V. SCULPTURE
Pottery passed into sculpture through baked clay—terra-cotta reliefs and statuettes, toys, imitations of fruit, grapes, fish—at last full-sized statues. Glazed terra cotta—majolica—abounded in the ruins of Pompeii. Temple pediments and eaves were adorned with terra-cotta palmettes, acroteria, gargoyles, and reliefs. The Greeks laughed at these ornaments, and under the Empire they went out of fashion; Augustus was no friend of clay.
It was probably through his Attic taste that relief and sculpture attained in Rome an excellence comparable with the best Hellenistic work. For a generation the artists of Rome carved fountains, tombstones, arches, and altars with a refinement of feeling, a precision of execution, a quiet dignity of form, a measure of modeling and perspective, that rank Roman reliefs among the masterpieces of the world’s art. In 13 B.C. the Senate celebrated the return of Augustus from the pacification of Spain and Gaul by decreeing that an Ara Pacis Augustae, or “Altar of the Augustan Peace,” should be erected in the Field of Mars. This is the noblest of all the sculptural remains of Rome. Perhaps the monument owed its form to the altar at Pergamum, and its processional motif to the Parthenon frieze; the altar was raised on a platform in an enclosure whose surrounding walls were partly carved in marble relief; the extant pieces are slabs from these walls.* One slab represents Tellus—Mother Earth—with two children in her arms, corn and flowers growing beside her, and animals lying contentedly at her feet. These were the leading ideas of the Augustan reformation: the family restored to parentage, the nation to agriculture, the Empire to peace. The central figure is unsurpassed; indeed, in its union of mature motherhood and womanly beauty, tenderness, and grace, there is a soft perfection unmatched by the stately goddesses of the Parthenon. The frieze of the outer wall had a lower panel of acanthus scrolls, broad-petaled peonies and poppies, and rich clusters of ivy berries; this too is unequaled in its class. Another panel showed two processions moving in opposite directions to meet before the altar of the Goddess of Peace. In these groups are grave and quiet figures, probably of Augustus, Livia, and the imperial family, with nobles, priests, Vestal Virgins, and children. These last are engagingly real in their shy innocence. One is a baby toddling along with no taste for ceremony; another is a boy already proud of his years; another a little girl with a nosegay; another, after some mischief, is being gently admonished by his mother. Henceforth children would play a rising role in Italian art. But never again would Roman sculpture show such mastery of drapery, such natural and effective grouping, such modulations of light and shade. Here, as in Virgil, propaganda had found a perfect medium.
The only Roman rivals of these reliefs are the carvings on the arches raised for the entry of triumphing generals. The finest survivor is the Arch of Titus, begun by Vespasian and completed by Domitian to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem. One relief shows the burning city, its walls in ruins, its people wild with fear, its wealth looted by legionaries; another pictures Titus riding into Rome in his chariot amid soldiers, animals, magistrates, priests, and prisoners, followed by the holy candelabra of the Temple, and varied spoils of war. The artists here experimented bravely: they cut different figures to different levels, and distributed them on diverse planes; they chiseled the background to give an illusion of depth; and they painted the whole to convey additional shades of fullness and distance. The action was shown not in separate episodes but in continuity, as on the friezes of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later on the columns of Trajan and Aurelius; so the sense of motion and life was better conveyed. The figures were not idealized and softened into a mood of Attic repose as in the Hellenistic Ara Pacis; they were taken from the flesh and the dirt, and carved in the earthy tradition of Italian realism and vitality. The subject was not perfect gods but living men.
It is this vigorous realism that distinguishes Roman sculpture from the Greek; but for this recurrent fidelity to their own bent the Romans would have added little to art. About 90 B.C.. a Greek from south Italy, Pasiteles, went to Rome, lived there for sixty years, did excellent work in silver, ivory, and gold, introduced silver mirrors, made skillful copies of Greek masterpieces, and wrote five volumes on the history of art; he was both the Vasari and the Cellini of his time. Another Greek, Arcesilaus, made for Caesar a famous statue of his distant relative, Venus Genetrix. Apollonius of Athens, probably in Rome, carved the powerful Torso Belvedere of the Vatican: a work conceived with moderation, proclaiming no bulging muscles, but showing a man in the fullness of healthy strength; we can only say of it that it is perfect so far as it goes. For a time the studios busied themselves giving Greek form to Italian gods, even to divine abstractions like Chance and Chastity. Presumably in this period and in Rome Glycon of Athens carved the Farnese Hercules. We cannot tell to what age or country the Apollo Belvedere belongs; perhaps it was a Roman copy of an original by Leochares of Athens. Every student knows how its calm beauty stirred Winckelmann to Uranian ecstasy.21 Juno received now two renowned embodiments: the porphyry Farnese Juno of the Naples Museum and the Ludovisi Juno of the Terme—cold and stern, righteous and just; one begins to understand Jove’s wanderings.
All these, and the graceful Perseus and Andromeda of the Capitoline Museum, were in the Greek style, idealized and generalized, and tiresomely divine. More arresting are the portrait busts that constitute a bronze-and-marble dictionary of Roman physiognomy from Pompey to Constantine. Some of these too are idealized, particularly the Julio-Claudian heads; but the old Etruscan realism, and the ever-present example of unflattering death masks, reconciled the Romans to being represented as ugly, provided they were shown as strong. So many of them bequeathed their effigies to public places that at times Rome seemed to belong less to the quick than to the dead. Some worthies could not bide their end, but erected themselves as statues before their death, until the jealous emperors, to make room for the living, forbade such premature immortality.
The greatest of the portrait busts is the so-named Head of Caesar, of black basalt, in Berlin. We do not know whom it represents; but the sparse hair and sharp chin, the thin and bony face, the heavy lines of weary thought, the resolution yielding to disillusionment, accord well with the traditional attribution. Only second to it is the colossal head of Caesar in Naples: here the wrinkles have set almost into bitterness, as if the giant had at last discovered that no mind is broad enough to understand, much less to rule, the world. Realistic to repulsiveness is the Pompey of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen: all the brave triumphs of his youth forgotten in the dull obesity of a beaten man. Of Augustus we have half a hundred statues, many of them masterly: Augustus the boy (in the Vatican), serious, keen, noble—the finest portrait of an actual youth in any age; Augustus at thirty (in the British Museum)—a bronze figure of burning determination, reminding us of Suetonius’ statement that the Emperor could quell a mutiny with a glance; Augustus the priest (in the Terme), a profound and pensive face emerging from a prison of drapery; and Augustus imperator, found in the ruins of Livia’s villa at Prima Porta, and now in the Vatican. The breastplate of this famous figure is covered with esoteric and distracting reliefs,* the pose is stiff, the legs are too mighty for such an invalid; but the head has a quiet and self-confident power that reveals the hand and soul of a great artist—who could not quite forget the Doryphoros of Polycleitus.
Livia herself was fortunate in the artist who made the head now in Copenhagen. The hair is stately, the bent Roman nose smacks of character, the eyes are thoughtful and tender, the lips pretty but firm; this is the woman who stood quietly behind Augustus’ throne, overthrew all her rivals and enemies, and mastered everybody but her son. Tiberius too fared well; idealized though it is, the seated figure in the Lateran Museum is a chef-d’oeuvre worthy of the hand that carved the diorite Chephren in Cairo. Claudius was not so lucky; surely the sculptor was making fun of him, or illustrating Seneca’s Pumpkinification, when he carved him up as a worried Jupiter, fat and amiable and dumb. Nero tried hard to develop a sense of beauty, but his real passion was for fame and size; he saw no better function for Zenodotus, the Scopas of this age, than to consume his time in making a colossus of Nero as Apollo, 117 feet high.* Hadrian had it removed to the foreground of the Flavian Amphitheater, which thence derived its name of Colosseum.22
With the honest Vespasian sculpture returned to reality. He let himself be represented frankly as a veritable plebeian, with coarse features, wrinkled brow, bald head, and enormous ears. Kinder is the bust in the Terme, showing a spirit harassed with affairs of state, or the businesslike face of the massive head in Naples. Titus comes down to us with a like cubical cranium and homely countenance; it is hard to think of this stout street vendor as the darling of mankind. Domitian had the good sense, in the realistic Flavian age, to have himself so hated in life that all his images were ordered destroyed after his death.
When the artist left the palace and roamed the streets he could give free play to the Italic imp of humorous truth. Some old man, surely less equipped with wisdom and denarii than the philosopher-premier, posed for the disheveled scarecrow once labeled Seneca. Athletes had their muscles immortalized for a moment by famous artists; and gladiators, as statues, found entry into the best homes, from patrician villas to Farnese palaces. The Roman sculptors relented when they handled the figures of women; now and then they carved an irascible shrew, but also they molded some Vestal Virgins of a graceful gravity, occasional incarnations of tenderness like the Clytie of the British Museum, and aristocratic ladies as fragilely charming as the dolls of Watteau or Fragonard.23 They were adept in the portrayal of children, as in the bronze Boy of the Metropolitan Museum, or the lnnocenza of the Capitoline. They could chisel or cast the forms of animals with startling vividness, as in the wolves’ heads found at Nemi in 1929, or the prancing horses of St. Mark’s. They seldom achieved the smooth perfection of the Periclean schools; but that was because they loved the individual more than the type, and relished the life-giving imperfections of the real. With all their limitations they stand supreme in the history of portrait art.
VI. PAINTING
The ancient visitor would have found painting even more popular than sculpture in Rome’s temples and dwellings, porticoes and squares. He would have come upon many works of old masters there—Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Apelles, Protogenes, and others—as dear to the opulent Empire as the paintings of the Renaissance are to rich America; and he would have seen in greater abundance, through their better preservation, the products of Alexandrian and Roman schools. The art was old in Italy, where every wall craved ornament. Once even Roman nobles had practiced it; but the Hellenistic invasion had made painting Greek and servile, and at last Valerius Maximus marveled that Fabius Pictor should have stooped to paint murals in the Temple of Health.24 There were exceptions: toward the end of the Republic Arellius made a name for himself by hiring prostitutes to pose for his goddesses; in the time of Augustus a dumb aristocrat, Quintus Pedius, took up painting because his defect closed most professions to him; and Nero employed for the interior of his Golden House one Amulius, who “painted with the greatest gravity, always in his toga.”25 But such men were rari nantes in the crowd of Greeks who, at Rome and Pompeii and throughout the peninsula, made copies or variations of Greek paintings on Greek or Egyptian themes.
The art was practically limited to fresco and tempera. In fresco a freshly plastered wall was painted with water-moistened colors; in tempera the pigments were mixed with an adhesive sizing and laid upon a dry surface. Portrait painters sometimes employed an encaustic process in which the tints were fused in hot wax. Nero had his picture painted on a canvas 120 feet high—the first known use of this material. Painting, as we have seen, was applied to statues, temples, stage scenery, and great linen pictures intended for exhibition in triumphs or in the Forum; but its favored receptacle was the external or internal wall. The Romans seldom placed furniture against a wall or hung pictures there; they preferred to use the entire space for one painting, or for a group of related designs. In this way the mural became a part of the house, an integral item in the architectural design.
The caustic humor of Vesuvius has preserved for us some 3 500 frescoes-more paintings at Pompeii than can be found in all the rest of the classic world. Since Pompeii was a minor town we may imagine how many such murals brightened the homes and shrines of classic Italy. The best survivors have been removed to the Naples Museum; even there their lithe grace impresses us; but only the ancients knew them in the full depth of their color and in the architectural framework that gave each picture a function and a place. In the House of Vettii the murals have been left in situ: in a dining room Dionysus surprises the sleeping Ariadne; on the opposite wall Daedalus displays his wooden cow to Pasiphaë; at the farther end Hermes looks on calmly as Hephaestus fastens Ixion to the torturing wheel; and in another room a succession of humorous frescoes shows carefree Cupids parodying the industries of Pompeii, including the wine business of the Vettii. The bite of time has gnawed into these once brilliant surfaces, but enough remains to shock the visitor into modesty; the figures are almost perfectly drawn, and so colorful with the flesh of life that they can still make the blood stir lustily in living veins.
It is by reference to these Pompeian paintings that connoisseurs have tried to understand the nature, and classify the periods and styles, of pictorial art in ancient Italy. The method is precarious, for Pompeii was more Greek than Latin; but what remains of classic painting in Rome and its suburbs falls in tolerably well with the Pompeian development. In the First or Incrustation Style (second century B.C..) walls were often colored to resemble inlaid marble slabs (crustae), as in the “House of Sallust” at Pompeii. In the Second or Architectural Style (first century B.C.) the wall was painted to simulate a building or façade or colonnade. Often the columns were represented as seen from within, and open country was pictured between them; in this way the artist gave to a probably windowless room cool vistas of trees and flowers, fields and streams, peaceful or playful animals; the imprisoned dweller could fancy himself in Lucullus’ gardens by merely looking at the wall; he might fish or row or hunt, or indulge a fondness for birds without suffering their untimeliness; nature was taken into the house. The Third or Ornate Style (A.D. 1-50) employed architectural forms purely for ornament, and subordinated landscape to figures. In the Fourth or Intricate Style (A.D. 50-79) the artist let his fancy riot, invented fantastic structures and shapes, placed them in positions gaily scornful of gravity, piled gardens and columns, villas and pavilions, upon one another in modernistic disarray,26 and occasionally achieved the impressionistic effect of a picture supplemented by unconscious memory and suffused with light. In all these kindred styles architecture was handmaid and mistress to painting, served it and used it, and gave body to a tradition that reawoke, after sixteen centuries, in Nicolas Poussin.
It is a pity that the subjects of the major extant paintings so seldom venture beyond Greek myth. We tire of these same gods and satyrs, heroes and sinners—Zeus and Mars, Dionysus and Pan, Achilles and Odysseus, Iphigenia and Medea; though a like charge could be brought against the Renaissance. There are a few pictures of still life, and here and there a fuller, an innkeeper, or a butcher shines on Pompeian walls. Love often dominates the scene: a girl sits brooding over some secret longing not unrelated to the Eros who stands beside her; young men and women gambol amorously on the grass; Psyches and Cupids frolic as if the town had never known anything but love and wine. If we may judge from their representation in these murals, the women of Pompeii deserved to have life center about their comeliness. We see them engrossed in the game of “knucklebones,” or leaning gracefully over a lyre, or composing poetry with a meditative stylus at the lips; their faces are quiet with maturity, their forms are healthily full, their robes fall about them with Pheidian amplitude and rhythm, they walk like Helens conscious of their divinity. One of them performs a Bacchic dance, apparently in thin air; her right arm, hand, and foot are as lovely as anything in the history of painting. Some male characters must be included with these masterpieces: Theseus victor over the Minotaur, Hercules rescuing Deianira or adopting Telephus, Achilles angrily surrendering the reluctant Briseis; in this last picture every figure nears perfection and Pompeian painting is at its best. Humor is represented, too: a disheveled pedagogue stumbles forward on his staff; a jolly satyr shakes his shanks in sardonic revelry, a bald ribald Silenus is caught in a mood of musical ecstasy. Taverns and brothels came in for appropriate decoration, and no eager tourist need be told that Priapus still flaunts his precious powers on Pompeian walls. At the other end of the gamut, in the Villa Item, is a series of religious pictures, suggesting the use of the place for celebrating the Dionysian mysteries: in one fresco a little girl, palsied with piety, reads from an apparently sacred book; in another a procession of damsels advances, blowing pipes and bringing sacrifice; in a third a nude lady dances on tiptoe while a neophyte kneels exhausted by some ritualistic whipping.27 Finer than any of these is a mural found in the ruins of Stabiae, presaging Botticelli and called Spring: a woman walks slowly through a garden, gathering flowers; only her back is seen, and the graceful turning of her head; but seldom has any art conveyed so movingly the poetry of this simple theme.
The most powerful of all the pictures recovered from these ruins is the Medea found at Herculaneum, and preserved in the Naples Museum—a brooding woman, magnificently draped, meditating the murder of her children; apparently this is a copy of the painting for which Caesar paid the artist, Timomachus of Byzantium, forty talents ($ 144,000).27a
Few pictures of such quality have been found in Rome. But in the suburban villa of Livia at Prima Porta a supreme example was discovered of that landscape painting in which Italy so far excels Greece. The eye is lured as if across a court to a marble trellis, beyond which is a jungle of plants and flowers so accurately reproduced that botanists can now identify and catalogue them; every leaf is carefully drawn and colored; birds perch here and there as if for a moment, and insects creep amid the foliage. Only less masterly is the “Aldobrandini” Wedding found on the Esquiline in 1606, and enthusiastically studied by Rubens, Vandyke, and Goethe. Perhaps it is a copy of a Greek work; perhaps it is an original by a Roman Greek, or by a Roman; we can only say that these figures—the quiet and timid bride, the goddess who counsels her, the mother absorbed in preparations, the maidens waiting to play the lyre and sing—are all done with a delicacy and sensitivity that make this mural a distinguished relic of classic art.
Roman painting laid no claim to originality; Greek artists carried with them everywhere the same traditions and methods; and even the vague impressionism of these pictures may be offshoots of Alexandrian skills. But there is in them a fineness of line, and a richness of color, that explain why painters like Apelles and Protogenes were held in as high repute as sculptors like Polycleitus and Praxiteles. Sometimes the color is as full as if Giorgione had laid it on; sometimes the subtle gradations of light and shade suggest Rembrandt; sometimes a crude figure catches the ungainly realism of Van Gogh. Perspective here is often faulty, and hasty workmanship limps behind mature conception. But a fresh vitality redeems these faults, the rhythm of the drapery lures the eye, and the woodland scenes must have been a delight to dwellers in a crowded town. Our taste today is more restrained; we like to leave a wall its own significance, and have hesitated, till yesterday, to cover it with paint. But to the Italian a wall was a prison, seldom opening through a window upon the world; he wished to forget the barrier, and be deluded by art into some verdant peace. Perhaps he was right: better a pictured tree on a wall than a magic casement’s prospect of a thousand unkempt rooftops blaspheming the sky and festering in the sun.
VII. ARCHITECTURE
1. Principles, Materials, and Forms
We have reserved for the climactic edification of our forgotten visitor the greatest of Rome’s arts, that in which she most ably defended herself against the Greek invasion, and displayed all her originality, courage, and power. Originality, however, is not parthenogenesis; it is, like parentage, a novel combination of pre-existing elements. All cultures are eclectic in their youth, as education begins with imitation; but when the soul or nation comes of age it stamps its character, if it has any, upon all its works and words. Rome, like other Mediterranean cities, took the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders from Egypt and Greece; but also she took the arch, the vault, and the dome from Asia, and with them made such a city of palaces, basilicas, amphitheaters, and baths as the earth had not yet beheld. Roman architecture became the art expression of the Roman spirit and state: boldness, organization, grandeur, and brutal strength raised these unparalleled structures upon the hills. They were the Roman soul in stone.
