Part 8 (1/2)

Even good scholars used formerly to make the mistake of supposing that Caesar, a man habitually abstemious, or at least temperate, had made up his mind to over-eat himself on this occasion, as he was intending to take an emetic afterwards. And even now it may be as well to point out that medical treatment by a course of emetics was a perfectly well known and valued method at this time;[453] that Caesar, whose health was always delicate, and at this time severely tried, was then under this treatment, and could therefore eat his dinner comfortably, without troubling himself about what he ate and drank: and that the apt quotation from Lucilius, and the literary conversation which (so Cicero adds) followed the dinner, prove beyond all question that this was no glutton's meal, but one of that ordinary and rational type, in which repose and pleasant intercourse counted for more than the mere eating and drinking.

No more work seems to have been done after the cena was over and the guests had retired. We found Cicero on one occasion going to bed soon after the meal; and, as he was up and active so early in the morning, we may suppose that he retired at a much earlier hour than we do. But of this last act of the day he tells us nothing.

CHAPTER X

HOLIDAYS AND AMUs.e.m.e.nTS

The Italian peoples, of all races, have always had a wonderful capacity for enjoying themselves out of doors. The Italian _festa_ of to-day, usually, as in ancient times, linked to some religious festival, is a scene of gaiety, bright dresses, music, dancing, bonfires, races, and improvisation or mummery; and all that we know of the ancient rural festivals of Italy suggests that they were of much the same lively and genial character. Tibullus gives us a good idea of them:

”Agricola a.s.siduo primum satiatus aratro Cantavit oerto rustica verba pede; Et satur arenti primum est modulatus avena Carmen, ut ornatos diceret ante decs; Agricola et minio suffusus, Bacche, rubenti Primus inexperta duxit ab arte choros.”[454]

It would be easy to multiply examples of such merry-making from the poets of the Augustan age, nearly all of whom were born and bred in the country, and shared Virgil's tenderness for a life of honest work and play among the Italian hills and valleys. But in this chapter we are to deal with the holidays and enjoyments of the great city, and the rural festivals are only mentioned here because almost all the characteristics of the urban holiday-making are to be found in germ there. The Roman calendar of festivals has its origin in the regularly recurring rites of the earliest Latin husbandman. As the city grew, these old agricultural festivities lost of course much of their native simplicity and navete; some of them survived merely as religious or priestly performances, some became degraded into licentious enjoyment; but the music and dancing, the gay dresses, the racing, the mumming or acting, are all to be found in the city, developed in one form or another, from the earliest to the latest periods of Roman history.

The Latin word for a holiday was _feriae_, a term which belongs to the language of religious law (_ius divinum_). Strictly speaking, it means a day which the citizen has resigned, either wholly or in part, to the service of the G.o.ds.[455] As of old on the farm no work was to be done on such days, so in the city no public business could be transacted.

Cicero, drawing up in antique language his idea of the ius divinum, writes thus of feriae: ”Feriis iurgia amovento, easque in familiis, operibus patratis, habento”: which he afterwards explains as meaning that the citizen must abstain from litigation, and the slave be excused from labour.[456] The idea then of a holiday was much the same as we find expressed in the Jewish Sabbath, and had its root also in religious observance. But Cicero, whether he is actually reproducing the words of an old law or inventing it for himself, was certainly not reflecting the custom of the city in his own day; no such rigid observance of a rule was possible in the capital of an Empire such as the Roman had become. Even on the farm it had long ago been found necessary to make exceptions; thus Virgil tells us:[457]

”Quippe etiam festis quaedam exercere diebus Fas et iura sinunt: rivos deducere nulla Religio vetuit, segeti praetendere saepem, Insidias avibus moliri, incendere vepres, Balantumque gregem fluvio mersare salubri.”

So too in the city it was simply impossible that all work should cease on feriae, of which there were more than a hundred in the year, including the Ides of every month and some of the Kalends and Nones.

