Daily Life In Ancient Rome

DAILY LIFE IN
ANCIENT ROME

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HEMICYCLE OF TRAJAN'S MARKET

DAILY LIFE IN

ANCIENT ROME

THE PEOPLE AND THE CITY
AT THE HEIGHT
THE EMPIRE

BY
JEROME CARCOPINO

DIRECTOR OF 1HE ECOLE FRANCHISE DE ROME
MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE

Edited with Bibliography and Notes

BY
HENRY T. ROWELL

PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Translated fro
by E. O. I

LONDON

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD.
BROADWAY HOUSE: 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.G.

Printed in Great Britain by
Lowe and Brydone Printers Limited, London, N.W.io

TO
PROFESSOR EMILE SERGENT

THE MASTER OF MY SON ANTOINE,
MY DOCTOR, AND MY FRIEND.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

In rendering quotations from Martial and Juvenal, Tacitus, Petronius
and Pliny the Younger, I have gratefully adopted less often adapted
the phrasing of the Loeb Classics, edited by T.E. Page, and Dr. W.H.D
Rouse (Heinemann, London).

E. O. L.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix

PREFACE xi

PART I

The Physical and Moral Background of Roman Life

I. THE EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY ... 3

1. The Splendour of the Urbs 3

2. The Precincts of Rome and the City's True Extent 10

3. The Growth of the City's Population 16

II. HOUSES AND STREETS 22

1. Modern Aspects of the Roman House 23

2. Archaic Aspects of the Roman House 31

3. Streets and Traffic 44

III. SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 52

1. Romans and Foreigners 52

2. Slavery and Manumission 56

3. The Confusion of Social Values 61

4. Living Standards and the Plutocracy 65

IV. MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 76

1. The Weakening of Paternal Authority .... 76

2. Betrothal and Marriage 80

3. The Roman Matron 84

4. Feminism and Demoralisation 90

5. Divorce and the Instability of the Family ... 95

V. EDUCATION AND RELIGION 101

1. Symptoms of Decomposition 101

2. Primary Education 103

3. The Routine Teaching of the Grammarian . . . 107

4. Impractical Rhetoric 114

5. The Decay of Traditional Religion 121

6. The Progress of Oriental Mysticism 128

7. The Advent of Christianity 136

viii DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

PART II

The Day's Routine

VI. THE MORNING 143

1. The Days and Hours of the Roman Calendar . . 143

2. The Roman Begins the Day 150

3. The Barber 157

4. The Matron Dresses 164

VII. OCCUPATIONS .....171

1. The Duties of a "Client" 171

2. Businessmen and Manual Labourers 173

3. Justice and Politics 184

4. Public Readings 193

VIII. SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 202

1. "Panem et Cir censes" 202

2. The Employment of Leisure 206

3. The Races 212

4. The Theatre 221

5. The Amphitheatre 231

6. Late Opposition 244

IX. AFTERNOON AND EVENING 248

1. Strolling, Gaming, and Pleasure 248

2. The Baths 254

3. Dinner 263

SOURCES or INFORMATION 277

NOTES 289

INDEX 319

ILLUSTRATIONS

Trajan's Column and Ruins of Basilica Ulpia . . . frontispiece
Hemicycle of Trajan's Market (photo Alinari) . . . frontispiece

The Imperial Fora (plan by I. Gismondi, reproduced by courtesy
of the Governatorato di Roma) 4

Via Biberatica in Trajan's Market (photo Governatorato di
Roma) 6

Great Hall of the Market (photo Governatorato di Roma) . . 6

Remains of an Ostian Insula with Shops and Apartments (Photo
Direzione degli Scavi di Ostia) 26

Reconstruction (by I. Gismondi, reproduced by courtesy of Pro-
fessor G. Calza; cf. "Le origini latine dell' abitazione mo-
derna," Architettura e Arti Decorative III [1923] .... 26

Remains of an Ostian Apartment House (photo Direzione degli
Scavi di Ostia) 30

Reconstruction (by I. Gismondi, reproduced by courtesy of Pro-
fessor G. Calza; cf. op. cit.) 30

Floor Plan (by Lawrence, reproduced by courtesy of Professor G.
Calza; cf. op. cit.) 30

Marble Table with Bronze Base (from Pompeii, now in the
Museo Nazionale, Naples; photo Alinari) 38

Chest or Safe for Valuables (from Pompeii, now in the Museo
Nazionale, Naples; photo Alinari) 38

Combination Brazier and Stove (from Stabiae, now in the Museo
Nazionale, Naples; photo Alinari) 38

Multiple Lamp Holder (from Pompeii, now in the Museo Na-
zionale, Naples; photo Alinari) 38

A Lar (now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) . . . 130

x DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

A Camillus (now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York; photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art) . 130

A Sistrum (now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art) . . . 130

The Magna Mater (now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York; photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of
Art) 130

A Gladiator's Greaves (from Pompeii, now in the Museo Na-
zionale, Naples; photo Alinari) 216

A Gladiator's Helmet (from Pompeii, now in the Museo Na-
zionale. Naples; photo Alinari) 216

Charioteers of the Four Factions (from an estate on the Via
Cassia outside of Rome, now in the Museo Nazionale Romano,
Rome; photo Alinari) 216

Theatre of Marcellus (photo Alinari) 234

Colosseum and Arch of Constantine (photo Aiinari) .... 234

PREFACE

F "Roman life" is not to become lost in
anachronisms or petrified in abstrac-
tion, we must study it within a strictly
defined period. Nothing changes more
rapidly than human customs. Apart
from the recent scientific discoveries
which have turned the world of today
upside down steam, electricity, rail-
ways, motorcars, and aeroplanes it is
clear that even in times of greater sta-
bility and less highly developed tech-
nique the elementary forms of everyday life are subject to unceasing
change. Coffee, tobacco, and champagne were not introduced into Eu-
rope until the seventeenth century; potatoes were first eaten toward the
end of the eighteenth, the banana became a feature of our dessert at the
beginning of the twentieth. The law of change was not less operative
in antiquity. It was a commonplace of Roman rhetoric to contrast the
rude simplicity of the republic with the luxury and refinement of impe-
rial times and to recall that Curius Dentatus "gathered his scanty veg-
etables and himself cooked them on his little stove/' l There is no com-
mon measure, whether of food or house or furniture, between ages so
different. Since a choice of period must necessarily be made, 1 shall
deliberately confine myself to studying the generation which was born
about the middle of the first century A. D., toward the end of the reign
of Claudius or the beginning of the reign of Nero, and lived on into the
reigns of Trajan (98-117) and of Hadrian (117-138). This generation
saw Roman power and prosperity at their height. It was witness of the
last conquests of the Caesars: the conquest of Dacia ( 106) which poured
into the empire the wealth of the Transylvanian mines; the conquest
of Arabia (109) which, supplemented by the success of the Parthian
campaign (115), brought flooding into Rome the riches of India and
the Far East, guarded by the legionaries of Syria and their desert allies.
In the material domain, this generation attained the highest plane

xii DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of ancient civilisation. By a fortunate coincidence all the more for-
tunate in that Latin literature was soon to run so nearly dry this gen-
eration is the one whose records combine to offer us the most complete
picture of Roman life that we possess. The Forum of Trajan in Rome
itself, the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the two prosperous resorts
buried alive by the eruption of 79, supply an immense fund of archaeo-
logical evidence. Recent excavations have also restored to us the ruins
of Ostia which date in the main from the time when the emperor Hadrian
created this great commercial city as the realisation of his town plan-
ning. Literature adds her testimony. We possess a profusion of vivid
and picturesque descriptions, precise and colorful, in the satirical
romance of Petronius, the Silvae of Statius, the Epigrams of Martial,
the Satires of Juvenal, and the Letters of Pliny the Younger. Fortune
has indeed favoured the historian in this case, supplying him with
both the obverse and the reverse of the medal.

It is not enough to focus our study of the Roman's life on a fixed
point in time. It would lack foundation and consistency if we did not
also focus it in space in the country or in the town. Even today, when
the facilities for communication, the diffusion of newspapers, the posses-
sion of radios bring something of the pleasure, the thought, and the
noise of the metropolis into the humblest country cottage, there remains
a vast discrepancy between the monotony of peasant existence and
the excitement of city life. A still greater gulf divided the peasant
from the townsman of antiquity. So glaring was the inequality between
them that, if we are to believe the learned historian Rostovtzeff, it
pitted the one against the other in a fierce and silent struggle which
pierced the dyke that protected the privileged classes from the barbarian
flood. The peasant pariah abetted the invading barbarian.

The townsman, in fact, enjoyed all the goods and resources of the
earth; the peasant knew nothing but unending labour without profit,
and lacked for ever the joys which warmed the heart of even the most
wretched in the cities: the liveliness of the palaestra, the warmth of the
baths, the gaiety of public banquets, the rich man's doles, the magnifi-
cence of public spectacles.

We must renounce the attempt to blend two such dissimilar pictures
into one, and must make a choice between them. The period which I
propose to describe day by day is that of the Roman subject of the first
Antonines days spent exclusively in the town, or rather in The City,
Rome, the Urbs, the hub and centre of the universe, proud and wealthy
queen of a world which she seemed at the time to have pacified for ever.

PREFACE xiii

We cannot, however, hope to paint the daily life of our Roman in
its reality if we do not first try to form a summary but adequate pic-
ture of the setting in which it was passed and by which it was coloured,
and free ourselves from false preconceptions concerning it. We must
seek to reconstruct the physical milieu of the great city in which this
life was lived; the social milieu of the various classes of the hierarchy
by which it was governed; the moral milieu of thought and sentiment
which explains both its merits and its weaknesses. We can satisfactorily
study the method in which the Roman of Rome employed his time only
after we have plotted out the main lines of the framework within which
he lived and outside which the routine of his daily life would be more
or iess unintelligible.

J.C.
La Ferte-sur-Aube

PART I

THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL BACKGROUND
OF ROMAN LIFE

The material characteristics of Imperial Rome are full of contradictions.
On the one hand the size of her population, the architectural grandeur
and the marble beauty of her buildings proclaim her kinship with the
great modern capitals of the West. On the other, the overcrowding to
which her multitudes were condemned piled ,on top of each other on
her irregular hills within an area restricted alike by nature and by
man the narrowness of her tangled lanes, the scantiness of her sani-
tary services, and the dangerous congestion of her traffic reveal a
closer relationship to those mediaeval towns of which the chroniclers
tell, whose appealing yet sordid picturesqueness, unexpected ugliness,
and swarming chaos survive in certain Moslem cities of today.
Our first task is to throw light on this essential contrast.

THE EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY

i. THE SPLENDOUR OF THE URBS

HERE is little need to dwell on the
splendour of the city of Rome at the
beginning of the second century of
our era. The ruins which reflect it
are incomparable; it would be
superfluous to enumerate them, still
more superfluous to describe them
one by one. It is enough to dwell
for a moment on the group which
is linked with the name of Trajan
and in which the genius of his time
reaches its zenith. 1 In the warm light which bathes them, these
ruins everywhere preserve the strength and harmony of those
vanished monuments of which for the most part they are but the
naked skeleton. Nowhere do they inspire us with a nobler or
more satisfying idea of the civilisation whose riches they display,
of the society whose discipline they evoke, of the men our ances-
tors and equals to whose intellectual stature and artistic mas-
tery they bear witness, than in the Forum of Trajan, which in the
very centre of the Urbs prolongs the forum of Augustus to the
north. In this spot, between the years 109 and 113, Trajan brought
to completion a work which calls forth not only our admiration but
our love. Thanks to the recent excavations of Corrado Ricci, we
are able to reconstruct it in its earliest perfection. The spacious-
ness of the conception as a whole, the supple complexity and
generous elaboration of every part, the sumptuousness of the
materials, the daring sweep of the lines, the ordered movement
of the decorations enable this creation of Trajan's easily to chal-
lenge comparison with the most ambitious work of modern archi-
tects. Even in its decay it has never ceased to supply them
with lessons and with models. Brilliant and faithful expression of

4 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

its own time, it seems under our very eyes to forge a link between
its day and ours.

Defying the difficulties which the irregularity of the ground
and the inconvenient proximity of earlier monuments opposed to
its development, this group of buildings united in a coherent and
harmonious whole a public square or forum, a judicial basilica,
two libraries, the famous column which rose between them, and
an immense covered market. We do not know the date at which
the market was completed, but it must have been built before
the Column, whose height, as we shall see, was governed by the
proportions of the market. The Forum and the Basilica were
inaugurated by Trajan on January i, 112; the Column on May
13, ii3. 2 The whole formed a sequence of daring magnificence.

