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| Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David |
I- THE FAMILY
Birth itself was an adventure in Rome. If the child was deformed or female, the father was permitted by custom to expose it to death.1 Otherwise it was welcomed; for though the Romans even of this period practiced some measure of family limitation, they were eager to have sons. Rural life made children assets, public opinion condemned childlessness, and religion promoted fertility by persuading the Roman that if he left no son to tend his grave his spirit would suffer endless misery. After eight days the child was formally accepted into the family and the clan by a solemn ceremony at the domestic hearth. A clan (gens) was a group of freeborn families tracing themselves to a common ancestor, bearing his name, united in a common worship, and bound to mutual aid in peace and war. The male child was designated by an individual first name (praenomen), such as Publius, Marcus, Caius; by his clan name (nomen), such as Cornelius, Tullius, Julius; and by his family name (cognomen), such as Scipio, Cicero, Caesar. Women were most often designated simply by the clan name-Cornelia, Tullia, Claudia, Julia. Since in classical days there were only some fifteen first names for males, and these tended to be repeated confusingly in many generations of the same family, they were usually reduced to an initial, and a fourth—or even a fifth—name was added for distinctiveness. So P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Maior, the conqueror of Hannibal, was differentiated from P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Minor, the destroyer of Carthage.
The child found itself absorbed into the most basic and characteristic of Roman institutions—the patriarchal family. The power of the father was nearly absolute, as if the family had been organized as a unit of an army always at war. He alone of the family had any rights before the law in the early Republic; he alone could buy, hold, or sell property, or make contracts; even his wife’s dowry, in this period, belonged to him. If his wife was accused of a crime she was committed to him for judgment and punishment; he could condemn her to death for infidelity or for stealing the keys to his wine. Over his children he had the power of life, death, and sale into slavery. All that the son acquired became legally his father’s property; nor could he marry without his father’s consent. A married daughter remained under her father’s power, unless he allowed her to marry cum manu—gave her into the hand or power of her husband. Over his slaves he had unlimited authority. These, and his wife and children, were mancipia to him—literally, “taken in hand”; and no matter what their age or status, they remained in his power until he chose to emancipate them—to let them “out of hand.” These rights of the paterfamilias were checked to some degree by custom, public opinion, the clan council, and praetorian law; otherwise they lasted to his death, and could not be ended by his insanity or even by his own choice. Their effect was to cement the unity of the family as the basis of Roman morals and government and to establish a discipline that hardened the Roman character into stoic strength. They were harsher in the letter than in practice; the most extreme of them were seldom used, the rest seldom abused. They did not bar a deep and natural pietas, or reverential affection, between parents and children. The tomb stelae of Rome are as tender as those of Greece or our own.
Since the greater urgency of the male supplies woman with charms more potent than any law, her status in Rome must not be judged from her legal disabilities. She was not allowed to appear in court, even as a witness. Widowed, she could not claim any dower right in her husband’s estate; he might, if he wished, leave her nothing. At every age of her life she was under the tutelage of a man—her father, her brother, her husband, her son, or a guardian—without whose consent she could not marry or dispose of property. On the other hand, she could inherit, though not beyond 100,000 sesterces ($15,000), and she could own without limit. In many instances, as the earlier passed into the later Republic, she became wealthy because her husband put his property in her name to escape bankruptcy obligations, damage suits, inheritance taxes, and other everlasting jeopardies. She played a role in religion as priestess; nearly every priest had to have a wife and lost his office when she died. Within the home (domus) she was honored mistress, mea domina, madame. She was not, like the Greek wife, confined to a gynaeceum, or woman’s quarters; she took her meals with her mate, though she sat while he reclined. She did a minimum of servile work, for nearly every citizen had a slave. She might spin, as a sign of gentility, but her chief economic function was to superintend the servants; she made it a point, however, to nurse her children herself. They rewarded her patient motherhood with profound love and respect; and her husband seldom allowed his legal mastery to cloud his devotion.
The father and the mother, their house and land and property, their children, their married sons, their grandchildren by these sons, their daughters-in-law, their slaves and clients—all these constituted the Roman familia: not so much a family as a household; not a kinship group but an assembly of owned persons and things subject to the oldest male ascendant. It was within this miniature society, containing in itself the functions of family, church, school, industry, and government, that the Roman child grew up, in piety and obedience, to form the sturdy citizen of an invincible state.
II. THE RELIGION OF ROME
1. The Gods
The Roman family was both an association of persons with things and an association of persons and things with gods. It was the center and source of religion, as well as of morals, economy, and the state; every part of its property and every aspect of its existence were bound up in a solemn intimacy with the spiritual world. The child was taught, by the eloquent silence of example, that the undying fire in the hearth was the sign and substance of the goddess Vesta, the sacred flame that symbolized the life and continuity of the family; which therefore must never be extinguished, but must be tended with “religious” care, and fed with a portion of each meal. Over the hearth he saw the little icons, crowned with flowers, that represented the gods or spirits of the family: the Lar that guarded its fields and buildings, its fortune and destiny, and the Penates, or gods of the interior, who protected the accumulations of the family in its storerooms, cupboards, and barns. Hovering invisible but potent over the threshold was the god Janus, two-faced not as deceitful but as watching all entry and exit at every door. The child’s father, he learned, was the ward and embodiment of an inner genius, or generative power, which would not die with the body, but must be nourished forever at the paternal grave. His mother was also the carrier of a deity and had likewise to be treated as divine; she had a Juno in her as the spirit of her capacity to bear, as the father enclosed a genius as the spirit of his power to beget. The child too had his genius or Juno, as both his guardian angel and his soul—a godly kernel in the mortal husk. Everywhere about him, he heard with awe, were the watchful Di Manes, or Kindly Shades, of those male forebears whose grim death masks hung on the household walls, warning him not to stray from the ways of his ancestors, and reminding him that the family was composed not merely of those few individuals that lived in his moment but also of those that had once been, or would someday be, members of it in the flesh, and therefore formed part of it in its spiritual multitude and timeless unity.
Other spirits came to his aid as he grew up: Cuba watched over his sleep, Abeona guided his first steps, Fabulina taught him to speak. When he left the house he found himself again and everywhere in the presence of gods. The earth itself was a deity: sometimes Tellus, or Terra Mater—Mother Earth; sometimes Mars as the very soil he trod, and its divine fertility; sometimes Bona Dea, the Good Goddess who gave rich wombs to women and fields. On the farm there was a helping god for every task or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for cattle, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure heaps, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for crops, Fornax for baking corn in the oven, Vulcan for making the fire. Over the boundaries presided the great god Terminus, imaged and worshiped in the stones or trees that marked the limits of the farm. Other religions may have looked to the sky, and the Roman admitted that there too were gods; but his deepest piety and sincerest propitiations turned to the earth as the source and mother of his life, the home of his dead and the magic nurse of the sprouting seed. Every December the Lares of the soil were worshiped in the joyful Feast of the Crossroads, or Compitalia; every January rich gifts sought the favor of Tellus for all planted things; every May the priests of the Arval (or Plowing) Brotherhood led a chanting procession along the boundaries of adjoining farms, garlanded the stones with flowers, sprinkled them with the blood of sacrificial victims, and prayed to Mars (the earth) to bear generous fruit. So religion sanctified property, quieted disputes, ennobled the labor of the fields with poetry and drama, and strengthened body and soul with faith and hope.
The Roman did not, like the Greek, think of his gods as having human form; he called them simply nurmna, or spirits; sometimes they were abstractions like Health, Youth, Memory, Fortune, Honor, Hope, Fear, Virtue, Chastity, Concord, Victory, or Rome. Some of them, like the Lemures or Ghosts, were spirits of disease, hard to propitiate. Some were spirits of the season, like Maia, the soul of May; others were water gods like Neptune, or woodland sprites like Silvanus, or the gods that dwelt in trees. Some lived in sacred animals, like the sacrificed horse or bull, or in the sacred geese that a playful piety preserved unharmed on the Capitol. Some were spirits of procreation; Tutumus supervised conception, Lucina protected menstruation and delivery. Priapus was a Greek god of fertility soon domiciled in Rome: maidens and matrons (if we may believe the indignant Saint Augustine) sat on the male member of his statue as a means of ensuring pregnancy;2 scandalous figures of him adorned many a garden; little phallic images of him were worn by simple persons to bring fertility or good luck or to avert the “evil eye.”3 Never had a religion so many divinities. Varro reckoned them at 30,000, and Petronius complained that in some towns of Italy there were more gods than men. But deus, to the Roman, meant saint as well as god.
