a briefer, sharper form, barbed with satiric sting. We do him injustice when we read these 1561 epigrams in a few sittings; they were issued in twelve books at divers times, and the reader was expected to use them in small portions as hors d’oeuvres, not as a prolonged feast. Most of them seem trivial today; their allusion was local and temporary, too well timed to endure. Martial does not take them very seriously; the bad ones, he agrees, outnumber the good, but he had to fill a volume.¹²⁹ He is a master of versification, knows all the meters and all the tricks of the poetic trade; but he avoids rhetoric as proudly as his prose patrician analogue, Petronius. He cares nothing for the mythological furniture that littered the literature of his age; he is interested in real men and women and their intimate life and describes them with relish and spite; “my pages,” he says, “taste of men.”¹³⁰ He can “take down” some stiff aristocrat or stingy millionaire, some pompous lawyer or famous orator; but he likes better to tell of barbers, cobblers, hawkers, jockeys, acrobats, auctioneers, poisoners, perverts, and prostitutes. His scenes are laid not in ancient Greece but in the baths, the theaters, the streets, the circus, the homes, and tenements of Rome. He is the poet laureate of worthless men.

He is more interested in money than in love, and most often thinks of the latter in one gender. There is some sentiment in him, and he speaks very tenderly of a friend’s child just dead; but there is no gallant line in his books, not even a noble wrath. He chants a litany of evil smells, and adds, “All these stenches I prefer to yours, Bassa.”¹³¹ He describes one of his mistresses:

Your tresses, Galla, are manufactured far away; you lay aside your teeth at night as you do your silk dresses; you lie stored away in a hundred caskets, and your face does not sleep with you; you wink with an eyebrow brought to you in the morning. No respect moves you for your outworn carcass, which you may now count as one of your ancestors.¹³²

He writes with unmanly vengefulness of the women who have refused him, and flings his epigrammatic mud at them with the delicacy of a scavenger. His love lyrics are addressed to boys; he climbs to ecstasy over the fragrance of “thy kisses, cruel lad.”¹³³ One of his love poems begot a famous English counterpart:

I do not love you, Sabidius, the reason I cannot tell;

This only I can say—I dislike you very well.^*

Indeed there are many whom Martial does not like. He describes them under transparent pseudonyms and in language that can be found today only on the most private public walls.¹³⁵ He is always libeling his enemies, as Statius is always celebrating his friends. Some of his victims retaliated by publishing under his name poems filthier than his own, or attacking the men whom Martial was anxious to please. From these technically perfect epigrams one could construct a full vocabulary of barroom urology.

But Martial’s obscenity sits on him lightly. He shares it with his time, and never doubts that even highborn maidens in palace bowers will like it. “Lucretia blushed and laid down my volume, but Brutus was present. Brutus, go away; she will read it.”¹³⁶ The poetic license of the age allowed indecencies, provided the meter and diction were correct. Sometimes Martial boasts of his lubricity; “no page of mine is without wantonness.”¹³⁷ More often he is a bit ashamed of it, and begs us to believe that his life is cleaner than his verse.

At last he tired of purveying compliments and insults as a source of food; he began to long for a quieter, wholesomer life, and the haunts of his native Spain. He was now fifty-seven, with gray head and bushy beard, so swarthy that anyone, he tells us, could see at a glance that he had been born near the Tagus. He addressed a poetical bouquet to the younger Pliny and received in return a sum that paid his fare to Bilbilis. The little town welcomed him, forgiving his morals for his fame; he found simpler patrons there, but more open-handed than those at Rome. A kindly lady presented him with a modest villa, and there he spent his few remaining years. In 101 Pliny wrote: “I have just heard of Martial’s death. The news has deeply grieved me. He was a man of wit, piquant and mordant, who mixed in his verse salt and honey, and not least of all, candor.”¹³⁸ There must have been some secret virtue in the man if Pliny loved him.

CHAPTER XV

Rome at Work

A.D. 14-96

I. THE SOWERS

TO the Silver Age belongs the classic Roman work on agriculture—the De Re Rustica (65) of Junius Columella. Like Quintilian, Martial, and the Senecas, he came from Spain; he farmed several estates in Italy and retired to a residence in Rome. The best lands, he found, were taken up by the villas and grounds of the rich; the next best by olive orchards and vineyards; only inferior soils were left for tillage. “We have abandoned the husbanding of our soil to our lowest slaves, and they treat it like barbarians.” The freemen of Italy, he thought, were degenerating in cities when they should have been hardening themselves by working the earth; “we ply our hands in circuses and theaters rather than among crops and vines.” Columella loved the soil, and felt that the physical culture of the earth is saner than the literary culture of the town; farming “is a blood relative of wisdom” (consanguinea sapientiae). To lure men back to the fields he adorned his subject with polished Latin, and when he came to speak of gardens and flowers he fell into enthusiastic verse.

It was in this period that Pliny the naturalist pronounced a premature epitaph: latifundia perdidere Italiam—“the large farms have ruined Italy.” Similar judgments occur in Seneca, Lucan, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal. Seneca described cattle ranches wider than kingdoms, cultivated by fettered slaves; some estates were so large, said Columella, that their masters could never ride around them.¹ Pliny mentions an estate with 4117 slaves, 7200 oxen, and 257,000 other animals.² Land distributions by the Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus had raised the number of small holdings, but many of these had been abandoned during the wars and bought in by the rich. When imperial administration reduced plunder in the provinces, much patrician wealth went into large farms. The latifundia spread because greater profits flowed from producing cattle, oil, and wine than from growing cereals and vegetables, and the discovery that ranching, to be most profitable, required the operation of large areas under one management. By the close of the first Christian century these advantages were being offset by the rising cost of slaves and their slow and uninventive work.³ The long transition now began from slavery to serfdom. As peace diminished the flow of war captives into bondage, some owners of large estates, instead of operating them with slaves, divided them into small holdings and leased these to free tenants (coloni, cultivators) who paid in rent and labor. Most of the ager publicus belonging to the government was now worked in this way. So were the extensive properties of the younger Pliny, who describes his tenants as healthy, sturdy, good-natured, talkative peasants—precisely such as one finds throughout Italy today, unchanged after all-changes.

The modes and tools of tillage were essentially as they had been for centuries. Plow, spade, hoe, pick, pitchfork, scythe, rake, have preserved their forms almost unaltered for 3000 years. Corn was ground in mills turned by water or by beasts. Screw pumps and water wheels raised water out of mines or into irrigation canals. Soils were protected by crop rotation, and fertilized by manure, alfalfa, clover, rye, or beans.⁴ Seed selection was highly developed. Skillful care drew three, sometimes four, harvests per year from the rich fields of the Campagna and the valley of the Po;⁵ from one planting of alfalfa four to six crops could be cut yearly for ten years.⁶ All but the rarest European vegetables were grown, some of them in greenhouses for the winter trade. Fruit and nut trees of every sort abounded, for Roman generals and merchants, and alien merchants and slaves, had brought in many new species: the peach from Persia, the apricot from Armenia, the cherry from Pontic Cerasus (whence its name), the grape from Syria, the damson (pruna damascena) from Damascus, the plum and filbert from Asia Minor, the walnut from Greece, the olive and fig from Africa. . . . Clever arboriculturists had grafted the walnut upon the arbutus, the plum upon the plane tree, the cherry upon the elm. Pliny enumerates twenty-nine varieties of figs grown in Italy.⁷ “Through the zeal of our farmers,” said Columella, “Italy has learned to produce the fruits of almost the whole world.”⁸ In turn it transmitted these arts to western and northern Europe. Our rich dietary has a wide geography and a long history behind it, and the very food that we eat may be part of our Oriental and classical heritage.

Olive orchards were numerous, but vineyards were everywhere, beautifully terraced on the slopes. Italy produced fifty famous kinds of wine, and Rome alone drank 25,000,000 gallons per year—two quarts per week for each man, woman, and child, slave or free. Most wines were produced by capitalistic organization—by large-scale operations financed from Rome.⁹ Much of the product was exported and taught the graces of wine to beer-drinking countries like Germany and Gaul. During this first century Spain, Africa, and Gaul began to grow their own grapes; Italian vintners lost one provincial outlet after another, and glutted their domestic market in one of the few “overproduction” crises of Roman economy. Domitian tried to ease the situation, and restore cereal culture, by prohibiting the further plantings of vines in Italy and ordering half of all vineyards in the provinces destroyed.¹⁰ These edicts aroused a fury of protest and could not be enforced. In the second century the wines of Gaul and the oil of Spain, Africa, and the East began to crowd Italian products out of Mediterranean markets, and the economic decline of Italy began.

A large part of the peninsula was given over to grazing. The cheapest soils and slaves could be used for the raising of cattle, sheep, and swine. Careful attention was paid to scientific breeding. Horses were bred chiefly for war, hunting, and sport, seldom as draft animals; oxen drew the plow and the cart, mules bore burdens on their backs. Cows, sheep, and goats gave three kinds of milk, from which the Italian made delectable cheeses then as now. Swine were herded in woods rich with acorns and nuts; Rome, said Strabo, lived chiefly on pork fattened in the oak forests of northern Italy. Poultry fertilized the farmyard and helped feed the family, while bees provided the ancient and honorable substitute for sugar. If we add some acres of flax and hemp, a little hunting and much fishing, we get a picture of the Italian countryside as it was nineteen hundred years ago, and is today.

