The Augustan Empire 43 BC

But the 'seven cities' of the Apocalypse should be guide enough to the sorts of other communities where Christians were soon to reside. Besides Ephesus (Apoc. 2:iff) they included not only the large urban centres of Smyrna (Apoc. 2:8ff), Pergamum (Apoc. 2:1 zS) and Sardis (Apoc. 3: iff) but more minor towns such as Thyatira (Apoc. 2:18ff) and Philadelphia (Apoc. 3-7ff). And we could reasonably surmise that there were more.[1032]Paul and his associates were not the only bearers of the message in Asia, whether it arrived via itinerant missionaries or mobile believers return­ing home.[1033] Asia Minor was well on the way to becoming the heartland of Hellenic Christianity. And whilst Acts has Paul's mission in Asia aimed first at Jew, and then at Greek as well as Jew, the deutero-Pauline encyclical letter to Christians of Asia (known as the Letter to the Ephesians) is certainly addressed to an audience envisaged primarily as Gentile ('you, Gentiles as you are in the flesh, you called the uncircum- cised', Eph. 2:11; 'I, Paul, who in the cause of you Gentiles am prisoner of Christ', Eph. 3.1). These Gentiles are seen in the Haustafel section of the letter (5:22ff, a section devoted to moral instructions on the proper ordering of the Christian household) as established families, as hierarchi­cally structured Christian households, not only of husbands, wives and children but of masters and slaves as well (6:5ff): here Christianity has moved, at least for some, into the slave-owning levels of Hellenic society (cf. Ep. Philemon, at Colossae).

We now cross the Aegean to Macedonia and Achaea: it is a crossing and landfall which Acts makes into a significant and solemn moment (i6:6ff), perhaps to be dated to the end of the forties. Here six communities are known to us. At his initial major landfall in Macedonia, at Philippi on the Via Egnatia, Paul, accompanied by Silas (and presumably Timothy), encounters for the first time a population predominandy Latin in character (it was a Roman colony which had received two groups of veteran settlers) — and he encounters the sort of reception and resistance that is to be characteristically Roman ('they are advocating customs which it is not lawful for us, being Romans, to adopt and follow', Acts 16:21, cf. Phil. 2:2). Physical assault by the city magistrates (strategoi) and temporary imprisonment follow — until, famously, Paul and Silas (= Silvanus) reveal their Roman citizenship (Acts 16:3 7flf). Acts has the new arrivals seek out on the Sabbath 'the place of prayer'³² outside the city gate - Jews are marginalized in this Romanized community - and, symbolically, they win over the house­hold of a godfearer (Lydia) as they do later the household of their Gentile gaoler. Jewish converts go unmentioned; and they are absent from the hortatory Letter to the Philippians except for the attack (j.aff) on those enemies ('those dogs') who insist on circumcision and other external observances. Here was formed a community notably generous in its contributions both to Paul (Phil. 4:15ff, cf. 2 Cor. n:8f) and for the Jerusalem collection (2 Cor. 8:if, 9:2ff ('the churches in Macedonia'), cf. Rom. 15:26), but there are no grounds for us to visualize it as a particularly sizable Christian group.

The missionary itinerary has Paul then aim for the next Jewish community, in the provincial headquarters and the large trading city of Thessalonica. Again Acts is careful to record Paul's habit of attending the synagogue and to note that a few (only) of the local Jews are persuaded (was Jason, and his household, one such?, Acts 17:5), whereas a great number of the Greek godfearers as well as a good number of the leading (Gentile) women (Acts i7:4)³³ are declared won over: indeed convert Jews go unaddressed in the Letters to the Thessalonians (note especially 1 Thess. 1:9, 2:i4ff envisaging a Gentile readership). And we are left in no doubt of the virulent hostility roused in the Jewish community generally (Acts 17:jff, cf. 1 Thess. 1:14!?, j:2f), a hostility which hounds Paul, Silas and Timothy even at Beroea (reached via Pella?), their next halting-place, known to us only from Acts (i7:ioff). And this, despite a warmer reception in the local synagogue of Beroea, with correspondingly, many Jewish converts as well as a considerable number of Greek women of high status and men³⁴ (Acts 17:12). It is well to be mindful of the rich variations in contemporary Judaism and hence in receptivity to Christian missionaries.

Apart from these three centres we have no knowledge of other locations to which Paul might be referring when he mentions (in 1 Thess. 4:10) 'all the brethren in the whole of Macedonia'. For our one source (Acts again, 17:14^ has Paul travel on hastily to Athens in the province of Achaea³⁵ where he is presented (as standard) speaking with Jews and godfearers (in the synagogue) and with passers-by (in the agora) before being given the celebrated Hellenic apologia for Christianity in the presence of the Areopagus, guardian council of the city's pagan religious traditions (Acts 17:2iflf): two resulting converts are named (Dionysius,

³² On the use ofprosiucht here see Schiirer 1979 (e i 207) 11 459f, 444*­³³ Nevertheless the general injunction (paralleled elsewhere) of 2 Thess. 3:12 to work away quietly earning one's living suggests a predominantly working audience.

Presumably Sopatros son of Pyrrhus (Acts 20:4) was one of these.

i Thess. 3:1, 3:6 merely has Paul waiting in Athens for Timothy.

Damaris) representing the fledgling Athenian church (Acts 17:34) - though it would be many centuries before Athens was to become in any sense a major Christian centre.[1034]

And so on to Corinth for a mission that was to last a year and a half (Acts 18:11) and for what appears to be, on our information, Paul's most penetrating evangelization, with high-status converts, Jews (the archisynagogusCrispus,[1035] Acts 18:8,1 Cor. 1:14), godfearers (Titius Iustus, Acts 18:7) as well as Gentiles (Gaius, 1 Cor. 1:15, Rom. 16:23; Erastus, Rom. 16:23 ^— city oikonomos (administrator); Stephanas, 1 Cor. 1:16, 1 Cor. 16:15),[1036] though it is well to bear in mind that Paul can characterize the congregation as including 'not many men of wisdom by any human standard, not many powerful, not many high-born', 1 Cor. 1:26. A later and shorter return visit is recorded in Acts 20: iff (cf. 2 Cor. 1:15 f; with a third visit projected in 2 Cor. 12:14, 13:0- The mission is represented in Acts as being directed first to Jew and to Gentile godfearer and then, with a conscious shift, concentrated upon the Gentile population after repudiation by the Jewish community (the cameo scene before the Roman governor of Achaea, Gallio, in Acts i8:i2ff, datable to the very early fifties, highlights the violence of the separation). And indeed the Letters to the Corinthians address basically Gentile sensibilities ('you know how when you were still pagans you were swept off to those dumb heathen gods', 1 Cor. 12:2). The impression these letters give us is of a sizable and diverse congregation clustering around the patronage of a number of different households,[1037] with local loyalties and rivalries revealed when they all assemble together ('I heard that when you meet as a congregation you fall into sharply divided groups', 1 Cor. 11:18): we can discern a variety of preachers (for example, Apollos 1 Cor. 1:12, the 'super-apostles' 2 Cor. 11:5, 12:11), with Paul feeling under distinct threat that his public performances are felt not to measure up to the professional epideicdc standards demanded of Hellenic rhetoric (2 Cor. 10: ioff) — clearly to the taste of some. We glimpse in Corinth a bustling and turbulent trading and administrative centre, open to ideas and to travellers — Paul is able to write to the church in Rome from Corinth well acquainted (whether in person or by reputation) with some twenty-eight individuals currendy domiciled there (relying on Rom. i6:₃ff). The Second Letter to the Corinthians is addressed to 'the church of God at Corinth together with all the saints throughout the whole of Achaea' (2 Cor. 1:1), but apart from Athens the only other Achaean Christian group known to us is nearby at Cenchreae, the port of Corinth on the Saronic Gulf (to which congregation belonged Phoebe, 'deacon of the church' and 'patroness (prostastis) of many', Rom. 16: if). We know of no jour­ney further to the south of Greece, into the Peloponnese, and whilst Paul can claim in Rom. 15:19 'I have completed the preaching of the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem as far round as Illyricum' we know of no voyaging into western Greece or the Adriatic.⁴⁰

As for the Mediterranean islands, even Crete, mentioned at the Pentecostal scene, fails to score any mention save in the (later) Epistle to Titus. There Paul is claimed to have visited the island, leaving Titus temporarily behind 'to institute elders in each city' (1:5). At the very least we can say Crete is the type of island believed to have fallen within the Pauline missionary orbit, with urban Christian communities fully established and with converts amongst the Jewish population (1:10—14). Others of Paul's missionary entourage are expected to be calling by (3:13): Crete was a natural port of call on the sea-lanes for missionaries on the move just as was Cyprus (cf. Acts 27:4, 27:7-8). And at least for Cyprus we are on firmer ground in claiming an early missionary visit by Paul (in company with the Cypriot Barnabas, and John Mark) with the towns of Salamis and Paphos specified (Acts 13:5—6). The mission was aimed 'at the synagogues of the Jews'⁴¹ and included, accordingly and pointedly, the confutation of a charlatan but influential Jewish sorcerer (13:6ff); Barnabas and Mark make a return missionary journey in Acts 15:39. But even (apparently) prior to Paul's mission, Jewish converts, scattering from Jerusalem after Stephen's death, had brought the good news to receptive Jews on the island (Acts 11:19).⁴² But of the Aegean and Ionian islands generally, there is not a word, though Paul's voyaging brought him in passing contact with a number (e.g. Acts 20: i4f, 21: iff). And it is fortuitous that we learn of an enforced sojourn by Paul on Malta

For what it is worth Titus 5:12 represents Paul as planning to winter at Nicopolis on the coast of Epirus and 2 Tim. 4:10 can report that Titus has gone to Dalmatia, further up the coastline. We have to wait until the early third century for the next Christian reference to Nicopolis: Origen found there a unique version of the Old Testament — which might suggest a somewhat early Christian connexion? (Eus. Hist. Etd. vi.16.2).

Note the convert Cypriot Jews who bring the message from Jerusalem to Gentiles at Antioch, Acts 11:20.

One such could be 'Mnason of Cyprus, a disciple from the early days' later found domiciled in Jerusalem (Acts 21:16). As so often with the testimony of Acts, the chronology of events is controversial.

(Acts 28:1-11)[1038] as well as an incidental landfall on Sicily (at Syracuse: Acts 28: i г).[1039] There, no Christians welcome Paul, unlike the reception accorded a little later at Puteoli (Acts 28:14) ^or earlier at Sidon (Acts 27:3): we should deduce that Christian communities were yet to be established. The impression to be gained is that whilst some regular ports - such as Troas (2 Cor. 2.i2f, cf. Acts 16:11, 2o:5ff), Cenchreae (Rom. 16:1-2) or Puteoli (Acts 28:14) ^- already had some Chrisdan presence, this was not by any means yet a regular feature. And for all we know such major port-cities in the western Mediterranean as Carthage, Tarraco and Massilia, not to mention the western provinces of north Africa, Spain (despite Paul's declared aspiration, to reach the western limits of the Roman world, Rom. 15124, 28),[1040] and Gaul, sdll lay entirely outside any evangelization. After all Spain is mendoned by Paul in a context of 'places where the very name of Christ has not been heard' (Rom. 15:20). And were there by chance merchant travellers to these ports who were Christians or any early Christian pioneers in these provinces the memory of them faded fast, and completely: it would not be without significance that the western Mediterranean generally lacked established Jewish communities at this date.

And finally, Italy and Rome. By the time of Paul's arrival (very late fifties a.d.?), there was already formed a congregation at the port of Puteoli on the Gulf of Naples, the major Italian harbour for traffic with the Orient (Acts 28:14).[1041] And of course Paul found in Rome itself a Christian community to welcome him (Acts 28:15): he had previous knowledge of or acquaintance with a number of its members (if we rely on Rom. 16:3ff) — and in his protreptic letter to the Roman brethren Paul had gone so far as to declare that the story of their faith was being told throughout all the world (Rom. 1:8). Acts is at pains to depict Paul making, once again, an initial effort — politely and patiently - to convince the Roman Jewish community (and it was a large one) but meeting with only mixed success (Acts 28:17ff). As we are given our final view of Paul teaching 'openly and unhindered' under house-custody awaiting trial, we are left with the deliberate impression that the two full years of waiting were spent largely with Gendle hearers (Acts 28:2jff). To a degree the letter to the Romans corroborates: it shows careful awareness of the mixed nature of the Roman congregadon with its firm message that there is no longer distinction to be made between Jew and Greek. As for the size of this community, whilst we cannot go beyond Tacitus' multitude ingens of Christian victims destined to fall in 64 a.d. we are left with the impression of a substantial community, probably grouped around a number of households as at Corinth[1042] (not unreasonably given the urban sprawl) and, as at Corinth, themselves subject to rivalries and jealousies (or so Clement of Rome, Ep. ad Corinth. 6 obscurely implies, cf. Rom. i6:i7ff).

Sporadic and fitful as our evidence manifestly is, adherents to this new religious movement had become, by the end of the sixties, as broadly spread in race and social class as they were scattered geographically. Being dispersed from Arabia in the East to Rome in the West, they spoke in a babel of tongues: Hebrew, Aramaic (and other Semitic languages), Greek, Latin (as at Philippi, Rome), local vernaculars (as in Galatia, Acts 14:11, and compare the Pentecostal scene of Acts z:<)ff). These reflected the range of country and nation of their origins, though Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek predominated (and our evidence is biased towards the latter). They dwelt not so much in country districts - villages and rural areas are not well represented (Palestine and Galatia providing the clearest examples, and rural penetration was to continue to be erratic, but not by any means unknown, over the succeeding centuries). The city, and the hellenized city at that, is where they characteristically dwelt, and the cities where we can see them — though they vary greatly in size and sophistication - for the most part (but not exclusively) lay on major routes of traffic and trade, or were reasonably accessible from them (as in the Lycus valley). And within those cities - to judge from the cases where we get status indicators — they appear to have formed congre­gations that might combine all but the highest levels of social stratifica­tion: that is not altogether surprising or radical when secular collegia can manifest similar combinations of class⁴⁸ and when the church-houses in which they characteristically met could operate under the prevailing patronage ethos, with comers able to find some familiar place or accepted social role. In all this it is easy to exaggerate the extent to which Christians might be located up the social scale — notoriously, the more socially prominent tend to be also the more visible in our sources. Nevertheless, in the city where we can form the most focused picture, viz. Corinth (though it, in turn, may well not be the most typical) we can discern not only men with households of notable substance (Gaius, as well as Crispus, Jason, Stephanus, Titius Iustus) and a local office-holder (Erastus) but converts with some social and intellectual pretensions (who clearly found Paul deficient on a number of counts, both in accomplishments and in deportment). But there were as well, equally clearly in this congregation, have-nots, dependants upon patronal largesse (i Cor. i i:2off) in addition to slaves (i Cor. 7:21). And all these were caught up together in the same religious movement (all too obviously not without consequential tensions): even so, they have a remarkable appetite for, or at least they are thought capable of following, complex theological exposition and argumentation.⁴⁹ Paul himself does not seem to have aimed specifically at the proletarian down-and-outs as his missionary target - rather, the established households of the urban artisans and the middle-to-lower-range traders and businessmen. Even Paul's own tent-making smacks of a self-conscious act of making himself accessible to the public in the market-place (though his professed motives might be somewhat different).⁵⁰

Whilst converts might range from Pharisees, still zealous for the observance of the Law, in Jerusalem to Greeks, sophisticated in the Hellenic philosophic traditions, in Athens (as perhaps Dionysius the Areopagite), nevertheless throughout, it is the Jewish sympathizers, godfearing Gentiles located somewhat to the margins of Judaism, who to our perception of things play a pivotal role: they appear to be found - and in significant numbers to be ready to lend an open ear — wherever synagogues flourished in the Diaspora: we must allow for a fair degree of interpenetration between Judaism and Gentile society around the Mediterranean at this period whilst aware, as always, that there will be regional differences (and sympathy with Judaism may diminish systema­tically as we move westwards, progressing deeper into a more Roman environment). Consequently, demarcation disputes with Judaism are perceived as endemic in this formative period as the processes of self- definition for the Christian movement get under way, processes which roused — and were to continue to rouse - much dissension and dispute within the movement itself: the Pauline formula for Gentile converts, involving as it did 'ritual invisibility', was manifestly not the only one nor was it necessarily acceptable either to them or to other (and especially Jewish) followers.

Some sort of control over our estimate of the social spread of Christianity in the generation between the thirties and the sixties might be sought in the onomastics of the Pauline connexion, from an examination of the sixty-six named individuals in the genuinely Pauline

⁴' For a useful study, Theissen 1982 (f 229) 69ff. ⁵⁰ See Hock 1980 (f 156).

documents (plus thirteen more for the Pauline following provided by Acts) or of the full register of some ninety-seven names if we include in the tally the pastorals as well (treating bynames as separate entries). Caveats are obviously demanded not only in the field of onomasdcs itself (which name is exclusively, characteristically, sometimes, never Jewish?) but also in using the Pauline mission as a typical sample (which one can well imagine it may not have been). It is, however, the best sample we have.

What emerges, on analysis, is a mixed population, with a noticeably high proportion of Latin names (in a ratio 1:2 for Latin: Greek names), with no more than a dozen manifesdy Semitic names altogether.[1043] The Latin proportion may be accounted for, in part, by the adoption of Roman names (especially praenomina and nomina) in the Greek East, but the statistics still suggest an unusual proportion of travellers or immi­grants whose traditional roots may not have been so deeply implanted in their local society of the eastern Mediterranean where Paul's mission had been concentrated — the more mobile may conceivably have been the more amenable to new ideas and to change. Actual mobility - or at least ability to travel — is a marked feature of many of the named figures in the Pauline corpus (nearly 50 per cent and rising to two-thirds if we assume that those greeted by name in Rom. 16 have encountered Paul person­ally). This may be partly a factor of secular occupation, partly of material support available to them (their own, or from the contributions of their brethren). This, too, may betoken a less fixed and traditional frame of mind on the part of the new adherents. At the least these members are not destitutes. And whilst fewer than 20 per cent of the named individuals in the Pauline connexion are women it is clear that they can play a prominent - though still circumscribed — role in prayer, prophecy, the ministry of teaching and of service and social support (note especially i Cor. 11:2ff, Phil. 4:2f, Rom. 16) - more so than is apparent to us in later generations (the pastorals e.g. 1 Tim. 2:8ff, already bearing testimony to a more traditional backlash).[1044] On the evidence we have, they would appear to have had access, in this first generation, to more influential status than was available to them in contemporary Judaism.[1045] But whatever may have been the personal and social factors which allowed minds to be receptive to the new message, it needs to be firmly recalled that the message they did receive was essentially theological: it was, in the Pauline version, an eschatological message of redemption and the parousia (the imminent Second Coming heralding final salvation), a message expressed as a kerygma (proclamation) of the crucified Jesus, raised from the dead, construed as the new Passover sacrifice (i Cor. 5:₇f), the new Covenant sacrifice (i Cor. 11:25),^a sacrificial expiadon for the new Israel consisting alike of Gentile (ritually freed of the Old Law) and of Jew (whether Law-observant or not): the Law of Christianity is proclaimed as a world religion. It was a message that manifested itself with superior spiritual powers, access to which was, importantly, open to all, not to a restricted elite: salvation was available universally. Above all we have that remarkable feature of Paul and his followers, viz. the vigour of their missionary zeal to bring both Jew and Gentile within the boundaries of the 'Israel of God', the ecclesia, the assembly of God where the cohesive factor would (ideally) be a combination of correct belief and right conduct, a combination unparalleled in the contemporary Gentile religious world.