Under these basic concepts lurked a polymorphous mass of popular beliefs in animism, fetishism, totemism, magic, miracles, spells, superstitions, and taboos, most of them going back to the prehistoric inhabitants of Italy, and perhaps to Indo-European ancestors in their ancient Asiatic home. Many objects, places, or persons were sacred (sacer) and therefore taboo—not to be touched or profaned: e.g., newborn children, menstruating women, condemned criminals. Hundreds of verbal formulas or mechanical contraptions were used to achieve natural ends by supernatural means. Amulets were well-nigh universal; nearly every child wore a bulla, or golden talisman, suspended from his neck. Small images were hung upon doors or trees to ward off evil spirits. Charms or incantations were used to avert accidents, cure disease, bring rain, destroy a hostile army, wither an enemy’s crops or himself. “We are all afraid,” said Pliny, “of being transfixed by curses and spells.”4 Witches appear in Horace, Virgil, Tibullus, Lucian. They were believed to eat snakes, fly through the air at night, brew poisons from esoteric herbs, kill children, and raise the dead. All but a few skeptics seem to have believed in miracles and portents, in speaking or sweating statues,5 in gods descending from Olympus to fight for Rome, in lucky odd and unlucky even days, and in the presaging of the future by strange events. Livy’s history must contain several hundred such portents, reported with philosophic gravity; and the elder Pliny’s volumes so abound in portents and magic cures that they might well have been called Supernatural History. The most serious business of commerce, government, or war could be deferred or ended by the priestly announcement of an unfavorable omen like abnormal entrails in a sacrificial victim or a roll of thunder in the sky.
The state did what it could to check these excesses—called them, indeed, precisely that, superstitio. But it sedulously exploited the piety of the people to promote the stability of society and government. It adapted the rural divinities to urban life, built a national hearth for the goddess Vesta, and appointed a college of Vestal Virgins to serve the city’s sacred fire. Out of the gods of the family, the farm, and the village it developed the di indigetes—or native gods—of the state, and arranged for these a solemn and picturesque worship in the name of all the citizens.
Among these original national gods Jupiter or Jove was the favorite, though not yet, like Zeus, their king. In the early centuries of Rome he was still a half-impersonal force—the bright expanse of the sky, the light: of the sun and the moon, a bolt of thunder, or (as Jupiter Pluvius) a shower of fertilizing rain; even Virgil and Horace occasionally use “Jove” as a synonym for rain or sky.6 In time of drought the richest ladies of Rome walked in barefoot procession up the Capitoline hill to the Temple of Jupiter Tonans—Jove the Thunderer—to pray for rain. Probably his name was a corruption of Diuspater, or Diespiter, Father of the Sky. Perhaps primitively one with him was Janus, originally Dianus: first the two-faced spirit of the cottage door, then of the city gate, then of any opening or beginning, as of the day or year. The portals of his temple were open only in time of war, so that he might go forth with Rome’s armies to overcome the gods of the foe. As old as Jupiter in the respect of the people was Mars, at first a god of tillage, then of war, then almost a symbol of Rome; every tribe in Italy named a month after him. Of like hoary antiquity was Saturn, the national god of the new-sown seed (sata). Legend pictured him as a prehistoric king who had brought the tribes under one law, taught them agriculture, and established peace and communism in the Saturnia regna—the Golden Age of Saturn’s reign.
Less powerful but more deeply loved than these were the goddesses of Rome. Juno Regina was the queen of heaven, the protective genius of womanhood, marriage, and maternity; her month of June 7 was recommended as the luckiest for weddings. Minerva was the goddess of wisdom (mens) or memory, of handicrafts and guilds, of actors, musicians, and scribes; the Palladium on which the safety of Rome was believed to depend was an image of Pallas Minerva, fully armed, which Aeneas was said to have brought from Troy through love and war to Rome. Venus was the spirit of desire, mating, fertility; sacred to her was April, the month of opening buds (aperire); poets like Lucretius and Ovid saw in her the amorous origin of all living things. Diana was the goddess of the moon, of women and childbirth, of the hunt, of the woods and their wild denizens, a tree spirit brought from Aricia when that region of Latium came under Roman power. Near Aricia were the lake and grove of Nemi, and in that grove was a rich shrine of Diana, the resort of pilgrims who believed that the goddess had once mated there with Virbius, the first “King of the Woods.” To ensure the fertility of Diana and the soil, the successors of Virbius—all priests and husbands of the huntress—were replaced, each in turn, by any vigorous slave who, having taken as a talisman a sprig of mistletoe (the Golden Bough) from the sacred oak tree of the grove, attacked and slew the king—a custom that endured till the second century of our era.8
These, then, were the major gods of the official Roman worship. There were lesser, but not less popular, national deities: Hercules, god of joy and wine, who was not above gambling gaily for a courtesan with the sacristan of his temple;9 Mercury, the patron deity of merchants, orators, and thieves; Ops, goddess of wealth; Bellona, goddess of war; and countless more. As the city spread its rule it brought in new divinities—di no-vensiles. Sometimes it imported the god of a beaten city into the Roman pantheon as a sign and surety of conquest, as when the Juno of Veii was led captive to Rome. Conversely, when the citizens of a community were moved to the capital their gods were brought with them, lest the spiritual and moral roots of the new inhabitants should be too suddenly snapped short; so immigrants bring their gods to America today. The Romans did not question the existence of these foreign deities; most of them believed that when they led the statue away the god had to come with it; many believed that the statue was the god.10
But some of the di novensiles were not conquered but conquering; they seeped into Roman worship through commercial, military, and cultural contacts with Greek civilization—first in Campania, then in south Italy, then in Sicily, finally in Greece itself. There was something cold and impersonal in the gods of the state religion; they could be bribed by offerings or sacrifice, but they could seldom provide comfort or individual inspiration; by contrast the gods of Greece seemed intimately human, full of adventure, humor, and poetry. The Roman populace welcomed them, built temples for them, and willingly learned their ritual. The official priesthood, glad to enlist these new policemen in the service of order and content, adopted the Greek gods into the divine family of Rome, and merged them, when possible, with their nearest analogues in the indigenous deities. As far back as 496 B.C. came Demeter and Dionysus, who were attached to Ceres and Liber (god of the grape); twelve years later Castor and Pollux were received, to become the protectors of Rome; in 431 a temple was raised to Apollo the Healer in the hope that he might allay a plague; in 294 Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, was brought from Epidaurus to Rome in the form of a huge snake,11 and a temple-hospital was built in his honor on an island in the Tiber. Cronus was accepted as substantially one with Saturn, Poseidon was identified with Neptune, Artemis with Diana, Hephaestus with Vulcan, Heracles with Hercules, Hades with Pluto, Hermes with Mercury. With the help of the poets Jupiter was elevated into another Zeus, a stern witness and guardian of oaths, a bearded judge of morals, a custodian of laws, a god of gods; and slowly the educated Roman was prepared for the monotheistic creeds of Stoicism, Judaism, and Christianity.
2. The Priests
To appease or enlist the aid of these gods Italy employed an elaborate clergy. In his home the father was priest; but public worship was conducted by several collegia—associations—of priests, each filling its own vacancies, but all under the lead of a pontifex maximus elected by the centuries. No special training was necessary for membership in these sacred colleges; any citizen might be enrolled in them or leave them; they formed no separate order or caste and were politically powerless except as tools of the state. They received the income of certain state lands for their support, with slaves to serve them; and grew rich through generations of pious legacies.
