LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Now that we have seen the Empire made comparatively secure by Augustus,
and set in the way of development on what seem to be rational
principles, let us pause and try to gain some idea of the social life
going on within it: excluding that of the city of Rome, which is no
longer of the old paramount importance. How did the inhabitants of the
Empire live and occupy themselves during the first two centuries of our
era?
The first point to make quite sure of is that this life was in the main
a life in towns. Roman policy had always favoured the maintenance of
existing towns, except in the very rare cases where they were deemed too
dangerous. Carthage and Corinth had been destroyed by Rome on this
pretext, but they had been founded afresh by Julius Cæsar, and were now
beginning a long and vigorous city life. In the East, where city-states
abounded, Rome retained and adorned them, or built new ones, as Pompey
did after crushing Mithradates and Tigranes. In the West, in Gaul and
Spain, where they did not exist at all, she founded some, and by a
wonderfully wise policy favoured the natural growth of others. The
people of these western provinces lived chiefly in some kind of
villages, scattered over a district which we may call a canton, often,
perhaps, as big as an English county of to-day. The Roman policy was
either to found a city to serve as the centre of the canton, and to
endow it with magistrates and senate on the Roman model: or to give the
canton its senate and magistrates, and leave it to develop its own
town-centre.
This policy shows extremely well the genius of Rome for civilising, or
Romanising, without destroying the grouping and the habits of the people
to be civilised, or Romanised. The old tribal (or cantonal) system
remained, and its officers were the chiefs of the old population; but
they now bore Roman names, _duoviri_, _quæstores_, and so on, and sat in
an assembly called _ordo_—i.e. senate. If a town were not founded at
once, in which the business of the canton could be carried on, it was
certain to grow of itself. A purely rural region, where the people live
in villages only, was contrary to Roman interests and traditions; it was
inconvenient for raising taxes, and it did not give those opportunities
of culture and amusement which the Roman looked for when he travelled or
settled in a province. The provincials, too, were in this way made more
happy and contented; town life greatly helped in civilising them,
attracting the better or richer people from the villages.
To help us in realising this urban character of Roman provincial life,
we may compare it with that of our fellow-subjects in India at the
present day. India is in the main a rural country, and by far the great
majority of its inhabitants live on the land and support themselves by
agriculture. Only about 30,000,000 live in towns, as against 235,000,000
in the rural districts, and the few great cities are rather industrial
and commercial centres than homes of culture and amusement. The economic
unit of India is the village, and this simple fact is enough to explain
why India never has been Anglicised. Instinctively the Romans perceived
that if a province were to be Romanised, the process could not be set
going in villages; and where there were only villages, they gave the
districts the opportunity of developing towns in their midst. The
opportunity, we may reasonably suppose, was rarely missed, for at all
times in their history the Romans had a wonderful power of making their
subjects eager to imitate their own institutions. Thus Spain, Gaul, and
even Britain, became rich in towns after the Roman model—towns which
served to humanise the people, while making them obedient subjects.
Let us now see, with the help of a few striking examples, how, by the
second century of our era, the Empire was covered with towns. For Italy
and Greece we do not need illustrations—we are already well aware of the
fact. But even far away in the East, in regions where the Greeks had
never settled, if the Romans came to stay they left cities behind them.
Look, for example, at a map of Syria or Palestine, and note the great
caravan route leading from Damascus southwards on the east side of the
Jordan, a road important to Rome because it carried the merchandise of
the Far East to Damascus and the Mediterranean by way of the Persian
Gulf and Petra. Before the traveller of to-day has gone far south from
Damascus he will come on the splendid ruins of two successive cities
built by the Romans in this period, Gerasa and Philadelphia, where the
sheep now graze among the ruins of temples, theatres, and baths. A
famous English traveller[15] wrote of them long ago that they enabled
him to form some conception of the grandeur and might of the Roman
Empire: “That cities so far removed from the capital, and built almost
in the desert, should have been adorned with so many splendid monuments,
afforded one of the most striking proofs of the marvellous energy and
splendid enterprise of that great people who had subjected the world.”
The mention of Damascus may remind us of a traveller of the first
century A.D. whose journeys are fortunately recorded and admirably
illustrate the fact that in Asia Minor and Greece the life of the people
was centred in the great cities. St. Paul went from city to city,
choosing by preference for his missionary work the most populous ones,
such as Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth and Athens.
Passing westwards, and leaving out of account the many cities of Egypt,
we shall find that what has been so far said holds good of the Roman
province of Africa. This province eventually became one of the most
highly cultured as well as populous, mainly owing to its numerous towns.
Of many of these the remains still astonish the traveller. A photograph
lies before me of one of them which still stands almost in the desert,
silent and abandoned, with temples, streets, and all the belongings of a
great city as perfect as at the excavated Pompeii, which was overwhelmed
in this period by the great eruption of Vesuvius. An inscription tells
us that Thamugadi was founded in the year A.D. 100, and built with the
help of a legion of Roman soldiers to guard civilisation against the
marauders of the desert. Another of these towns is a good example of the
way in which the army contributed to the policy of creating
town-centres; Lambæsis, now called Djebel-Aures, was the permanent
station of a military force, round which there grew up a civil
population of traders and camp-followers. Great roads, here as
everywhere in the Empire, connected these towns with each other and with
the capital of the province, in this case Carthage.
