in the hands of the opposition, the intimate life of the city has been
still more distorted through being written for us by satirists. The
humorous or venomous descriptions of Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius
form our principal source of information, and Pliny, who gives us
a very different picture of tranquil and cultivated leisure or of
useful activity carried on in refined and elegant surroundings, has
commonly been regarded as a remarkable exception. Yet the material
remains are on the side of Pliny; and we owe a great debt to modern
writers, like Dr. Dill, who have been able to emphasise this point.
Romances such as those of Lytton, Melville, and Sienckewicz have
embroidered the theme of Juvenal, and everybody nowadays has his vision
of Imperial Rome based upon such fairy-tales. It is probably vain to
attempt a refutation of the popular view which pictures the Roman
of the Empire as exclusively spending his time in the amphitheatre
watching the lions devour the Christians, except when he was supping
on nightingales’ tongues from plates of gold. Moreover these things
are a not unimportant part of the truth. Imperial Rome remained as
bloody and brutal in its amusements as Republican Rome. In fact, as
the emperors were not only richer than the old senators, but also
much more carefully watched and bitterly lampooned, so the number of
wild beasts slain at a _venatio_ of Trajan exceeded the slaughters
exhibited by Pompeius. Doubtless the imperial epicure Apicius excelled
the republican glutton Lucullus in the variety of his menu, and the
lascivious entertainments of Petronius Arbiter and his master Nero
certainly dwarfed the attempts of Sulla. At heart it was the same Roman
People, enjoying the same stupid pleasures and violent sensations under
circumstances of greater magnificence and refinement. It was a society
founded on slavery, acknowledging no limits to the free indulgence of
pleasure. But one misconception must be combated. The whole imperial
period of five centuries should not be regarded as one slippery
Gadarene slope down which the Romans were hurrying to destruction.
Fashions came and went. Extravagance was at its height under Nero:
there was a reaction towards greater simplicity under Vespasian. Under
Trajan and Hadrian life was orderly and refined. Under M. Aurelius
philosophy was even more fashionable than vice. Nor was bloodshed
the only form of public enjoyment; the amphitheatres often presented
spectacles quite as inoffensive and much more splendid than our modern
hippodromes and circuses. Chariot-racing, in particular, though a good
deal more dangerous than the modern steeplechase, took its place along
with gladiators and beast-baiting as the popular sport, and the Romans
showed as much enthusiasm for Coryphæus and Hirpinus as we do for our
Ormondes and Persimmons. The charioteer Lacerna had as much vogue with
them as had Fred Archer with our fathers, and they took sides with
the Prasina Factio even more seriously than we do with Light or Dark
Blue oarsmen. The Romans had an inherited taste for blood. There were
philosophers who condemned gladiatorial shows, but the defence of the
ancient sportsman was similar to and perhaps not less true than the
modern fox-hunter’s excuse: the gladiators themselves enjoyed the fun
almost as much as the spectators.
On the whole, apart from its follies, material civilisation was
steadily advancing during the whole period at present under review.
In such matters as transit, public health, police, water-supply,
engineering, building, and so forth, Rome of the second century left
off pretty much where the reign of Queen Victoria was to resume. The
modern city of Rome is obtaining its drinking-water out of about three
of the nine great aqueducts which ministered to the imperial city. The
hot-air system which warms the hotels of modern Europe and America was
in general use in every comfortable villa of the first century A.D.
Education was more general and more accessible to the poor in A.D.
200 than in A.D. 1850. The siege artillery employed by Trajan was as
effective, probably, as the cannon of Vauban.