In the third century before Christ the main pontifical college had nine members. They kept historical annals, recorded laws, took auspices, offered sacrifices, and purified Rome with quinquennial lustrations. In performing the official ritual the pontiffs were aided by fifteen flamines—kindlers of the sacrificial flames. Minor pontifical colleges had special functions: the Salii, or Leapers, ushered in each New Year with a ritual dance to Mars; the fetiales sanctified the ratification of treaties and declarations of war; and the Luperci, or Brotherhood of the Wolf, carried on the strange rites of the Lupercalia. The college of the Vestal Virgins tended the state hearth, and sprinkled it daily with holy water from the fountain of the sacred nymph Egeria. These white-clad, white-veiled nuns were chosen from among girls six to ten years of age; they took a vow of virginity and service for thirty years, but in return they received many public honors and privileges. If any of them was found guilty of sexual relations she was beaten with rods and buried alive; Roman historians record twelve cases of such punishment. After thirty years they were free to leave and marry, but few took or found the opportunity.12
The most influential of the priestly colleges was that of the nine augures who studied the intent or will of the gods, in earlier times by watching the flight of birds,I later by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals. Before every important act of policy, government, or war, the “auspices were taken” by the magistrates and interpreted by the augurs, or by special haruspices—liver inspectors—whose art went back through Etruria to Chaldea and beyond. As the priests were occasionally open to financial persuasion, their pronouncements were sometimes adjusted to the needs of the purchaser; for example, inconvenient legislation could be stopped by announcing that the auspices were unfavorable for further business on that day; or the Assembly might be induced by “favorable” auspices to vote a war.13 In major crises the government professed to learn the pleasure of Heaven by consulting the Sibylline Books—the recorded oracles of the Sibyl, or priestess of Apollo, at Cumae. Through such means, and occasional deputations to the oracle at Delphi, the aristocracy could influence the people in any direction to almost any end.14
The ritual of worship aimed merely to offer the gods a gift or sacrifice to win their aid or avert their wrath. To be effective, said the priests, the ceremony had to be performed with such precision of words and movements as only the clergy could manage. If any mistake was made, the rite had to be repeated, even to thirty times. Religio meant the performance of ritual with religious care.15 The essence of the ceremony was a sacrifice—literally making a thing sacer—i.e., belonging to a god. In the home the offering would normally be a bit of cake or wine placed on the hearth or dropped into the domestic fire; in the village it would be the first fruits of the crops, or a ram, a dog, or a pig; on great occasions, a horse, a hog, a sheep, or an ox; on supreme occasions the last three were slaughtered together in the su-ove-taur-ilia. Holy formulas pronounced over the victim turned it into the god who was to receive it; in this sense the god himself was sacrificed;16 and since only the viscera were burned on the altar, while priests and people ate the rest, the strength and glory of the god (men hoped) passed into his feasting worshipers. Sometimes human beings were offered in sacrifice; it is significant that a law had to be passed as late as 97 B.C. forbidding this. By a variant of these ideas of vicarious atonement a man might offer his life for the state as the Decii had done, or Marcus Curtius, who, to propitiate angry subterranean powers, leaped into a chasm that an earthquake had opened in the Forum—whereupon, we are told, the chasm closed and all was well.17
Pleasanter was the ceremony of purification. This might be of crops or flocks, of an army or a city. A procession made the circuit of the objects to be purified, prayer and sacrifice were offered, evil influences were thereby dispelled, and misfortune was turned away. Prayer was still imperfectly evolved from magic incantations; the words for it—carmen—meant not only a chant but a charm; and Pliny frankly reckoned prayer as a form of magical utterance.18 If the formula was properly recited, and was addressed to the correct deity according to the indigitamenta, or classified directory of the gods compiled and kept by the priests, the request was certain to be granted; if not granted there must have been an error in the ritual. Akin to magic were also the vota, or vowed offerings, with which the people sought to gain the help of the gods; sometimes great temples rose in fulfillment of such vows. The multitude of votive offerings found in Roman remains suggests that the religion of the people was warm and tender with piety and gratitude, a feeling of kinship with the hidden forces in nature, and an anxious desire to be in harmony with them all. By contrast the state religion was uncomfortably formal, a kind of legal and contractual relation between the government and the gods. When new cults flowed in from the conquered East it was this official worship that declined first, while the picturesque and intimate faith and ritual of the countryside patiently and obstinately survived. Victorious Christianity, half surrendering, wisely took over much of the faith and ritual; and, under new forms and phrases, they continue in the Latin world to this day.
3. Festivals
If the official worship was gloomy and severe, its festivals redeemed it, and showed men and gods in a lighter mood. The year was adorned with over a hundred holy days (feriae), including the first of every month and sometimes the ninth and fifteenth. Some of the feriae were sacred to the dead or to the spirits of the lower world; these were “apotropaic” in their ceremonies, aiming to appease the departed and turn away wrath. On May 11-13 Roman families commemorated with awe the feast of the Lemures, or dead souls; the father spat black beans from his mouth, and cried: “With these beans I redeem myself and mine. . . . Shades of my ancestors, depart!”19 The Parentalia and the Feralia, in February, were similar attempts to propitiate the fearsome dead. But for the most part the festivals were occasions of feasting and jollity, often, among the plebs, of sexual freedom; on such days, says a character in Plautus, “you may eat what you like, go where you like . . . and love whom you like, provided you abstain from wives, widows, virgins, and free boys”;20 apparently he felt that a wide choice would still remain.
On February 15 came the strange Lupercalia, sacred to the God Faunus as averter of wolves (lupercus): goats and sheep were sacrificed; and the luperci—priests clad only in goatskin girdles—ran around the Palatine praying to Faunus to drive away evil spirits, and striking the women whom they encountered with thongs of hide from the sacrificed animals, to purify them and make them fertile; then puppets of straw were cast into the Tiber to appease or deceive the river god, who had perhaps, in wilder days, demanded living men. On March 15 the poor emerged from their hovels and, like the Jews on the Feast of Tabernacles, built themselves tents in the Field of Mars, celebrated the coming of the New Year, and prayed to the goddess Anna Perenna (Ring of the Years) for as many years as they quaffed cups of wine.21 April alone had six festivals, culminating in the Floralia; this Feast of Flora, goddess of flowers and springs, continued for six days of bibulous and promiscuous revelry. The first of May was the Feast of the Good Goddess, Bona Dea. On May 9, 11, and 13 Liber and Libera, god and goddess of the grape, were celebrated in the Liberalia; the phallus, symbol of fertility, was frankly honored by gay crowds of men and women.23 At the end of May the Arval Brethren led the people in the solemn and yet joyful Ambarvalia. The gods were neglected in the autumn months, after the crops were safely in, but December was again rich in feasts. The Saturnalia ran from the 17th to the 23rd; they celebrated the sowing of the seed for the next year and commemorated the happy classless reign of Saturn; gifts were exchanged, and many liberties were allowed; the distinction between slave and free was for a while abolished or even inverted; slaves might sit down with their owners, give orders to them, rail at them; the masters waited upon their slaves, and did not eat till all the slaves were filled.24
These festivals, though agricultural in origin, remained popular in the cities and survived through all vicissitudes of belief into the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. Their number was so confusing that one of the prime purposes of the Roman calendar was to list them for the guidance of the people. In early Italian custom the chief priest had convened the citizens at the beginning of every month and named the festivals to be observed in the next thirty days; this calling (calatio) gave a name (calendae) to the first day of each month. To the Romans, as in some measure to modern Catholics or orthodox Jews, a calendar meant a priestly list of holidays and business days, interspersed with scraps of sacred, legal, historical, and astronomical information. Tradition ascribed to Numa the calendar that governed Roman chronology and life till Caesar. It divided the year into twelve lunar months, with complex intercalations that summed up to an average of 366 days per year. To remedy the mounting excess the pontiffs were empowered (191 B.C.) to revise the intercalations; but they used their authority to lengthen or shorten magistracies pleasing or displeasing to them, so that by the end of the Republic the calendar, then three months amiss, was a monster of chaos and chicanery.
In the early days time had been measured simply by the height of the sun in the sky. In 263 B.C. a sundial was brought from Catana, in Sicily, and placed in the Forum; but as Catana was four degrees south of Rome, the dial was deceptive, and the priests were for a century unable to make the needed adjustments. In 158 B.C. Scipio Nasica set up a public clepsydra, or water clock. The month was divided into three periods by the kalends (first), the nones (fifth or seventh), and the ides (thirteenth or fifteenth); and the days were clumsily named by their distance before these dividing lines; so March 12 was “the fourth day before the ides of March.” A loose economic week was marked out by the nundinae, or every ninth day, when the villagers came to market in the towns. The year began with the coming of spring, and the first month, Martius, bore the name of the god of sowing; next came Aprilis, sprouting; Maius, month of Maia, or perhaps of increase; Iunius, month of Juno, or possibly of thriving; then Quinctilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December, named from their numerical order in the year; then January for Janus, and February for the februa, or magic objects by which persons might be purified. The year itself was called annus, ring; as if to say that in reality there is no beginning and no end.
4. Religion and Character
Did this religion help Roman morals? In some ways it was immoral: its stress on ritual suggested that the gods rewarded not goodness but gifts and formulas; and its prayers were nearly always for material goods or martial victory. Ceremonies gave drama to the life of man and the soil, but they multiplied as if they, and not the devotion of the part to the whole, were the proper essence of religion. The gods were, with some exceptions, awesome spirits without moral aspect or nobility.
Nevertheless, the old religion made for morality, for order and strength in the individual, the family, and the state. Before the child could learn to doubt, faith molded its character into discipline, duty, and decency. Religion gave divine sanctions and support to the family: it instilled in parents and children a mutual respect and piety never surpassed, it gave sacramental significance and dignity to birth and death, encouraged fidelity to the marriage vow, and promoted fertility by making parentage indispensable to the peace of the dead soul. By ceremonies sedulously performed before each campaign and battle it raised the soldier’s morale, and led him to believe that supernatural powers were fighting on his side. It strengthened law by giving it celestial origins and religious form, by making crime a disturbance of the order and peace of Heaven, and by placing the authority of Jove behind every oath. It invested every phase of public life with religious solemnity, prefaced every act of government with ritual and prayer, and fused the state into such intimate union with the gods that piety and patriotism became one, and love of country rose to a passion stronger than in any other society known to history. Religion shared with the family the honor and responsibility of forming that iron character which was the secret of Rome’s mastery of the world.