To the south rose the Forum proper in majestic simplicity a
vast esplanade, 116 metres by 95, surrounded on three sides by a
portico. On the south side, through which the public entered, this
portico was supported by a single row of columns, and on east and
west by a double colonnade. To east and west its back wall, built
of peperino faced with marble, curved out into a semicircle
45 metres in radius. In the centre of the forum rose the eques-
trian statue of the emperor in gilded bronze, attended by more
modest statues ranged between the surrounding columns, com-
memorating men who had served the empire well by the sword
or by the spoken word. Three steps of yellow marble led up to
the entrance of the Basilica Ulpia which derived its title from the
family name of Trajan. The Basilica, which measured 159 metres
from east to west and 55 from north to south was raised one metre
above the level of the Forum and excelled the Forum itself in
opulence. It was an immense hypostyle hall, designed in oriental
style and entered from the south on one of its longer sides. The
interior was divided into five naves 130 metres long, the central
one reaching a width of 25 metres; there were 96 pillars in all;
the entire floor was paved with Luna marble, while the roof was
adorned with tiles of gilded bronze. The hall was encircled by a
portico with sculptures in the spaces, and the attic was orna-
mented with bas-reliefs distinguished for their animation and the
delicacy of their modelling. Finally, the upper entablature re-
peated several times on each face the brief and haughty inscrip-
tion "E Manubiis" proclaiming that the building had been erected
from the spoils of war (the plunder taken from the Dacians of

THE IMPERIAL FORA

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY 5

Decebalus). Beyond and parallel to .the Basilica, and rising as
high above it as it rose above the Forum, stretched the two rec-
tangles of the twin libraries, the Bibliothecae Ulpiae, bearing, like
the Basilica, the Gentile name of their common founder. One of
these libraries was consecrated to Greek manuscripts, the other
to Latin manuscripts and the imperial archives; in each of them
the space above the plutei, or cupboards which housed the manu-
scripts, was decorated with a series of busts representing the
writers who had attained greatest fame in the two languages of
the empire.

A narrow quadrilateral 24 metres by 16 separated the two libra-
ries, and in the centre of it there rose, and still rises almost intact,
the marvel of marvels: the Column of Trajan. 3 The base is an
almost perfect cube of stone 5.5 metres high, pierced by a bronze
gate above which was the dedicatory inscription. The other three
sides of the pedestal were decorated with arms and trophies, and
all four sides with bosses interlaced with laurel. The Column is
composed entirely of marble, has a diameter of 3.70 metres and
a height of 29.77, an d contains a spiral staircase of white marble
starting from the base of the pedestal and boasting 185 steps.
The monumental Doric capital which crowns the column was
originally surmounted by a bronze eagle with outspread wings.
After the death of Trajan the eagle was replaced by a bronze
statue of the dead emperor which was probably torn down and
melted in the chaos of the invasions. That was replaced in 1588
by the statue of Saint Peter which we see today. The total height
of the monument is approximately 38 metres, which corresponds
to the 128^2 Roman feet of which the ancient documents tell.

Grandiose as are the mere proportions of the Column of Tra-
jan in themselves, the effect is heightened by the external arrange-
ment of the marble blocks of which it is composed. Seventeen
colossal drums of marble bear twenty-three spiral panels which,
if ranged in a straight line, would measure nearly 200 metres.
From base to capital these panels represent in relief the major
episodes of the two Dacian campaigns in their historic sequence,
from the beginning of the first campaign to the end of the second.
They have been executed with so much skill that they conceal
from view the forty-three windows which serve to light the interior
of the column. Twenty-five hundred separate figures have been
counted in these reliefs. Wind and weather have reduced them

6 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

all alike to the warm but uniform colour of the Parian marble in
which they were carved, but formerly they shone in brilliant
colours which proclaimed the supremacy of the Roman sculptors
in this type of historic relief.

Trajan's unexpected death occurred in the early days of 'Au-
gust, 117, when he had already set out on his return journey to
Rome after handing over to Hadrian the command of the army
he had raised against the Parthians. His ashes were brought back
from Asia to Rome and placed in the chamber in the pedestal of
his great Column. The burial of his ashes within the pomcrium
transgressed the laws which forbade the burial of ordinary mor-
tals within the sacred space. 4 Though his successor Hadrian and
the Senate unanimously declared that the deceased emperor was
above the common law, they nevertheless took in this matter an
initiative which Trajan himself had neither desired nor foreseen.
He had not designed his Column as his tomb. His commemora-
tive purpose in erecting it had been twofold: the reliefs it bore
were to immortalise the victories he had won over the external
enemy, and its unique proportions were to symbolise the super-
human effort he had made to conquer Nature for the adornment
and prosperity of Rome. The two last lines of his inscription made
his intention clear. Today only a few letters of the inscription
cannot be read, but in the seventh century the unknown visitor
whom we call the Anonymous Traveller from Einsiedeln was able
to copy it entire. The meaning of Trajan's formula "ad dccla-
randum quantae altitudinis mons et locus tantis opcribus sit
cgestus" 7} has become clear since scholars realised that the verb
cgercre expressed the two contradictory meanings, "to empty"
and "to erect," both of which are needed to interpret literally
this noble phrase. The Column was intended to indicate how much
the spur (mons} which the Quirinal Hill thrust out to meet the
Capitoline had been levelled, and how great an area (locus} had
been cleared for the giant monuments which to the east completed
the emperor's work and which were rescued from the ruins in
1932 by the scientific faith of Corrado Ricci. The majestic hemi-
cycle of bricks which encircles the Forum proper on the side of
the Quirinal and the Subura easily sustained the five stories which
housed the 150 booths or tabernae of the market. 6 Shallow rooms
on the level of the Forum formed the ground floor, and here fruit
and flowers were probably set out for sale. The front of the first

3

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY 7

floor was a loggia of vast arcades, whose long vaulted halls served
as storehouses for oil and wine. Rarer products, especially pepper
and spices (piper a) from the distant East could be bought on the
second and third floors. The Middle Ages preserved the memories
of the spice market in the name of a steep and winding street
which served the spice merchants of antiquity before it came to
serve the subjects of the popes- -the Via Biberatica. Along the
fourth story ran the formal hall where congiaria* were distributed
and where, from the second century on, the offices of public assist-
ance (stationes arcariorwn Caesarianorum) were permanently
installed. 7 On the fifth and last story were ranged the market fish-
ponds, one set of them linked by channels to the aqueduct which
supplied them with fresh water, and another designed to receive
sea water brought from Ostia.

From this fifth story spectators can still survey the immensity
of Trajan's achievement, and note that they are standing exactly
on a level with the halo of Saint Peter who now crowns the Col-
umn of Trajan. From this point of vantage they can feel the full
significance of the inscription and appreciate the matchless gran-
deur of the works carried out by Apollodorus of Damascus to the
order of the greatest of the Caesars His massive buildings climb
and mask the slopes of the Quirinal which were smoothed out to
fit them without the aid of explosives such as the engineers of
today have at their disposal. The proportions of these buildings
have been so harmonised that all thought of their weight is for-
gotten in the satisfying perception of their perfect equilibrium.
Here is a masterpiece indeed, which has survived successive ages
without ceasing to stir each in turn to enthusiasm. The Romans of
old were aware that neither their city itself nor the world out-
side offered anything finer to man's admiration. Ammianus Mar-
cellinus has recorded that when the emperor Constantine, in com-
pany with the Persian ambassador Ormisda, made his solemn
entry into Rome in 357 and for the first time trod the pavement
of Trajan's Forum, he could not restrain a cry of admiration and
the regret that he could never construct anything like it. 8 He
stated, however, that he would and could copy the equestrian
statue of Trajan which stood there. To this the Persian replied,
"First, Sire, command a like stable to be built, if you can, so that
the steed which you intend to create may range as widely as this

* Congiaria were public distributions of food or money.

8 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

which you see." The Romans of the later empire felt impotent
before these monuments created by the genius of their ancestors.

The perfection of the prodigious jellipse of the Colosseum can-
not counteract the uneasiness one feels at the thought of the car-
nage that took place there. The baths of Caracalla suffer from
a certain excess which presages decadence. Nothing, on the other
hand, disturbs the nobility of the impression created by the
Forum and the market-place of Trajan. They impress without
overwhelming. The grace of their curves tempers their immen-
sity. On this high plane of art great artists of great epochs meet,
and we find that something of this restrained and vital harmony
flowed into Michael Angelo's facade of the Farnese Palace and
into the Colonne Vendome which the architects of Napoleon
Bonaparte cast from the bronze cannons of Jena. Rome at her
greatest is reflected here.

It is a striking fact that Trajan obviously strove not alone to
commemorate the victory which had at one blow replenished the
treasury of the Caesars and furnished this abundant wealth, 9 but
also to justify it by the quality of the culture which his soldiers
brought to the vanquished. The statues of his porticos unceasingly
connect the glories of the intellect with those of arms. At the
foot of the market where the people of Rome bought their daily
food, beside the Forum where the consuls gave their audience and
the emperors made their pronouncements whether a Hadrian
proclaimed remission of taxes or a Marcus Aurelius poured his
private wealth into the public treasury there swept the great
hemicycle where, as M. Marrou has demonstrated, the masters
of literature continued down to the fourth century to gather their
students round them and impart instruction. 10

The Basilica itself, for all its luxury, stood three steps lower
than the two great libraries which were its neighbours. According
to the interpretation recently revived by M. Paribeni, we may
assume that the historic Column which rose between them repre-
sents the brilliant realisation by Apollodorus of an original con-
ception emanating from the emperor himself. No prototype has
yet been discovered, although it may name among its posterity
the Aurelian Column at Rome itself and the columns of Theo-
dosius and Arcadius at Constantinople, to name only examples
dating from antiquity. It is no accident that the Column of Trajan
was erected in the very centre of the city of books. Trajan must

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY 9

have intended the spirals which clothe it to represent the unroll-
ing of two scrolls (volumina) which formed a marble record of
his warlike exploits and extolled to the skies his clemency as well
as his might. 11 One relief, three times as large as the others, sepa-
rates the two series of records and reveals their significance. 12
It represents a figure of Victory in the act of writing on her shield
"Ense et Stylo," which might be rendered, "By the word and by
the pen." This is the eloquent symbol of the pacificatory and
civilising goal which Trajan in all sincerity set himself in his
conquests. It throws light on the thought which dominated his
ambitions and led him, while deprecating violence and injustice,
to seek by all means to find spiritual justification for the imperi-
alism of Rome.

In this spot which proclaims the ideal of the new empire we
see the very heart of the metropolis which had grown with the
empire's growth and which ended by vying in population with
the greatest of our modern capitals. The inauguration of his
Forum completed the renovation of the city which Trajan had
undertaken in order to make the Urbs worthy of his hegemony
and to bring relief to a population crushed by its own increasing
numbers. With this in mind he had enlarged the circus, excavated
a naumachia, canalised the Tiber, drawn off new aqueducts, built
the largest public baths that Rome had ever seen, and subjected
private building enterprise to rigorous and far-sighted control. 13
The Forum crowned his work. By levelling off the Quirinal he
opened new roads to traffic, as well as added another immense
open public space in the centre of the city to those created by his
predecessors, Caesar, Augustus, the Flavians, and Nerva, who
one after another had sought to relieve the congestion of the
Forum proper. By adorning his Forum with exedrae, a Basil-
ica and libraries, he dignified the leisure of the multitudes who
daily frequented it; to improve the facilities for provisioning the
teeming populace, he supplemented these buildings by markets,
comparable in their spaciousness and the ingenuity of their de-
sign to those which Paris acquired only in the nineteenth century.
These works of Trajan can, in fact, be fully understood only when
we keep in mind the multitudes whose lot they alleviated and
whose presence still haunts their ruins. We have other irrefutable
evidence of their having existed, but even without that the works
of Trajan alone would prove it.

io DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

2. THE PRECINCTS OF ROME AND THE CITY'S TRUE
' EXTENT

No question has been more frequently discussed than the
population of the capital of the Roman Empire, nor is there any
whose solution is more urgent for the historian especially if it
is true, as the Berber sociologist Ibn Khaldun contended, that
the level of a civilisation can be in some degree estimated by the
size and growth of its cities, an inevitable consequence of the
development of human society. But there is no question which
has provoked more polemics or given rise to more contradictory
opinions. Since Renaissance days the scholars who have ap-
proached the problem have always been divided into two hostile
camps. Some, hypnotised by the object of their study, are over-
ready to ascribe to their beloved antiquity, which they dream of
as an Age of Gold, the same range and vitality that the modern
world owes to the progress of science. Justus Lipsius, for instance,
among others, estimates the population of ancient Rome at about
four millions. 14 Others, more inclined to underestimate past gen-
erations, refuse a priori to ascribe to them achievements equal to
those of modern times, and Bureau de la Malle, who was the first
French scholar to devote serious research to the distribution of
populations in ancient times, considers a total of about 261,000
the highest figure which can plausibly be assigned to the city
of the Caesars. 15 Both Bureau de la Malle and Justus Lipsius,
however, started with rooted preconceptions, and an unprejudiced
critic may perhaps find it possible to arrive at an approximation
somewhere between these two extremes that is sufficiently near
the truth.

