HUMANITARIAN MEASURES OF AUGUSTUS—LIFE IN THE
IMPERIAL CITY—FIRST ATTEMPTS OF THE STATE TO CHECK
INFANTICIDE—TRAJAN AND THE VELEIA LOAN—STOIC SPIRIT IN
PLINY’S CHARITY.
Astonishing depravity marked the last days of the Republic, to the
point where it was even said that annual divorces were as much the
fashion in Rome as voluntary celibacy.[335] Seneca says there were
women who reckoned their years by their husbands. In the severe,
early period of the Republic, celibacy was considered censurable and
even guilty,[336] whereas later it was not only condoned but wittily
approved, to judge by the quips of the dramatist, Plautus, whose
cynical references to marriage and the burden of a wife read not unlike
our own scoffing and immoral dramatists of the eighteenth century.[337]
Civil wars and proscriptions had left great voids in Roman families;
more prolific foreigners, freedmen, and slaves began to dominate the
noisy city now beginning to earn her title of Mistress of the World.
The visitor to Pompeii today, noting the large and heavy paving blocks,
the narrow sidewalks, the deep ruts made in these solid streets by
the heavy wagons, the open shops, the indecent signs, sees Rome in
miniature. All this cosmopolitan disorder marked the greater town that
had not twenty thousand inhabitants but a million; the noise and the
congestion increased out of all proportion to its size because of the
character of its dwellers, for Rome had a large foreign population.
As in modern New York or London, it was in the foreign quarters that
were found the discomforts, the loud misunderstandings, and the noisy,
tragic fights for small things.
The stranger arriving in Rome had hardly entered its gates when he was
being jostled and shoved. The narrow streets were filled with pedlars
calling their wares of all kinds, from matches (_sulphurata_), in
exchange for broken glass where money was scarce, to a dish of boiled
peas for an _as_, or fine smoking sausages for those who had more
money. Idlers filled the streets at all hours, but especially at the
lunch hour (the sixth) when business ceased and those who patronized
the cafés (_tabernæ_) were hurrying to get to their accustomed
tables.[338]
[Illustration: THE FINDING OF ROMULUS AND REMUS]
Around billboards (_programmata_) announcing new plays or
exhibitions, crowds gathered while other groups watched acrobats, who
beat themselves for the comic effects produced; dancers, jugglers,
snake charmers, and performers of every kind and nation abounded.
Heavily loaded wagons rumbled noisily along while their drivers cursed
and lashed the tired beasts of burden, or the appearance of a tamed
bear threw an entire street into wild and joyous confusion. Or perhaps
a new troupe of gladiators entered town, to the complete cessation
of all business and pastimes.[339] Here and there in the streets,
money-changers and others set up tables in convenient places where they
were least apt to be driven away, and hawked loudly the bargains that
they offered. Money from all the world was then flowing Romeward, and
in nothing was this shown more than in expensive funerals, with their
hired and vociferous mourners, blocking the streets and putting an
end for the time being, to other business—and amusements.[340] Narrow
as were the streets, they were made more so by the _tabernæ_, built
up against the houses, this practice becoming so much of a nuisance
(as in modern times) that the Emperor Domitian caused a decree to be
issued against them, forcing the owners to remove the encroachments and
confine themselves to the area of the house.[341]
A drunken man taking the entire _via_ in his navigation—to the
amusement of the crowd; a member of the city guard hurrying some
offender to the court; or, reclining in his _lectica_, a noble, carried
by six uniformed slaves, his other numerous attendants clearing the way
for him—all these added to the noise and confusion—while through it all
children crowded the curb with their games.
Such was the Rome that Augustus found, its proud citizens masters of
the world, luxurious, sensual, disdainful of the very idea of duty,
idling days away while they scoffed at marriage. But the foreigners,
the freedmen, and the slaves married, and when the burden of a new
child was too much for the small income made by amusing or serving
some Roman citizen, the little newcomer was thrown into the Tiber or
left unmarked on a busy thoroughfare. One of the first undertakings of
Augustus was to try to remedy these evil conditions by laws and fiscal
measures, his principal endeavour being to put an end to the corruption
of morals and the exhaustion of the legitimate population.
From the day of the battle of Actium (B. C. 31) when the Roman
world practically lay at his feet, Octavius, or Augustus as he was
afterward called, while gratifying his ambition in adding to his
power, studiously and ostentatiously observed the forms of popular
government. In this he was paying heed to the fate of his uncle and
also conciliating the people, though with every ingratiating move he
increased his power.
