THE HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN, IN TOWN AND COUNTRY
We saw that the poorer classes in Rome were lodged in huge _insulae_,
and enjoyed nothing that can be called home life. The wealthy
families, on the other hand, lived in _domus_, i.e. separate
dwellings, accommodating only one family, often, even in the
Ciceronian period, of great magnificence. But even these great houses
hardly suggest a life such as that which we associate with the word
home. As Mr. Tucker has pointed out in the case of Athens,[375] the
warmer climates of Greece and Italy encouraged all classes to spend
much more of their time out of doors and in public places than we
do; and the rapid growth of convenient public buildings, porticoes,
basilicas, baths, and so on, is one of the most striking features in
the history of the city during the last two centuries B.C. Augustus,
part of whose policy it was to make the city population comfortable
and contented, carried this tendency still further, and under the
Empire the town house played quite a subordinate part in Roman
social life. The best way to realise this out-of-door life, lazy and
sociable, of the Augustan age, is to read the first book of Ovid's
_Ars Amatoria_,--a fascinating picture of a beautiful city and its
pleasure-loving inhabitants. But with the Augustan age we are not here
concerned.
Yet the Roman house, like the Italian house in general, was in origin
and essence really a home. The family was the basis of society, and by
the family we must understand not only the head of the house with
his wife, children, and slaves, but also the divine beings who dwelt
there. As the State comprised both human and divine inhabitants, so
also did the house, which was indeed the germ and type of the State.
Thus the house was in those early times not less but even more than a
house is for us, for in it was concentrated all that was dear to
the family, all that was essential to its life, both natural and
supernatural. And the two--the natural and supernatural--were not
distinct from each other, but associated, in fact almost identical;
the hearth-fire was the dwelling of Vesta, the spirit of the flame;
the Penates were the spirits of the stores on which the family
subsisted, and dwelt in the store-cupboard or larder; the
paterfamilias had himself a supernatural side, in the shape of his
Genius; and the Lar familiaris was the protecting spirit of the
farmland, who had found his way into the house in course of time,
perhaps with the slave labourers, who always had a share in his
worship.[376]
It would probably be unjust to the Roman of the late Republic to
assume that this beautiful idea of the common life of the human and
divine beings in a house was entirely ignored or forgotten by him. No
doubt the reality of the belief had vanished; it could not be said of
the city family, as Ovid, said of the farm-folk:[377]
ante focos olim scamnis considere longis
mos erat _et mensae credere adesse deos_.
The great noble or banker of Cicero's day could no longer honestly
say that he believed in the real presence of his family deities; the
kernel of the old feeling had shrunk away under the influence of Greek
philosophy and of new interests in life, new objects and ambitions.
But the shell remained, and in some families, or in moments of anxiety
and emotion, even the old feeling of _religio_ may have returned.
Cicero is appealing to a common sentiment, in a passage already
once quoted (_de Domo_, 109), when he insists on the real religious
character of a house: "his arae sunt, his foci, his di penates: his
sacra, religiones, caerimoniae continentur." And this was in the heart
of the city; in the country-house there was doubtless more leisure and
opportunity for such feeling. In the second century B.C. old Cato had
described the paterfamilias, on his arrival at his farm from the
city, saluting the Lar familiaris before he goes about his round of
inspection; and even Horace hardly shows a trace of the agnostic when
he pictures the slaves of the farm, and the master with them, sitting
at their meal in front of the image of the Lar[378]. We may perhaps
guess that with the renewal of the love of country life, and with
that revival of the cultivation of the vine and olive, and indeed of
husbandry in general, which is recognisable as a feature of the last
years of the Republic, and which is known to us from Varro's work
on farming, and from Virgil's _Georgics_, the old religion of the
household gained a new life.
It is not necessary here to give any detailed account of the shape
and divisions of a Roman house of the city; full and excellent
descriptions may be found in Middleton's article "Domus" in the
_Dictionary of Antiquities_, and in Lanciani's _Ruins and Excavations
of Ancient Rome_; and to these should be added Mau's work on Pompeii,
where the houses were of a Roman rather than a Greek type. What we are
concerned with is the house as a home or a centre of life, and it is
only in this aspect of it that we shall discuss it here.