Most of the leading architects in Rome were Romans, not Greeks. One of them, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, wrote a world classic On Architecture (ca. 27 B.C..).* Having served as military engineer under Caesar in Africa, and as an architect under Octavian, Vitruvius retired in old age to formulate the principles of Rome’s most honored art. “Nature has not given me stature,” he confessed, “my face is homely with years, and illness has stolen my strength; therefore I hope to win favor by my knowledge and my book.”29 As Cicero and Quintilian made philosophy a prerequisite for the orator, so Vitruvius required it of the architect; it would improve his purposes while science improved his means; it would make him “high-minded, urbane, just, loyal, and without greed; for no true work can be done without good faith and clean hands.”30 He described the materials of architecture, the orders and their elements, and the diverse types of building in Rome; and added discourses on machinery, water clocks, speedometers,† aqueducts, town planning, and public sanitation. As against the rectangular design established by Hippodamus in many Greek cities, Vitruvius recommended the radial arrangement used in Alexandria (and modern Washington); the Romans, however, continued to lay out their towns on the rectangular plan of their camps. He warned Italy that in several localities its drinking water led to goiter, and declared that poisoning could come from working with lead. He explained sound as a vibratory motion of the air, and wrote our oldest extant discussion of architectural acoustics. His book, rediscovered in the Renaissance, deeply influenced Leonardo, Palladio, and Michelangelo.
The Romans, says Vitruvius, built with wood, brick, stucco, concrete, stone, and marble. Bricks were the usual substance of walls, arches, and vaults, and served as a frequent facing for concrete. Stucco too was often used as a facing. It was made of sand, lime, marble dust, and water, took a high polish, and was laid on in several coats, often to a thickness of three inches; hence it could keep its form for nineteen centuries, as in some parts of the Colosseum. In making and using concrete the Romans were unrivaled until our time. They took the volcanic ash abounding near Naples, mixed it with lime and water, threw in fragments of brick, pottery, marble, and stone, and produced, from the second century B.C. onward, an opus caementicum as hard as rock, and capable of being poured into almost any shape. They cast it as we do, in troughs formed of boards. By its means they could cover large unsupported spaces with rigid domes free from the lateral thrust of an arched roof; in this way they topped the Pantheon and the great baths. Stone was employed for most temples and the more pretentious homes. One variety from Cappadocia was so translucent that a temple built with it was adequately lighted with all its openings closed.32 The conquest of Greece brought a taste for marble, which was satisfied first by importing columns, then marble, and finally by working the Carrara quarries near Luna. Before Augustus marble was largely confined to columns and slabs; in his time it was used as a facing for brick and concrete; only in this superficial sense did he leave Rome, here and there, a city of marble; walls of solid marble were rare. The Romans liked to mingle in the same building the red and gray granite of Egypt, the green cipollino of Euboea, the black and yellow marbles of Numidia, with their own white Carrara, and with basalt, alabaster, and porphyry. Never had architectural material been so complex or so colorful.
To the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders Rome added the Tuscan and Composite styles, and certain modifications. Columns were often monoliths instead of superimposed drums. The Doric column received an Ionic base and took on a new, unfluted slenderness; the Ionic capital was sometimes given four volutes to offer the same appearance from every side; the Corinthian column and capital were developed to a delicate beauty beyond any Greek example, but in later decades this style was spoiled by undue elaborations. A like excess poured flowers over the Ionic volutes to make the Composite capital, as in the Arch of Titus; sometimes the volutes ended in animal or human forms suggestive of gargoyles and presaging medieval forms. The lavish Romans often mixed several orders in the same building, as in the theater of Marcellus; and then again, with perverse economy, they left the side columns attached to the cella, as in the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. Even when the development of the arch had taken from columns their old supporting role the Romans added them as functionless ornaments—a custom that has survived into our own uncertain age.
2. The Temples of Rome
For nearly all her temples Rome kept the Greek trabeate principle-architraves (i.e., master beams) upheld by columns and carrying the roof. Augustus was conservative in art as in everything else, and most of the shrines built by his order clung to the orthodox tradition. From his time onward the emperors multiplied homes for their Olympic rivals and clothed their lechery with an architectural piety that crowded the hills and blocked the streets with tiled and gilded fanes. Jupiter, of course, was their favorite recipient. Among many he had one as Jupiter Tonans, the Thunderer; another as Jupiter Stator, who had stayed the flight of the Romans in battle; and he shared with Juno and Minerva the holiest of Rome’s sanctuaries, atop the Capitoline hill. There in the central cell, flanked by a three-storied Corinthian colonnade, was the gold-and-ivory colossus of Jupiter Optimus Maximus—Jove the Best and Greatest. Tradition ascribed the first form of this supreme house of Roman worship to Tarquinius Priscus; it was several times burned down and rebuilt; Stilicho (A.D. 404) stole its gold-plated bronze doors to pay his soldiers, and the Vandals carried off the gold-plated tiles of the roof. Some fragments of the pavement remain.
On the northern summit of the same hill rose the Temple of Juno Moneta, Juno the Monitor or Guardian; here was the Roman mint, and from its name, of course, comes our word for the root of much ambition. On the south side of the hill was the shrine of Saturn, the oldest god of the Capitol; the Romans dated its first dedication at 497 B.C.; eight Ionic columns and an architrave survive. In the Forum, at the foot of the hill, was the little Temple of Janus, god of all beginnings; its doors were opened only in time of war, and were closed but three times in Rome’s ancient history. At the southeast corner of the Forum stood the Temple of Castor and Pollux, erected in 495 B.C.; three slender Corinthian columns have come down to us from the reconstruction by Tiberius; they are by common consent the finest columns in Rome.
In his own forum Augustus added a Temple of Mars Ultor—the Avenger-vowed before Philippi; three of its majestic columns stand. One end of its cella was a semicircular apse, an architectural form destined to become the chancel of early Christian churches. On the Palatine Augustus built entirely of marble a sumptuous temple to Apollo for the god’s help at Actium; he adorned it with sculptures by Myron and Scopas, added a splendid library and an art gallery to its enclosure, and did all he could to make men feel that the god had left Greece for Rome and had brought with him the spiritual and cultural leadership of the world. It was even whispered by Augustus’ friends, now that his mother was safely dead, that Apollo, disguised as an agile snake, had begotten the subtle prince.
In the northwest part of the city was a great shrine to Isis, and on the Palatine a spacious sanctuary for Cybele. Handsome shelters were provided for personified abstractions—Health, Honor, Virtue, Concord, Faith, Fortune, and many more. Nearly all of these contained galleries of statuary and painting. In his great Temple of Peace Vespasian gathered for the general eye many of the art treasures of Nero’s Golden House, and some of the relics of Jerusalem. The Temple of Fortuna Virilis, in the Forum Boarium, has the distinction of being the most completely preserved of the pre-Augustan buildings in Rome. The ladies of the capital frequently worshipped there, for the goddess, they believed, would teach them how to conceal their defects from men.
To these and a hundred other temples in the classic rectangular style the architects of Rome added several circular temples, which revealed a new mastery of the problems presented by a dome. Tradition derived this type from the round hut of Romulus, religiously preserved on the Palatine for many centuries. Almost as old was the pretty Aedes Vestae, or House of Vesta, near the Temple of Castor and Pollux; its circular cella, faced with white marble, was enclosed by handsome Corinthian columns, and its roof was a dome of gilded brass. Adjoining it was the Palace of the Vestals—eighty-four rooms built cloisterwise around a peristyled court, the Atrium Vestae. The Pantheon was not yet a circular temple; as built by Agrippa it was rectangular, but had a circular plaza before it; Hadrian’s architects raised over this space the round temple and mighty dome which are still among the bravest works of man.
3. The Arcuate Revolution
Rome was greater in her secular than in her sacred architecture. For here she could escape the bondage of tradition and unite engineering with art—utility and power with beauty and form—in a manner all her own. The principle of Greek architecture had been the straight line (however delicately modulated as in the Parthenon): the vertical column, the horizontal architrave, the triangular pediment. The principle of specifically Roman architecture was to be the curve. The Romans wanted grandeur, audacity, size; but they could not roof their vast buildings on rectilinear and trabeate principles except by a maze of impeding columns. They solved the problem with the arch, usually in its rounded form; with the vault, which is a prolonged arch; and with the dome, which is a rotated arch. Perhaps Roman generals and their aides had brought from Egypt and Asia a growing familiarity with arcuate shapes, and had reawakened early Roman and Etruscan traditions long overwhelmed by orthodox Greek styles. Now Rome employed the arch on so great a scale that the whole art of building took from this form a new and lasting name. By laying a web of brick ribs along the lines of strain before pouring concrete into the wooden frame of the roof, the Romans developed the articulated vault; by crossing two cylindrical or barrel vaults at right angles they produced a network of ribs and groins that could sustain a heavier superstructure and bear more lateral thrust. These were the principles of Rome’s arcuate revolution.
It was in the great baths and amphitheaters that the new style reached its completion. The baths of Agrippa, Nero, and Titus were the first of a long series that culminated in the Baths of Diocletian. They were monumental buildings of concrete faced with stucco or brick, and rising to majestic heights. The interiors were richly decorated with marble and mosaic pavements, varicolored columns, coffered ceilings, paintings, and statuary. They were equipped with dressing rooms, hot and cold baths, an intermediate room of warm air, swimming pools, palaestras, libraries, reading rooms, research rooms, lounges, and probably art galleries. Most of the chambers were centrally heated by large clay pipes running under floors and within the walls. These thermae were the most spacious and sumptuous public buildings ever erected, and they have never been equaled in their class. They were part of that socialism of recreation with which the principate excused its growing monarchy.*
This same paternalism built the greatest theaters in history. Those of Rome were much fewer but larger than those of modern capitals. The smallest was that which Cornelius Balbus built in the Field of Mars (13 B.C.), seating 7700; Augustus rebuilt Pompey’s theater, seating 17,500; he completed another, named for Marcellus, seating 20,500. Unlike Greek theaters, these were walled, and the stands were supported by arched and vaulted masonry instead of resting on the slope of a hill. Only the stage was roofed; but often the audience was sheltered from the sun by a linen awning (velarium), which in Pompey’s theater covered a space 550 feet wide. Over the entrances were boxes for dignitaries and magnates. Some stages had curtains which, when the play began, were not raised aloft, but lowered into a groove. The stage was elevated some five feet. Its background usually took the form of an elaborate building which, extending from wing to wing, helped the actors to throw their voices out over the immense audiences. Seneca speaks of “stage mechanics who invent scaffolding that goes aloft of its own accord, or floors that rise silently into the air.”32a A change of scene was effected by revolving prisms, or by moving a set into the wings or into the loft, thereby exposing the next. Acoustics were aided by sinking hollow jars into the floor and walls of the stage.32b The auditorium was cooled by rivulets of water running along the passages; sometimes a mixture of water, wine, and crocus juice was conducted by pipes to the highest tiers and thence scattered over the audience as a perfumed spray.32c Statues adorned the interior, and large pictures were painted as scenery. Probably no theater or opera house in the world today could equal the size and splendor of Pompey’s.
More popular still were the circus, the stadium, and the amphitheater. Rome had several stadiums, used chiefly for athletic contests. Horse or chariot races, and some spectacles, were presented at the Circus Flaminius in the Field of Mars, or, more usually, at the Circus Maximus as rebuilt by Caesar between the Palatine and Aventine hills. This was an immense ellipse 2200 feet long and 705 feet wide, with wooden seats on three sides for 180,000 spectators.33 We may judge the wealth of Rome by noting that Trajan rebuilt these seats in marble.
By comparison the Colosseum was a modest structure, seating only 50,000. Its plan was not new; the cities of Greek Italy had long since had amphitheaters; Curio, as we have seen, composed one in 53 B.C.; Caesar built another in 46, Statilius Taurus another in 29 B.C.. The Flavian Amphitheater, as Rome called the Colosseum, was begun by Vespasian and finished by Titus (A.D. 80); the architect’s name is unknown. Vespasian chose as its site the lake in the gardens of Nero’s Golden House, between the Caelian and Palatine hills. It was constructed of travertine stone in an ellipse 1790 feet around. Its external wall rose 157 feet and was divided into three stories, the first partly supported by Tuscan-Doric, the second by Ionic, the third by Corinthian, columns, with an arch in each intercolumnar space. The main corridors were roofed with barrel vaults, sometimes crossed in the style of medieval cloisters. The interior was also divided into three tiers, each upheld by arches, divided into concentric rings of boxes or seats, and cut by stairways into cunei, “wedges.” The aspect of the interior today is that of a mass of masonry into which some giant artisan has cut the arches, passages, and seats. Statues and other decorations adorned the whole, and many rows of seats were in marble. There were eighty entrances, two of them reserved for the emperor and his suite; these entrances and the exits (vomitoria) could empty the gigantic bowl in a few minutes. The arena, 287 by 180 feet, was surrounded by a fifteen-foot wall topped with an iron grating to protect brutes from beasts. The Colosseum is not a beautiful building, and its very immensity reveals a certain coarseness, as well as grandeur, in the Roman character. It is only the most imposing of all the ruins left by the classic world. The Romans built like giants; it would have been too much to ask that they should finish like jewelers.
Roman art had taken over in eclectic confusion the Attic, Asiatic, and Alexandrian styles—restraint, immensity, and elegance; it never quite combined them into that organic unity which is one requisite of beauty. There is something Oriental in the crude strength of the typically Roman buildings; they are awe-inspiring rather than beautiful; even Hadrian’s Pantheon is a structural marvel rather than an artistic whole. Except in certain moments, as in the Augustan reliefs and the glass, we must not look here for delicacy of feeling or refinement of execution; we must expect an engineer’s art that seeks the perfection of stability, economy, and use, a parvenu’s infatuation with immensity and ornament, a soldier’s insistence on realism, a warrior’s art of overwhelming force. The Romans did not finish like jewelers because conquerors do not become jewelers. They finished like conquerors.
Without doubt they created the most influential and fascinating city in history. They made a plastic, pictorial, and structural art that every man could understand, and a city that every citizen could use. The free masses were poor, but in some measure they owned much of the wealth of Rome: they ate the corn of the state, they sat at almost no cost in the theaters, the circuses, the amphitheaters, and the stadiums; they exercised, refreshed, amused, and educated themselves in the baths, they enjoyed the shade of a hundred colonnades, and walked under decorated porticoes that covered many miles of street and three miles in the Field of Mars alone. Never had the world seen such a metropolis. At its center a tumultuous Forum busy with business, resounding with oratory, alive with empire-shaking debates; then a ring of majestic temples, basilicas, palaces, theaters, and baths, in a profusion without parallel; then a ring of humming shops and teeming tenements; still another ring of homes and gardens, again with temples and public baths; and last of all, a circle of villas and estates pushing the city into the countryside and binding the mountains with the sea: this was the Rome of the Caesars—proud, powerful, brilliant, materialistic, cruel, iniquitous, chaotic, and sublime.
CHAPTER XVII
Epicurean Rome
30 B.C.-A.D. 96
I. THE PEOPLE
LET us enter these dwellings, temples, theaters, and baths, and see how these Romans lived; we shall find them more interesting than their art. We must at the outset recall that by Nero’s time they were only geographically Roman. The conditions that Augustus had failed to check—celibacy, childlessness, abortion, and infanticide among the older stocks, manumission and comparative fertility among the new—had transformed the racial character, the moral temper, even the physiognomy, of the Roman people.
Once the Romans had been precipitated into parentage by the impetus of sex, and lured to it by anxiety for the post-mortem care of their graves; now the upper and middle classes had learned to separate sex from parentage, and were skeptical about the afterworld. Once the rearing of children had been an obligation of honor to the state, enforced by public opinion; now it seemed absurd to demand more births in a city crowded to the point of redolence. On the contrary, wealthy bachelors and childless husbands continued to be courted by sycophants longing for legacies. “Nothing,” said Juvenal, “will so endear you to your friends as a barren wife.”1 “Crotona,” says a character in Petronius, “has only two classes of inhabitants—flatterers and flattered; and the sole crime there is to bring up children to inherit your money. It is like a battlefield at rest: nothing but corpses and the crows that pick them.”2 Seneca consoled a mother who had lost her only child by reminding her how popular she would now be; for “with us childlessness gives more power than it takes away.”3 The Gracchi had been a family of twelve children; probably not five families of such abundance could be found in Nero’s age in patrician or equestrian Rome. Marriage, which had once been a lifelong economic union, was now among a hundred thousand Romans a passing adventure of no great spiritual significance, a loose contract for the mutual provision of physiological conveniences or political aid. To escape the testatory disabilities of the unmarried some women took eunuchs as contraceptive husbands;4 some entered into sham wedlock with poor men on the understanding that the wife need bear no children and might have as many lovers as she pleased.5 Contraception was practiced in both its mechanical and chemical forms.6 If these methods failed there were many ways of procuring abortion. Philosophers and the law condemned it, but the finest families practiced it. “Poor women,” says Juvenal, “endure the perils of childbirth, and all the troubles of nursing . . . but how often does a gilded bed harbor a pregnant woman? So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist!” Nevertheless, he tells the husband, “rejoice; give her the potion . . . for were she to bear the child you might find yourself the father of an Ethiopian.”7 In so enlightened a society infanticide was rare.*
The infertility of the moneyed classes was so offset by immigration and the fecundity of the poor that the population of Rome and the Empire continued to grow. Beloch estimated it at 800,000 for the Rome of the early Empire, Gibbon at 1,200,000, Marquardt at 1,600,000.† Beloch computed the population of the Empire at 54,000,000, Gibbon at 120,000,000.11 The aristocracy was as numerous as before, but it was almost wholly altered in origin. We hear no more of the Aemilii, Claudii, Fabii, Valerii; only the Cornelii remained of the proud clans that, as late as Caesar, had strutted their Rome. Some had vanished through war or political execution; others had faded out through family limitation, physiological degeneration, or an impoverishment that had lowered them into the plebeian mass. Their places had been taken by Roman businessmen, Italian municipal dignitaries, and provincial nobles. In A.D. 56 a senator declared that “most of the knights, and many of the senators, were descendants of slaves.”12 After a generation or two the new optimates adopted the ways of their predecessors, had fewer children and more luxuries, and surrendered to inundation from the East.
First had come the Greeks—not so much from the mainland as from Cyrenaica, Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. They were eager, clever, facile semi-Orientals; many of them small traders or import merchants; some of them scientists, writers, teachers, artists, physicians, musicians, actors; some sincerely, some venally, devoted to philosophy; some of them able administrators and financiers, many of them without moral scruple, nearly all without religious belief. The majority had come as slaves and were not an ideal selection; freed, they kept their external servility, their internal hatred and scorn of the rich Roman who lived intellectually on the cultural leavings of ancient Hellas. The streets of the capital were now noisy with restless and voluble Greeks; the Greek language was more often heard there than the Latin; if one wished to be read by all classes he had to write in Greek. Nearly all the early Christians in Rome spoke Greek; so did the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews. A large colony of Egyptians—traders, artisans, artists—lived in the Field of Mars. Syrians, thin, affable, shrewd, were everywhere in the capital, busy with trade, handicrafts, secretarial work, finance, and chicanery.