II. CHRISTIANS AND THE LAW

Christ

The trial and condemnation of Christ 'as a criminal' (as pointedly observed by Tacitus, Ann. xv.44: 'Christus ... supplicio adfectus erat') certainly helped to cast a lengthy shadow of criminality over those who professed to be servants of his Name.[1046] But the precise grounds for his sentence by the Roman procurator of Judaea have been, of course, endlessly disputed. The most plausible reconstruction — but reconstruc­tion it is — is that whilst to the pious Jewish mind, and to the Sanhedrin, the essential crime may well have been blasphemy, to the Roman legal mind and to the governor's consilium it was as likely as not a charge of sedition, combined with the open threat of Jewish retaliation if Pilate refused to comply, that induced the condemnation. At all events it was Pilate who condemned whilst Jews accused - or that is what the sources, in retrospect, insist (e.g. Acts 3:13, 5:z8fF, 13:28): such a combination of politics and theology was to dog the early followers in their relations with the society about them and with the Roman authorities.[1047]

Sources

Sources are troublesome (here, as everywhere else). Acts is our major source for the early political relations between the Christian followers and the societies in which they lived. But Acts has amongst its underpinning themes the law-abiding nature of the Christian victims: the municipal and provincial administration, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Christian movement (growing as it is and spreading among the Gentiles, themselves of increasing dignity and status) need not live together in other than harmony, but (the document pointedly and persistendy argues) it is the Jews (the 'unconverted Jews') who by, their hostility have consistendy stirred up trouble with the authorities for Christians⁵⁶ and have thereby forfeited their ancient claims to be the chosen race. Paul's personal spiritual history in Acts is patterned to reflect this progression, shifting from Jewish hostility to Christian conversion, and then, increasingly, dedicated to a mission away from the synagogues towards the Gentile world, leading, ultimately, as far as Rome. Paul's own retrospective views of his past life (both as persecutor and as persecuted) are notoriously unspecific and shifting in emphasis (Gal. i:i3f, 1:2}; i Cor. 15:8f; 2 Cor. ii:2jff; Phil. 3:6): nevertheless, it remains clear that the initial followers of Jesus (whether from Paul himself or the author of Acts) in their perception of things were 'persecuted' - and in most cases persecuted by Jews, at times via urban or Roman authorities. It is an attitude encapsulated in the words given to Paul at Miletus to the Ephesian elders: 'In city after city the Holy Spirit assures me that imprisonment and hardships await me' (Acts 20:23); significandy, as the climax to the Beatitudes in the Matthaean version (j:ioff) figures the blessedness of those who suffer insults and persecu­tion for Christ's sake. It is quite another matter to determine how exaggerated or indeed accurate a construing of events all this may be. But it is the mentality of this society which is crucial for its future: persecutions needs must come just as they had beset the prophets of old. The Christian prototype was on its way to be set not as the conforming

⁹⁶ Thus, in order, in the first dozen chapters (as a sample):

'the Chief Priests, the Controller of the Temple and the Sadducees' along with 'the Jewish rulers, elders and doctors of the law' (Peter and John, in Jerusalem, Acts 4:1—))

'the High Priest and all his supporters, the Sadducean party' ('the Apostles', in Jerusalem, Acts 5:17)

'members of the Synagogue called the Synagogue of Freedmen' stirring up 'the [Jewish] people, the ciders and the doctors of the law' (Stephen, in Jerusalem, Acts 6:96)

(4) (The pre-conversion) Saul, in Jerusalem, Acts 8:iff (men and women)

(ĵ) Saul, from the High Priest in Jerusalem to Damascus (via the synagogues of Damascus), Acts 9:if (men and women)

'The Jews' (the converted Saul, in Damascus, Acts 9:23)

Herod (pleasing the Jews) (James, the brother of John, and Peter, in Jerusalem, Acts ia:iff)

In all the many instances of'persecution' in the later chapters of Acts Jews fail to be implicated only in 16:2 off (Paul and Silas in Macedonian Philippi), in 17:18ff (Paul in Athens - but is this actually 'persecution'?) and in I9:2jff (Paul's companions Gaius and Aristarchus in Ephesus) - that is, in a Roman colony and in two of the great pagan cities of the eastern Mediterranean (with characteristic displays of pagan and self-interested prejudices).

householder but as the singular and suffering martyr, 2 Cor. n:2jff, providing the locus classicus of the series of personal sufferings that might lie in store. By the time of the composition of the Apocalypse the attitude was firmly established (17:6: 'And I saw that the Woman [ = Rome] was drunk with the blood of the Saints and with the blood of those who had borne witness to Jesus').

Accordingly, the death of Stephen, as Christian protomartyr, is highlighted in Acts 6 as the quintessential experience awaiting these Christian followers: the prophetic and inspirited individual is depicted as the innocent vicdm of uncontrolled Jewish mob lynching, 6:j4ff (though it is possible that legal condemnadon by the Sanhedrin for violating the Temple precincts had been formally executed).[1048] It is a scene which the unconverted Saul is tellingly made to approve (Acts 8:1, cf. 26:9ff- is Gal. 1:17 irreconcilable?). Whereas the encounters of (the later converted) Paul with Roman provincial authorities are contrived to represent him as unfairly accused by conniving enemies of Chrisdanity, and accused of offences which are rightly judged by the Roman legal representatives as not punishable under the law — thus before Gallio, the proconsul of Achaea in 51/2 (Acts 18:12ff, cf. before Sergius Paulus, the proconsul of Cyprus, Acts 13:6ff) and before Felix and Festus, procura­tors of Judaea (Acts 24—6). Note the verdicts allegedly given after the - manifestly informal - hearing at Caesarea before Festus and Agrippa and his court: 'This man is doing nothing that deserves death or imprison­ment'; 'This fellow could have been released had he not appealed to Caesar' (Acts 26:3if).

However apologedc and pardal these accounts may be, two points still emerge clearly — individual Chrisdans, for whatever circumstances, did keep falling foul of the law but no Roman law, nevertheless, specifically oudawed Chrisdanity as such. The dealings of the Roman emperors themselves with Christians confirm this judgement.

ĵ. Claudius

No certitude is possible that the incident recorded by Suetonius {Claud. 2 5.4) concerned Christians at all. All we know is that Claudius 'expelled from Rome Jews who were causing continual disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus' ('Judaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuan- tis'). We can merely speculate whether this may register a garbled tradition of rioting within the Jewish community in Rome, between enthusiast converts to the recendy arrived Christian secta and other Jews of more traditional persuasions.⁵⁸ But the speculation must remain idle: we are otherwise ignorant of what occasioned the rioting and whether it was indeed basically domestic in character. And Claudius' reaction to Jewish turbulence in Rome follows imperial precedence (e.g. under Tiberius, Tac. Ann. 11.8 5, Suet. Tib. 36) and it is not inconsistent with his treatment of Jews elsewhere (e.g in Alexandria, P. Land. 1912 coll. ivf. = GCN 37o.73ff). Acts 18:2 blandly records that Aquila, a Pontic Jew, had arrived at Corinth from Italy 'because Claudius had issued an edict that all Jews should leave Rome': presumably Christians would have been affected insofar as they were also Jews. Certainly this incident is recorded as no general ideological pogrom: no more than a peace and order measure, and a local and temporary one that, it is implied, was involved.

4. Nero

Tacitus, an experienced and senior senator (consul a.d. 97), had been proconsular governor of the province of Asia early on in the second decade of the second century: there Christians were doubdess becoming a perceptible fact of life if not yet greatly numerous. He is our original source (Ann. xv.44) to connect the fire of Rome under Nero (July a.d. 64) with Christians. There is every reason to weigh seriously his account written under early Hadrian (though it would be prudent to take authorial attitudes in his account as reflecting more certainly those that prevailed in his class half a century after the events he is describing). He makes the connexion between fire and Christians in a narrative context in which dominant motifs are the destruction (much exaggerated, in fact) of the Rome of old and the present realities under Nero of a modern Rome of degraded immorality and irresponsibility in government (instanced by inter alia gratuitous cruelty and imperial spectacles).

As the Tacitean narrative runs, expiatory rites hallowed by traditional religion had failed to scotch the prevailing rumour of Nero's personal responsibility for starting the disastrous fire. So Nero provided Chris­tians as scapegoats ('subdidit reos': the wording implies they were not, in Tacitus' view, in fact responsible for the fire); they were followers of a new-fangled superstition 'hated for their crimes' (typical, therefore, of the modern influx of depravity into the capital). Those who confessed

^и Oros. vii.6.1 j f in fact reads Cbristo. He dates the incident to the ninth year of Claudius' reign (a.d. 49) but on that can be placed no firm reliance. Dio lx.6.6 (under a.d. 41, but in a generalizing context) possibly registers earlier measures taken by Claudius in an attempt to contain the Jewish turbulence in Rome, for 'he did not drive them out of the city but ordered them, whilst continuing their ancestral way of life, not to assemble'.

were arrested - the tense in Tacitus' wording ('qui fatebantur') implies they were confessing to being Christians - and they in turn revealed the names of others: a huge multitude was thus convicted 'not so much on the charge of arson as for their hatred of humankind'. Nothing is revealed by Tacitus of the actual processes of their legal conviction (did Nero delegate authority and if so, to whom?) but he does disclose a belief that whilst the charge of arson was false they undoubtedly deserved punishment anyway. In his view Christians are tainted with crime. But he manages nevertheless to create a haunting memory of their deaths, contrived (as he puts it) 'not for the public good but to glut one man's cruelty', a holocaust lit to indulge Nero's histrionic obsessions: 'Mock­ery of various kinds was added to their deaths: covered with the skins of wild beasts they were torn to pieces by dogs, they were nailed to crosses or were doomed to the flames: when daylight failed their burning served to illuminate the night. Nero had made available his gardens for the spectacle and provided a Circus show, dressed as a charioteer mingling with the crowd or driving on a chariot.' There is no good reason to disbelieve this account but there is room to suspect that Tacitus may have enhanced the numbers (multitude ingens) in order to highlight Nero's monstrosities. Suetonius (Ner. 16.2) merely records the capital punish­ment ('afflicti suppliers') of Christians amongst a heterogeneous cata­logue of Nero's praiseworthy deeds. But the evidence does not warrant any credence in a persecution more widespread than Rome: there are no compelling grounds for positing any general enactment against Chris­tians.⁵⁹ Neither are the arguments strong for accepting the speculation that it was through the influence of the imperial consort Poppaea that potential hostility against Jews was deflected onto their Christian rivals.⁶⁰ But the clear identification by people and Roman authorities alike of the separate existence of Christians is significant. Nero thus emerges in the Christian tradition as the very first of the imperial Persecutors (e.g. Tert. Apol. 5.3, cf. Melito ap. Eus. Hist. Eccl. iv.26.9).

Peter and Paul

There appears to be nothing except historical convenience to connect the deaths of Peter and Paul with these events of a.d. 64. Our last secure

See the analysis of Barnes 1968 (f 8j) and for examples of the connexion in the popular mind between dissident minority groups and the threat of urban incendiarism, Livy xxxix.14.10 (Bacchanalians in Rome), Sail. Cat. 43.2 (Catilinarians in Rome), Joseph. BJ xlvii-lxi (Jews in Antioch).

For the case see, for example, Frend 1965 (f 139) i64f: Poppaea undoubtedly shared in the fashionable fascination with Jewish rituals and customs (e.g. Joseph. BJ vn.43 (Greeks in Antioch) Ap. n.282f (Greeks and Barbarians everywhere)) but Josephus' enrolment of her among the tbeostbeis (worshippers of God) A] xx.195, cf. Vit. xvi ought to be taken as non-technical and as honorific flattery (for the evidence and general discussion, Schŭrer 1986 (e 1207) in.i 78, 165).

glimpse of Paul is that provided by the conclusion of Acts (28:16, 30) where he is depicted (in about a.d. 62) as being under house detendon in Rome awaiting trial. The chances are high (but by no means absolute), given the delays of two full years already, that the trial was in the end aborted and that Paul secured some casual release.⁶¹ Certainly the tone of the narrative in Acts and its whole tendency suggests (or at the very least is contrived to suggest) that at the time of writing the death of Paul at the hands of Roman authorities has not yet taken place — though admittedly Paul is made to foretell the permanence of his departure from Miletus and Ephesus (Acts 20:2 5, 3 8, at Miletus) along with forebodings of death (Acts 21:10-14, ^at Caesarea). And as for Peter, notoriously his Roman whereabouts are even more difficult to establish with any security.⁶² On the other hand there can be no doubt about the reality of the cultus of Peter and Paul as martyrs located on the Vatican hill and by the Ostian Way, by no later than the course of the second century,⁶³ and of the tradition of their deaths as martyrs by the very end of the first.⁶⁴ But for all we know the incidents which encompassed their deaths in Rome may well have been quite separate from the Neronian fire.⁶⁵

It would not be too long after these incidents that (inspired) Christians - if we are to believe a persistent story (and we need not) - took refuge from Jerusalem immediately before its siege and eventual destruction and fled to the safety of (Jordanian) Pella of the Decapolis. On this version of events providential protection did save Palestinian Christians from becoming victims in the devastation that was to befall Palestinian Jewry.⁶⁶

iii. conclusion

Actual deaths may have been relatively few before a.d. 70.⁶⁷ But their heroic circumstances ensured that the lives of these charismatic indivi-

For valuable discussion, Sherwin-White 1963 (d 109) 1 i8f.

On these, both the Pauline corpus and Acts are famously silent. 1 Pet. purports to be written from 'Babylon' (5:13: presumably = Rome, cf. Eus. Hist. Eccl. 11.15.2), thereby witnessing a (?very late) first-century tradition of a Roman residence. For a convenient collection of the evidence, O'Connor 1969 (f 196).

See Eus. Hist. Excl. 11.2).6ff(Gaius): discussion Toynbeeand Ward Perkins i9;6(e 134) 128ff.

For example 1 Clement 5 -4f (late in the first century; Peter and Paul), cf. John 21:18f (Peter). Neither mentions the place of death.

For what it is worth Eus. Cbron. GCS (= Die griecbiscben cbristlicben Scbrijtsteller der ersten Jabrbunderte) 20.216 and Jerome GCS 47.185 record the deaths four years after the fire.

The story (which suspiciously ensures an apostolic pedigree for the church of Pella) has disturbingly irreconcilable variants: Eus. Hist. Ecd. 111.5.3 (implausibly making the migration not only of the full Jerusalem church but of all the 'holy men' in the land of Judaea besides), Epiph. Adv. Haeres. 29.7, 30.2, Mens. ij.2ff.

Despite impressions Stephen and James, the brother of John, are the only two to die in Acts (7:60,12:if) along with the unsubstantiated Jerusalem victims whom Saul 'persecuted to the death' (if we are to place literal credence in the speech given him in Acts 22:4).

duals were to become the enduring models of behaviour and the focus of theological attention: characteristically these were outspoken missionar­ies, the zealous apostles, the staunch disciples and their descendants, often, as society and tradition expected of them, rootless men and professed celibates, or men who had sacrificed country and kin to their religious cause — and perceived, besides, as being direct descendants of one persistent lineage in Jewish tradition enshrined in the Book of Maccabees. Before their glittering examples the solid and dutiful householders of the secondary epistles ascribed to Paul, living out stable and orderly lives of domesticated Christianity, with loving wives, obedient progeny and submissive slaves, failed to capture the theological and spiritual imagination. Despite opponents, and despite the passage of the years, the spirit of the Pauline theology of imminent parousia - and his own potent example — was to maintain its hold on the high ground into the succeeding centuries. And it may well be that after the initial missionary successes (at least as highlighted for our benefit in Acts) the consolidation and spread of the Christian communities proceeded at a less spectacular pace in the following generations.

SOCIAL STATUS AND SOCIAL LEGISLATION¹

susan treggiari

The epoch of the destruction of the last great hellenistic monarchy which could challenge Rome in the Mediterranean world and of the addition of a princeps to the Roman constitutional system clarified the superiority of all Roman citizens to all others with whom they lived. Although political liberty was henceforth circumscribed, the privilege of citizens in private law and social status was apparent. Roman law applied only to citizens, but the spread of citizenship, the pervasive presence of a Roman administrative model and the symbiosis of Romans with non-Romans encouraged the imitation of Roman law and social institutions.² Nor was Rome immune to influences from outside: the migration of scholars after the conquest of Alexandria, the convenient Jewish idea of the sabbath, innovations in religion or cuisine. Roman social patterns and life must be seen against the mosaic of the empire.

I. LEGAL DISTINCTIONS

Gaius, writing his textbook on Roman law in the second century a.d., launches into the law of persons with a pithy classification of the human race, as far as it was relevant to Roman law: 'the primary distinction in the law of persons is this, that all men are either free or slaves. Next, free men are either ingenui (freeborn) or libertini (freedmen). Ingenui are those born free, libertini those manumitted from lawful slavery. Next, of freedmen there are three classes: they are either Roman citizens or Latins or in the category of dediticii.' (Inst. 1.3.9-12, de Zulueta's translation.)

To the mind of a Roman lawyer, legal status is the essential distinction. Although his first two sentences could be taken to refer to the whole human race, the third makes it clear that he is thinking of the community of Roman citizens and of slaves and dediticii within that context, those subject to Roman law ('the ... law observed by us',

I am indebted to David Cherry, Colin Wells, members of Stanford seminars, and the editors for discussion and comments, and to James Rives for efficient verification of references.

A Spanish inscription of 87 B.C. provides a striking early instance. See Richardson 1983 (в 271); Birks, Rodger and Richardson 1984 (d 247).

873

ibid. 8). His categories are not exhaustive for the whole of humanity. Division of humanity into slaves (born or made) and free implies that the free are subdivided into freeborn non-Roman and freeborn Roman (citizen-born or enfranchised aliens) on the one hand, and freed slaves on the other. Slaves freed by non-Romans become non-Roman free people; those freed by Romans fall into three classes. All the resulting classes need also to be subdivided by two other important variables, sex and age. Roman women are termed citizens, cives Komanae. They had no right to vote or stand for office, but in private law their rights were comparable to those of male citizens (with certain restrictions) and they could pass on citizenship to children or freed slaves. Boys attained the full public rights of citizens when judged mature for the Forum and military service (at about seventeen); they attained majority in private law at puberty or fourteen, a status which girls reached at twelve.³

Our focus, like that of our Roman sources, will be on that small proportion of inhabitants of the empire who, in 28 B.C., were free and Roman citizens, at most 5-6 million men, women and children, of whom not many more than 4 million lived in Italy.⁴ But the masses of non- citizens of many disparate cities and tribes, who heavily outnumbered Roman cidzens in the provinces, and the slaves, who made up a substantial proportion of the populadon in Rome and other cities and on the estates and cattle pastures of Italy, must not be forgotten. They sharpened Romans' perception of their own position of privilege. There is continuity between the humbly born traders who, as Cicero said (11 Verr. 5.167), ought to have been able to trust to their citizen status to protect them in any province, among non-citizens as well as before Roman officials, even where they had no acquaintances to;vouch for them, and the prosperous and scholarly Paul of Tarsus, who, when his zeal as a preacher came to the attention of the authorities, was able to claim citizen rights and convince officialdom that his own evidence on his status could be trusted.

Though the citizen's rights appear most strikingly when he is accused of a crime, they were usually important to his life because they dictated his capacity to act in private law. Roman civil law superimposed further regulations on the conventions generally accepted by mankind, the ius gentium. Free persons who were not Roman citizens had a legal personality through the laws of their own community, which were recognized by Rome. But slaves were chattels and had none. Slaves of Romans nevertheless had a role in Roman law, since they could function as extensions of their owners' personalities.⁵ But any Roman who was on the point of making a contract or marriage ought to have taken the

Buckland 1963 (f 646) i42f; Gardner 1986 (f 33) 14.

