Rome, page 10
Not all this water was used for drinking, cooking, and washing. Water also had a strong—indeed, essential—decorative and metaphorical aspect in ancient Rome, as it does today. Not every house had a garden, but many did, and those fortunate enough to have one needed a good supply of water for plants, pools, and, of course, fountains. The fountains of Rome, celebrated in numberless paintings and poems as well as in music—one thinks of the charming trills and tinklings of Respighi’s Le fontane di Roma—have always been a feature of the city and the culture it embodied. Because of the low water-pressure in the days before mechanical pumps, the “abounding glittering jet” that spells “fountain” to us today and was so magnificently choreographed by the likes of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the seventeenth century was not available in ancient Rome, but a lot of refreshment and relaxation could be had from trickling basins, ornamental pools, shallow waterfalls, and chasses d’eau—the most grandiose project of this kind being the celebrated Canopus in the garden of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli.
All this civic splendor, and much more, depended on a colonial empire which had grown from a small seed in Italy, at the mouth of the Tiber—Ostia, that vital port where the wealth of the growing empire came in and the administrative manpower went out, taken from its original inhabitants in Etruscan times. Now, at the turn of the millennium, its spread was prodigious. In Africa, Rome commanded the provinces of Numidia, Mauretania, Cyrenaica, and Africa Proconsularis. Its African possessions did not supply mineral wealth (that came largely from Spain), but they gave Rome huge supplies of grain and other foodstuffs and, as a bonus, supplied the wild animals for the shows in the arenas. Rome had all of Egypt. Its command of the Iberian Peninsula, modern Spain and Portugal, was divided between the provinces of Tarraconensis, Lusitania, and Baetica. It ruled Gaul (Lugdunensis, Narbonensis, Belgica) and Britain. It had—insecurely, at times—the frontier provinces of Germany and the lands along the natural frontier of the Danube, such as Dacia. It had annexed Greece (Macedonia, Achaea, and Thrace) and much of Asia Minor. Its farthest Eastern Provinces included Judaea, Syria, and Mesopotamia.
At its height, the Roman Empire included fifty to sixty million people—all under the absolute rule of one single man, all members of subject populations: citizens of Rome, but also other Italians; Europeans and Middle Easterners of all sorts, Gauls, Dacians, Armenians, Mesopotamians, Syrians, Africans, Egyptians; Britons, Spaniards, Germans, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. These formed a vast and bewilderingly complex mosaic of languages, histories, creeds, and customs, some willingly passive to Roman authority, most of them manageable by dint of colonial firmness, and a few—such as the ever-fractious Jews—continually at odds with the system that had taken them over. Some of these peoples had very little effect on the core culture of Rome. Others, notably Greece, not only influenced but transformed it. “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit,” wrote Horace, “et artes intulit agresti Latio”: “When Greece was taken she enslaved her rough conqueror, and introduced the arts to cloddish Latium.”
Almost as soon as he had emerged victoriously from the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.E., Augustus launched into an ambitious program to restore his city’s damaged prosperity. He took advantage of the long-term security of funds and work which his principate—the word given to his rule as Princeps or “First citizen,” a title Augustus had chosen to avoid the taint of absolutism or kingship—allowed. “Professing himself satisfied with the tribunician power for the protection of the plebs,” wrote Tacitus,
Augustus enticed the soldiers with gifts, the people with grain, and all men with the allurements of peace, and gradually grew in power, concentrating in his own hands the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. No one opposed him, for the most courageous had fallen in battle.… As for the remaining nobles, the readier they were for slavery, the higher they were raised in wealth and offices.
It was an essential part of Augustus’ political genius that, now and over the coming decades of his reign, he successfully maintained the illusion that he was not a dictator, just a savior, the man who had restored the Republic and its primal virtues by handing it back to the Senate, and thus to the people, of Rome.