The city of Rome must have been a wonderful spectacle under the
emperors. One of our modern international exhibitions might faintly
recall a little of its splendours, with gilt and stucco for gold and
marble. Northward from the slope of the Aventine Hill there was a
succession of majestic public buildings, temple beyond temple, forum
beyond forum, as each of the great emperors had added to the work of
his predecessor and endeavoured to eclipse it. At your feet would be
the Circus Maximus, where the chariot-races were held, and behind it
the Palatine Hill crowded with palaces. To the east of it ran the
Triumphal Road passing through the Arch of
[Illustration: The Roman Forum in the early Empire]
Constantine to the Colossus of Nero and the mighty Flavian Amphitheatre
known to us as the Colosseum. From there the Sacred Way led north-west
through the Arch of Titus past the Temple of Venus and Rome and the
Basilica of Constantine to a series of stately _fora_, opening one
from the other and containing altars, columns, arches, statues, and
temples surrounded with shady colonnades, whose cloisters served
for business and pleasure. Above them on the west rose the ancient
Capitoline Hill crowned with its great Temple of Jupiter and immemorial
citadel. Picture these magnificent spaces filled with grave citizens
in their flowing white togas, hurrying slaves in their bright tunics,
visitors and barbarians from all corners of the earth, trousered
Gauls, skin-clad Sarmatians, mitred Parthians. Every now and then the
burly gladiators swagger through the crowd admired by every one, or a
procession of the shaven begging priests of Isis passes by with strange
cries and gestures. Perhaps the lictors come swinging down the hill
bidding every one make way for the slaves who carry the litter of the
emperor who is on his way to sacrifice. Or fancy the crowd in the Great
Amphitheatre, which held more than eighty thousand spectators, with
the purple and gold awnings spread to protect them from the blazing
sunshine, the auditorium perfumed with scents and cooled by fountains,
and the arena at their feet flooded with water to present a naval
combat. It is a city wrapped in profound peace, still dreaming amid its
splendours that it is the mistress of the world.
And these signs of magnificent material riches were not confined to
Rome. Alexandria would almost rival her. Asiatic towns like Ephesus
and Antioch presented a similar appearance of luxury and opulence.
In the north Lugudunum and even Londinium had a splendour of their
own. In Gades Spain had a handsome and highly civilised capital.
The Roman remains at Trier utterly dwarf the comfortable erections
of a prosperous modern town. Out in the desert at Palmyra[67] and
Ba’albek[68] there were rising into existence those huge buildings
which testify to the industry fostered by the provincial government of
the emperors. Along the sea-coast of Campania there were sea-fronts of
continuous villas whose marble fragments are still washed up in the
Bay of Naples. It tasks the imagination of genius to conjure up that
glowing world of the past out of the ruined foundations which remain.
Turner’s famous picture of Baiæ represents a successful attempt to do
so. Pompeii, wonderful as it is, was only a very small and obscure
country town. Yet it was lavishly provided with temples, baths,
theatre, and amphitheatre.
On the coast of North Africa, where nothing but man’s labour organised
under a good government is required to make the desert blossom as a
rose, there was a teeming population which prospered on agriculture.
Timgad (Thamugadi) was founded in the year 100 as a colony by Trajan,
and it was the head-quarters of the Third Legion. Here, in the blank
desert of to-day, the French explorers have revealed porticoes and
colonnades, a forum, a municipal senate-house, a theatre, a capitol,
rostra, a triumphal arch, baths, shrines, and temples, together
with the aqueduct and fountains which alone made all this splendour
possible.[69] For public munificence this age is unequalled in
history. It must have been a very powerful sense of patriotism which
compelled every rich man to devote so large a part of his fortune to
the embellishment of his native town. The benefactions of the modern
millionaire seem miserly in comparison. Pliny, who was not a very rich
man as wealth was accounted in his day, presented his native town
of Como with a library at a cost of nearly £9000, and maintained it
with an annual endowment of more than £800. He offered to contribute
one-third to the cost of a secondary school, and made the wise
provision that the parents of the boys should contribute the rest, in
order that they might feel an interest in the school and take pains
in the choice of suitable teachers. He gave nearly £5000 more for the
support of poor children. He bequeathed more than £4000 for public
baths and nearly £16,000 to his freedmen and for public feasts. And,
as Dr. Dill has pointed out, the inscriptions of every municipal town
prove that this princely generosity and patriotism were by no means
the exception. “There was in those days an immense civic ardour, an
almost passionate rivalry, to make the mother city a more pleasant and
a more splendid home.” Among the most princely of these benefactors was
the Athenian Professor of Rhetoric, Herodes Atticus, who added a new
quarter to Athens in the reign of Hadrian.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of life in the Roman Empire under
the good emperors of the second century is the growth of a lower class
with occupations and ideals of its own. We have already remarked that
the poor free Roman of republican days scarcely emerges into the
light except as a soldier. But now the inscriptions show us a happy
and industrious class of artisans and humble tradesmen, grading down
through the freedmen to the slaves, many of whom now lived and worked
under quite tolerable conditions of life. Especially noteworthy is the
social tendency of the day. Every occupation and craft was forming its
guilds or “collegia” about which the inscriptions give us full and most
interesting details. The collegia were not quite Friendly Societies,
and still less Trade Unions, though they undoubtedly claimed political
privileges and perhaps even made some attempt at collective bargaining
with the public. Sometimes they obtained exemption from taxation. They
dined together, they had their chapels and festivals, their colours and
processions. They had officers modelled on the old Roman magistracy,
with senators as committee and a quæstor as treasurer. They had their
list of patrons who were expected to earn the honour by generosity. In
the main they were burial clubs. Even slaves, and even gladiators, the
most despised of slaves, had their guilds and fraternities: of course
they were regulated by the state.