Brunt 1971 (a 9) 12. ⁵ Watson 1987 (f 703) ch. 6.

precaution of checking whether the other party was a slave or a non- citizen (peregrinusjperegrina). A man who unwittingly married a non- citizen or slave woman might find that he had begotten non-citizen (and in Roman law illegitimate) or slave children; anyone who left property to a slave enriched his or her owner; bequests to a non-citizen were void. Theoretically, the distinction between slave and free was sharp: a human being was either one or the other. In practice, status was fluid. A person might experience several changes of status in a lifetime. A Roman citizen might (through being captured in war for example) fall into slavery. A slave might be freed by a Roman and become a full citizen. Doubt and obscurity might exist. There were people wrongfully treated as slaves, foundlings for instance, whose free birth might be proved and whose status restored; persons thought to be slaves by current 'owners' acting in good faith (bona fide servientes)-, slaves who had been manumitted under a will, in the interval between the testator's death and the implemen­tation of the provisions of a will (statuliberi); slaves informally manumit­ted, who did not become citizens or, in strict law, free people.

ii. social distinctions

i. Or dines

Gradations of prestige, gradus dignitatis, might seem necessary for an equitable state (Cic. Rep. 1.43). Prestige was partly determined by constitutional function. Rome contained various orders or ranks, ordines.[1049] Upper-class writers defined their society in constitutional terms as made up of Senate and People (plebs is used of the 'commons', e.g. D1. 16.238 pr.) or, in more evocative language, of patres and Quirites (e.g. Hor. Carm. iv.14.1). These categories exclude or overlook the political nonentities, citizen women and children. For the late Republic, the membership of the senatorial order was defined by the current list of senators, men elected to the quaestorship and not subsequently demoted by censors or exiled by courts or a dictator or proscribed by triumvirs. (Close relatives of senators might be regarded as sharing their interests, but were not members of the order at this date.) Another stratum had gradually become defined. According to the Elder Pliny, an order had been inserted between the commons (plebs) and the senators (patres), when it became customary for wealthy men to wear a gold ring. The ring distinguished this 'second order' from the plebs, as the lad- clave distinguished senators (who also wore gold rings) from them (hn xxxiii. 29). Pliny's account is significant because it represents the views of an erudite administrator on the class to which he belonged. But it is imprecise in its chronology. The second order was in PUny's day called equites, a title earlier enjoyed by the equites equopublico (cavalry) and gradually extended to jurors, although as late as the time of Augustus some jurors remained in the lower stratum of wearers of the iron ring rather than the gold one. It was now money, not the privilege of the public horse, which marked equites. What interests Pliny and has puzzled modern scholars is the fuzziness of the definition of the second class. But this is natural, since the class had evolved gradually over a couple of centuries. The growth of wealth and of the citizen body (as Pliny, a native of Comum in Transpadane Italy, recognized) meant that more men were qualified for various forms of public service and interested in achieving some public recognition without wanting a senatorial career. C. Gracchus in 123 B.C. first recruited them for honorific, influential and burdensome jury-service.⁷ The class from which he drew was probably defined by the possession of capital of at least HS 400,000. By the 60s B.C. the title of equites was standard for non-senatorial jurors. Men whose property qualified them for jury service but who were not on the lists naturally claimed the title or were given it informally by their friends. But, because it was public function which defined an ordo, they could not strictly be regarded as members of the nascent equestrian order. Augustus, by holding the census efficiently and by expanding the number of administrative posts available, was to define the second order more formally and greatly increase its prestige. Five thousand equites Komani might in his time attend the parade which celebrated their official position (Dion. Hal. Ant. Кот. vi.13.4); there were 3,000 jurors. Tiberius was to unite jurors and holders of the public horse in one order, enjoying the title of equites and the gold ring.⁸

Equites in the broad sense might also remain entirely private gentle­men, managing their estates (the major form of investment for most of them) or sharing in financial ventures, especially banking and the larger scale forms of trade. Some local magnates qualified for equestrian rank. Strabo (iii.5.3—5 (169C), v.i.6-7 (213C)) says Gades and Padua in the time of Augustus had 500 equites each. Whereas the Senate when swollen in the time of Caesar had had 900 members, the size of the equestrian order was very much greater. If Padua and Gades could show 1,000 whom their contemporaries regarded as equestrian, the order in its extended sense must have numbered in the tens of thousands by 44 B.C.

In the towns, the decurions formed an order just as the Senate did at Rome: local town councils included men who might also enjoy the status

Sherwin-White 1982 (a 88), especially 28.

Pliny, HN xxxiii.32. Cf. Wiseman 1970 (d 80) 76. See also Brunt 1988 (d 28).

of Roman eques (e.g. Cic. Fam. хш. 11). The decurionate was a channel to the equestrian and senatorial orders.⁹ Members of disreputable pro­fessions were barred, as from the equestrian order; freedmen, allowed by Caesar, were later excluded; the qualification of a minimum capital may have varied according to local circumstances.¹⁰ Certain other groups whose status was legally defined or who performed public functions might also be termed ordines. Ex-slaves, libertini, were defined by their origin; the or do scribarum, the most eminent of public servants, some of whom were also equites, were marked out because, like senators, they were registered.¹¹

Other men who served the state were registered and distinguishable. Civil servants, apparitores, such as lictors and heralds, like the scribes bridged the gap between the upper classes and the freed slave.¹² Freeborn citizens in search of upward mobility were likely to join the army rather than the civil service. A private soldier might rise to the centurionate; a senior centurion was likely on retirement to become a prominent citizen in an Italian town. Augustus structured conditions of service and career-patterns: service became a road to upward mobility or to maintenance of a family's position. The successful make a transition to the decurionate or to equestrian administrative posts.¹³ The gradual rise of families depended on a series of individual successes. Thus the historian Velleius Paterculus (praetor with his brother Magius Celer Velleianus in a.d. 15) was descended on his mother's side from a Campanian great-grandfather, Minatus Magius, who received Roman citizenship and his sons the praetorship after service in the Social War, and from a paternal grandfather who was an officer under Pompey and later M. Brutus and Ti. Nero, and killed himself in 41 в.с. The father was also an equestrian military man and Velleius himself reached the Senate via army service under the future emperor Tiberius, son of his grand­father's distinguished friend (Veil. Pat. 11.16.2, 76.1). More dramatic stories of rags to riches in three generations or less circulated about new men, concerned to tie the senator as closely as possible to discreditable antecedents. Thus Cicero's grandfather was a fuller, Octavian was connected by Antony and others with grandfathers and great-grand­fathers in low trade; P. Vitellius, eques and procurator of Augustus and father of four senators and grandfather of the emperor, was said to be son of an unsavoury speculator and a common prostitute and grandson of a freed cobbler and of a baker (Plut. Cic. 1, Suet. Aug. 2, 4, Vit. 2).

' Demougin 198) (e 34); Wiseman 1971 (d 81) 86ff; on qualifications, Crook 1967 (p 21) 6;ff.

¹⁰ See Wiseman 1971 (d 81) 89-94; Garnsey 1970 (p 33) 242-5.

" Cicero regarded the tax-contractors as an ordo: Plane. 23; Fam. xin.9.2. See Badian 1972 (o 84) 74. ¹² Purcell 1983 (F49).

¹³ Dobson 1970 (d 181) and 1974 (d 182); Breeze 1975 (d 167). On recruitment of the poor as common soldiers, Campbell 1984 (d 173) 8ff.

Wealth

But Roman class structure cannot be described solely by ordines. Economic distinctions modify the pattern imposed by constitudonal function or legal status.[1050] The most striking fact about society is the gap between rich and poor. At the top, senators and equiteshzd, until the time of Augustus, the same census qualification of HS 400,000 (Dio liv. 17.5). But this is a minimum. Although misfortune could mean that a senator failed to maintain his qualification, many possessed capital far above that level. No totals are recorded for the Republic, but senators and equites could build vast fortunes through running and increasing estates and through financial investment and speculadon (especially in the tax companies). The great generals and their friends dramatically increased their wealth through booty and the exploitation of financial opportuni­ties in the provinces. Late republican data show the pattern for the beginning of our period. Pompey began with at least large estates in Picenum; by 51 the amount of interest actually paid (not as much as what was owed) to him by one foreign king was HS 792,000 per month (Cic. Att. vi. 1.3). The disposable capital of Pompey in the fifties or Caesar in the forties was immense by the standards of ordinary senators. They could carry out public building schemes, and give games which put the munificence of lesser politicians in the shade. The enrichment and expenditure of the triumvirs and emperors followed the same pattern. But, though not comparable with the fortunes of such leaders, the property of the wealthier senators, enriched by civil war and conquest abroad, was huge. For Crassus a bon mot, for Domitius Ahenobarbus armies of tenants, for Lucullus luxurious dinners and gardens survive to attest wealth.[1051] Cicero (with no public munificence on his record) collected villas and found some display necessary to the maintenance of his position (his critics thought a new man could have done with less): HS 3,500,000 (partly borrowed) bought his town house; HS 20 million came to him in inheritances, together with other honest, but short-lived, perquisites of an administrative career.

Setting himself up, in a sermon on true riches, as a senator of Stoic continence whose fortune would generally be considered modest, but who could adjust his expenditure to allow some surplus, Cicero mentions HS 100,000 as an income which would more than cover expenses, where an extravagant man would find 600,000 inadequate.[1052]But he regarded 80,000 as an adequate allowance for young Marcus when he was only a student in Athens — and in the first year travelling expenses brought the figure up to 100,000 (Att. xv.17.1, xvi.1.5 with Shackleton Bailey ad loc.). So 100,000 must not be taken seriously as representing Cicero's own budget. Some equites were as rich as wealthy senators; they could, if they wished, like Atticus, live with less display. Inheriting HS 10 million and an antique house on the Quirinal to add to his paternal (2 million) and other property, he lived with quiet good taste and such economy that he is said to have paid out only 3,000 a month for domesdc expenses (Nep. Att. 5.2, 13, 14.2, 21.1).

The good man of course avoided disgraceful sources of enrichment (despoiling provinces, ejecting neighbours, going shares with unscrupu­lous freedmen and so on, Cic. Parad. 43, 46 etc.). Ranching on public land; the intensive exploitation of private land for cash crops or products such as oil and wine, bricks, pottery, dmber, quarrying; rent from urban property such as housing or brothels; investment in transmarine commerce and small shops; usury; booty and the perquisites of office: these and other means of profit were usual and acceptable.¹⁷ The largest attested senatorial fortune (from a rhetorical source) is that of Cn. Cornelius Lentulus the augur, probably the consul of 14 в.с. Seneca and Tacitus agree that he rose from poverty, but Tacitus claims that his money was made honourably and Seneca that he owed it to the generosity of Augustus. Seneca puts it at HS 400 million, a figure based perhaps on multiplication of the equestrian minimum and affection for 40 and 400, rather than on verification of records. But it is highly significant for upper-class perception, under Nero, of what a senator might be worth.¹⁸ Seneca himself is said to have had 300 million sesterces.¹⁹

Lentulus had allegedly earlier scarcely supported the position of a nobilis. Other senators had difficulty maintaining the senatorial property qualification. This by 13 в.с. was fixed at HS 1 million.²⁰ Senators who dropped below the property qualification might resign or appeal to the emperor for a subvention: some are attested, especially if notable for ancestry or extravagance.²¹

Equites (who had to possess at least HS 400,000 and, usually, free birth)²² might exceed the senatorial minimum, as Atticus had done, and

For means of enrichment see Finley 1976 (a 27); D'Arms 1981 (p 22) ch. 5 and, for a later period, Duncan-Jones 1982 (л 24) ch. t on Pliny.

Sen. Ben. 11.27.1f; Tac. Ann. rv.44.1; Suet. Tib. 49. Appropriately, the money reverted to the emperor under his will (Suet. Tib. 49). Cf. PIR с 1379; Syme 1939 (a 93) 381, cf. 40of.

Tac. Ann. хш.42.4; Dio Lxi.10.3, cf. Vibius Crispus; Tac. Dial, vm; Brunt 1975 (f 13) 624 n.16. Duncan-Jones 1982 (л 24) App. 7 tabulates known fortunes under the Empire.

Dio uv.26.3-4,pace Suet. Aug. 41.1. Clear summary by Talbert 1984 (d 77) 47ff. See further Nicolet 1976 (d j 3), 1984 (c :8o) 9off.

Hopkins 1983 (a 46) 7jf; Talbert 1984 (d 77) 47fT.

Hor. Epist. 1.1.57-9; An P. 383-4.

might rival the wealthiest senators. Virgil is said to have acquired nearly HS io million from friends {Vita Verg. 13). Maecenas must have far outclassed him. Moralists were more likely to focus on wealthy freedmen whose fortunes approached even that of Lentulus. The richest according to tradidon were found under Claudius, the imperial freedmen Narcissus with over HS 400 million (Dio LXi.34.4) and M. Antonius Pallas with HS 300 million (Tac. Ann. xii.53.5). But already soon after the civil wars Caecilius Isidorus, despite losses, died possessed of 60 million in cash, besides estates estimated to bring him up to the level of L. Ahenobarbus (cos. 54 B.C.) and of the Claudian freedmen.[1053] M. Aurelius Zosimus, freedman and accensus of Cotta Maximus (Messallinus, cos. 20), received several gifts equivalent to the equestrian census from his patron.[1054]

Less than the equestrian census might make a family wealthy by the standards of a small community. The capital required of some municipal councillors is known to have been HS 100,000. Retired centurions or freedmen traders or even efficient farmers might attain solid wealth.[1055]But ordinary artisans, shopkeepers and peasants were immeasurably removed from equestrian wealth. The pay of a private soldier, HS 900 annually, out of which he paid for food and equipment, was attractive and must have represented security compared with what an able-bodied man could have earned as a labourer, seasonally employed and with no compensation for injury. Cicero had argued in the 70s в.с. that an ordinary labourer would earn no more than HS 3 daily (QRosc. 28). Daily rates must have varied according to skill, demand, area and season; we cannot determine fluctuations over time.[1056] Nor are costs of even basic essentials such as food and housing determinable over time or for any given moment. The precise economic situation of the small proprietor and the wage-earner eludes us. In the city of Rome and other urban centres, the craftsmen, shopkeepers and freed slaves (who often pos­sessed a skill) distinguish themselves from the lower part of the population by their habit (which cost money) of commemorating themselves on tomb inscriptions. Some slaves, who might possess slaves of their own or other property, must also be counted among the relatively well-off.

j. Birth

'Though you strut in the pride of wealth, Fortune does not change your birth' (Hor. Epod. iv.5-6). Romans did not measure social position by census rating. Patrician lineage, descent from ancient consuls, descent from any man who had held the consulship or done great deeds, all these had varying weight. Nohiiitas came to descendants in the male line from the first three. It might be difficult to discriminate between the scion of a patrician family which had achieved little in recent decades (e.g. Cic. Mur. 16) and the representative of a plebeian noble house, particularly as the female line might introduce other themes. Caesar could wring every last drop of value from descent from Alban kings and kinship with the new achiever, Marius. Octavian, a Iulius only by his maternal grand­mother and by an arrangement which even his stepfather for a time refrained from acknowledging (Cic. Att. xiv. 12.2), became more accep­table to the nobles by his last marriage to an heiress of Claudii Nerones and Livii Drusi. Descent from mythical heroes or ancient kings might balance lack of recent and Roman public service. Maecenas, who remained an eques, drew real influence from his close friendship with Octavian and social status from his alleged descent from Etruscan princes (Hor. Carm. 1.1.1). Such genealogy could be alleged even in the minutes of the Senate (Tac. Ann. xii.5 3.3).[1057]

Absence of real or fictitious distinctions of birth was not an insuper­able barrier to advancement. (If fictitious, they were normally invented after a man had succeeded.) The Senate had necessarily always been recruited from below, and although new men who rose to the consulship were rare, men of equestrian family steadily reached lower magistracies and their sons or grandsons might do better. New men, novi homines, whose families showed no previous senator, stand at the opposite end of the continuum from the nobilis. Between were various gradations.[1058]

As the equestrian order was the seedbed of the Senate (Livy, XLii.61.5), closely linked to it by blood, intermarriage, friendship and similar interests and education, so lower strata of the propertied classes supplied recruits to the equestrian order. A man of modest means, tenuis, who knew how to make money, might end as a rich and influential eques.[1059]

These various stratifications, themselves untidy, from senators and equites and local notables down through civil servants and centurions to freed slaves and the common people, were interconnected by networks of patronage and friendship. The archaic patron-client relationship, sanctioned by the Twelve Tables, had evolved into a fluid situation in the late Republic, when ancestral ties of dependence were probably less relevant to a noble and a humble citizen than current economic des (for instance Domitius Ahenobarbus could sdll control his tenants) and political advantage (popularis tribunes could attract voters and successful generals rely on their troops). But poets and scholars who needed to make their way as 'friends' of powerful men and the domi nobiles like the Roscii of Ameria sdll cultivated patrons of higher status than them­selves. A Cicero could be useful, as senator and governor, to rich Greeks or Roman tax-contractors or businessmen, and they could be useful to him. Mutual interest was strengthened by a code which recommended reciprocity and strict repayment of beneficia. Between social equals the role of benefactor and beneficiary might rotate. Benefits might also be asked for third parties. Where there was inequality of status or influence, a humble amicus might request help from his patron who would ask his own patron to bring about the desired result.[1060]

The troubles of the late Republic and triumviral period ruined many and promoted some. Territorial expansion and the civil wars of Caesar and the Pompeians increased the need for commanders and administra­tors; reliable and successful soldiers claimed rewards from the victor; despite casualdes, the number of senators was inflated under Caesar. The wars which followed gave men of all classes further opportunities to rise. For example, Caesar's friendship secured the consulship of Cornelius Balbus of Gades (40 B.C.). The freedman's son Q. Horadus Flaccus would probably not have held an equestrian command if Brutus had not badly needed officers. Calvisius Sabinus (probably of Spoleto) was promoted by Caesar and rewarded by Octavian for attempting to defend the dictator against his assassins. He was consul in 39 and did Octavian good service in the navy and as governor of Spain during the war of Acdum. A son and grandson follow him to the consulship. C. Carrinas (cos. suff. 43) is comparable. Young men of hitherto obscure Italian families came up with Octavian, for instance Salvidienus Rufus (who should have been consul in 39). M. Vipsanius Agrippa, who dropped the gentile name which revealed his un-Roman background, outshone them all. The piping days of peace gave fewer opportunities to soldiers, but reliability and efficiency might still win promotion through imperial favour and the eloquent new man might still rise through forensic oratory.[1061]

iii. social problems at the beginning of the principate

The two themes of Romans who reflected on the twenty years after the murder of Caesar were social disruption and moral decay. The agony of the civil wars of the 80s and the shameful proscriptions of Sulla had been burned into the memory of Cicero's generation (Cic. Cat. 11.20). Cicero himself perished in the second proscription, ordered by younger men. His elder, M. Terentius Varro (116—27), survived, but his book On Peace dates to the. aftermath of Caesar's civil war, when his Pompeian sympathies had been forgiven, not to the peace dominated by the last and youngest of the triumvirs.³²

C. Sallustius Crispus (?86—35), a new man from Sabine territory who reached the praetorship under Caesar (46), between 44 and 3 5 produced a series of works on the decline of the Republic, diagnosing its ills as avarice, luxury and selfish ambition. Since 146 B.C., avaritia had driven out good faith and replaced it with pride, cruelty, irreligion and venality. Ambitio taught deceit and treachery to friends. Luxuria came in with Sulla's eastern wars: conspicuous and reckless consumption included sexual and sensual indulgence of all kinds and a mania for building private houses, where the Romans of old had built simple temples. Sallust sounds notes which recur in Horace a decade later.³³

Cornelius Nepos, from Cisalpina, friend of Cicero, Atticus and Catullus 99 — c. 24 b.c.), made no sermons on civil war, but his assessment of Atticus' life defends the virtue of the able and rich eques who chose to take no part in politics, to be the friend simultaneously of Hortensius and Cicero, or of Brutus and Antony or Antony and Octavian, and (more remarkably) to succour the losers.³⁴ Since the second edition of this life appeared between Atticus' death in 32 and 27 B.C., it took courage to point out what wisdom Atticus had displayed in keeping the friendship of both Octavian and Antony when they were rivals for supreme power (20.5). Nepos preferred Atticus, who never lost a friend, to the warring princes who corresponded with him about literature. It was not many years later that one of Brutus' former officers, re-reading Homer, praised the peacemakers and criticized ruthless leaders. Achilles was ruled by passion, and both he and Agamemnon by

be the son of a gladiator. But Tiberius defended him by saying that 'he seemed to be his own father' (Tac. Ann xi.21.3, cf. Cic. Phil, vi.17: Cicero 'a se ortum').