III. MORALS
What kind of morality emerged from this life in the family and among the gods? Roman literature, from Ennius to Juvenal, idealized these earlier generations and mourned the passing of ancient simplicity and virtue. These pages too will suggest a contrast between the stoic Rome of Fabius and the epicurean Rome of Nero. But the contrast must not be exaggerated by a biased selection of the evidence. There were epicureans in Fabius’ days and stoics in Nero’s.
From beginning to end of Roman history the sexual morality of the common man remained essentially the same: coarse and free, but not incompatible with a successful family life. In all free classes virginity was demanded of young women, and powerful tales were told to exalt it; for the Roman had a strong sense of property and wanted a wife of such steady habits as would reasonably ensure him against leaving his goods to his rival’s breed. But in Rome, as in Greece, premarital unchastity in men was not censured if it preserved a decent respect for the hypocrisies of mankind. From the elder Cato to Cicero 25 we find express justifications of it. What increases with civilization is not so much immorality of intent as opportunity of expression. In early Rome prostitutes were not numerous. They were forbidden to wear the matron’s robe that marked the reputable wife, and were confined to the dark corners of Rome and Roman society. There were as yet no educated courtesans like the hetairai of Athens, nor such delicate drabs as posed for Ovid’s verse.
Men married early—usually by twenty; not through romantic love but for the sound purposes of having a helpmate, useful children, and a healthy sexual life. In the words of the Roman wedding ceremony, marriage was liberum quaerendorum causa—for the sake of getting children; on the farm, children, like wives, were economic assets, not biological toys. Marriages were often arranged by the parents and engagements were sometimes made for couples in their infancy. In every case the consent of both fathers was required. Betrothal was formal and constituted a legal bond. The relatives gathered in a feast to witness the contract; a stipula, or straw, was broken between the parties as a sign of their agreement; the stipulations—especially those concerning the dowry—were put in writing; and the man placed an iron ring upon the fourth finger of the girl’s left hand, because it was believed that a nerve ran thence to the heart.26 The minimum age for legal marriage was twelve for the girl, fourteen for the man. Early Roman law made marriage compulsory;27 but this law must have become a dead letter by 413 B.C., when Camillus as censor imposed a tax on bachelors.
Marriage was either cum manu or sine manu—with or without the handing over of the bride and her possessions to the authority of the husband or the father-in-law. Marriage sine manu dispensed with religious ceremony and required only the consent of the bride and groom. Marriage cum manu was by usus—a, year’s cohabitation; or by coemptio—purchase; or by confarreatio (literally, eating a cake together), which required religious ceremony and was confined to patricians. Marriage by actual purchase disappeared at an early date, or was reversed; the bride’s dowry often in effect bought the man. This dowry was usually at the husband’s disposal, but its equivalent had to be returned to the wife in divorce or on the death of the male. Weddings were rich in folk ceremony and song. The two families feasted in the home of the bride; then they marched in colorful and frolicsome procession to the home of the groom’s father, to an accompaniment of flutes, hymeneal chants, and Rabelaisian raillery. At the garlanded door the bridegroom asked the girl, “Who art thou?” and she answered with a simple formula of devotion, equality, and unity: “Where thou art Caius, there am I Caia.” He lifted her over the threshold, presented her with the keys of the house, and put his neck with hers under a yoke to signify their common bond; hence marriage was called coniugium—a yoking together. In token of her joining the new family the bride then took part with the others in worshiping the household gods.
Divorce was difficult and rare in marriages by confarreatio; marriages cum manu could be dissolved only by the husband; in marriage sine manu divorce was open to either party at will, without asking consent of the state. The first recorded divorce in Roman history is dated 268 B.C.; a suspicious tradition claimed that no divorce had previously occurred since the foundation of the city.28 Clan custom required a husband to divorce an unfaithful or childless wife. “If you find your wife in the act of adultery,” said old Cato, “the law permits you to kill her without trial. If by chance she surprises you in the same condition she must not touch you even with the tips of her fingers; the law forbids her.”29 Despite these distinctions there were apparently many happy marriages. The tombstones abound in post-mortem affection. One honored touchingly a lady who had served two husbands well:
"Thou wert beautiful beyond measure, Statilia, and true to thy husbands! . . . He who came first, had he been able to withstand the fates, would have set up this stone to thee; while I, alas, who have been blessed by thy pure heart these sixteen years, now have lost thee".30
The young women of early Rome were probably not quite so pretty as the later ladies whom the experienced Catullus would credit with laneum latusculum manusque mollicellas31—“little sides as smooth as wool, and soft little hands.” Presumably in those rural days toil and care soon overlaid this adolescent loveliness. Feminine features were classically regular, nose small and thin, hair and eyes usually dark. Blondes were at a premium, as were the German dyes that made them. As for the Roman male, he was impressive rather than handsome. A stern education and years of military life, hardened his face, as later indulgence would soften it into flabbiness. Cleopatra must have loved Antony for something else than his wine-puffed cheeks, and Caesar for some other charm than his eagle’s head and nose. The Roman nose was like the Roman character—sharp and devious. Beards and long hair were customary till about 300 B.C., when barbers began to ply their trade in Rome. Dress was essentially like the Greek. Boys, girls, magistrates, and the higher priests wore the toga praetexta, or purple-fringed robe; on attaining his sixteenth birthday the youth changed to the toga virilis—the white robe of manhood—as a symbol of his right to vote in the assemblies and his duty to serve in the army. Women wore, indoors, a dress (stola) bound with a girdle under the breasts, and reaching to the feet; outdoors they covered this with a palla, or cloak. Indoors, men wore a simple tunica, or shirt; outdoors they added a toga, and sometimes a cloak. The toga (tegere, to cover) was a woolen garment in one piece, twice the width and thrice in length the height of the wearer. It was wrapped around the body, and the surplus was thrown back over the left shoulder, brought forward under the right arm, and again thrown over the left shoulder. The folds at the breast served as pockets; the right arm remained free.
The Roman male cultivated a severe dignity (gravitas) as an uncomfortable necessity in an aristocracy that ruled a people, then a peninsula, then an empire. Sentiment and tenderness belonged to private life; in public a man of the upper classes had to be as stern as his statue, and hide behind a mask of austere calm the excitability and humor that cry out not only in the comedies of Plautus but in the speeches of Cicero. Even in private life the Roman of this age was expected to live Spartanly. Luxury of dress or table was reproved by the censor; even negligent tillage could bring some Cato down upon the farmer’s head. In the First Punic War the Carthaginian ambassadors, returning from Rome, amused the rich merchants by telling how the identical set of silver plate had appeared in every house to which they had been invited; one set, secretly passed about, had sufficed the whole patriciate. In that age the Senate sat on hard wooden benches in a curia, or hall, never heated even in winter.
Nevertheless, between the First and Second Punic Wars, wealth and luxury made a good beginning. Hannibal gathered a peck of gold rings from the fingers of Romans slain at Cannae;32 and sumptuary laws repeatedly—therefore vainly—forbade ornate jewelry, fancy dress, and costly meals. In the third century B.C. the menu of the average Roman was still simple: breakfast (ientaculum) of bread with honey or olives or cheese; luncheon (prandium) and dinner (cena) of grains, vegetables, and fruit; only the rich ate fish or meat.33 Wine, usually diluted, graced nearly every table; to drink undiluted wine was considered intemperance. Festivals and banquets were a necessary relaxation in this stoic age; those who could not unbend to them became too tense, and showed their nervous fatigue in the portrait statues they left to posterity.