II. THE ARTISANS

There was not in Roman life—and perhaps there would not be in a healthy economy—so geographical a division between agriculture and industry as in our modern states. The ancient rural home—cottage, villa, or estate—was literally a manufactory, where the hands of men carried on a dozen vital industries, and the skill of women filled the house and its environs with a score of wholesome arts. There the woods were turned into shelter, fuel, and furniture, cattle were slain and dressed, grain was milled and baked, oil and wine were pressed, food was prepared and preserved, wool and flax were cleaned and woven; sometimes clay was fired into vessels, bricks, and tiles, and metal was beaten into tools; life there had an educative fullness and variety that come to few of us in our time of wider movement and narrowing specialties. Nor was this diversity of occupation the sign of a poor and primitive economy; the wealthiest households were the most self-sufficient, and prided themselves on making the largest part of what they needed. A family was an organization of economic helpmates engaged in the united agriculture and industry of a home.

When an artisan undertook to do a certain task for several families, and set up his shop at some center within reach of them all, village economy supplemented, but did not supersede, domestic industry. So the miller took and ground the grain of many fields; later he baked the bread, and finally he delivered it. Forty bakeries were unearthed at Pompeii, and at Rome the pastrymakers were a separate guild. There were likewise contractors who bought an olive crop on the trees and gathered the fruit;¹¹ most estates, however, continued to process their own oil and bake their own bread. The clothing of peasants and philosophers was homespun, but the well-to-do wore garments that, though woven at home, were carded, cleaned, bleached, and cut in a fullery. Some delicate woolen fabrics were woven in factories; and such flax as was not made into sails or nets was turned by factories into linen garments for women and handkerchiefs for men.¹² In its next stage the cloth might be sent to a dyer, who not only colored it but impressed upon it such delicate designs as we find on the costumes in Pompeian murals. Tanning of leather had also reached the factory stage, but shoemakers were usually individual craftsmen, making shoes to order; some were specialists who made only fancy slippers for feminine feet.

The extractive industries were manned almost wholly by slaves or criminals. The gold and silver mines of Dacia, Gaul, and Spain, the lead and tin of Spain and Britain, the copper of Cyprus and Portugal, the sulphur of Sicily, the salt beds of Italy, the iron of Elba, the marble of Luna, Hymettus, and Paros, the porphyry of Egypt, and in general all subsoil natural resources, were owned by the state, were operated by it or on lease from it, and provided a main source of the national revenue; the gold of Spain alone yielded Vespasian $44,000,000 a year.¹³ The quest for minerals was a chief source of imperialist conquest; the mineral wealth of Britain, says Tacitus, was “the prize of victory” in Claudius’ campaign.¹⁴ Wood and charcoal were the chief fuels. Petroleum was known in Commagene, Babylonia, and Parthia,¹⁵ and the defenders of Samosata threw it in flaming torches upon Lucullus’ troops; but there is no sign of its commercial use as a fuel.^* Coal was found in the Peloponnesus and northern Italy, but was used chiefly by smiths.¹⁶ The art of carburizing iron into steel had now spread from Egypt throughout the Empire. Most ironworkers, coppersmiths, goldsmiths, and silversmiths had a single forge and worked with one or two apprentices. At Capua, Minturnae, Puteoli, Aquileia, Como, and elsewhere several forges and smelters were united in factories; those at Capua were apparently large-scale capitalist enterprises externally financed.

The building trades were well organized and specialized. Dendrophoroi (“tree-bearers”) cut and delivered the wood, fabri lignarii (“woodworkers”) made houses and furniture, caementarii mixed the cement, structores laid the foundations, arcuarii built the arches, parietarii raised the walls, tectores applied plaster, albarii whitewashed it, artifices plumbarii inserted the plumbing—usually with pipes of lead (plumbum), and marmorii paved marble floors; we may imagine the jurisdictional disputes. Bricks and tiles were provided by potteries, many of which had reached the factory stage. Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius owned such factories and made fortunes from them.¹⁷ The kilns of Arretium, Mutina, Puteoli, Surrentum, and Pollentia supplied the ordinary tableware of all the European and African provinces as well as Italy. This wholesale production laid no claim to artistic excellence; the emphasis was now frankly on quantity; and the terra sigillata (“signed earthenware”) that now crowded the Italian market was distinctly inferior to the earlier product of Arretium. Outstanding work, as we shall see, was done in glass.

The factory production of glass, brick, tiles, pottery, and metalware does not warrant us in ascribing an industrial capitalism to ancient Italy. Rome itself had only two large factories—a paper mill and a dyeing establishment;¹⁸ probably neither metals nor fuels were at hand in quantity, and the profits of politics seemed more honorable than the proceeds of industry. In the factories of central Italy almost all the workers, and some of the managers, were slaves; in those of north Italy there was a greater proportion of freemen. Slaves were still sufficiently available to discourage the development of machinery; listless slave labor, with small stake in the product, was not likely to make inventions; some labor-saving devices were rejected because they might have caused technological unemployment; and the purchasing power of the people was too low to stimulate or support mechanized production.¹⁹ There were of course many simple machines, common to Italy, Egypt, and the Greek world: screw presses, screw pumps, water wheels, animal-driven grain mills, spinning wheels, looms, the crane and pulley, the revolving mold for pottery. . . . But Italian life was now (A.D. 96) as highly industrialized as life was ever to be until the nineteenth century. It would hardly go further on the basis of slavery and a high concentration of wealth. Roman law contracepted large organizations by requiring every sharer in an industrial undertaking to be a legally responsible partner; it forbade “limited liability” companies and allowed joint-stock corporations only for the performance of governmental contracts. Since similar restrictions affected banks, these could seldom provide capital for large-scale enterprise. At no time would the industrial development of Rome or Italy equal that of Alexandria or the Hellenistic East.

III. THE CARRIERS

From Caesar to Commodus wheeled vehicles were forbidden in Rome by day; people then walked, or were carried in slave-borne chairs or litters. For longer distances they traveled on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages or chariots. Travel by public stagecoach averaged some sixty miles a day. Caesar once rode by carriage 800 miles in eight days; messengers bearing the news of Nero’s death to Galba in Spain covered 332 miles in thirty-six hours; Tiberius, hurrying day and night, rode in three days 600 miles to stand beside his dying brother. The public post, by carriage or horse at all hours, averaged one hundred miles a day. Augustus had modeled it on the Persian system, as indispensable to imperial administration. It was called cursus publicus as serving the res publica, or commonwealth, by carrying official correspondence. Private individuals could use it only by rare and special permission through a government diploma (“double-folded”) or passport entitling the bearer to certain privileges and introducing him en route to persons of diplomatic importance. A more rapid means of communication was sometimes arranged by semaphores flashing signals from point to point; by this primitive telegraph the arrival of the grain ships at Puteoli was quickly made known to worried Rome. Nonofficial correspondence went by special courier or merchants or traveling friends; some traces suggest the existence, under the Empire, of private companies arranging to transmit private mail. Fewer letters were written than now, and better. Nevertheless, the movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar’s day as at any time before the railway. In 54 B.C.. Caesar’s letter from Britain reached Cicero at Rome in twenty-nine days; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, required thirty days.²⁰

Communication and transport were immensely aided by the consular roads. These were the tentacles of Roman law, the members by which the mind of Rome became the will of the realm. They achieved in the ancient world a commercial revolution comparable in kind with that which the railroads effected in the nineteenth century. Until steam transportation came, the roads of medieval and modern Europe were inferior to those of the Empire under the Antonines. Italy alone had then 372 main routes, and 12,000 miles of paved thoroughfares; the Empire had 51,000 miles of paved highways and a pervasive network of secondary roads. Highways ran over the Alps to Lyons, Bordeaux, Paris, Rheims, Rouen, and Boulogne; others to Vienna, Mainz, Augsburg, Cologne, Utrecht, and Leiden; and from Aquileia a road skirted the Adriatic to connect with the Via Egnatia to Thessalonica. Magnificent bridges replaced the ferries that had crept across a thousand impeding streams. At every mile on the consular roads stone markers gave the distance to the next town; 4000 of these survive. At intervals seats were placed for tired travelers. At every tenth mile a statio offered a stopping place, where fresh horses could be hired; at every thirty miles was a mansio—an inn that was also a store, a saloon, and a brothel.²¹ The main halting points were the civitates, cities, usually equipped with fair hotels, which were in some cases owned and managed by the municipal government.²² Most innkeepers robbed their guests whenever convenient, and other thieves made the highways unsafe at night despite a garrison of soldiers at each statio. “Itineraries” could be bought, showing routes, stations, and intermediate distances.²³ Rich men, disdaining the inns, brought their equipage and slaves with them, and slept in their guarded carriages or in the homes of friends or officials on the way.