Varro's fragmentary early Satires include Sexagesii, about a Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep for fifty years and awoke c. 70 B.C. to find a great increase in greed, luxury and corruption (in Bŭcheler, Petronii Saturae 51 ĵff, frr. 483-503).

Sail. Cat. 10-13. The link between extravagance and civil war is explicitly made in Tacitus' version of a letter of Tiberius on the subject of a proposed sumptuary law (Ann. in.54.5).

Nep. Att. 2.2, cf. 1.4, 8.6, 9-4f, 11.2, 4. See Horsfall 1989 (в 88).

anger: the parallel with Antony and Octavian is clear. Virtue and wisdom are personified by Ulysses, who tried to get his companions safely home and who resisted the harlot who tried to enslave him. Horace and his friends (he admits) follow bad leaders mindlessly, suppressing their anxieties and postponing the moral effort which is needed to save them.[1062]

Sallust, Nepos and Horace were all conscious of the violent reversals of fortune which their age had witnessed. The fates of Pompey, Caesar and Antony were potent. Lesser men rose or fell. Octavian's admiral L. Tarius Rufus was said to have sprung from the lowest level of society (Pliny, HN xvin.37: 'infima natalium humilitate'). Horace attacks an alleged ex-slave who became a military tribune (Epod. iv). Varying fortune raised men or ruined them, putting down the mighty and advancing the obscure.[1063] Men were perturbed by the ambition of leaders, vices of generals, changes in the state, revolution, violent disaster, the fall of the great and the rise of the humble.[1064] The Roman instinct was to get back to a mythical status quo, to a time when citizens were brave, hardworking, unselfish and harmonious.

Cicero had advised Caesar, when he controlled the state, to stabilize the Republic and so avoid further dissension (Marcell. 29); in particular he ought to set up courts, restore credit, repress self-indulgent vices, propagate children, and by means of severe laws tie up everything which had collapsed and run wild (ibid. 23). This vague and viticultural recipe represents a return to old values and discipline, imposed from outside. Caesar, as dictator like Sulla, could claim a mandate to rebuild the state. Sulla had systematized courts and magistracies and passed a sumptuary law (Gell. NA 11.24.11); Caesar too tidied up the system, passed repressive measures, tackled the financial crisis and perhaps (Dio XLin.25.2) offered rewards to fathers of large families. Sumptuary laws checked extravagance in meals, building and perhaps women's jewellery.³⁸

The triumvirs, charged, like Sulla, with rebuilding, concerned them­selves with the excision of their enemies from the body polidc and other urgent measures. Once the emergency was advertised as over in 28,³⁹ Octavian had to take up the work of reconstruction. Before, Horace had prayed for the cessation of civil war, now he turns to a Sallustian diagnosis of problems to be solved. As Augustus, the ruler must aspire to be a father of cities (Carm. 111.24). Founders were expected to construct a society as well as a constitution. It was in these years that Livy was describing the work of Romulus and Numa. The date at which Dionysius of Halicarnassus worked on the same theme is obscure: it is tempting to associate his remarks on Romulus with the debate on whether it was worth attempting to legislate morality which took place between 28 and 18, but as his book began to be circulated in 7, its composidon may well postdate the legislation of 18 в.с.[1065]

Dionysius took the traditional philosophical view that the state depended on households, so the lawgiver should start by regulating marriages and sexual conduct. Romulus was an effective lawgiver. Instead of passing specific laws which allowed a husband to sue for adultery or desertion or a wife for ill-usage, desertion or recovery of dowry, he secured the good behaviour of wives by making marriage indissoluble and safeguarding their rights.[1066] It was traditional that founders or constitution-makers regulated social behaviour. The Sici­lian Diodorus (writing c. 60-30 B.C., died not earlier than 21) had recently given fresh currency to the legend that Zaleucus had enacted a law at Locri that a woman was not to leave the city at night, unless she was going to commit adultery, or to wear gold or purple unless she was a courtesan (xn.21.1). Charondas at Thurii was held to have legislated against adultery and remarriage for men (Stob. Flor. iv.2.24, cf. Diod. xii. 12. i). Augustus would be expected to link sumptuary legislation and sexual behaviour.

The restoration of temples in г8[1067] seems to have been accompanied by an effort to shore up sexual mores.[1068] A remark of Livy's on Roman intolerance of necessary remedies (Praef. 9) and an ode of Horace (rii. 24) suggest that reaction was so unfavourable that Augustus dropped the proposal for the moment. Horace calls on an undefined man to restore old values of frugality and chastity to Rome: 'Oh whoever wishes to take away impious slaughter and civil madness, if he seeks to have the words "Father of cities" inscribed beneath his statues, let him dare to curb unbroken licence. He will be glorious to posterity.' The benefactor will need courage, but a later generation will be grateful to him. The link is made between the vices of parents and the corruption of children: fathers are avaricious and unscrupulous, mothers, thanks to their rich dowries, can control their husbands or take lovers. Surplus wealth should be given to Capitoline Jove (or thrown away). The horsebreaking or pruning will not be pleasant: penalties will be needed, but legislation is useless without a fundamental change in behaviour.

Contemporary analysis of social problems focused on morality. Since a poor man or a slave might be thought to have deserved his lot because of bad character, we should not expect Romans to see poverty and slavery as social problems which required cure. But moderns, starting from their own presuppositions, diagnose slavery and the comparative stagnation of the Roman economy as the main causes of the top-heavy social system. The emperors palliated the insecurity of the poor of the city. They also propped up members of the senatorial class who were unable to maintain the economic base which public service and high position required. They sent aid in response to disasters. There was some 'humanitarian' legislation on the treatment of slaves, but this was dictated by concern for morality and the security of the free population rather than for the slaves: the result might be Claudius' decree that sick slaves abandoned by their owners were free, or the Silanian senatusconsultum of a.d. io providing for the torture of all slaves present in the house when the master was murdered.[1069] The exceptionally high proportion of slaves in Italian society depressed the condition of the poorer Romans and their reproductivity.[1070] Rome had once had great reserves of manpower: now, despite her admired generosity with the citizenship, the supply of soldiers was drying up. Augustus' preoccupation is indicated by his introduction of registration for legitimate children and enfranchized aliens.[1071] If, as seems likely, it was Augustus himself who introduced the rule that soldiers could not marry, he must have been thinking only of military discipline and not of the usefulness of breeding citizens for the legions.[1072]

iv. the social legislation of augustus and the julio-claudians

The decade after 23 B.C. saw concentrated legislation in various areas. Augustus himself claimed that his laws re-introduced old standards and set an example to posterity. Like Horace, he harks back to a mythical past. Tiberius was in closer accord with the tradition of the republican aristocracy when he deprecated interference in private morality.[1073]

Augustus could not enforce his reforms without at least some measure of consensus: this he presumably achieved by 18, when the Senate and People approved the Julian law on the marriage of the orders.⁴⁹ The Julian law on adultery is convincingly dated to the same year. Some curbs on luxury had been introduced by sumptuary legisladon regulat­ing public banquets in 22, maximum expenditure on dinner parties, and perhaps other extravagances which may have included the building mania attacked by Horace.⁵⁰

i. Marriage

Opposition to the marriage law was not stifled when it was passed: Augustus apparently had to make various modifications (Suet. Aug. 34, Dio lvi. 10). Major revision (with some concessions) took place in the crisis year a.d. 9, when the suffect consuls Papius and Poppaeus updated the Julian law. Some complexities in the administration of the law seem to have been sorted out by a senatorial committee under Tiberius in a.d. 20 (Tac. Ann. 111.28.6); refinements were introduced by juristic interpre­tation; later emperors restated or refined the law. The difference between the Julian and the Papio-Poppaean laws is obscured because the law as it stood from a.d. 9 is normally cited by the jurists as the Julian and Papian law. It seems clear that the original law had introduced penalties against men and women who were unmarried at an age at which they were expected to be married, or childless at an age when they could have been parents. It formulated rules about the intermarriage of people of various classes (which reflected previous custom) and introduced rewards to encourage parenthood.

The motive for the law seems to have been that Augustus perceived men as reluctant to marry: he read to the Senate the old speech of Metellus which contained the hackneyed aperqu that, though marriage had its inconvenient side it was necessary for the survival of state and family, through the production of children. He also perceived men as reluctant to father and rear children: Germanicus in a.d. 9 was presented as a model father (Suet. Aug. 34). This perception of the aristocracy goes back at least to the second century. Augustus, who held a census in 28, had hard evidence on the number of children claimed by citizen fathers.⁵¹

hi. 25-8, especially 28.6 on Lex Julia et Papia; Suet. Tib. 35.1 for family disciplining of adulteresses. The evidence on the texts of the marriage laws is conveniently assembled by B. Biondi in ADA no. 28, i66ff. The best account of the law is Brunt 1971 (a 9) App. 8. Cf. Treggiari 1991 (f 70) 277ff.

«» KG 6.2, cf. Hor. Carm. Sate. \ jf.

Carm. hi.i. jjff, 24-3f. For Augustus' law in 22 B.C. see Dio Liv.2.3; Suet. Aug. 34; Gell. NA 11.24.14. For the aftermath, Tac. Ann. 111.5 2—5 (a.d. 22): Tiberius' refusal to witch-hunt, although Augustus' law neglected. For previous laws see Gell. NA 11.24; Macrob. Sat. 111.13.13.

Cf. Brunt 1971 (a 9) 11 ĵff on the Augustan census.

Dio suggests that there was a known shortage of 'well-born' (which seems in this context to mean freeborn) women: 'Since males far outnumbered females among the freeborn, he encouraged anyone who wanted to marry even freedwomen, except the senators, and he ordered that their reproduction should be legitimate' (Liv.16.2). Moderns now generally agree that marriage between freeborn and freed had not (as Dio implies) been forbidden before: if he is muddled on this point it does not inspire faith in his views on the sex ratio.⁵² Dio may be arguing back from the law to the situation.⁵³ But if contemporaries perceived a shortage of women, their best evidence would have been the census, in which fatherless unmarried women may have been under-reported (as women are in modern non-industrial populations). A real imbalance between the sexes might be caused by abandonment or malnutrition of girl babies. If Augustus saw this as a problem, we might expect measures against abandonment (which would constitute no greater invasion of privacy than did his adultery law). But he impartially encouraged the rearing of children of either sex. Nothing confirms Dio's alleged cause for the endorsement of hypergamy for freedwomen, nor did the text of the law speak only of freedwomen but of freedmen as well (D 23.2.44 pr.).

The law forbade intermarriage of senators, their sons, sons' sons and grandsons, their daughters, sons' daughters and sons' sons' daughters with freed persons, actors and actors' children. This is the first indication that the liberi of senators were to be regarded as sharing and affecting their status, although they are not yet called senatorii,⁵⁴ Freeborn Roman citizens were forbidden to marry infamous persons such as prostitutes. A person of higher rank was naturally barred from marriages forbidden to his inferiors (D 23.2.49). Forbidden marriages seem not originally to have been null but not to have conferred the advantages provided by the law.

The law was long and complicated. It invalidated provisions against marriage imposed by third parties. It laid down a series of penalties for the unmarried (caelibes), and for men over twenty-five and women over twenty who were childless (orbi).⁵⁵ A caelebs could not take under the will of anyone outside the sixth degree (unless he or she married within 100

Watson 1967 (f 700) 3 }ff. For the interpretation of'well-born' see Brunt 1971 (a 9) 558.

Rawson 1986 (f 34) 49 n. 51.

D. 23.2.44: 'qui senator est quive filiuis neposve ex filio proneposve ex filio nato cuius eorum est erit...' Cf. Nicolet 1976 (d 5 3) 38.

The prescribed ages for marriages were from twenty (or perhaps less, since this age is directly attested for parenthood: Tit. Dip. 16.1) to fifty for women and twenty-five to sixty for men. (Tit. Ulp. 16. i; Gnomon of the Idiologus (FIRA 1 99) 24—8; cf. Sen. fr. 119 Haase; Suet. Claud. 23.1; Tert. ApoL 4.8. There were grace periods for a woman who was widowed or divorced (two years and eighteen months from a.d. 9).

days: Tit. Ulp. 17.1); a married but childless person could only take half. Unclaimed property went to heirs or legatees who fulfilled the law's conditions or, failing that, to the treasury. The unmarried seem to have been debarred from public games (EJ² 30A, but cf. Suet. Aug. 34.2). The law offered rewards, for example, to parents of one child by allowing one year's seniority in public office[1074] or the right to inherit each other's whole estate or to take under the wills of people outside the sixth degree; three children exempted a father from various legal dudes in Rome (four in Italy, five in the provinces), three enabled a freedman worth HS 100,000 to exclude his patron from inheriting, two to get off services promised to his patron; three released a freeborn woman, four a freedwoman, from guardianship (Gai. Inst. 111.44).

The law paid particular attention to the wealthier classes and freed persons. The reason was probably practical. Although he continued the grain-dole to adult male citizens in Rome, Augustus was in no position to finance family allowances for poor citizens (there was occasional largesse to fathers: Suet, Aug. 46), but he could release libertini who became parents from certain disabilities and duties (which cost him nothing) and he could interfere with the free transfer of property. In stopping orbi who had given no children to the state from enriching themselves with the property of strangers, and in seeing that property ultimately went to the community, he attacked the problems of avarice and childlessness. He was concerned to maintain the prestige of the senatorial class by checking marriage with people who might have dubious antecedents, but he was not concerned to delineate class boundaries or to favour native parents over freed.[1075]

Augustus' laws responded to a complex situation and shifting political possibilities. It is a mistake to ask what his one motive was in inspiring the legislation of 18 в.с. and a.d. 9. The need to encourage nuptiality and reproductivity in order to supply Rome with soldiers and administrators appears to have been most prominent in the minds of Augustus and his advisers. The laws would also serve to encourage the upper classes to breed sons to succeed them in their dignities and property: it reinforced the executive measures which Augustus took to recruit qualified men to the service of the state and to encourage continuity, loyalty and esprit de corps .[1076]

2. Adultery

The Julian law on adultery and extramarital sexual intercourse is intimately connected with the marriage law.⁵⁹ It covered adultery by married women and all kinds of fornication (stuprum) involving a person of respectable status. Slaves, prostitutes and women in low professions thought to involve sexual services (for instance, tavern waitresses) were outside the scope of the law.

Public sanctions against seduction of boys already existed. Adulterous wives had until now been dealt with by husbands or families, divorced and sometimes penalized by loss of one-sixth of their dowries or by relegation zoo miles from Rome. Rapists and seducers could be privately sued for damages. A permanent court was now set up to deal with adultery and stuprum. The law was exhaustive and complex; interpre­tation accrued. The most important of the known provisions are as follows. A husband who knew of his wife's adultery was to divorce her (with seven citizens as witnesses, D 24.2.9) and he or her father was then to prosecute her within sixty days. If he failed to prosecute, then an outsider might do so within the next four months, or if the husband failed to divorce, within five years from the alleged offence. A woman convicted by the court lost half her dowry and one-third of her other property and was relegated to an island. She could not form another fully valid marriage. The alleged adulterer might be brought to trial subse­quently: the penalties were confiscation of half his property and relegation to a different island. A husband who failed to divorce risked the same penalties on a charge of pandering, as did anyone who married a convicted adulteress. A wife could not prosecute her husband for his adultery with a married woman, but if she connived at it she could be prosecuted, as could anyone who facilitated the affair. Detailed rules were laid down on the degree of violence which a husband or father who caught a woman in the act might subsequently justify. A husband could defend himself against a charge of having murdered the lover only if the latter was of low status; the wife's father could kill any lover caught in the act, but only in his own or the husband's house and if the woman was under his legal control or her husband's, but he had also at least to attempt to kill his daughter. Such murders seem to have been rare. The husband was forbidden to kill his wife.⁶⁰

In describing the purpose and impact of the law, both ancient and modern writers tend to concentrate on the provisions about adultery, which was of interest to jurists because it caused divorce and loss of dowry. But the law may initially have been motivated not only by the

ADA no 14, 112.ft. Corbett 1950 (f6jo) ijjff; Gardner 1986 (f 33) 4-/S-, Raditsa 1980 (f 5 3).

There are traces of killings in second and third century rescripts: £>48.3.33 pr., 39.8; C] ix.9.4.

conviction that women were evading a commitment to chastity implicit in the marriage bond and that their adultery threatened the stability of the family and the production of legitimate children, but also by a conservative backlash against the mores of the fiercely individualistic aristocrats, whose conspiracies were allegedly cemented by homosexual bonds formed in adolescence and by collusion in heterosexual intrigue.⁶¹ The lurid picture painted by Cicero for the entertainment of Atticus about procurement of an acquittal attests the deep conviction of old- fashioned Romans that some aristocrats were sexual mafiosi and that irregular sexual practices were at the root of political corruption.⁶² It is difficult to separate slander from reality.

Realities of sexual conduct are comparatively inaccessible even through questionnaire and autobiography, harder to reach by way of political oratory or erotic verse. Latin literature had recently turned to exploration of emotional life; in law by about 100 B.C., marriages in which the husband had legal control of the wife had become uncommon; women had more independence in the bestowal of themselves and their property; wives, like husbands, could divorce unilaterally and without necessarily suffering severe economic consequences, scandal or complete separation from children. Men connected this social and legal emancipa­tion with a sexual revolution. The evidence which reaches us is tendentious and it is impossible to measure the incidence of adultery and fornication in the society of Caelius and Clodia or of Ovid and Iulia. Augustus, who suffered not only the usual accusations of homosexuality but also circumstantial criticisms of adulteries with women of standing, and who had certainly married the divorced Livia with indelicate haste (Suet. Aug. 69, cf. his letter to Maecenas: Ep. fr. 32, Malcovati), was in a good position to assess the sexual morality of the upper classes, but can hardly have had statistical data.

The severe penalties ordained by the adultery law inflicted suffering on everyone concerned. A husband confronted with undeniable evi­dence stood at least to lose his wife (whom he might regret) and also most of her dowry. Although relegation was not always permanent and some social life must have developed on the islands, the lives of condemned women in particular were ruined. The system was (as for the marriage law) operated by private prosecutors, who, if successful, were rewarded by a percentage of the confiscated property. This opened the door to persecution of the wealthier members of society, while it was

Suetonius lists the law on electoral bribery between marriage and adultery (Aug. 34; cf. Dio liv.16.1).