One of the first laws he proposed was the _lex Julia_ (_de maritandis
ordinibus_) which was rejected by the _comitia tributa_, B. C. 18, but
was adopted in A.D. 4. To this was added as a supplement the _lex
Papia Poppæa_, the two being known as the _lex Julia et Papia_ or as
_novæ leges_, or simply _leges_, the latter reference indicating that
they were referred to as the laws _par excellence_. Not only marriage,
but everything connected with it was treated in these two laws, which
really constituted a code, the most extensive after the laws of the
Twelve Tables.
These laws made a great impression on Roman society. How completely
customs had swung to extremes since the days of Romulus is shown in
this _lex Papia_, as Gaius calls it. Instead of securing the father in
his right over the life of children, as the stern head of the house who
might decide at will whether he should let his offspring live, the law
now decreed that it was through the children that he gained a status in
the community. Persons who were not married and had no children were
unable to inherit; the unmarried person not being able to take any part
of what had been left to him, and the married person without children
(_orbus_) being able to take only one half.[342] Among the provisions
of the _lex Julia_, or the _leges_, were those entitling that candidate
for office who had the greatest number of children to preference. Of
the two consuls it was decreed that he should be the senior whose
children were the most numerous; a relief from all personal taxes and
burdens was granted to citizens who had three children if they lived
in Rome, four if they lived in Italy, and five if they lived in the
provinces.
With the establishment of the _caduca_, by which there was instituted
a punishment for sterility and a reward for legitimate procreation, it
can be seen that there would follow some diminution in the number of
children exposed, though according to Tacitus,[343] “marriages and the
rearing of children did not become more frequent, so powerful are the
attractions of the childless state.”
By giving the people, or the common treasury, the benefit of the
clause forfeiting the inheritance on account of sterility, the law was
recognizing the _populus_ as the common father, a legal concept that is
becoming more and more the attitude of the twentieth century, and was
then first trenchantly expressed.
Suppressed in part by the constitution of Caracalla as to the
privileges of paternity to the claim upon the _caduca_, and by
Constantine as to the penalties for celibacy, these laws were not
completely and textually abrogated until Justinian. They were the
beginning, however, of the new movement; out of the degeneration and
degradation of the waning days of the Republic there had come at
least this forward step, though the patricians complained that these
provisions gave rise to despised informers and opportunities for
tyrannical misuse of power.
The child now had some other than a future use; it had an immediate
value. Occasionally, in times past, strangers had picked up children
exposed by their parents and had reared them as slaves, or maimed and
blinded them for the profession of begging. Augustus set aside a reward
of two thousand sesterces (about $40.00) for the person who would
rear an orphan. This was the seed of a growing humanity, the first
intimation of an inclination to treat children with kindness, though
it contrasts with Augustus’s own personal conduct when his anger was
aroused. Both his daughter and granddaughter were so profligate that
he banished them; when his granddaughter Julia was delivered of a
child after sentence, he ordered that the child be “neither owned as a
relative nor brought up.”[344]
From the death of Augustus, 14 A.D., to the reign of Nerva, 96 A.D.,
the violent sway of the army and the tragic fate of successive emperors
cloud the history of Roman law and progress.
The Emperor Claudius distinguished himself by ordering that Claudia, a
child by his first wife, “who was in truth the daughter of his freedman
Boter, be thrown naked at her mother’s door.”[345]
There were no successors to the great jurists of the type of Capito
and Labeo, whose opinions in Augustan days were accepted by even the
emperor himself. With the coming of Nerva there was a great change in
the attitude toward children. Despite a short reign of two years and
a reputation for a weak will, it was to his initiative that the State
owed the movement to put an end to the practice of abandoning infants,
by having the government subsidize poor parents.
Apparently there was no other way of stopping this ruinous custom in a
degenerate day. It was useless to appeal to the rich to rear families,
and the poor who were still producing children were becoming poorer.
One of Nerva’s noteworthy acts to alleviate conditions was the founding
of colonies, and it was in accordance with the same general plan that,
a few months before he died, he ordered that assistance should be given
parents who found themselves without the means of bringing up their
offspring.
This order was issued in the year 97, and so successful was the
experiment under his successor, who accepted and enlarged the plan,
that in the year 100, five thousand children were receiving aid from
the State. Much credit is given to Trajan for following up the ideas
of Nerva, but it was to Nerva that Rome owed Trajan, one of the most
humane of her emperors.
Another evidence of the humanity of Nerva was the fact that he
prohibited the making of eunuchs, a practice that had met with the
disfavour of the Emperor Domitian years before, and a practice that
led the Pope Clement XIV., to decree, centuries later, that no more
_castrats_ should sing in churches. And these things he did when the
extravagance of his predecessors had made it necessary for him to sell
the imperial furniture and jewels in order to replenish the treasury.