Those who champion what I shall call the "Little Rome" theory
are invariably statisticians who first submit the question to an
examination of the circumstantial evidence. They dismiss all indi-
cations, however explicit, given by ancient writers, and base
their conclusions solely on a consideration of the terrain. They
accept only one basis of calculation: the relation between the
known area and the possible population inhabiting it. They con-
sequently decide that Imperial Rome, which they hold to have
been exactly delimited by the Aurelian Wall and to have very
nearly coincided with the area of the present-day Rome they
have visited, cannot have sheltered a population much larger than

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY n

the present. At first sight this argument might appear convincing.
Reflection shows, however, that it is based on the fallacy of sup-
posing that the territorial aspect of ancient Rome was the same
as at present, and on the false postulate that we are entitled arbi-
trarily to apply to this :rea the demographic coefficient derived
'from the most recent statistics.

In the first place this method makes the mistake of ignoring
the elasticity of space or, more exactly, the compressibility of
man. Bureau reached his figures by applying to the space en-
closed by the Aurelian Wall the population density of Paris under
Louis Philippe, say 150 persons to the hectare. If he had been
writing seventy-five years later, when the density of Paris had
reached 400 persons to the hectare, as it did in 1914, his result
would have been nearly three times' as large. M. Ferdinand Lot
fell into the same petitio principii when he overhastily ascribed to
the Rome of Aurelian the population density of the Rome of 1901,
and estimated its inhabitants at 538,ooo. 16 Since then, post-war
building has not nearly doubled the area of Rome, yet the census
of January, 1939, records a population of 1,284,600, considerably
more than double. In both these cases it is not the population
which Rome actually housed in former times that is computed,
but the population which might have been contained within the
space of ancient Rome, reckoned by the density of population at
the time of the writer, a choice which is purely accidental and
arbitrary. Even on an unchanging terrain, living conditions alter
from one epoch to another, and it is evident that however in-
genious the attempt to establish a proportion between an area
which is conceived as a known quantity and a population which
is an unknown quantity, this ratio must remain purely hypo-
thetical.

If, moreover, as I myself believe, ancient Rome was not circum-
scribed within the limits that have been affirmed, a further un-
known quantity is introduced which vitiates the above calcula-
tions. The Aurelian Wall, which is supposed to have formed its
perimeter, no more represented the absolute limit of Imperial
Rome than the pomerium, falsely ascribed to Servius Tullius, had
earlier sufficed to circumscribe the Rome of the republic. This
point demands some explanation.

Like all the Greek and Latin cities of antiquity, ancient Rome,
from the dawn of her legend to the end of her history, had always

12 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

consisted of two inseparable elements, a sharply defined urban
agglomeration (Urbs Roma) and the rural territory attached to
it (Ager Romanus). The Ager Romanus extended to the bound-
aries of the adjacent cities, which had preserved their municipal
individuality in spite of political annexation; Lavinium, Ostia,
Fregenae, Veii, Fidenae, Ficulea, Gabii, Tibur, and Bovillae. The
Urbs proper was the home of the gods and their sanctuaries, of the
king, and later of the magistrates who were heirs to his dismem-
bered power, of the Senate and the comitia who, in co-operation
first with the king and later with the magistrates, governed the
City-State. Thus in its origins the city represented something
greater and different from a more or less closely packed aggregate
of dwelling houses : it was a templum solemnly dedicated accord-
ing to rites prescribed by the discipline of the augurs, its precincts
strictly defined by the furrow which the Latin founder, dutifully
obeying the prescriptions of Etrurian ritual, had carved round it
with a plough drawn by a bull and cow of dazzling white. The
share had been duly lifted over the spots where one day the city
gates would stand, and the clods of earth thrown up in its passage
had been scrupulously lifted and thrown within the circuit. The
sacred orbit thus described in anticipation of the fortifications and
walls to come, formed the abbreviated ground plan, the prophetic
image of the future city, and hence was known as the pomerium
(pone muros). From the pomerium the Urbs derived its name,
its original definition, and its supernatural protection, assured by
the taboos which preserved its soil alike from the defilement of
foreign cults, the threat of armed levies, and the interment of the
dead. 17

The position of the pomerium altered with the successive de-
velopments which produced the Rome of history. Although it
preserved its religious character and continued to protect the
citizens by remaining closed to gatherings of the legions, by classic
times it had ceased to form the limit of the city. It remained a
spiritual symbol, but its practical functions had been usurped by
a concrete reality the Great Wall, which false tradition ascribed
to King Servius Tullius but which was in fact built by order of the
republican Senate between 378 and 352 B.C. 18 This wall was
constructed of blocks of volcanic rock so firmly dressed that
entire sections of it are still extant in the Rome of the twentieth
century, notably in the Via delle Finanze, in the gardens of the

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY 13

Palazzo Colonna, and in the Piazza del Cinquecento opposite the
railway station; sufficient traces of it remain to enable us to re-
construct the whole. From the third century B.C., the urban
area of Rome was no longer defined by the pomerium, but by the
wall whose massive courses had withstood the assault of Han-
nibal; and the two areas were clearly distinguished from each
other. Though both excluded the great plain, the Campus Martius,
which lay between the Tiber and the hills and was dedicated to
military exercises, the wall was nevertheless more extensive than
the pomerium, and comprised many districts not included in the
latter: the Citadel (arx) and the Capitoline, the north-western
tip of the Esquiline, the Velabrum, and above all the two summits
of the Aventine. The northern Aventine had been included .from
the first, the southern when the consuls of 87 prolonged the wall to
strengthen the city against the attack of Cinna. In all, it is reck-
oned that the wall enclosed 426 hectares, a trifling area compared
to the 7,000 hectares of modern Paris, but large beside the 120
hectares of ancient Capua, the 117 of Caere, and the 32 with
which Praeneste had to be content. Such comparisons, however,
are idle. The calculation of the ground area of the Urbs gives no
certain clue to the number of its inhabitants.

From the moment that the Romans, in a fair way to conquer the
world, had ceased to dread their enemies, the walls which they
had built for their protection with yesterday's Gallic terror fresh
in mind had lost all military .value, and the inhabitants of the
city began to overflow their bounds, as they had earlier over-
flowed the pomerium. By virtue of the right of the impcratores,
who had extended the frontiers of the empire, and also with a
view to placating the urban plebs, Sulla in the year 81 B.C. re-
leased for dwelling-houses a portion of the Campus Martius be-
tween the Capitol and the Tiber how large a portion we un-
fortunately do not know. 19 On this side then, the Urbs officially
outgrew its boundaries, as it had in fact unofficially spread be-
yond them in other directions. When Caesar removed to a Roman
mile beyond the walls the boundary marks assigned to Rome in
accordance with the posthumous law preserved to us by the Table
of Heraclea, 20 he merely gave legal recognition to a state of
affairs which no doubt went back to the second century B.C.

Augustus in his turn only pursued and amplified the innovation
initiated by his adoptive father, when in 7 B.C. he completed the

14 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

identification of the Urbs with the fourteen regions into which he
had redivided the ancient and the newer quarters of the city:
thirteen regions on the left bank of the Tiber, the fourteenth on
the right or farther bank, the "regio Trans tibcrina," whose mem-
ory is kept alive by the Trastevere of today. 21

Augustus, who boasted that he had pacified the world and who
solemnly closed the Temple of Janus, 22 had no hesitation in dis-
mantling the ancient republican fortifications. And Rome, now
freed thanks to her glory and to her annexations from all
anxiety about her own security, proceeded to burst her bonds on
every side. If five of the fourteen regions of Augustus were con-
tained within the ancient circuit of the city, five others lay partly
within and partly without, while the remaining four were com-
pletely outside: the fifth (Esquiline), the seventh (Via Lata),
the ninth (Circus Flaminius), and the fourteenth (Transti-
berina). As if to emphasise the emperor's intentions, popular
usage presently gave the first of these the name of Porta Capena,
and the gate which had originally been a point on the circum-
ference now came to occupy the centre.

The fourteen regions of Augustus lasted as long as the empire,
and their limits bounded the Rome of the first Antonines. Within
this framework we must reconstruct the city of this period for
ourselves. It is not possible to submit these regions to exact meas-
urement, and it would be a grave error to identify them with
those still marked by the brick wall with which Aurelian sought
to protect the capital of the empire against the approach of the
barbarians, and which, from 274 A.D. on, served at once as ram-
part and pomerium.' 23 Even today, with its ruined curtains and
succession of dilapidated towers, this impressive structure, whose
brick masonry blazes in the rays of the setting sun, conveys to
the least sensitive of tourists a vivid impression of the majesty
that made Rome glorious even in her decadence.

The Aurelian Wall, which reached a length of 18.837 kilo-
metres and enclosed an area of 1,386 hectares, 68 ares, and 50
centiares, was constructed in precisely the same manner as the
almost contemporary enclosures with which Qaul bristled in de-
fense against the Germanic hordes. These latter have been made
the subject of an admirable study by M. Adrien Blanchet. 24 The
Gallic fortifications never attempted to protect an entire town, but

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY 15

only its more vital parts, as a cuirasse protects the warrior's
breast; similarly the Aurelian Wall did not aspire to encircle all
the fourteen regions of Rome. Far from feeling bound by the
configuration of the entire city, Aurelian's engineers gave their
attention to linking together the main strategic points and to
utilising as far as possible such earlier constructions, like the aque-
ducts, as could more or less easily be incorporated in thtir system.
From the Pincian to the Salarian Gate in the seventh region,
the toll-post marks (dp pi) have been discovered as far as a
hundred metres beyond the wall. 1 ' 5 From the Praenestine to the
Asinarian Gate, the fifth region must have extended 300 metres
beyond it, for at this distance we find the obelisk of Antinoiis
erected, according to the hieroglyphs of its inscription, "at the
boundary of the town." Similarly, from the Metrovian to the
Ardeatine Gate, the first region overshot the wall by an average
of 600 metres, since the curtain runs in this sector one Roman
mile (1,482 metres) to the south of the Porta Capena, and the
region included the Aedis Martis a mile and a half away and
stretched as far as the River Almo (known today as the Acqua-
taccio), whose course lies 800 metres farther on. Finally, and
above all, it would be easy to demonstrate that the fourteenth
region, whose total perimeter is double that of the wall on the
farther bank of the Tiber, overshot the wall by 1,800 metres in
the north and 1,300 in the south. In view of these facts, there can
be no question of assuming that the fourteen regions which con-
stituted Imperial Rome were confined within the area surrounded
by the Aurelian Wall. It would be equally inadmissible to imagine
them restricted to the 2,000 hectares delimited by the mobile
cordon of the toll-posts, for from the time of Augustus the jurists
had laid down the principle that Rom^ of the fourteen regions was
not confined within an unalterable circumference, but in law, as
in fact, was in a state of perpetual giowth, and that her area was
automatically extended as new dwellings were constructed pro-
longing the blocks of ancient buildings. 26 This essentially realistic
legal ruling not only defeats at the start any attempt to calculate
the population of Rome on so uncertain and changeable a basis as
the area of the fourteen regions, but presupposes in the lawyers
who enunciated it a faith in an indefinite future growth of the
Imperial City.