The Jews were already in Caesar’s time a substantial element in the population of the capital. A few had come as early as 140 B.C..;13 many had been brought to Rome as war captives after Pompey’s campaign of 63 B.C. They were rapidly emancipated, partly by their industry and thrift, partly because their strict adherence to their religious customs was inconvenient for their masters. By 59 B.C. there were so many Jewish citizens in the assemblies that Cicero represented opposition to them as political temerity.14 In general the republican party was hostile to the Jews, the populares and the emperors were friendly.15 * By the end of the first century they numbered some 20,000 in the capital.18 They lived mostly on the west side of the Tiber, where they suffered periodically from the floods. They worked on the near-by docks, engaged in handicrafts and retail business, and peddled goods through the city. There were some rich men among them, but only a few great merchants; Syrians and Greeks dominated international commerce. Synagogues were numerous in Rome, and each had its school, its scribes, and its gerousia, or senate of elders.19 The separatism of the Jews, their scorn of polytheism and image worship, the severity of their morals, their refusal to attend the theaters or the games, their strange customs and ceremonies, their poverty and resultant uncleanliness, led to the usual racial antagonisms. Juvenal denounced their fertility, Tacitus their monotheism, Ammianus Marcellinus their fondness for garlic.20 Bad feeling was heightened by the bloody capture of Jerusalem, and the procession of Jewish captives and sacred spoils featured in the triumph of Titus and in the reliefs on his arch. Vespasian heaped insult upon injury by ordering that the half shekel paid annually by the Jews of the Dispersion for the upkeep of the Temple at Jerusalem should henceforth be contributed yearly to the rebuilding of Rome. Nevertheless, many educated Romans admired Jewish monotheism; some were converted to Judaism, and several, even of high family, observed the Jewish Sabbath as a day of worship and rest.21
If we add to the Greeks, the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews some Numidians, Nubians, and Ethiopians from Africa; a few Arabs, Parthians, Cappadocians, Armenians, Phrygians, and Bithynians from Asia; powerful “barbarians” from Dalmatia, Thrace, Dacia, and Germany; mustachioed nobles from Gaul, poets and peasants from Spain, and “tattooed savages from Britain”22—we get an ethnic picture of a very heterogeneous and cosmopolitan Rome. Martial marveled at the pliable facility with which the courtesans of Rome readjusted their language and their charms to so varied and polyglot a clientele.23 Juvenal complained that the Orontes, Syria’s great river, was flowing into the Tiber,24 and Tacitus described the capital as “the cesspool of the world.”25 Oriental faces, ways, dress, words, gestures, quarrels, ideas, and faiths made up a great part of the city’s seething life. By the third century the government would be an Oriental monarchy; by the fourth the religion of Rome would be an Oriental creed, and the masters of the world would kneel to the god of the slaves.
There were elements of nobility in this motley crowd. It showed its contempt of Nero’s mistress Poppaea when angry senators dared not speak, and it stormed the senate house to protest the wholesale slaughter of Pedanius Secundus’ slaves.26 The simple virtues of the common man were not wanting in it; the family life of the Jews was exemplary, and the little Christian communities were troubling the pleasure-mad pagan world with their piety and their decency. But most of the inflowing peoples had literally been demoralized by uprootage from their native surroundings, cultures, and moral codes; years of slavery had destroyed in them that self-respect which is the backbone of upright conduct; and daily friction with groups of different customs had worn away still more of their custom-made morality. If Rome had not engulfed so many men of alien blood in so brief a time, if she had passed all these newcomers through her schools instead of her slums, if she had treated them as men with a hundred potential excellences, if she had occasionally closed her gates to let assimiliation catch up with infiltration, she might have gained new racial and literary vitality from the infusion, and might have remained a Roman Rome, the voice and citadel of the West. The task was too great. The victorious city was doomed by the vastness and diversity of her conquests, her native blood was diluted in the ocean of her subjects, her educated classes were drawn down by the power of numbers to the culture of those who had been her slaves. Much breeding overcame good breeding; the fertile conquered became masters in the sterile master’s house.
II. EDUCATION
We do not know much of Roman childhood, but we can judge from Roman art and epitaphs that when children came they were loved not wisely but too well. Juvenal interrupts his wrath to write a tender passage on the good examples we must place before our children’s eyes, the evil sights and sounds we must keep from them, the respect that we should show them even in the excesses of our love.27 Favorinus, in a discourse premimicking Rousseau, begged mothers to nurse their babes.28 Seneca and Plutarch spoke to the same effect, which was slight indeed; wet-nursing was the rule in all families that could afford it, with no evident tragedies ensuing.*
Early education came from the nurse, who was usually Greek. There were fairy tales beginning, “Once upon a time a king and a queen . . .” Primary schooling was still entrusted to private enterprise. Rich men often hired tutors for their children, but Quintilian, like Emerson, warned against this as depriving the child of formative friendships and stimulating rivalries. Ordinarily the boy and girl of the free classes entered at the age of seven an elementary school, accompanied each way by a paedagogus (“child-leader”) to guard his safety and his morals. Such schools existed everywhere in the Empire, even in small country towns; the wall scribblings at Pompeii suggest a general literacy, and probably education was then as widespread in the Mediterranean world as at any time before or since. Both the paedagogus and the teacher (ludi magister, “schoolmaster”) were usually Greek freedmen or slaves. In Horace’s youth and native town each pupil paid the teacher eight asses (forty-eight cents) monthly; 30 350 years later Diocletian fixed the maximum fee for the elementary teacher at fifty denarii ($20) per month per pupil; we may judge from this the rise of the teacher and the fall of the as.
About the age of thirteen the successful student, of either sex, was graduated into a secondary or high school; Rome had twenty of these in A.D. 130. Here the scholars studied more grammar, the Greek language, Latin and Greek literature, music, astronomy, history, mythology, and philosophy, generally through lecture-commentaries on the classic poets. Up to this point the girls seem to have taken the same courses as the boys, but they often sought additional instruction in music and dancing. Since the secondary teachers (grammatici) were nearly always Greek freedmen, they naturally emphasized Greek literature and history; Roman culture took on a Greek tint, until by the end of the second century almost all higher education was given in Greek, and Latin literature was swallowed up in the general Hellenic koiné and culture of the age.
The Roman equivalent of our college and university education was provided in the schools of the rhetors. The Empire bristled with rhetoricians who spoke for their clients in court, or wrote speeches for them, or gave public lectures, or taught their art to pupils, or did all four. Many of them traveled from city to city, speaking on literature, philosophy, or politics, and giving exhibitions of how to handle any subject with oratorical skill. The younger Pliny tells of the Greek Isaeus, then sixty-three years old:
He proposes several questions for discussion, gives his audience liberty to call for any they please, and sometimes even to say what side of it he should defend; whereupon he rises, dons his gown, and begins. . . . He introduces his theme with great propriety, his narrative is clear, his controversy ingenious, his logic forcible, and his rhetoric sublime.31
Such men might open a school, employ assistants, and gather a large student body. Pupils entered about their sixteenth year, and paid fees as high as 2000 sesterces per course. The chief subjects were oratory, geometry, astronomy, and philosophy—which included much that is now termed science. These constituted a “liberal education”—i.e., one designed for a well-to-do freeman (homo liber), who would presumably have no physical work to perform. Petronius complained, as every generation does, that education unfitted youth for the problems of maturity: “The schools are to blame for the gross foolishness of our young men, since in them they see or hear nothing at all of the affairs of everyday life.”32 We can only say that they gave the assiduous student that clarity and quickness of thought which have distinguished the legal profession in all ages, and that capacity for unscrupulous eloquence which marked the orators of Rome. Apparently no degrees were granted in these schools. The student might stay as long, and take as many courses, as he liked; Aulus Gellius remained till he was twenty-five. Women also attended, some after marriage. Those who wished further instruction went to Athens for philosophy at its bubbling source, to Alexandria for medicine, or to Rhodes for the last subtleties of rhetoric. Cicero spent $4000 a year maintaining his son in the university of Athens.
By Vespasian’s time the schools of rhetoric had so grown in number and influence that the wily Emperor thought it advisable to bring the more important ones in the capital under governmental control by paying their head professors a state salary—the highest being 100,000 sesterces ($10,000) a year. We do not know to how many teachers or cities Vespasian extended this subsidy. We hear of private endowments for higher education, such as the younger Pliny established at Comum.33 Trajan provided scholarships for 5000 boys who had less money than brains. By the reign of Hadrian governmental financing of secondary schools had been adopted in many municipalities throughout the Empire, and a pension fund had been set aside for retired teachers. Hadrian and Antoninus exempted the leading professors of each city from taxation and other civic burdens. Education reached its height while superstition grew, morals declined, and literature decayed.
III. THE SEXES
The moral life of youth was carefully guarded in the girl, leniently supervised in the young man. The Roman, like the Greek, readily condoned the resort of men to prostitutes. The profession was legalized and restricted; brothels (lupanaria) were by law kept outside the city walls and could open only at night; prostitutes (meretrices) were registered by the aediles and were required to wear the toga instead of the stola. Some women enrolled as prostitutes to avoid the legal penalties of detected adultery. Fees were adjusted to bring promiscuity within the reach of every pocketbook; we have heard of the “quarter-of-an-as woman.” But there was now a rising number of educated courtesans who sought to win patrons by poetry, singing, music, dancing, and cultured conversation. One did not have to go outside the walls to find these or other ladies of easy persuasion; Ovid assures us that they could be met under the porticoes, at the circus, in the theater, “as numerous as stars in the sky”;34 and Juvenal found them in the precincts of temples, particularly that of Isis, a goddess lenient to love.35 Christian authors charged that prostitution was practiced within the cellas and between the altars of Roman temples.36
Male prostitutes were also available. Condemned by law, tolerated by custom, homosexualism flourished with Oriental abandon. “I am stricken with the heavy dart of love,” sings Horace—and for whom?—“for Lyciscus, who claims in tenderness to outdo any woman”; from this passion he can be freed “only by another flame for some fair maid or slender youth.”37 Martial’s choicest epigrams turn upon pederasty; and one of Juvenal’s least publishable satires represents the complaint of a woman against this outrageous competition.38 Erotic poetry of indifferent worth and gender, the Priapeia, circulated freely among sophisticated youths and immature adults.
Marriage contended bravely with these rival outlets and, helped by anxious parents and matrimonial brokers, managed to find at least temporary husbands for nearly every girl. Unmarried women above nineteen were considered “old maids,” but they were rare. The betrothed couple seldom saw each other; there was no courtship, not even a word for it; Seneca complained that everything else was tested before purchase, but not the bride by the groom.39 Sentimental attachment before marriage was uncommon; love poetry was addressed to married women or to women whom the poet never thought of marrying; and women’s escapades came after marriage, as under similar conditions in medieval and modern France. The elder Seneca assumed widespread adultery among Roman women,40 and his philosopher son thought that a married woman content with two lovers was a paragon of fidelity.41 “Pure women,” sang the cynical Ovid, “are only those who have not been asked; and a man who is angry at his wife’s amours is a mere rustic.”42 These may be literary conceits; more reliable is the simple epitaph of Quintus Vespillo to his wife: “Seldom do marriages last without divorce until death; but ours continued happily for forty-one years.”43 Juvenal tells of a woman who married eight times in five years.44 Having been wed for property or politics rather than for love, some women considered their duty fulfilled if they surrendered their dowries to their husbands and their persons to their lovers. “Did we not agree,” an adulteress in Juvenal explained to her unexpected husband, “that we should both do as we liked?”45 The “emancipation” of women was as complete then as now, barring the formalities of the franchise and the letter of dead laws. Legislation kept women subject, custom made them free.
In a number of cases emancipation, as in our time, meant industrialization. Some women worked in shops or factories, especially in the textile trades; some became lawyers and doctors;46 some became politically powerful; the wives of provincial governors reviewed and addressed troops.47 The Vestal Virgins secured political appointments for their friends, and the women of Pompeii announced their political preferences on the walls. Conservatives moaned and gloated over the apparent fulfillment of Cato’s warning that if women achieved equality they would turn it into mastery. Juvenal was horrified to find women actresses, athletes, gladiators, poets;48 Martial describes them as fighting wild beasts, even lions, in the arena;49 Statius tells of women dying in such jousts.50 Ladies rode through the streets in sedan chairs, “exposing themselves on every side to the view”;51 they conversed with men in porticoes, parks, gardens, and temple courts; they accompanied them to private or public banquets, to the amphitheater and the theater, where “their bare shoulders,” said Ovid, “give you something charming to contemplate.”52 It was a gay, colorful, multisexual society that would have astonished the Periclean Greeks. In the spring fashionable women filled the boats, shores, and villas of Baiae and other resorts with their laughter, their proud beauty, their amorous audacities, and political intrigue. Old men denounced them longingly.
Frivolous or immoral women were then, as now, a conspicuous minority. Quite as numerous—though not always distinct—were the ladies who fell in love with art, religion, or literature. Sulpicia’s verses were thought worthy of being handed down with those of Tibullus; they were highly erotic, but as they were addressed to her husband they were almost virtuous.53 Martial’s friend Theophila was a philosopher, a real expert on the Stoic and Epicurean systems. Some women busied themselves in philanthropy and social service, gave temples, theaters, and porticoes to their towns, and contributed as patronesses to collegia. An inscription at Lanuvium speaks of a curia mulierum, “an assembly of women”; Rome had a conventus matronarum; perhaps Italy had a national federation of women’s clubs. In any case, after reading Martial and Juvenal, we are disconcerted to find so many good women in Rome. Octavia faithful to Antony through every betrayal, and rearing devotedly his exotic children; Antonia her loving daughter, the chaste widow of Drusus, and the perfect mother of Germanicus; Mallonia, who publicly reproved Tiberius for his wickedness and then killed herself; Arria Paeta, who, when Caecina Paetus was ordered by Claudius to die, plunged a dagger into her breast and, dying, handed the weapon to her husband with the assuring words, “It does not hurt”;54 Paulina, who tried to die with Seneca; Politta, who, when Nero had her husband executed, began to starve herself, and, when the same sentence came to her father, joined him in suicide;55 Epicharis, the freedwoman who suffered every torture rather than betray the conspiracy of Piso; the unnumbered women who concealed and protected their husbands in the proscriptions, went with them into exile, or like Fannia, wife of Helvidius, defended them at great risk and cost: these alone would tip the scale against all the trollops of Martial’s epigrams and Juvenal’s stings.
Behind such heroines were the nameless wives whose marital fidelity and maternal sacrifices sustained the whole structure of Roman life. The old Roman virtues—pietas, gravitas, simplicitas—the mutual devotion of parents and children, a sober sense of responsibility, an avoidance of extravagance or display—still survived in Roman homes. The refined and wholesome families described in Pliny’s letters did not suddenly begin with Nerva and Trajan; they had existed quietly through the age of the despots; they had survived the espionage of emperors, the debasement of a helpless populace, the vulgarity of the demimonde. We catch glimpses of such homes in the epitaphs of mate to mate and of parents to children. “Here,” reads one, “lie the bones of Urbilia, wife of Primus. She was dearer to me than life. She died at twenty-three, beloved of all. Farewell, my consolation!” And another: “To my dear wife, with whom I passed eighteen happy years. For love of her I have sworn never to remarry.”56 We can picture these women in their homes—spinning wool, scolding and educating their children, directing servants, carefully administering their modest funds, and sharing with their husbands in the immemorial worship of the household gods. Despite her immorality it was Rome, not Greece, that raised the family to new heights in the ancient world.
IV. DRESS
If we may judge from a few hundred statues, the Roman males of Nero’s day were stouter and softer in figure and features than the men of the young Republic. World rule kept many of them characteristically hard and stern, fearful rather than lovable; but food and wine and sloth had rounded many others into shapes that would have scandalized the Scipios. They still shaved, or, more usually, were shaved by barbers (tonsores). A youth’s first shave was a holyday in his life; often he piously dedicated his original whiskers to a god.57 Common Romans continued the republican tradition and had their hair cut close, or even cropped, but an increasing number of dandies had theirs curled; Mark Antony and Domitian are so represented. Many men wore wigs, some had the semblance of hair painted on their pates.58 All classes, indoors and out, now dressed in a simple tunic or blouse; the toga was donned only for formal occasions, by clients at receptions and by patricians in the Senate or at the games. Caesar wore a purple toga as a sign of office; many dignitaries imitated him; but soon the purple robe became a prerogative of the emperors. There were no irksome trousers, no elusive buttons, no drooping hose; but in the second century men began to wrap their legs with fasciae, or bands. Footwear ranged from the sandal—a leather or cork sole attached Nipponwise by a thong between the big and second toes—to the high shoe of full leather, or of leather and cloth, usually worn with the toga in synthesis or full dress.
Roman women of the early Empire, as seen in frescoes and statuary and on coins, were much like the women of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, except that they were nearly all brunette. Their figures were moderately slender, and their robes gave their carriage a hypnotic grace. They knew the value of sunshine, exercise, and fresh air; some brandished dumbbells, some swam assiduously, some dieted; others reined in their bosoms with stays.59 Feminine hair was usually combed back and bound in a knot behind the neck, often enclosed in a net, and tied with a band or ribbon over the head. Later fashions demanded a loftier coiffure, supported by wire and elaborated with a wig of blonde hair imported from German maids.60 A woman of fashion might occupy several slaves for hours in manicuring her nails and dressing her hair.61
Cosmetics were as varied as today. Juvenal describes “beautification” as one of the most important technologies of the age; physicians, queens, and poets wrote volumes on the subject.62 A Roman lady’s boudoir was an arsenal of cosmetic instruments—tweezers, scissors, razors, files, brushes, combs, strigils, hair nets, wigs—and jars or phials of perfumes, creams, oils, pastes, pumice stone, soaps. Depilatories were used to remove hair, scented ointments to wave it or fix it. Many women applied to their faces a nocturnal mask of dough and asses’ milk in a mixture concocted by Poppaea, who found it helpful in repairing a bad complexion; therefore asses followed her in all her travels; sometimes she took a whole herd with her and bathed in asses’ milk.63 Faces were whitened or rouged with paint, brows and eyelashes were dyed black or painted over, sometimes the veins of the temple were traced with delicate lines of blue.64 Juvenal complained that a rich woman “reeks of Poppaean ointments that stick to the lips of her unfortunate husband,” who never sees her face. Ovid found these arts disillusioning and advised the ladies to conceal them from their lovers—all but the combing of their hair, which entranced him.66
Delicate lingerie was now added to the simple feminine garments of pre-Hannibalic Rome. Scarfs fell over the shoulders, and veils made an alluring mystery of the face. In winter soft furs caressed affluent forms. Silk was so common that men as well as women wore it. Silk and linen were colored with costly dyes; Romans often paid a thousand denarii for a pound of double-dyed Tyrian wool.67 Embroideries of gold and silver thread decorated dresses, curtains, carpets, and coverlets. Women’s shoes were made of soft leather or cloth, sometimes elaborately cut into an openwork pattern; they might be trimmed with gold and beset with jewelry;68 and high heels were often added to remedy the shortcomings of nature.
Jewelry was an important part of a woman’s equipment. Rings, earrings, necklaces, amulets, bracelets, breast chains, brooches, were necessities of life. Lollia Paulina once wore a dress covered from head to foot with emeralds and pearls, and carried with her the receipts showing that they cost 40,000,000 sesterces.69 Pliny describes over a hundred varieties of precious stones used in Rome. Expert imitations of these provided a busy industry; Roman “emeralds” of glass were superior to modern forgeries and were sold as genuine by jewelers as late as the nineteenth century.70 Men as well as women were fond of large and conspicuous stones. One senator had in his ring an opal as big as a filbert. Hearing of it, Antony had him proscribed; he escaped, carrying 2,000,000 sesterces on his finger; doubtless jewelry was then, as often, a hedge against inflation or revolution. Silver plate was now common in all but the lower classes. Tiberius and later emperors issued edicts against luxury, but these could not be enforced and were soon ignored. Tiberius yielded, and confessed that the extravagance of patricians and parvenus gave employment to the artisans of Rome and the East, and allowed provincial tribute to flow back from the capital. “Without luxury,” he said, “how could Rome, how could the provinces, live?”