Despite all difficulties, there was probably more traveling in Nero’s day than at any time before our birth. “Many people,” says Seneca, “make long voyages to see some remote sight”;²⁴ and Plutarch speaks of “globe-trotters who spend the best part of their lives in inns and on boats.”²⁵ Educated Romans flocked to Greece and Egypt and Greek Asia, scratched their names on historic monuments, sought healing waters or climates, ambled by art collections in the temples, studied under famous philosophers, rhetors, or physicians, and doubtless used Pausanias as their Baedeker.²⁶

These “grand tours” usually involved a voyage on one or more of the merchant vessels that cut the Mediterranean with a hundred routes of trade. “Look at the harbors and seas,” exclaimed Juvenal, “filled with great keels, more peopled than the land.”²⁷ Rome’s rival ports, Puteoli, Portus, and Ostia, were alive with fabri navales building ships, stuppatores calking them, saburarii loading sand into them as ballast, sacrarii unloading grain in sacks, mensores weighing it, lenuncularii operating tenders between large ships and the shore, and urinatores diving for goods fallen into the sea. Of corn barges alone twenty-five were drawn up the Tiber every working day; if we add the transport of building stone, metals, oil, wine, and a thousand other articles, we picture a river teeming with commerce and noisy with loading and carrying machines, with dockmen, porters, stevedores, traders, brokers, and clerks.

Ships were driven with sails, aided by one or more banks of oars. They were larger, on the average, than before; Athenaeus describes a grain cargo vessel as 420 feet long with a fifty-seven-foot beam;²⁹ but this was highly exceptional. Some vessels had three decks; many took 250, several took a thousand, tons of freight. Josephus tells of one that carried 600 persons—passengers and crew;³⁰ another carried an Egyptian obelisk as large as that in Central Park, New York, together with 200 sailors, 1300 passengers, 93,000 bushels of wheat, and a load of linen, pepper, paper, and glass.³¹ Nevertheless, voyages except along the coasts were still dangerous, as Saint Paul found; between November and March only a few vessels ventured across the open Mediterranean, and in midsummer eastward voyages were made almost impossible by the etesian winds. Night sailing was now frequent, and every harbor of any pretense had a good lighthouse. Danger of piracy had almost disappeared from the Mediterranean. To discourage it, and starve rebellion, Augustus had stationed two main war fleets at Ravenna on the Adriatic and at Misenum on the Bay of Naples, besides minor squadrons at ten other points in the Empire. We may judge what Pliny called “the immense majesty of the Roman peace” by the fact that for two centuries we hardly hear of these fleets.

Passenger schedules were largely indefinite, as sailings were determined by weather and commercial convenience. Rates were low—e.g., two drachmas ($1.20) from Athens to Alexandria; but passengers brought their own food, and probably most of them slept on deck. Speed was as moderate as the fares, and varied with the winds, averaging six knots per hour; one might cross the Adriatic in a day, or, like Cicero, take three weeks from Patrae to Brundisium. A swift cruiser might make 230 knots in twenty-four hours.³² With favorable winds, six days carried one from Sicily to Alexandria or from Gades to Ostia, and four from Utica to Rome.³³ The longest and most dangerous voyage was the six-month sail from Aden, in Arabia, to India, for monsoons forced vessels to hug the pirate-breeding coast all the way. At some time before A.D. 50 an Alexandrian Greek skipper, Hippalus, charted the periodicity of the monsoon winds and found that in certain seasons he could sail directly and safely across the Indian Ocean. The discovery was almost as important for that sea as the voyage of Columbus was for the Atlantic. From Egyptian ports on the Red Sea ships thereafter sailed to India in forty days. About A.D. 80 another Alexandrian captain, of unknown name, wrote a Periplus of the Erythrean Sea as a handbook for merchants trading along the east African coast and with India. Meanwhile other mariners had developed routes through the Atlantic to Gaul, Britain, Germany, even to Scandinavia and Russia.³⁴ Never before in human memory had the seas borne so many vessels, products, and men.

IV. THE ENGINEERS

The ships and roads that carried goods, the bridges that bound the roads, the harbors and docks that received the ships, the aqueducts that brought clean water to Rome, the sewers that drained the rural marshes and the city’s waste, were the work of Roman, Greek, and Syrian engineers operating with armies of free labor, legionaries, and slaves. They raised or drew heavy loads or stones by pulleys on cranes or vertical beams, worked by windlasses on treadmills turned by animals or men.³⁵ They banked the treacherous Tiber with walls set back in three stages, so that low water would not expose the muddy bed.^* They dredged a multiple harbor at Ostia for Claudius, Nero, and Trajan, opened lesser havens at Marseilles, Puteoli, Misenum, Carthage, Brundisium, and Ravenna, and renewed the greatest of all at Alexandria. They emptied the Fucine Lake and reclaimed its bed for cultivation by boring a tunnel through a mountain of rock. They lined the subsoil of Rome with sewers of concrete, brick, and tile which lasted for hundreds of years. They drained the swamps of Campania sufficiently to make it habitable, for many sumptuous palaces are indicated by the ruins there.³⁶† They executed the astonishing public works by which Caesar and the emperors mitigated unemployment and beautified Rome.

The consular roads were among their simpler achievements. How did these highways compare with those of today? They were from sixteen to twenty-four feet wide, but near Rome part of this width was taken up with sidewalks (margines) paved with rectangular stone slabs. They went straight to their goal in brave sacrifice of initial economy to permanent saving: they overleaped countless streams with costly bridges, crossed marshes with long, arched viaducts of brick and stone, climbed up and down steep hills with no use of cut and fill, and crept along mountainsides or high embankments secured by powerful retaining walls. Their pavement varied with locally available material. Usually the bottom layer (pavimentum) was a four- to six-inch bed of sand, or one inch of mortar. Upon this were imposed four strata of masonry: the statumen, a foot deep, consisting of stones bound with cement or clay; the rudens, ten inches of rammed concrete; the nucleus, twelve to eighteen inches of successively laid and rolled layers of concrete; and the summa crusta of silex or lava polygonal slabs, one to three feet in diameter, and eight to twelve inches thick. The upper surface of the slabs was smoothed, and the joints were so well fitted as to be hardly discernible. Occasionally the surface was of concrete; on less important roads it might be of gravel; in Britain it was composed of flint stones laid in cement upon a gravel bed. The substructure was so deep that little attention was given to drainage. All in all, these were the most durable roads in history. Many of them are still in use; but their steep gradients, designed for pack mules and small vehicles, have compelled their abandonment by modern traffic.³⁷

The bridges that carried these roads were themselves high exemplars of wedded science and art. The Romans inherited from Ptolemaic Egypt the principles of hydraulic engineering; they employed them on an unprecedented scale, and the methods they transmitted remained unchanged till our time. They carried to its ancient limit the building of foundations and piers under water. They drove into the bed a double cylinder of piles, boarded each cylinder tightly, drained the water from between them, covered the exposed bottom with rock or lime, and on this basis raised the pier. Eight bridges crossed the Tiber at Rome: some sacredly ancient like the Pons Sublicius, on which no metal might be used; some so well built that like the Pons Fabricius they are functioning to this day. From these spans the Roman arch would go forth to bridge a hundred thousand streams in the white man’s world.

Pliny thought that the aqueducts were Rome’s greatest achievement. “If one will note the abundance of water skillfully brought into the city for many public and private uses; if he will observe the lofty aqueducts required to maintain a proper elevation and grade, the mountains that had to be pierced, the depressions that had to be filled—he will conclude that the whole globe offers nothing more marvelous.”³⁸ From distant springs fourteen aqueducts, totaling 1300 miles, brought through tunnels and over majestic arches into Rome some 300,000,000 gallons of water daily—as large a quantity per capita as in any modern city.³⁹ These structures had their faults; leaks developed in the lead pipes and required frequent repair; by the end of the Western Empire all the aqueducts had gone out of use.^* But when we consider that they fed ample water to homes, tenements, palaces, fountains, gardens, parks, and public baths where thousands bathed at once, and that enough remained to create artificial lakes for naval battles, we begin to see that despite terror and corruption Rome was the best managed capital of antiquity and one of the best equipped cities of all time.

At the head of the water department at the close of the first century was Sextus Julius Frontinus, whose books have made him the most famous of Roman engineers. He had already served as praetor, as governor of Britain, and several terms as consul. Like modern British statesmen he found time to write books as well as to govern states; he published a work on military science, of which the concluding portion, Stratagemata, remains,^* and left us his personal account of the water system of Rome (De aquis urbis Romae). He describes the corruption and malfeasance that he found in his department on taking office, and how palaces and brothels secretly tapped the water mains, and so greedily that once Rome ran out of water.⁴¹ He describes his resolute reforms; tells in proud detail the sources, length, and function of each aqueduct; and concludes like Pliny: “Who will venture to compare with these mighty conduits the idle Pyramids, or the famous but useless works of the Greeks?”⁴² We sense here the frankly utilitarian Roman with little taste for beauty apart from use; we can understand him and admit that a city should have clean water before it has Parthenons. Through these artless books we perceive that even in the age of the despots there were Romans of the old type, men of ability and integrity, conscientious administrators who made the Empire prosper under the lords of misrule and opened a way for monarchy’s golden age.