1 6 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

3. THE GROWTH OF THE CITY'S POPULATION

Available records bear convincing witness to the growth of the
Roman population. It progressively increased from the time of
Sulla till the principate, and was further accelerated under the
prosperous government of the Antonines. To convince ourselves
of this, we need only collate two sets of statistics, separated by an
interval of three centuries, which have by a fortunate accident
been preserved. They give a census of the vici of Rome, that is,
the quarters within the fourteen regions separated from each other
by the streets which bounded them. Augustus had granted each
vicus a special administration presided over by its own magistcr,
and protected by the Lares of the cross-roads. 27 On the one hand
the elder Pliny informs us that in the lustrum of 73 A.D. con-
ducted by the censors Vespasian and Titus, Rome was divided
into 265 vici. 2 * On the other, the Regionaries f that invaluable com-
pilation of the fourth century, records a total of 307 vici.-" The
oldest of the Regionaries, the Notitia, was begun in 334, and the
latest, the Curiosum, covers the year 357. The year 345 A.D.
might be taken as an intermediate date. So we find that between 74
and 345 A.D. the number of vici had grown by 42, which implies a
territorial increase of 1 5 per cent in the area of Rome. At the same
time, we observe that between the time of Caesar and that of
Septimius Severus a corresponding increase of population must
have taken place. We have, it is true, no direct evidence of this,
but may unhesitatingly deduce it from the increase in the charges
for public assistance to the Roman plebs. In the times of Caesar
and Augustus, Annona, the mythological personification of the
year's food supplies, had on her hands only 150,000 poor to whom
she distributed free grain. 30 When Dio Cassius lauded the lib-
erality of the congiarium of 203 in the reign of Septimius Severus,
the number of recipients had risen to 175,000, an increase of 16.6
per cent. 31 The parallelism of these percentages is instructive.
First of all it proves what might a priori have been assumed
that the increase of population had gone hand in hand with the
geographical extension of the fourteen regions. The second thing
it indicates might also have been taken for granted because of the
consolidation of the Pax Romana during the second half of the
second century: the greatest increase to which the Regionaries of
the fourth century bear witness but of which we have indica-

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY 17

tions before the largesse of 203 dates from the Pax Romana.
From this it follows happily for us and our thesis that we
must estimate the population of Rome under the early Antonines,
that is to say at a period of marked prosperity for which statistics
are unfortunately lacking, at a higher figure than the epochs
immediately preceding, and not far below the figure supplied by
the later data of the Regionaries.

Now from the beginning of the first century B.C. to the middle
of the first century A.D. we are in a position to follow the irresist-
ible movement which swelled the population of Rome to a point
where her cohesion was in danger of being undermined and her
food supply of breaking down. As I have pointed out elsewhere,
the outbreak of the Social War in 91 B.C. drove back on Rome in
chaotic confusion all Italians who refused to make common cause
with the allied insurgents and sought a refuge from their re-
prisals. 32 The influx of these refugees caused a sudden leap in
numbers similar to that of fifteen years before, when the flood of
Greek refugees from Asia Minor raised Athens to the rank of a
great European capital. Faced by provinces and an Italy torn
between the democratic government of Rome and the armies
mobilised against that government by the senatorial aristocracy,
the censors of 86 B.C. were obliged to abandon the attempt to
make the usual general census of all citizens of the empire, and
proceeded instead to catalogue the different categories of popu-
lation who were herded together in the city. Saint Jerome records
in his Chronicle the result of this census, of 463,000 souls, made
without regard to sex, age, status, or nationality: "descriptions
Romae facta inventa sunt hominum CCCCLXIII milia" 33 Thirty
years later the figure was considerably higher, if it is true, as
Lucan's commentator asserts, that when-Pompey took charge of
the Annona in September, 57 B.C., he succeeded in getting the
grain needed to feed a minimum of 486,000 mouths. 34 After the
triumph of Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. the population made another
upward bound. The fact itself cannot be doubted, though, for
lack of figures we cannot make an exact estimate of the increase;
instead of the 40,000 whom Cicero mentions in his In Verrem
as receiving free grain in 71 B.C., Caesar in 44 B.C. admitted no
less than 150,000 to the free distribution. 36 Moreover, as Censor
Morum, he standardised the accidental procedure of the censors
of 86 B.C. and ordered that the traditional album of the citizens

i8 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of the empire should be supplemented by detailed statistics on
the inhabitants of the Urbs, who should henceforth be tabulated
street by street and building by building from information fur-
nished by proprietors on their own responsibility. 37

The advance in numbers continued under the principate of
Augustus. The available data combine to force us to conclude
that the inhabitants of Rome must have reached nearly a million.
First, we note the quantity of grain which the Annona had to
store each year for the support of the population: Aurelius Victor
tells us that 20,000,000 modii (1,698,000 hectolitres) were sup-
plied by Egypt, and Josephus records that Africa furnished twice
that amount in all, therefore, 60,000,000 modii?* Allowing an
average yearly consumption of 60 modii (5.094 hectolitres) per
head, this would represent 1,000,000 recipients. Secondly, we
have Augustus' own declaration in his Res Gcstae that when he
was invested for the twenty-second time with the tribunicia
potestas and for the twelfth time with the consular dignity, that
is to say, in the year 5 B.C., he gave 60 denarii to each of the
320,000 citizens composing the urban plebs. 39 Now, according to
the words which the emperor deliberately employed, this dis-
tribution was confined to adult males the Latin text specifies
viritim, the Greek translation XOCT' av&pa. It excluded, therefore,
all women and girls and all boys under eleven. Taking the aver-
age proportion established in our time by the actuaries between
men, women, and children, this yields a Roman population of at
least 675,000 cives. To this we must add a garrison of 12,000 men
who lived in Rome but did not partake in the congiaria, the host
of noncitizens (peregrini), and another item, more important
than either, the slaves. The words of Augustus himself thus lead
us to calculate the total population of Rome at close to a million,
if indeed it did not exceed that figure.

Lastly, we have the statistics included in the Regionaries of
the fourth century A.D. These compel us to assess still higher the
figure for the second century, a time when, as we have seen, the
population of Rome vigorously increased. Adding up, region by
region, the dwelling-houses of the Urbs as catalogued in the
Notitia, we get the two totals: 1,782 domus and 44,300 insulae;
but both the summary of the Notitia and Zacharias record 1,797
domus and 46,602 insulae. It is safe to assume that the discrep-
ancy between these documents is due to the muddle-headedness of

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY 19

the copyist of the Notitia, who appears to have dozed over the
detailed enumerations which he had to transcribe. In the course of
his uncongenial task he frequently mangled or omitted items be-
fore his eyes, or simply duplicated them, as when he attributed the
same number of domus to the tenth and eleventh regions and the
same number of inmlac to both the third and fourth and the
twelfth and thirteenth regions. In other words, we are entitled
to put our trust rather in the summary of the Notitia and Zach-
arias; and from the figures they give of the dwellings of Rome to
deduce that other figure which they do not give the total of the
population which may be inferred from the 1,797 domus and the
46,602 insulae of their record.

Obviously the result can only be approximate, and the exag-
gerated scruples of contemporary criticism have wilfully com-
plicated the conditions of calculation. In France, especially, M.
fidouard Cuq 4 " and M. Ferdinand Lot 41 have interpreted the
plural form "domus" of the Notitia as embracing all the real
estate of the Urbs, and the plural "insulac" as a synonym for
"ccnacula" denoting the sets of living quarters or "flats'' into
which buildings were divided. They hold, therefore, that the
two figures ^veihip Taking an average of five persons per "flat,"
they dogmatically apply it to the 46,602 insulae of the Notitia,
and on this basis estimate the total population of the Urbs as
233,010. Their arithmetical calculations are, however, vitiated
from the start by the evident falsity of their interpretation of the
Latin words. To a Latin scholar the word domus, whose etymol-
ogy implies a hereditary property, means a private house which
is undivided and in which there live only the owner and his
family; while the insula, as its name vividly suggests, is a large
isolated building, an interest-bearing piece of real estate, a
"block" subdivided into a number of flats or cenacula, each jf
which houses a tenant or a family of tenants. Examples of these
usages could be indefinitely multiplied : Suetonius recalls Caesar's
order laying the duty of filling up the census forms on the owners
of insulae: "per dominos insularum" ; 4 ' 2 Tacitus shrinks from the
task of compiling an exact list of the temples, the domus, and
insulae which had fallen victims to the fire of 64 A.D.; 43 the
biographer who wrote the Historia Augusta records that during
the reign of Antoninus Pius a fire in Rome consumed 340 dwell-
ings in one day apartment houses or private houses : "incendium

20 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

trecentas quadraginta insulas vel domus absumpsit" 44 In all
these texts the insula never appears as an autonomous building.
It is an architectural unit, but not a unit of dwelling. That it was
used in this sense in the Notitia is proved beyond all possibility
of doubt by the detailed description given there of the Insula of
Felicula as one of the sights of the ninth region deserving the
attention of tourists. The reference is to the apartment block of
Felicula, of whose extraordinary dimensions we shall speak later.
We are therefore not justified in dividing the 46,602 insulae
among the 1,797 domus of our statistics. They must on the con-
trary be added together; and to estimate the inhabitants of the
insulae, we must multiply not only by the average dwellers in a
cenaculum but also by the number of cenacula or flats in each
insula.

The total of 233,010 inhabitants at which MM. Cuq and Lot
arrived by their wrong conception of the insula is less even than
the total of adult male citizens alone who enjoyed the generosity
of Augustus. The discrepancy is so obviously ludicrous that it
suffices to condemn their theory. Are we then, in natural reaction
against this sort of calculation, to reckon about 25 cenacula to
each insula, which would result in the Notitia from the ratio be-
tween the 1,797 domus defined as so many insulae, and the 46,602
insulae defined as so many cenacula? This would be to fall into
an error of exaggeration as reprehensible as the opposite. When
we study the various types of Roman house in the following chap-
ter, we shall soon be convinced that the average insula contained
five or six cenacula or flats, each of which housed at least five or
six occupants. We are hence obliged to conclude, from the evi-
dence of the Regionaries of the fourth century, that in the second
century (when the growth of Rome was probably completed, or
at any rate her population had greatly increased) the city had
50,000 citizens, bond or free, living in at least 1,000 domus , and
a further population, which must have varied between 1,165,000
and 1,677,000, in its 46,602 apartment blocks. Even taking the
lower of these two figures, and limiting the total estimate to
around 1,200,000 inhabitants for the Urbs of the Antonines, 45 it
is clear that Rome's population approached that of our own capi-
tals in size, without enjoying any of the benefits of improved
technics and communications which facilitate life and intercourse
in our modern towns,

EXTENT AND POPULATION OF THE CITY 21

The capital of the empire must have suffered all the distresses
of overpopulation which we experience, but in a far worse degree.
If Rome was as enormous for her day as New York is for ours;
if Rome, Queen of the Ancient World,

"Terr arum dea gentiumque, Roma
Cui par est nihil et nihil secundum 4 *

(goddess of continents and peoples, O Rome, whom nothing can
equal and nothing approach )" became in the time of Trajan a
colossal and devouring town which stupefied the stranger and the
provincial as the American metropolis astonishes the Europe of
today, she paid even more dearly for the dimensions which her
dominating position had inflicted upon her.

II

HOUSES AND STREETS

|VEN assessing the area of the Urbs
at more than 2,000 hectares, the
circuit of the Imperial City was
too limited to accommodate 1,200,-
ooo inhabitants, comfortably es-
pecially since every part of it could
not be used for housing. We must
subtract the numerous zones where
public buildings, sanctuaries, basil-
icas, docks, baths, circuses, and
theatres were in the hands of public
authorities, who permitted only a handful of persons to live in
them, such as porters, bonders, clerks, beadles, public slaves, or
members of certain privileged corporations. We must exclude
the capricious bed of the Tiber and the forty or so parks and
gardens which stretched along the Esquiline, the Pincian, and
both banks of the river; the Palatine Hill, which was reserved
exclusively for the emperor's enjoyment; and finally the Campus
Martius, whose temples, porticos, palaestrae, ustrinae, and tombs
covered more than two hundred hectares, from most of which all
human habitations were banished in deference to the gods.