If we cross the sea from Africa to Gaul or Spain we shall find the same
process going on. Spain we must pass by; but in Gaul we land at the
ancient Greek city of Massilia, which, as Marseilles, is still the great
port of southern France. A little to the north, Nismes (Nemausus) was
formed into a city by Augustus out of a rural population; its vast Roman
amphitheatre and an exquisitely beautiful temple belong to the second
century, and still stand in the middle of the modern city. Lyons was
also founded by Augustus, as we saw in the last chapter, with a special
purpose. Farther north the cities on the great roads were gradually
formed, out of tribal populations living in villages, and many of them
still bear the names of those tribes: Paris is the town-centre of the
Parisii, Rheims of the Remisii, Soissons of the Suessiones, Trier of the
Treveri. This last city, on the Moselle, now a German one, can boast of
more imposing Roman work than any north of Italy, and is within
comparatively easy reach of visitors from our shores.
Britain, which was invaded and made a province in the reign of Claudius,
was never so fully Romanised as other provinces, partly owing to the
wild and stubborn nature of its inhabitants; but even in our midst the
Roman has left obvious traces of his belief in town life. London was a
trading centre before the coming of the Romans, and they maintained it
as such; but nearly all their other towns had a more directly military
origin and object. The oldest of them is Colchester, a military colony,
which still has its Roman walls. Then came St. Albans (Verulamium),
Gloucester, Chester, Lincoln and York, strategical points of importance,
where populous cities still stand. In a few cases towns have
disappeared, and have only been recovered by excavation, _e.g._ Calleva
(Silchester, near Basingstoke), the town-centre of the Atrebates; but
many of our country towns, besides those just mentioned, still stand on
ancient Roman sites, and even without much excavation have yielded
traces of their Roman inhabitants. One, and one only, Dorchester, still
boasts of a complete little amphitheatre, which stands just outside the
town between the Great Western and South Western railways, and has been
used by Mr. Thomas Hardy for a scene in one of his novels. All our towns
and villages of which the names contain the word _chester_ or _cester_
are Roman in origin, though they may not have been large cities like
Gloucester (Glevum); for _chester_ is only our English form of _castra_,
the Latin for a military encampment.
If it is now quite clear that the town is the unit of civilisation in
the Empire, what was the social and political life of the town? Of this
we know now much more than we used to do, for it is mirrored in the many
thousands of inscriptions from every Roman province, which have now at
last been collected and correctly published under the direction of the
famous Theodor Mommsen, whose name cannot be omitted entirely, even in
such an unpretending book about Rome as this. In records on stone there
is, indeed, something lacking that can only be supplied by literature,
which reports more elaborately and earnestly the thoughts and feelings
of men; and in the Empire, apart from Italy and Rome, there is but
little literature to help us out. But the inscriptions supply us with
the necessary facts.
First, of the political condition of these innumerable towns we may say
that it shows diversity in unity. There were several grades of privilege
among them. Some were nominally independent of the Roman government, and
in alliance with it, but these were few; Athens is the most famous
example. Others were communities of Roman citizens; and many had the
Latin right, _i.e._ inferior privilege. Lastly, there were great numbers
of cities—a majority of the whole number—whose inhabitants were not
Roman citizens at all, but directly under the control of the governor of
their province, who was limited in his authority over the more
privileged and independent towns. So much for diversity.
But all the cities were in reality governed and organised in much the
same way. In each there was a constitution closely resembling that of
Rome, and in most instances modelled directly upon it. As at Rome, they
had yearly elected magistrates, who, after holding office, passed into a
senate of advisers and councillors; and these magistrates were elected
by the _populus_, or the whole body of citizens. Here was plenty of
useful work to do, as we can guess from our own experience of local
self-government. Plutarch, writing in this period of his own little town
of Chæronea in Greece, realises this to the full, and urges that the
work of the magistrate is honourable work, and the more so as it is
combined with the sense of citizenship in a great empire.
There was, however, a tendency in these provincial towns, as in the city
of Rome itself, for the magistrate, who must be a man of substance, to
undertake the expense of amusing the people; a tendency to make the
people dependent on the rich for their comforts rather than on their own
industry and exertion. The magistrate, besides paying a large fee on his
accession to office, was expected to give public games, to feast the
people, or to give them a present of money all round. And he would wish,
too, to distinguish his magistracy by erecting some public buildings—a
bath, aqueduct, or theatre; or to endow a school. So it came to pass in
course of time that his burdens were heavier than he could bear, and
that the whole class to which he belonged, the senatorial one, was
involved in the same difficulties. This class could not be recruited
from the common people, who rarely had the means, or, indeed, the
energy, to rise to affluence; and the tendency as time went on was to
draw the line ever more sharply between the dignity of the various
classes. But the ruin of the senatorial class, or _curiales_, lies
outside our limits.