But it was a fiction—a necessary one. Although Augustus created a charade of restoring the Republic, few Romans now remembered what it had once been. He had no intention of allowing republican chaos to seize the state again. He made a point of consulting the Senate, but the Senate reciprocally made a habit of never defying his will. He kept total command of the Roman army, and of the imperial provinces. He was also pontifex maximus, the supreme religious authority of the state.
Augustus was not a consistently great general, but he had his successes. The chief one was the annexation of Egypt as a Roman province in 30 B.C.E., which gave Rome an unfailing and inexhaustible supply of grain. His armies completed the conquest of Spain. He also had military failures, the worst of which was undoubtedly the destruction of three whole legions in an ambush in the Teutoburg Forest, on the north side of the Rhine. The leader of the German attack, Hermann or Arminius, was one of the geniuses of German military history, his name invoked by every German leader from Frederick the Great through Bismarck to (of course) Adolf Hitler. For a long time after, it is reported, Augustus would beat his head on the wall at night and beseech the gods, “Give me back my legions!”
But, win or lose, the loyalty of the Roman army was always sworn by oath, by each individual, to Augustus personally. He was their paymaster. Their commanding officers were chosen by him, and the head commanders of their campaigns were usually members of his family—Tiberius, Germanicus, or Agrippa. If the soldier lived long enough to complete his term of service (sixteen years, and later twenty), he would expect to be settled on a patch of arable land to complete his life as a farmer, and the matter of what land he received, and where, was decided by Augustus. He was, in short, the soldiers’ patron, and they were his clients: an arrangement wholly familiar from civilian life, but transferred with even more stringent bonds of obligation and discipline to the military.
For a few years after Actium, Octavian/Augustus shrewdly passed up the most obvious possibility raised by his victory—to declare himself dictator of Rome and its empire. In 28 or 27 B.C.E., he made a move that seemed to confirm that he was no dictator, but, rather, was acting as the savior of the Republic and its primal virtue, when he formally restored the supreme power to the Senate and people.
In a document titled the Res gestae (Things Done), whose most complete text is not in Rome but, strange to say, bilingually inscribed in stone on the wall of the Temple of Rome and Augustus in Ancyra (modern Ankara), in Galatia—the original was placed outside his mausoleum in Rome, but written on bronze pillars, so it was “recycled” by later thieves—Augustus set forth this as the first of what he considered the main achievements of his reign. “In my sixth and seventh consulships, after I had stamped out the civil wars, and at a time when by universal consent I was in absolute control of everything, I transferred the management of politics [res publica] to the discretion of the Senate and people of Rome. For this service I was given the name ‘Augustus’ by a decree of the Senate.”
This was merely a façade, though; his actual power was near absolute. There was no “permanent revolution,” no automatic retention of supreme power—but he was placed in charge of Gaul, Spain, Syria, and Egypt, where most of the legions were stationed, and he remained one of Rome’s two consuls, exercising consular imperium (either as consul or as proconsul) until his death. To make quite sure that he did not suffer Julius Caesar’s fate, he re-created a special elite unit, another Praetorian Guard, for his personal protection.
The bonds of deference and clientship did the rest. Moreover, they did so for a very long time. Just as England in 1900 had many citizens who had turned sixty without ever knowing any ruler but Queen Victoria, crowned in 1837, so at the time of Augustus’ death (14 C.E.) countless Roman citizens had never known any form of government other than the stable principate. The management of an empire without Augustus must have seemed to many people hard to imagine, almost a contradiction in terms.