V. THE TRADERS

The improvement of government and transport expanded Mediterranean trade to an unprecedented amplitude. At one end of the busy process of exchange were peddlers hawking through the countryside everything from sulphur matches to costly imported silks; wandering auctioneers who served also as town criers and advertised lost goods and runaway slaves; daily markets and periodical fairs; shopkeepers haggling with customers, cheating with false or tipped scales, and keeping a tangential eye for the aedile’s inspectors of weights and measures. A little higher in the commercial hierarchy were shops that manufactured their own merchandise; these were the backbone of both industry and trade. At or near the ports were wholesalers (magnarii) who sold, to retailers or consumers, goods recently brought in from abroad; sometimes the owner or captain of a vessel would sell his cargo directly from the deck.

For two centuries Italy enjoyed an “unfavorable” balance of trade—cheerfully bought more than she sold. She exported some Arretine pottery, some wine and oil, some metalware, glass, and perfumes from Campania; for the rest her products were kept at home. Meanwhile the wholesalers had agents buying goods for Italy in all parts of the Empire, and foreign merchants had Greek or Syrian drummers touting and placing their goods in Italy. By this double process the delicacies of half the planet came to please the palate, clothe the flesh, and adorn the home of the Roman optimate. “Whoever wishes to see all the goods of the world,” said Aelius Aristides, “must either journey throughout the world or stay in Rome.”⁴³ From Sicily came corn, cattle, hides, wine, wool, fine woodwork, statuary, jewelry; from north Africa corn and oil; from Cyrenaica silphium; from central Africa wild beasts for the arena; from Ethiopia and east Africa ivory, apes, tortoise shell, rare marbles, obsidian, spices, and Negro slaves; from west Africa oil, beasts, citron, wood, pearls, dyes, copper; from Spain fish, cattle, wool, gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron, cinnabar, wheat, linen, cork, horses, ham, bacon, and the finest olives and olive oil; from Gaul clothing, wine, wheat, timber, vegetables, cattle, poultry, pottery, cheese; from Britain tin, lead, silver, hides, wheat, cattle, slaves, oysters, dogs, pearls, and wooden goods. From Belgium flocks of geese were driven all the way to Italy to supply goose livers for aristocratic bellies. From Germany came amber, slaves, and furs; from the Danube wheat, cattle, iron, silver, and gold; from Greece and the Greek isles cheap silk, linen, wine, oil, honey, timber, marble, emeralds, drugs, artworks, perfumes, diamonds, and gold. From the Black Sea came corn, fish, furs, hides, slaves; from Asia Minor fine linen and woolen fabrics, parchment, wine, Smyrna and other figs, honey, cheese, oysters, carpets, oil, wood; from Syria wine, silk, linen, glass, oil, apples, pears, plums, figs, dates, pomegranates, nuts, nard, balsam, Tyrian purple, and the cedar of Lebanon; from Palmyra textiles, perfumes, drugs; from Arabia incense, gums, aloes, myrrh, laudanum, ginger, cinnamon, and precious stones; from Egypt corn, paper, linen, glass, jewelry, granite, basalt, alabaster, and porphyry. Finished products of a thousand kinds came to Rome and the West from Alexandria, Sidon, Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Rhodes, Miletus, Ephesus, and the other great cities of the East, while the East received raw materials and money from the West.

In addition to all this there was a substantial import trade from outside the Empire. From Parthia and Persia came gems, rare essences, morocco leather, rugs, wild beasts, and eunuchs. From China—through Parthia, or India, or the Caucasus—came silk, raw or manufactured; the Romans thought it a vegetable product combed from trees and valued it at its weight in gold.⁴⁴ Much of this silk came to the island of Cos, where it was woven into dresses for the ladies of Rome and other cities; in A.D. 91 the relatively poor state of Messenia had to forbid its women to wear transparent silk dresses at religious initiations; it was with such garments that Cleopatra touched the hearts of Caesar and Antony.⁴⁵ In return the Chinese imported from the Empire carpets, jewels, amber, metals, dyes, drugs, and glass. Chinese historians speak of an embassy coming by sea to the Emperor Huan-ti in 166 from the Emperor “An-Tun”—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; more probably it was a band of merchants posing as ambassadors. Sixteen Roman coins, dating from Tiberius to Aurelius, have been found in Shansi. From India came pepper, spikenard, and other spices (the same that Columbus would seek), herbs, ivory, ebony, sandalwood, indigo, pearls, sardonyx, onyx, amethyst, carbuncle, diamonds, iron products, cosmetics, textiles, tigers, and elephants. We may judge the extent of this trade, and the Roman hunger for luxuries, by noting that Italy imported more from India than from any other country except Spain.⁴⁶ From one Egyptian port alone, Strabo avers, 120 ships sailed every year for India and Ceylon.⁴⁷ In exchange India took a modest quantity of wine, metals, and purple, and the rest—over 100,000,000 sesterces per year—in bullion or coin. A like amount went to Arabia and China, and probably to Spain.⁴⁸

This immense trade produced prosperity for two centuries, but its unsound basis ruined Roman economy in the end. Italy made no attempt at equaling imports with exports; she appropriated the mines, and taxed the people, of half a hundred states to provide her with the money to meet her international balances. As the richer veins of the mines gave out, and the zest for exotic luxuries continued, Rome tried to stave off the breakdown of her import system by conquering new mineral regions like Dacia, and by debasing her once incorruptible currency—turning ever less bullion into ever more coin. When the costs of administration and war mounted nearer to the profits of empire, Rome had to pay for goods with goods, and could not. Italy’s dependence upon imported food was her vital weakness; the moment she could not force other countries to send her food and soldiers she was doomed. Meanwhile the provinces recovered not only prosperity but economic initiative: Italian merchants, in this first century A.D., almost disappeared from Eastern ports, while Syrian and Greek traders established themselves at Delos and Puteoli and multiplied in Spain and Gaul. In the leisurely oscillation of history the East was preparing once more to dominate the West.

VI. THE BANKERS

How were production and commerce financed? First by the maintenance of a comparatively reliable currency internationally honored. All Roman coins had suffered gradual depreciation since the First Punic War, for the Treasury had found it convenient to pay off governmental war debts by permitting the inflation that naturally comes from the multiplication of money and the diminution of goods. The as, originally a pound of copper, had been reduced to two ounces in 241, one ounce in 202, half an ounce in 87 B.C., and a quarter ounce in A.D. 60. During the final century of the Republic the generals had issued their own coinage, usually in aurei, gold coins, normally worth one hundred sesterces. From this military coinage that of the emperors was descended, and the emperors followed Caesar’s custom of stamping their effigies on their issues as symbols of the state’s guarantee. The sesterce was now made from copper instead of silver and was revalued at four asses.^* Nero lowered the silver content of the denarius to ninety per cent of its former quantity, Trajan to eighty-five per cent, Aurelius to seventy-five, Commodus to seventy, Septimius Severus to fifty. Nero reduced the aureus from one fortieth of a pound of gold to one forty-fifth, Caracalla to one fiftieth. A general rise of prices accompanied these depreciations, but income seems to have risen commensurately until Aurelius; perhaps this controlled inflation was a simple way of relieving debtors at the expense of creditors whose superior ability and opportunity, unchecked, would have concentrated wealth to the point of economic coagulation and political revolution. Despite these changes we must consider the Roman fiscal system one of the most successful and stable in history. For two centuries a single monetary standard was honored throughout the Empire; and with this stable medium investment and trade flourished as never before in the memory of men.

Consequently bankers were everywhere. They served as money-changers, accepted checking accounts and interest-bearing deposits, issued travelers’ checks and bills of exchange, managed, bought, and sold realty, placed investments and collected debts, and lent money to individuals and partnerships. This banking system had come from Greece and the Greek East, and was mostly in the hands of Greeks and Syrians even in Italy and the West; in Gaul the words for Syrian and banker were synonyms.⁴⁹ Interest rates, which had sunk to four per cent under the weight of Augustus’ Egyptian spoils, rose to six per cent after his death, and reached their legal maximum of twelve per cent by the age of Constantine.

