Part 1 (1/2)

Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero.

by W. Warde Fowler.

PREFATORY NOTE

This book was originally intended to be a companion to Professor Tucker's _Life in Ancient Athens_, published in Messrs. Macmillan's series of Handbooks of Archaeology and Art; but the plan was abandoned for reasons on which I need not dwell, and before the book was quite finished I was called to other and more specialised work. As it stands, it is merely an attempt to supply an educational want. At our schools and universities we read the great writers of the last age of the Republic, and learn something of its political and const.i.tutional history; but there is no book in our language which supplies a picture of life and manners, of education, morals, and religion in that intensely interesting period. The society of the Augustan age, which in many ways was very different, is known much better; and of late my friend Professor Dill's fascinating volumes have familiarised us with the social life of two several periods of the Roman Empire. But the age of Cicero is in some ways at least as important as any period of the Empire; it is a critical moment in the history of Graeco-Roman civilisation. And in the Ciceronian correspondence, of more than nine hundred contemporary letters, we have the richest treasure-house of social life that has survived from any period of cla.s.sical antiquity.

Apart from this correspondence and the other literature of the time, my mainstay throughout has been the _Privatleben der Romer_ of Marquardt, which forms the last portion of the great _Handbuch der Romischen Altertumer_ of Mommsen and Marquardt. My debt is great also to Professors Tyrrell and Purser, whose labours have provided us with a text of Cicero's letters which we can use with confidence; the citations from these letters have all been verified in the new Oxford text edited by Professor Purser. One other name I must mention with grat.i.tude. I firmly believe that the one great hope for cla.s.sical learning and education lies in the interest which the unlearned public may be brought to feel in ancient life and thought. We have just lost the veteran French scholar who did more perhaps to create and maintain such an interest than any man of his time; and I gladly here acknowledge that it was Boissier's _Ciceron et ses amis_ that in my younger days made me first feel the reality of life and character in an age of which I then hardly knew anything but the perplexing political history.

I have to thank my old pupils, Mr. H.E. Mann and Mr. Gilbert Watson, for kind help in revising the proofs.

W.W.F.

CHAPTER I

TOPOGRAPHICAL

The modern traveller of to-day arriving at Rome by rail drives to his hotel through the uninteresting streets of a modern town, and thence finds his way to the Forum and the Palatine, where his attention is speedily absorbed by excavations which he finds it difficult to understand. It is as likely as not that he may leave Rome without once finding an opportunity of surveying the whole site of the ancient city, or of asking, and possibly answering the question, how it ever came to be where it is. While occupied with museums and picture-galleries, he may well fail ”totam aestimare Romam.”[1]

a.s.suming that the reader has never been in Rome, I wish to transport him thither in imagination, and with the help of the map, by an entirely different route. But first let him take up the eighth book of the _Aeneid_, and read afresh the oldest and most picturesque of all stories of arrival at Rome;[2] let him dismiss all handbooks from his mind, and concentrate it on Aeneas and his s.h.i.+ps on their way from the sea to the site of the Eternal City.

Virgil showed himself a true artist in bringing his hero up the Tiber, which in his day was freely used for navigation up to and even above the city. He saw that by the river alone he could land him exactly where he could be shown by his friendly host, almost at a glance, every essential feature of the site, every spot most hallowed by antiquity in the minds of his readers. Rowing up the river, which graciously slackened its swift current, Aeneas presently caught sight of the walls and citadel, and landed just beyond the point where the Aventine hill falls steeply almost to the water's edge. Here in historical times was the dockyard of Rome; and here, when the poet was a child, Cato had landed with the spoils of Cyprus, as the nearest point of the river for the conveyance of that ill-gotten gain to the treasury under the Capitol.[3] Virgil imagines the bank clothed with wood, and in the wood--where afterwards was the Forum Boarium, a crowded haunt--Aeneas finds Evander sacrificing at the Ara maxima of Hercules, of all spots the best starting-point for a walk through the heart of the ancient city. To the right was the Aventine, rising to about a hundred and thirty feet above the river, and this was the first of the hills of Rome to be impressed on the mind of the stranger, by the tale of Hercules and Cacus which Evander tells his guest. In front, but close by, was the long western flank of the Palatine hill, where, when the tale had been told and the rites of Hercules completed, Aeneas was to be shown the cave of the Lupercal; and again to the left, approaching the river within two hundred yards, was the Capitol to be:

Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit, Aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.