The oldest Italian dwelling was a mere wigwam with a hearth in the
middle of the floor, and a hole at the top to let the smoke out. But
the house of historical times was rectangular, with one central room
or hall, in which was concentrated the whole indoor life of the
family, the whole meaning and purpose of the dwelling. Here the human
and divine inhabitants originally lived together. Here was the hearth,
"the natural altar of the dwelling-room of man," as Aust beautifully
expresses it;[379] this was the seat of Vesta, and behind it was the
_penus_ or store-closet, the seat of the Penates; thus Vesta and the
Penates are in the most genuine sense the protecting and nourishing
deities of the household. Here, too, was the Lar of the familia with
his little altar, behind the entrance, and here was the _lectus
genialis_,[380] and the Genius of the paterfamilias. As you looked
into the atrium, after passing the _vestibulum_ or space between
street and doorway, and the _ostium_ or doorway with its _janua_, you
saw in front of you the impluvium, into which the rainwater fell from
the _compluvium_, i.e. the square opening in the roof with sloping
sides; on either side were recesses (_alae_), which, if the family
were noble, contained the images of the ancestors. Opposite you was
another recess, the _tablinum_, opening probably into a little garden;
here in the warm weather the family might take their meals.
This is the atrium of the old Roman house, and to understand that
house nothing more is needed. And indeed architecturally, the atrium
never lost its significance as the centre of the house; it is to the
house as the choir is to a cathedral.[381] And it is easy to see how
naturally it could develop into a much more complicated but convenient
dwelling; for example, the alae could be extended to form separate
chambers or sleeping-rooms, the tablinum could be made into a
permanent dining-room, or such rooms could be opened out on either
side of it. A second story could be added, and in the city, where
space was valuable, this was usually the case. The garden could be
converted, after the Greek fashion, and under a Greek name, into a
_peristylium_, i.e. an open court with a pretty colonnade round it,
and if there were space enough, you might add at the rear of this
again an _exedra_, or an _oecus_, i.e. open saloons convenient for
many purposes. Thus the house came to be practically divided into two
parts, the atrium with its belongings, i.e. the Roman part, and the
peristylium with its developments, forming the Greek part; and the
house reflects the composite character of Roman life in its later
period, just as do Roman literature and Roman art. The Roman part was
retained for reception rooms, and the Lar, the Penates, and Vesta,
with their respective seats, retired into the new apartments for
privacy. When the usual crowd of morning callers came to wait upon a
great man, they would not as a rule penetrate farther than the atrium,
and there he might keep them waiting as long as he pleased. The Greek
part of the house, the peristylium and its belongings, was reserved
for his family and his most intimate friends. In Pompeii, which was an
old Greek town with Roman life and habits superadded, we find atrium
and peristylium both together as early as the second century B.C.[382]
At what period exactly the house of the noble in Rome began thus to
develop is not so certain. But by the time of Cicero every good domus
had without doubt its private apartments at the rear, varying in shape
and size according to the ground on which the house stood.[383]
The accompanying plan will give a sufficiently clear idea of the
development of the domus from the atrium, and its consequent division
into two parts; it is that of "the house of the silver wedding" at
Pompeii.
[Illustration: PLAN OF THE HOUSE OF THE SILVER WEDDING. From Mau's
_Pompeii_.]
But in spite of all the convenience and comfort of the fully developed
dwelling of the rich man at Rome, there was much to make him sigh for
a quieter life than he could enjoy in the noisy city. He might
indeed, if he could afford it, remove outside the walls to a "domus
suburbana," on one of the roads leading out of Rome, or on the hill
looking down on the Campus Martius, like the house of Sallust the
historian, with its splendid gardens, which still in part exists in
the dip between the Quirinal and the Pincian hills.[384] But nowhere
within three miles or more of Rome could a man lose his sense of being
in a town, or escape from the smoke, the noise, the excitement of the
streets. After what has been said in previous chapters, the
crowd in the Forum and its adjuncts can be left to the reader's
imagination; but if he wishes to stimulate it, let him look
at the seventh chapter of Cicero's speech for Plancius, where
the orator makes use of the jostling in the Forum as an
illustration so familiar that none can fail to understand it.[385] A
relief, of which a figure is given in Burn's _Roman Literature and
Roman Art_, p. 79, gives a good idea of the close crowding, though no
doubt it was habitual with Roman artists to overcrowd their scenes
with human figures. Even as early as the first Punic war a lady could
complain of the crowded state of the Forum, and, with the grim humour
peculiar to Romans, could declare that her brother, who had just lost
a great number of Roman lives in a defeat by the Carthaginians, ought
to be in command of another fleet in order to relieve the city of more
of its surplus population. What then must the Forum have been two
centuries later, when half the business of the Empire was daily
transacted there! And even outside the walls the trouble did not
cease; all night long the wagons were rolling into the city, which
were not allowed in the day-time, at any rate after Caesar's municipal
law of 46 B.C. Like the motors of to-day, one might imagine that their
noise would depreciate the value of houses on the great roads. The
callers and clients would be here of a morning, as in the house within
the walls; the bore might be met not only in the Via Sacra, like
Horace's immortal friend, but wherever the stream of life hurried with
its busy eddies[386]. Lucilius drew a graphic picture of this feverish
life, which is fortunately preserved; it refers of course to a time
before Cicero's birth (Fragm. 9, Baehrens):
nunc vero a mani ad noctem, festo atque profesto,
totus item pariter populus, plebesque patresque,
iactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam:
uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti,
verba dare ut oaute possint, pugnare dolose:
blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se:
insidias facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes.