Roman dress was not more luxurious than that of modern women, and far less gorgeous and costly than the garb of medieval lords. Fashion did not change in Rome as rapidly as in modern cities; a good garment might be worn a lifetime and remain in style. But compared with the standards of the Republic before Lucullus and Pompey had brought in the loot and hedonism of the East, upper-class Rome was now an epicurean paradise of fine clothing, varied food, elegant furniture, and stately homes. Shorn of political leadership, almost of political power, the aristocracy retired from the curia to its palaces, and abandoned itself, with no morals but philosophy, to the pursuit of pleasure and the art of life.
V. A ROMAN DAY
The luxuries of the home far outran the luxuries of dress. Floors of marble and mosaic; columns of polychrome marble, alabaster, onyx; walls painted with brilliant murals or encrusted with costly stones; ceilings sometimes coffered in gold71 or plate glass;72 tables with citrus wood standing on ivory legs; divans decorated with tortoise shell, ivory, silver, or gold; Alexandrian brocades or Babylonian coverings for which common millionaires paid 800,000, Nero 4,000,000, sesterces;73 beds of bronze fitted with mosquito netting; candelabra of bronze, marble, or glass; statues and paintings and objects of art; vases of Corinthian bronze or Murrhine glass—these were some of the ornaments that crowded the mansions of Nero’s age.
In such a home the master lived as in a museum. Slaves had to be bought to guard this wealth, and others to guard these. Some houses had 400 of them, engaged in attendance, supervision, or industry; the life of the great man, even in the privacy of his rooms, was spent in the publicity of his slaves. To eat with a servant at each elbow, to undress with a slave at each boot, to relax with a menial at every door—this is not paradise. To assure the misery of wealth the great man began his day, about seven, by receiving his “clients” and parasites and offering his cheeks to their kisses. After two hours of this he might breakfast. Then he received and returned formal visits of his friends. Etiquette required that one must repay the calls of every friend, help him in his lawsuits and candidacies, attend the betrothal of his daughter, the coming of age of his son, the reading of his poems, the signing of his will. These and other social obligations were performed with a grace and courtesy not exceeded in any civilization. Then the great man went to the Senate, or labored on some governmental commission, or attended to his personal affairs.
For the man of modest means life was simpler, but not less arduous. After the social calls of the early morning he gave himself to his business till noon. Humble folk were at their work by sunrise; as there was little night life, the Roman took full advantage of the day. A light luncheon came at noon, dinner at three or four—the higher the class, the later the hour. After luncheon and a siesta, the peasant and the employed prolétaire returned to work till nearly sunset; others sought recreation outdoors or in the public baths. The Romans of the Empire took their bathing more religiously than their gods. Like the Japanese, they could bear public better than private smells, and no ancient people but the Egyptians rivaled them in cleanliness. They carried handkerchiefs (sudaria) to wipe away their sweat,74 and brushed their teeth with powders and paste. In the early Republic a bath every eighth day had sufficed; now one had to bathe daily or risk a Martial’s epigram; even the rustic, says Galen, bathed every day.75 Most homes had bathtubs, rich houses had bathroom suites sparkling with marble, glass, or silver fixtures and taps.76 But the majority of free Romans relied on the public baths.
Ordinarily these were privately owned. In 33 B.C.. there were 170 in Rome; in the fourth century A.D. there were 856, besides 1352 public swimming pools.77 More popular than such establishments were the great baths built by the state, managed by concessionaires and staffed by hundreds of slaves. These thermae—“hot [waters]”—erected by Agrippa, Nero, Titus, Trajan, Caracalla, Alexander Severus, Diocletian, and Constantine, were monuments of state-socialistic splendor. The Baths of Nero had 1600 marble seats and accommodated 1600 bathers at one time; the Baths of Caracalla and those of Diocletian accommodated 3000 each. Admission was open to any citizen for a quadrans (1½ cents) ;78 the government met the balance of the cost, and apparently oil and service were included in the fee. The baths were open from daybreak to one P.M. for women, from two to eight P.M. for men; but mixed bathing was allowed by most of the emperors. Normally the visitor went first to a dressing room to change his clothes; then to the palaestra to box, wrestle, run, jump, hurl the disk or the spear, or play ball. One ball game was like our “medicine ball”; in another two opposed groups scrambled for a ball, and carried it forward against each other with all the enterprise of a modern university.79 Sometimes professional ballplayers would come to the baths and give exhibitions.80 Oldsters who preferred to take their exercise by proxy went to massage rooms and had a slave rub away their fat.
Passing to the baths proper, the citizen entered the tepidarium—in this case a warm-air room; thence he went on to the calidarium, or hot-air room; if he wished to perspire still more freely, he moved into the laconicum, and gasped in superheated steam. Then he took a warm bath and washed himself with a novelty learned from the Gauls—soap, made from tallow and the ashes of the beech or the elm.81 These warm rooms were the most popular and gave the baths their Greek name; probably they were Rome’s attempt to forestall or mitigate rheumatism and arthritis.82 The bather progressed to the frigidarium and took a cold bath; he might also dip into the piscina, or swimming pool. Then he had himself rubbed with some oil or ointment, usually made from the olive; this was not washed off, but merely scraped off with a strigil and dried with a towel, so that some oil might be returned to the skin in place of that which the warm baths had removed.
The bather seldom left the thermae at this point. For these were clubhouses as well as baths; they provided rooms for games like dice and chess,83 galleries of painting and statuary, exedrae where friends might sit and converse, libraries and reading rooms, and halls where a musician or a poet might give a recital or a philosopher might explain the world. In these afternoon hours after the bath Roman society found its chief meeting point; both sexes mingled freely in gay but polite association, flirtation, or discussion; there, and at the games and in the parks, the Romans could indulge their passion for talk, their fondness for gossip, and learn all the news and scandal of the day.
If they wished they could have dinner in the restaurant at the baths, but most of them dined at home. Perhaps because of the lassitude caused by exercise and warm bathing, the custom was to recline at meals. Once the women had sat apart while the men reclined; now the women reclined beside the men. The triclinium, or dining room, was so named because it usually contained three couches, arranged in square-magnet form around a serving table. Each couch normally accommodated three persons. The diner rested his head on his left arm, and his arm on a cushion, while the body extended diagonally away from the serving table.
The poorer classes continued to live chiefly on grains, dairy products, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Pliny lists a wide assortment of vegetables in the Roman dietary, from garlic to rape. The well to do ate meat, with the usual superabundance of reckless carnivores. Pork was the favorite flesh food; Pliny praises the pig for furnishing fifty different dainties.84 Pork sausages (botuli) were hawked through the streets in portable ovens, as on our highways today.
When one dined at a banquet he expected rarer foods. The banquet began at four and lasted till late in the night or till the next day. The tables were strewn with flowers and parsley, the air was scented with exotic perfumes, the couches were soft with cushions, the servants were stiff with livery. Between the appetizer (gustatio) and the dessert (secunda mensa, “second table”) came the luxury dishes on which the host and his chef prided themselves. Rare fish, rare birds, rare fruit, appealed to the curiosity as well as the palate. Mullets were bought at a thousand sesterces a pound; Asinius Celer paid 8000 for one; Juvenal growled that a fisherman cost less than a fish. As an added delight for the guests, the mullet might be brought in alive and boiled before their eyes, that they might enjoy the varied colors it took in the agony of death.85 Vedius Pollio raised these sesquipedalian fish in a large tank and fed them with unsatisfactory slaves.86 Eels and snails were considered dainties, but the law forbade the eating of dormice.87 The wings of ostriches, the tongues of flamingoes, the flesh of songbirds, the livers of geese, were favorite dishes. Apicius, a famous epicure under Tiberius, invented the pâté de fois gras by fattening the livers of sows with a diet of figs.88* Custom allowed the diner to empty his stomach with an emetic after a heavy banquet. Some gluttons performed this operation during the meal and then returned to appease their hunger; vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant, said Seneca—“they vomit to eat, and eat to vomit.”90 Such behavior was exceptional, and no worse than the braggart drunkenness of American conventioneers. Pleasanter was the custom of presenting gifts to the guests, or letting flowers or perfumes fall upon them from the ceiling, or entertaining them with music, dancing, poetry, or drama. Conversation, loosened with wine and stimulated by the presence of the other sex, would conclude the evening.
We must not think of such banquets as the customary end of a Roman day, or as more frequent in a Roman’s life than the dinners-cum-oratory so popular today. History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day. Most Romans were like our neighbors and ourselves: they rose reluctantly, ate too much, worked too much, played too little, loved much, seldom hated, quarreled a bit, talked a great deal, dreamed waking dreams, and slept.
VI. A ROMAN HOLIDAY
1. The Stage
Having many gods to worship, and many provinces to milk, Rome had many holidays, once solemn with religious pageantry, now gay with secular delight. In summer many of the poor fled from the humid heat to suburban or riverside taverns or groves, drinking, dining, dancing, and loving in the open air. Those who could afford it might go to the bathing resorts that lined the western coast, or sport with the rich on Baiae’s bay. In winter it was the ambition of every caste-conscious Roman to go south, if possible to Rhegium or Tarentum, and return with a coat of tan as a certificate of class. But those who stayed in Rome found entertainment plentiful and cheap. Recitations, lectures, concerts, mimes, plays, athletic contests, prize fights, horse races, chariot races, mortal combats of men with men or beasts, not-quite-sham naval battles on artificial lakes—never was a city more bountifully amused.
In the early Empire there were in the Roman year seventy-six festival days on which ludi were performed. Of these, fifty-five were ludi scenici, devoted to plays or mimes; twenty-two were games in the circus, the stadium, or the amphitheater. The number of ludi increased until by A.D. 354 they were presented on 175 days in the year.91 This meant no growth in the Roman drama; on the contrary, the drama decayed while the stage prospered. Original dramas were now written to be read rather than played; the theater contented itself with old Roman and Greek tragedies, old Roman comedies, and mimes. Stars dominated the stage and made huge fortunes. Aesopus the tragedian, after a life of assiduous extravagance, left 20,000,000 sesterces. Roscius the comic actor made 500,000 sesterces a year and became so rich that for several seasons he acted without pay—a scorn of money that made this ex-slave the lion of aristocratic gatherings. The games of the circus and the amphitheater absorbed the interest and coarsened the taste of the public, and the Roman drama died in the arena, another martyr to Roman holidays.
Through emphasis on acting and scenery rather than plot or thought, the drama gradually yielded the stage to mimes and pantomimes. The mime contained little dialogue, chose its themes from lowly life, and relied on character sketches presented with skillful mimicry. Freedom of speech, having disappeared from the assemblies and the Forum, survived for a moment in these brief farces, when a mime would risk his head to earn applause by a double-entendre aimed at an emperor or his favorites. Caligula had an actor burned alive in the amphitheater for such an allusion.92 On the day when the parsimonious Vespasian was buried a mime imitated the obsequies. During the procession the corpse sat up and asked how much this funeral was costing the state. “Ten million sesterces,” was the answer. “Give me 100,000,” said the imperial cadaver, “and throw me into the Tiber.”93 The mime alone admitted women as actors; and as these were thereby automatically classed as prostitutes, they had nothing to lose by obscenity. On special occasions like the Floralia the audience called upon these performers to remove every garment.94 Both sexes attended these performances, as in our time. Cicero found brides there, and they found him.
By suppressing speech altogether, and raising the theme to subjects from classic literature, the pantomime (“all mimicry”) was evolved out of the mime. There was a profit in foregoing language; the polyglot population of Rome, of which a considerable part could understand only the simplest Latin, followed the action better when unburdened with words. In 21 B.C. two actors, Pylades of Cilicia and Bathyllus of Alexandria, came to Rome and introduced the pantomime—already popular in the Hellenistic East—by performing one-act plays composed only of music, action, gesture, and dance. Tired of dramas in ancient and pompous verse, Rome welcomed the new art, thrilled to the grace and skill of the actors, enjoyed the gorgeousness of their costumes, the splendor or humor of their masks, the trained and dieted perfection of their figures, the Oriental expressiveness of their hands, their quick and versatile impersonation of diverse characters, their sensuous enactment of erotic scenes. Audiences divided into frantic cliques and claques in support of rival favorites; women of high station fell in love with the actors, and pursued them with gifts and embraces, until one literally lost his head over Domitian’s wife. The pantomime gradually drove all rivals but the mime from the Roman stage. The drama succumbed to the ballet.
2. Roman Music
Such a triumph was made possible by the high development of music and the dance. Under the Republic dancing had been looked upon as disgraceful; the younger Scipio had compelled the closing of schools that taught music and dancing,95 and Cicero had remarked that “only a lunatic would dance when sober.”96 But the pantomimes made dancing a fashion, then a passion; nearly every private home, says Seneca, had a dancing platform, echoing to the feet of men and women; rich households now had a dancing master, as well as a chef and a philosopher, as part of their equipment. As practiced in Rome the dance involved the rhythmical movement of the hands and the upper body even more than of legs and feet. Women cultivated the art not only for its own attractiveness, but because it gave them flexibility and grace.
The Romans loved music only less than power, money, women, and blood. Like nearly everything else in Rome’s cultural life, her music came from Greece and had to fight its way against a conservatism that identified art with degeneration. In 115 B.C.. the censors had forbidden the playing of any instrument except the short Italian flute. A century later the elder Seneca still considered music unmanly; but meanwhile Varro had devoted a book to De Musica, and this treatise, together with its Greek sources, became the support of many Roman works on musical theory.97 Finally the rich and sensuous Greek modes and instruments won the day over Roman awkwardness and simplicity, and music became a regular element in the education of women, and frequently of men. By A.D. 50 it had captured all classes and sexes; men as well as women spent whole days in hearing, composing, or singing airs; at last even emperors climbed and descended scales, and the philosophic Hadrian, as well as the effeminate Nero, was proud of his skill on the lyre. Lyric poetry was intended to be sung with music, and music was seldom composed except for poetry; ancient music was subordinated to the verse, whereas with us the music tends to overwhelm the words. Choral music was popular and was frequently heard at weddings, games, religious ceremonies, and funerals. Horace was deeply moved by the sight and sound of youths and maidens singing his carmen saeculare. In such choruses all the voices sang the same note, though in different octaves; part singing was apparently unknown.
The basic instruments were the flute and the lyre. Our wind and string orchestras are still variations of these forms: the most heroic symphony is a judicious combination of puffing, plucking, scraping, and beating. The flute accompanied drama and was supposed to arouse emotion; the lyre attended song and was expected to elevate the soul. The flute was long, had many openings, and a greater range of expression than the modern instrument. The lyre and the cithara were like our harp, but took a greater variety of shapes. Among the Greeks they had been of modest size, but the Romans magnified them until Ammianus described citharas “as large as carriages”;98 in general the Roman instruments, like ours, improved upon earlier ones chiefly in sonorousness and size. The strings of the lyre were made of gut or sinew and numbered up to eighteen; they were plucked with a plectrum or with the fingers—which alone could execute the quicker runs. From Alexandria, early in the first century, came the hydraulic organ, with several registers, stops, and orders of pipes. Nero fell in love with it, and the calm Quintilian was impressed by its versatility and power.
Formal concerts were given, and musical contests played a part in some public games. Even modest dinners required a bit of music; Martial promises his guest at least a flute player;99 as for Trimalchio’s feast, the tables are wiped in rhythm with song. Caligula had an orchestra and a chorus on his pleasure boat. At the pantomimes symphoniae were performed—i.e., a chorus sang and danced to the accompaniment of an orchestra. Sometimes the actor would sing the solo parts, sometimes a professional singer (cantor) sang the words while the actor gestured or danced. It was not unheard of for a pantomime to be accompanied by 3000 singers and 3000 dancers.100 The orchestra was led by flutes, aided by lyres, cymbals, pipes, trumpets, “syringes,” and scabella—boards fastened to the players’ feet and capable of producing a pandemonium even more frightful than that of a modern orchestra at the height of its powers. Seneca mentions harmony in the playing of individuals,101 but there is no sign that ancient orchestras used harmony contrapuntally. The accompaniment was usually on a higher note than the song, but it did not, so far as we know, pursue a distinct sequence.
Virtuosi were plentiful and minor performers abounded. Talent converged from all provinces upon the center of the world’s gold, while the institution of slavery permitted the training of choruses and orchestras on a large but inexpensive scale. Many rich establishments had their own musicians, and sent the most promising to famous teachers for advanced instruction. Some became citharoedi and gave concerts in which they sang and played the lyre; some specialized in singing, usually composing their own songs; some gave concerts on the organ or the flute like Cannus, who boasted, in the style of Beethoven, that his music could alleviate sorrow, increase joy, elevate piety, and fan the flame of love.102 These professionals went on extended concert tours throughout the Empire, earning plaudits, fees, public monuments, and infatuations; some, says Juvenal, sold their love for an added honorarium.103 Women fought for the plectra with which famous players had touched the strings, and offered sacrifice at the altars for the victory of their musical favorites in the Neronian and Capitoline games. We can faintly picture the imposing scene when musicians and poets from all the realm competed before great throngs, and the breathless winners received the crown of oak leaves from the emperor’s hands.
We do not know enough of Roman music to describe its quality. Apparently it was louder, fuller, wilder than the Greek; a weird Oriental quality had entered it from Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria. Old men mourned that recent composers were abandoning the restraint and dignity of the classic style, and were disordering the soul and nerves of youth with extravagant airs and noisy instruments. Certainly no people ever loved music more. The songs of the stage were caught up by a lively and volatile populace and rang through the streets and windows of Rome; the complex airs of the pantomimes were so fondly remembered that devotees could tell from the first notes of a strain to what play and scene it belonged. Rome made no real contribution to music, except perhaps through the better organization of performers into larger groups. But it honored music with exuberant usage and resilient response; it gathered the musical heritage of the ancient world into its temples, theaters, and homes; and when it passed it left to the Church the instruments and elements of the music that moves and deepens us today.
3. The Games
Now that war seemed banished, the great games were the most exciting event of the Roman year. They took place chiefly in celebration of religious festivals—of the Great Mother, of Ceres, of Flora, of Apollo, of Augustus; they might be the “Plebeian Games” to appease the plebs, or “Roman Games” in honor of the city and its goddess Roma; they might be offered in connection with triumphs, candidacies, elections, or imperial birthdays; they might, like the ludi saeculares, commemorate some cycle in Roman history. Like the games of Achilles in honor of Patroclus, those of Italy had originally been offered as a sacrifice to dead men. At the funeral of Brutus Pera in 264 B.C. his sons gave a “spectacle” of three duels; at the funeral of Marcus Lepidus in 216 B.C.. twenty-two combats were fought; and in 174 B.C.. Titus Flaminius celebrated his father’s death with gladiatorial games in which seventy-four men fought.