Below it the hero is shown the shrine of the prophetic nymph Carmenta, with the Porta Carmentalis leading into the Campus Martius; then the hollow destined one day to be the Forum Romanum, and beyond it, in the valley of the little stream that here found its way down from the plain beyond, the grove of the Argiletum. Here, and up the slope of the Clivus sacer, with which we shall presently make acquaintance, were the lowing herds of Evander, who then takes his guest to repose for the night in his own dwelling on the Palatine, the site of the most ancient Roman settlement.[4]

What Evander showed to his visitor, as we shall presently see, comprised the whole site of the heart and life of the city as it was to be, all that lay under the steep sides of the three almost isolated hills, the Capitoline, Palatine, and Aventine. The poet knew that he need not extend their walk to the other so-called hills, which come down as spurs from the plain of the Campagna,--Quirinal, Esquiline, Caelian. Densely populated as those were in his own day, they were not essential organs of social and politics life; the pulse of Rome was to be felt beating most strongly in the s.p.a.ce between them and the river where too the oldest and most cherished a.s.sociations of the Roman people, mythical and historical, were fixed. I propose to take the reader, with a single deviation, over the same ground, and to ask him to imagine it as it was in the period with which we are concerned in this book. But first, in order to take in with eye and mind the whole city and its position, let us leave Aeneas, and crossing to the right bank of the Tiber by the Pons Aemilius,[5] let us climb to the fort of the Janiculum, an ancient outwork against attack from the north, by way of the via Aurelia, and here enjoy the view which Martial has made forever famous:

Hinc septem dominos videre montes Et totam licet aestimare Romam, Albanos quoque Tusculosque colles Et quodcunque iacet sub urbe frigus.

No one who has ever stood on the Janiculum, and looked down on the river and the city, and across the Latin plain to the Alban mountain and the long line of hills--the last spurs of the Apennines--enclosing the plain to the north, can fail to realise that _Rome was originally an outpost of the Latins_, her kinsmen and confederates, against the powerful and uncanny Etruscan race who dwelt in the undulating hill country to the north. The site was an outpost, because the three isolated hills make it a natural point of defence, and of attack towards the north if attack were desirable; no such point of similar vantage is to be found lower down the river, and if the city had been placed higher up, Latium would have been left open to attack,--the three hills would have been left open to the enemy to gain a firm footing on Latin soil. It was also, as it turned out, an admirable base of operations for carrying on war in the long and narrow peninsula, so awkward, as Hannibal found to his cost, for working out a definite plan of conquest. From Rome, astride of the Tiber, armies could operate on ”interior lines” against any combination--could strike north, east, and south at the same moment. With Latium faithful behind her she could not be taken in the rear; the unconquerable Hannibal did indeed approach her once on that side, but fell away again like a wave on a rocky sh.o.r.e. From the sea no enemy ever attempted to reach her till Genseric landed at Ostia in A.D. 455.

Thus it is not difficult to understand how Rome came to be the leading city of Latium; how she came to work her conquering way into Etruria to the north, the land of a strange people who at one time threatened to dominate the whole of Italy; how she advanced up the Tiber valley and its affluents into the heart of the Apennines, and southward into the Oscan country of Samnium and the rich plain of Campania. A glance at the map of Italy will show us at once how apt is Livy's remark that Rome was placed in the centre of the peninsula.[6] That peninsula looks as if it were cleft in twain by the Tiber, or in other words, the Tiber drains the greater part of central Italy, and carries the water down a well-marked valley to a central point on the western coast, with a volume greater than that of any other river south of the Po. A city therefore that commands the Tiber valley, and especially the lower part of it, is in a position of strategic advantage with regard to the whole peninsula. Now Rome, as Strabo remarked, was the only city actually situated on the bank of the river; and Rome was not only on the river, but from the earliest times astride of it. She held the land on both banks from her own site to the Tiber mouth at Ostia, as we know from the fact that one of her most ancient priesthoods[7]

had its sacred grove five miles down the river on the northern bank.

Thus she had easy access to the sea by the river or by land, and an open way inland up the one great natural entrance from the sea into central Italy.[8] Her position on the Tiber is much like that of Hispalis (Seville) on the Baetis, or of Arles on the Rhone, cities opening the way of commerce or conquest up the basins of two great rivers. In spite of some disadvantages, to be noticed directly, there was no such favourable position in Italy for a virile people apt to fight and to conquer. Capua, in the rich volcanic plain of Campania, had far greater advantages in the way of natural wealth; but Capua was too far south, in a more enervating climate, and virility was never one of her strong points. Corfinium, in the heart of the Apennines, once seemed threatening to become a rival, and was for a time the centre of a rebellious confederation; but this city was too near the east coast--an impossible position for a pioneer of Italian dominion.

Italy looks west, not east; almost all her natural harbours are on her western side; and though that at Ostia, owing to the amount of silt carried down by the Tiber, has never been a good one, it is the only port which can be said to command an entrance into the centre of the peninsula.