As a matter of fact a double change had come about since the city and its dominion began to increase rapidly about the time of the Punic wars. First, many of the old festivals, sacred to deities whose vogue was on the wane, or who had no longer any meaning for a city population, as being deities of husbandry, were almost entirely neglected: even if the priests performed the prescribed rites, no one knew and no one cared,[458] and it may be doubted whether the State was at all scrupulous in adhering to the old sacred rules as to the hours on which business could be transacted on such days.[459]

Secondly, certain festivals which retained their popularity had been extended from one day to three or more, in one or two cases, as we shall see, even to thirteen and fifteen days, in order to give time for an elaborate system of public amus.e.m.e.nt consisting of chariot-races and stage-plays, and known by the name of _ludi_, or, as at the winter Saturnalia, to enable all cla.s.ses to enjoy themselves during the short days for seven mornings instead of one. Obviously this was a much more convenient and popular arrangement than to have your holidays scattered about over the whole year as single days; and it suited the rich and ambitious, who sought to obtain popular favour by shows and games on a grand scale, needing a succession of several days for complete exhibition. So the old religious word feriae becomes gradually supplanted, in the sense of a public holiday of amus.e.m.e.nt, by the word _ludi_, and came at last to mean, as it still does in Germany, the holidays of schoolboys.[460] These ludi will form the chief subject of this chapter; but we must first mention one or two of the old feriae which seem always to have remained occasions of holiday-making, at any rate for the lower cla.s.ses of the population.

One of these occurred on the Ides of March, and must have been going on at the moment when Caesar was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 44 B.C. It was the festival of Anna Perenna, a mysterious old deity of ”the ring of the year.” The lower cla.s.s of the population, Ovid tells us,[461] streamed out to the ”festum geniale” of Anna, and spent the whole day in the Campus Martius, lying about in pairs of men and women, indulging in drinking and all kinds of revelry. Some lay in the open; some constructed tents, or rude huts of boughs, stretching their togas over them for shelter. As they drank they prayed for as many years of life as they could swallow cups of wine. The usual characteristics of the Italian _festa_ were to be found there: they sang anything they had picked up in the theatre, with much gesticulation (”et iactant faciles ad sua verba ma.n.u.s”), and they danced, the women letting down their long hair. The result of these performances was naturally that they returned home in a state of intoxication, which roused the mirth of the bystanders. Ovid adds that he had himself met them so returning, and had seen an old woman pulling along an old man, both of them intoxicated. There may have been other popular ”jollifications” of this kind, for example at the Neptunalia on July 23, where we find the same curious custom of making temporary huts or shelters;[462] but this is the only one of which we have any account by an eye-witness.

Of the famous Lupercalia in February, and some other festivals which neither died out altogether nor were converted into ludi, we only know the ritual, and cannot tell whether they were still used as popular holidays.

One famous festival of the old religious calendar did, however, always remain a favourite holiday, viz. the Saturnalia on December 17, which was by common usage extended to seven days in all.[463] It was probably the survival of a mid-winter festivity in the life of the farm, at a time when all the farm work of the autumn was over, and when both bond and free might indulge themselves in unlimited enjoyment. Such ancient customs die hard, or, as was the case with the Saturnalia, never die at all; for the same features are still to be found in the Christmas rejoicings of the Italian peasant. Every one knows something of the character of this holiday, and especially of the entertainment of slaves by their masters,[464] which has many parallels in Greek custom, and has been recently supposed to have been borrowed from the Greeks. Various games were played, and among them that of ”King,” at which we have seen the young Cato playing with his boy companions.[465] Seneca tells us that in his day all Rome seemed to go mad on this holiday.

But we must now turn to the real _ludi_, organised by the State on a large and ever increasing scale. The oldest and most imposing of these were the Ludi Romani or Magni, lasting from September 5 to September 19 in Cicero's time. These had their origin in the return of a victorious army at the end of the season of war, when king or consul had to carry out the vows he had made when entering on his campaign.

The usual form of the vow was to entertain the people on his return, in honour of Jupiter, and thus they were originally called ludi _votivi_, before they were incorporated as a regularly recurring festival. After they became regular and annual, any entertainment vowed by a general had to take place on other days; thus in the year 70 B.C. Pompey's triumphal ludi votivi immediately preceded the Ludi Romani of that year,[466] giving the people in all some thirty days of holiday. The centre-point, and original day, of the Ludi Romani was the Ides (13th) of September, which was also the day of the epulum Jovis,[467] and the dies natalis (dedication day) of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter; and the whole ceremonial was closely connected with that temple and its great deity. The triumphal procession pa.s.sed along the Sacra via to the Capitol, and thence again to the Circus Maximus, where the ludi were held. The show must have been most imposing; first marched the boys and youths, on foot and on horseback, then the chariots and charioteers about to take part in the racing, with crowds of dancers and flute-players,[468] and lastly the images of the Capitoline deities themselves, carried on _fercula_ (biers). All such shows and processions were dear to the Roman people, and this seems to have become a permanent feature of the Ludi Romani, whether or no an actual triumph was to be celebrated, and also of some other ludi, e.g.