As yet, in spite of its growing centralisation and spirit of paternal
despotism, the Roman government was true to its ancient principle of
allowing full local autonomy. The municipal life of a small Campanian
town like Pompeii afforded scope for local ambition and a political
ardour to which the election posters and the inscriptions scratched
or scribbled on the walls bear eloquent witness.[70] Sometimes the
name of the candidate is written with the laconic addition _v. b._,
“a good man,” or it may be “Please make P. Furius duumvir, he’s a
good man.” But occasionally the commendations are more explicit: “a
most modest young man,” “he will look after the treasury,” “worthy of
public office,” and so forth. Sometimes a trade-guild supports its
candidate. Thus the liquor interest in politics is already noticeable
in A.D. 70. The humour of the opposition is seen in such a poster as
“the pickpockets request the election of Vatia as ædile.” And the
intrusion of the feminine element is to be observed in “_Claudium
IIvir. animula facit_” (“His little darling is working for Claudius as
duumvir”). The wit of the Pompeian wall-scribe was brighter, though
not always cleaner, than that of his modern counterpart. There is the
proud inscription “Restitutus has often deceived many girls,” but there
are also testimonies of conjugal affection like “Hirtia, the Dewdrop,
always and everywhere sends hearty greeting to C. Hostilius, the
Gnat, her husband, shepherd and gentle counsellor.” There is also an
interesting account from a bakery:
1 lb. of oil _6d._
straw _7½d._
hay _2s._
a day’s wages _7½d._
bran _9d._
a neck-wreath _4½d._
oil _9d._
We find advertisements like “Scaurus’s tunny jelly, Blossom Brand, put
up by Eutyches, slave of Scaurus.”
EDUCATION AND LITERATURE
A noticeable feature of the times was the wide diffusion of education.
Every one, it seems, could read and write, even the slaves, even the
humble British workman. Many a Pompeian schoolboy has scribbled a
line from Vergil, or Ovid, or Propertius. Many an adult has added
his or her original compositions. We have seen in the case of Pliny
how the rich men interested themselves in the foundation of schools,
both primary and secondary, for their native towns. In the Greek
world, as may be expected, education was most highly developed and
thoroughly graded from the elementary to the university stage. For
elementary schools the voluntary system was in vogue, but it was under
careful public supervision, and, as we have seen, the state undertook
the maintenance of poor children, girls as well as boys. In contrast
to the present day, the teachers were often held in high honour,
and many a public inscription testifies to the gratitude of a town
towards its schoolmasters. That they also received more substantial
recognition is proved by the fact that they were often able to leave
handsome benefactions themselves. They were elected, sometimes after an
examination or after giving specimen lessons, by the local education
committees, with religious ceremonies, and they took an oath of office
on entering upon their duties. They had their unions and associations
like other professions. In one inscription found in Callipolis, “The
young men and the lads and the boys and their teachers” unite to confer
a wreath of honour upon one of the mathematical masters. The teachers
seem to have been subject to annual election or re-election. There were
also visiting masters of special subjects. The Greek secondary school
tended to lay much stress upon athletics, but it gave more attention
to music and religion than similar institutions of to-day. Reading,
writing, and arithmetic together with music, dancing, and drill were
the staple subjects of the elementary school. “Rhetoric,” which meant
the study of literature on the technical side, as well as the practice
of declamations, was the main occupation in the high schools and the
universities. But philosophy, moral and physical, was also carefully
studied. University professors often rose to real affluence.