Charity found little scope in this frugal life. Hospitality survived as a mutual convenience at a time when inns were poor and far between; but the sympathetic Polybius reports that “in Rome no one ever gives away anything to anyone if he can help it”34—doubtless an exaggeration. The young were kind to the old, but in general the graces and courtesies of life came to Rome only with the dying Republic. War and conquest molded morals and manners and left men often coarse and usually hard, prepared to kill without compunction and be killed without complaint. War captives were sold into slavery by the thousands, unless they were kings or generals; these were usually slaughtered at the victor’s triumph or allowed to starve leisurely to death. In the business world these qualities took on a fairer aspect. The Romans loved money, but Polybius (about 160 B.C.) describes them as industrious and honorable men; a Greek, said the Greek, could not be prevented from embezzling, no matter how many clerks were set to watch him, while the Romans spent great sums of public money with only rare cases of ascertained dishonesty.35 We note, however, that a law to check malpractice at elections was passed in 432 B.C. Roman historians report that political integrity was at its height in the first three centuries of the Republic; but they arouse suspicion by their high praise of Valerius Corvus, who, after occupying twenty-one magistracies, returned to his fields as poor as he had come; of Curius Dentatus, who kept no part of the spoils he had taken from the enemy; and of Fabius Pictor and his associates, who handed over to the state the rich presents they had received on an embassy to Egypt. Friends lent one another substantial amounts without interest. The Roman government was guilty of frequent treachery in dealing with other states, and perhaps in foreign relations the Empire was more honorable than the Republic. But the Senate refused to connive at the poisoning of Pyrrhus, and warned him of the plot. When, after Cannae, Hannibal sent ten prisoners to Rome to negotiate for the ransom of 8000 others, and drew from them a promise to return, all but one kept their word; the Senate apprehended the tenth, put him in irons, and turned him over to Hannibal, whose joy at his victory, says Polybius, “was not so great as his dejection when he saw how steadfast and high-spirited the Romans were.”27
In summary, the typical educated Roman of this age was orderly, conservative, loyal, sober, reverent, tenacious, severe, practical. He enjoyed discipline, and would have no nonsense about liberty. He obeyed as a training for command. He took it for granted that the government had a right to inquire into his morals as well as his income, and to value him purely according to his services to the state. He distrusted individuality and genius. He had none of the charm, vivacity, and unstable fluency of the Attic Greek. He admired character and will as the Greek admired freedom and intellect; and organization was his forte. He lacked imagination, even to make a mythology of his own. He could with some effort love beauty, but he could seldom create it. He had no use for pure science, and was suspicious of philosophy as a devilish dissolvent of ancient beliefs and ways. He could not, for the life of him, understand Plato, or Archimedes, or Christ. He could only rule the world.
IV. LETTERS
The Roman was formed not only by the family, the religion, and the moral code, but, in less degree, by the school, the language, and the literature. Plutarch dates the first Roman school about 250 B.C..; 38 but Livy, perhaps romancing, describes Virginia, the desired of the Decemvir, as “going to a grammar school in the Forum” as early as 450.39 The demand for written laws, and the publication of the Twelve Tables, suggest that by that date a majority of the citizens could read.
The teacher was usually a slave or freedman, employed by several families to instruct their children, or setting up his own private school and taking any pupil that came. He taught reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, history, and obedience; moral education was fundamental and unceasing; disciple and discipline were almost the same word. Memory and character alike were trained by memorizing the Twelve Tables of the law. Heine remarked that “the Romans would not have had much time left for conquering the world if they had first had to learn Latin”;40 but they too had to conjugate irregular Latin verbs, and soon would be put to Greek. The boy familiarized himself, through poetry and prose, with the exploits of his country and its heroes, and received many a patriotic lesson conveyed through edifying episodes that had never occurred. No attention was given to athletics; the Romans thought it better to train and harden the body by useful work in the field or the camp rather than through contests in the palaestra or gymnasium.
The language, like the people, was practical and economical, martially sharp and brief; its sentences and clauses marched in disciplined subordination to a determined goal. A thousand similarities allied it, within the Indo-European family, with Sanskrit and Greek and the Celtic tongues of ancient Gaul, Wales, and Ireland. Latin was poorer than Greek in imagery, flexibility, and ready formation of compounds; Lucretius and Cicero complained of its limited vocabulary, its lack of subtle shadings. Nevertheless, it had a sonorous splendor and masculine strength that made it ideal for oratory, and a compactness and logical sentence form that made it an apt vehicle for Roman law. The Latin alphabet came from Euboean Chalcis via Cumae and Etruria.41 In the oldest Latin inscription known to us, ascribed to the sixth century B.C., all the letters are Greek in form. C was sounded like our K, J like Y, V like U or W, the vowels as in Italian. Caesar’s contemporaries knew him as Yooleoos Keyssar, and Cicero was Keekero.
The Romans wrote in ink with a slit metal reed (calamus, stilus), at first upon leaves (folia), whence our words folio and leaf (two pages); then upon strips of inner bark (liber); often upon white (album) tablets of waxed wood; later upon leather, linen paper, and parchment. As the written forms of Latin resisted change more than the spoken words, the language of literature diverged more and more from the speech of the people, as in modern America or France. The melodious Romance languages—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Rumanian—evolved from the crude popular Latin brought to the provinces, not by poets and grammarians, but by soldiers, merchants, and adventurers. So the words for horse in the Romance languages—caballo, cavallo, cheval, cal—were taken from the spoken Latin caballus, not from the written equus. In popular Latin ille (he) was one syllable, like French and Italian il; and final -s and -m were, as in those languages, dropped or not pronounced. The best came from a corruption of the worst: corruptio pessimi optima.
What literature did the young Roman read in those first three centuries of the Republic? There were religious hymns and chants, such as the song of the Arval Brethren, and there were popular lays of Rome’s historic or legendary past. There were official—usually priestly—records of elections, magistracies, events, portents, and holidays.II On the basis of these archives Q. Fabius Pictor compiled (202 B.C.) a respectable History of Rome—but in Greek; Latin was not yet thought fit for literary prose and was not used by historians until Cato. There were farragoes of prose called saturae—medleys of merry nonsense and erotic banter—out of which Lucilius would forge a new form for Horace and Juvenal. There were boisterously obscene burlesques or mimes, usually acted by players from Etruria; some of these performers, coming from the town of Istria, were named istriones, and gave the word histrio (actor) to Latin, and its derivatives to modern tongues. There were also, on holidays or market days, crude, half-impromptu farces that gave their stock characters to thousands of Italian comedies, ancient and modern: the rich and stupid father, the extravagant love-entangled youth, the maligned virgin, the clever intriguing servant, the glutton always maneuvering for a meal, the rollicking, tumbling clown. Already the last flaunted the gaily colored patches, the long expansive trousers, the large-sleeved doublet, and the shorn head, still familiar to our youth. An exact likeness of Punchinello, or Punch, has been found on the frescoes of Pompeii.42
Literature came formally to Rome about 272 B.C. in the person of a Greek slave. In that year Tarentum fell; many of its Greek citizens were slaughtered, but Livius Andronicus had the luck to be merely enslaved. Brought to Rome, he taught Latin and Greek to his master’s children and some others, and translated the Odyssey for them into Latin “Saturnian” verse—lines of loose and irregular rhythm, scanned by accent rather than quantity. Freed for his services, he was commissioned by the aediles to produce a tragedy and a comedy for the ludi, or games, of 240 B.C. He composed them on Greek models, directed them, acted the main parts, and sang them to the accompaniment of a flute till his voice gave out; then he had another sing the lines while he acted them—a method followed in many later plays at Rome, and influential in generating the pantomime. The government was so well pleased by this introduction of the literary drama that in honor of Andronicus it gave poets the right to incorporate, and allowed them to hold their meetings in the Temple of Minerva on the Aventine. Henceforth it became the fashion to present such ludi scenici, or scenic plays, at the public festivals.43
Five years after this historic première a plebeian ex-soldier from Campania, Cnaeus Naevius, shocked the conservatives by producing a comedy in which he satirized with Aristophanic freedom the political abuses that were flourishing in the capital. The old families complained, and Naevius was jailed. He apologized and was freed, wrote another satire as sharp a the first, and was banished from Rome. In exile and old age he composed, with undiscourageable patriotism, an epic poem on the First Punic War, in which he had fought; it began with the founding of Rome by Trojan refugees, and provided Virgil with a theme and several scenes. His condemnation was a double misfortune: the vitality and originality of Roman comedy suffered from a censorship that made libel a capital crime, and Roman politics lost the purge of a public critique. Naevius wrote also a poetic drama based on Roman history; this experiment too ended with him, and thereafter Roman tragedy circled vainly in the cropped pastures of Greek myth. Only a few fragments survive to reveal Naevius’ quality. One describes a coquettish girl:
"As if playing ball in a ring she skips from one to another, and is all things to all men with her words and winks, her caresses and embraces; now a squeeze of the hand or a pressure of the foot; her ring to look at, her lips to blow an inviting kiss; here a song, there the language of signs".44
It is pleasant to see that women were then as charming as now, that not all Romans were Catos, and that under the shadow of the Porch even virtue might take a holiday.
Beyond the essentials of arithmetic, and enough geometry to plot a farm or plan a temple, science played as yet no part in the education or culture of the Roman citizen. The boy counted on his fingers (digita), and the figures he used were imitations of an extended digit (I), a hand (V), or two hands joined at their apexes (X); and he was content to form the other numerals by repeating these symbols (II, III), and prefixing (IV, IX) or suffixing (VI, XII) digits to V or X to lessen or increase them. Out of this manual arithmetic came the decimal system, constructed on parts and multiples of ten—i.e., the ten fingers. The Romans used geometry well in building and engineering, but added not one theorem to that rounded achievement of the Greek mind. We hear nothing of Roman astronomy in this period except in its presperous sister or mother—astrology.