Alt. i. id ;. On the link between sexual immorality and subversion: Sail. Cat. 15. Homosexual bonding of conspirators or dangerous radicals: e.g. Cic. Cat. li.nf, Dom. 49, Pbil. n.44f; heterosexual: Dom. 2;, 8 3; Sail. Cat. 2 5. See G riffin 1977 (c 104) 21 f on the 'stereotype of the man of action who lives a life of luxury', alternately admired and attacked.

hardly worth an outsider's while to pursue humbler adulterers. It also meant that a husband, to protect his wife, might divorce and prosecute her and hope that she would be acquitted (D 48.5.3). The law made some gestures towards preserving the stability of marriages: for instance, if a husband kept his wife a prosecutor would have to sue him first, for conniving (D 48.5.12.10, 48.5.27), and if a divorced woman remarried without having received notice of prosecution, the prosecutor was to sue her alleged lover first (D 48.5.18.6, 48.5.12.11), but its overall effect was to destabilize. Adultery cases could be brought by delatores, men who made money and a career by prosecution, and a charge of adultery (how well founded we naturally cannot tell) was routinely brought when someone wanted to ruin an imperial or senatorial woman (e.g. Gaius' sisters, Nero's wife Octavia).

j. Effectiveness of the laws on marriage and adultery

The laws were praised by Horace, in the Secular Hymn of 17 B.C., for producing children (i7ff) and, in the Odes, for having curbed licence and restored old values {Carm. iv. 15 -9ff). Households were clear of stuprum and wives bore children who looked like their husbands (iv. 5,2off). Circumspecdon in recommending extramarital affairs was imposed on Ovid but perhaps morals were unaffected: Augustus and others in 2 в.с. discerned promiscuity in the heart of the governing class.

The marriage law of 18 в.с. does not seem to have impelled Horace to marry; the consuls who proposed the second law were caelibes, though it need not be assumed that they were lifelong bachelors. What was the situation before? Custom dictated that upper-class women married early in their reproductive years and, if necessary, often. Since a dowry provided income, a young Marcus or young Quintus Cicero might start considering matrimony in his early twenties; the rich eques Atticus married in his fifties; the normal age may have been in the late twenties. Men were not necessarily repelled by the idea of marrying: the demo­graphic problem was that, while generally interested in breeding heirs to their name and property, they miscalculated by producing fewer than those needed to replace themselves and continue their lines.⁶³ Most men had wives through most of adult life. The law sought to make them marry younger — and here there is some visible impact in the careers of young senators, such as Agricola — and to rear more children. In setting the ages of parenthood at twenty for women and twenty-five for men, Augustus was not encouraging an unhealthy age of first pregnancy: this requirement suggested an age of marriage of about eighteen for women and twenty-two or twenty-three for men. Senators seem to have adopted

⁶³ Hopkins 1983 (a 46) chs. 2, 3, especially 69Й.

the latter.[1077] There was no need for the upper classes to change their habits in marrying off their daughters. The most eligible girls probably continued to marry before eighteen. One child probably sufficed for entitlement to inheritances; a bigger family secured seniority in a political career.

The effect of the adultery law is hard to assess. Its deterrent effect might be demonstrated by the comparative rarity of known trials. Or did the upper class close ranks and discourage delation? Augustus himself invoked it in 2 b.c. and a.d. 8 and sharpened the penalties (Tac. Ann. 111.24.2f). Later attested trials usually involved women of the highest position and the charge was often linked with treason.[1078] Prosecutions for stuprum are rarely documented. Tiberius, perhaps deploring Augustus' interference in private life, as he found sumptuary legislation vain, encouraged reversion to domestic jurisdiction (Suet. Tib. 35.1), although he checked women who attempted to evade the law by registering as prostitutes.[1079] Moralists continued to claim that adultery was rife.[1080] Domitian revived the law, which may suggest that he thought the number of prosecutions insufficient. But professional prosecutors presented a threat to the rich: the law encouraged not only collusion and cover-up, but blackmail (D 4.2.7.1). Renewal and expansion of both marriage and adultery laws and the continuing interest of jurists suggest that, although the laws failed in their general aim and, as Tacitus says, corruption and legislation went together, they were sporadically enforced, especially against the rich and prominent.[1081]

4. Manumission

Ambivalent traditions guarded the citizen body. Constant appeal was made to the ancestral virtues of Romans and Latins. But the extension of citizen rights to non-citizens was deep-rooted. The extension was grounded in practical needs, but justified by the moral qualities of the recipient - industry, loyalty, courage, eloquence. Men who would adopt the ancient customs of Romans deserved to be recruited. As the Senate was theoretically open to the good and rich, so the citizenship was to be open to the best men of allied states and to slaves and other non-citizens who deserved well (Cic. Arch. 19, 22ff, Balb. especially 24, 31). The enfranchisement of slaves was effected chiefly by their owners by three formal methods: by the census, by the rod (a procedure before a magistrate with imperium) or posthumously by testament.[1082] The increase in wealth in the late Republic meant a huge increase in the number an individual owner could enfranchise; slaves might be freed not as a reward for long or outstanding service, but in order to give their new votes or political support to their ex-owner (patronus) or relieve him of the direct burden of their support, by claiming the grain allowance in Rome. Private bodyguards and private armies increased the need for trusted liberti.¹⁰ The right of a citizen man or woman to pass on full ciuzen rights to slaves is remarkable - especially when we remember that a R от ana had no vote and could not secure citizen rights to her own children by a non-Roman husband. Augustus, as patron of the whole state could not shake this entrenched system, but he had reason to regulate the influx of citizens which any private owner could create at a time. Horace, the freedman's son, in a savage epode had attacked a former slave, scarred by public flogging, who sat in the fourteen rows with the equites (Epod. 4). Augustus, after advertising victory in a 'slave war' against Sextus Pompeius, may well have thought it necessary to regulate manumission (Cf. RG 25.1; Dio Lvi.33.3). Dionysius explicitly connects the legislation with a need to keep out criminals (iv.24).

Manumission by will took effect on the owner's death, by census only at Rome and sporadically (and this method became obsolete under Augustus), by the rod only when a magistrate was available (but in the provinces as at Rome) (Tit. Ulp. 1.6-9). F°^r convenience or haste, owners might free their slaves informally, by a written or verbal declaration. This method did not confer citizenship but allowed the slave temporary liberty, which might be protected by the praetor.[1083] Any property, or children born to an informally freed woman, belonged to the master (Jr. Dos. 5). Equity demanded that owners should not be encouraged to shrug off their responsibilities while retaining their privileges in this way.[1084]

Three laws regulated manumission, the Lex Fufia Caninia of 2 B.C., the Lex Aelia Senda of a.d. 4 and a Lex Iunia of uncertain date, which is associated with the Aelio-Sentian law and seems to precede it. It fits well with Augustus' social engineering (particularly with an urge to keep legal status tidy) and may tentatively be assigned to 17 B.C., the period of

Augustus' major efforts in this area.[1085] The Lex Iunia recognized informally freed slaves and gave them freedom and a half-citizenship, as 'Junian Latins', like that of Latin colonists of an earlier age. The law specified that the owner must want the slave to be free and that he must be worthy of freedom in the opinion of the magistrate whose duty it would be to protect him; there were various details about the rights of owners.[1086] The law proved useful and adaptable: further rulings were gradually added.[1087]

Another area was regulated by the Fufio-Caninian law, which limited the numbers an owner could free by will. This method was popular because it displayed generosity at the expense of heirs. Augustus introduced a sliding scale: testators might free both slaves if they only had two, half the total if they had two to ten, a third if ten to thirty, a fourth if thirty to 100, one fifth if 100-500, and never more than 100. But they might always free as many as they would have been allowed if they had been in the category below (so an owner of thirty-two might free ten, rather than eight). This law applied only to will: an owner could still free as many as he liked in his lifetime.[1088] Augustus had now regulated the two methods of manumission which had previously needed no specific ratification by public authority.

The Lex Aelia Sentia was a comprehensive law on manumission and the resulting rights of patrons and libertini. It required the freedman to show gratitude. It contained a requirement that the manumitter must be over twenty, but if he could prove a valid reason before a magistrate with imperium and a special council (five senators and five equites in Rome, or twenty citizens in the provinces) he could free by the rod (or infor­mally).[1089] The motive must be honourable: this was interpreted as meaning that the council might approve manumission of a blood relative or quasi-relative such as a nurse, a benefactor or a girl a master wanted to marry. The law also introduced a minimum age for the slave, thirty, again with the possibility of justifying exceptions before a council.[1090] A younger slave did not become a citizen, but probably a Latin.[1091] The law also invalidated manumission which defrauded a creditor or a patron, and it debarred from either citizen or Latin rights slaves previously punished as criminals by their owners or the state, by whatever means they were freed.[1092] These were put in a pre-existing category of particu­larly recalcitrant surrendered enemies, the dediticii. They had to reside at least 100 miles from Rome[1093] and could not make a will[1094] or inherit.[1095]Junian Latins were prohibited by the Junian law from making a will (Tit. Ulp. 20.14). Unlike dediticii, they were encouraged to become full citizens. For instance, a man freed under thirty who had become a Latin, could prove that he had in accordance with the Aelio-Sentian Law married a Roman or Latin woman and had a year-old child and claim promotion to full citizenship for himself and his family.[1096] The Visellian Law, under Tiberius (Pa.d. 24) gave Roman citizenship to Junians who served six years in the vigiles; a Claudian edict to those who built a ship of at least 10,000 measures and transported grain to Rome for six years, and Nero to those who built a house in Rome costing at least HS 100,ooo.[1097]Formal repetition by iusta manumissio after thirty also gave full citizen­ship.[1098] This law, among other things, laid down guidelines for magis­trates who authorized a manumission.

Ancient sources thought Augustus aimed at checking the flow of servile and foreign blood into the citizen body.[1099] Though the Fufio- Caninian law may have reduced the number of manumissions, the rest of his legislation blocked only criminal ex-slaves and made access to citizenship easier for others. He aimed to regulate, not to stop the talented and energetic. Pollution by foreigners remained a favourite theme of writers. But by the time of Nero it could be argued that most senators and equites had ex-slaves in their family trees (Tac. Ann. xiii.27.2).

Later emperors also intervened. The Visellian law regulated the promotion of freedmen, pursuing those who sought offices reserved for the freeborn, unless they obtained the gold ring by application to the emperor (CJ ix. 21), but also, as we have seen, assisting their rise in return for public service. Under Claudius, an important step was taken to channel talent into the service of the emperor himself, when Pallas the financial bureau chief excogitated a senatorial decree which ensured that if a slave lived in quasi-marriage with a free woman, his owner could, if he wished, take her and her children as his slaves. (The children would otherwise have been freeborn and illegitimate, and their father's owner have no rights over them.) The Senate may have thought they were repressing ambidous slaves and punishing perverse women, but the main modve was probably to allow the emperor to recruit back into his service the promising sons of his slave bureaucrats.⁸⁸ This system is introduced just when it seems that the upward mobility of slave 'civil servants' was recognized enough for them to become eligible husbands to freeborn women (although these were often daughters of imperial libertt).⁸⁹ We see in this later legislation nuanced measures designed for the state, not in the interests of any one group. It is unprofitable to expect general laws to be simple enough to be labelled as 'pro' or 'anti' a whole category of the population, let alone such a large and heterogeneous group as the slaves of Roman citizens.

v. the impact of the principate on society

Mixed 'marriages' (legally contubernid) between slave and freeborn persons are a striking indication of the fluidity of status which increases thanks to the dominant influence of great patrons and new opportunities for enrichment and influence which begin in the years of eastern and civil wars in the eighties b.c. and continue at least until the end of the Julio- Claudian period, vividly illustrated by the clients and freedmen of Sulla and Pompey and by the great Pallas and Felix. These brothers (so probably home-born slaves) were freed by the younger Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia, and were employed, by her son Claudius, (probably) Pallas as a rationibus and Felix in such posts as the governorship of Judaea (52-60). Pallas' work and influence were acknowledged by the grant of praetorian insignia; Felix is alleged to have been married successively to three foreign princesses, including a granddaughter of Antony and Cleopatra.⁹⁰ The imperial slave or freed

^ffl On 'civil servants' see above all Weaver 1971 (d 22). For this explanation of the SC Claudianum, i6zff. Cf. Weaver in Rawson 1986 (f 34) t4j-69- Talbert 1984 (d 77) 44! lists the sources. The rule may also aim at acquisition of new slaves in general and avoidance of loss of patronal rights. ⁸⁹ Gai. Inst. 1.84, 91; Tac. Ann. xii.jj.i; Weaver 1972 (d 22) i62ff.

⁹⁰ For Pallas, see Oost 1958 (с 383). For Felix, Weaver 1972 (d 22) 279. His name is proudly evoked by his daughter in commemorating his great-grandson, a boy of senatorial family (CIL v 54, Pola).

civil servants have rightly been seen as a 'symptom of the interpenet- ration of classes in Roman Imperial society'.[1100]

Great freedmen consorted with senators and members of the imperial family (Pallas was an ally of Agrippina and accused of being her lover). Another of Antonia's ex-slaves, Antonia Caenis, was influential not only as a confidential secretary but as the mistress and later concubine of a future emperor, Vespasian. Claudia Acte in a similar role exercised influence and acquired wealth through Nero. Freedmen, barred nor­mally from a public career, and freedwomen, barred, among other things, from marriage with senatorii, were partly dependent on their patrons, a dependence which could increase their usefulness and opportunities.

Imperial liberti provide a striking illustration of the difference the Principate made to Roman society. It was shocking to republican sentiment if dependent freedmen who were employed by patrons who held public office displayed their influence or wealth. Pompey caused offence; Cicero was discreet. Everyone needed the services of confiden­tial administrators.[1101] Augustus perforce continued the system, but on the whole succeeded in not publicizing the important role played by his own freedmen.[1102] But while the freedmen of republican governors were important as long as their patrons were in office or power, the servants of Augustus who met the growing need for skilled subordinates could enjoy a longer and more secure career. For the first dme, one man in control of Rome could evolve policy over a long period and needed a large and complex staff to supervise its administration. The beginnings of the 'civil service' under Augustus are obscure, for the surviving epigraphic data are thin. But it is clear that a staff of slaves and freedmen who belonged to the emperor himself and undertook specialized tasks which supported him in his public role gradually evolved during his Principate. Their legal status was that of his private household and individuals may have moved back and forth between functions which we would regard as domesdc and those we would regard as public. They range from accountants and secretaries to the aqueduct workers re­cruited by Agrippa and bequeathed to the emperor, who remained as a disdnct corps. Their social and economic position varied accordingly. These imperial civil servants parallel the apparitores. By the end of the Julio-Claudian period a (flexible) career structure had been established. The new minimum legal age of manumission seems to have been regarded as the norm. The death of an emperor implied no serious break in continuity. The imperial bureaucracy functioned efficiendy under a Nero and only the most prominent freedmen might fail to survive a change of dynasty. The most successful might be the ancestors of senators; the ordinary freedmen of the emperor enjoyed advantages unobtainable by the poorer freeborn cidzen of the capital. It is the patronage of the emperor and the administrative needs of the system which fostered the growth of this bureaucracy. Just as Augustus shaped the senatorial and equestrian orders to provide a pool from which provincial administrators and army officers might be drawn, he created a permanent substructure of lesser functionaries.

Senatorial sources, alert to detect that an emperor was swayed by non- senators and people excluded from a constitutional position, would attack wives, mothers and mistresses as well as ex-slaves. Women of the imperial family were like freedmen in dependence and influence. Antonia, Octavia's younger daughter by Antony, for instance, seems to have endeared herself particularly to Augustus and Livia. She was kept in reserve as a bride for Livia's son Drusus (they married when he was twenty-two and she twenty), allowed to remain a widow on his death (she had the requisite three children, but might normally have been expected to remarry, since she was only twenty-seven) and held an important position as the sister-in-law of Tiberius, the mother of Germanicus (Tiberius' adopted son), the grandmother of Gaius and his ill-fated brothers. She was a noted deployer of patronage, in the manner of noble matrons, which had been expanded by Livia. Good fortune in marriage alliances and motherhood and discreet conduct maintained and enhanced the position of Livia⁹⁴ and Antonia; the fortunes of others fluctuated. But the Principate gave the emperor's kinswomen opportu­nities richer than those enjoyed by republican ladies. Dynastic planning by Augustus and his closest advisers brought noble families successively into the imperial network, which was scarcely expanded by transient marriages of later principes. The pattern remained that dictated by Augustus, the descendants of his recruits providing new matches. Emperors' wives whose position depended entirely on their husbands, like Nero's Poppaea, could never attain the importance of the unrivalled Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus, sister of Gaius, niece and then wife of Claudius and mother of Nero.⁹⁵ Since influence depended on a woman's position in relation to the current emperor, it often shifted. Widowhood might push the elder Agrippina or Livia Julia to the margins of power. Women had no lasting constitutional position. The emperor might bestow the title 'Augusta'. But there were no empresses, either as consorts or as mothers. Regnant women were even more unthinkable. On the other hand, the position of women and children

⁹⁴ See, e.g. Tic. Ann. v.i, Dio Lvn.12. » Tac. Ann. xn.42.}.

related to Augustus was at once recognized by Romans and provincials. Augustus' house was princely; the ladies might in the East be honoured with the attributes of suitable goddesses, in the West have towns named after them. Group portraits of the family set up by loyal towns may include women and children.[1103]

The independence and individuality of women (despite the restric­tions of the marriage legislation and their deployment as brides) is signalled by nomenclature. Few aristocrats in the Republic used a second name for women. Practice becomes more flexible from Augustus on, starting with the top. Livia Drusilla dropped her second name; her stepdaughter Iulia's daughters were known as lulia (a striking departure from the rule that legitimate daughters take the father's name) and Agrippina (from the father's cognomen). The daughter of Drusus and Antonia was known not as Claudia, but by the two gentile names of Livia (from her paternal grandmother) and lulia (presumably from her step- grandfather, Augustus). Maternal descent in a dynasty founded by a man without a son acquires an importance unrecognized in old agnatic theory. The upper class follows suit. There was also continued progress in economic rights.[1104] Accidents of survival and inheritance often concentrated economic power in the hands of women in all the propertied classes and no doubt down to the level of market-women.[1105]

The existence of a 'court', with various nuclei (the circle of lulia was distinguishable on sight from that of Livia: Macrob. Sat. 11.5.6) changed the focus of society. Promotion was validated by the princeps, perhaps on the recommendation of a Livia, a Maecenas or a Pallas.⁹⁹ Subventions to enable a senator to maintain his status or dowries to protegees flowed from the imperial family, who in turn were enriched by legacies from foreign kings and wealthy Romans. Yet this was the last efflorescence of the old aristocracy. The Julio-Claudians and their kin died out, the last males wiped out by Nero, only one great-great-granddaughter of Augustus, Iunia Calvina, surviving under Vespasian. Then unallied republican nobles also disappeared; the newer families show little continuity in senatorial status. The turnover accelerated as senators were recruited from all over the empire.