Yet there are some things that not even the most inspired and determined leader can do, and one of the things he failed at—a vital part of his intentions—was his effort to restore ancient Roman virtues by means of legislation. “By new laws passed at my instigation, I brought back those practices of our ancestors that were passing away in our age.” He had the Senate pass sumptuary laws limiting extravagance and the gratuitous display of wealth, and he tried to restore what he saw as the diminished dignitas of the upper classes by cracking down on the frequency of divorce and adultery among them. He was no puritan, and his own family was certainly no model of virtue—for reasons lost to history, he felt obliged to banish his adopted son Agrippa Postumus (12 B.C.E.–14 C.E.) to the dull Mediterranean island of Planasia, where he was shortly murdered; in 2 B.C.E., he had banished his only daughter, Julia; in 8 C.E., his granddaughter, also named Julia, both for sexual immorality. Apparently, what irked Augustus particularly in his granddaughter’s conduct was that, in the course of a wild party, she placed a chaplet on the head of a statue of the satyr Marsyas,1 a gesture with pronounced sexual overtones. But Augustus’ attempt to legislate his subjects into virtue was, like most such efforts before or since, a failure.
It was also a small matter compared with his achievements. He re-created the Roman state and its power, refreshed it, and set a pattern of Roman rule that would last some five hundred years. No other statesman of antiquity could have made such a claim. And to the extent that he could set a compelling example through his own way of life, he did that, too. Augustus had none of the obtrusive vices of his successors. He believed in dignity but not pomposity; in ceremony, where necessary and within the limits proper to a chief priest, but not in Oriental showiness, even though he was regarded as a divine being, Divus Augustus. Nor was he given to luxurious display, despite his overwhelming wealth. Few later emperors—Claudius and Hadrian being among the exceptions—would show such an understanding of the difference between auctoritas (authoritative influence) and imperium (command from above).
Augustus was no glutton. He lived, and ate, with moderation. “He … preferred the food of the common people,” recalled Suetonius, “especially the coarser sort of bread, whitebait, fresh hand-pressed cheese … and would not wait for dinner, but ate anywhere.” In oratory, he loathed what he called “the stink of far-fetched phrases.” But he “gave all possible encouragement to intellectuals; he would politely and patiently attend readings not only of their poems and historical works, but of their speeches and dialogues; yet objected to being made the theme of any work unless the author were known as a serious and reputable writer.” He also possessed a dry sense of humor, if one is to believe some of the stories about him. He went to a courtier’s house for dinner and was served a poor, unelaborated meal. As he was taking his leave, he murmured, “I’d no idea I was such a close friend of yours.” Learning of the death of a Roman eques who (without anyone’s knowledge) had contracted debts of 20 million sesterces, Augustus sent an agent to the auction of the man’s property. There, he bought the man’s pillow for his personal use. Eyebrows were raised. But, the emperor explained, “The pillow on which he could rest with all those debts must be especially conducive to sleep.” And he could take a joke, or so it was said. Back in Rome after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, he was approached by a man who offered him, for twenty thousand sesterces, a tame raven that had learned to croak, “Hail, Caesar, victor, commander!” Augustus gave him the money, but then a friend of the bird’s owner told him that he had a second raven, which he had trained to say, just in case, “Hail, Antony, commander, victor!” The bird was produced. It did indeed hail Antony. Instead of taking offense, the emperor merely told him to split the money with the friend. He was whimsical with his presents, which might be gold plate or, just as easily, “lengths of goat-hair cloth, or sponges, or pokers, or tongs.”
At the top of the social tree, in this newly stabilized Rome, below the emperor himself, were the senators and their families. It was not in Augustus’ interest to lord it over them, since that would have diminished his pretense to be primus inter pares, first among equals, and increased the risk that disaffected citizens might see him as a king. The senators were traditionally very much an elite, and Augustus was careful to preserve that status for them—even though, under his rule, they had less and less to do. Particularly important for senatorial self-esteem were the magistracies, which they (and they alone) could hold. They were expected to set standards of dignity, and at times compelled by law to do so—no senator could marry an ex-slave, appear onstage as an actor, or (unthinkable liberty!) enter the arena as a gladiator. Property qualifications also existed: in practice, by Augustus’ time, there was no senatorship for men who owned less than a million sesterces.
Below the senators were the equites, or knights and squires. In earlier days of the Republic, they had been a cavalry force, hence relatively wealthy. This no longer applied, since under the later Republic and the Principate cavalry was supplied by Rome’s allied states. But one still needed to be quite rich—400,000 sesterces or more—to qualify as an eques.