No one, however, would contend that the position of Rome is an ideal one. Taken in and by itself, without reference to Italy and the Mediterranean, that position has little to recommend it. It is too far from the sea, nearly twenty miles up the valley of a river with an inconveniently rapid current, to be a great commercial or industrial centre; and such a centre Rome has never really been in the whole course of her history. There are no great natural sources of wealth in the neighbourhood--no mines like those at Laurium in Attica, no vast expanse of corn-growing country like that of Carthage. The river too was liable to flood, as it still is, and a familiar ode of Horace tells us how in the time of Augustus the water reached even to the heart of the city.[9] Lastly, the site has never really been a healthy one, especially during the months of July and August,[10] which are the most deadly throughout the basin of the Mediterranean. Pestilences were common at Rome in her early history, and have left their mark in the calendar of her religious festivals; for example, the Apolline games were inst.i.tuted during the Hannibalic war as the result of a pestilence, and fixed for the unhealthy month of July. Foreigners from the north of Europe have always been liable to fever at Rome; invaders from the north have never been able to withstand the climate for long; in the Middle Ages one German army after another melted away under her walls, and left her mysteriously victorious.

There are some signs that the Romans themselves had occasional misgivings about the excellence of their site. There was a tradition, that after the burning of the city by the Gauls, it was proposed that the people should desert the site and migrate to Veii, the conquered Etruscan city to the north, and that it needed all the eloquence of Camillus to dissuade them. It has given Livy[11] the opportunity of putting into the orator's mouth a splendid encomium on the city and its site; but no such story could well have found a place in Roman annals if the Capitol had been as deeply set in the hearts of the people as was the Acropolis in the hearts of the Athenians. At a later time of deep depression Horace[12] could fancifully suggest that the Romans should leave their ancient home like the Phocaeans of old, and seek a new one in the islands of the blest. Some idea was abroad that Caesar had meant to transfer the seat of government to Ilium, and after Actium the same intention was ascribed to Augustus, probably without reason; but the third ode of Horace's third book seems to express the popular rumour, and in an interesting paper Mommsen[13]

has stated his opinion that the new master of the Roman world may really have thought of changing the seat of government to Byzantium, the supreme convenience and beauty of which were already beginning to be appreciated.[14]

Virgil, on the other hand, though he came from the foot of the Alps and did not love Rome as a place to dwell in, is absolutely true to the great traditions of the site. For him ”rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma” (_Georg_. ii. 534); and in the _Aeneid_ the destiny of Rome is so foretold and expressed as to make it impossible for a Roman reader to think of it except in connexion with the city. He who needs to be convinced of this has but to turn once more to the eighth _Aeneid_, and to add to the charming story of Aeneas' first visit to the seven hills, the splendid picture of the origin and growth of Roman dominion engraved on the s.h.i.+eld which Venus gives her son. Cicero again, though he was no Roman by birth, was pa.s.sionately fond of Rome, and in his treatise _de Republica_, praised with genuine affection her ”nativa praesidia.”[15] He says of Romulus, ”that he chose a spot abounding in springs, healthy though in a pestilent region; for her hills are open to the breezes, yet give shade to the hollows below them.” And Livy, in the pa.s.sage already quoted, in language even more perfect than Cicero's, wrote of all the advantages of the site, ending by describing it as ”regionum Italiae medium, ad incrementum urbis natum unice loc.u.m.” It is curious that all these panegyrics were written by men who were not natives of Rome; Virgil came from Mantua, Livy from Padua, Cicero from Arpinum. They are doubtless genuine, though in some degree rhetorical; those of Cicero and Livy can hardly be called strictly accurate. But taken together they may help us to understand that fascination of the site of Rome, to which Virgil gave such inimitable expression.

On this site, which once had been crowded only when the Roman farmers had taken refuge within the walls with their families, flocks, and herds on the threatening appearance of an enemy, by the time of Cicero an enormous population had gathered. Many causes had combined to bring this population together, which can be only glanced at here. As in Europe and America at the present day, so in all the Mediterranean lands since the age of Alexander, there had been a constantly increasing tendency to flock into the towns; and the rise of huge cities, such as Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, Corinth, or Rhodes, with all the inevitably ensuing social problems and complications, is one of the most marked characteristics of the last three centuries B.C. In Italy in particular, apart from the love of a pleasant social life free from manual toil, with various convenient resorts and amus.e.m.e.nts, the long series of wars had served to increase the population, in spite of the constant loss by the sword or pestilence; for the veteran soldier who had been serving, perhaps for years, beyond sea, found it hard to return to the monotonous life of agriculture, or perhaps found his holding appropriated by some powerful landholder with whom it would be hopeless to contest possession. The wars too brought a steadily increasing population of slaves to the city, many of whom in course of time would be manumitted, would marry, and so increase the free population. These are only a few of the many causes at work after the Punic wars which crammed together in the site of Rome a population which, in the latter part of the last century B.C., probably reached half a million or even more.[16]

Let us now descend from the Janiculum, and try to imagine ourselves in the Rome of Cicero's time, say in the last year of the Republic, 50 B.C., as we walk through the busy haunts of this crowded population.