The Flavii represent the gradual rise of an Italian family. T. Flavius Petro, a municeps of Reate, after serving under Pompey in the civil war, is said to have retired to his home town to earn his living as a debt-collector (like Horace's father). His son Sabinus according to some was a professional soldier who perhaps rose to be chief centurion of a legion, according to others first an excise-officer in Asia and then a banker in the Alps. His wife, Vespasia Polla, from a well-established family of Nursia, had more distinguished connexions: her father was an equestrian officer and her brother became praetor. Their two sons, Sabinus and Vespasian, both achieved a senatorial career, though Vespasian was late in embark­ing on it. Sabinus rose to be prefect of the city and Vespasian, through military ability and (it was alleged) the favour of the emperor Gaius and the imperial freedman Narcissus, to be proconsul of Africa and com­mander in the Jewish War, before he made his bid for the supreme power.[1106] This was the culmination of the advancement of Italian families which Augustus had begun.[1107]

A policy of enfranchizing suitable provincials and of promodng promising men from one level to another in the hierarchy of service is deduced from the emperor's reported acdons and from the epigraphic records of individual careers. Comparatively few junior candidates can have been personally known to the emperor. Some were recommended to him by his advisers or their patrons. The system secured the controlled promotion of others, for instance the auxiliary troops who on discharge became ciuzens. By the end of the Julio-Claudian period the citizen body was much expanded and both equites and senators were of more diverse origin than in the late Republic. The Alexandrian Jew, Ti. Iulius Alexander, would not have been prefect of Egypt under Augustus as he was under Nero.[1108] Roman society continued to show remarkable powers of absorption at all levels. Newcomers, says Tacitus, were assimilated through customs, liberal arts and marriage ties (Ann. xi. 24.10). Despite their anxiety to conform, they contributed to the gradual changes of Roman culture. Though they might adopt Latin, new names, Roman cults, the practice of Greco-Roman rhetoric or the 'epigraphic habit', they might cling, for example, to non-classical ideas of visual art, to foreign deities and old customs. Enfranchized Jews, numerous in the city by the time of Caesar, communicated to Rome the idea of the week and a weekly day of renewal (e.g. Hor. Sat. 1.9.69; Ov. Rem. Am. 219Q.

The imperial peace and Augustan reorganization meant that Roman citizens were spread over the old and newly annexed provinces as never before.[1109] Veterans and some civilians were sent to colonies; peasants displaced in the reallocations of Italian land in the civil war period emigrated to provinces; provincials, particularly the upper classes, were gradually enfranchized. The army provided continual geographical mobility for citizens and a route to citizenship for non-citizens. By the end of our period Italians were not joining up in such numbers as they had under Augustus: in part this may be an indicadon of the prosperity of Italy (so that their economic prospects in civilian life were now better). Augustus had done much to promote the standard of living of urban Italians, though nothing directly to solve the social problems caused by the agrarian economy.

The Roman plebs, losing political power, gained in material advan­tages, which ranged from a fire brigade to attractive places of public resort. The esprit de corps and energies of the guilds (collegia) were regulated and scope found for the ambitions of comparatively humble men for community service and social recognition. In Italian towns freedmen in particular enjoyed the office of Augustales. Such bodies directed loyalty to the emperor and created outlets for ambition, altruism and talent. The activity of guilds and boards of minor officials seems to have been a 'grassroots' phenomenon. The upper-class bias of our sources must not blind us to the strong sense of personal worth and of community which is often attested by the lower classes. The population of the capital was heterogeneous, including the poorest of native-born labourers, craftsmen and shopkeepers, the great households of the rich, foreign traders and envoys. But Rome could still elicit loyalty from the descendants of slaves. An actor and freedman of Claudius or Nero, with the pleasing name Tiberinus, is commemorated by his mother (presum­ably a freedwoman, but of another family), who makes him claim, 'Rome is my fatherland, my parents are from the heart of the plebs.'¹⁰⁴ Despite the insecurities and miseries of life, those plebeians who could afford to commemorate themselves show the vigour, independent spirit and cockney pride which Horace caught in his portrayal of the auctioneer Mena (Epist. 1.7.461!). The type survives the Augustan revolution and the steady influx of freedmen and foreigners. At this social level, the impact of emperors is limited. But the institution of what, in contrast to republican laissez-faire, must be regarded as responsive government with some ability to plan ahead produced an Italian heyday.

The Roman world was opened up both physically and mentally. The Principate brought improved roads, made safer from brigands, sea-lanes at risk from weather rather than pirates. But more important was mental attitude. A new mood of optimistic imperialism encouraged Italians to

^IM CIL vi 53960= 10097, Ti. Claudius Esquilina Aug(usti libertus) Tiberinus. Note that the tribe is given '... Roma mihi patria est, media de plebe parentes ...'. Brunt 1971 (f i 2) 148ЛГdraws up a balance-sheet of the socio-economic situation of the rural and urban plebs under the Empire.

enjoy that share in the empire which two generations earlier had been denied them and annexed new cidzens to the service of Rome. Provin­cials recognized that they belonged to an empire ruled from Rome (Luke 2:1). As it was natural for a clever young man from Sulmo to make a career in Rome, whether he decided to be a senator or a poet, so humbler Italians marched out to all the frontiers, to war down the proud and exploit, bully, love or learn from the local people. If we look at the experience of the citizen of non-Italian descent, we see that by the time of Nero, Paul knows people he can write to not only in cities of the Greek East, but in Rome and the household of Caesar. It is hard to imagine that his opposite number in republican Rome would have had a similar mental map.

In upper-class life, Vespasian marks a sharper social break than Augustus. A change of taste, personified by the Sabine grandson of a Pompeian centurion, accomplished the switch in mores which Augustan legislation had been powerless to effect. People like Velleius or the Plinies now outnumbered survivors of a frivolous society like Ummidia Quadratilla. According to Tacitus' diagnosis, luxury and display, which lasted from Actium to the war of a.d. 68/9, gave way to parsimony, when they became dangerous and when new men of simpler tastes came to power. Or is there merely a cyclical pattern (Tac. Ann. 111.55)? Cicero and Horace would perhaps have been disappointed by the change they had advocated. But the demographic problems remained. Rome never had hereditary monarchy or hereditary Senate. Some sons of senators lost their census qualification, some opted out, some families lacked sons. Equites might, like Ovid (Tr. 1v.10.27ff, cf. Hor. Sat. n.3.i68ff), refuse promotion. A trickle of the new rich, often freedmen, percolated into the higher strata: their sons were equites, their grandsons even senators. Members of the richest classes moved in and out of functions in high administration.

Society changed between 44 в.с. and a.d. 69. Some developments, such as the improved right of succession given to women, seem to have happened because views of the family continued to move further away from patriarchy and emphasis on agnatic relationships. Augustus merely hastened this trend. Others, such as greater social mobility up or down, were caused or increased by the major upheaval of the civil wars. Where before there had been a number of principes viri at the top of the social, economic and political pyramid, the emperor now stood alone and his kin and close associates occupied the strata below him. The whole of society felt the effect of his presence. For instance, his servants, particularly Augusti liberti, outranked other freedmen and might even, for wealth and influence, counterbalance senators. But no emperor could alter the basic social structures, even had he wished. The rights of citizens to own slaves and to enfranchize by manumission were unassail­able. Marriage remained consensual. Reproductivity continued to be controlled by living conditions, not fiat. Planned legislation had less effect than the superimposition of an emperor on the constitutional, economic and social structure and the actions of the individual rulers. The effect of these was to unify the empire as never before; to draw in foreigners to the citizenship and recruits to the army and higher administration, and to produce a more broadly based and transient elite of officials within the upper classes. Beneath the princeps, Roman society remained a pyramid, but peace, prosperity and enfranchizement increased the relative size of the propertied classes within the cidzen body. The social structure of the ruling elite survived the Julio-Claudian period, but its membership and tone were transformed.

Emperors affected society by legislation and the deliberate institution of certain pracuces, by individual acts of patronage (beneficia), by acquiescing in practices or institutions initiated by others, by the example which they set and by just 'being there'. Augustus deliberately undertook social engineering; his successors were normally concerned to continue what he had begun. Social legislation was effective in setting up a framework in which people should operate, but not in attacking perceived moral problems. The emperors stimulated social develop­ments which were not the primary object of their actions or over which they had no direct control. It would be naive to expect otherwise.

CHAPTER 19 LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

GAVIN TOWNEND

i. definition of the period

While the age of Golden Latin is accepted as straddling the late republican and Augustan periods, the division between these two is particularly arbitrary, with no satisfactory date to set as the boundary — neither the death of Cicero in 43 B.C. nor the victory of Octavian in 31. Sallust survived into the 30s, but is properly classified as republican on the basis both of subject-matter and of atdtudes; Nepos, soil alive several years after Acdum, likewise looks back to the last period of the Republic and shows no real affinity to the new age; Marcus Varro produced a great part of his work during Cicero's lifetime and his De Re Rustica in 37/36 b.c., although he was still writing when he died in 27, the year when the name 'Augustus' appeared, to distinguish the new era beyond doubt. On the other hand, within a year or two of 40 в.с. the emergence of Octavian Caesar as champion and saviour in the first Eclogue establishes Virgil as an Augustan from the start; while the fourth of the series, for all its puzzles, is already looking into a future of peace and prosperity. The dedication to Maecenas of both Epodes and Satires 1 attaches Horace openly to the imperial entourage, even if the decisive poems belong relatively late in the decade. The 30s are in every way a period of transidon, in literature as in politics. The two previous decades had seen the great advances of Catullus, Lucredus and Cicero, the last with his expressed determinadon to make Ladn literature the equal of Greek in every department. In the 20s a confident professionalism manifests itself, with the major theme of patriotism flowering in the Augustan peace and with unthreatened leisure for the romantic games of elegiac and lyric poetry. The lessons of Cicero's mastery of language for a whole range of literary purposes are available for application to poetry and prose alike, without yet becoming stereotyped as technique replaces original imagination, but with ars matching ingenium even more completely than Cicero had observed in the work of Lucredus.

Yet from the start imagination had its limitations. The emulation of Greek models so desired by Cicero was to lead inexorably to the summing-up by Quintilian towards the close of the following century,

905

with parallel lists of writers in Greek and in Latin, carefully arranged according to their genres and set before the reader as models for imitatio in the pursuit of rhetorical excellence. This avoidance of innovation and failure to welcome the concept of change is paralleled in Roman politics and life in every period. Iulius Caesar had outraged the establishment, at least, by preparing to change the shape of the state as arbitrarily as he changed the Roman calendar. The 'Roman revolution' of Augustus owed much of its success to the extent to which change was concealed under the cover of 'restoration of the Republic', and insistence on precedent was emphasized at almost every stage under the early Principate. Throughout three centuries of imperial development, there was apparently never a moment when an emperor or a political theorist so much as contemplated the suitability of the machinery of government and society to its changing function and attempted to lay down the pattern for a fundamental revision. In a very similar way, literary criticism is essentially conservative, with imitatio as a basic presupposi­tion: first the transference into Latin of forms and ideas derived from the Greeks; then the recognition of a Roman master in the relevant field, whether a Lucilius (one of the few genuine innovators), a Cicero, a Cornelius Gallus or a Virgil, and an attempt to adapt his achievements to new themes and new demands; and all the time compliance with the rules of the genre, one of a limited number with names revealing their Greek origins,[1110] and on a lower level with the conventions of such forms of expression[1111] as the propemptikon (farewell to a traveller), the soteria (thanksgiving for safety), the kletikon (invitation) and others less clearly named or defined.

Only the genre of satire has no formal Greek model and no Greek name - indeed no secure Latin name either, until the tradition started by Ennius' satura prevailed over Horace's preferred and clearer title of sermones (conversations). At the same time the rules of the genre were established almost as firmly as those of almost any other, allowing that an inherent formlessness was part of the tradition; so that dactylic hexa­meters were prescribed, as already sometimes in Ennius and always in Lucilius after his early experiments. This was at the cost of excluding that eccentric alternative tradition known as 'Menippean', characterized by the total lack of formal rules to the point of mixing prose with verse in all sorts of metre. Quintilian could not help recognizing this variant, as introduced by so reputable a writer as Varro; but the examples which have come down to us in fragmentary form from the Neronian age, under the uncertain dtles of Apocolocyntosis and Satiricon, are not acknowledged by Quintilian or any other critic of the classical period.

The exclusion of satire from the canon of regular genres is marked by its admission into Ladn of Greek words and phrases, a licence shared by those two minor genres never fully recognized by the Greeks although invented by them, the episde (whether in prose or in verse) and biography. The true Greek genres are accepted by the Ladn writers without real question, and there are only minor attempts to cross the boundaries between them and to form such hybrids as Hamlet's 'tragical-comical-historical-pastoral', which sdll show the dominance of the classical categories. It is rare for a major writer to go as far as Virgil does in borrowing formal elements from tragedy to relate the story of Dido, and from Callimachean epyllion to describe Evander's recepdon of Aeneas on the Paladne. Once Cicero, Virgil and Horace were securely established as paragons in their different fields, their influence was paramount; and even in the Silver Age, starting with the death of Augustus and running on well after the disappearance of his descen­dants, reactions against the masters, such as those of Seneca and Lucan never escaped from dependence on the genre.

ii. patronage and its obligations

The social position of literature at Rome, never as fully integrated into the life of the city as it had been at Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries, changed markedly after Actium, when oratory lost its pre­eminence with its divorce from a genuine political function. Already at the end of the second century B.C. the function of drama, whether tragic or comic, seems to have been greatly diminished, as the population became too big and too cosmopolitan to provide the common cultural background necessary for a mass audience.[1112] Drama survived, so far as it did, simply because of the major reputation of tragedy and comedy among classical genres, and revivals may have depended for their appeal largely on the spectacle.[1113] There is virtually no evidence that the contemporary tragedies written by Q. Cicero, Caesar or Asinius Pollio ever reached the stage or were even intended to.

Instead, literature becomes more and more the property of an elite, as Horace repeatedly emphasizes.[1114] Writers had never expected direct financial returns from the sale of their works, so long as there was no possible system of copyright or royalties; and men like Terence, of provincial origin and low rank, had attached themselves to prominent figures in society, without any apparent loss of creative independence. Even Lucilius, financially secure and proud of being his own man, took pleasure also in being a close associate of Scipio Aemilianus, and did not object to devoting two or three of his satires to attacking his patron's political enemies, while confident of freedom from reprisals. Of the major writers of the last generation of the Republic, Cicero, Varro and Catallus had no need of literary patronage; the posidon of Lucretius and his possible dependence on C. Memmius remains mysterious.⁶

During the years from Philippi to Actium, political protection was perhaps more important; and the writer is traditionally pictured as dispossessed of his property and as welcoming the patronage of a great man for financial security at least. This tendency is perhaps accentuated by the fact that the great majority of writers, both in the Augustan period and throughout the following century, came from outside Rome, from the towns of Italy proper (Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid), from the old province of Cisalpine Gaul (several of the earlier neoteric poets, Cornelius Nepos, Virgil, Livy, and in due course the two Plinies), from southern Gaul (Cornelius Gallus and perhaps Tacitus a century later), or from Spain (the two Senecas, Lucan, Columella, Quintilian, Martial). But most of these men of letters appear to have enjoyed comfortable means and independent position, and to have fully assimilated into upper-class Roman society, with traditional Roman ideas and standards.

Not dissimilar was the position of Greeks, now rivalling Italians in the equestrian civil service, as the authors of extensive prose works in their own language. None of these comes from old Greece: Dionysius of Halicarnassus combines orthodox and respectable literary cridcism with antiquarian history, evidently to present Rome to the Greek-speaking world, in Rome and in the provinces; Nicolaus of Damascus stands sufficiently close to Augustus to exploit the emperor's own apologia in the composidon of his highly favourable biography, and then attaches himself to Herod the Great as a spokesman for the king and his people; Diodorus from Sicily writes voluminous if uninspired history, as does Strabo from Pontus, now known only from his geographical work. These men hardly need to be counted as 'Augustan writers', however important their work may have been in making the new era acceptable to the hellenistic world and cementing the unity of Greek and Roman after the rift in the 30s. Some dme later, Philo of Alexandria, well known for his activities as a spokesman for the Jews under Caligula and Claudius, but mainly concerned with arguing the connexion between Greek and Jewish philosophy, belongs almost exclusively to his own hellenistic- Jewish society; but the Greek epigrammadst Lucillius, largely interested in music and drama, must have some claim as part of the literary scene of an emperor as philhellene as Nero. But, outside the field of diplomadc activity, where Greek oratory found a new and increasing role in the

⁶ Cf. Wiseman 1974 (в 197л) 26-39.

mouths of envoys from provincial communities, the dependence of any of these men on the support, financial or otherwise, of Roman patrons is impossible to determine.

The picture is much clearer for the most prominent of the Augustan poets. Horace, son of a freedman and starting badly by fighdng for the losing side at Philippi, became an accepted member of Maecenas' well- defined circle and was able in due course to give up his post as scriba and to settle down as a small country gentleman with a modest apartment in the capital. The later offer of the post of secretary to Augustus himself seems to have been rejected rather from aversion to regular employment than from any fear of subservience to the emperor's wishes (Suet. Vita Hor.). Virgil, losing his family estate near Mantua, sought and gained the support first of Pollio, a distinguished writer himself and an independent politician, and then of Maecenas to restore his posidon and presumably to promote his literary career. He appears to have given up his connexion with the north and lived for the most part near Naples (Suet. Vita Ver.). Financial considerations were to some extent involved in these and other cases, even if the claim to poetical poverty in Tibullus, as in Juvenal in the second century, is nothing but a literary convention. But the main objective appears to have been status and connexions.

It is hardly now believed that Maecenas (and still less Messalla, as patron of Tibullus and others) actually prompted the composition of particular works for quasi-political reasons, apart from such pieces d'occasion as Horace's Carmen Saeculare, written in 17 в.с. for a specific religious festival and with an obvious political aim; nor that Livy, close to the imperial family though he was and possibly financially rewarded for his help to the young Claudius in composing history, needed official direcdon to make him an active defender of ancient traditions and values, such as Augustus admired and wished to propagate.⁷ In fact, Livy was notorious for his republican sympathies and particularly for his support of the memory of Pompey, which excited Augustus' comment but did not lead to the withdrawal of his friendship.⁸ We certainly fail to find the sort of subservience which might have been expected of court poets. In the light of what we know of the war of propaganda which developed between Antony and Octavian during the late 30s, before Actium and probably earlier, it is noteworthy that there is no sign of the poets' involvement in this campaign. Even in Horace's Satires, where Lucilius had provided some precedent for attacking a patron's enemies, Antony appears only once (1.5.33), with an oblique reference four lines earlier to aversos amicos to be reconciled by the envoys, and there is no trace of criticism or hostility. In the diplomatic purpose of the trip to Brundisium, on which Horace and Virgil accompanied Maecenas,

⁷ Syme 1959 (в 177); Walsh 1974 (в 191л) j-6. ⁸ Suet. Claud. 41.1, Tac. Ann. 1v.34.j.

Horace assumes complete lack of interest. Again in the Epodes (vii and xvi) he twice laments the civil strife of the period without any suggestion of partisanship or idea of solution, while in the first of the series, whether written for the expedition against Sextus Pompeius or Antony, Horace gives no hint that the temptation to accompany Maecenas was due to anything but personal affection.[1115]

The Eclogues were a less likely medium for expressing political views, and Virgil does no more than address Octavian, unnamed but unmistak­able, as patron and protector in the first poem; while in the fourth contemporaries may have been more confident than we can be of the extent to which Octavian, or indeed any specific individual, was the subject of hopes or praise. In the Georgics, once peace had been established, Octavian can be hymned as the greatest of benefactors, deserving the title of godhead in the same way as Lucredus had honoured Epicurus for his blessings to mankind (v. 76"); and in ш.16 Virgil promises a new poem centred on 'Caesar' as if on a god. Yet it is difficult to see how the four books, with their periodic outbursts of depression leading sometimes to despair, can be regarded as the sort of propaganda for an officially inspired revival of agriculture that historians used to claim they were.