Then came the plebs, or ordinary people—the majority of Roman citizens. Some were born free, but others were liberti or freedmen, former slaves who had been manumitted by their owners. No stigma attached to being a libertus, and none to the free children of slaves. On the contrary: it was a matter for congratulation. When the novelist Petronius depicted the freedman Trimalchio in the Satyricon flaunting his status, it was not with contempt, still less with hate: Trimalchio might indeed be vulgar, gross, and a bit of a thug, like a goodly portion of the citizens of the Upper East Side today, but he had made it into respectability, and who was going to rebuke a former slave for waving his cash around?
At the bottom of the Roman social order, one comes to the slaves, without whom the society as a whole could not possibly have functioned. Their legal status was simple. They were chattels, things, owned absolutely by their masters, who could buy and sell them as they pleased, and assign them to do any work they wanted.
The fact that slave labor was less efficient than free was well known to the Romans, because it was the first big thing a slave owner learned. Pliny, for instance, attributed the high food productivity of pre-imperial Rome to its reliance on free workers on farms, and its fall in his own time to the general use of slave labor. “In those days,” he wrote, more as a moralist than an economist,
…the lands were tilled by the hands of the very generals, the soil exulting beneath the plowshare crowned with wreaths of laurel and guided by a husbandman graced with triumphs.… But today these same lands are tilled by slaves whose legs are in chains, by the hands of malefactors and men with branded faces.… And we are surprised that the yields from the labor of workhouse slaves are not the same as from the honest toil of warriors!
Nevertheless, given the choice, what Roman was going to do without his or her slaves? Most slave owners had few, perhaps no more than one or two—just like most landowners in the slave South of America before the Civil War—but the slave populations of some upper capitalist families in Rome were truly impressive. The freedman Gaius Caecilius Isidorus, toward the end of the first century C.E., left 4,116 slaves when he died. More than a few Roman bigwigs owned 1,000 slaves, and the emperor might be served by as many as 20,000. But the statistics are unreliable, especially for the top end of slaveholding. It is conventionally supposed that about one person in three in imperial Rome was a slave.
What did they do? Just about everything. They served, performing an incredible number and variety of tasks and services, which rose almost to a madness of detail in the division of labor. Slaves worked as water carriers, valets, bricklayers, and litter bearers. Their rural equivalents pruned the vines, fed the pigs, sowed and harvested the wheat. They were secretaries, draftsmen, accountants, stone carvers, and teachers. The great man’s toilette would be taken care of by the bathing attendants (balneatores), the masseurs (aliptae), the hairdressers (ornatores), and the barbers (tonsores). His food would be prepared by pastry cooks (libarii), bakers (pistores), and other kinds of coquus or cook, and served up by the structores (majordomos), the dining-room attendants (triclinarii), the waiters who carried the dishes in (ministratores), and those who took them out again (analectae). Before any food was eaten by the owner, it would be tasted, just in case an enemy had reached the kitchen, by the praegustatores. At intervals in the parade of dishes, the emperor or aristocrat would be entertained by dancing girls (saltatrices), dwarfs (nani), and buffoons (moriones). If a slave was the body servant or the secretary of a master, that implied a certain trust, even closeness. It also meant, however, that the slave would be treated as one who had privileged information, which could lead to torture under interrogation.
The living conditions of domestic slaves in prominent households tended to be better than those of farm-labor slaves out in the country, though not always. But they were also unstable and came without guarantees. The law did not recognize that a slave could be punished by loss of status, for he or she had no status to lose. The master owned the slave’s body and could do as he pleased with it: flog it, fuck it, work it three-quarters to death. The law of deference and obedience (obsequium) was made of iron. On the other hand, a slave might sometimes receive a sum of money, known as the peculium, from his or her master; this might be saved, and eventually go toward buying manumission. But it was entirely gratuitous, and no slave had a right under law to such peculia.