One of his coins shows him seated in the _curule_ chair, dispensing
charity to a boy and girl, the mother standing near, with the legend
“Tutela Italia.”
One need only to read the gentle replies of the Emperor Trajan to the
younger Pliny, to see that, in that reign at least, there was a great
change and that the conception of duty in the modern sense was creeping
into a military world. Pliny himself, in a letter to Cannius, describes
how he settled five hundred thousand sesterces (about $20,000) on the
city of Como for the maintenance of children, “who were born of good
families”—an act as traceable to the growing protective tendency as to
Pliny’s patriotism and love of glory.
According to the tablet of Velia[346] to the Emperor Trajan, the landed
proprietors of the place received on mortgage at five per cent.,[347]
less than half the usual rate of that time, what would be about $50,000
of our money, the interest of which was to go to the maintenance of
three hundred poor children.
The means employed to help parents and prevent them from exposing
their children were skilfully contrived. Through the municipality,
Trajan lent money to certain proprietors to improve their land, and the
interest paid on this loan constituted a benevolent fund by which the
children were taken care of, or rather, by which their parents were
rewarded for not murdering them. From the table of Velia we learn also
that fifty-one proprietors of that section received on land twelve
times the value of the loan, or 1,116,000 sesterces ($52,820) the
annual interest of which, 55,800 sesterces ($2,650), constituted a fund
for the support of three hundred children, two hundred and sixty-four
boys and thirty-six girls. The boys received annually 192 sesterces,
and the girls 144 sesterces. Illegitimate children were given less,
the boys 144 sesterces, and the girls 120 sesterces, although in the
tablet there were only two illegitimate children, one boy and one girl.
The fact that the number of girls assisted was only one-tenth the
number of boys, goes to show, that this new institution was not due so
much to the fact that the sentiment of charity had infiltrated through
pagan society, as to the fact that pagan society was endeavouring to
repair the ravages of degenerate and pauperistic days, shown in the
diminution of the class of freedmen in Rome.[348]
Writing to Pliny at Bithynia, to which place he had been sent by Trajan
as imperial legate, the Emperor mildly answers an inquiry as to what
the law shall be in that province regarding deserted children. Trajan
rules that deserted children, who are found and brought up, shall be
allowed their freedom without being obliged to repay the money expended
for their maintenance.
“The question concerning such children who were exposed by their
parents,” says Trajan, “and afterward preserved by others, and educated
in a state of servitude, though born free, has been frequently
discussed; but I do not find in the constitutions of the princes,
my predecessors, any general regulation upon this head extending to
all the provinces. There are, indeed, some rescripts of Domitian to
Avidius Niguinus and Armenius Brocchus, which ought to be observed; but
Bithynia is not comprehended in the provinces therein mentioned. I am
of opinion, therefore, that the claims of those who assert their right
of freedom upon this principle, should be allowed, without compelling
them to purchase their liberty by repaying the money advanced for their
maintenance.”[349]
A new note this, for in order to encourage the saving of children who
had been exposed, the custom had been rigidly followed that the person
who saved a child was able to regard it as his slave, without regard to
what its condition had been previous to exposure.
As shown in the correspondence of Pliny and Trajan, there is much
truth, in the contention that the Emperor shows up better than the
philosopher and poet.
The noteworthy thing about this remarkable exchange of letters is that
a new spirit is revealed. It is a living, working philosophy that we
discover, practical results of that philosophy bringing a kindlier
treatment of slaves, a greater respect for women, a more thoughtful
regard for the education of the young, and a gentler assistance of the
helpless and distressed.
True, Cicero, a century and a half before had preached doctrines
that paved the way, and for generations earlier there had been such
a kindlier spirit in the air. But not until now do we find a man of
Pliny’s dominating prominence, or nearness to power, suggesting that he
will pay a third of the expenses of the cost of founding a university
in his own town. His reason, he says, is to save youths from going to
Milan for their education and thereby getting away from the proper home
influences.
Tracing the thin thread of child progress through these livid days we
are brought in touch with the little known but better side of Roman
life; for despite the general debauchery of the upper classes and
the unwholesome pictures of Juvenal, there is evidence that there
were Roman families untouched by the general immorality where women
of the type of Marcia or Helvia, addressed in the letters of Seneca,
presided over homes in which there was an atmosphere of virtue and
self-restraint, and where tales of deeds of the Romans of the earlier
days still had their charm and their influence.