Now we must remember that the ancient Romans had no access
to the almost unlimited suburban space which overground and
underground transport puts at the disposal of London, Paris, and
New York. They were condemned to remain within closer terri-
torial limits owing to a lack of technical skill which strictly limited
the space at their command; and they were unable to increase
the area of their city in proportion to the numerical increase of
their population. They were driven to compensate for this lack of
room by two contradictory expedients: narrow streets and tall
houses. Imperial Rome was continually forced to juxtapose her
splendid monuments to an incoherent confusion of dwelling-

HOUSES AND STREETS 23

houses at once pretentious and uncomfortable, fragile and inordi-
nately large, separated by a network of gloomy, narrow alleys.
When we try to reconstruct ancient Rome in our imagination, we
are ever and again disconcerted by the contrast of modern
spaciousness with primitive mediaeval simplicity, an anticipation
of orderliness that is almost American with the confusion of an
oriental labyrinth.

i. MODERN ASPECTS OF THE ROMAN HOUSE 1

At first sight the student is struck by the "up-to-date" appear-
ance of what was of old the prevailing type of Roman building.
The plan, the dimensions, and the structure of these buildings,
were revealed in the author's study of the docks of Ostia, pub-
lished in 1910; 2 by the excavations which were resumed in 1907
on the site of this colony suburb and faithful miniature of
Rome herself from which Guido Calza ten years later skilfully
drew the necessary deductions; 3 by the unearthing in Rome itself
of Trajan's market-place and of buildings bordering the Via
Biberatica; 4 by the discovery of ruins surviving under the stair-
way of the Ara Coeli; r> and finally by the study of buildings which
existed on the slopes of the Palatine in the Via dei Cerchi, 6 and
under the gallery of the Piazza Colonna. 7

Thirty years ago when men tried, in imagination, to visualize
ancient Rome, they transferred to the banks of the Tiber the
various types of building which had been recovered from the
lava and lapilli of Vesuvius and reconstructed an image of the
Urbs to match those of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Today, on
the other hand, no trained archaeologist would dream of applying
this summary and completely illusory method. Certainly it may
safely be admitted that the mansion known as the House of Livia
on the Palatine, 8 and the House of the Gamala at Ostia, which
later passed into the hands of a certain Apuleius, 9 had kinship
with the country houses of Herculaneum arid Pompeii; and it
may at a pinch be assumed that the private mansions of the
wealthy, the domus which are noted in the Regionaries, fre-
quently borrowed the same features. But the Regionaries give the
city only 1,797 domus against 46,602 insulae; that is to say, only
one private house for every 26 blocks of apartment houses. Cor-
roborating the evidence of the texts and the objective interpre-
tation of the fragments of the survey register of the Urbs which

24 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Septimius Severus re-exposed on the Forum of Peace, 10 the most
recent explorations have shown that there was as large a gulf
between the predominant insula and the rare domus as between a
Roman palace and a seaside villa, or between the maisons of the
great Paris boulevards and the cottages of the Cote d'fimeraude.
Paradoxical as it may seem at first sight, there is certainly a
much closer analogy between the insula of Imperial Rome and
the humble casa of contemporary Rome than between the insula
and the domus of Pompeian type.

The Roman domus turned a blind, unbroken wall to the street
and all its doors and windows opened on its interior courts. The
insula, on the other hand, opened always to the outside and when
it formed a quadrilateral around a central courtyard, its doors,
windows, and staircases opened both to the outside and to the
inside.

The domus was composed of halls whose proportions were cal-
culated once for all and dictated by custom in advance. These
halls opened off each other in an invariable order : fauces, atrium,
alae, triclinium, tablinum, and peristyle. The insula combined
a number of cenacula, that is to say, distinct and separate dwell-
ings like our "flats" or "apartments," consisting of rooms not
assigned in advance to any particular function. The plan of each
story was apt to be identical with that above and below, the
rooms being superimposed from top to bottom of the building.
The domus, influenced by Hellenistic architecture, spread hori-
zontally, while the insula, begotten probably in the course of the
fourth century B.C. of the necessity of housing a growing popula-
tion within the so-called Servian Walls, inevitably developed in a
vertical direction.

In contrast to the Pompeian domus, the Roman insula grew
steadily in stature until under the Empire it reached a dizzy
height. Height was its dominant characteristic and this height
which once amazed the ancient world still astounds us by its
striking resemblance to our own most daring and modern build-
ings. As early as the third century B.C. insulae of three stories
(tabulata, contabidationes, contignationes) were so frequent that
they had ceased to excite remark. In enumerating the prodigies
which, in the winter of 218-217 B.C., preluded the invasion of
Hannibal, Livy mentions without further comment the incident
of an ox which escaped from the cattle market and scaled the

HOUSES AND STREETS 25

stairs of a riverside insula to fling itself into the void from the
third story amid the horrified cries of the onlookers. 11 By the end
of the republic the average height of the insulae indicated by this
anecdote had already been exceeded. Cicero's Rome was, as it
were, borne aloft and suspended in the air on the tiers of its apart-
ment houses: "Romam cenaculis sublatum atque suspensam." 12
The Rome of Augustus towered even higher. In his day, as Vitru-
vius records, "the majesty of the city and the considerable in-
crease in its population have compelled an extraordinary exten-
sion of the dwelling houses, and circumstances have constrained
men to take refuge in increasing the height of the edifices. " 1S
This remedy proved so perilous that the emperor, alarmed by
the frequent collapse of buildings, was forced to regulate it and
to forbid private individuals to erect any building more than 20
metres high. 14 It followed that avaricious and bold owners and
contractors vied with each other in exploiting to the full the
freedom still left them under this decree. Proofs abound to show
that during the empire period the buildings attained a height
which for that epoch was almost incredible. In describing Tyre
at the beginning of the Christian Era, Strabo notes with surprise
that the houses of this famous oriental seaport were almost higher
than those of Imperial Rome. ir> A hundred years later, Juvenal
ridicules this aerial Rome which rests only on beams as long and
thin as flutes. 16 Fifty years later Aulus Gellius complains of stiff,
multiple-storied houses ("multis arduisque tabtdatis"); 11 and the
orator Aelius Aristides calculates in all seriousness that if the
dwellings of the city were all reduced to one story they would
stretch as far as Hadria on the upper Adriatic. 18 Trajan in vain
renewed the restrictions imposed by Augustus and even made
them more severe by imposing a limit of eighteen metres on the
height of private houses. 19 Necessity, however, knows no law:
and in the fourth century the sights of the city included that giant
apartment house, the Insula of Felicula, besides the Pantheon and
the Column of Marcus Aurelius. It must have been erected a
century and a half before, for at the beginning of the reign of
Septimius Severus (193-211) its fame had already spread across
the seas. When Tertullian sought to convince his African com-
patriots of the absurdity of the heretical Valentinians, who filled
the infinite space which separates the Creator from his creatures
with mediators and intermediaries, he rallied the heretics on

26 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

having "transformed the universe into a large, furnished apart-
ment house, in whose attics they have planted their god under
the tiles ("ad summas tegulas") and accuses them of "rearing to
the sky as many stories as we see in the Insula of Felicula in
Rome." 20

Despite the edicts of Augustus and Trajan, the audacity of the
builders had redoubled and the Insula of Felicula towered above
the Rome of the Antonines like a sky-scraper. Even if this particu-
lar building remained an exception, an unusually monstrous
specimen, we know from the records that all around it rose build-
ings of five and six stories. Martial was fortunate in having to
climb only to the third floor of his quarters on the Quirinal, for
many other tenants of the house were worse lodged. 21 In Martial's
insula and in the neighbouring blocks of flats there were many
dwellers perched much higher up, and in the cruel picture Juvenal
paints of a fire in Rome, he seemed to be addressing one unfortu-
nate who, like the god of the Valentinians, lived under the tiles:
"Smoke is pouring out of your third floor attic, but you know
nothing of it; if the alarm begins on the ground floor, the last
man to burn will be he who has nothing to shelter him from the
rain but the tiles, where the gentle doves lay their eggs." 22

There are two types of these innumerable and imposing struc-
tures, whose summits were invisible to the passer-by unless he
stepped back some distance. In the more luxurious, the ground
floor or most of it was let as a whole to one tenant. This floor had
the prestige and the advantages of a private house and was often
dignified by the name of domus in contrast to the flats or cenacula
of the upper stories. 28

Only people of consequence with well-lined purses could indulge
in the luxury of such a domus. We know for instance that in
Caesar's day Caelius paid for his annual rent of 30,000 sesterces
($1,200.00). 24 In the humbler insulae the ground floor might be
divided into booths and shops, the tabernae, which we can vis-
ualize the better because the skeletons of many have survived to
this day in the Via Biberatica and at Ostia. Above the tabernae
lowlier folk were herded. Each taberna opened straight onto the
street by a large arched doorway extending its full width, with
folding wooden leaves which were closed or drawn across the
threshold every evening and firmly locked and bolted. Each rep-
resented the storehouse of some merchant, the workshop of some

KKMMXS or \\ OS I IAN IXSl'LA \\ITH SHOPS AM)
AP\R'I MIA IS

HOUSES AND STREETS 27

artisan, or the counter and show-window of some retailer. But in
the corner of each taberna there was nearly always a stair of five
or six steps of stone or brick continued by a wooden ladder. The
ladder led to a sloping loft, lit directly by one long oblong win-
dow pierced above the centre of the doorway, which served as
the lodging of the storekeeper, the caretakers of the shop, or the
workshop hands.- 5 Whoever they might be, the tenants of tabcr-
nae had never more than this one room for themselves and their
families: they worked, cooked, ate, and slept there, and were at
least as crowded as the tenants of the upper floors. Perhaps on
the whole they were even worse provided for. Certainly they fre-
quently found genuine difficulty in meeting their obligations. To
bring pressure to bear on a defaulter, the landlord might "shut
up the tenant" (pcrduderc inquilinum). that is, make a lien on
his property to cover the amount due.' J<;

There were, then, differences between the two types of apart-
ment house which are known by the common name of insula,
but almost all resulted from the primary distinction between
those houses where the rcz-dc-chaussec formed a domus and those
in which it was let out in tabrrnac. The two types might be
found side by side, and they obeyed the same rules in the internal
arrangement and external appearance of their upper stories.

Let us for a moment consider the Rome of our own day. It is
true that in the course of the last sixty years, and particularly
since the parcelling out of the Villa Ludovisi, Rome has seen the
separate development of ''aristocratic quarters/' But prior to
that, an equalitarian instinct had always tended to place the
most stately dwellings and the humblest side by side; and even
today the stranger is sometimes surprised to turn from a street
swarming with the poorest of the poor and find himself face to
face with the majesty of a Palazzo Farnese. This brotherly feature
of the living Rome helps us to reconstruct in imagination the
Rome of the Caesars where high and low, patrician and plebeian,
rubbed shoulders everywhere without coming into conflict.
Haughty Pompey did not consider it beneath his dignity to re-
main faithful to the Carinae.- 7 Before migrating for political and
religious reasons info the precincts of the Regia, the most fas-
tidicus of patricians, Julius Caesar, lived in the Subura. 28 Later
Maecenas planted his gardens in the most evilly reputed part of
the Esquiline. 29 About the same period the ultra-wealthy Asinius

28 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Pollio chose for his residence the plebeian Aventine, where Li-
cinius Sura, vice emperor of the reign of Trajan, also elected to
make his home. 30 At the end of the first century A.D. the em-
peror Vespasian's nephew and a parasite poet like Martial were
near neighbours on the slopes of the Quirinal, 31 and at the end of
the second century Commodus went to dwell in a gladiatorial
school on the Caelian. 32

It is true that when they were laid waste by fire the various
quarters of the city rose from their ashes more solid and more
magnificent than before. 33 Nevertheless, the incongruous juxta-
positions which persist to this day were repeated with a minimum
of change after each renovation, and every attempt to specialise
the fourteen regions of the Urbs was foredoomed to failure.
Hypersensitive people, anxious to escape the mob, were driven
to move to a greater and greater distance, to take refuge on the
fringes of the Campagna among the pines of the Pincian or the
Janiculum, where they could find room for the parks of their
suburban villas. 34 The common people, meanwhile, driven out of
the centre of the city by the presence of the court and the pro-
fusion of public buildings but nevertheless fettered to it by the
business transacted there, overflowed by preference into the zones
intermediate between the fora and the outskirts, the outside
districts adjacent to the Republican Wall, which the reform of
Augustus had with one stroke of the pen incorporated in the
Urbs. The Regionaries record the number of insulac or apart-
ment blocks in each region, and the number of vici or arteries
serving the insulae; and separate averages may be obtained for
the eight regions of the old city and the six regions of the new.
The average for the older regions is 2,965 insulae with 17 vici
and for the newer 3,429 insulac with 28 vici. We note that the
largest number of insulae were massed in the new city; and that
they attained the greatest size not in the old city where there
were 174 insulae per vicus, but in the new where there were only
123 per vicus. The Regionaries also locate for us the Insula of
Felicula, the giant sky-scraper in the ninth region, known as the
region of the Circus Flaminius, in the very heart of the new city.
Isolated soundings lead us to the same conclusion as do mass
statistics: the successful experiments of imperial city planning
caused the huge modern-style apartment blocks of ancient Rome
to increase in. number and grow to immoderate size.