the Apollinares and the Megalenses.[469] Thus the idea was kept up that the greatness and prosperity of Rome were especially due to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, who, since the days of the Tarquinii, had looked down on his people from his temple on the Capitol.[470]

The Ludi Plebeii in November seem to have been a kind of plebeian duplicate of the Ludi Romani. As fully developed at the end of the Republic, they lasted from the 4th to the 17th; their centre-point and original day was the Ides (13th), on which, as on September 13, there was an epulum Jovis in the Capitol.[471] They are connected with the name of that Flaminius who built the circus Flaminius in the Campus Martius in 220 B.C., the champion of popular rights, killed soon afterwards at Trasimene; and it is probable that his object in erecting this new place of entertainment was to provide a convenient building free of aristocratic a.s.sociations. But unfortunately we know very little of the history of these ludi.

If we may suppose that the Ludi Plebeii were inst.i.tuted just before the second Punic war, it is interesting to note that three other great ludi were organised in the course of that war, no doubt with the object of keeping up the drooping spirits of the urban population. The Ludi Apollinares were vowed by a praetor urba.n.u.s in 212, when the fate of Rome was hanging in the balance, and celebrated in the Circus Maximus: in 208 they were fixed to a particular day, July 13, and eventually extended to eight, viz. July 6-13.[472] In 204 were inst.i.tuted the Ludi Megalenses, to celebrate the arrival in Rome of the Magna Mater from Pessinus in Phrygia, i.e. on April 4; but the ludi were eventually extended to April 10.[473] Lastly, in 202 the Ludi Ceriales, which probably existed in some form already, were made permanent and fixed for April 19: they eventually lasted from the 12th to the 19th.[474] After the war was over we only find one more set of ludi permanently established, viz. the Florales, which date from 173.

The original day was April 28, which had long been one of coa.r.s.e enjoyment for the plebs; like the other ludi, these too were extended, and eventually reached to May 3.[475] April, we may note, was a month chiefly consisting of holidays: the Ludi Megalenses, Ceriales, and Florales occupied no less than seventeen of its twenty-nine days.

When Sulla wished to commemorate his victory at the Colline gate, he inst.i.tuted Ludi Victoriae on November I, the date of the battle, and these seem to have been kept up after most of Sulla's work had been destroyed; they are mentioned by Cicero in the pa.s.sage quoted above from the Verrines, as Ludi Victoriae, but we hear comparatively little of them.

Before we go on to describe the nature of these numerous entertainments, it may be as well to realise that the spectators had nothing to pay for them; they were provided by the State free of cost, as being part of certain religious festivals which it was the duty of the government to keep up. Certain sums were set aside for this purpose, differing in amount from time to time; thus in 217 B.C., for the Ludi Romani, on which up to that time 200,000 sesterces (16,600) had been spent, the sum of 333,333-1/3 sest. was voted, because the number three had a sacred signification, and the moment was one of extreme peril for the State.[476] On one occasion only before the end of the Republic do we hear of any public collection for the ludi; in 186 B.C. Pliny tells us that every one was so well off, owing no doubt to the enormous amount of booty brought from the war in the East, that all subscribed some small sum for the games of Scipio Asiaticus.[477]

There was no doubt a growing demand for magnificence in the shows, and thus it came about that the amount provided by the State had to be supplemented. But the usual way of supplementing it was for the magistrate in charge of the ludi to pay what he could out of his own purse, or to get his friends to help him; and as all the ludi except the Apollinares were in charge of the aediles, it became the practice for these, if they aspired to reach the praetors.h.i.+p and consuls.h.i.+p, to vie with each other in the recklessness of their expenditure. As early as 176 B.C. the senate had tried to limit this personal expenditure, for Ti. Semp.r.o.nius Gracchus as aedile had that year spent enormous sums on his ludi, and had squeezed money (it does not appear how) out of the subject populations of Italy, as well as the provinces, to entertain the Roman people.[478] But naturally no decrees of the senate on such matters were likely to have permanent effect; the great families whose younger members aimed at popularity in this way were far too powerful to be easily checked. In the last age of the Republic it had become a necessary part of the aedile's duty to supplement the State's contribution, and as a rule he had to borrow heavily, and thus to involve himself financially quite early in his political career. In his _de Officiis_,[479] writing of the virtue of _liberalitas_, Cicero gives a list of men who had been munificent as aediles, including the elder and younger Cra.s.sus, Mucius Scaevola (a man, he says, of great self-restraint), the two Lueulli, Hortensius, and Sila.n.u.s; and adds that in his own consuls.h.i.+p P. Lentulus outdid all his predecessors, and was imitated by Scaurus in 58 B.C.[480] Cicero himself had to undertake the Ludi Romani, Megalenses, and Florales in his aediles.h.i.+p; how he managed it financially he does not tell us.[481] Caesar undoubtedly borrowed largely, for his expenditure as aedile was enormous,[482] and he had no private fortune of any considerable amount.