The famous “panic” of A.D. 33 illustrates the development and complex interdependence of banks and commerce in the Empire. Augustus had coined and spent money lavishly, on the theory that its increased circulation, low interest rates, and rising prices would stimulate business. They did; but as the process could not go on forever, a reaction set in as early as 10 B.C., when this flush minting ceased. Tiberius rebounded to the opposite theory—that the most economical economy is the best. He severely limited the governmental expenditures, sharply restricted new issues of currency, and hoarded 2,700,000,000 sesterces in the Treasury. The resulting dearth of circulating medium was made worse by the drain of money eastward in exchange for luxuries. Prices fell, interest rates rose, creditors foreclosed on debtors, debtors sued usurers, and moneylending almost ceased. The Senate tried to check the export of capital by requiring a high percentage of every senator’s fortune to be invested in Italian land; senators thereupon called in loans and foreclosed mortgages to raise cash, and the crisis rose. When the senator Publius Spinther notified the bank of Balbus and Ollius that he must withdraw 30,000,000 sesterces to comply with the new law, the firm announced its bankruptcy. At the same time the failure of an Alexandrian firm, Seuthes and Son—due to their loss of three ships laden with costly spices—and the collapse of the great dyeing concern of Malchus at Tyre, led to rumors that the Roman banking house of Maximus and Vibo would be broken by their extensive loans to these firms. When its depositors began a “run” on this bank it shut its doors, and later on that day a larger bank, of the Brothers Pettius, also suspended payment. Almost simultaneously came news that great banking establishments had failed in Lyons, Carthage, Corinth, and Byzantium. One after another the banks of Rome closed. Money could be borrowed only at rates far above the legal limit. Tiberius finally met the crisis by suspending the land-investment act and distributing 100,000,000 sesterces to the banks, to be lent without interest for three years on the security of realty. Private lenders were thereby constrained to lower their interest rates, money came out of hiding, and confidence slowly returned.⁵⁰

VII. THE CLASSES

Nearly everybody in Rome worshiped money with mad pursuit, and all but the bankers denounced it. “How little you know the age you live in,” says a god in Ovid, “if you fancy that honey is sweeter than cash in hand!”⁵¹—and a century later Juvenal sarcastically hails the sanctissima divitiarum maiestas, “the most holy majesty of wealth.” To the end of the Empire Roman law forbade the Senatorial class to invest in commerce or industry; and though they evaded the prohibition by letting their freedmen invest for them, they despised their proxies and upheld rule by birth as the sole alternative to rule by money, or myths, or the sword. After all the revolutions and the decimations the old class divisions remained, with brand-new titles: members of the Senatorial and equestrian orders, magistrates and officials, were called honestiores, i.e., “men of honors” or offices; all the rest were humiliores, “lowly,” or tenuiores, “weak.” A sense of honor often mingled with the proud gravity of the senator: he served in a succession of public posts without pay and at much personal expense; he administered important functions with a fair degree of competence and integrity; he provided for public games, helped his clients, freed some of his slaves, and shared a part of his fortune with the people through benefactions before or after his death. Because of the obligations his position entailed, he was required to have a million sesterces to enter or remain in the Senatorial class.

One senator, Gnaeus Lentulus, had 400,000,000 sesterces; but with this exception the greatest fortunes in Rome were those of businessmen who did not disdain to handle money or trade. While reducing the powers of the Senate, the emperors had favored the business class with high office, had protected industry, commerce, and finance, and had based upon equestrian support the security of the Principate against patrician intrigue. Membership in this second order required 400,000 sesterces and specific nomination by the prince. Consequently many men of means belonged to the plebs.

The plebs was now a motley receptacle of such innominate businessmen, freeborn workers, peasant proprietors, teachers, doctors, artists, and freedmen. The census defined the proletarii not by their occupation but by their offspring (proles); an old Latin treatise called them “plebeians who offer nothing to the state but children.”⁵² Most of them found employment in the shops, factories, and commerce of the city at an average wage of a denarius (forty cents) a day; this rose in later centuries, but not faster than prices.⁵³ Exploitation of the weak by the strong is as natural as eating and differs from it only in rapidity; we must expect to find it in every age and under every form of society and government; but rarely has it been so thorough and unsentimental as in ancient Rome. Once all men had been poor, and had not known their poverty; now penury rubbed elbows with wealth, and suffered from consciousness. Absolute destitution, however, was prevented by the dole, the occasional gifts of patrons to clients, and the lordly legacies of rich men like Balbus, who left twenty-five denarii to every citizen of Rome. Class divisions verged upon caste; yet an able man might free himself from slavery, make a fortune, and rise to high office in the service of the prince. The freedman’s son became a fully enfranchised freeman, and his grandson could become a senator; soon a freedman’s grandson, Pertinax, would be emperor.

During the first century many high offices were filled by freedmen. They often had charge of the imperial finances in the provinces, the waterways of Rome, the mines and quarries and estates of the emperor, and the provisioning of the army camps. Freedmen and slaves, nearly all of Greek or Syrian origin, managed the imperial palaces and held vital positions in the imperial cabinet. Petty industry and trade fell increasingly into the control of freedmen. Some of them became great capitalists or landowners; some accumulated the largest fortunes of their time. Their past had seldom given them moral standards or elevated interests; after their liberation money became the absorbing interest of their lives; they made it without scruple and spent it without taste. Petronius savagely excoriated them in Trimalchio, and Seneca, less bitter, smiled at the new rich who bought books in ornamental sets but never read them.⁵⁴ Probably these satires were in part the jealous reactions of a caste that saw its ancient prerogatives of exploitation and luxury encroached upon, and could not forgive the men who were rising to share its perquisites and power.

The success of the freedmen must have given some consoling hope to the class that did most of the manual work in Italy. Beloch estimated the slaves in Rome about 30 B.C. at some 400,000, or nearly half the population; in Italy at 1,500,000. If we may believe the table gossipers of Athenaeus, some Romans had 20,000 slaves.⁵⁵ A proposal that slaves be required to wear a distinctive dress was voted down in the Senate lest they should realize their numerical strength.⁵⁶ Galen reckoned the proportion of slaves to freemen at Pergamum about A.D. 170 as one to three—i.e., twenty-five per cent; probably this proportion was not much different in other cities.^56a Human prices varied from 330 sesterces for a farm slave to the 700,000 ($105,000) paid by Marcus Scaurus for Daphnis the grammarian;⁵⁷ the average price was now 4000 sesterces ($400). Eighty per cent of the employees in industry and retail trade were slaves, and most of the manual or clerical work in government was performed by servi publici—“public slaves.” Domestic slaves were of every variety and condition: personal servants, handicraftsmen, tutors, cooks, hairdressers, musicians, copyists, librarians, artists, physicians, philosophers, eunuchs, pretty boys to serve at least as cupbearers, and cripples to provide amusement by their deformities; there was a special market at Rome where one might buy legless, armless, or three-eyed men, giants, dwarfs, or hermaphrodites.⁵⁸ Household slaves were sometimes beaten, occasionally killed. Nero’s father killed his freedmen because they refused to drink as much as he wished.⁵⁹ In an angry passage of his essay on anger Seneca describes the “wooden racks and other instruments of torture, the dungeons and other jails, the fires built around imprisoned bodies in a pit, the hook dragging up the corpses, the many kinds of chains, the varied punishments, the tearing of limbs, the branding of foreheads” ;^59a all these, apparently, entered into the life of the agricultural slave. Juvenal describes a lady as having slave after slave thrashed while her hair was being curled,⁶⁰ and Ovid pictures another mistress jabbing hairpins into her maidservant’s arms;⁶¹ but these tales have the earmarks of literary concoctions and must not be taken for history.

We are in danger of exaggerating the cruelty of the past for the same reason that we magnify the crime and immorality of the present—because cruelty is interesting by its very rarity. By and large the lot of a domestic slave under the Empire was lightened by a growing acceptance into the family, by mutual loyalty, by the pretty custom of owners waiting on the slaves at certain feasts, and by a security and permanence of employment exceptional in modern times. The joys of family life were not denied them, and their tombstones reveal as much tenderness as those of the free. One reads: “His parents have raised this monument to Eucopion, who lived six months and three days; the sweetest and most delightful babe, who, though he could not yet speak, was our greatest happiness.”⁶² Other epitaphs show the most affectionate relations between masters and slaves: one owner declares that a dead servant was as dear to him as his son; a young noble mourns the death of his nurse; a nurse expresses her grief over a dead charge; a learned lady raises an elegant memorial to her librarian.⁶³ Statius writes a “Poem of Consolation to Flavius Ursus on the Death of a Favorite Slave.”⁶⁴ It was not unusual for slaves to risk their lives to protect their masters; many voluntarily accompanied them into exile; several gave their lives for them. Some owners freed their slaves and married them; some treated them as friends; Seneca ate with his.⁶⁵ The refinement of manners and sensitivity, the absence of a color line between master and slave, the tenets of the Stoic philosophy, and the classless faiths coming in from the East had a share in the mitigation of slavery; but the basic factors were the economic advantage of the owner, and the rising cost of slaves. Many slaves were respected as having high cultural abilities—stenographers, research aides, financial secretaries and managers, artists, physicians, grammarians, and philosophers. A slave could in many cases go into business for himself, giving a share of his earnings to his owner and keeping the rest as his peculium, a “little money” peculiarly his own. With such earnings, or by faithful or exceptional service, or by personal attractiveness, a slave could usually achieve freedom in six years.⁶⁶

The condition of the workers, and even of the slaves, was in some measure relieved by the collegia, or workers’ organizations. By this period we hear of these in great number and in proud specialization; there were separate guilds of trumpeters, horn players, clarion blowers, tuba players, flutists, bagpipers, etc. Usually the collegia were modeled on the Italian municipality: they had a hierarchy of magistrates and one or more favorite deities whom they honored with a temple and an annual feast. Like the cities, they asked and found rich men and women to be their patrons, and to repay compliments by helping to finance their outings, their assembly halls, and their shrines. It would be an error to think of these associations as corresponding to the labor unions of our time; we can picture them better in terms of our fraternal orders, with their endless offices and titles of honor, their brotherly hilarity and jaunts, and their simple mutual aid. Rich men often encouraged the formation of these guilds and remembered them in their wills. In the collegium all the men were “brothers” and all the women “sisters,” and in some of them the slave could sit at table or in council with freeborn men. Every “member in good standing” was guaranteed a fancy funeral.