HOUSES AND STREETS 29

Seen from the outside, all these monumental blocks of flats
were more or less identical in appearance and presented a fairly
uniform fagade to the street. Piled story upon story, the large-
bayed cenacula were superimposed one above the other; the first
steps of their stone staircases cut through the line of the tabcrnae
or the walls of the domus. Reduced to its governing essentials,
the plan of these buildings is familiar. They might well be urban
houses of today or yesterday. From a study of the best preserved
c.i their ruins, the most competent experts have been able to
reproduce on paper the original plan and elevation; and these
drawings show such startling analogies with the buildings in
which we ourselves live that at first sight we are tempted to mis-
trust them. A more attentive examination, however, bears witness
to the conscientious accuracy of these reconstructions. M. Boe-
thius, for instance, has brought together on one photographic
plate such and such a section of Trajan's market or such and
such a building at Ostia and an equivalent existing piece of build-
ing in the Via.dei Cappellari at Rome or the Via dei Tribunali at
Naples. By this means he has demonstrated a surprising re-
semblance at moments approaching identity between these
plans, separated in time by so many centuries. 35 If they could
rise from the dead, the subjects of Trajan or of Hadrian would
feel they had come home when they crossed the threshold of these
modern Roman casoni; but they might with justice complain that
in external appearance their houses had lost rather than gained
in the course of the ages.

Superficially compared with its descendant of the Third Italy,
the insula of Imperial Rome displays a more delicate taste and a
more studied elegance, and in truth the ancient building gives the
more modern impression. Here wood and rubble are ingeniously
combined in its facings and there bricks are disposed with cun-
ning skill, all harmonised with a perfection of art which has been
forgotten among us since the Norman mansions and the castles
of Louis XIII. Its doorways and its windows were no less numer-
ous and often larger. Its row of shops was usually protected and
screened with the line of a portico. In the wider streets its stories
were relieved by a picturesque variety either of loggias (pergulae)
resting on the porticos or of balconies (maeniana). Some were of
wood, and the beams that once supported them may be found
still embedded in the masonry; others were brick, sometimes

30 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

thrown out on pendentives whose lines of horizontal impost are
the parents of the parallel extrados, sometimes based on a series
of cradle-vaults supported by large travertine consoles firmly em-
bedded in the masonry of the prolonged lateral walls.

Climbing plants clung round the pillars of the loggias and the
railing of the balconies, while most of the windows boasted minia-
ture gardens formed of pots of flowers such as the elder Pliny
has described. In the most stifling corners of the great city these
flowers assuaged somewhat the homesickness for the countryside
which lay heavy on the humble town dweller sprung from a long
line of peasant ancestors. 30 We know that at the end of the fourth
century the host of a modest inn at Ostia, like that in which Saint
Augustine set his gentle and memorable discourse with Saint
Monica, 37 always surrounded his guest house with green and
shady trees. The Casa dei Dipinti, considerably older still, seems
to have been completely festooned with flowers, and the highly
plausible reconstruction of it which MM. Calza and Gismondi
have made suggests a garden city in every respect like the most
attractive ones that enlightened building societies and philan-
thropic associations are putting up today for the workmen and
lower middle classes of our great towns.

Unfortunately for this insula, the most luxurious of those to
which archaeology has so far introduced us, its external appear-
ance belied its comforts. The architects had indeed neglected
nothing in its outward embellishment. They had paved it with tiles
and mosaics. By long and costly processes they had clothed it with
colours as fresh and living in their day as those of the frescoes of
Pompeii, though now three parts obliterated. To these it owes
the name by which learned Italians call it, Casa dei Dipinti, the
House of Paintings. I dare not assert that it was equipped with
laquearia enamelled on movable plaques of arbor vitae or carved
ivory, such as wealthy upstarts like Trimalchio fixed above their
dining-tables and worked by machinery to rain down flowers or
perfume or tiny valuable gifts on their surprised and delighted
guests, 38 but it is not improbable that the ceilings of the rooms
were covered with the gilded stucco which the elder Pliny's con-
temporaries admired. 39 Be that as it may, all this luxury had
its price, and the most opulent of the insulae suffered from the
fragility of their construction, the scantiness of their furniture,
insufficient light and heat, and absence of sanitation.

KI. MAINS 01 AN OSII\N APAR I ML.N I HOL'SK

RLCONS1 KL C1I ION

FLOOR PLAN

HOUSES AND STREETS 31

2. ARCHAIC ASPECTS OF THE ROMAN HOUSE

These lofty buildings were far too lightly built. While the
domtis of Pompeii easily covered 800 to 900 square metres, the
insulae of Ostia, though built according to the specifications
which Hadrian laid down, were rarely granted such extensive
foundations. As for the Roman insulae, the ground plans recov-
erable from the cadastral survey of Septimius'Severus, who repro-
duced them, show that they usually varied between 300 and 400
square metres. 40 Even if there were no smaller ones (which is
extremely unlikely) of which all trace has been buried for ever
in the upheavals of the terrain, these figures are misleading: a
foundation of 300 square metres is inadequate enough to carry a
structure of 1 8 to 20 metres high, particularly when we remember
the thickness of the flooring which separated the stories from
each other. We need only consider the ratio of the two figures
given to feel the danger inherent in their disproportion. The lofty
Roman buildings possessed no base corresponding to their height
and a collapse was all the more to be feared since the builders,
lured by greed of gain, tended to economise more and more at the
expense of the strength of the masonry and quality of the mate-
rials. Vitruvius states that the law forbade a greater thickness
for the outside walls than a foot and a half, and in order to
economise space the other walls were not to exceed that. 41 He
adds that, at least from the time of Augustus, it was the custom
to correct this thinness of the walls by inserting chains of bricks
to strengthen the concrete. He observes with smiling philosophy
that this blend of stone-course, chains of brick and layers of con-
crete in which the stones and pebbles were symmetrically em-
bedded, permitted the convenient construction of buildings of
great height and allowed the Roman people to create handsome
dwellings for themselves with little difficulty: "populus romanus
egregias habet sine impeditione habitationes."

Twenty years later Vitruvius would have recanted. The ele-
gance he so admired had been attained only at the sacrifice of
solidity. Even after the brick technique had been perfected in
the second century, and it had become usual to cover the entire
facade with bricks, the city was constantly filled with the noise
of buildings collapsing or being torn down to prevent it; and the
tenants of an insula lived in constant expectation of its coming

32 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

down on their heads. We may recall the savage and gloomy tirade
of Juvenal: "Who at cool Praeneste, or at Volsinii amid its leafy
hills, was ever afraid of his house tumbling down? . . . But here
we inhabit a city propped up for the most part by slats : for that
is how the landlord patches up the crack in the old wall, bidding
the inmates sleep at ease under the ruin that hangs above their
heads." 42

The satirist has not exaggerated and many specific cases pro-
vided for in the legal code, the Digest, take for granted precisely
the precarious state of affairs which excited Juvenal's wrath.

Suppose, for instance, that the owner of an insula has leased it for a
sum of 30,000 sesterces to a principal tenant who by means of sub-
letting draws from it a revenue of 40,000 sesterces, and that the owner
presently, on the pretext that the building is about to collapse, decides
to demolish it; the principal tenant is entitled to bring an action for
damages. If the building was demolished of necessity, the plaintiff will
be entitled to the refund of his rent and nothing further. On the other
hand, if the building has been demolished only to enable the owner
to erect a better and ultimately more remunerative building, the de-
fendant must further pay to the principal tenant who has been com-
pelled to evict his sub-tenants whatever sum the plaintiff has thus lost. 43

This text is suggestive both in itself and in its implications.
The terms in which it is couched leave no doubt as to the fre-
quency of the practices of which it speaks, and they indicate that
the houses of Imperial Rome were at least as fragile as the old
American tenements which not so long ago collapsed or had to be
demolished in New York.

The Roman houses, moreover, caught fire as frequently as the
houses of Stamboul under the Sultans. This was because, in the
first place, they were unsubstantial; further, the weight of their
floors involved the introduction of massive wooden beams, and
the movable stoves which heated them, the candles, the smoky
lamps, and the torches which lighted them at night 'involved per-
petual risk of fire; and finally, as we shall see, water was issued
to the various stories with grudging hand. All these reasons com-
bined to increase both the number of fires and the rapidity with
which they spread. The wealthy Crassus in the last century of
the republic devised a scheme for increasing his immense fortune
by exploiting these catastrophes. 44 On hearing the news of an
outbreak, he would run to the scene of the disaster and offer pro-

HOUSES AND STREETS 33

fuse sympathy to the owner, plunged in despair by the sudden
destruction of his property. Then he would offer to buy on the
spot at a sum far below its real value the parcel of ground,
now nothing but a mass of smouldering ruins. Thereupon, em-
ploying one of the teams of builders whose training he had him-
self superintended, he erected a brand new insula, the income
from which amply rewarded him for his capital outlay.

Even later, under the empire, after Augustus had created a
corps of vigiles or fire-fighting night watchmen, the tactics of
Crassus would have been no less successful. 4r> In spite of the
attention Trajan paid to the policing of the Urbs, outbreaks of
fire were an everyday occurrence in Roman life. The rich man
trembled for his mansion, and in his anxiety kept a troop of
slaves to guard his yellow amber, his bronzes, his pillars of
Phrygian marble, his tortoise-shell inlays. 40 The poor man was
startled from his sleep by flames invading his attic and the terror
of being roasted alive. 47 Dread of fire was such an obsession
among rich and poor alike that Juvenal was prepared to quit
Rome to escape it: u No, no, I must live where there is no fire and
the night is free from alarms!" 48 He had hardly overstated the
case. The jurists echo his satires, and Ulpian informs us that
not a day passed in Imperial Rome without several outbreaks of
fire: "plurimis uno die inccndiis cxortis." 4< *

The scantiness of furniture at least reduced the gravity of
each of these catastrophes. Granted that they were warned in
time, the poor devils of the ccnacula (like that imaginary Ucale-
gon whom Juvenal ironically saddled with the epic name of one
of the Trojans of the Aeneid) were quickly able "to clear out
their miserable goods and chattels." <r ' The rich had more to lo^e
and could not, like Ucalegon, stuff all their worldly possessions
into one bundle. Apart from their statues of marble and bronze,
their furniture, however, was sparse enough, for wealth displayed
itself not in the number of items but in their quality, the precious
materials employed, and the rare shapes which bore witness to
their owner's taste.

In the passage of Juvenal quoted above, 51 the millionaire he
pictures was taking precaution to save not what we nowadays
would call "furniture/' but his curios and objcts d'art. For every
Roman, the main item of furniture was the bed (lectus) on which
he slept during his siesta and at night and on which he reclined

34 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

by day to eat, read, write, or receive visitors. 52 Humble people
made shift with a shelf of masonry built along the wall and cov-
ered with a pallet. Those better off had handsomer and more
elaborate couches in proportion to their means. Most beds were
single ones (lectuli). There were double beds for married couples
(lecti geniales); beds for three which graced the dining-room
(triclinia) ; and those who wished to make a splash and astonish
the neighbours had couches for six. Some were cast in bronze;
most were simply carved in wood, either in oak or maple, tere-
binth or arbor vitae, or it might be in those exotic woods with
undulating grain and changing lights which reflected a thousand
colours like a peacock's tail (lecti pavonini) . Some beds boasted
bronze feet and a wooden frame, others again ivory feet and a
frame of bronze. In some cases the woodwork was inlaid with
tortoise-shell; in some the bronze was nielloed with silver and
gold. There were even some, like Trimalchio's, of massive silver.
Whatever its nature and style, the bed was the major piece of
furniture alike in the aristocratic domus and in the proletarian
insula, and in many cases it deterred the Romans from seeking
to provide themselves with anything else. Their tables (mensae)
had little in common with ours. 53 They never developed into
sturdy tables with four legs those were introduced late in his-
tory through the intermediary of Christian rites. When the em-
pire was in its glory, the mensa was a set of little shelves in tiers,
supported on one leg, and used to display for a visitor's admira-
tion the most valuable treasures of the house (cartibula) . Alter-
natively, it might be a low table of wood or bronze with three
or four adjustable supports (trapezophores) , or a simple tripod
whose folding metal legs usually ended in a lion's claw. As for
seats, remains of these are not without reason more rarely
found in the excavations than tables. The armchair with back,
the thronus, was reserved for the divinity; the chair with a more
or less sloping back, the cathedra, was especially popular with
women. 54 Great ladies, whose indolence is a target for Juvenal's
scorn, 55 would languidly repose in them, and we have literary
record of their existence in two houses : the reception hall in the
palace of Augustus 56 Corneille's "Be seated, Cinna" is derived
directly from Seneca's account and in the room (cubiculum)
where the younger Pliny invited his friends to come and talk with
him. 67 Also they appear in literature as the distinguishing prop-

HOUSES AND STREETS 35

erty of the master who is teaching in a schola or, in connection
with religious ceremonies, as the property of the jrater arvalis
of the official religion, 50 of the head of certain esoteric pagan
sects, and later of the Christian presbyter. We speak with perfect
right, therefore, of the "Chair of Saint Peter" or the "chair" of
a university professor.