Our friend Caelius Rufus was elected curule aedile while he was in correspondence with Cicero, and his letters give us a good idea of the condition of the mind of an ambitious young man who is bent on making the most of himself. He is in a continual state of fidget about his games; he has set his heart on getting panthers to exhibit and hunt, and urges Cicero in letter after letter to procure them for him in Cilicia. ”It will be a disgrace to you,” he writes in one of them, ”that Patiscus has sent ten panthers to Curio, and that you should not send me ten times as many.”[483] The provincial governor, he urges, can do what he pleases; let Cicero send for some men of Cibyra, let him write to Pamphylia, where they are most abundant, and he will get what he wants, or rather what Caelius wants. Even after a letter full of the most important accounts of public business, including copies of senatus consulta (ad Fam. viii. 8), he harks back at the end to the inevitable panthers. Cicero tells Atticus that he rebuked Caelius for pressing him thus hard to do what his conscience could not approve, and that it was not right, in his opinion, for a provincial governor to set the people of Cibyra hunting for panthers for Roman games.[484]

From the same pa.s.sage it would seem that Caelius had also been urging him to take other steps in his province of which he disapproved, no doubt with the same object of raising money for the ludi. This letter to Caelius is not extant, but we may believe that Cicero had the courage to reprove his old pupil, and that the constant worrying for panthers was more than even his amiability could stand. But others were less sensitive; and it is a well known fact in natural history that the Roman games had a powerful effect, from this time forwards, in diminis.h.i.+ng the numbers of wild animals in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and in bringing about the extinction of species.

In our own day the same work is carried on by the big-game sportsman, somewhat farther afield; the pleasure of slaughter being now confined to the few rich and adventurous, who shoot for their own delectation, and not to make a London holiday.

Thus to all his ludi the citizen had the right of admission free of cost.[485] An Englishman may find some difficulty at first in realising this; it is as if cricket and football matches and theatres in London were open to the public gratis, and the cost provided by the London County Council. Yet it is not difficult to understand how the Roman government drifted into a practice which was eventually found to have such unfortunate results. It has already been explained that ludi were originally attached to certain religious festivals, which it was the duty of the State and its priests and magistrates to maintain. The Romans, like all Italians, loved shows and out-of-door enjoyment, and as the population increased and became more liable to excitement during the stress of the great wars with Carthage, it became necessary to keep them cheerful and in good humour by developing the old ludi and inst.i.tuting new ones, for which it would have been contrary to all precedent to make them pay. The government, as we may guess from the history of the ludi which has just been sketched, seems to have been careful at first not to go too far with this policy, and it was some time before any ludi but the Romani were made annual and extended to the length they eventually reached. But the sudden increase of wealth after the great struggle was over was answerable for this, as for so many other damaging tendencies. We have seen that the people themselves in 186 were able and willing to contribute; and now it was possible for aediles to invest their capital in popular undertakings which might, later on, pay them well by carrying them on to higher magistracies and provincial governors.h.i.+ps, where fresh fortunes might be made. The evil results are, of course, as obvious here as in the parallel case of the corn-supply (see above, p. 34); enormous amounts of capital were used unproductively, and the people were gradually accustomed to believe that the State was responsible for their enjoyment as well as their food. But we must be most careful not to jump to the conclusion that this was due to any deliberate policy on the part of the Roman government. They drifted into these dangerous shoals in spite of the occasional efforts of intelligent steersmen; and it would indeed have needed a higher political intelligence than was then and there available, to have fully divined the direction of the drift and the dangers ahead of them.

We must now turn in the last place to consider the nature of the entertainments, and see whether there was any improving or educational influence in them.