Medicine, till the third century, was largely a matter of family herbs, magic, and prayer; the gods alone could heal; and to make cure certain a special god was invoked for each disease 45—as one now invokes a specialist. Against the mosquitoes of the Roman campagna appeal was made to the goddesses Febris and Mephitis, as, until our century, the Romans petitioned La Madonna della Febbre, Our Lady of the Fever.46 Healing shrines and sacred waters were as common as today. The temple of Aesculapius was a busy center of religious healing, where diet and hydrotherapy, peaceful surroundings and a quiet routine, prayer and the soothing ritual of worship, the aid of practical physicians and the cheerfulness of skilled attendants, conspired to restore confidence and to effect apparently miraculous cures.47 Nevertheless, there were slave doctors and quacks in Rome five centuries before Christ; and some of these practiced dentistry, for the Twelve Tables forbade the burial of gold with the dead except where gold had been used to wire teeth.48 In 219 we hear of the first freeman physician in Rome—Archagathus the Peloponnesian. His surgical operations so delighted the patricians that the Senate voted him an official residence and the freedom of the city; later his “mania for cutting and burning” won him the name of Carnifex, butcher.49 From that time onward Greek physicians flocked to Rome, and made the practice of medicine there a Greek monopoly.
V. THE GROWTH OF THE SOIL
The Roman of those centuries had little need of medicine, for his active life in farming or soldiering kept him healthy and strong. He took to the land as the Greek to the sea; he based his life on the soil, built his towns as meeting places for farmers and their products, organized his armies and his state on his readiness to defend and extend his holdings, and conceived his gods as spirits of the living earth and the nourishing sky.
As far back as we can reach into Rome’s past we find private property.50 Part of the land, however, was ager publicus—public acreage usually acquired by conquest and owned by the state. The peasant family of the early Republic owned two or three acres, tilled them with all hands and occasionally a slave, and lived abstemiously on the product. They slept on straw,51 rose early, stripped to the waist,52 and plowed and harrowed behind leisurely oxen whose droppings served as fertilizer, and their flesh as a religious offering and a festival food. Human offal was also used to enrich the soil, but chemical fertilizers were rare in Italy before the Empire. Manuals of scientific agriculture were imported from Carthage and Greece. Crops were rotated between grains and legumes, and lands were turned periodically to pasturage to prevent their exhaustion. Vegetables and fruits were grown in abundance, and formed, next to grains, the chief articles of food. Garlic was already a favorite seasoning. Some aristocratic families derived their names in part from the vegetables traditionally favored in their plantings: Lentuli, Caepiones, Fabii, from lentils, onions, beans. Culture of the fig, olive, and grape gradually encroached upon cereal and vegetable crops. Olive oil took the place of butter in the diet and of soap in the bath; it served as fuel in torches and lamps and was the chief ingredient in the unguents made necessary for hair and skin by the dry winds and fiery sun of the Mediterranean summer. Sheep were the favorite herd, for the Italians preferred clothing of wool. Swine and poultry were raised in the farmyard, and almost every family nursed a garden of flowers.54
War transformed this picture of rural toil. Many of the farmers who changed plowshares for swords were overcome by the enemy or the town and never returned to their fields; many others found their holdings so damaged by armies or neglect that they had not the courage to begin anew; others were broken by accumulated debt. Such men sold their lands at depression prices to aristocrats or agricultural capitalists who merged the little homesteads into latifundia (literally, broad farms), turned these vast areas from cereals to flocks and herds, orchards and vines, and manned them with war-captured slaves under an overseer who was often himself a slave. The owners rode in now and then to look at their property; they no longer put their hands to the work, but lived as absentee landlords in their suburban villas or in Rome. This process, already under way in the fourth century B.C., had by the end of the third produced a debt-ridden tenant class in the countryside, and in the capital a propertyless, rootless proletariat whose sullen discontent would destroy the Republic that peasant toil had made.
VI. INDUSTRY
The soil was poor in minerals—a fact that would write much economic and political history in Italy. There was no gold and little silver; there was a fair supply of iron, some copper, lead, tin, and zinc, but too scarce to support an industrial development. The state owned all mines in the empire, but leased them to private operators, who worked them profitably by using up the lives of thousands of slaves. Metallurgy and technology made few advances. Bronze was still employed more frequently than iron, and only the best and latest mines were equipped with the winches, windlasses, and chain buckets that Archimedes and others had set up in Sicily and Egypt. The chief fuel was wood; trees were cut also for houses and ships and furniture; mile by mile, decade by decade, the forest retreated up the mountainside to meet the timber line. The most prosperous industry was the manufacture of weapons and tools in Campania. There was no factory system, except for armament and pottery. Potters made not only dishes but bricks and tiles, conduits and pipes; at Arretium and elsewhere the potters were copying Greek models and learning to make artistic wares. As early as the sixth century the textile industry, in the design, preparation, and dyeing of linen and wool, had grown beyond the domestic stage despite the busy spinning of daughters, wives, and slaves; free and unfree weavers were brought together in small factories, which produced not only for the local market but also for export trade.
Industrial production for nonlocal consumption was arrested by difficulties of transport. Roads were poor, bridges unsafe, oxcarts slow, inns rare, robbers plentiful. Hence traffic moved by choice along canals and rivers, while coastal towns imported by sea rather than from their hinterland. By 202, however, the Romans had built three of their great “consular roads”—so called because usually named after the consuls or censors who began them. Soon these highways would far surpass in durability and extent the Persian and Carthaginian roads that had served them as models. The oldest of them was the via Latina which, about 370 B.C., brought Romans out to the Alban hills. In 312 Appius Claudius the Blind, with the labor of thousands of criminals,55 started the via Appia, or Appian Way, between Rome and Capua; later it reached out to Beneventum, Venusia, Brundisium, and Tarentum; its 333 English miles bound the two coasts, eased trade with Greece and the East, and collaborated with the other roads to make Italy one nation. In 241 the censor Aurelius Cotta began the Aurelian Way from Rome through Pisa and Genoa to Antibes. Caius Flaminius in 220 opened the Flaminian Way to Ariminum; and about the same time the Valerian Way connected Tibur with Corfinium. Slowly the majestic network grew: the Aemilian Way climbed north from Ariminum through Bononia and Mutina to Placentia (187); the Postumian Way linked Genoa with Verona (148); and the via Popilia led from Ariminum through Ravenna to Padua (132). In the following century roads would dart out from Italy to York, Vienna, Thessalonica, and Damascus, and would line the north African coast. They defended, unified, and vitalized the Empire by quickening the movement of troops, intelligence, customs, and ideas; they became great channels of commerce, and played no minor role in the peopling and enrichment of Italy and Europe.
Despite these highways, trade never flourished in Italy as in the eastern Mediterranean. The upper classes looked with contempt upon buying cheap and selling dear, and left trade to Greek and Oriental freedmen; while the countryside contented itself with occasional fairs, and “ninth-day” markets in the towns. Foreign commerce was similarly moderate. Sea transport was risky; ships were small, made only six miles an hour sailing or rowing, hugged the coast, and for the most part kept timidly in port from November to March. Carthage controlled the western Mediterranean, the Hellenistic monarchies controlled the east, and pirates periodically swept out of their lairs upon merchants relatively more honest than themselves. The Tiber was perpetually silting its mouth and blocking Rome’s port at Ostia; two hundred vessels foundered there in one gale; besides, the current was so strong that the voyage upstream to Rome hardly repaid the labor and the cost. About 200 B.C.. vessels began to put in at Puteoli, 150 miles south of Rome, and ship their goods overland to the capital.