When the next work came to be written, Virgil may have been aware that Augustus (as he now was) wanted a nadonal epic to indicate the position of the princeps in a re-born Rome and an extended empire, together with an exposition of the moral values on which the new age was to be based; but it cannot be supposed that the Aeneid was in any way what had been suggested or expected. The term 'propaganda' fits awkwardly here,[1116] despite the explicit recognidon in three major passages (i. 286-96, with its notorious ambiguities, vi. 791-805, and viii. 671-728); and there are all too many passages which appear to question the full worth of the leader's triumph. An epic intended simply to glorify and jusdfy the character and victories of the ideal ruler, with Aeneas in some degree representing and prescribing the pattern of the just and self- sacrificingprinceps, as Virgil's hero appears to do, could have reached the conclusion of the conflict against his rival without a savage killing, which, however acceptable in the context of heroic warfare and however justified in terms of statecraft, still has to be carried out in the madness of rage and revenge.[1117] The great majority of contemporary readers, like the majority since then, will have been sufficiently carried along by the force of the narrative to accept the death of Turnus as dramatically and morally appropriate; everything we can infer about Virgil indicates that he can never have been happy about this resolution of the problem. Likewise, the inflated praise of Augustus' young nephews and son-in-law can properly be seen as a tribute to the princeps and his bereaved sister Octavia, as if the poet might hope thereby to gain favour; but the fact that Marcellus' death concludes and crowns the long pageant of the glories of Rome suggests that what matters most to Virgil in the end is the price paid for military and political triumph and the irredeemable sorrow for the death of a young man.¹² A whole-hearted panegyric of the Augustan achievement, however full of hope for the future, did not require both its halves to end in such a minor key.

The failure of Horace to realize what might have been expected of the laureate, who could produce the Carmen Saeculare and hymn the victories of Drusus and his brother in Carm. rv.4, is more obvious and less demanding of explanation. The Roman odes of the third book are full of noble sentiments and an expression of true Roman virtues; but they hardly add up to the direct propaganda that has often been seen in them. All too often, as in 111.4, overt praise of Augustus drifts off into the poet's private reactions and his addiction to wine and girls; while private odes on themes of self-indulgence and the shortness of human life not only predominate in the collection but are commonly felt to reveal Horace at his most effective. We appear to have another Augustan spokesman who can hardly be held to have produced exactly what the Augustan age demanded.

This leads to a question which is especially pressing in connexion with the opening decades of the Principate: the tendency of poets to propound a set of values totally at variance with the major programme of moral reform whereby Augustus was hoping to bring Rome back to the greatness of earlier centuries. Respectable private and public behaviour, the marriage of Roman men to Roman women, the production of true Roman children to fight Rome's wars and carry on the traditions of 700 years - these are the most obvious of the ideas on which the Julian legislation and Augustus' own injunctions sought to base the new society of citizens. Of the poets who might be expected to promote these ideas, Virgil never married, and seems to have had homosexual inclina­tions, if any. Horace likewise remained celibate, although he gives the impression that he followed the Epicurean practice of sexual indulgence with women and boys indiscriminately to work off natural needs when they arose, as first Lucretius and then the satiric spokesman of Sat. 1.2 had recommended. This may be merely the convention of the genre, but Horace nowhere attempts to suggest anything else — certainly not that he ever contemplated any sort of permanent union.

For the three elegists, things are no better. Tibullus and Propertius, as

¹² VI.868-86, with Otis 1963 (в 133л) 303-4.

poets, are romantically inclined bachelors, Tibullus expressing affection for boys no less than for girls; as men, they may have had wives and children. The anonymous life of Tibullus is too fragmentary to establish his marital status, unless by negative inference, although Pliny's friend Passennus Paulus (Ep. vi.15) appears to have claimed direct descent from Propertius. Whatever may be the truth of that, their love-poetry is as extramarital as that of Catullus, without ever a hint of true love leading to marriage or to possible divorce and the infringement of the rules of class. The only claim to paternity in the whole of Augustan poetry is Propertius' negative assertion (11.7.14) that he would produce no sons to fight Rome's wars — no sons at all, indeed, for this is no pacifist manifesto

and that the emperor's wishes have no validity in the context of love. Ovid is even worse. He married three times and, like Augustus, produced one daughter, the only attested child of any major republican or Augustan poet; but his poetry reveals a still more irresponsible rejection of the Augustan ideal. In the Ars Amatoria, as already in the Amoves, he describes a world devoted to philandering and promiscuity. In particular, he pays what must have been a most unwelcome tribute to the age of Augustus and its moral climate, when he declares (Ars Am. hi. 121-2), 'I congratulate myself on being born now and no earlier: this age is suited to my way of life.' On this reckoning, the new pax Augusta had produced the circumstances for an unworried self-indulgence, quite unaffected by the emperor's pronouncements and legislation aiming at the restoration of old-fashioned values. This attitude of Ovid's ('prisca iuvent aliis') must have been largely responsible, perhaps even more than his questionable complicity in the intrigues of Augustus' grand­daughter, the younger lulia, for his banishment to the Black Sea in a.d. 8

the clearest example known to us of a decisive punishment visited by Augustus on an offensive writer, and one never revoked by his successor.

In his attempts to secure his recall from exile, Ovid indulged to some extent in the sort of flattery which becomes more and more noticeable as the Julio-Claudian age advances. In Tiberius' reign, Velleius Paterculus, while evidently paying due credit to the emperor's earlier successes as a military leader, clearly expresses himself in stronger terms than the truth required.¹³ Poets in the following reigns were guilty of increasing servility, often revealing a tendency to build up the achievements, or at least the promise, of a new emperor by blackening the name of his predecessor. There is some evidence that the same is true of some of the lost historians of the Julio-Claudians, such as Servilius Nonianus and Cluvius Rufus, if not of the more solid annalists, Aufidius Bassus and the

¹³ E.g. 11.94.1-5,124.1-5; but see Woodman 1977 (в 202) 54-5; Goodyear in Kenney and Clausen 1982 (в 95) 639—40.

elder Pliny.¹⁴ Certainly Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (if that is the proper name of the Ludus de morte Claudii), mocks the dead Claudius and exalts the young Nero in a way which appears to illustrate the development of the historical tradition from reign to reign. Even the very fulsomeness of flattery may sometimes have suggested an element of irony which rather implies mockery - a device which many have seen in Catullus' praise of Cicero in poem 49. The subtlety which this technique would require means that today we can never confidendy assess the poet's sincerity.

Flattery must necessarily have occupied a great amount of the oratory which was delivered during the period, if Pliny's surviving Panegyric provides a fair example for this earlier part of the century. But that speech, delivered in a.d. 100 under Trajan, is the first we possess in full since the death of Cicero. The considerable fragments of Claudius' speech delivered in a.d. 48 on the admission of Gallic notables to the Senate and preserved on a bronze tablet at Lyons, reveal the antiquaria- nism of the speaker, who knows that he does not need eloquence or cogency to gain his point. Tacitus, who claimed that the role of oratory had virtually ceased with the end of open discussion under the Republic (Dial. 40-1), gives his own version of the same speech, with considerable freedom, but reproducing the same qualities accurately enough {Ann. xi.24). We cannot tell whether other speeches from the period inserted in the Annals are as closely related to the speaker's recorded words; but it is noticeable that the most powerful come from men of independent mind upholding their own ideas of freedom — ideas which interested the historian far more than any speeches which have simply approved of the emperor's policy. Thus we have a speech from M. Terentius (vi.8), protesting against the doctrine of guilt by association; from Cremutius Cordus (iv.34-5), defending the rights of the historian; and from Thrasea Paetus (xv.20-1), upholding the old values of Roman administ­ration by Roman magistrates. The eloquence may be Tacitus' own, interested to emphasize the voices of independent spirits. In any case, there is a significant, and probably deliberate, link with the republican ideal of unfettered rights to express one's beliefs and act according to one's conscience, without ever proposing any genuine reform of the imperial system or expressing concern for the great majority of people whose interests might be affected.

This ideal, harking back to the heroic names of the younger Cato, of Brutus and Cassius, appears to have provided a continuous focus for discontent among senators throughout the first century. We lack Tacitus' account of the debate which followed the murder of Caligula, when the abolition of the Principate was allegedly debated for the first and last time; but hostility to tyranny, if not to autocracy, plays an active

¹⁴ G. B. Townend Hermes 88 (i960) 98-120, 89 (1961) 227-48.

part in the literature of the period. The actual expression of this hostility in the political field is regarded by Tacitus as fruitless and exhibitionist (Agr. 42.4-5); and he puts similar words into the mouth of Tigellinus, which he himself might not totally disclaim, blaming Stoicism for this truculence and mischief-making (Ann. xiv. 5 7, supported by Agr. 4-4-5 )-¹⁵

Thanks to the loss of all of Livy's later books, we can form little idea of his treatment of the rise of Augustus to supremacy; but nothing suggests that he expressed hostility to the new settlement. Velleius Paterculus, to be discussed below, is too deeply devoted to Tiberius to reveal any reservations, and Curtius Rufus, writing his history of Alexander the Great apparently under Claudius, steers well clear of all but the most conventional reference to the contemporary world. Of the other main writers who recorded the reigns of the various Julio-Claudians within a few years of their deaths, Aufidius Bassus, Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus and the elder Pliny, we can infer little except that they provided a steady annalistic record of events and a great deal of highly hostile anecdotage to be used by Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio. There is no trace of any sort of republican sentiment, except in Cremutius Cordus, of whom we know at least that his remarks about the republican heroes, Brutus and Cassius, offended Tiberius enough to lead to prosecution and the ineffectual destruction of his works, which survived to gain a reputation for freedom of expression, and the surprising approval of Caligula (Tac. Ann. iv.34—5; Suet. Calig. 16.1). Titus Labienus, an outspoken orator and historian, shared the same fortune, without apparently expressing any positive republican views (Sen. Controv. x pr. 5—8).

In practice, the 'Stoic opposition', while confined to a small group of interrelated families, appears to have been sentimental and ineffectual, with Stoic language often playing no more significant a part than much of the traditional Christian language does in the literature of recent centuries in Britain. But Stoicism is still prominent in Latin literature of the Silver Age which follows Augustus. The Stoic concepts which feature in Manilius' astronomical poem are a feeble attempt to match the glowing Epicureanism of Lucretius, without any sort of credibility or cogency. More importance can be attached to expressions of hostility to Nero, as dominus rather than rex, found in Seneca and his nephew Lucan. Seneca produced a manifesto in favour of the just ruler in the De

¹⁵ The word 'Stoic', like the ancient literary terms 'lyric', 'tragic' and 'satiric', must be recognized as possessing a very precise sense in antiquity, deriving from the philosophical school of Zeno (335­265 b.c.) in the Stoa Poikile (painted portico) in Athens, with its rigid doctrines of absolute virtue and duty, of acceptance of divine destiny combined with involvement in public life. In particular, the Roman Stoics expressed opposition to tyranny and admired Caesar's opponents, Cato and M. Brutus.

Clementia, which he wrote for his pupil Nero early in his reign; and the same ideas appear scattered through his other works, particularly in the tragedies, where tyrants from Greek myth are employed presumably to cast light upon the contemporary situation, as some imitator of Seneca did more overtly in the play Octavia, written not long after Nero's death, with Nero as the stock tyrant and Seneca as the sage counselling restraint and justice. The whole tradition about Seneca has been bedevilled from the first by the paradox of the declared Stoic preacher, albeit of the new liberal type, who advocated the simple life but possessed immense wealth, which he was alleged to have increased by highly questionable financial practices, and who acted as tutor and then as minister to the unteachable and irresponsible Nero.

Seneca was driven to his death in a.d. 65 for his supposed complicity in the 'Pisonian conspiracy', if not its leadership. This plot certainly aimed at the assassination of the emperor (in the best tradition of the Athenian and republican tyrannicides) and at his replacement either by the unimpressive aristocrat Piso or by the elderly and ailing Seneca himself. So little was achieved that its true details cannot be discovered, if the conspirators indeed shared any common aim beyond that of murder.¹⁶ To judge from Seneca's literary utterances, tyranny was abominable enough to warrant such an action, although he never actually recommends it. The link between philosophical theory and effective political action remains tenuous.

More certainly prominent in the same conspiracy was Lucan, des­cribed by his biographer as virtually the standard-bearer of the affair. His motive appears to have been that Stoic opposition to tyranny which features with increasing force in the books of his Bellum Civile, after the gross flattery of Nero with which the epic opens, closely matched by the panegyrics of contemporary poets and by Seneca himself in his Apocolo- cyntosis a few years earlier. Despite the claim in 1.3 3-45 that the civil war was justified as leading to the eventual accession of Caesar's descendant Nero, and despite the evident fascination of Caesar as the natural hero in comparison with the ineffectual Pompey, the poem turns into a clear indictment of Caesajrism, with such phrases as 'Caesareae domus series' (iv.823) among the holders of bloody power pointing unmistakably at the latest of the line. But despite this ideological motive, there is reason to suppose that Lucan was primarily inspired by personal rancour from his loss of favour with Nero after he had been so rash as to surpass his patron in poetic skill. In the light of what follows, the flattery in the first book is a prime candidate to be considered from its very excess to be ironical in intention, even before the open break with Nero had taken place.

¹⁶ Griffin 1984 (c 352), esp. 166-70.

It is difficult to know how much consistency we should look for in such a poet, or whether he was capable of any degree of subtlety. To judge by the evidence of Tacitus (Ann. xv.56-7), supported by Sueto­nius, Lucan's Stoicism did not establish his fortitude; for he turned state's evidence at the first threat and incriminated his own mother and several others, before recovering his philosophical principles and com­mitting suicide in the tradition of the republican martyrs and his uncle Seneca. The biography by Vacca ignores all this story of cowardice; while Stadus, in his commemorative poem {Silv. 11.7), contrives to say nothing at all about the circumstances of Lucan's condemnation and death. There is incidentally no reference to his relationship to Stoics in any of these sources. The ancient biography of Persius, on the other hand, makes much of his training in Stoicism and his links with prominent exponents under Nero: he was much more deeply imbued with Stoic ideas and language than Lucan. But neither these ideological opponents of the establishment nor those most inclined to support the imperial system appear to have been able to exploit their convictions to the major advantage of their works, in prose or in verse. Only the two greatest of the Augustan poets found valid inspiration in some of the emperor's ideas and made a significant contribution to the new political order; but their reservations were always striking enough, as we have noted at the start of this section, to ensure that their independence never degenerated into subservience.

III. RHETORIC AND ESCAPISM

In a world where political comment was perilous and profitless and speech-making had no real political function, the development of rhetoric was at once natural and paradoxical. Cicero had not only provided a model for oratory; he had produced a series of treatises which could be the basis of training in all the necessary techniques. The establishment of rhetorical schools for young men of means is more or less contemporary with the rise of the Augustan age, as professionals took over where Cicero had left off in his coaching of aspirant politicians. Much of our knowledge of this training is contained in the Controversiae and Suasoriae, collections published by the elder Seneca during the reign of Tiberius of the rhetorical exercises performed by teachers and their pupils and preserved as examples of the craft. Stock themes were provided, whether of hypothetical legal problems or of situations from myth or history, which the student was required to develop in his own way, so as to catch and hold the attention of the listening audience and give them something to remember. Originality of expression was all- important, no matter how trite the material; and great value was attached to the sententia as the pithy and memorable phrase, often containing paradox and seldom concerned with real life or with the actual problems to be encountered in the courts or the Senate. Many listeners besides Petronius {Sat. 1—2) and Juvenal (1.15-17, vn.i 50—4) must have suffered from the crambe repetita of the same old material, whether served up by the inept or by the intolerably ingenious. But rhetorical training seems to have been more or less compulsory for any young man who wanted to make his way in public life and for many who had no such ambidon.

Certainly it shows its influence in most of the surviving literature from the very beginning of the Augustan period. Not a little of Virgil's power can be seen to depend on his absorption of the Ciceronian rules for producing effective arguments, although the technique is never allowed to take precedence. Ovid's Heroides display most clearly the young poet's delight in all the devices of rhetoric, which he had learnt in the schools, gaining a distinction on which the elder Seneca comments. The Heroides are essentially similar compositions, depending for their success on immense dexterity in saying the same thing in an endless variety of different ways, as heroine after heroine laments her unhappy lot. Much the same is true of many elements in the Metamorphoses, particularly the actual descriptions of transformations of men or women into other creatures or plants. The ability to play this game with such unwearying freshness makes Ovid the perfect example of how the techniques of the schools could best be exploited in the most unlikely literary forms.

The vitality and originality which characterizes the literature of the Augustan age declines sharply during the succeeding reigns. In prose, Valerius Maximus, as much a devotee of the rhetorical schools as the elder Seneca himself, produces a series of books containing exempla of virtues and vices for the orator to exploit in his own compositions; but he has been unable to resist treating them in the fashionable rhetorical manner, often at the cost of clarity, in his attempt to avoid the monotony which such a catalogue might involve. It must have been very difficult for the aspiring speaker to incorporate such sophisticated material into his own speeches. At about the same time, Velleius Paterculus sets out to relate the history of the world in two books (an understandable reaction to Livy and Diodorus); but the need to cover the same stories, which generations of historians had dealt with in their own ways, constrains him to use all the devices of technique in pursuit of his own sort of originality. He is no master, as Ovid had been; and his account of the Batde of Actium (11.85) illustrates excellendy the deployment of ingeni­ous language which fails to leave any impression either of what really happened or of its historical significance. The batde had presumably been dealt with in Rabirius' lost epic and perhaps in Varius Rufus' panegyric of Augustus, as it was by the author of the De Bello Actiaco, which survives in papyrus fragments;¹⁷ even Livy may have found it advisable to treat the subject as an excuse for rhetorical display rather than as an account of tactical moves and individual prowess. After these, and who knows how many other versions, there was little left for Velleius to do except to search for paradoxes as the schools had taught and the fashion demanded.

For the younger Seneca, trained in the manner illustrated by his father's works, the exposition of his chosen subject, philosophy, as a guide to life, a purpose of some weight and significance, continually tended to be dominated by the need to express the same doctrine again and again in striking and memorable phrases. The Epistulae Morales, generally regarded as the most successful and attractive of his volumi­nous works, suffer from something like the same fault as Ovid's Heroides: that, no matter how deeply felt, the subjects are so repetitive that they are kept going, up to the grand total of 124, by ingenuity rather than anything else. The same is true of the philosophical dialogues, enlivened though they are by striking exempla, as if to demonstrate how Valerius Maximus' anecdotes might be applied to a good purpose. Novelty of expression is the more necessary as Seneca is not searching for philoso­phical truth, as Plato does, so much as preaching an accepted code, enriched from Epicurus and elsewhere, to assist the reader in coping with the problems of life, and doing so in such a way as to seize and retain the attention by force of language. Apart from modifications of traditional Stoicism, Seneca, like most Silver Age writers, makes very little positive addition to what has been said before.

The nine tragedies which have come down to us under Seneca's name share enough of the characteristics of his prose works to make the slightly uncertain attribution of most, at least, virtually certain. Derived obliquely from Greek tragedies, mostly extant works by Euripides or Aeschylus, they have been totally adapted to the taste of the day, in which stage performance was a minor consideration, if indeed contem­plated at all. Stoic doctrines, with the usual love of paradox, colour the speeches of kings, queens, commoners and choruses alike; and the dramatic flow is almost entirely sacrificed to the succession of telling sententiae, few of them appropriate to speaker or circumstances. Topics recur in speech after speech in different plays (freedom and tyranny, death as an escape, the wise man's invulnerability), but so skilfully organized that the sameness is at least masked at the first reading. Although limited by the setdngs of the plays, the ideas and expressions

" Cf. H. Benario, "The Carmen de Bella Aetiaeoin ANRIP II, 30.3 (1983) 1656-62. The fragments preserved in fact deal with events in Egypt some time after the battle and exhibit a freedom in imaginative fictions which do not suggest a composition as early as the Augustan age proper.

are much the same as those of the prose works, only made more remote from the reader by transference to the unreal heroic world of Greek mythology.