In the polite world of Rome, literature was extremely fashionable.
Everybody was writing and insisting upon reading his compositions to
his friends. These literary labours were often pursued with amazing
diligence. Both Pliny and his uncle devoted themselves to reading and
writing almost from morning to night, and Pliny the Younger tells how
he was laughed at for carrying his notebooks with him even when he was
out boar-hunting. By the time he was fourteen he had written a Greek
tragedy. His sketch of a day’s doings at his country villa shows the
literary perseverance of a Roman gentleman. He rose at six and began to
compose in his bedroom. Then he would summon his secretary to take down
the result from dictation. At ten or eleven he would continue his work
in some shady colonnade, or under the trees in the garden, after which
he drove out, still reading. “A short siesta, a walk, declamation in
Greek and Latin, after the habit of Cicero, gymnastic exercise, and the
bath, filled the space until dinner-time arrived.” Even during dinner
a book was read aloud and the evening was enlivened by acting or music
or conversation. Many of Pliny’s friends, such as Suetonius and Silius
Italicus, emulated this studious existence, and his uncle even excelled
it. The elder Pliny consulted two thousand volumes in the writing of
his Natural History alone, and he left one hundred and sixty volumes of
closely written notes and excerpts. Nor was this an unimportant circle
of literary bookworms. On the contrary, it was the highest society of
the day. The elder Pliny was on terms of daily intercourse with the
Emperor Vespasian, and the younger Pliny besides being governor of
Bithynia was intimate with Trajan.
At first sight we may find it strange that all this strenuous devotion
to study produced so little in the way of first-rate original
literature. It is of course customary to ascribe the decline--assuming
that it was a decline--of the Golden Age of Augustan literature into
the Silver Latin of Tacitus and Juvenal to the tyranny of emperors
like Tiberius and Nero. It is perfectly true that Tiberius made it
dangerous for senatorial historians to praise the murderers of a Cæsar.
But that is a ludicrously inadequate explanation for the eclipse of
literature. The experience of Vergil showed that it was possible for
a great loyalist to win fortune and glory amounting to idolisation.
The senators who wanted to continue their school declamations against
tyranny were certainly discouraged, but there was still plenty of room
for literary activity. The truth is, as we have seen, that Augustan
literature was not the work of a young Rome, but of an old and perhaps
already declining Græco-Roman culture. Again it was literary, not
political, causes which led to literary decline. Tacitus, who had for
his themes the conquest of Britain and the wars in Germany and the
East, the Siege of Jerusalem, the burning of Rome, the tragic Year of
the Four Emperors, the crimes and follies of Nero, and the development
of the great imperial system, complains of the lack of interest in the
history of his own times compared with those of the heroic past. The
tyranny that depressed literature was of its own making, the tyranny
of convention, classicism and erudition. To take poetry, though so
many noble writers were toying with the epic, they only produced the
pedantic _Thebaid_ of Statius, the weary _Argonauticon_ of Silius
Italicus, an imitation of an imitation of Homer, and the _Pharsalia_ of
Lucan, which, though it contains many a brilliant epigram and memorable
phrase, is to the majority of mankind almost unreadable. This is simply
because Lucan was consciously pursuing the path which Vergil had
pointed out and producing work which was the logical succession to the
style of the _Æneid_. The _Pharsalia_ is unmixed declamation, rhetoric
shouting at top pitch on page after page. Vergil had accomplished
the literary epic to perfection: to carry it any further in the same
direction was to incur tediousness. Above all, both Lucan and Silius
lacked the greatest of all Vergil’s gifts, his wonderful ear for verbal
music. Vergil, like Milton, presented his epic diluted for mortal
ears with music and human nature. It was not in the spirit that Lucan
failed. He admired the republican cause and Pompeius, its champion,
quite as sincerely as Vergil admired Augustus or Milton Cromwell. Thus
it was not politics, but the literary gift which caused his failure,
at least his failure to hold the ear of to-day. Past generations have
esteemed him high among the world’s poets. Dante owed not a little to
Lucan and Statius as well as to Vergil.