That this exciting social atmosphere, with its jostling and
over-reaching in the Forum, and its callers and dinner-parties in the
house, had some sinister influence on men's tempers and nerves, there
can be no doubt. Cicero dearly loved the life of the city, but he paid
for it by a sensibility which is constantly apparent in his letters,
and diminished his value as a statesman. When he wrote from Cilicia to
his more youthful friend Caelius, urging him to stick to the city, in
words that are almost pathetic, it never occurred to him that he was
prescribing exactly that course of treatment which had done himself
much damage[387]. The clear sight and strong nerve of Caesar, as
compared with so many of his contemporaries, was doubtless largely due
to the fact that between 70 and 50 B.C., i.e. in the prime of life, he
spent some twelve of the twenty years in the fresher air of Spain and
Gaul. Some men were fairly worn out with dissipation and the resulting
ennui, and could get no relief even in a country villa. Lucretius has
drawn a wonderful picture of such an unfortunate, who hurries from
Rome into the country, and finding himself bored there almost as soon
as he arrives, orders out his carriage to return to the city. To fill
oneself with good things, yet never to be satisfied (explere bonis
rebus, satiareque nunquam), was even for the true Epicurean a most
dismal fate.[388]
But there was at this time, and had been for many generations, a
genuine desire to escape at times from town to country; and Cicero, in
spite of his pathetic exhortation to Caelius, was himself a keen
lover of the ease and leisure which he could find only in his
country-houses. The first great Roman of whom we know that he had a
rural villa, not only or chiefly for farming purposes, but as a refuge
from the city and its tumult, was Scipio Africanus the elder. His
villa at Liternum on the Campanian coast is described by Seneca in his
86th epistle; it was small, and without the comforts and conveniences
of the later country-house; but its real significance lies not so much
in the increasing wealth that could make a residence possible without
a farm attached to it, but in the growing sense of individuality that
made men wish for such a retreat. There are other signs that Scipio
was a man of strong personality, unlike the typical Roman of his day;
he put a value upon his own thoughts and habits, apart from his duty
to the State, and retired to Liternum to indulge them. The younger
Scipio too (Aemilianus), though no blood-relation of his, had the same
instinct, but in his case it was rather the desire for leisure and
relaxation,--the same love of a real holiday that we all know so well
in our modern life. "Leisure," says Cicero, is not "contentio animi
sed relaxatio"; and in a charming passage he goes on to describe
Scipio and Laelius gathering shells on the sea-shore, and becoming
boys again (repuerascere).[389] This desire for ease and relaxation,
for the chance of being for a while your true self,--a self worth
something apart from its existence as a citizen, is apparent in the
Roman of Cicero's day, and still more in the hard-working functionary
of the Empire. Twice in his life the morbid emperor Tiberius shrank
from the eyes of men, once at Rhodes and afterwards at Capreae,--a
melancholy recluse worn out by hard work.