The same combination of rhetoric and philosophy shows itself inevitably in Seneca's nephew, Lucan; although for him philosophy is not a major preoccupation, but simply a source for ideas and common­places, together with the accepted link of Stoicism with the republican­ism which colours the narrative of the Bellum Civile. This story, already related in prose by Pollio and Livy, is made the field for the same sort of cleverness as we find in Seneca, with rather too many memorable phrases for more than a handful to deserve remembering, and with almost unlimited skill in making the same ideas sound fresh each time they occur. Lucan's originality lies partly in his choice of a subject from relatively recent history (although almost from the start poets had followed the laureates of Alexander the Great in writing short-lived accounts of Rome's glorious victories or of the achievements of the latest military hero, whether Marius or Caesar, Octavian or Germanicus), partly in his deliberate rejection of the conventional Homeric gods so busily employed by Virgil. This may be regarded as a concession to Stoicism, allowing Fate to play the dominant part rather than the eccentric and partial Olympians.

At least one can find in Lucan enough independence from tradition to grant him a degree of self-confidence hardly to be matched elsewhere in the derivative literature of the period. Our other surviving Silver Latin epics, by Silius Italicus, Valerius Flaccus and Statius, date from the Flavian dynasty; but they continue the general tendencies of the Julio- Claudian writers virtually unchanged, with the same desire for effect, which had begun as early as the major elegists, together with the same sensationalism and bloodthirstiness. All look back rather than forward, with Virgil always at hand as a model: the contemporary world or the future has no part in their scheme. It seems most unlikely that Statius' German War cut any new ground, in manner or subject-matter.

There may have been other important poets in the period from Tiberius to Nero, but even their names are lost. We do possess a number of minor poems, some falsely attributed to the young Virgil, perhaps to replace the master's lost juvenilia. These are commonly dated after the death of Augustus, but are essentially continuations of the practices of the great Augustans. None contains a hint of genuine creative potential. More interesting is the group of more or less court poems from the reign and perhaps from the circle, of Nero: pastorals from Calpurnius Siculus and from an anonymous poet preserved in a manuscript at Einsiedeln, quite competent but uninspired pastiches of Virgil's Eclogues, though hardly to be mistaken for Virgil, containing considerable florid emphasis on the golden age of the young Nero and no likelihood at all that their panegyric is ironical. Likewise, and possibly from the pen of these same writers, is the panegyric of Calpurnius Piso, perhaps the patron of Calpurnius Siculus, which essays to praise without relevant material to hand. This ineffectual praise points to a subject as dubious as the supposed leader of the Pisonian conspiracy of a.d. 65, and underlines the lack of valid themes for poetry during this period. What we know of Nero's own poetry on the Trojan War does not suggest that he was concerned with anything but the manipuladon of words or hoped to establish any relevance of the Trojan War to his own day.

The reaction against these poetical fashions, especially epic as written by Nero himself, is found in Petronius, rather too intimate a member of the imperial clique for his esoteric criticisms of Lucan and others to be fully comprehensible to us[1118] (neither as parody nor as models for improvement do they really make sense). And in Persius, whose charges of vapidity, affectation and effeminacy show at least that he has not got Lucan in mind, there is a strong protest against those who have nothing to say and use fanciful and contorted language to say it (1.32—5, et alibi). Yet Persius, setting out to write satire in the tradidon of Lucilius and Horace, has chosen an almost impossible course. He declares his intention of using everyday language (v. 14, verba togae), as his pre­decessors had done, but his complex allusiveness requires an intimate knowledge of Horace and probably of other writers no longer available to us. His dizzying switch of metaphors and his unexpected Unking of words produce a texture which is anything but conversational (as satire or sermo had come to expect), straightforward or unaffected. And his material is all from stock: themes and phrases from Horace and the Stoic tradition make up a great part of it. But at least Persius comes closer to touching the heart than any other writer in a period when literature is tending to become a private pursuit to be practised and enjoyed in the sort of group of mutual admirers described by Persius in satire 1 and by Tacitus in Ann. xiv. 16, as led by Nero and evidently supported by Lucan before the rupture. Horace and Virgil may to some extent have distanced themselves from all but a very select public by the complexity of their texture and their demands on the reader's knowledge and sensitivity; but they still provided plenty to engage a wide interest, with no reason for anyone to complain of the irrelevance of their poetry to the contempor­ary world.

One method of finding material for poetry without touching too directly on the perilous issues of the day, a method already practised by Catullus and followed by the Augustans and on into the Silver Age, was the Alexandrine device of exploiting Greek mythology to provide either examples or actual subjects for poetry. Virgil's use of the Trojan War and the adventures of the Trojan Aeneas to provide an aetiology for Rome and for the Augustan settlement is on a different level (or series of levels) from any other borrowing we are aware of. The use of lesser myths, some of extreme obscurity, by Horace, Tibullus and Propertius to illuminate erotic and other topics in contemporary life, whether ser­iously or ironically, enriches their poetry immensely, without necessarily adding to the impact.¹⁹ Ovid, after playing with Greek stories similarly in his early love-poetry, turns to myth as a subject in its own right for the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, largely in order to deal with erotic themes without causing further offence to the moral climate of Augustan reform. With very little serious intention and with all the apparatus of rhetorical mastery, he tells his stories for their own sake and with immense success.

Major Greek myth serves a much more solemn purpose in Seneca's tragedies, a field in which Roman subjects had hardly ever proved effective; although, as already remarked, some fairly close follower of Seneca was before long to devise in the Octavia a tragedy built round the efforts of Seneca himself to dissuade Nero from adopting the role of tyrant, and Tacitus (Dial. 2—3) reports the immediate impact of dramas on the themes of Domitius and Cato at about the same date. Epic, with the major exception of Lucan, depends likewise on myth, as we see it in the Flavian age with Valerius Flaccus' retelling of the Argonaut story and with Statius on the Theban and Trojan wars. For Silius Italicus the Punic War was very nearly as mythical as the legendary wars of Greece; and Curtius' version of the history of Alexander in prose is essentially part of the same process. Juvenal, in his first satire, laments the tedious dominance of the Greek cycles of mythology, in tragedy and epic alike, and he is supported by numerous epigrams of Martial. Their criticism evidently applies to almost the whole of the first century after Christ.

IV. THE JUSTIFICATION OF LITERATURE

Various reasons were advanced during the period for writing and for reading different sorts of books. For Quintilian, writing on the training of the young orator, almost all literature could contribute to the mastery of rhetorical techniques, even Catullus and Lucretius. He has no place for works which do not belong to the recognized genres, such as Phaedrus' fables or Petronius' picaresque novel.

¹⁹ E.g. Hor. Carm. iii.i i and 17; Prop. 1.20 and passim.

Again, as Homer was often regarded by the Greeks as a repository of knowledge on all manner of practical matters, so a whole range of Latin works existed primarily as sources of information. Here Vitruvius On Architecture is an accepted example, with no literary pretensions, but demonstrating his practical value when he became a working handbook for Renaissance architects. Mela's Geography, limited though it is, could be of some use. Celsus On Medicine, as on other branches of knowledge in books now lost, seems to have been properly and exclusively concerned to impart information.

With the agricultural writers, however, Varro's practical application seems largely to be sacrificed to literary considerations, Columella's rather less so; but when Columella completes his treatise with a book in hexameter verse, he is deliberately placing himself beside Virgil's Georgia, the practical value of which, whether for constructing a plough, selecting a lucky day for various activities, or replacing a stock of bees, makes no claim at all for serious consideration. Likewise Manilius, following Cicero's translation of the hellenistic Aratus' astronomical poem, is concerned rather to write poetically than to provide genuine information; and it is noticeable that Tiberius' heir, Germanicus, during the same period chose to attempt an improvement on Cicero's Aratea as a purely literary challenge. For Quintilian, such didactic poets as Lucretius and Aemilius Macer are classified along with Virgil, as writers of epic, without concern for their subject-matter. It is certainly difficult to regard Grattius on hunting, Horace on poetry, or Ovid on the calendar (and perhaps on fishing) as allowing their subject to take precedence over their art.

The moral purpose of literature, taken over from the Greeks and emphasized in numerous apologias for the time spent on composition, is especially prominent in historiography, where there is a claim that reading about the past will enlighten and improve the quality of life, private and public, in the future; Cicero adds that this interest was not confined to the elite (De Or. 11.5 9-61). There is a similar assumption that the main funcdon of satire is moral, if not precisely didactic. Yet in Horace's Satires it is apparent that his primary purpose is neither to attack vice nor to advocate virtue: it is rather to discuss themes, ostensibly moral or not, in such a way as to involve the reader in a humane attitude to life and mankind. Only perhaps in the sequel, the first book of Epistles, can Horace be felt to provide specific moral admonish­ment to his addressee and thus to the reader, as when he encourages Tibullus to count his blessings and enjoy life as Horace does (4.12-16), or warns Celsus not to be too pleased with himself (8.15-17); and even in this book the majority of poems are concerned rather to play round quasi-philosophical commonplaces. Persius, Horace's successor in the Lucilian tradition, preaches with some fervour the urgent need for moral reform and for escaping from the ties which hinder moral freedom, but in such a way that everything takes second place to style and the striking expression. Seneca, whose philosophical works are certainly less theore­tical than practical, uses the epistolary form to exhort his friend Lucilius, and so the general reader, often with a personal reference to his own circumstances and shortcomings which owes something to Horace and contributes a good deal to Persius. The moral dialogues are more remote and less immediately cogent; only the manifesto De Clementia appears seriously to aim at prescribing moral standards and political advice to the new emperor Nero. If moral impact is to be sought anywhere in the period, it is to be found most effectively in Virgil's Georgics and Aeneid, both ostensibly devoted to quite different objectives, but expressing a view of man's position in the universe and relationship to nature which goes well beyond Augustus' declared doctrine of restoring the morality of Roman life.

The overt declarations of poets and prose-writers alike seldom reveal their true objectives. Horace's division between the utile and the dulce (Ars 343) draws attention to the rarity with which it is claimed that literature exists to give pleasure to the reader — that is, that literature is virtually an end in itself. This view, already apparent in Catullus, ties in with the recognition, most explicit in Horace, that literature is for the elite, a limited number of devotees - for those few who are capable of appreciating the writer's artistry in whatever field he chooses to operate. From this point of view, the moral and erotic themes of Horace, the piety and patriotism of Virgil, the love-affairs in the elegists, the Stoicism and republicanism in Lucan, all form the material which the poet exploits to create different literary masterpieces.

There is a curious conflict concerning the writer's originality: poets continually claim to be the first to strike out a particular line, but this means for the most part a new line in Latin.²⁰ Explicitly or implicitly, there is always the assumption of accepted conventions within which a new work must develop, and the concept of imitatio of predecessors is seldom far away, together with the practice of allusiveness to recall the reader to the earlier masters, Greek or Latin, who have provided ideas for the new writer to play with and make his own. This is most evident in Virgil's deliberate evocation of (successively) Theocritus, Hesiod and Homer in his three great works; in Horace's use for the Odes of both the early lyricists and the Alexandrians; in the elegists' open acknowledge­ment of their debts to Callimachus, Philitas, Euphorion and others,

²⁰ Williams 1968 (a 105) 2)5-267, with (e.g.) Virg. C. hi. 10-12, Hor. Carm. 111.50.13-14.

whose influence we should recognize if their works had not been wholly or mainly lost.[1119]

Most contentious and debatable here is the role of Cornelius Gallus as in some sense the founder of the whole Augustan movement. The discovery in 1978 of a papyrus containing two tetrasdchs and fragments of other lines, clearly belonging to Gallus, has done little to clarify the nature of his poetry and the limits of his influence on his successors.²² His influence on the young Virgil especially cannot be doubted, but the precise part he plays in the sixth and tenth Eclogues still defies secure definition, while the pursuit of themes and phrases from Gallus in Propertius is a still-growing industry. One feature can be detected, in accordance with previous expectation: the emphasis on the poet's own personality and experience as a major element in his poetry and the development throughout a book of elegy of the course of a love-affair, which was to provide an important bridge between the personal poetry of Catullus (and very likely of other members of his circle) and the 'subjective love-elegy' of the Augustans. This autobiographical tendency in Latin poetry, not necessarily always based on reality, appears to take its origin in the satires of Lucilius, reporting 'the whole of life' according to Horace (Sat. 11.1.3 2-4); and it developed in Horace's Satires and Epistles alongside the similar phenomenon in elegy and to a great extent in his own Odes. The personal and conversational becomes a characteristic of the greater part of Augustan poetry, although making little impact in Virgil.

An important issue here is the recognition that an intimate knowledge of the poetry of Gallus, and perhaps of other lost poets such as Cinna and Valerius Cato, could be taken for granted by the Augustan poets; and the alert reader would pick up many references and echoes which escape us today. This does not mean that Gallus was regarded as a completely satisfactory modĉl for aetiological or erotic verse — certainly the surviving fragments contain usages which were totally rejected by the next generation. The concept of the master as model seems only to be fully developed after the climax of the Augustan age, when Virgil's pre­eminence is so universally recognized that epic poets feel obliged to follow him more or less closely, unless they take a positive step, as Lucan did, in abandoning all of Virgil's heroic machinery and writing a fundamentally different sort of historical epic. Horace's mastery in lyric poetry, on the other hand, appears virtually to have prevented later poets from attempting to operate within the genre at all; while Statius' two essays in Alcaic and Sapphic in the fourth book of Silvae (5 and 7) simply demonstrate that nothing was left for an imitator to achieve. Whatever Caesius Bassus composed to deserve respectful comments from Persius (vi. i) and Quintilian (x. i .96), not a line of his lyrics has survived to show us whether his achievement was worth anything. However justified Gallus' reputation was among the Augustans, at least he never discour­aged others from pursuing the tradition he had started.

The importance of earlier writers as sources for ideas and allusions of various sorts was expressly acknowledged in antiquity, as is shown by Macrobius' lists in Khz. Saturnalia (especially v.2-22, vi.1-5), which were probably compiled by critics over several centuries, of Virgilian borrow­ings from Greek and early Latin poets; although it is not clear how concerned these critics were to assess the actual effect of some of these quotations. Modern scholarship has made considerable advances, handi­capped by the loss of so many works which were evidently available to Virgil and others. But it has failed to find an altogether satisfactory explanation of the famous echo in Aeneas' address to the ghost of Dido, 'invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi' (Aen. vi.460) from Catullus' burles­que, 'invita, о regina, tuo de vertice cessi' (56.39), which in turn presumably reflects a line, now lost, in Callimachus' original poem on the Lock of Berenice, on which Catullus' poem was based: it may be that both come from an unknown predecessor of enough solemnity for Virgil not to feel that the pathos of his own context might be spoiled by reminiscences of Catullus' parody.[1120] On the other hand, Virgil strikingly quotes from his own Georgics to provide animal-similes for the Aeneid, evidently when he wants to sharpen the reader's attention and remind him of elements in the earlier context which have relevance to the later.[1121]

There seems to be no comment in ancient criticism on the major Virgilian symbols which play a prominent and continuous part in certain books of the Aeneid, as the snakes and fire do in 11, if not throughout all; but the presence and the effect of these symbols can hardly be denied once they are noticed. The reader's attention is likewise demanded, if scholars are right, by the occurrence of key words in Virgil (but also, it has been suggested, in Persius); and on a much larger scale by consideration of the overall architecture of the book of Eclogues, of the four Georgics, of the whole Aeneid, and increasingly complex diagrams have been produced for the books of the elegiac poets, for Horace's Odes, and for almost every other book of Latin poetry.[1122] It may be significant that the greatest of the Augustans have lent themselves remarkably to the requirements of modern research, so that an endless succession of doctoral theses and published monographs can be extracted from more and more different ways of analysing language, metre, assonance, structure, symbolism and so on, suggesting that all these things were planted by Virgil and the others in their poetry in the expectation that the more appreciadve reader would be equipped to observe them for himself and to gain the more from the work. There is little evidence, however, that this sort of awareness was encouraged by the grammaticus or the literary critic, who were more concerned with correct reading and the understanding of references, in the manner of a good nineteenth-century commentary. It is more credible, though unprovable, that the greatest artist may admit these elements unconsciously, and that the reader may equally unconsciously enjoy and value the work all the more on account of these qualities.

V. THE ACCESSIBILITY OF LITERATURE

The impact of major literature on the great public is hard to assess. The considerable production of tragedies seems never to have reached the theatres, the output of Asinius Pollio and Ovid evidently having little more success than Augustus' abortive Ajax; the Medea is one of Ovid's very few works not to be preserved for posterity (Quint. Inst, x.1.98; Tac. Dial. 12.6). Seneca's surviving plays contain elements of descrip­tions of their action suggesting that they did not need to be seen to be appreciated, but rather read aloud, perhaps to the accompaniment of dancing or mime. Mime itself, which under the late Republic retained some of the literary quality of Herondas and Sophron, still found no favour with Horace (Sat. 1.10.5-6). Under the Empire it came to depend more and more on the obscene and the spectacular, including real sex and real crucifixions, until it seems to have merged with pantomime. This never ranked as literature, despite the libretti derived from Virgil and Ovid and others specifically written by Lucan and Statius.

The most significant type of public performance becomes the recitatio, of poetry and prose alike. This seems to have been the regular way of launching a new work before the publication of an approved text.²⁶ Only after such an occasion, and the correction of faults which might have come to light, would the author make the work available to the public; and this, in the case of Virgil and Persius, and probably Lucan, might mean posthumous publication. Subsequent reading might also take the form of an oral performance, often by specifically trained slaves, to an individual or a group. In addition, we hear of public performances by professional cantores, as something quite distinct from Virgil's own reading of the Georgics and of three books of the Aeneid to the imperial household, as well as trials of various passages before a rather wider

²⁴ Kenney in Kenney and Clausen 1982 (в 95) 12.

audience (Suet. Vita Ver. 27, 32-3). Horace in particular (Sat. 1.4.73-7) emphasizes that he never recites his works except to selected friends and on their express insistence; while others take advantage of the crowds in the public baths to force their works on all sorts of listeners. The importance of all these readings will have been greatly increased by the extent of aural memory enjoyed by a society with far less written material than the modern world possesses, so that whole passages appear to have been retained by hearers, with varying degrees of accuracy.[1123]

But apart from the fact that reading, like writing, was almost always carried out aloud, the general status of reading appears to have borne a considerable similarity to that of our own day, with bookstalls selling copies for personal enjoyment and most works available in the great public libraries, which begin almost exactly with the Augustan age and expanded rapidly in the following two centuries.[1124] We still hardly know the extent of these collections, nor how far the different libraries duplicated each other. It would appear that readers would normally consult books inside the libraries, as in the British Library or the Bodleian. It may have been exceptional, and a matter of privilege, for Marcus Aurelius in the second century to report to Fronto that he has taken certain volumes of Cato out of the library of Apollo on the Palatine and advise him to bribe the librarian of the Tiberian collection to let him have copies from there.

Some works were evidently produced in fairly large numbers, with individuals having copies made by their own slaves from a borrowed text; others probably never merited marketing to any effective extent. Survival down to the Renaissance is little indication of the availability of works in antiquity: the fact that Velleius has come down to us largely complete cannot be proof of wide circulation. On the other hand, there is reason to suppose that Juvenal made so little impact in his own day that he survived only because of a surprising popularity in the fourth century, attested by Ammianus (28.4.14), when there was a sudden demand for improved texts, enriched with scholia and commenticious biographies of the author.²⁹ Gellius provides some interesting stories, not always plausible, of discovering rare texts in unlikely places (e.g. ix.4.1, xvin.9.5); yet Quintilian can recommend for the student's reading a very wide range of authors as undistinguished as Rabirius and Albinovanus Pedo (e.g. x. 1.90), who must at least have been available in one or more of the public libraries. It is a bolder assertion that the libraries in Rome also contained copies of all the obscure works cited only by Dionysius of