To facilitate this external and internal trade it became necessary to establish a state-guaranteed system of coinage, measures, and weights.III Till the fourth century B.C. cattle were still accepted as a medium of exchange, since they were universally valuable and easily moved. As trade grew, rude chunks of copper (aes) were used as money (ca. 330 B.C.); estimate was originally aes tumare, to value copper. The unit of value was the as (one)—i.e., one pound of copper by weight; ex-pend meant weighed out. When, about 338 B.C., a copper coinage was issued by the state, it often bore the image of an ox, a sheep, or a hog, and was accordingly called pecunia (pecus, cattle). In the First Punic War, says Pliny, “the Republic, not having means to meet its needs, reduced the as to two ounces of copper; by this contrivance a saving of five sixths was effected, and the public debt was liquidated.”56 By 202 the as had fallen to an ounce; and in 87 B.C. it was reduced to half an ounce to help finance the Social War. In 269 two silver coins were minted: the denarius, equal to ten asses, and corresponding to the Athenian drachma in the latter’s depreciated Hellenistic form; and the sestertius, representing two and a half asses, or a quarter of a denarius. In 217 appeared the first Roman gold coins—the aurei—with values of twenty, forty, and sixty sesterces. In metallic equivalence the as would equal two, the sesterce five, the denarius twenty, cents in the currency of the United States; but as precious metals were much less plentiful than now, and therefore had a purchasing power several times greater than today,57 we shall, ignoring price fluctuations before Nero, roughly equate the as, sesterce, denarius, and talent (6000 denarii) of the Roman Republic with six, fifteen, and sixty cents, and $3600 respectively, in terms of United States currency in 1942.IV
The issuance of this guaranteed currency promoted the profession and operations of finance. The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples; and the state continued to the end to use its strongly built shrines as repositories for public funds, perhaps on the theory that religious scruples would help discourage robbery. Moneylending was an old business, for the Twelve Tables had forbidden interest above eight and one third per cent per annum.60 The legal rate was lowered to five per cent in 347, and to zero in 342, but this Aristotelian prohibition was so easily evaded that the actual minimum rate averaged twelve per cent. Usury (above twelve per cent) was widespread, and debtors had periodically to be rescued from their accumulating obligations by bankruptcy or legislation. In 352 B.C. the government used a very modern method of relief: it took over such mortgages as offered a fair chance of repayment, and persuaded mortgagees to accept a lower interest rate on the others.61 One of the streets adjoining the Forum became a banker’s row, crowded with the shops of the moneylenders (argentarii) and money-changers (trapezitae). Money could be borrowed on land, crops, securities, or government contracts, and for financing commercial enterprises or voyages. Co-operative lending took the place of industrial insurance; instead of one banker completely underwriting a venture, several joined in providing the funds. Joint-stock companies existed chiefly for the performance of government contracts let out on bids by the censor; they raised their capital by selling their stocks or bonds to the public in the form of partes or particulae—“little parts,” shares. These companies of “publicans”—i.e., men engaged on public or state undertakings—played an active role in supplying and transporting materials for the army and navy in the Second Punic War—not without the usual attempts to cheat the government.62 Businessmen (equites) directed the larger of these enterprises, freedmen the smaller. Nongovernmental business was carried on by negotiatores, who usually provided their own funds.
Industry was in the hands of independent craftsmen, working in their separate shops. Most such men were freemen, but an increasing proportion were freedmen or slaves. Labor was highly differentiated, and produced for the market rather than for the individual customer. Competition by slaves depressed the wages of free workers, and reduced the proletariat to a bitter life in slums. Strikes among these men were impracticable and rare,63 but slave uprisings were frequent; the “First Servile War” (139 B.C.) was not the first. When public discontent became acute, some cause could be found for a war that would provide universal employment, spread depreciated money, and turn the wrath of the people against a foreign foe whose lands would feed the Roman people victorious, or receive them defeated and dead.64 The free workers had unions or guilds (collegia), but these seldom concerned themselves with wages, hours, or conditions of labor. Tradition credited Numa with having established or legalized them; in any case, the seventh century B.C. had organizations of flute players, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, fullers, shoemakers, potters, dyers, and carpenters.65 The “Dionysian Artists”—actors and musicians—were among the most widespread associations in the ancient world. By the second century B.C. we find guilds of cooks, tanners, builders, bronzeworkers, ironworkers, ropemakers, weavers; but these were probably as old as the others. The chief aim of such unions was the simple pleasure of social intercourse; many of them were also mutual-benefit societies to defray the cost of funerals.
The state regulated not only the guilds, but many aspects of Rome’s economic life. It supervised the operation of mines and other governmental concessions or contracts. It quieted agitation among the plebs by importing food and distributing it at nominal prices to the poor or to all applicants. It levied fines upon monopolists, and it nationalized the salt industry to end a monopoly that had raised the price of salt beyond the reach of the working class. Its commercial policy was liberal: after overcoming Carthage it opened the western Mediterranean to all trade; and it protected Utica and, later, Delos on condition that they remain free ports, permitting the entry and exit of goods without fee. At various times, however, it forbade the export of arms, iron, wine, oil, or cereals; it laid a customs duty, usually of two and a half per cent, upon the entry of most products into Rome, and afterward extended this modest tariff to other cities. Until 147 B.C. it required a tributum, or property tax, throughout Italy. All in all, its revenues were modest; and like other civilized states it used them chiefly for war.66
VII. THE CITY
Through taxes, spoils, indemnities, and inflowing population Rome was now (202 B.C.) one of the major cities of the Mediterranean ensemble. The census of 234 listed 270,713 citizens—i.e., free adult males; the figure fell sharply during the great war, but rose to 258,318 in 189, and 322,000 in 147. We may calculate a population of approximately 1,100,000 souls in the city-state in 189 B.C., of whom perhaps 275,000 lived within the walls of Rome. Italy south of the Rubicon had some 5,000,000 inhabitants.67 Immigration, the absorption of conquered peoples, the influx, emancipation, and enfranchisement of slaves, were already beginning the ethnic changes that by Nero’s time would make Rome the New York of antiquity, half native and half everything.
Two main cross streets divided the city into quarters, each with its administrative officials and tutelary deities. Chapels were raised at important intersections, and statues at lesser ones, to the lares compitales, or gods of the crossings—a pretty custom still found in Italy. Most streets were plain earth; some were paved with small smooth stones from river beds, as in many Mediterranean cities today; about 174 the censor began to surface the major thoroughfares with lava blocks. In 312 Appius Claudius the Blind built the first aqueduct, bringing fresh water to a city that had till then depended upon springs and wells and the muddy Tiber. Piping water from aqueduct-fed reservoirs, the aristocracy began to bathe more than once a week; and soon after Hannibal’s defeat Rome opened its first municipal baths. At an unknown date Roman or Etruscan engineers built the Cloaca Maxima, whose massive stone arches were so wide that a wagon loaded with hay could pass under them.68 Smaller sewers were added to drain the marshes that surrounded and invaded Rome. The city’s refuse and rain water passed through openings in the streets into these drains and thence into the Tiber, whose pollution was a lasting problem of Roman life.
The embellishment of the city was almost confined to its temples. Houses adhered to the plain Etruscan style already described, except that the exterior was more often of brick or stucco, and (as a sign of growing literacy) was often defaced with graffiti—“scratchings” of strictly fugitive verse or prose. Temples were mostly of wood, with terra-cotta revetments and decorations, and followed Etruscan plans. A temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva stood on the Capitoline hill; another to Diana on the Aventine; and others rose (before 201 B.C.) to Juno, Mars, Janus, Venus, Victory, Fortune, Hope, etc. In 303 Caius Fabius added to his leguminous clan name the cognomen of Pictor, painter, by executing frescoes in the Temple of Health on the Capitoline. Greek sculptors in Rome made statues of Roman gods and heroes in terra cotta, marble, or bronze. In 293 they erected on the Capitol a bronze Jupiter of such Olympian proportions that it could be seen from the Alban hills twenty miles away. About 296 the aediles set up a bronze she-wolf, to which later artists added the figures of Romulus and Remus. We do not know if this is the group described by Cicero, or if either of these is identical with the existing Wolf of the Capital; in any case, we have in this a masterpiece of the highest order, dead metal alive in every muscle and nerve.
While through painting and statuary the aristocracy commemorated its victories and recommended its lineage, the people consoled themselves with music and the dance, comedies and games. The roads and homes of Italy resounded with individual or choral song; men sang at banquets, boys and girls chorused hymns in religious processions, bride and groom were escorted with hymeneal chants, and every corpse was buried with song. The flute was the most popular instrument, but the lyre too had its devotees, and became the favorite accompaniment of lyric verse. When great holidays came, the Romans crowded to amphitheater or stadium, and pullulated under the sun while hirelings, captives, criminals, or slaves ran and jumped, or, better, fought and died. Two great amphitheaters—the Circus Maximus (attributed to the first Tarquin) and the Circus Flaminius (221 B.C.)—admitted without charge all free men and women who came in time to find seats. The expense was met at first by the state, then by the aediles out of their own purse, often, in the later Republic, by candidates for the consulate; the cost increased generation by generation, until in effect it barred the poor from seeking office.
Perhaps we should class with these spectacles the official “triumph” of a returning general. Only those were eligible for it who had won a campaign in which 5000 of the enemy had been slain; the unfortunate commander who had won with less slaughter received merely an nation—for him no ox was sacrificed, but only a sheep (ovis). The procession formed outside the city, at whose borders the general and his troops were required to lay down their arms; thence it entered through a triumphal arch that set a fashion for a thousand monuments. Trumpeters led the march; after them came towers or floats representing the captured cities, and pictures showing the exploits of the victors; then wagons rumbled by, heavy with gold, silver, works of art, and other spoils. Marcellus’ triumph was memorable for the stolen statuary of Syracuse (212); Scipio Africanus in 207 displayed 14,000 and, in 202, 123,000 pounds of silver taken from Spain and Carthage. Seventy white oxen followed, walking philosophically to their death; then the captured chiefs of the enemy; then lictors, harpers, pipers, and incense-bearers; then, in a flamboyant chariot, the general himself, wearing a purple toga and a crown of gold, and bearing an ivory scepter and a laurel branch as emblems of victory and the insignia of Jove. In the chariot with him might be his children; beside it rode his relatives; behind them his secretaries and aides. Last came the soldiers, some carrying the prizes awarded them, everyone wearing a crown; some praising their leaders, others deriding them; for it was an inviolable tradition that on these brief occasions the speech of the army should be free and unpunished, to remind the proud victors of their fallible mortality. The general mounted the Capitol to the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, laid his loot at the feet of the gods, presented an animal in sacrifice, and usually ordered the captive chieftains to be slain as an additional thank-offering. It was a ceremony well designed to stir military ambition and reward military effort; for man’s vanity yields only to hunger and love.
