Part 25 (1/2)
=Moral Decay Continues at Rome.=--Seneca in his Letters and Juvenal in his Satires have presented portraits of the men and women of their time so striking that the corruption of the Rome of the Caesars has remained proverbial. They were not only the disorders left over from the republic--the gross extravagance of the rich, the ferocity of masters against their slaves, the unbridled frivolity of women. The evil did not arise with the imperial regime, but resulted from the excessive acc.u.mulation of the riches of the world in the hands of some thousands of n.o.bles or upstarts, under whom lived some hundreds of free men in poverty, and slaves by millions subjected to an unrestrained oppression. Each of these great proprietors lived in the midst of his slaves like a petty prince, indolent and capricious. His house at Rome was like a palace; every morning the hall of honor (the atrium) was filled with clients, citizens who came for a meagre salary to salute the master[151] and escort him in the street. For fas.h.i.+on required that a rich man should never appear in public unless surrounded by a crowd; Horace ridicules a praetor who traversed the streets of Tibur with only five slaves in his following. Outside Rome the great possessed magnificent villas at the sea-sh.o.r.e or in the mountains; they went from one to the other, idle and bored.
These great families were rapidly extinguished. Alarmed at the diminis.h.i.+ng number of free men, Augustus had made laws to encourage marriage and to punish celibacy. As one might expect, his laws did not remedy the evil. There were so many rich men who had not married that it had become a lucrative trade to flatter them in order to be mentioned in their will; by having no children one could surround himself with a crowd of flatterers. ”In the city,” says a Roman story-teller, ”all men divide themselves into two cla.s.ses, those who fish, and those who are angled for.” ”Losing his children augments the influence of a man.”
=The Shows.=--In the life of this idle people of Rome the spectacles held a place that we are now hardly able to conceive. They were, as in Greece, games, that is to say, religious ceremonies. The games proceeded throughout the day and again on the following day, and this for a week at least. The amphitheatre was, as it were, the rendezvous of the whole free population; it was there that they manifested themselves. Thus in 196, during the civil wars, all the spectators cried with one voice, ”Peace!” The spectacle was the pa.s.sion of the time. Three emperors appeared in public, Caligula as a driver, Nero as an actor, Commodus as a gladiator.
=The Theatre.=--There were three sorts of spectacles: the theatre, the circus, and the amphitheatre.
The theatre was organized on Greek models. The actors were masked and presented plays imitated from the Greek. The Romans had little taste for this recreation which was too delicate for them. They preferred the mimes, comedies of gross character, and especially the pantomimes in which the actor without speaking expressed by his att.i.tudes the sentiments of the character.
=The Circus.=--Between the two hills of the Aventine and the Palatine extended a field filled with race courses surrounded by arcades and tiers of seats rising above them. This was the Circus Maximus. After Nero enlarged it it could accommodate 250,000 spectators; in the fourth century its size was increased to provide sittings for 385,000 people.
Here was presented the favorite spectacle of the Roman people, the four-horse chariot race (quadrigae); in each race the chariot made a triple circuit of the circus and there were twenty-five races in a single day. The drivers belonged to rival companies whose colors they wore; there were at first four of these colors, but they were later reduced to two--the Blue and the Green, notorious in the history of riots. At Rome there was the same pa.s.sion for chariot-races that there is now for horse-races; women and even children talked of them. Often the emperor partic.i.p.ated and the quarrel between the Blues and the Greens became an affair of state.
=The Amphitheatre.=--At the gates of Rome the emperor Vespasian had built the Colosseum, an enormous structure of two stories, accommodating 87,000 spectators. It was a circus surrounding an arena where hunts and combats were represented.
For the hunts the arena was transformed into a forest where wild beasts were released and men armed with spears came into combat with them. Variety was sought in this spectacle by employing the rarest animals--lions, panthers, elephants, bears, buffaloes, rhinoceroses, giraffes, tigers, and crocodiles. In the games presented by Pompey had already appeared seventeen elephants and five hundred lions; some of the emperors maintained a large menagerie.
Sometimes instead of placing armed men before the beasts, it was found more dramatic to let loose the animals on men who were naked and bound. The custom spread into all cities of the empire of compelling those condemned to death to furnish this form of entertainment for the people. Thousands of persons of both s.e.xes and of every age, and among them Christian martyrs, were thus devoured by beasts under the eyes of the mult.i.tude.
=The Gladiators.=--But the national spectacle of the Romans was the fight of gladiators (men armed with swords). Armed men descended into the arena and fought a duel to the death. From the time of Caesar[152]
as many as 320 pairs of gladiators were fought at once; Augustus in his whole life fought 10,000 of them, Trajan the same number in four months. The vanquished was slain on the field unless the people wished to show him grace.
Sometimes the condemned were compelled to fight, but more often slaves and prisoners of war. Each victory thus brought to the amphitheatre bands of barbarians who exterminated one another for the delight of the spectators.[153] Gladiators were furnished by all countries--Gauls, Germans, Thracians, and sometimes negroes. These peoples fought with various weapons, usually with their national arms. The Romans loved to behold these battles in miniature.