Ordinarily the Romans were content with benches (scamna)
or stools (subsellia) or sellae without arms or back, which they
carried about with thenr out of doors. Even when the seat was
the magistrate's ivory sclla curulis, or made of gold like Julius
Caesar's, it was never more than a folding "camp stool." 60 The
rest of the furniture, the essentials apart from beds, consisted of
the covers, the cloths, the counterpanes, the cushions, which were
spread over or placed on the bed, at the foot of the table, on the
seat of the stool, and on the bench; and finally, the eating uten-
sils and the jewellery. Silver table services were so common that
Martial ridicules patrons who were too niggardly of their Satur-
nalian gifts to give their clients at least five pounds (a trifle over
three pounds avoirdupo : s) of silverware. 61 Only the very poor
used earthenware. The rich had vessels carved by a master hand,
sparkling with gold and set with precious stones. 02 Reading some
of the ancient descriptions, one seems to relive a scene out of the
Arabian Nights, set in spacious, unencumbered rooms where
wealth is revealed only by the profusion and depth of the divans,
the iridescence of damask, the sparkle of jewellery and of dama-
scened copper and yet all the elements of that "comfort" to
which the West has grown so much attached are lacking.

Even in the most luxurious Roman house, the lighting left
much to be desired: though the vast bay windows were capable
of flooding it at certain hours with the light and air we moderns
prize, at other times either both had to be excluded or the inhabit-
ants were blinded and chilled beyond endurance. Neither in the
Via Biberatica nor in Trajan's market nor in the Casa dei Dipinti
at Ostia do we find any traces of mica or glass near the windows,
therefore the windows in these places cannot have been equipped
with the fine transparent sheets of lapis specularis with which
rich families of the empire sometimes screened the alcove of a
bedroom, a bathroom or garden hothouse, or even a sedan chair.
Nor can they have been fitted with the thick, opaque panes which
are still found in place in the skylight windows of the baths of

36 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Herculaneum and Pompeii, where they provided a hermetic clo-
sure to maintain the heat without producing complete darkness. 63
The dwellers in a Roman house must have protected themselves,
very inadequately, with hanging cloths or skins blown by wind
or drenched by rain; or overwell by folding shutters of one or
two leaves which, while keeping cold and rain, midsummer heat
or winter wind at bay, also excluded every ray of light. In quar-
ters armed with solid shutters of this sort the occupant, were he
an ex-consul or as well known as the ^ounger Pliny, was con-
demned either to freeze in daylight or to be sheltered in dark-
ness. 64 The proverb says that a door must be either open or shut.
In the Roman insula, on the contrary, the tenant could be com-
fortable only when the windows were neither completely open nor
completely shut; and it is certain that in spite of their size and
number, the Romans' windows rendered them neither the service
nor the pleasure that ours give us.

In the same way, the heating arrangements in the insula were
extremely defective/ 15 As the atrium had been dispensed with,
and the ccnacula were piled one above the other, it was impos-
sible for the inhabitants of an insula to enjoy the luxury com-
mon to the peasantry, of gathering round the fire lighted by the
womenfolk in the centre of their hovels, while sparks and smoke
escaped by the gaping hole purposely left in the roof. It would
be a grave mistake, moreover, to imagine that the insula ever en-
joyed the benefit of central heating with which a misuse of lan-
guage and an error of fact have credited it. The furnace arrange-
ments which are found in so many ruins never fulfilled this
office. They consisted of, first, a heating apparatus (the hypo-
causis} consisting of one or two furnaces which were stoked,
according to the intensity of heat desired and the length of time
it was to be maintained, with wood or charcoal, faggots or dried
grass; second, an exit channel through which the heat, the soot,
and the smoke penetrated indiscriminately into the adjacent
hypocaustum; third, the heat-chamber (the hypocaustum} char-
acterised by piles of bricks in parallel rows, between and over
which heat, soot, and smoke circulated together; and finally the
heated rooms resting on, or, rather, suspended above the hypo-
caustum and known, therefore, as the suspensurae. Whether or
not they were connected with it by the spaces within their parti-
tion walls, the suspensurae were separated from the hypocaustum

HOUSES AND STREETS 37

by a flooring formed of a bed of bricks, a layer of clay, and a
pavement of stone or marble. This compact floor was designed to
exclude unwelcome or injurious exhalations and to slow down the
rise of temperature. It will be noticed that in this device the
heated surface of the suspcnsurae was never greater than the sur-
face of the hypocaustum and its working demanded a number of
hypocauses equal to, if not greater than, the number of hypo-
causta. It follows, therefore, that this system of furnaces had
nothing to do with central heating and was not applicable to
many-storied buildings. In ancient Italy it was never used to heat
an entire building, unless it was one single and isolated room like
the latrine excavated in 1929 at Rome between the Great Forum
and the Forum of Caesar. Moreover, even in the buildings
where such a furnace system existed, it never occupied more than
a small fraction of the house: the bathroom in the best-equipped
villas of Pompeii or the caldarium of the public baths. It need
hardly be stressed that no traces of such a system have been
found in any of the insulae known to us.

This was not the worst. The Roman insula lacked fireplaces as
completely as furnaces. Only a few bakeries at Pompeii had an
oven supplied with a pipe somewhat resembling our chimney; it
would be too much to assume that it was identical with it, for
of the two examples that can be cited, one is broken off in such a
way that we cannot tell where it used to come out, and the other
was not carried up to the roof but into a drying cupboard on the
first floor. No such ventilation shafts have been discovered in the
villas of Pompeii or Herculaneum; still less, of course, in the
houses of Ostia, which reproduce in every detail the plan of the
Roman insula. We are driven to conclude that in the houses of
the Urbs bread and cakes were cooked with a fire confined in an
oven, other food simmered over open stoves, and the inhabitants
themselves had no remedy against the cold but what a brazier
could provide. 67 Many of these were portable or mounted on
runners. Some were wrought in copper or bronze with great taste
and skill. But the grace of this industrial art was scant compen-
sation for the brazier's limited heating power and range. The
haughtiest dwellings of ancient Rome were strangers alike to
the gentle, equal warmth which the radiator spreads through pur
rooms and to the cheerfulness of our open fires. They were
threatened moreover by the attack of noxious fumes and not in-

38 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

frequently by the escape of smoke which was not always pre-
vented either by the thorough drying or even by the preliminary
carbonisation of the fuel (ligna coctilia, acapna).

To make matters worse, the insula was as ill supplied with
water as with light and heat. I admit that the opposite opinion is
generally held. People forget that the conveyance of water to the
city at State expense was regarded as a purely public service
from which private enterprise had been excluded from the first,
and which continued to function under the empire for the benefit
of the collective population wjth little regard for the needs of
private individuals. According to Frontinus, a contemporary of
Trajan, eight aqueducts brought 222,237,060 gallons of water a
day to the city of Rome, 68 but very little of this immense supply
found its way to private houses.

In the first place, it was not until the reign of Trajan and the
opening on June 24, 109, of the aqueduct called by his name, aqua
Traiana, that fresh spring water was brought to the quarters on
the right bank of the Tiber; 69 until then, the inhabitants had to
make their wells suffice for their needs. Secondly, even on the
left bank access to the distributory channels connected by per-
mission of the princeps with the castella of his aqueducts was
granted, on payment of a royalty, only to individual concession-
aires and to ground landlords; 70 and certainly up to the beginning
of the second century these concessions were revocable and were,
in fact, brutally revoked by the administration on the very day
of the death of a concessionaire. 71 Finally, and most significantly,
it seems that these private water supplies were everywhere con-
fined to the ground floor, the chosen residence of the capitalists
who had their domus at the base of the apartment blocks.

In the colony of Ostia, for instance, which, like its neighbour
Rome, possessed an aqueduct, municipal channels, and private
conduits, no building that has so far been excavated reveals any
trace of rising columns which might have conveyed spring water
to the upper stories. All ancient texts, moreover, whatever the
period in which they were written, bear conclusive witness to the
absence of any such installations. Under the empire, the poet
Martial complains that his town house lacks water although it is
situated near an aqueduct. 72 In the Satires of Juvenal the water-
carriers (aquarii) are spoken of as the scum of the slave popula-
tion. 73 The jurists of the first half of the third century consid-

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MULTIPLE LAMP HOLDER

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HOUSES AND STREETS 39

ered the water-carriers so vital to the collective life of each insula
that they formed, as it were, a part of the building itself and, like
the porters (ostiarii) and the sweepers (zetarii), were inherited
with the building by the heir or legatees. 74 The praetorian prefect
Paulus, in issuing instructions to the praefectus vigilum, did not
forget to remind the commandant of the Roman firemen that it
was part of his duty to warn tenants always to keep water ready
in their rooms to check an outbreak: "ut aquam unusquisque
inquilinus in cenaculo habeat iubetur admonere." 75

Obviously, if the Romans of imperial times had needed only
to turn a tap and let floods of water flow into a sink, this warning
would have been superfluous. The mere fact that Paulus expressly
formulated the warning proves that, with a few exceptions to
which we shall revert later, water from the aqueducts reached
only the ground floor of the insula. The tenants of the upper
cenacula had to go and draw their water from the nearest foun-
tain. The higher the flat was perched, the harder the task of
carrying water to scrub the floors and walls of those crowded
contignationcs. It must be confessed that the lack of plentiful
water for washing invited the tenants of many Roman cenacula
to allow filth to accumulate, and it was inevitable that many
succumbed to the temptation for lack of a water system such as
never existed save in the imagination of too optimistic archaeolo-
gists.

Far be it from me to stint my well-deserved admiration for the
network of sewers which conveyed the sewage of the city into
the Tiber. The sewers of Rome were begun in the sixth century
B.C. and continually extended and improved under the republic
and under the empire. The cloacae were conceived, carried out,
and kept up on so grandiose a scale that in certain places a wag-
gon laden with hay could drive through them with ease; and
Agrippa, who perhaps did more than any man to increase their
efficiency and wholesomeness by diverting the overflow of the
aqueducts into them through seven channels, had no difficulty in
travelling their entire length by boat. 76 They were so solidly
constructed that the mouth of the largest, as well as the oldest
of them, the Cloaca Maxima, the central collector for all the
others from the Forum to the foot of the Aventine, can still be
seen opening into the river at the level of the Ponte Rotto. Its
semicircular arch, five metres in diameter, is as perfect today as

40 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

in the days of the kings to whom it is attributed. 77 Its patinated,
tufa voussoirs have triumphantly defied the passage of twenty-
five hundred years. It is a masterpiece in which the enterprise and
patience of the Roman people collaborated with the long experi-
ence won by the Etruscans in the drainage of their marshes; and,
such as it has come down to us, it does honour to antiquity. But
it cannot be denied that the ancients, though they were courageous
enough to undertake it, and patient enough to carry it through,
were not skilful enough to utilise it as we would have done in
their place. They did not turn it to full account for securing a
cleanly town or ensuring the health and decency of the inhabit-
ants.