It was only in its lighter forms that poetry continued to make
progress. The _Silvæ_ of Statius, which were shorter occasional poems
in elegiac or lyric measures thrown off at odd moments with ease and
rapidity, are far more interesting than his frigid epic. Martial, the
Spanish writer of _vers de société_, has a pretty wit that is often
surprisingly modern in its tone. Certainly Juvenal towers over all
others who have attempted satire. Horace had been content with an easy
familiarity of tone which might wheedle a friend into the path of good
sense by poking fun at his follies. Juvenal thunders his denunciations
of wickedness with a moral heat which is surprising in an age often
accused of feebleness. He does, however, resemble Lucan in spoiling
some of his effects by want of light and shade, by a too-persistent
flow of rhetoric. He seems unable to distinguish between harmless
follies like playing the flute and real delinquencies like murdering
one’s mother. He clearly draws far too black a picture of the men and
morals of his day. But the pulpit from which he preaches is a high one.
If Juvenal is supreme over the poets of his time, Tacitus is as
clearly monarch of the prose-writers. He was continuing the work
of Livy and writing from the same republican standpoint. But for
history-writing he had certainly discovered a finer style of rhetoric.
Both are rhetoricians first and historians a long way after, but the
packed epigrams of Tacitus say more in a line than Livy is capable of
thinking in a chapter. In describing a battle, a riot, or a panic, or
in painting some tragic scene, such as the death of Vitellius, Tacitus
is unequalled. The freedom that was permitted to him and Suetonius
in depicting the crimes and follies of the earlier Cæsars affords
remarkable evidence of the freedom of letters under Nerva, Trajan, and
Hadrian. Here, again, it is necessary, as in the case of Juvenal, to
beware of accepting too literally the severity of his criticisms upon
the preceding generation. To praise the past at the expense of the
present was one of the traditions of Roman literature. But Tacitus was
the last of Rome’s great historians and his loss was irreparable.
All the erudition of the age added little to the real advance of
learning except in the domain of law. Industrious compilers like
Pliny the elder have preserved a great deal of ancient lore for
our study, but they are for the most part utterly uncritical and
unscientific. There were no scientific thinkers like Aristotle in the
Roman world. Still, some text-books which served the Middle Ages for
instruction were produced under the principate, such as Vitruvius
on architecture, Strabo and Pomponius Mela on geography, Columella
on agriculture, Quintilian on rhetoric, and Galen on medicine. The
latter was state-physician to Marcus Aurelius and was employed by him
to study and combat the terrible plague which the Roman army brought
back from the East. But for medical science he added little to his
Greek master Hippocrates. In just the same way, the philosophers came
no nearer to the core of reality than their masters of the fourth and
third centuries before Christ, hard though they toiled and much as
they spoke and wrote. They were indeed learning, what the old Greeks
had failed or scorned to learn, how to apply doctrines to life, but
in depth of thought they were so far behind that they ceased even
to be able to comprehend Aristotle. Even Philo, the profound and
learned Jewish philosopher, is doing little more than to attempt an
application of Platonic and other Greek ideas to the teaching of Moses.
Such originality as there was in the world of letters still proceeded
mainly from the provinces. Greece was still putting forth original
contributors to literature like the novelist Lucian, the biographer and
moralist Plutarch, Pausanias the guide-book writer, Dio Chrysostom and
Apollonius the preachers. Africa produced a novelist in the mysterious
quack-magician Apuleius. Spain sent forth a whole galaxy of talent in
the two Senecas, Martial, Lucan, and Quintilian. The younger Seneca,
Nero’s complacent tutor, is perhaps the most typical figure in the
literature of the principate. Trained as a rhetorician, like all the
men of his day, his literary work consists of rhetorical drama and
rhetorical philosophy, including some rhetorical science. No writer has
ever attained to such a position of wealth and honour by the exercise
of his pen. It cannot be said that Seneca’s position was gained
without defilement, or that it brought him happiness. He was largely
responsible by his weak compliance for the deterioration of character
in his imperial pupil. If so, it brought its own retribution, for Nero
drove him to suicide. Though Seneca’s tragedies are neglected to-day,
they formed the connecting-link between Euripides and the stage of the
Renaissance.