There were also, among these contestants in the circus, some who fought from their own choice, free men who from a taste for danger submitted to the terrible discipline of the gladiator, and swore to their chief ”to allow themselves to be beaten with rods, be burned with hot iron, and even be killed.” Many senators enrolled themselves in these bands of slaves and adventurers, and even an emperor, Commodus, descended into the arena.
These b.l.o.o.d.y games were practised not only at Rome, but in all the cities of Italy, Gaul, and Africa. The Greeks always opposed their adoption. An inscription on a statue raised to one of the notables in the little city of Minturnae runs as follows: ”He presented in four days eleven pairs of gladiators who ceased to fight only when half of them had fallen in the arena. He gave a hunt of ten terrible bears.
Treasure this in memory, n.o.ble fellow-citizens.” The people, therefore, had the pa.s.sion for blood,[154] which still manifests itself in Spain in bull-fights. The emperor, like the modern king of Spain, must be present at these butcheries. Marcus Aurelius became unpopular in Rome because he exhibited his weariness at the spectacles of the amphitheatre by reading, speaking, or giving audiences instead of regarding the games. When he enlisted gladiators to serve against the barbarians who invaded Italy, the populace was about to revolt.
”He would deprive us of our amus.e.m.e.nts,” cried one, ”to compel us to become philosophers.”
=The Roman Peace.=--But there was in the empire something else than the populace of Rome. To be just to the empire as a whole one must consider events in the provinces. By subjecting all peoples, the Romans had suppressed war in the interior of their empire. Thus was established the Roman Peace which a Greek author describes in the following language: ”Every man can go where he will; the harbors are full of s.h.i.+ps, the mountains are safe for travellers just as the towns for their inhabitants. Fear has everywhere ceased. The land has put off its old armor of iron and put on festal garments. You have realized the word of Homer, 'the earth is common to all.'” For the first time, indeed, men of the Occident could build their houses, cultivate their fields, enjoy their property and their leisure without fearing at every moment being robbed, ma.s.sacred, or thrown into slavery--a security which we can hardly appreciate since we have enjoyed it from infancy, but which seemed very sweet to the men of antiquity.
=The Fusion of Peoples.=--In this empire now at peace travel became easy. The Romans had built roads in every direction with stations and relays; they had also made road-maps of the empire. Many people, artisans, traders, journeyed from one end of the empire to the other.[155] Rhetors and philosophers penetrated all Europe, going from one city to another giving lectures. In every province could be found men from the most remote provinces. Inscriptions show us in Spain professors, painters, Greek sculptors; in Gaul, goldsmiths and Asiatic workmen. Everybody transported and mingled customs, arts, and religion. Little by little they accustomed themselves to speak the language of the Romans. From the third century the Latin had become the common language of the West, as the Greek since the successors of Alexander had been the language of the Orient. Thus, as in Alexandria, a common civilization was developed. This has been called by the name Roman, though it was this hardly more than in name and in language. In reality, it was the civilization of the ancient world united under the emperor's authority.
=Superst.i.tions.=--Religious beliefs were everywhere blended. As the ancients did not believe in a single G.o.d, it was easy for them to adopt new G.o.ds. All peoples, each of whom had its own religion, far from rejecting the religions of others, adopted the G.o.ds of their neighbors and fused them with their own. The Romans set the example by raising the Pantheon, a temple to ”all the G.o.ds,” where each deity had his sanctuary.
Everywhere there was much credulity. Men believed in the divinity of the dead emperors; it was believed that Vespasian had in Egypt healed a blind man and a paralytic. During the war with the Dacians the Roman army was peris.h.i.+ng of thirst; all at once it began to rain, and the sudden storm appeared to all as a miracle; some said that an Egyptian magician had conjured Hermes, others believed that Jupiter had taken pity on the soldiers; and on the column of Marcus Aurelius Jupiter was represented, thunderbolt in hand, sending the rain which the soldiers caught in their bucklers.
When the apostles Barnabas and Paul came to the city of Lystra in Asia Minor, the inhabitants invoked Barnabas as Jupiter and Paul as Mercury; they were met by a procession, with priests at the head leading a bull which they were about to sacrifice.
Cultured people were none the less credulous.[156] The Stoic philosophers admitted omens. The emperor Augustus regarded it as a bad sign when he put on the wrong shoe. Suetonius wrote to Pliny the Younger, begging him to transfer his case to another day on account of a dream which he had had. Pliny the Younger believed in ghosts.
Among peoples ready to admit everything, different religions, instead of going to pieces, fused into a common religion. This religion, at once Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Asiatic, dominated the world at the second century of our era; and so the Christians called it the religion of the nations; down to the fourth century they gave the pagans the name of ”gentiles” (men of the nations); at the same time the common law was called the Law of Nations.
FOOTNOTES:
[145] Inscriptions have been found where the name of Domitian has thus been cut away.