The simplest public games were athletic contests, usually held in a stadium. The performers, mostly professionals and aliens, ran foot races, threw the discus, wrestled, and boxed. The Roman public, accustomed to sanguinary gladiatorial exhibitions, only mildly favored athletics, but relished the prize fights in which massive Greeks fought almost to the death with gloves reinforced at the knuckles with an iron band three quarters of an inch thick. The gentle Virgil describes a milder pugilistic feast in almost modern terms:
Then the son of Anchises brought out hide gloves of equal weight, and bound the hands of the antagonists. . . . Each took his stand, poised on tiptoe and raising one arm. . . . Drawing their heads back from the blows they spar, hand against hand. They aim many hard blows, wildly pummeling each other’s sides and chests, ears and brows and cheeks, making the air resound with their strokes. . . . Entellus puts forth his right; Dares slips aside in a nimble dodge. . . . Entellus furiously drives Dares headlong over the arena, redoubling his blows, now with the right hand, now with the left. . . . Then Aeneas put an end to the fray, Dares’ mates led him to the ships with his knees shaking, his head swaying from side to side, his mouth spitting teeth and blood.104
Still more exciting were the races at the Circus Maximus. On two successive days forty-four races were run, some of horses and jockeys, some of light two-wheeled chariots drawn by two, three, or four horses abreast. The cost was met by rival stables owned by rich men; the jockeys, drivers, and chariots of each stable were costumed or painted in distinctive colors-white, green, red, or blue; and all Rome, as the time for these contests approached, divided into factions named from these colors, and particularly the red and the green. At home, in school, at lectures, in the forums, half the talk was about favorite jockeys and charioteers; their pictures were everywhere, their victories were announced in the Acta Diurna; some of them made great fortunes, some had statues raised to them in public squares. On the appointed day 180,000 men and women moved in festive colors to the enormous hippodrome. Enthusiasm rose to a mania. Excited partisans smelled the dung of the animals to assure themselves that the horses of their favorite drivers had been properly fed.105 The spectators passed by the shops and brothels that lined the outer walls; they filed through hundreds of entrances and sorted themselves with the sweat of anxiety into the great horseshoe of seats. Vendors sold them cushions, for the seats were mostly of hard wood, and the program would last all day. Senators and other dignitaries had special seats of marble, ornamented with bronze. Behind the imperial box was a suite of luxurious rooms, where the emperor and his family might eat, drink, rest, bathe, and sleep. Gambling was feverish, and fortunes passed from hand to hand as the day advanced. From openings under the stands emerged the horses, the jockeys and drivers, and the chariots; and each faction shook the stands with applause as its favorite color appeared. The charioteers, mostly slaves, wore bright tunics and shining helmets; in one hand was a whip, and in their belts a knife to cut, in accident, the traces tied to their waists. Along the middle of the elliptical arena ran the spina (“thorn,” “spine”), an island a thousand feet long, adorned with statues and obelisks; at one end were the metae (“measures”), circular pillars that served as goals. The usual length of a chariot race was seven circuits, about five miles. The test of skill lay in making the turns at the goals as swiftly and sharply as safety would allow; collisions were frequent there, and men, chariots, and animals mingled in fascinating tragedy. As the horses or chariots clattered to the final post the hypnotized audience rose like a swelling sea, gesticulated, waved handkerchiefs, shouted and prayed, groaned and cursed, or exulted in almost supernatural ecstasy. The applause that greeted the winner could be heard far beyond the limits of the city.
The most stupendous of all the spectacles offered at Roman celebrations was the sham naval battle. The first large naumachia was given by Caesar in a basin excavated for the purpose on the outskirts of the city. Augustus marked the dedication of his temple to Mars the Avenger by presenting 3000 fighters in a replica of the battle of Salamis on an artificial lake 1800 by 1200 feet. Claudius, as already noted, celebrated the completion of the Fucine tunnel with a conflict of triremes and quadriremes involving 19,000 men. They fought with a disappointing courtesy, and soldiers had to be sent among them to ensure a proper shedding of blood.106 At the dedication of the Colosseum Titus had its arena flooded, and reproduced that battle of the Corinthians and Corcyreans which had brought on the Peloponnesian War. The combatants in these engagements were war captives or condemned criminals. They butchered one another until one side or the other was killed off; the victors, if they had cut bravely, might be granted freedom.
The games reached their climax in the contests of animals and gladiators in the amphitheater—after Vespasian, in the Colosseum. The arena was an immense wooden floor strewn with sand; parts of this floor could be lowered and then quickly raised with a change of scene; and at brief notice the whole floor could be covered with water. Large chambers beneath it held the animals, machines, and men scheduled for the program of the day. Just above the arena’s guard wall was a podium or marble terrace on whose ornate seats sat senators, priests, and high officials; above this was the suggestum, a high loge where the emperor and empress sat on thrones of ivory and gold, surrounded by their family and retinue. Behind this aristocratic circle sat the equestrian order, in twenty tiers of seats. A lofty intervening wall, decorated with statuary, separated the upper orders from the lower classes in the stands above. Any free person, male or female, could come, and apparently no admission was charged. The crowd took advantage of the emperor’s presence, here and at the circus, to shout its wishes to him—for the pardon of a prisoner or a fallen fighter, the emancipation of a courageous slave, the appearance of favorite gladiators, or some minor reform. From the topmost wall awnings could be unrolled to the arena railing to shade such parts of the assemblage as might suffer from the sun. Here and there fountains threw up jets of scented water to cool the air. When noon came most of the spectators hurried below to eat lunch; concessionaires were on hand to sell them food and sweets and drinks. On occasion the entire multitude might be fed by the order and bounty of the emperor, or dainties and presents might be scattered among the scrambling crowd. If, as sometimes occurred, contests were presented at night, a circle of lights could be lowered over the arena and the spectators. Bands of musicians performed in the interludes and accompanied the crises of the combats with exciting crescendo strains.
The simplest event in the amphitheater was an exhibition of exotic animals. Gathered from all the known world, elephants, lions, tigers, crocodiles, hippopotami, lynxes, apes, panthers, bears, boars, wolves, giraffes, ostriches, stags, leopards, antelopes, and rare birds were kept in the zoological gardens of emperors and rich men, and were trained to skillful exploits or merry pranks; apes were taught to ride dogs, drive chariots, or act in plays; bulls let boys dance on their backs; sea lions were conditioned to bark in answer to their individual names; elephants danced to cymbals struck by other elephants, or they walked a rope, or sat down to table, or wrote Greek or Latin letters. Animals might be merely paraded in bright or humorous costumes; usually, however, they were made to fight one another, or with men, or they were hunted to death with arrows and javelins. In one day, under Nero, 400 tigers fought with bulls and elephants; on another day, under Caligula, 400 bears were slain; at the dedication of the Colosseum 5000 animals died.107 If the animals wished to compromise they were stung to combat by lashes, darts, and hot irons. Claudius made a division of the Praetorian Guard fight panthers; Nero made them fight 400 bears and 300 lions.108
Combats of a bull with a man, long popular in Crete and Thessaly, were introduced into Rome by Caesar and were a frequent spectacle in the amphitheater.109 Condemned criminals, sometimes dressed in skins to resemble animals, were thrown to beasts made ravenous for the occasion; death in such cases came with all possible agony, and wounds were so deep that physicians used such men to study internal anatomy. All the world knows the story of Androcles, the runaway slave; captured, he was flung into the arena with a lion; but this lion, we are told, remembered that Androcles had once drawn a thorn from its paw, and refused to injure him. Androcles was pardoned, and made a living by exhibiting his civilized lion in taverns.110 The condemned man was sometimes required to play in no make-believe way some famous tragic role: he might represent Medea’s rival, and be garbed in a handsome robe that would suddenly burst into flame and consume him; he might be burned to death on a pyre as Heracles; he might (if we may believe Tertullian) be publicly castrated as Atys; he might play Mucius Scaevola and hold his hand over burning coals until it was shriveled up; he might be Icarus and fall from the sky into no merciful ocean but a crowd of wild beasts; he might be Pasiphaë, and bear the embraces of a bull. One victim was dressed as Orpheus; he was sent with his lyre into an arena set as a pleasant grove of trees and brooks; suddenly hungry animals emerged from recesses and tore him to pieces.111 Laureolus, a robber, was crucified in the arena for the amusement of the populace; but as he took too long in dying, a bear was brought in and was persuaded to eat him, piece by piece, as he hung upon the cross. Martial describes the spectacle with fascination and approval.112
The supreme events were the combats of armed men, in duels or en masse. The contestants were war captives, condemned criminals, or disobedient slaves. The right of victors to slaughter their prisoners was generally accepted throughout antiquity, and the Romans thought themselves generous in giving captives a chance for their lives in the arena. Men convicted of capital crimes were brought to Rome from all parts of the Empire, were sent to gladiatorial schools, and soon appeared in the games. If they fought with exceptional bravery they might win immediate freedom; if they merely survived they had to fight again and again as holidays recurred; if they lasted three years they were released into slavery; if then they satisfied their masters for two years they were freed. Crimes entailing condemnation to a gladiatorial career were limited to murder, robbery, arson, sacrilege, and mutiny, but sedulous governors responsive to imperial needs might override these restrictions if the arena ran short of men.113 Even knights and senators might be sentenced to fight as gladiators, and sometimes a passion for applause led members of the equestrian order to offer themselves as volunteers. Not a few men, under the lure of adventure and danger, enlisted in the gladiatorial schools.
Such schools had existed in Rome as early as 105 B.C.. Under the Empire there were four of them there, several more in Italy, and one in Alexandria. Rich men, in Caesar’s day, had their own schools for preparing slaves to be gladiators. They used the graduates as bodyguards in peace and as aides in war, hired them out to fight at private banquets, and lent them to the games. On entering a professional gladiatorial school many a novice took an oath “to suffer himself to be whipped with rods, burned with fire, and killed with steel.”114 Training and discipline were rigorous; diet was supervised by physicians, who prescribed barley to develop muscle; violation of rules was punished by scourging, branding, and confinement in chains. Not all of these candidates for death were discontented with their lot. Some were elated with victories and thought of their prowess rather than their peril; some complained that they were not allowed to fight often enough;115 such men hated Tiberius for giving so few games. They had the stimulus and consolation of fame; their names were daubed by admirers upon public walls; women fell in love with them, poets sang of them, painters portrayed them, sculptors carved for posterity their iron biceps and terrifying frowns. Many, however, were despondent at their imprisonment, their brutalizing routine, and their brief expectation of life. Several committed suicide; one by stuffing his throat with a sponge used to clean privies, another by inserting his head between the spokes of a moving wheel, several by hara-kiri in the arena.116
On the eve of their combat they were given a rich banquet. The rougher ones ate and drank heartily; others took sad leave of their wives and children; those who were Christians joined in a last agapé, or “supper of love.” The next morning they entered the arena in festal dress and paraded from one end of it to the other. They were usually armed with swords, or spears, or knives, and armored with bronze helmets, shields, shoulderplates, breastplates, and greaves. They were classified according to their weapons: retiarii, who entangled their opponents with nets and dispatched them with daggers; secutores, skilled in pursuit with shield and sword; laqueatores, slingshooters; dimachae, with a short sword in each hand; essedarii, who fought in chariots; bestiarii, who contended with beasts. Besides these enterprises the gladiators engaged in duels, in pairs or in groups. If a dueler in a single combat was seriously wounded, the provider of the games asked the spectators for their will; they held thumbs up—or waved handkerchiefs—as signs of mercy, or turned thumbs down (pollice verso) to signify that the victor was to kill the defeated forthwith.117 Any combatant who betrayed a reluctance to die aroused the resentment of the people and was prodded to bravery by hot irons.118 Richer slaughter was furnished by mass battles in which thousands of men fought with desperate ferocity. In the eight spectacles given by Augustus 10,000 men took part in such wholesale conflicts. Attendants in the garb of Charon probed the fallen with sharp rods to see if they were feigning death, and killed such actors with mallet blows on the head. Other attendants, dressed like Mercury, dragged the bodies away with hooks, while Moorish slaves gathered up the bloodied ground in shovels and spread fresh sand for the next death.
Most Romans defended the gladiatorial games on the ground that the victims had been condemned to death for serious crimes, that the sufferings they endured acted as a deterrent to others, that the courage with which the doomed men were trained to face wounds and death inspired the people to Spartan virtues, and that the frequent sight of blood and battle accustomed Romans to the demands and sacrifices of war. Juvenal, who denounced everything else, left the games unscathed; the younger Pliny, a highly civilized man, praised Trajan for providing spectacles that impel men “to noble wounds and the scorn of death”;119 and Tacitus reflected that the blood spilled in the arena was in any case vilis sanguis—the “cheap gore” of common men.120 Cicero was revolted by the slaughter; “what entertainment,” he asks, “can possibly arise, to a refined and humanized spirit, from seeing a noble beast struck to the heart by its merciless hunter, or one of our own weak species cruelly mangled by an animal of far greater strength?” But, he added, “when guilty men are compelled to fight, no better discipline against suffering and death can be presented to the eye.”121 Seneca, dropping in at the games during the noon recess, when most of the assemblage had left for luncheon, was shocked to see hundreds of criminals driven into the arena to amuse the remaining audience with their blood.
I come home more greedy, more cruel and inhuman, because I have been among human beings. By chance I attended a midday exhibition, expecting some fun, wit, and relaxation . . . whereby men’s eyes may have respite from the slaughter of their fellow men. But it was quite the contrary. . . . These noon fighters are sent out with no armor of any kind; they are exposed to blows at all points, and no one ever strikes in vain. . . . In the morning they throw men to the lions; at noon they throw them to the spectators. The crowd demands that the victor who has slain his opponent shall face the man who will slay him in turn; and the last conqueror is reserved for another butchering. . . . This sort of thing goes on while the stands are nearly empty. . . . Man, a sacred thing to man, is killed for sport and merriment.122
VII. THE NEW FAITHS
Religion accepted the games as proper forms of religious celebration and inaugurated them with solemn processions. The Vestal Virgins and the priests occupied seats of honor in the theaters, at the circus, and before the arena. The emperor who presided was the high priest of the state religion.
Augustus and his successors had done everything they could to revitalize the old faith, except to live moral lives; even the declared atheists among them, like Caligula and Nero, had carried out all the ritual traditionally due the official gods. The Luperci priests still danced through the streets on their festival day; the Arval Brethren still mumbled prayers to Mars in old Latin that no one could understand. Divination and augury were assiduously practiced and widely trusted; all but a few philosophers believed in astrology, and the emperors who banished astrologers consulted them. Magic and sorcery, witchcraft and superstition, charms and incantations, “portents” and the interpretation of dreams were deeply woven into the tissue of Roman life. Augustus studied his dreams with the diligence of a modern psychologist; Seneca saw women sitting on the steps of the Capitol waiting the pleasure of Jupiter because their dreams had told them they were desired of the god.123 Every consul celebrated his inauguration by sacrificing steers; Juvenal, who could laugh at everything else, piously slit the throats of two lambs and a young ox in gratitude for the safe voyage of a friend. Temples were rich with gold and silver offerings; candles burned before the altars; the lips, hands, and feet of divine images were worn by the kisses of the devout. The old religion seemed still vigorous; it created new gods like Annona (gatherer of the world’s corn for Rome), put new life into the worship of Fortuna and Roma, and gave powerful support to law, order, and tyranny. If Augustus had returned a year after his death he might well have claimed that his religious revival had proved a happy success.
Despite these appearances the ancient faith was diseased at the bottom and at the top. The deification of the emperors revealed not how much the upper classes thought of their rulers, but how little they thought of their gods. Among educated men philosophy was whittling away belief even while patronizing it. Lucretius had not been without effect; men did not mention him, but merely because it was easier to practice epicureanism than to study Epicurus or his passionate expositor. The rich youths who went to Athens, Alexandria, and Rhodes for higher education found no sustenance there for the Roman creed. Greek poets made fun of the Roman pantheon, and Roman poets leaped to imitate them. The poems of Ovid assumed that the gods were fables; the epigrams of Martial assumed that they were jokes; and no one seems to have complained. Many of the mimes ridiculed the gods; one whipped Diana off the stage, another showed Jove making his will in expectation of death.124 Juvenal, like Plato five centuries before him and ourselves eighteen centuries after him, noted that the fear of a watchful deity had lost its power to discourage perjury.125 Even on the tombstones of the poor we note increasing skepticism, and some candid sensuality. Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo, reads one—“I was not, I was, I am not, I care not”; and another, Non fueram, non sum, nescio—“I had not been, I am not, I know not”; and another, “What I have eaten and drunk is my own; I have had my life.”126 “I believe in nothing beyond the grave,” says one tombstone; “There is no Hades, no Charon, no Cerberus,” asserts another. “Now,” a harassed soul wrote, “I need never fear hunger, need never pay rent, and am at least free from gout”; and a somber Lucretian writes of the buried flesh: “The elements out of which he was formed take possession of their own again. Life is only lent to man; he cannot keep it forever. By his death he pays his debt to Nature.”127
But doubt, however honest, cannot long take the place of belief. Amid all its pleasures this society had not found happiness. Its refinements wearied it, its debaucheries exhausted it; rich and poor were still subject to pain and grief and death. Philosophy—least of all so coldly superior a doctrine as Stoicism—could never give the common man a faith to grace his poverty, encourage his decency, solace his sorrows, and inspire his hopes. The old religion had fulfilled the first of these functions; it had failed in the rest. Men wanted revelation, and it gave them ritual; they wanted immortality, and it gave them games. Men who had come, enslaved or free, from other states felt excluded from this nationalistic worship; therefore they brought their own gods with them, built their own temples, practiced their own rites; in the very heart of the West they planted the religions of the East. Between the creeds of the conquerors and the faith of the defeated a war took form in which the weapons of the legions were useless; the needs of the heart would determine the victory.
The new deities came with war captives, returning soldiers, and merchants. Traders from Asia and Egypt set up temples in Puteoli, Ostia, and Rome for the cult of their traditional gods. The Roman government treated these alien faiths for the most part with toleration; since it would not admit foreigners to its own worship it preferred that they should practice their imported rites rather than have no religion at all. In return it required that each new faith should exercise a similar tolerance towards other creeds, and should include in its ritual some obeisance to the emperor’s “genius” and the goddess Roma, as an expression of loyalty to the state. Encouraged by this lenience, the Oriental faiths already domiciled in Rome became major religions of the populace. Hoping to civilize the cult, Claudius removed the restrictions that had harassed the worship of the Great Mother; he allowed Romans to become her ministrants, and established her feast around the vernal equinox, from March 15 to 27. Her chief rival in this first Christian century was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood, fertility, and trade. Again and again the government had forbidden the cult in Rome, but it always returned; the piety of the devotees overcame the power of the state, and Caligula marked the surrender by building with public funds an immense shrine to her in the Field of Mars. Otho and Domitian took part in the Isiac festivals; Commodus, with shaven head, walked humbly behind the priests, holding reverently in his arms a statue of Anubis, the Egyptian monkey god.
The divine invasion swelled from year to year. From southern Italy came the worship of Pythagoras—vegetarianism and reincarnation. From Hierapolis came Atargatis, known to the Romans as dea Syria, “the Syrian goddess,” Aziz the “Zeus of Doliche,” and other strange gods; their worship was spread by Syrian merchants and slaves; and at last a young priest of a Syrian Baal ascended the throne as Elagabalus—worshiper of the god of the sun. From hostile Parthia came the cult of another sun-god, Mithras; its devotees were enlisted as soldiers in the great cosmic war of Light against Darkness, of Good against Evil; it was a virile faith that won men rather than women, and pleased the Roman legions stationed on distant frontiers where they could hardly hear the voices of their native gods. From Judea came Yahweh, an uncompromising monotheist who commanded the most difficult life of piety and regulation, but gave his followers a moral code and courage that supported them well in tribulation, and clothed with a certain nobility the life of the humblest poor. Among the Roman Jews who prayed to him were some, as yet obscurely distinguished from the rest, who worshiped his incarnate and resurrected son.