Everyman had to provide his own "health resort" in those days: there
was nothing to correspond to the modern hotel. Even at the great
luxurious watering-places on the Campanian coast, Baiae and Bauli, the
houses, so far as we know, were all private residences.[390] I do not
propose to include in this chapter any account of these centres of
luxury and vice, which were far indeed from giving any rest or relief
to the weary Roman; the society of Baiae was the centre of scandal and
gossip, where a woman like Clodia, the Lesbia of Catullus, could live
in wickedness before the eyes of all men.[391] Let us turn to a more
agreeable subject, and illustrate the country-house and the country
life of the last age of the Republic by a rapid visit to Cicero's
own villas. This has fortunately been made easy for us by the very
delightful work of Professor O.E. Schmidt, whose genuine enthusiasm
for Cicero took him in person to all these sites, and inspired him to
write of them most felicitously.[392]
There being no hotels, among which the change-loving Roman of Cicero's
day could pick and choose a retreat for a holiday, he would buy a site
for a villa first in one place, then in another, or purchase one ready
built, or transform an old farm-house of his own into a residence with
"modern requirements." In choosing his sites he would naturally look
southwards, and find what he sought for either in the choicer parts of
Latium, among the hills and woods of the Mons Albanus and Tusculum,
or in the rich Campanian land, the paradise of the lazy Roman; in the
latter case, he would like to be close to the sea on that delicious
coast, and even in Latium there were spots where, like Scipio and
Laelius, he might wander on the sea-shore. All this country to the
south was beginning to be covered with luxurious and convenient
houses; in the colder and mountainous parts of central Italy the villa
was still the farm-house of the older useful type, of which the object
was the cultivation of olive and vine, now coming into fashion, as
we have already seen. For Cicero and his friends the word _villa_ no
longer suggested farming, as it invariably did for the old Roman, and
as we find it in Cato's treatise on agriculture; it meant gardens,
libraries, baths, and collections of works of art, with plenty of
convenient rooms for study or entertainment. Sometimes the garden
might be extended into a park, with fishponds and great abundance of
game; Hortensius had such a park near Laurentum, fifty jugera enclosed
in a ring-fence, and full of wild beasts of all sorts and kinds. Varro
tells us that the great orator would take his guests to a seat on an
eminence in this park, and summon his "Orpheus" thither to sing and
play: at the sound of the music a multitude of stags, boars, and other
animals would make their appearance--having doubtless been trained
to do so by expectation of food prepared for them.[393] Such was the
taste of the great master of "Asiatic" eloquence. We are reminded of
the fairy tale of the Emperor of China and the mechanical nightingale.
His great rival in oratory had simpler tastes, in his country life as
in his rhetoric. Cicero had no villa of the vulgar kind of luxury; he
preferred to own several of moderate comfort rather than one or two of
such magnificence. He had in all six, besides one or two properties
which were bought for some special temporary object; and it is
interesting to see what relation these houses had to his life and
habits. At no point could he afford to be very far from Rome, or from
a main road which would take him there easily. The accompanying little
map will show that all his villas lay on or near to one or other of
the two great roads that led southwards from the capital. The via
Latina would take him in an hour or two to Tusculum, where, since
the death of Catulus in 68, he owned the villa of that excellent
aristocrat.[394] The site of the villa cannot be determined with
certainty, but Schmidt gives good reasons for believing that it was
where we used formerly to place it, on the slope of the hill above
Frascati. That it really stood there, and not in the hollow by
Grottaferrata,[395] we would willingly believe, for no one who
has ever been there can possibly forget the glorious view or the
refreshing air of those flowery slopes. No wonder the owner was fond
of it. He tells Atticus, when he first came into possession of it,
that he found rest there from all troubles and toils (_ad Att._ i. 5.
7.), and again that he is so delighted with it that when he gets
there he is delighted with himself too (_ad Att._ i. 6). Much of his
literary work was done here, and he had the great advantage of
being close to the splendid library of Lucullus' neighbouring
villa, which was always open to him.[396] At Tusculum he spent
many a happy day, until his beloved daughter died there in 45,
after which he would not go there for some time; but he got the better
of this sorrow, and loved the place to the end of his life.
[Illustration: MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE POSITION OF CICERO'S VILLAS.]
If this villa was where we hope it was, the great road passed at no
great distance from it, in the valley between Tusculum and the Mons
Albanus; and by following this for some fifty miles to the south-east
through Latium, Cicero would strike the river Liris not far from
Fregellae, and leaving the road there, would soon arrive at his native
place Arpinum, and his ancestral property. For this old home he always
had the warmest affection; of no other does he write in language
showing so clearly that his heart could be moved by natural beauty,
especially when combined with the tender associations of his
boyhood[397]. In the charming introduction to the second book of
his work _de Legibus_ (on the Constitution), he dwells with genuine
delight on this feeling and these associations; and there too we get
a hint of what Dr. Schmidt tells us is the peculiar charm of the
spot,--the presence and the sound of water; for if he is right, the
villa was placed between two arms of the limpid little river Fibrenus,
which here makes a delta as it joins the larger Liris[398].