The lower class was engaged in industry, either on the land, or in the
town itself. This industry was not to any large extent employed by
capital, nor was it in competition with slave-labour, of which in
provincial towns we do not hear much. The members of the various trades
and callings worked on their own account, but were almost invariably
grouped together in gilds or associations, and these are one of the most
interesting features in the life of this period. Each of these gilds was
licensed, or should have been licensed, by the central government at
Rome—a good example of the way in which the long arm of that government
reached to every provincial town through the agency of the provincial
governor and his officials. Illegal association was a serious crime, and
this was one of the reasons why the small Christian communities were
looked on with suspicion by the government.
What was the object of these associations? The question has often been
asked whether they were in any sense provident societies like our
friendly societies, and, on the whole, the conclusion of investigators
has been that they were not. If we had more literature dealing with
provincial life, or such a correspondence as that of Cicero and his
friends, we could give a more certain answer.
But in one sense at least they may be called provident societies. All,
or nearly all, of them had as one main object the assurance of a proper
tomb and decent funeral for the members. This object can only be fully
appreciated after some real study of the social life and religion of
that and the preceding age, but when it is understood it is
inexpressibly touching. It would seem that the life of the working man
of that day was by no means an unhappy one, that he was not driven or
enslaved by an employer nor forced to live in grimy and unwholesome
surroundings. So far as we can tell he had little anxiety in this life,
and worshipped his gods, and performed his vows to them, with genuine
gratitude. But that he should be utterly neglected and forgotten after
death, thrown into some common grave to moulder away unnoticed, “where
no hand would bring the annual offering of wine and flowers”—this seems
to have been the shadow ever hanging over his life. We may doubt whether
the hope of immortality had, as a rule, anything to do with this
anxiety. It was rather an inherited instinct than a faith or creed that
moved these poor people. Originally it had been the desire not to have
to wander as a ghost for want of due burial; now it is rather the fear
that they might be forgotten by those left behind, or, indeed, by future
generations.
The instinct of association is common to man, and in a vast empire,
where the tendency was, and long had been, to obliterate the old social
grouping of kinship, real or supposed, it would be some consolation to
belong to a club of friends with common interests, accustomed to share
the joys and perils of life, and bent on decent burial when death should
overtake them. Even in this life they would meet from time to time to
eat, drink and enjoy themselves.
On the whole, we may conclude that this life of the towns was a happy
one, so long as the frontiers were well guarded and no sudden raid or
invasion by an enemy was likely; so long, too, as person and property
were securely protected under Roman law administered without corruption,
and amusements and conveniences were to be had for little or nothing.
But undoubtedly something was wanting; there was mischief in the social
system somewhere, though it was not easy to lay finger upon it. The sap
was running in the plant too feebly; there was a lack of keen industrial
energy and of the instinct of self-help. As time went on, the central
government grew too paternal, interfered too much in the life of these
towns, and so encouraged the tendency to “slackness.” And more and more,
as pressure came on the Empire from without, the play of life in these
once happy cities became an automatic movement of machinery, the central
wheel of which was the Cæsar at Rome.
Another aspect of the life of the provincial towns must be mentioned
here, which suggests that the trend of the time was not entirely
healthy. I said at the beginning of this book that the great monuments
left behind her by Rome were mainly of a useful and practical kind,
_e.g._ roads, aqueducts, places of business. This is true, but it is now
necessary to add that some of the most imposing of these fabrics were,
in the period we have now reached, entirely devoted to amusement, and
amusement of a kind neither educating nor humane. The taste had long
been growing at Rome for spectacles of bloodshed—combats of gladiators,
and the hunting of wild beasts in a confined space; and from Rome this
degraded taste passed only too rapidly into the provinces. Most large
provincial towns had their amphitheatre, in imitation of the huge one at
Rome, which we know as the Coliseum; and the more fully Romanised a
province was, the more of these homes of inhumanity were to be found in
it. The most magnificent one still standing outside Italy, that at
Nismes, dates, strange to say, from the mild and enlightened age of the
Antonines, to which we are coming in the next chapter. The Greeks,
indeed, never took much interest in such shows; but in the western
provinces, where the best and most virile populations of the Empire were
now to be found, their effect was beyond doubt pernicious, for they
encouraged not only inhumanity, but idleness. Day after day the greater
part of the population of a city might sit and watch lazily these bloody
entertainments, on which, perhaps, some wealthy citizen was wasting his
capital to his own ruin.
As may, perhaps, be said of ourselves in this present age, the Romans of
the Empire were being encouraged to live too much in the enjoyment of
the present, without anxiety for the future. So, too, the cultured
classes gradually came to look back at the past, to the great
achievements of Rome in war and literature, as all in all to them, and
lost the desire to strike out new lines, to make new discoveries, to try
new experiments. “Over all, to our eyes, there broods the shadow which
haunts the life that is nourished only by memories, and to which the
future sends no call and offers no promise.”[16]