CHAPTER XVIII
Roman Law*
146 B.C..-A.D. 192
I. THE GREAT JURISTS
LAW was the most characteristic and lasting expression of the Roman spirit. As Greece stands in history for freedom, so Rome stands for order; and as Greece bequeathed democracy and philosophy as the foundations of individual liberty, so Rome has left us its laws, and its traditions of administration, as the bases of social order. To unite these diverse legacies, to attune their stimulating opposition into harmony, is the elemental task of statesmanship.
Since law is the essence of Roman history it has been impossible to keep them separate, and this chapter can only be a structural and synoptic supplement to preceding and subsequent details. The Roman constitution was like the British—no set of permanently binding rules, but a stream of precedent giving direction without preventing change. As wealth increased, and life became more complex, new legislation issued from assemblies, Senate, magistrates, and princes; the body of the law grew as rapidly as the Empire and reached out to ever new frontiers. The education of lawyers, the guidance of judges, and the protection of the citizen from illegal judgments demanded the organization and formulation of the law into some orderly and accessible form. Amid the turmoil of the Gracchan and Marian revolution Publius Mucius Scaevola (consul, 133 B.C..) and his son Quintus (consul, 95 B.C..) labored to reduce the laws of Rome to an intelligible system. Cicero, pupil of another Quintus Mucius Scaevola (consul, 117 B.C.), wrote eloquently on the philosophy of law, and constructed an ideal code designed to preserve the fortune that he had gained and the faith that he had lost. The contradictory enactments of Marius and Sulla, the unprecedented powers of Pompey, the revolutionary legislation of Caesar, and the new constitution of Augustus created fresh problems for minds that struggled to make a logic of the law; and the brilliant jurist Antistius Labeo confounded confusion by declaring the decrees of Caesar and Augustus void, as the expression of usurped and illegal authority. Not till the Principate had established itself, first by the use of force and then by the force of use, could the new legislation win acceptance in the minds of men as well as in the courts of power. To the second and third centuries of our era belongs the honor of giving Roman law its final formulation in the West—an achievement comparable to the formulation of science and philosophy in Greece.
Here, too, Caesar had set the goal; but the actual work did not begin till Hadrian (A.D. 117). This best educated of the emperors gathered about him a corps of jurists as his Privy Council, and commissioned them to replace the variable annual edicts of the praetors with a Perpetual Edict to be observed by all future judges in Italy. The Greeks had produced since Solon no masterpiece of jurisprudence, and never a codified system of law; but the Greek cities of Asia and Italy had developed excellent municipal codes. The much-traveled Hadrian knew these cities well and was perhaps inspired by their constitutions to improve and co-ordinate the laws of Rome. Under his successors, the Antonines, the work of codification continued, and the half-official repute enjoyed by the Stoic philosophy permitted a profound Greek influence upon Roman law. The Stoics declared that law should accord with morality, and that guilt lay in the intention of the deed, not in the results. Antoninus, a product of the Stoic school, decreed that cases of doubt should be resolved in favor of the accused, and that a man should be held innocent until proved guilty1—two supreme principles of civilized law.
Favored by imperial patronage, the science of jurisprudence nurtured a succession of geniuses. Salvius Julianus, a Roman of African birth, showed so much learning and industry as quaestor Augusti, or legal adviser to the emperor, that the Senate voted him double the usual salary of that office. His responsa were acclaimed for their logic and clarity; his Digesta presented a systematic arrangement of civil and praetorian law; it was he who, as the leading member of Hadrian’s Council, formulated the Praetorian Perpetual Edict. Another jurist is known to us only by his first name, Gaius; his famous Institutiones was discovered by Niebuhr in 1816 on a faded palimpsest overwritten with some essays by Saint Jerome; it is now our fullest authority for pre-Justinian Roman law. It was issued (ca. A.D. 161) not as a creative work but as an elementary manual for students; if we find it a masterpiece of orderly exposition, we may imagine the intellectual stature of the men whose lost treatises it summarized. Sixty years later Papinian, Paulus, and Ulpian brought Roman jurisprudence to its height; while the administration of the law fell a victim to violence and chaos, they gave it a rational formulation and consistency. After them the great science sank in the general ruin.
II. THE SOURCES OF THE LAW
As the terminology of science and philosophy comes mostly from the Greek, betraying their source, so the language of the law comes mostly from the Latin. Law in general was ius, justice or right; lex meant a specific law.* Jurisprudence—wisdom in the law—was defined in the Digest of Justinian (A.D. 533) as both a science and an art: the “science of the just and the unjust,” and the “art [i.e., administration] of the good and the equitable.”2 lus included unwritten law, or custom, as well as written law. The latter was composed of ius civile—the “law of [Roman] citizens”—and ius gentium—“the law of the nations.” Civil law was “public law” when it related to the state or the official worship, and “private law” when it dealt with the legal interrelations of the citizens.
Roman law as a whole flowed from five sources. 1. Under the Republic the ultimate source of law was the will of the citizens, expressed as leges in the Curial and Centurial Assemblies, and as plebiscita (“decided by the plebs”) in the Tribal Assembly. The Senate acknowledged leges only when they had been proposed to the assemblies with the proper formalities and by a magistrate of Senatorial rank. When Senate and assembly agreed in passing a measure, it was proclaimed in the name of Senatus Populusque Romanus.
2. The Senate itself, in theory, had no lawmaking power under the Republic; its senatusconsulta were, formally, recommendations to the magistrates; gradually they became directives, then imperatives, until in the later Republic and under the Empire they took on the force of laws. Altogether the laws passed by the assemblies or the Senate were so few in the course of six centuries as to astonish one accustomed to the legislative flux of modern states.
3. The need for minor or more specific laws was met by the edicta of the municipal officials. Each new urban praetor (our “chief city magistrate”) issued an edictum praetorium, announced by a herald in the Forum and inscribed upon a wall, and stating the legal principles on which the praetor proposed to act and judge during his year’s term. Similar edicts could be put forth by circuit judges (praetores peregrini) and provincial praetors. Through their power of imperium, or rule, the praetors were allowed not only to interpret existing laws, but to make new ones. In this way Roman law combined the stability of its basic legislation with the flexibility of praetorian judgments. When a law or clause was carried down from one praetorian edict to the next for many years, it became a definite part of the ius honorarium; by the time of Cicero this “law of the offices” had displaced the Twelve Tables as the main text of legal instruction in Rome. Nevertheless, a praetor often reversed the decisions, and sometimes contradicted the principles, of a predecessor, so that uncertainties of law and arbitrariness of judgment were added to the abuses natural in every judicial system operated by men. It was to end this uncertainty that Hadrian instructed Julianus to unify all preceding ius honorarium in a Perpetual Edict alterable only by the emperor.
4. The constitutiones principum, or statutes of the princes, became themselves in the second century a varied source of law. They took four forms. (a) The prince issued edicta by virtue of his imperium as an official of the city; these were valid for the whole Empire, but apparently lapsed after his death. (b) His decreta as a judge, like those of other magistrates, had the force of law. (c) Imperial rescripta were his answers to inquiries. Usually they were epistulae—letters—or subscriptiones, brief replies “written under” a question or petition. The wise and pithy letters in which Trajan answered the requests of governmental appointees for instruction were incorporated into the laws of the Empire and kept their validity long after his death, (d) The mandata of the emperors were their directives to officials; in the course of time these came to constitute a detailed code of administrative law.
5. Under certain circumstances law could be created by the responsa prudentium. It must have been a pleasant sight when learned jurists sat in chairs in the open Forum (or, in later decades, in their homes), and gave legal opinions to all who asked, taking their chances on some indirect remuneration. Often their advice was solicited by lawyers or municipal judges. Like the great rabbis of the Jews they reconciled contradictions, drew subtle distinctions, interpreted and adjusted the ancient law to the needs of life or the exigencies of politics. Their written replies, by unwritten custom, had an authority only less than the law’s. Augustus gave such opinions full legal force on two conditions; that the jurist should have received from the Emperor the ius respondendi, or right of giving legal opinions; and that the reply should be sent under seal to the judge trying the case in point. By the time of Justinian these responsa had become a vast school and literature of law, the fountain and foundation of his culminating Digest and Code.
III. THE LAW OF PERSONS
“All law,” says the precise Gaius, “pertains to persons, to property, or to procedure.”3 The word persona had signified an actor’s mask; later it was applied to the part played by a man in life; finally it came to mean the man himself—as if to say that we can never know a man, but only the parts he plays, the mask or masks that he wears.
The first person in Roman law was the citizen. He was defined as anyone who had been accepted into a Roman tribe by birth, adoption, emancipation, or governmental grant. Within this franchise were three grades: (1) full citizens, who enjoyed the fourfold right of voting (ius suffragii), of holding office (ius honorum), of marriage with a freeborn person (ius connubii), and of engaging in commercial contracts protected by Roman law (ius commercii); (2) “citizens without suffrage,” who had the rights of marriage and contract, but not of voting or office; and (3) freedmen, who had the rights of voting and contract, but not of marriage or office. The full citizen had, furthermore, certain exclusive rights in private law: the power of the father over his children (patria potestas), of the husband over his wife (manus), of an owner over his property, including his slaves (dominium), and of a freeman over another by contract (mancipium). A kind of potential citizenship, called Latinitas or ius Latii, was conferred by Rome upon the free inhabitants of favored towns and colonies, whereby they acquired the right of contract, but not of intermarriage, with Romans, and their magistrates received full Roman citizenship upon completing their terms of office. Each city of the Empire had its own citizens and conditions of citizenship; and by a unique tolerance a man might be a citizen—and enjoy the civic rights—of several cities at once. The most precious privilege of a Roman citizen was the safeguarding of his person, property, and rights by the law, and his immunity from torture or violence in the trying of his case. It was the glory of Roman law that it protected the individual against the state.
The second person in Roman law was the father. The patria potestas had been weakened by the spread of law into areas formerly governed by custom; but we may judge its surviving force from the fact that when Aulus Fulvius set out to join Catiline’s army, his father called him back and put him to death. In general, however, the power of the father declined as that of the government rose; democracy entered the family when it left the state. In the early Republic the fathers had been the state; the family heads formed the Curial Assembly, and the clan heads probably constituted the Senate. Rule through family and clan diminished as population became more abundant and diverse, and life more mobile, commercial, and complex; kinship, status, and custom were replaced by contract and law.4 Children won greater freedom from their parents, wives from their husbands, individuals from their groups. Trajan compelled a father to emancipate a son whom he had maltreated; Hadrian took from the father the right of life and death over his household and transferred it to the courts; Antoninus forbade a father to sell his children into slavery.5 Custom had long since reduced the use of these old powers to rare occurrences. Law tends to lag behind moral development, not because law cannot learn, but because experience has shown the wisdom of testing new ways in practice before congealing them into law.
The Roman woman gained new rights as the man lost old ones; but she was clever enough to disguise her freedom under continuing legal disabilities. The law of the Republic assumed that she was never sui iuris, “of her own right,” but always dependent upon some male guardian; “according to our ancestors,” said Gaius, “even women of mature age must be kept in tutelage because of the lightness of their minds.”6 In the later Republic and under the Empire this legal dependence was largely annulled by feminine charms and willfulness, abetted by male susceptibility and affection. From Cato the Elder to Commodus Roman society, legally patriarchal, was ruled by women, with all the graceful mastery of Renaissance Italian or Bourbon French salons. The laws of Augustus made some obeisance to the facts by releasing from tutela any woman who had borne three legitimate children.7 Hadrian decreed that women might dispose of their property as they liked, provided they obtained the consent of their guardians; but actual procedure soon dispensed with this consent. By the end of the second century all compulsory tutelage was ended in law for free women over twenty-five.
The consent of both fathers was still required for legal marriage.8 Marriage by confarreatio was now (A.D. 160) confined to a few Senatorial families. Marriage by purchase (coemptio) lingered as a form; the bridegroom paid for the bride by weighing an as or an ingot of bronze in a scale before five witnesses, her father or her guardian having consented.9 Most marriages were now by usus, i.e., cohabitation. To avoid falling under the manus or proprietory power of her husband, the wife absented herself three nights in each year; thereby she retained control of her property, excepting her dowry. Indeed, the husband often put his property in his wife’s name to avoid suits for damages or the penalties of bankruptcy.10 Such marriage sine manu could be ended by either party at will; marriage by other forms could be ended only by the husband. Adultery was still a minor offense in the man; in the woman it was a major offense against the institutions of property and inheritance. But the husband no longer had the right to kill his wife taken in adultery; this right was now vested technically in her father, actually in the courts; and the penalty was banishment. Concubinage was recognized by the law as a substitute for marriage, but not as an accompaniment to it; and a man could not legally have two concubines at once. Children by a concubine were classed as illegitimate and could not inherit—which made concubinage all the more attractive to men who liked to be courted by hunters of legacies. Vespasian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius lived in concubinage after the death of their wives.11
The law struggled to encourage parentage among the freeborn, but with negligible results. Infanticide was forbidden except in the case of infants deformed or incurably diseased. The detected procurer of abortion was banished and lost part of his property; if the woman died he was to be put to death;12 these laws, of course, were largely evaded then as now. Children of any age remained under the authority of the father except when thrice sold by him into bondage, or when formally emancipated, or when the son held a public office or became a flamen dialis, or when a daughter married cum manu or became a Vestal Virgin. If a son married in the lifetime of his father, the patria potestas over the grandchildren, resided in the grandfather.13 By the legislation of Augustus the earnings of a son in the army, in public office, in priestly orders, or in the liberal professions were freed from the old rule that such gains belonged to the father. A son might still be sold into bondage (mancipium); but this differed from slavery (servitus) in leaving the bondsman with his former civic rights.
The slave had no legal rights whatever; indeed, Roman law hesitated to apply the term persona to him and compromised by calling him an “impersonal man.”14 It is only by a considerate error that Gaius discusses him under the law of persons; logically the slave came under the rubric of property (res). He could not own, inherit, or bequeath; he could not make a legal marriage; his children were all classed as illegitimate, and the children of a slave woman were classed as slaves even if the father was free.15 Slaves male or female might be seduced by their master without legal redress. The slave could not bring action in the courts against those who injured him; he could proceed in such a case only through his owner. The latter, under the law of the Republic, could beat him, imprison him, condemn him to fight beasts in the arena, expose him to die of starvation, or kill him, with cause or without, and with no other control than a public opinion formed by slaveowners. If a slave ran away and was caught he could be branded or crucified; Augustus boasted that he had recaptured 30,000 runaway slaves and had crucified all who had not been claimed.16 If, under these or other provocations, a slave killed his master, law required that all the slaves of the murdered man should be put to death. When Pedanius Secundus, urban prefect, was so slain (A.D. 61), and his 400 slaves were condemned to die, a minority in the Senate protested, and an angry crowd in the streets demanded mercy; but the Senate ordered the law to be carried out, in the belief that only by such measures could a master be secure.17
It is to the credit of the Empire—or perhaps of the diminishing supply of slaves—that their condition was progressively improved under the emperors. Claudius prohibited the killing of a useless slave and ruled that an abandoned sick slave who recovered should become automatically free. The lex Petronia, probably under Nero, forbade owners, without a magistrate’s approval, to condemn slaves to fight in the arena. Nero allowed maltreated slaves to use his statue as an asylum and appointed a judge to hear their complaints—a modest advance that seemed revolutionary to Rome, since it opened the courts to slaves. Domitian made it a criminal offense to mutilate slaves for sensual purposes. Hadrian ended the right of the owner to kill a slave without magisterial sanction. Antoninus Pius permitted an abused slave to take sanctuary in any temple and had him sold to another master if he could prove injury. Marcus Aurelius encouraged owners to bring before the courts, rather than themselves punish, damages sustained by them from their slaves; in this way, he hoped, law and judgment would gradually replace brutality and private revenge.18 Finally a great jurist of the third century, Ulpian, proclaimed what only a few philosophers had dared suggest—that “by the law of Nature all men are equal.”19 Other jurists laid it down as a maxim that where the freedom or slavery of a man was in question, all doubts should favor liberty.20
Despite these mitigations, the legal subjection of slaves is the worst blot on Roman law. The last indignity was the tax and restrictions upon emancipation. Many owners evaded the lex Fufia Canina by informally freeing a slave without official witness or legal ceremony; such liberation, however, conferred not citizenship but only Latinitas. The slave freed by process of law became a citizen with limited civic rights; but custom required him to pay his respects to his former owner every morning, attend him when needed, vote for him at every opportunity, and, in some cases, pay him a portion of all money earned. If the freedman died intestate, his property went automatically to his living patron; if he made a will he was expected to leave him a part of his estate.21 Only when the master was dead, dutifully mourned, and safely buried could the freedman really breathe the air of freedom.
To these general divisions of the law of persons must be added the legislation which in modern codes is separately known as criminal law. Roman jurisprudence recognized crimes against the individual, the state, and social or business groups considered as juridical persons. Against the state one might be guilty of maiestas, treason by act or word; vis publica, sedition; sacrilegium, offenses against the state religion; ambitus, bribery; crimen repetundarum, extortion or corruption in public administration; peculatus, embezzlement of state funds; and corruptio judicis, bribery of a judge or juryman; from this partial list we may see that corruption has an ancient pedigree and a probable future. Against the individual one could commit iniuria, physical injury; falsum, deception; stuprum, indecency; and caedes, murder. Cicero mentions a lex Scantinia against pederasty; 22 Augustus corrected the error with a fine, Martial with epigrams, Domitian with death. Personal injury was no longer punished with equivalent retaliation, as in the Twelve Tables, but by a fine. Suicide was no crime; on the contrary, before Domitian, it was in some sense rewarded; a man condemned to death could usually, by suicide, ensure the validation of his will and the unimpeded transmission of his property to his heirs. The law left the last choice free.
IV. THE LAW OF PROPERTY
Problems of ownership, obligation, exchange, contract, and debt took up by far the largest part of Roman law. Material possession was the very life of Rome, and the increase of wealth and the expansion of trade demanded a body of law immeasurably more complex than the simple code of the Decemvirs.
Ownership (dominium) came by inheritance or acquisition. Since the father owned as agent and trustee of the family, the children and grandchildren were potential owners—sui heredes in the law’s queer phrase—“their own heirs.”23 If the father died intestate they succeeded automatically to the family property, and the oldest father among the sons inherited the dominium. The making of valid wills was hedged about with hundreds of legal restrictions, and their composition required, as now, a gorgeous and sonorous tautology. Every testator was compelled to leave a specified portion of his estate to his children, another part to a wife who had borne him three children, and (in some cases) parts to his brothers, sisters, and ascendants. No heir might take any part of an estate without assuming all the debts and other legal obligations of the deceased; not infrequently a Roman found himself saddled with a damnosa hereditas—a legacy, so to speak, in the red. Where an owner died without children and without a will, his property and his debts passed automatically to the nearest “agnate,” or relative descended from a common ancestor exclusively through males. In the later Empire this male conceit abated, and by the time of Justinian agnates and cognates (relatives through male or female lines of ascent) inherited with equal right. An old law passed on the urging of Cato (169 B.C.) had forbidden any Roman who owned 100,000 sesterces ($15,000) or more to bequeath any part of his estate to a woman. This lex Voconia was still on the statute books in Gaius’ time, but love had found a way. The testator left property on trust (fideicommissum) to a qualified heir, and bound him by a solemn request to transfer the property before a stated date to the woman named. By this and other channels much of the wealth of Rome passed into the hands of women. Gifts offered another escape from testamentary law; but gifts made in prospect of death were subject to legal scrutiny, and under Justinian they were liable to the same laws as those that harassed legacies.