But of this house we know for certain neither the site nor the
plan,--not so much indeed as we know about a villa of the brother
Quintus, not far away, the building of which is described with such
exactness in a letter written to the absent owner[399], that Schmidt
thinks himself justified in applying it by analogy to the villa of
the elder brother. But such reasoning is hardly safe. What we do know
about the old house is that it was originally a true villa rustica,--a
house with land cultivated by the owner that Cicero's father, who had
weak health and literary tastes, had added to it considerably, and
that Cicero himself had made it into a comfortable country residence,
with all necessary conveniences. He did not farm the ancestral land
attached to it, either himself or by a bailiff, but let it in small
holdings[400] (praediola), and we could wish that he had told us
something of his tenants and what they did with the land. It was not,
therefore, a real farm-house, but a farm-house made into a pleasant
residence, like so many manor-houses still to be seen in England.
Its atrium had no doubt retired (so to speak) into the rear of the
building, and had become a kitchen, and you entered, as in most
country-houses of this period, through a vestibule directly into a
peristyle: some idea of such an arrangement may be gained from the
accompanying ground-plan of the villa of Diomedes just outside
Pompeii, which was a city house adapted to rural conditions (villa
pseudurbana).[401]
If Cicero wished to leave Arpinum for one of his villas on the
Campanian coast, he would simply have to follow the valley of the
Liris until it reached the sea between Minturnae and Formiae, and at
the latter place, a lively little town with charming views over the
sea, close to the modern Gaeta, he would find another house of his
own,--the next he added to his possessions after he inherited Arpinum.
Formiae was a very convenient spot; it lay on the via Appia, and was
thus in direct communication both with Rome and the bay of Naples,
either by land or sea. When Cicero is not resting, but on the move or
expecting to be disturbed, he is often to be found at Formiae, as in
the critical mid-winter of 50-49 B.C.; and here at the end of March
49 he had his famous interview with Caesar, who urged him in vain to
accompany him to Rome. Here he spent the last weary days of his life,
and here he was murdered by Antony's ruffians on December 7, 43.
[Illustration: PLAN OF THE VILLA OF DIOMEDES. From Man's _Pompeii_.]
This villa was in or close to the little town, and therefore did not
give him the quiet he liked to have for literary work. It would seem
that the _bore_ existed elsewhere than at Rome; for in a short letter
written from Formiae in April 59, he tells Atticus of his troubles
of this kind: "As to literary work, it is impossible! My house is a
basilica rather than a villa, owing to the crowds of visitors from
Formiae ... C. Arrius is my next door neighbour, or rather he almost
lives in my house, and even declares that his reason for not going to
Rome is that he may spend whole days with me here philosophising. And
then, if you please, on the other flank is Sebosus, that friend of
Catulus! Which way am I to turn? I declare that I would go at once to
Arpinum, if this were not the most, convenient place to await your
visit: but I will only wait till May 6: you see what bores are
pestering my poor ears."[402]
But his Campanian villas would be almost as easy to reach as Arpinum,
if he wished to escape from Formiae and its bores. To the nearest of
these, the one at or near Cumae, it was only about forty miles' drive
along the coast road, past Minturnae, Sinuessa, and Volturnum, all
familiar halting-places. Of this "Cumanum," however, we know very
little: that volcanic region has undergone such changes that we
cannot recover the site, and its owner never seems to have felt any
particular attachment to it. It was in fact too near Baiae and Bauli
to suit a quiet literary man; the great nobles in their vast luxurious
palaces were too close at hand for a _novus homo_ to be perfectly
at his ease there. Yet near the end of his life Cicero added to
his possessions another property in this neighbourhood, at or near
Puteoli, which was now fast becoming a city of great importance; but
this can be explained by the fact that a banker of Puteoli named
Cluvius, an old friend of his, had just died and divided his property
by will between Caesar and Cicero,--truly a tremendous will! Cicero
seems to have purchased Caesar's share, and to have looked on the
property as a good investment. He began to build a villa here, but had
little chance of using it. It may have been here that he entertained
Caesar and his retinue at the end of the year 45,[403] as described by
him in the famous letter of December 21 (_ad Att_. xiii. 52); when two
thousand men had somehow to be provided for, and in spite of literary
conversation, Cicero could write that his guest was not exactly one
whom you would be in a hurry to see again.