In the last century of the Republic demagogues of all orders discovered that many collegia could be persuaded to vote almost to a man for any giving candidate. In this way the associations became political instruments of patricians, plutocrats, and radicals; and their competitive corruption helped to destroy Roman democracy. Caesar outlawed them, but they revived; Augustus dissolved all but a few useful ones; Trajan again forbade them; Aurelius tolerated them; obviously they persisted throughout, within or beyond the law. In the end they became vehicles through which Christianity entered and pervaded the life of Rome.

VIII. THE ECONOMY AND THE STATE

How far did the government, under the Empire, attempt to control the economic life? It tried, and largely failed, to restore peasant proprietorship; here the emperors were more enlightened than the Senate, which was dominated by the owners of the latifundia. Domitian sought to encourage the planting of cereals in Italy, but without success; in consequence Italy was always in fear of starvation. Vespasian forced the Senate to accept him as emperor by holding Egypt, then the chief source of Italy’s wheat; Septimius Severus would do the same by seizing north Africa. The state had to assure, and therefore supervise, the importation and distribution of grain; it offered privileges to merchants bringing grain to Italy; Claudius guaranteed them against loss, and Nero freed their ships from the property tax. The delay or wrecking of the grain fleet was now the only cause that could stir the Roman populace to revolt.

The Roman economy was a system of laissez faire tempered with state ownership of natural resources—mines, quarries, fisheries, salt deposits, and considerable tracts of cultivated land.⁶⁸ The legions made the bricks and tiles needed for their buildings, and were often used on public construction, especially in the colonies. The manufacture of arms and machines of war was probably reserved for state arsenals; and there may have been, in the first century, such governmentally owned factories as we hear of in the third.⁶⁹ Public works were normally let out to private contractors under such strict state supervision that they were usually well done, and with a minimum of corruption.⁷⁰ About A.D. 80 such enterprises were increasingly carried out by the emperor’s freedmen with the labor of governmental slaves. At all times, apparently, the mitigation of unemployment was one purpose of these state undertakings.⁷¹

Trade was moderately burdened with a one per cent sales tax, light custom dues, and occasional tolls for the passage of goods over bridges and through towns. The aediles supervised retail trade under an excellent system of regulations, but, if we may believe an irate character in Petronius, they were no better than similar officials in other times; “they graft with the bakers and other such scoundrels . . . and the jaws of the capitalists are always open.”⁷² Finance was subject to governmental manipulation of the currency, and to the competition of the Treasury, which appears to have been the largest banker in the Empire; it lent money at interest to farmers on the pledge of their crops, and to city dwellers on the security of their furniture.⁷³ Commerce was aided by wars, which opened new resources and markets and won control of trade routes; so the expedition of Gallus into Arabia secured the passage to India against the competition of Arabs and Parthians. Pliny complained that campaigns had been undertaken that Roman ladies and dandies might have a wider choice of perfumes.⁷⁴

We must not exaggerate the wealth of ancient Rome. The total annual revenue of the state under Vespasian was at most 1,500,000,000 sesterces ($ 150,000,000)—less than a fifth of the budget of New York City today. The means of amassing great fortunes by large-scale production were unknown or ignored, and had not developed the immense and taxable industry and commerce of the modern world. The Roman government spent little on the navy, and nothing on servicing a national debt; it lived on its income, not on its debts. Industry being largely domestic, its products passed to the consumer with less intervening trade and taxation than today. Men produced for their own localities rather than for the general market. They did more for themselves, less for unseen others, than we do. They used their bodies more, worked longer hours less intensely, and did not miss a thousand luxuries that lay outside their dreams. They could not begin to rival the wealth of even our less affluent years; but they enjoyed a degree of prosperity such as the Mediterranean nations had not known before and, as a whole, have never known again. It was the material zenith of the ancient world.

CHAPTER XVI

Rome and Its Art

30 B.C.-A.D.96

I. THE DEBT TO GREECE

THE Romans were not of themselves an artistic people. Before Augustus they were warriors, after him they were rulers; they counted the establishment of order and security through government a greater good and nobler task than the creation or enjoyment of beauty. They paid great sums for the works of dead masters, but looked down upon living artists as menials. “While we adore images,” said the kindly Seneca, “we despise those who fashion them.”¹ Only law and politics, and, of manual arts, only agriculture (by proxy), seemed honorable ways of life. Barring the architects, most artists in Rome were Greek slaves or freedmen or hirelings; nearly all worked with their hands and were classed as artisans; Latin authors seldom thought of recording their lives or their names. Hence Roman art is almost wholly anonymous; no vivid personalities humanize its history as Myron, Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Protogenes light up the aesthetic story of Greece. Here the historian is constrained to speak of things, not men, to catalogue coins, vases, statues, reliefs, pictures, and buildings in the desperate hope that their accumulation may laboriously convey the crowded majesty of Rome. The products of art appeal to the soul through eye or ear or hand rather than through the intellect; their beauty fades when it is diluted into ideas and words. The universe of thought is only one of many worlds; each sense has its own; each art has therefore its characteristic medium, which cannot be translated into speech. Even an artist writes about art in vain.

A special misfortune clouds Roman art: we come to it from Greek art, which seems at first Its model and master. As the art of India disturbs us by strange shapes, so that of Rome chills us by the monotonous repetition of familiar forms. We have seen long since these Doric, Ionic, Corinthian columns and capitals, these smooth idealized reliefs, these busts of poets, rulers, and gods; even the astonishing frescoes of Pompeii, we are told, were copies of Greek originals; only the “Composite” order is indigenously Roman, and it offends our notions of classic unity, simplicity, and restraint. Certainly the art of the Augustan Age in Rome was overwhelmingly Greek. Through Sicily and Greek Italy, through Campania and Etruria, finally through Greece, Alexandria, and the Hellenic East, the aesthetic forms, methods, and ideals of Hellas passed into Roman art. When Rome became mistress of the Mediterranean, Greek artists poured into the new center of wealth and patronage and made countless copies of Greek masterpieces for Roman temples, palaces, and squares. Every conqueror brought home examples, every magnate scoured the cities for the surviving treasures, of Greek workmanship. Gradually Italy became a museum of bought or stolen paintings and statuary that set the tone of Roman art for a century. Artistically Rome was swallowed up in the Hellenistic world.

All this is half the truth. In one aspect, as we shall see, the history of Roman art is a conflict between the architrave and the arch; in another it is the struggle of native Italian realism to recover from the invasion of the peninsula by a Greek art that had pictured gods rather than men, the type or Platonic idea rather than the earthly individual, and had sought a noble perfection of form rather than truth of perception and utterance. That virile indigenous art which had helped to carve the figures on Etruscan tombs hibernated between the Greek conquest and Nero’s philhellenic ecstasy; but at last it broke the Hellenistic mold, and revolutionized classic art with realistic sculpture, impressionistic painting, and an architecture of arch and vault. Through these, as well as by her borrowed beauty, Rome became for eighteen centuries the art capital of the Western world.

II. THE TOILERS’ ROME

The ancient traveler bent on making a tour of Flavian Rome, and coming northward up the Tiber from Ostia, would first of all have noted the swiftness of the muddy current, carrying along the soil of hills and valleys to the sea. In this simple fact lay the leisurely tragedy of erosion, the difficulty of two-way commerce on the river, the periodical silting of the Tiber’s mouth, and the floods that almost every spring inundated the lower levels of Rome, confined the residents to upper stories reached by boats, and often destroyed the corn stored in granaries on the wharves. When the waters fell they carried houses to ruin, and men and animals to death.²

As he neared the city ^* the visitor’s eye would be caught by the Emporium, which ran for a thousand feet along the river’s eastern edge, and was noisy with workers, warehouses, markets, and moving goods. Beyond it rose that Aventine hill on which the angry plebs had staged its “sit-down strikes” of 494 and 449 B.C.. On the left bank at this point were the gardens that Caesar had bequeathed to the people, and behind them the Janiculum. Near the eastern shore at the beautiful Pons Aemilius lay the Forum Boarium or Cattle Market, with its (still standing) temples to Fortune and Mater Matuta, the Goddess of the Dawn. Farther north on the right loomed the Palatine and Capitoline hills, thick with palaces and temples. On the left bank were Agrippa’s gardens, and beyond them the Vatican hill. North of the city’s center, off the eastern shore, stretched the spacious lawns and decorative buildings of the Campus Martius, or Field of Mars; here were the theaters of Balbus and Pompey, the Circus of Flaminius, the Baths of Agrippa, and Domitian’s stadium; here the legions practiced, athletes competed, chariots raced, the people played ball,³ and the Assembly gathered, under the emperors, to go through the motions of democracy’s ghost.