VIII. POST MORTEM
War was the most dramatic feature of a Roman’s life, but it did not play so absorbing a role as in the pages of Rome’s historians. Perhaps even more than with us his existence centered about his family and his home. News reached him when it was old, so that his passions could not be stirred every day by the gathered turmoil of the world. The great events of his career were not politics and war, but anxious births, festal marriages, and somber deaths.
Old age was not then the abandoned desolation that so often darkens it in an individualistic age. The young never questioned their duty to care for the old; the old remained to the end the first consideration and the last authority; and after their death their graves were honored as long as a male descendant survived. Funerals were as elaborate as weddings. The procession was led by a hired band of wailing women, whose organized hysteria was cramped by a law of the Twelve Tables71 forbidding them to tear out their hair. Then came the flute players, limited by a like Solonic law to ten; then some dancers, one of whom impersonated the dead. Then followed in strange parade actors wearing the death masks, or waxen images, of those ancestors of the corpse who had held some magistracy. The deceased came next, in splendor rivaling a triumph, clothed in the full regalia of the highest office he had held, comfortable in a bier overspread with purple and gold-embroidered coverlets, and surrounded by the weapons and armor of the enemies he had slain. Behind him came the dead man’s sons, dressed and veiled in black, his daughters unveiled, his relatives, clansmen, friends, clients, and freedmen. In the Forum the procession stopped, and a son or kinsman pronounced a eulogy. Life was worth living, if only for such a funeral. In the early centuries Rome’s dead had been cremated; now, usually, they were buried, though some obstinate conservatives preferred combustion. In either case, the remains were placed in a tomb that became an altar of worship upon which pious descendants periodically placed some flowers and a little food. Here, as in Greece and the Far East, the stability of morals and society was secured by the worship of ancestors and by the belief that somewhere their spirits survived and watched. If they were very great and good, the dead, in Hellenized Roman mythology, passed to the Elysian Fields, or the Islands of the Blessed; nearly all, however, descended into the earth, to the shadowy realm of Orcus and Pluto. Pluto, the Roman form of the Greek god Hades, was armed with a mallet to stun the dead; Orcus (our ogre) was the monster who then devoured the corpse. Because Pluto was the most exalted of the underground deities, and because the earth was the ultimate source of wealth and often the repository of accumulated food and goods, he was worshiped also as the god of riches and plutocrats; and his wife Proserpina—the strayed daughter of Ceres—became the goddess of the germinating corn. Sometimes the Roman Hell was conceived as a place of punishment;72 in most cases it was pictured as the abode of half-formless shades that had been men, not distinguished from one another by reward or punishment, but all equally suffering eternal darkness and final anonymity. There at last, said Lucian, one would find democracy.73
I Hence the words augurs—bird carriers (aves-gero)— and auspices—bird inspection (aves-spicio). Primitive man may actually have learned to forecast weather through the movements of birds.
II Fasti consulares, libri magistratuum, annales maximi, fasti calendares.
III Some Roman measures: a modius was approximately a peck; a foot was 11 5/8 English inches; 5 Roman feet made a pace (passus); 1000 paces made a mile (milia passuum) of 1619 English yards; a iugerum was about 2/3 of an acre. Twelve ounces (unciae) made a pound.
IV In northern Italy, about 250 B.C., a bushel of wheat cost half a denarius (thirty cents); bed and board at an inn cost half an as (three cents) a day; 58 in Delos, in the second century B.C.., a house of medium type rented for four denarii ($2.40) a month; in Rome, A.D. 50, a cup and saucer cost half an as (three cents)
NOTES
1. Twelve Tables, iv, 1.
2. St. Augustine, City of God, vi, 9.
3. Horace, Satires, i, 8, 35; Müller-Lyer, F., Evolution of Modern Marriage, 55; Castiglione, 195; Howard, C., Sex Worship, 65, 79; Enc. Brit., 11th ed., XVII, 467; XXI, 345.
4. Pliny, xxviii, 19.
5. Livy, xxiii, 31.
6. Virgil, Georgics, ii, 419; Horace, Odes, i, 1.25.
7. Frazer, Magic Art, II, 190; the derivation is questioned by Fowler, W. W., Roman Festivals of the Republic, 99.
8. Virgil, Aeneid, vii, 761; Ovid, Fasti, vi, 753; Metamorphoses, xv, 497; Strabo, v, 3.12; Pliny, xxx, 12-13; Frazer, Magic Art, I, 11.
9. Boissier, G., La réligion romaine, I, 27.
10. Livy, v, 21-2; vi, 29; Coulanges, 199.
11. Ovid, Metam., xv, 626.
12. Livy, viii, 15; Lanciani, R., Ancient Rome, 143.
13. Fowler, W. W., Religious Experience of the Roman People, 337.
14. Mommsen, III, 11.
15. Cicero, Pro Archia, 4; Fowler, op. cit., 30. The derivation is not certain; Cicero gives another in De natura deorum, ii, 28.
16. Reinach, S., Apollo, 109.
17. Livy, vii, 5.
18. Pliny, xxviii, 10.
19. Harrison, J., Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 35.
20. Plautus, Curculio, 33-8.
21. Ovid, Fasti, iii, 523.
23. Howard, 66.
24. Athenaeus, xiv, 44.
25. Westermarck, E., Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, I, 430; Cicero, Pro Caelio, 20.
26. Brittain, A., Roman Women, 135-6.
27. Coulanges, 63.
28. Plutarch, “Numa and Lycurgus.”
29. Gellius, x, 23.
30. Abbott, F., Common People of Ancient Rome, 87.
31. Catullus, Poems, xxv.
32. Pliny, xxxiii, 16.
33. Fowler, W. W., Social Life at Rome, 50-1, 270.
34. Polybius, xxxi, 26.
35. Ibid., vi, 56.
36. Cf. Appian, vi, passim.
37. Polybius, vi, 58.
38. Plutarch, Quaestiones Romanae, 59.
39. Livy, iii, 38.
40. Heine, H., Memoirs, I, 12.
41. Thompson, Sir E., Greek and Latin Paleography, 5.
42. Schlegel, A. W., Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 202.
43. Livy, vii, 2; Bieber, N., History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 307.
44. In Duff, J., Literary History of Rome, 130.
45. Castiglione, 196.
46. Lanciani, R., Ancient Rome, 53.
47. Glover, T. R., Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, 13; Fried-lander, L., Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, III, 141.
48. Twelve Tables, x, 9.
49. Pliny, xxix, 6.
50. Frank, Economic Survey, I, 12; CAH, VII, 417; for the contrary cf. Mommsen, History, I, 193, 238.
51. Pliny, xviii, 3.
52. Virgil, Georgics, i, 299.
53. Guhl, E., and Koner, W., Life of the Greeks and Romans, 503.
54. Cato, de agri cultura, viii; Varro, Rerum rusticarum libri tres, pref.
55. Cicero, Letters, vii, 1.
56. Pliny, xxxiii, 13.
57. CAH, VIII, 345.
58. Mommsen, History, III, 75.
59. CAH, X, 395; Frank, Economic History of Rome, 340. For other comparative prices cf. ibid., 66.
60. Twelve Tables, viii, 18; Tacitus, Annals, vi, 16.
61. Livy, vii, 19-21, 42.
62. Paul-Louis, 118.
63. Frank, Economic History, 119; for a contrary view cf. Ward, C. O., The Ancient Lowly, 208-9.
64. Livy, viii, 12; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, ix, 43.
65. Mommsen, History, I, 248-9; Paul-Louis, 47.
66. 77% between 200 and 150 B.C.—Frank, Economic Survey, I, 146.
67. Ibid., 41; CAH, VIII, 344; Paul-Louis, 102; Mommsen, History, II, 55.
68. Pliny, xxxvi, 24.
69. Enc. Brit., XIX, 466.
70. Rickard, T., Man and Metals, I, 280.
71. Twelve Tables, x, 4.
72. E.g. in Plautus’ Captives, 998.
73. Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, xxv.
Written by Will Durant in "The Story of Civilization -Volume III- Caesar And Christus", Simon and Schuster, New York, USA, 1965, excerpts chapter IV. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be post by Leopoldo Costa.
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