Across the bay, and just within view from the higher ground between
Baiae and Cumae, lay the little town of Pompeii, under the sleeping
Vesuvius. Here, probably just outside the town, Cicero had a villa of
which he seems to have been really fond, and the society of a quiet
and gentle friend, M. Marius. Whether we can find the remains of this
villa among the excavations of Pompeii is very doubtful: but our
excellent guide Schmidt assures us that he has good reason for
believing that one particular house, just outside the city on the left
side of the road in front of the Porta Herculanea, which has for no
very convincing reason ever since its excavation in 1763 been called
the Villa di Cicerone, really is the house we wish it to be. But alas!
an honest man must confess that the identification wants certainty,
and the chance of finding any object or inscription which may confirm
it is now very small.
If Cicero were summoned suddenly back to Rome for business, forensic
or political, he would hasten first to Formiae and sleep there, and
thence hurry, by the via Appia and the route so well known to us
from Horace's journey to Brundisium, to another house in the little
sea-coast town of Antium. This was his nearest seaside residence, and
he often used it when unable to go far from Rome. After the death of
his daughter in 45 he seems to have sold this house to Lepidus, and,
unable to stay at Tusculum, where she died, he bought a small villa
on a little islet called Astura, on the very edge of the Pomptine
marshes, and in that melancholy and unwholesome neighbourhood he
passed whole days in the woods giving way to his grief. Yet it was
a "locus amoenus, et in mari ipso, qui et Antio et Circeiis aspici
possit.[404]" It suited his mood, and here he stayed long, writing
letter after letter to Atticus about the erection of a shrine to the
lost one in some gardens to be purchased near Rome.
This sketch of the country-houses of a man like Cicero may help us
to form some idea of the changeful life of a great personage of the
period. He did not look for the formation of steady permanent habits
in any one place or house; from an early age he was accustomed to
travel, going to Greece or Asia Minor for his "higher education,"
acting perhaps as quaestor, and again as praetor or consul, in some
province, then returning to Rome only to leave it for one or other of
his villas, and rarely settling down in one of these for any length of
time. It was not altogether a wholesome life, so far as the mind
was concerned; real thought, the working out of great problems of
philosophy or politics, is impossible under constant change of scene,
and without the opportunity of forming regular habits.[405] And the
fact is that no man at this time seriously set himself to think out
such problems. Cicero would arrive at Tusculum or Arpinum with some
necessary books, and borrowing others as best he could, would sit down
to write a treatise on ethics or rhetoric with amazing speed, having
an original Greek author constantly before him. At places like Baiae
serious work was of course impossible, and would have been ridiculed.
There was no original thinker in this age. Caesar himself was probably
more suited by nature to reason on facts immediately before him than
to speculate on abstract principles. Varro, the rough sensible scholar
of Sabine descent, was a diligent collector of facts and traditions,
but no more able to grapple hard with problems of philosophy or
theology than any other Roman of his time. The life of the average
wealthy man was too comfortable, too changeable, to suggest the
desirability of real mental exertion.
Nor has this life any direct relation to material usefulness and the
productive investment of capital. Cicero and his correspondents never
mention farming, never betray any interest in the new movement,
if such there was, for the scientific cultivation of the vine and
olive.[406] For such things we must go to Varro's treatise, written,
some years after Cicero's death, in his extreme old age. In the third
book of that invaluable work we shall find all we want to know about
the real _villa rustica_ of the time,--the working farm-house with its
wine-vats and olive-mills, like that recently excavated at Boscoreale
near Pompeii. Yet it would be unfair to such men as Cicero and his
friends, the wiser and quieter section of the aristocracy, to call
their work altogether unproductive. True, it left little permanent
impress on human modes of thought; it wrought no material change for
the better in Italy or the Empire. We may go so far as to allow
that it initiated that habit of dilettantism which we find already
exaggerated in the age lately illuminated for us by Professor Dill in
his book on _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, and far more
exaggerated in the last age of Roman society, which the same author
has depicted in his earlier work. But it may be doubted whether under
any circumstances the Romans could have produced a great prophet or a
great philosopher; and the most valuable work they did was of
another kind. It lay in the humanisation of society by the rational
development of law, and by the communication of Greek thought and
literature to the western world. This was what occupied the best days
of Cicero and Sulpicius Rufus and many others; and they succeeded at
the same time in creating for its expression one of the most perfect
prose languages that the world has ever known or will know. They did
it too, helping each other by kindly and cheering intercourse,--the
_humanitas_ of daily life. It is exactly this humanitas that the
northern mind of Mommsen, in spite of its vein of passionate romance,
could not understand; all the softer side of that pleasant existence
among the villas and statues and libraries was to him simply
contemptible. Let us hope that he has done no permanent damage to
the credit of Cicero, and of the many lesser men who lived the same
honourable and elegant life.