Disembarking at the city’s northern limits, the visitor saw some remains of the wall ascribed to Servius Tullius. Rome had probably rebuilt it after the Gallic raid of 390 B.C., but the power of Roman arms, and the apparent security of the capital, allowed the rampart to lapse into ruins; not till Aurelian (A.D. 270) would another wall rise, a symbol of security gone. Gates had been cut in the wall, usually as single or triple archways, to permit the passage of the great roads from which they took their names. Touring the boundary of the city east and then south, the visitor would see the luxuriant gardens of Sallust, the dusty camp of the Praetorians, the arches of the Marcian, Appian, and Claudian aqueducts, and on his right, in turn, the Pincian, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, and Caelian hills. Leaving the walls and walking northwest on the Appian Way, he would pass through the Porta Capena along the southern slope of the Palatine to the Nova Via (“New Street”), and then northward through a maze of arches and buildings to stand in the ancient Forum, the head and heart of Rome.

Originally it had been a market place, some 600 by 200 feet; now (A.D. 96) the sellers had retired into the near-by streets or into other forums, but in the adjoining basilicas men sold shares in the publicans’ corporations, made contracts with the government, defended themselves in the courts, or consulted lawyers on how to escape the law. Around the Forum had been built, as around New York’s Wall Street, some modest temples to the gods, and some larger ones to Mammon. A population of statues adorned it, and the colonnades of great edifices provided the shade that could hardly come from a few ancient trees. From 145 B.C.. till Caesar it had been the meeting place of the assemblies. At either end stood a speaker’s platform, named rostrum because an earlier stand had been decorated with the rostra or prows of ships captured from Antium in 338 B.C.. At the western end was the Millenarium Aureum, or Golden Milestone, a column of gilded bronze set up by Augustus to mark the junction and origin of several consular roads; on it were inscribed the major towns reached and their distances from Rome. Along the southwest side ran the Sacra Via, or Sacred Way, which led up to the temples of Jupiter and Saturn on the Capitoline hill. North of this Forum the visitor would find a larger one, the Forum Iulium, built by Caesar to relieve the older area; near by were additional forums laid out for Augustus and Vespasian; and soon Trajan would clear and adorn the greatest of them all.

Even in so hasty a circuit the ancient tourist would have felt the crowded diversity of the city’s population and the tortuous inadequacy of its haphazard streets. A few of these were from sixteen to nineteen feet wide; most of them were meandering alleys in the Oriental style. Juvenal complained that carts rumbling over the uneven pavements at night made sleep impossible, while the jostling crowds made daytime walking a form of war. “Hurry as we may, we are blocked by a surging host in front, and by a dense mass of people pressing upon us from behind. One digs an elbow into me, another a sedan pole; one bangs a beam, another a wine cask, against my head. My legs are beplastered with mud; huge feet trample upon me from every side; a soldier plants his hobnail boot squarely upon my toes.”⁴ The main thoroughfares were paved with large pentagonal blocks of lava stone, sometimes so firmly set in concrete that a few have remained in place till our time. There was no street lighting; whoever ventured out after dark carried a lantern, or followed a torchbearing slave; in either case he ran the gauntlet of many thieves. Doors were fastened with locks and keys; windows were bolted at night, and those on the ground floor were guarded—as now—by iron bars. To these perils Juvenal adds the objects, solid or liquid, thrown from upper-floor windows. All in all, he thought, only a fool would go out to dinner without making his will.⁵

Since there were no public vehicles to transport workers from their homes to their toil, most of the plebs lived in brick tenements near the heart of the town, or in rooms behind or above their shops. A tenement usually covered an entire square, and was therefore called an insula, or island. Many of these buildings were six or seven stories high, and so flimsily built that several collapsed, killing hundreds of occupants. Augustus limited the frontal height of buildings to seventy Roman feet, but apparently the law permitted greater elevations in the rear, for Martial tells of “a poor devil whose attic is 200 steps up.”⁶ Many tenements had shops on the ground floor; some had balconies on the second; a few were connected at the top with tenements across the street by arched passages containing additional rooms—precarious penthouses for particular plebeians. Such insulae almost filled the Nova Via, the Clivus Victoriae (Victory Hill) on the Palatine, and the Subura—a noisy brothel-ridden district between the Viminal and the Esquiline. In them dwelt the longshoremen of the Emporium, the butchers of the Macellum, the fishmongers of the Forum Piscatorium, the cattlemen of the Forum Boarium, the vegetable vendors of the Forum Holitorium, and the workers in Rome’s factories, clerkships, and trades. The slums of Rome lapped the edges of the Forum.

The streets off the Forum were lined with shops and resounded with labor and bargaining. Fruit sellers, booksellers, perfumers, milliners, dyers, florists, cutlers, locksmiths, apothecaries, and other caterers to the needs, foibles, and vanities of mankind blocked the thoroughfares with their projecting booths. Barbers plied their trade in the open air, where all could hear; wine taverns were so numerous that Rome seemed to Martial one vast saloon.⁷ Each trade tended to center in some quarter or street and often gave the locality a name; so the sandalmakers were gathered in the Vicus Sandalarius, the harnessmakers in the Vicus Lorarius, the glassblowers in the Vicus Vitrarius, the jewelers in the Vicus Margaritarius.

In such shops the artists of Italy did their work—all but the greatest of them, who drew high fees and lived in peripatetic luxury. Lucullus gave Arcesilaus a million sesterces to make a statue of the goddess Felicitas, and Zenodorus received 400,000 for a colossus of Mercury.⁸ Architects and sculptors were ranked with physicians, teachers, and chemists as pursuing artes liberales, arts of freemen; but the men who did most of the artwork of Rome were or had been slaves. Some owners had their bondsmen trained in carving, painting, and like skills, and sold their products in Italy and abroad. In such shops labor was sharply divided: some specialized in votive figures, others in decorative cornices; some cut glass eyes for statues; different painters made arabesques or flowers or landscapes or animals or men, and worked in turn on the same picture. Several artists were expert forgers, producing antiques of any marketable age.⁹ The Romans of the last century B.C.. were easily deceived in these matters, for, like most nouveaux riches, they tended to value objects according to cost and rarity rather than by beauty and use. During the Empire, when it was no longer a distinction to be wealthy, taste improved, and a sincere love of excellence brought to many thousands of families a refinement of utensils and ornaments such as only a very few had known in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. Art was to antiquity what industry is to modernity. Men could not then enjoy the lavish abundance of useful products now poured forth by our machines; but they could, if they cared enough, gradually surround themselves with objects whose zealously finished form gave to all who lived with them the subtle and quiet happiness of beautiful things.

III. THE HOMES OF THE GREAT

The visitor seeking to study the dwellings of the middle class would have found them away from the city’s center on the main diverging roads. Their brick-and-stucco exteriors were still built, as before, in the plain and solid style dictated by insecurity and heat; the Roman bourgeois wasted no art on passers-by. Few houses rose to more than two stories. Cellars were rare; roofs sparkled with red tiles; windows were fitted with shutters or, occasionally, panes of glass. The entrance was usually a double door, each half turning on metal pivots. Floors were of concrete or tile, often of mosaic squares; there were no carpets. Around the central atrium were grouped the main rooms of the house: this is the architectural origin of the cloister and the college quadrangle. In the richer houses one or more rooms would be used for bathing, usually in tubs much like our own. Plumbing was carried by the Romans to an excellence unmatched before the twentieth century. Lead pipes brought water from the aqueducts and mains into most tenements and homes; fittings and stopcocks were of bronze, and some were molded into highly ornamental designs.¹⁰ Leaders and gutters of lead carried rain from the roof. Most rooms were heated, if at all, by portable charcoal braziers; a few homes, many villas and palaces, and the public baths enjoyed central heating from wood- or charcoal-burning furnaces supplying hot air to various rooms through tile pipes or passages in floors and walls.^*

In the early Empire a Hellenistic addition was made to the rich Roman’s house. To provide a privacy not always possible in the atrium, he built behind it a peristylium, a court open to the sky, planted with flowers and shrubs, adorned by statues, surrounded by a portico, and centering about a fountain or a bathing pool. Around this court he raised a new set of rooms: a triclinium or dining room, an oecus (“house”) for the women, a pinacotheca for his art collection, a bibliotheca for his books, and a lararium for his household gods; there might also be extra bedrooms, and little alcoves called exedrae—“sitting-out” nooks. Less expensive homes substituted a garden for the peristylium; and if even that could find no ground, the Romans placed flower boxes in the windows or grew flowers and shrubs on the roof. Some large roofs, says Seneca, had grape arbors, fruit trees, and shade trees planted in boxes of soil;¹² not a few had solaria for baking bellies in the sun.