Acquisition came by transfer, or by legal conveyance resulting from a suit at law. Transfer (mancipatio, “taking in hand”) was a formal gift or sale before witnesses and with scales struck by a copper ingot as token of a sale; without this ancient ritual no exchange had the sanction or protection of the law. An intermediate or potential ownership was recognized under the name of possessio—the right to hold or use property; e.g., tenants on state lands were possessores (“sitters,” squatters), not domini; but their prescriptive right (usucapio, “taking by use”) became dominium, and could no longer be questioned after two years of unchallenged occupancy. Probably this lenient conception of occupation as so soon generating ownership came from patricians who were in this manner acquiring public lands.24 By the same right of usucapio a woman who lived with a man through a year without three nights’ absence became the property (in manu) of the man.
Obligation was any compulsion by law to the performance of an act. It could arise by delict or by contract. Delicts or torts—noncontractual wrongs committed against a person or his property—were in many cases punished by an obligation to pay the injured person a sum of money in compensation. A contract was an agreement enforceable at law. It did not have to be written; indeed, until the second century A.D. the verbal agreement made by uttering the word spondeo—“I promise”—before a witness was considered more sacred than any written compact. The many witnesses and solemn ceremony once required for legal contract were no longer necessary; business was quickened by the legal recognition of any clear agreement—usually entries made by the parties in their account books (tabulae) But the law guarded transactions carefully: it warned the seller with a caveat venditor, as well as the buyer with a caveat emptor, against the myriad forms of cheating natural to civilized life. Any seller of slaves or cattle, for example, was required by law to disclose their physical defects to the purchaser and was held accountable despite a plea of ignorance.25
Debt was contracted by loan, mortgage, deposit, or trust. Loans for consumption were usually secured by a mortgage on realty or movable goods. A default in principal entitled the mortgagee to take over the property. In early republican law, as we have seen, such default permitted the lender to attach the person of the borrower as a bondsman.* The lex Poetelia (326 B.C..) modified this rule by allowing the debtor to work off his obligation while retaining his freedom. After Caesar, defaulted mortgages were usually satisfied by the sale of the debtor’s property without jeopardy to his person; but cases of enslavement to a creditor occur as late as Justinian. Commercial defaults were mitigated by a law of bankruptcy which sold the bankrupt’s property to pay his debts, but permitted him to keep as much of his later acquisitions as his subsistence required.
The chief crimes against property were damage, theft, and rapine—theft with violence. The Twelve Tables had condemned a detected thief to be flogged and then delivered as a bondsman to his victim; if the thief was a slave he was to be scourged and flung from the Tarpeian rock. Increased social security permitted praetorian law to soften these severities to a twofold, threefold, or fourfold restitution.26 In its final form the law of property was the most perfect part of the Roman code.
V. THE LAW OF PROCEDURE
Of all ancient peoples the Romans were the most prone to litigation, despite the discouraging complexity, technicality, and confusing fictions of their procedural law. Doubtless our own legal actions would have seemed to them equally devious and prolonged. The older the civilization, the longer the lawsuits. Any man, as noted above, could make himself a prosecutor in a Roman court. In the patrician Republic the accuser, the defendant, and the magistrate were required to follow a form called legis actio, or process of law, and the slightest deviation invalidated the action. “Thus,” says Gaius, “a man who sued another for cutting his vines, and in his action called them Vines,’ lost his case because he should have called them ‘trees,’ since the Twelve Tables speak generally of ‘trees’, and not particularly of vines.”27 Each party deposited with the magistrate a sum of money (sacra-mentum), which was forfeited by the losing party to the state religion. The defendant also had to give bail (vadimonium) as security for his subsequent appearances. The magistrate then turned over the dispute to a person on the list of those qualified to act as judges. In some cases the judge issued an interim inter-dictum, requiring one or more of the parties in the case to perform or refrain from certain actions. If the defendant lost, his property—sometimes his person—could be seized by the plaintiff until the judgment was satisfied.
About 150 B.C. the lex Aebutia abolished the necessity of using this ritual legis actio, and accepted in its place a procedure per formulam. Specific acts and words were no longer required; the parties shared with the magistrate in determining the form under which the matter was to be submitted to the judge; and the magistrate then wrote to the judge an instruction (formula) on the factual and legal questions involved; it was partly in this way that the praetor, as magistrate, made “praetorian law.” In the second century A.D. a third mode of action—cognitio extraordinaria—came into use: the magistrate decided the case himself. By the end of the third century the formulary procedure had disappeared, and the summary judgment of a magistrate responsible only to the emperor, and usually owing his office to him, reflected the coming of absolute monarchy.
The litigants could conduct their case, and the praetor or judge decide it, without the help of lawyers if they wished; but as the iudex was not often a professional trained in the law, and the litigants might at every step stumble over a technicality, all parties to a dispute usually sought the aid of trial lawyers (advocati), legal technicians (pragmatici), consultants (iurisconsulti), or jurists (iurisprudentes). There was no lack of legal talent, for every fond parent yearned to see his son an advocate, and the law, then as now, was the vestibule to public office. A character in Petronius gives his son a collection of red-backed books (codices) “to learn a little law,” as “it spells money.”28 A law student began by learning the elements from some private instructor; in his second stage he attended the consultations of eminent jurists; thereafter he apprenticed himself to a practicing lawyer. Early in the second century A.D. certain iurisconsulti set up in various parts of Rome schools (stationes) at which they gave instruction or advice in the law; Ammianus complains of their high fees, saying that they charged even for their yawns and made matricide venial if the client paid enough.29 These teachers were called iuris civilis professores; apparently the title of professor came from the fact that they were required by law to declare (profiteri) their intention of teaching, and to secure a license therefor from the public authority.30
Out of the many lawyers so trained there were inevitably some who sold their learning to sordid causes,31 accepted bribes to present their client’s case weakly,32 found loopholes in the law for any crime, fomented disputes among rich men, dragged on suits to any lucrative length,33 and shook the courts or the Forum with their intimidating questioning and their vituperative summations. Forced to compete for cases, some lawyers sought to build a reputation by walking hurriedly through the streets with bundles of documents in their hands, borrowed rings on their fingers, dependents attending them, and hired claqueurs to applaud their speech.34 So many ways had been found of circumventing the old Cincian law against fees that Claudius legalized them up to 10,000 sesterces per case; any fee above this figure was to be recoverable by law.35 This restriction was easily evaded, for we hear of a lawyer in Vespasian’s reign amassing a fortune of 300,000,000 sesterces ($30,000,000).36 As in every generation, there were attorneys and judges whose clear and disciplined minds were at the service of truth and justice regardless of fee; and the lowest practitioners were redeemed by the great jurists whose names are the highest in the history of the law.
Courts for the trial of offenders varied from the hearings held by individual judges or magistrates to the assemblies, the Senate, and the emperor. Instead of a single judge the praetor might choose by lot (subject to a number of challenges by accuser and defendant) a jury of almost any size, usually fifty-one or seventy-five, from the 850 Senatorial or equestrian names on the jury list. Two special courts were permanently maintained: the decemviri, or Ten Men, to try cases of civil status; and the centumviri, or Hundred Men, to hear suits in property and bequest. The proceedings of these bodies were open to the public, for the younger Pliny describes the great crowd that came to hear him address the larger court.37 Juvenal38 and Apuleius 39 complain of judicial procrastination and venality, but their very indignation suggests exceptional cases.
Trials were marked by a freedom of speech and action seldom known in modern courts. Several lawyers might appear on each side; some specialized in preparing the evidence, some in presenting it. The proceedings were recorded by various clerks (notarii, actuarii, scribae), and were sometimes taken down in shorthand; Martial says of certain scribes, “However fast the words may run, their hands are quicker still.”41 Plutarch tells how stenographers took down the speeches of Cicero, often to his discomfort. Witnesses were dealt with according to time-honored precedents. Says the exemplary Quintilian:
In the examination of a witness the first essential is to know his type. For a timid witness may be terrorized, a fool outwitted, an irascible man provoked, and vanity flattered. The shrewd and self-possessed witness must be dismissed at once as malicious and obstinate; or ... if his past life admits of criticism, his credit may be overthrown by the scandalous charges that can be brought against him.42
Almost any kind of argument might be made by the advocate. He could show the court pictures of the alleged crime, painted on canvas or wood; he could hold a child in his arms while arguing a point; he could bare the scars of an accused soldier or the wounds of a client. Defenses were contrived against these weapons. Quintilian tells how one attorney, when his opponent illustrated a summation by bringing his client’s children into court, threw dice among them; the children scrambled for the tesserae and ruined a peroration.43 The slaves of either party to a suit might be tortured to elicit evidence, but such evidence was not admissible against their owners. Hadrian decreed that slaves should be tortured for evidence only as a last resort and under the strictest regulations, and he warned the courts that evidence secured by torture could never be trusted. Legal torture nevertheless persisted, and was extended in the third century to freemen.44 The jury voted by depositing marked tablets in an urn; a majority sufficed for a decision. In most cases the loser might appeal to a higher court, and finally, if he could afford it, to the emperor.
Penalties were fixed by law rather than left to the discretion of the judge. They varied with the rank of the offender, being severest for the slave; he might be crucified, the citizen might not; and no Roman citizen, as every reader of the Acts of the Apostles knows, could be scourged, tortured, or put to death over his appeal to the emperor. Different penalties were laid upon honestiores and humiliores for the same crime; they varied also according as the offender was freeborn or freeman, solvent or bankrupt, soldier or civilian. The simplest punishment was a fine. Since the value of currency changed more rapidly than the penalties named in the law, certain anomalies ensued. The Twelve Tables exacted a fine of twenty-five asses (originally twenty-five pounds of copper) for striking a freeman; when rising prices had lowered the as to six cents Lucius Veratius went about striking freemen in the face, followed by a slave who counted out twenty-five asses to each victim.45 Some offenses resulted in infamia (“speechlessness”), chiefly the inability to appear, or be represented by another, in an action at law. A more stringent punishment was loss of civic rights (capitis deminutio), which took the progressive forms of incapacity to inherit, deportation, and enslavement. Deportation was the harshest form of exile: the condemned man was put in chains, confined in some inhospitable place, and deprived of all his property. Exilium was milder in allowing the victim to live in freedom wherever he pleased outside of Italy; relegatio, as in the case of Ovid, involved no confiscation, but compelled the outcast to stay in a specified town, usually far from Rome. Imprisonment was seldom used as a permanent punishment, but men might be condemned to menial labor on public works, or in the mines, or in the quarries of the state. Under the Republic a freeman sentenced to death could escape the penalty by leaving Rome or Italy; under the Empire the death penalty was imposed with increasing frequency and ruthlessness. Prisoners of war, and in some cases other condemned men, might be thrown into the Career Tullianum, to die of starvation, rodents, and lice in underground darkness and irremovable filth.46 There Jugurtha died, and Simon Ben-Giora, heroic defender of Jerusalem against Titus. There, said tradition, Peter and Paul had languished before their martyrdom, and had written their last addresses to the young Christian world.
VI. THE LAW OF THE NATIONS
The most difficult problem of Roman law was to adjust itself as an intelligent master to the varied codes and customs of the lands that Roman arms or diplomacy had won. Many of these states were older than Rome; what they had lost in military courage they made up in proud traditions and a jealous fondness for their peculiar ways. Rome met the situation ably. A praetor peregrinus was appointed at first for the foreigners in Rome, then for Italy, then for the provinces; and power was given him to make some viable union between Roman and local law. The annual edicts of this praetor and the provincial governors and aediles gradually created the ius gentium by which the Empire was ruled.
This “Law of the Nations” was not an international law—not a body of commitments accepted by the generality of states as governing their interrelations. In a sense not much more tenuous than today there was in antiquity an international law, insofar as certain common customs were honored in peace and war—the mutual safeguarding of international merchants and diplomats, the granting of truce for the burial of the dead, abstention from the use of poisoned arrows, etc. The jurists of Rome, by a patriotic fiction, described the ius gentium as law common to all nations. But they were too modest about Rome’s part in it. Actually it was local law adapted to Roman sovereignty, and designed to govern the peoples of Italy and the provinces without giving them Roman citizenship and the other rights of the ius civile.
By a corresponding fiction the philosophers attempted to identify the Law of the Nations with the “Law of Nature.” The Stoics defined the latter as a moral code implanted in man by “natural reason.” Nature, they held, was a system of reason, a logic and order in all things; this order, spontaneously developing in society, and coming to consciousness in man, was natural law. Cicero phrased the fancy in a famous passage:
True law is right reason in agreement with nature, world-wide in scope, unchanging, everlasting. . . . We may not oppose or alter that law, we cannot abolish it, we cannot be freed from its obligations by any legislature, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder of it. This law does not differ for Rome and for Athens, for the present and for the future; ... it is and will be valid for all nations and all times. ... He who disobeys it denies himself and his own nature.47
It was a perfect statement of an ideal that grew in force as Stoicism reached the throne in the Antonines. Ulpian developed it into the far-reaching principle that class distinctions and privileges are accidental and artificial; and from this it was but a step to the Christian conception of all men as fundamentally equal. But when Gaius defined the ius gentium as simply “the law which natural reason has established among all mankind,”48 he was mistaking Roman arms for Divine Providence. Roman law was the logic and economy of force; the great codes of ius civile and ius gentium were the rules by which a wise conqueror gave order, regularity, and time’s sanctity to a sovereignty based upon the legions’ strength. They were natural, but only in the sense that it is natural for the strong to use and abuse the weak.
Nevertheless, there is something noble in this imposing architecture of government called Roman law. Since the victor must rule, it is a boon that the rules of his mastery should be clearly expressed; in this sense law is the consistency of power. It was natural that the Romans should create the greatest system of law in history: they loved order and had the means to enforce it; upon the chaos of a hundred diverse nations they laid an imperfect but sublime authority and peace. Other states had had laws, and legislators like Hammurabi and Solon had issued small bodies of humane legislation; but no people had yet achieved that immense co-ordination, unification, and codification which occupied the highest legal minds of Rome from the Scaevolas to Justinian.
The flexibility of the ius gentium facilitated the transmission of Roman law to medieval and modern states. It was a happy accident that while the chaos of barbarian invasion was mutilating the legal heritage in the West, the Code, Digest, and Institutes of Justinian were collected and formulated in Constantinople, in the comparative security and continuity of the Empire in the East. Through those labors, and a hundred lesser channels, and the silent tenacity of useful ways, Roman law entered into the canon law of the medieval Church, inspired the thinkers of the Renaissance, and became the basic law of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, even—within the British Empire—of Scotland, Quebec, Ceylon, and South Africa. English law itself, the only legal edifice of comparable scope, took its rules of equity, admiralty, guardianship, and bequests from Roman canon law. Greek science and philosophy, Judeo-Greek Christianity, Greco-Roman democracy, Roman law—these are our supreme inheritance from the ancient world.
CHAPTER XIX
The Philosopher Kings
A.D. 96-180
I. NERVA
WITH the assassination of Domitian the principle of heredity disappeared for a century from Roman monarchy. The Senate had never recognized inheritance as a source of sovereignty; now, after 123 years of submission, it reasserted its authority; and as in Rome’s beginnings it had chosen the king, now it named one of its own members princeps and imperator. It was an act of courage intelligible only when we remember that the vigor of the Flavian family was exhausted in that same generation which had seen the vitality of the Senate renewed by Italian and provincial blood.
Marcus Cocceius Nerva was sixty-six when supremacy surprised him. The colossal Nerva of the Vatican shows a handsome and virile face; no one would suppose that this was a respectable jurist with a bad stomach, a mild and amiable poet who had once been hailed as “the Tibullus of our time.”1 Perhaps the Senate had chosen him for his gray harmlessness. He consulted it on all policies, and kept his pledge never to be the cause of death to any of its members. He recalled Domitian’s exiles, restored their property, and moderated their revenge. He distributed 60,000,000 sesterces’ worth of lands among the poor, and established the alimenta—a state fund to encourage and finance parentage among the peasantry. He annulled many taxes, lowered the inheritance dues, and freed the Jews from the tribute that Vespasian had laid upon them. At the same time he repaired the finances of the state by economy in his household and his government. With reason he thought that he had been just to all classes, and remarked that “I have done nothing that could prevent me from laying down the imperial office and returning to private life in safety.”2 But a year after his accession the Praetorian Guard, which had been forestalled in his nomination and resented his economy, besieged his palace, demanded the surrender of Domitian’s assassins, and killed several of Nerva’s councilors. He offered his throat to the swords of the soldiers, but they spared him. Humiliated, he wished to abdicate, but his friends persuaded him, instead, to return to Augustus’ example and adopt as his son and successor a man acceptable to the Senate and capable of ruling not only the Empire, but the Guard as well. The greatest debt that Rome owed Nerva was that he chose Marcus Ulpius Traianus to succeed him. Three months later, after a reign of sixteen months, he passed away (98).
The principle of adoption thus accidentally restored meant that each emperor, as he felt his powers decline, would associate with himself in rule the ablest and fittest man he could find, so that when death came there would be neither the absurdity of a Praetorian elevation, nor the risk of a natural but worthless heir, nor a civil war among competitors for the throne. It was a lucky chance that no son was born to Trajan, Hadrian, or Antoninus Pius, and that each could apply the adoptive plan without slighting his offspring or his own parental love. While the principle was maintained it gave Rome “the finest succession of good and great sovereigns the world has ever had.”3
II. TRAJAN
Trajan received word of his accession while he was in charge of a Roman army in Cologne. It was characteristic of him that he went on with his work at the frontier and postponed his coming to Rome for nearly two years. He had been born in Spain of an Italian family long settled there; in him and in Hadrian Roman Spain arrived at political hegemony, as it had reached literary leadership in Seneca, Lucan, and Martial. He was the first in a long line of generals whose provincial birth and training seemed to give them the will-to-life that had gone from the native Roman stock. That Rome made no protest against this enthronement of a provincial was in itself an event and omen in Roman history.
Trajan never ceased to be a general. His carriage was military, his presence commanding; his features were undistinguished but strong. Tall and robust, he was wont to march on foot with his troops and ford with full armament the hundred rivers they had to cross. His courage showed a stoic impartiality between life and death. Told that Licinius Sura was plotting against him, he went to Sura’s house for dinner, ate without scrutiny whatever food was offered him, and had himself shaved by Sura’s barber.4 He was not in any technical sense a philosopher. He used to take Dio Chrysostom, the “golden-mouthed” rhetor, with him in his chariot to discourse to him on philosophy, but he confessed that he could not understand a word of Dio’s talk5—the worse for philosophy. His mind was clear and direct; he uttered an amazing minimum of nonsense for a man. He was vain, like all human beings, but completely unassuming; he took no advantage of his office, joined his friends at table and the hunt, drank with them copiously, and indulged in occasional pederasty as if out of deference to the customs of his time. Rome thought it worthy of praise that he never disturbed his wife Plotina by making love to another woman.