Many Romans wearied of the roar and rush of Rome and fled to the peace and boredom of the countryside. Rich and poor alike developed a feeling for nature beyond anything discernible in ancient Greece. Juvenal thought a man foolish to live in the capital when, for the annual rental of a dark garret in Rome, he might buy a pretty house in some quiet Italian town and surround it with “a trim garden fit to feast a hundred Pythagoreans.”¹³ The well to do moved out of Rome in early spring to villas in the foothills of the Apennines or on the shores of lakes or the sea. The younger Pliny has left us a pleasant description of his country house at Laurentum on the coast of Latium. He calls it “large enough for my convenience, without being expensive to maintain”; but as he goes on we suspect a pose in his modesty. He describes “a small porch sheltered by glazed windows and overhanging eaves . . . a handsome dining room gently washed by the edge of the last breakers,” and so bright with spacious windows as to give “a view in three directions, as if of three different seas”; an atrium “whence the prospect ends in woods and mountains”; two drawing rooms; a “semicircular library whose windows receive the sun all day long”; a bedchamber, and several rooms for servants. In an opposite wing were “an elegant parlor,” a second dining room, and four small rooms; a bathroom suite consisting of “a pleasant undressing room,” a frigidarium or cold bath, a tepidarium with three pools heated to different degrees, and a calidarium or hot bath; all centrally heated by hot-air pipes. Outside were a swimming pool, a ball court, a storehouse, a variegated garden, a private study and banquet hall, and an observation tower with two apartments and a dining room. “Tell me now,” Pliny concludes, “have I not just cause to bestow my time and affection upon this agreeable retreat?”¹⁴

If a senator could have such a villa on the sea, and another on Como, we may begin to imagine the sprawling luxury of Tiberius’ estate at Capri, or Domitian’s at Alba Longa—not to speak of the one that Hadrian would soon build at Tibur. To match this cubicular extravagance the visitor would have to find entry to the palaces of millionaires and emperors on the Palatine. In domestic architecture the Romans did not care to imitate classic Greece, where homes were modest and only temples were great; they modeled their palaces upon the residences of the half-Orientalized Hellenistic kings; Ptolemaic styles came to Rome with Cleopatra’s gold, and royal architecture accompanied monarchical politics. The palace of Augustus, receiving the name from the hill it stood on, spread with extensions as the administrative functions of the imperial household increased. Most of his successors built additional palaces for themselves and their staffs: Tiberius his domus Tiberiana, Caligula his domus Gaiana, Nero his domus aurea.

This Golden House became the passing wonder of Rome. Its buildings alone covered 900,000 square feet, and yet were but a small part of a mile-square villa that overflowed from the Palatine upon the neighboring hills. A great park surrounded the palace, with gardens, meadows, fish ponds, game preserves, aviaries, vineyards, streams, fountains, waterfalls, lakes, imperial galleys, pleasure houses, summerhouses, flower houses, and porticoes 3000 feet long. An angry wit scratched a representative comment on a wall: “Rome has become the habitation of one man. It is time, citizens, to emigrate to Veii—unless, indeed, Veii itself is to be comprised in Nero’s home.”¹⁵ The interior of the palace gleamed with marble, bronze, and gold, with the gilded metal of countless Corinthian capitals, and with thousands of statues, reliefs, paintings, and objects of art bought or looted from the classic world; among them was the Laocoön. Some of the walls were inlaid with mother-of-pearl and various costly gems. The ceiling of the banquet hall was covered with ivory flowers from which, at a nod of the emperor, a perfumed spray would fall upon his guests. The dining room had a spherical ceiling of ivory painted to represent the sky and the stars, which was kept in constant slow rotation by hidden machines. A suite of rooms provided hot baths, cold baths, tepid baths, salt-water baths, and sulphur baths. When the Roman architects Celer and Severus had nearly finished the immense structure and Nero moved in, he remarked, “At last I am lodged.” A generation later this Roman Versailles, too costly and dangerous to maintain amid surrounding poverty, had fallen into neglect. Over its ruins Vespasian built the Colosseum, Titus and Trajan their enormous public baths.

Domitian shared Nero’s architectural madness. For him Rabirius raised the domus Flavia, not quite as elephantine as Nero’s museum, but yielding little to it in gaudy splendor and decoration. One wing alone contained a vast basilica, probably the court where the Emperor tried cases of final appeal; the same wing enclosed a peristylium covering 30,000 square feet. Adjoining this was a banquet hall, whose pavement of red porphyry and green serpentine survives; gone are the delicate marble screens and beautifully columned windows through which the diners might watch the waters splashing over the marble basins of the nymphaea or fountains outside. It should be added that Domitian used this building only for receptions and administration; usually he lived in the more modest quarters of Augustus’ palace. Doubtless these royal edifices were part of the façade of empire, designed to impress natives, visitors, and embassies, while the emperors themselves, perhaps excepting Caligula and Nero, fled from the constraining formality of these ceremonial rooms to the ease and intimacy of their family quarters, and enjoyed, as Antoninus Pius would put it, “the pleasure of being men.”¹⁶

IV. THE ARTS OF DECORATION

In these palaces, and in the homes of the rich, a hundred arts were employed to make everything if not beautiful, at least expensive. The floors were often of polychrome marble, or mosaics whose patient combination of tiny varicolored cubes (tesserae) resulted in paintings of remarkable realism and permanence. Furniture was less abundant and comfortable than among ourselves, but of generally superior design and workmanship. Tables, chairs, benches, couches, beds, lamps, and utensils were made of lasting materials, and lavishly adorned; the best wood, ivory, marble, bronze, silver, and gold were carefully turned and finished, decorated with plant or animal forms, or inlaid with ivory, tortoise shell, chased bronze, or precious stones. Tables were sometimes cut from costly cypress or citrus woods; some were of gold or silver; many were of marble or bronze. Chairs were of every sort from folding stool to throne, but less calculated than ours to deform the spine. Beds were of wood or metal, with slim but sturdy legs often ending in an animal’s head or foot; a bronze web, instead of a spring, supported a mattress filled with straw or wool. Bronze tripods of elegant form took the place of our end tables; and here and there were cabinets with pigeonholes for rolled books. Bronze braziers warmed the rooms, and bronze lamps lighted them. Mirrors too were of bronze, highly polished, embossed or engraved with floral or mythical designs; some were made horizontally or vertically convex or concave to distort reflections into a humorous slenderness or rotundity.¹⁷

The factories of Campania working with the rich output of Spanish mines, produced silverware on a large scale for a wide market; silver services were now common in the middle and upper classes. In 1895 an excavator found in the cistern of a villa at Boscoreale a remarkable collection of silver, apparently deposited there by its owner before his unsuccessful flight from the embers of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. One of the sixteen cups bears an almost perfect representation of simple foliage; two depict skeletons in high relief; another pictures Augustus enthroned between Venus and Mars, the rival deities of mankind; the sliest shows Zeno the Stoic pointing with scorn at Epicurus, who is helping himself to a huge piece of cake, while a pig, with uplifted foreleg, politely asks for a share.

The coins and gems of the early Empire prove the progress of the engraver’s art. Those of Augustus show the same good taste, sometimes the same designs, as the Altar of Peace. Precious stones imported from Africa, Arabia, and India were cut and set into rings, brooches, necklaces, bracelets, cups, even into walls. A ring on at least one finger was a social necessity; a few fops wore rings on all fingers but one. The Roman sealed his signature with his ring and therefore liked to have the seal individually designed. Some of the best-paid artists in Rome were gem cutters, like the Dioscurides who made Augustus’ seal. In cutting cameos the Golden Age reached a level never surpassed; the gemma Augusta in Vienna is among the finest in existence. To collect gems and cameos became a hobby of rich Romans—Pompey, Caesar, Augustus; by inheritance the imperial gem cabinet grew till Marcus Aurelius sold it to help pay for his war against the Marcomanni. From the official guardian of the imperial seals and gems England derived her Keeper of the Great, or Privy, Seal.

Meanwhile the potters of Capua, Puteoli, Cumae, and Arretium were filling Italian homes with every variety of ceramic art. Arretium had mixing vats with a capacity of 10,000 gallons. Its red-glazed tableware was for a century the most widely spread product of Italy; specimens of it have been found almost everywhere. Iron stamps, hollowed out in relief, were used to impress upon each vase, lamp, or tile the name of the maker, sometimes also the names of the year’s consuls, as a date. To this degree the ancients knew the art of printing; they left it undeveloped because slave copyists were cheap.¹⁸

From pottery the workers of Cumae, Liternum, and Aquileia turned to the production of artistic glass.^* The Portland Vase is a famous example of its kind;† finer still is the “Blue Glass Vase” found at Pompeii, depicting in lively and graceful action a vintage feast of Bacchus.¹⁹ In the reign of Tiberius, say Pliny and Strabo,²⁰ the art of glass blowing was brought from Sidon or Alexandria to Rome, and soon produced polychrome phials, cups, bowls, and other forms of such delicate beauty that they became for a time the favorite prey of art collectors and millionaires. In Nero’s reign 6000 sesterces were paid for two small cups of blown glass now known as millefiori, or “thousand flowers,” produced by fusing together differently colored glass rods. Even more prized were the “Murrhine” vases imported from Asia and Africa. They were made by placing white and purple glass filaments side by side to form a desired pattern, and then firing them; or pieces of colored glass were embedded in a transparent white body. Pompey brought some to Rome after his victory over Mithridates; Augustus, though he melted down Cleopatra’s gold plate, kept for himself her goblet of Murrhine glass. Nero paid a million sesterces for one such cup; Petronius, dying, broke another lest it should fall into Nero’s hands. All in all, the Romans have had no superior in making glass; and there are few art collections in the world more precious than those of Roman glass in the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.