When, in the forty-second year of his age, Trajan reached Rome, he was at the height of his faculties. His simplicity, geniality, and moderation readily won a people so lately acquainted with tyranny. The younger Pliny was chosen by the Senate to pronounce the “panegyric” of greeting. About the same time Dio Chrysostom delivered before the Emperor a discourse on the duties of a monarch as viewed by the Stoic philosophy. Both Pliny and Dio distinguished between dominatio and principatus: the prince was to be not lord of the state but its first servant, the executive delegate of the people, chosen through their representatives, the senators. Imperaturus omnibus elegi debet ex omnibus, said Pliny: “He who is to command all should be elected by all.”6 The general listened courteously.
Such fair beginnings were not new in history; what astonished Rome was that Trajan fulfilled their promise abundantly. He gave to his aides or associates the villas in which his predecessors had stayed for a few weeks in the year; “he regarded nothing as his own,” said Pliny, “unless his friends possessed it”;7 as for himself he lived as simply as Vespasian. He asked the Senate’s opinion on all matters of moment, and discovered that he might wield nearly absolute power if he never used absolute speech. The Senate was willing to let him rule if he would observe the forms that maintained its dignity and prestige; like the rest of Rome, it now loved security too much to be capable of freedom. Perhaps also it was pleased to find Trajan a conservative, who had no intention of mulcting the rich to appease the poor.
Trajan was an able and tireless administrator, a sound financier, a just judge. To him the Digest of Justinian ascribes the principle, “It is better that the guilty should remain unpunished than that the innocent should be condemned.”8 By careful supervision of expenditures (and some lucrative conquests) he was able to complete extensive public works without increasing taxation; on the contrary, he lowered taxes and published a budget to expose the revenues and outlays of the government to examination and criticism. He required from the senators who enjoyed his comradeship an administrative devotion almost as meticulous as his own. The patricians entered the bureaucracy and worked as well as played; Trajan’s extant correspondence with them suggests how carefully they labored under his watchful and inspiring leadership. Many of the Eastern cities had mismanaged their finances to the point of bankruptcy, and Trajan sent cur at ores like the younger Pliny to help and check them. The procedure weakened municipal independence and institutions, but it was unavoidable; self-government, by extravagance and incompetence, had brought its own end.
Nurtured on war, the Emperor was a frank imperialist who preferred order to liberty and power to peace. Hardly a year after his arrival in Rome he set out for the conquest of Dacia. Roughly corresponding to the Rumania of 1940, Dacia plunged like a fist into the heart of Germany, and would therefore be of great military value in the struggle that Trajan foresaw between the Germans and Italy. Its annexation would give Rome control of the road that ran down the Save to the Danube and thence to Byzantium—an invaluable land route to the East. Besides, Dacia had gold mines. In a campaign brilliantly planned and swiftly executed, Trajan led his legions through all obstacles and resistance to the Dacian capital, Sarmizegetusa, and forced its surrender. A Roman sculptor has left us an impressive portrait of the Dacian king Decebalus—a face noble with strength and character. Trajan reinstated him as a client king and returned to Rome (102); but Decebalus soon broke his agreements and resumed his independent sway. Trajan marched his army back into Dacia (105), bridged the Danube with a structure that was one of the engineering marvels of the century, and again stormed the Dacian capital. Decebalus was killed, a strong garrison was left to hold Sarmizegetusa, and Trajan went back to Rome to celebrate his victory with 10,000 gladiators (probably war captives) in 123 days of public games. Dacia became a Roman province, received Roman colonists, married them, and corrupted the Latin language in its own Rumanian way. The gold mines of Transylvania were put under the direction of an imperial procurator and soon paid for the material cost of the war. To reimburse himself for his labors Trajan took out of Dacia a million pounds of silver and half a million pounds of gold—the last substantial booty that the legions would win for Roman sloth.
With these spoils the Emperor distributed 650 denarii ($260) to all such citizens as applied for the gift—probably some 300,000; and enough remained to remedy the unemployment of demobilization with the greatest program of public works, governmental aid, and architectural adornment that Italy had seen since Augustus. Trajan improved the older aqueducts and built a new one which is still in operation. At Ostia he constructed a spacious harbor connected by canals with the Tiber and the harbor of Claudius, and decorated it with warehouses that were models of beauty as well as of use. His engineers repaired old roads, carried a new one across the Pontine marshes, and laid the Via Traiana from Beneventum to Brundisium. They reopened the Claudian tunnel that had drained the Fucine Lake, dredged harbors at Centumcellae and Ancona, gave Ravenna an aqueduct, and Verona an amphitheater. Trajan supplied the funds for new roads, bridges, and buildings throughout the Empire. But he discouraged the architectural rivalry of the cities and urged them to spend their surplus on improving the condition and environment of the poor. He was always ready to help any city that had suffered from earthquake, fire, or storm. He tried to promote agriculture in Italy by requiring senators to invest a third of their capital in Italian land; and when he saw that this was extending the latifundia, he encouraged small proprietors by advancing them state funds at low interest for the purchase and improvement of their lands and homes.9 To raise the birth rate he enlarged the alimenta, or feeding fund: the state made mortgage loans at five per cent (half the usual rate) to Italian peasants, and allowed local charity boards to distribute the interest to poor parents at sixteen sesterces ($1.60) monthly for each boy raised by them, and twelve for each girl. The sums seem small, but contemporary testimony indicates that from sixteen to twenty sesterces sufficed for a month’s care of a child on a first-century Italian farm.10 With a similar hope Trajan allowed the children of Rome to receive the corn dole in addition to that given to their parents. The system of alimenta was enlarged by Hadrian and the Antonines, was extended to several parts of the Empire, and was supplemented by private philanthropy; so the younger Pliny gave 30,000 sesterces a year as alimenta to the children of Comum, and Caelia Macrina left a million to like purpose for the children of Tarracina in Spain.
Trajan, like Augustus, favored Italy over the provinces, and Rome over Italy. He used to the full the architectural genius of Apollodorus, a Damascene Greek who had designed the new roads and aqueduct, and the Danube bridge. The Emperor now commissioned him to clear away large blocks of houses, cut 130 feet from the base of the Quirinal hill, lay out in this and the adjoining space a new forum equal in area to all preceding forums combined, and surround it with buildings of a majesty fit for a world capital that had reached the height of its power and opulence. The Forum Traianum was entered through the Triumphal Arch of Trajan. The interior, 370 by 354 feet, was paved with smooth stone and surrounded by a high wall and portico; east and west walls were indented with hemicycle exedrae formed of Doric columns. In the center rose the Basilica Ulpia, named after Trajan’s clan and intended as an office building for commerce and finance; its exterior was adorned with fifty monolithic columns, its floor was of marble, its immense nave was enclosed by granite colonnades, its roof of massive beams was covered with bronze. Near the northern end of the new forum two libraries were built, one for Latin works, the other for Greek. Between them rose the column, behind them the temple, of Trajan. When the forum was complete it was accounted one of the architectural wonders of the world.
The column, still standing, was first of all an achievement in transportation. It was cut from eighteen cubes of marble, each weighing some fifty tons; the blocks were brought by ship from the island of Paros, were transferred to barges at Ostia, were drawn against the current up the river, and were moved on rollers up the bank and through the streets to their site. The cubes were recut into thirty-two blocks. Eight formed the pedestal; three sides of this were decorated with sculptures; the fourth opened into a spiral stairway of 185 marble steps. The shaft, twelve feet in diameter at the bottom, and ninety-seven feet high, was composed of twenty-one blocks and was topped by a statue of Trajan holding a globe of the world. Before being raised into position the blocks were carved with reliefs picturing the campaigns in Dacia. These reliefs are the culmination of Flavian realism and of ancient historical sculpture. They do not aim at the calm beauty or idealized types of Greek sculpture; they seek rather to convey a vivid impression of living individuals in the actual scenes and turmoil of war; they are Balzac and Zola after Corneille and Racine. In the 2000 figures of these 124 spiral panels we follow the conquest of Dacia step by step: the Roman cohorts issuing from their stations in full armor; the crossing of the Danube on a pontoon bridge; the pitching of a Roman camp in the enemy’s land; the confused conflict of spears, arrows, sickles, and stones; a Dacian village set to the torch, with women and children begging Trajan for mercy; Dacian women torturing Roman prisoners; soldiers displaying before the Emperor the heads of slain enemies; surgeons treating the wounded; the Dacian princes drinking one after another the cup of poison; the head of Decebalus brought as a trophy to Trajan; the long file of captive men, women, and children snatched from their homes into foreign settlement or Roman slavery—this and more the dark column tells in the most masterly narrative relief in sculptural history. These artists and their employers were not chauvinists; they showed Trajan’s acts of clemency, but also they revealed the heroic aspects of a nation’s struggle for freedom; and the finest figure in the scroll is the Dacian king. It is a strange document, too crowded for full effectiveness; some figures so crude that one wonders if a Dacian warrior carved them; superposition primitively substituted for perspective; and the whole observable, like Pheidias’ frieze, only by some skylark scorner of the ground. But it was an interesting deviation from a classic style whose placidity had never expressed the overwhelming energy of the Roman character. Its “method of continuity”11—making each scene melt into the next—carried on the suggestions of Titus’ arch and prepared for medieval reliefs. Despite its defects the spiral story was imitated again and again, from the column of Aurelius in Rome, and that of Arcadius in Constantinople, to the Napoleonic shaft in the Place Vendôme in Paris.
Trajan completed his building program by finishing in the grand manner the baths begun by Domitian. Meanwhile six years of peace had wearied him; administration was a task that did not awaken his reserve energies as war did; he did not feel alive in a palace. Why not take up Caesar’s plans where Antony had failed, settle the Parthian question once and for all, establish a more strategic frontier in the East, and capture control of the trade routes across Armenia and Parthia to Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and India?
After careful preparation he set out again with his legions (113). A year later he had taken Armenia; yet another year and he had marched down through Mesopotamia, captured Ctesiphon, and reached the Indian Ocean—the first and last Roman general to stand before that sea. The population at home learned geography by following his victories; the Senate was amused to be informed, almost weekly, of another nation conquered or hastily submitting: the Bosporus, Colchis, Asiatic Iberia, Asiatic Albania, Osrhoene, Messenia, Media, Assyria, Arabia Petrea, at last even Parthia. Parthia, Armenia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia were constituted provinces, and the new Alexander had the glory of naming and crowning a client king over the ancient enemies of Rome. Standing on the shores of the Red Sea, Trajan mourned that he was too old to repeat the Macedonian’s advance to the Indus. He contented himself with building a Red Sea fleet to control the passage and commerce to India; left garrisons at all strategic points, and turned back reluctantly toward Rome.
Like Antony he had gone too fast and too far and had neglected to consolidate his victories and his lines. On reaching Antioch he was informed that the Parthian king Osroes, whom he had deposed, had gathered another army and had reconquered central Mesopotamia; that rebellion had broken out in all the new provinces; that the Jews of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyrene were in revolt; and that disaffection was flaring up in Libya, Mauretania, and Britain. The old warrior wished to take the field again, but his flesh refused. He had worn himself out by living as actively in the hot East as in the West; dropsy set in, and a paralytic stroke left the great will helpless in a broken frame. Sadly he commissioned Lucius Quietus to put down the uprisings in Mesopotamia, sent Marcius Turba to suppress the Jews in Africa, and left his nephew Hadrian in command of the main Roman army in Syria. He had himself carried down to the Cilician coast, hoping to sail thence to Rome, where the Senate was preparing for him the greatest triumph since Augustus. He died at Selinus on the way (117), aged sixty-four, after a reign of nineteen years. His ashes were taken to the capital, and were buried under the great column that he had chosen as his tomb.
III. HADRIAN
1. The Ruler
Probably we shall never know whether the most brilliant of the Roman emperors won his throne by amorous connivance or by Trajan’s conviction of his worth. “His appointment,” says Dio Cassius, “was due to the fact that when Trajan died without an heir, his widow Plotina, who was in love with Hadrian, conspired to secure him the succession.”12 Spartianus repeats the story.13 Plotina and Hadrian denied the rumor, which nevertheless persisted to the end of his reign. He settled the matter by distributing a generous donative among the troops.
Publius Aelius Hadrianus traced his cognomen and family to the town of Adria, on the Adriatic coast; thence, said his autobiography, his ancestors had migrated to Spain. The same Spanish town, Italica, that had seen the birth of Trajan in 52 saw that of his nephew Hadrian in 76. When the boy’s father died (86) he was placed under the guardianship of Trajan and Caelius Attianus. The latter tutored him and instilled in him so warm a fondness for Greek literature that the youth was nicknamed Graeculus. He studied also singing, music, medicine, mathematics, painting, and sculpture, and later dabbled in half a dozen arts. Trajan called him to Rome (91) and gave him his niece in marriage (100). Vivia Sabina, as preserved in portrait busts that may have idealized her, was a woman of distinguished and conscious beauty, in whom Hadrian found no lasting happiness. Possibly he loved dogs and horses too keenly, and spent too much time hunting with them, and building tombs for them when they died. Perhaps he was unfaithful, or seemed so. In any case, she bore him no children, and though she accompanied him on many of his travels, they lived in lifelong estrangement. He showed her every favor and courtesy, and gave her every kindness but affection. When Suetonius, one of his secretaries, spoke disrespectfully of her he dismissed him.
Hadrian’s first decision as emperor was to revise the imperialistic policy of his uncle. He had counseled Trajan against the Parthian expedition as too great an expenditure of men and means so soon after the Dacian Wars, and as promising, at best, gains difficult to hold; and Trajan’s generals, eager for glory, had never pardoned his opposition. Now he withdrew the legions from Armenia, Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Parthia, made Armenia a client kingdom instead of a province, and accepted the Euphrates as the eastern boundary of the Empire; he played Augustus to Trajan’s Caesar, and consolidated with peaceful administration as much as he could of the unprecedented realm that reckless arms had won. The generals who had led Trajan’s forces—Palma, Celsus, Quietus, Nigrinus—thought this policy cowardly and unwise; to cease to attack, they felt, was merely to defend, and merely to defend was to begin to die. While Hadrian was with his legions on the Danube the Senate announced that the four generals had been detected in a conspiracy to overthrow the government and had been executed by the Senate’s orders. Rome was shocked to find that the men had received no trial; and though Hadrian, returning hurriedly to Rome, protested that he had had nothing to do with the matter, no one believed him. He vowed to put no senator to death except at the Senate’s bidding, distributed a gift of money among the people, amused them with abundant games, canceled tax arrears to the amount of 900,000,000 sesterces, publicly burned the tax records in a fiscal auto-da-fé, and for twenty years governed with wisdom, justice, and peace. But his unpopularity remained complete.
His ancient biographer describes him as tall and elegant, with hair curled, and “a full beard to hide the natural blemishes of his face”;14 thenceforth all Rome wore beards. He was strongly built and kept himself in vigor by frequent exercise, above all by hunting; on several occasions he killed a lion with his own hands.15 So many elements were mingled in him that description is baffled. We are told that he was “stern and cheerful, humorous and grave, sensual and cautious, hard and liberal, severe and merciful, deceptively simple, and always in all things various.”16 He had a quick, impartial, skeptical and penetrating mind, but he respected tradition as the connective tissue of generations. He read and admired the Stoic Epictetus, but he sought pleasure with shamelessness and taste. He was irreligious and superstitious, laughed at oracles, played with magic and astrology, encouraged the national faith, and sedulously performed the duties of pontifex maximus. He was courteous and obstinate, sometimes cruel, usually kind; perhaps his contradictions were merely adaptations to circumstance. He visited the sick, helped the unfortunate, extended existing charities to orphans and widows, and was a generous patron to artists, writers, and philosophers. He was a good singer, dancer, and harpist, a competent painter, a middling sculptor. He wrote several volumes—a grammar, an autobiography, poems decent and indecent,17 in Latin and Greek. He preferred Greek to Latin literature, and old Cato’s simple Latin to Cicero’s smooth eloquence; under his example many authors now affected an archaic style. He organized the state-paid professors into a university, paid them well, and built for them a magnificent Athenaeum to rival the Museum of Alexandria. It delighted him to gather scholars and thinkers about him, to puzzle them with questions, and laugh at their contradictions and disputes. Favorinus of Gaul was the wisest of this philosophic court; when his friends rallied him for yielding to Hadrian in argument, he answered that any man with thirty legions behind him must be right.18
Along with these multiple intellectual interests went an unerring sense for the practical. Following Domitian’s lead, Hadrian reduced his freedmen to subordinate functions, chose businessmen of tried ability to administer the government, and formed from them and senators and jurists a concilium to meet in regular sessions for the consideration of policies. He appointed an advocatus fisci, or Attorney for the Treasury, to detect corruption or deceit in the payment of taxes, with the illuminating result that while taxes remained as before, revenues were decidedly increased. He himself kept watch on each department and, like Napoleon, astonished its heads by detailed knowledge of their field. “His memory was vast,” says Spartianus; “he wrote, dictated, listened, and conversed with his friends, all at the same time”19—though the frequency of this tale invites suspicion. Under his care, and with the help of an extended civil service, the Empire was probably better governed than ever before or afterward. The price of this zealous order was a swelling bureaucracy, and a “mania of regulation” that moved the principate still closer to absolute monarchy. Hadrian observed all the forms of co-operation with the Senate; nevertheless, his appointees and their executive orders encroached more and more upon the functions of what had once seemed “an assembly of kings.” He was too close to his problems to foresee that his efficient but proliferating bureaucracy might become in time an unbearable burden upon the taxpayers. On the contrary, he believed that within the framework of law and ordinance which his government had established every person in the Empire would find career open to talent and any man could rise rapidly from class to class.
His clear and logical mind resented the chaos of accumulated, obscure, and contradictory laws. He commissioned Julianus to co-ordinate the enactments of past praetors into a Perpetual Edict, and encouraged further codifications that paved the way for Justinian. He acted as a supreme court both in Rome and on his journeys, and earned the reputation of a fair and learned judge, always as lenient as the reign of law would permit. He issued innumerable decrees, usually in favor of the weak against the strong, the slave against the master, the small farmer against the large estate, the tenant against the landlord, the consumer against the deceptions of retailers and the multiplication of middlemen.20 He rejected accusations for maiestas, refused bequests from parents, or persons unknown to him, and ordered a tolerant application of the laws against Christians.21 By his own example on state lands he encouraged the practice of emphyteusis (“implanting”), by which owners rented rough acres to tenants to be planted with orchards and remain rent-free till fruit grew. He was not a radical reformer; he was only a superlative administrator seeking, within the limits and inequalities of human nature, the greatest good of the whole. He preserved old forms, but he quietly poured new content into them according to the needs of the time. Once, when his passion for administration flagged, he refused audience to a petitioning woman with the plea, “I haven’t time.” “Don’t be emperor, then,” she cried. He granted her a hearing.22
FIG. 17—The Portland Vase British Museum
FIG. 18—Frieze from the Altar of Peace Uffizi Gallery, Florence
FIG. 19—Frieze of Tellus from the Altar of Peace Uffizi Gallery, Florence
FIG. 20—Portrait of a Young Girl Museo delle Terme, Rome
FIG. 21—Clytie” British Museum
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