The system served to collect the sewage of the rcz-de-chausee
and of the public latrines which stood directly along the route, but
no effort was made to connect the cloacae with the private latrines
of the separate cenacula. There are only a few houses in Pompeii
whose upstairs latrines were so designed that they could empty
into the sewer below, whether by a conduit connecting them with
the sewer or by a special arrangement of pipes, and the same
can be said of Ostia and Herculaneum. 7s But since this type of
drainage is lacking in the most imposing insulac of Ostia as in
those of Rome, we may abide in general by the judgment of Abbe
Thedenat, who thirty-five years ago stated unequivocally that the
living quarters of the insulae had never at any time been linked
with the cloacae of the Urbs. 79 The drainage system of the Roman
house is merely a myth begotten of the complacent imagination
of modern times. Of all the hardships endured by the inhabitants
of ancient Rome, the lack of domestic drainage is the one which
would be most severely resented by the Romans of today.

The very rich escaped the inconvenience. If they lived in their
own domus, they had nothing to do but construct a latrine on the
ground level. Water from the aqueducts might reach it and at
worst, if it was too far distant from one of the sewers for the
refuse to be swept away, the sewage could fall into a trench
beneath. These cess trenches, like the one excavated near San
Pietro in 1892, were neither very deep nor proof against seepage,
and the manure merchants had acquired the right probably
under Vespasian 80 to arrange for emptying them. If the privi-
leged had their domus in an insula, they rented the whole of the
ground floor and enjoyed the same advantage as in a private

HOUSES AND STREETS 41

house. The poor, however, had a longer way to go. In any case
they were forced to go outside their homes. If the trifling cost
was not deterrent, they could pay for entry to one of the public
latrines administered by the conductores foricarum* 1 The great
number of these establishments, which the Regionaries attest, is
an indication of the size of their clientele. In Trajan's Rome, as
today in some backward villages, the immense majority of private
people had to have .recourse to the public latrine. But the com-
parison cannot be pushed further. The latrines of ancient Rome
are disconcerting on two counts ; we need only recall the examples
of Pompeii, of Timgad, of Ostia, and that already alluded to at
Rome itself, which was heated in winter by a hypocausis: the
jorica at the intersection of the Forum and the Forum lulium. 82

The Roman jorica was public in the full sense of the term, like
soldiers' latrines in war time. People met there, conversed, and
exchanged invitations to dinner without embarrassment. 83 And
at the same time, it was equipped with superfluities which we
forego and decorated with a lavishness we are not wont to spend
on such a spot. All round the semicircle or rectangle which it
formed, water flowed continuously in little channels, in front of
which a score or so of seats were fixed. The seats were of marble,
and the opening was framed by sculptured brackets in the form of
dolphins, which served both as a support and as a line of demarca-
tion. Above the seats it was not unusual to see niches containing
statues of gods or heroes, as on the Palatine, or an altar to For-
tune, the goddess of health and happiness, as in Ostia; 84 and not
infrequently the room was cheered by the gay sound of a playing
fountain as at Timgad. 85 Let us be honest with ourselves: we are
amazed at this mixture of delicacy and coarseness, at the solem-
nity and grace of the decorations and the familiarity of the actors.
It is like nothing but the fifteenth century madrasas in Fez, where
the latrines were also designed to accommodate a crowd, and
decorated with exquisitely delicate stucco and covered with a
lacelike ceiling of cedar wood. Suddenly Rome where even the
latrines of the imperial palace, as majestic and ornate as a
sanctuary beneath its dome, contained three seats side by side 86
Rome at once mystic and sordid, artistic and carnal, without
embarrassment and without shame seems to join hands with the
distant Haghrab at the epoch of the Merinids, so far removed
from us in time and space.

42 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

But the public latrines were not the resort of misers or of the
very poor. These folk had no mind to enrich the conductores
joricarum to the tune of even one as. They preferred to have
recourse to the jars, skilfully chipped down for the purpose,
which the fuller at the corner ranged in front of his workshop. He
purchased permission for this from Vespasian, in consideration
of a tax to which no odour clung, so as to secure gratis the urine
necessary for his trade. 87 Alternatively they clattered down the
stairs to empty their chamber pots (las ana) and their commodes
(sellae pertusae) into the vat or dolium placed under the well of
the staircase. 88 Or if perhaps this expedient had been forbidden
by the landlord of their insula, they betook themselves to some
neighbouring dungheap. For in Rome of the Caesrrs, as in a
badly kept hamlet of today, more than one alley stank with the
pestilential odour of a cess trench (lacus) such as those which
Cato the Elder during his censorship paved over when he cleaned
the cloacae and led them under the Aventine. 89 Such malodorous
trenches were extant in the days of Cicero and Caesar; Lucretius
mentions them in hK poem, DC rcrum natural Two hundred
years later, in the time of Trajan, they were still there and one
might see unnatural mothers of the Megaera type, anxious to
rid themselves of an unwanted child, surreptitiously taking ad-
vantage of a barbarc us law and exposing a new-born infant there;
while matrons grieving over their barrenness would hasten no
less secretly to snatch the baby, hoping to palm it off on a credu-
lous husband as their own, and thus with a supposititious heir to
still the ache in his paternal heart. 91

There were other poor devils who found their stairs too steep
and the road to these dung pits too long, and to save themselves
further trouble would empty the contents of their chamber pots
from their heights into the streets. So much the worse for the
passer-by who happened to intercept the unwelcome gift! Fouled
and sometimes even injured, as in Juvenal's satire, 92 he had no
redress save to lodge a complaint against the unknown assailant;
many passages of the Digest indicate that Roman jurists did
not disdain to take cognisance of this offence, to refer the case to
the judges, to track down the offender, and assess the damages
payable to the victim. Ulpian classifies the various clues by which
it might be possible to trace the culprit.

HOUSES AND STREETS 43

If [he says] the apartment [cenaculum] is divided among several ten-
ants, redress can be sought only against that one of them who lives in
that part of the apartment from the level of which the liquid has been
poured. If the tenant, however, while professing to have sub-let [cena-
cularium exercens], has in fact retained for himself the enjoyment of
the greater part of the apartment, he shall be held solely responsible.
If, on the other hand, the tenant who professes to have sub-let has in
fact retained for his own use only a modest fraction of the space, he
and his sub-tenants shall be jointly held responsible. The same will
hold good if the vessel or the liquid has been thrown from a balcony. 93

But Ulpian does not exclude the culpability of an individual if
the inquiry is able to fix the blame on one guilty person, and he
requests the praetor to set in equity a penalty proportionate to
the seriousness of the injury. For instance*

When in consequence of the fall of one of these projectiles from a house,
the body of a free man shall have suffered injury, the judge shall award
to the victim in addition to medical fees and other expenses incurred in
his treatment and necessary to his recovery, the total of the wages of
which he has been or shall in future be deprived by the inability to work
which has ensued. 94

Wise provisions these, which might seem to have inspired our
laws relating to accidents, but which we have failed to adopt in
their entirety, for Ulpian ends with a notable restriction. In for-
mulating his final paragraph he expresses with unemotional sim-
plicity his noble conception of the dignity of man: "As for scars
or disfigurement which may have resulted from such wounds,' no
damages can be calculated on this count, for the body of a free
man is without price. "

The lofty sentiment of this phrase rises like a flower above a
cess pit and serves to accentuate our dismayed embarrassment at
the state of affairs of which these subtle legal analyses give a
glimpse. Our great cities are also shadowed by misery, stained by
the uncleanness of our slums, dishonoured by the vice they har-
bour. But at least the disease which gnaws at them is usually
localised and confined to certain blighted quarters, whereas we
get the impression that slums invaded every corner of Imperial
Rome. Almost everywhere throughout the Urbs the insulae were
the property of owners who had no wish to be concerned directly
in their management and who leased out the upper stories to a
promoter for five-year terms in return for a rent at least equal

44 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

to that of the ground-floor domus. This principal tenant who set
himself to exploit the sub-letting of the cenacula had no bed of
roses. He had to keep the place in repair, obtain tenants, keep the
peace between them, and collect his quarterly payments on the
year's rent. Not unnaturally he sought compensation for his
worries and his risks by extorting enormous profits. Ever-rising
rent is a subject of eternal lamentation in Roman literature.

In 153 B.C. an exiled king had to share a flat with an artist, a
painter, in order to make ends meet. 95 In Caesar's day the
humblest tenant had to pay a rent of 2,000 sesterces ($80) a year.
In the times of Domitian and of Trajan, one could have bought
a fine estate at Sora or Frusino for the price of quarters in Rome. 96
So intolerable was the burden of rent that the sub-tenants of the
first lessee almost invariably had to sub-let in their turn every
room in their cenaculum which they could possibly spare. Almost
everywhere, the higher you went in a building, the more breath-
less became the overcrowding, the more sordid the promiscuity.
If the rez-de-chaussee was divided into several tabernae, they
were filled with artisans, shopkeepers and eating-house keepers,
like those of the insula which Petronius describes. 97 If it had been
retained for the use of one privileged possessor, it was occupied
by the retainers of the owner of the domus. But whatever the dis-
position of the ground floor, the upper stories were gradually
swamped by the mob: entire families were herded together in
them; dust, rubbish, and filth accumulated; and finally bugs ran
riot to such a point that one of the shady characters of Petronius'
Satyricon, hiding under his miserable pallet, was driven to press
his lips against the bedding which was black with them. 98
Whether we speak of the luxurious and elegant domus or of the
insulae caravanserais whose heterogeneous inhabitants needed
an army of slaves and porters under the command of a servile
steward to keep order among them the dwelling-houses of the
Urbs were seldom ranged in order along an avenue, but jostled
each other in a labyrinth of steep streets and lanes, all more or
less narrow, tortuous, and dark, and the marble of the "palaces"
shone in the obsr irity of cut-throat alleys.

; v STREETS AND TRAFFIC

If some magic wand could have disentangled the jumble of the
Roman streets ^nd laid them end to end, they would certainly

HOUSES AND STREETS 45

have covered a distance of 60,000 passus, or approximately 89
kilometres. So we learn from the calculations and measurements
carried out by the censors Vespasian and Titus in 73 A.D. 99 And
the elder Pliny, moved to pride by the contemplation of this im-
mense extent of streets, compares with it the height of the build-
ings they served and proclaims that there existed in all the ancient
world no city whose size could be compared to that of Rome. 100
The size is not to be denied, but if instead of admiring the
imaginary and orderly perspective which Pliny plotted in a
straight line on his parchment, we consider the actual layout of
Roman streets, we find them forming an inextricably tangled net,
their disadvantages immensely aggravated by the vast height of
the buildings which shut them in. Tacitus attributes the ease and
speed with which the terrible fire of 64 A.D. spread through
Rome to the anarchy of these confined streets, winding and twist-
ing as if they had been drawn haphazard between the masses of
giant insulae. 101 This lesson was not lost on Nero; but if in re-
building the burnt-out insulae he intended to reconstruct them
on a more rational plan with better alignment and more space
between, he failed on the whole to achieve his aim. 102 Down to
the end of the empire the street system of Rome as a whole rep-
resented an inorganic welter rather than a practical and efficient
plan. The streets always smacked of their ancient origin and
maintained the old distinctions which had prevailed at the time
of their rustic development: the timer a y which were tracks only
for men on foot, the actus, which permitted the passage of only
one cart at a time, and finally the viae proper, which permitted
two carts to pass each other or to drive abreast. 103 Among all the
innumerable streets of Rome, only two inside the old Republican
Wall could justly claim the name of via. They were the Via
Sacra and the Via Nova, which respectively crossed and flanked
the Forum, and the insignificance of these two thoroughfares re-
mains a perpetual surprise. Between the gates of the innermost
enclosure and the outskirts of the fourteen regions, not more
than a score of others de erved the title : the roads which led out
of Rome to Italy, the Via Appia, the Via Latina, the Via Ostien-
sis, the Via Labicana, etc. They varied in width from 4.80 to 6.50
metres, a proof that they had not been greatly enlarged since
the day when the Twelve Tables had prescribed a maximum
width of 4.80 metres.

44 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

to that of the ground-floor domus. This principal tenant who set
himself to exploit the sub-letting of the cenacula had no bed of
roses. He had to keep the place in repair, obtain tenants, keep the
peace between them, and collect his quarterly payments on the
year's rent. Not unnaturally he sought compensation for his
worries and his risks by extorting enormous profits. Ever-rising
rent is a subject of eternal lamentation in Roman literature.

In 153 B.C. an exiled king had to share a flat with an artist, a
painter, in order to make ends meet. 95 In Caesar's day the
humblest tenant had to pay a rent of 2,000 sesterces ($80) a year.
In the times of Domitian and of Trajan, one could have bought
a fine estate at Sora or Frusino for the price of quarters in Rome. 96
So intolerable was the burden of rent that the sub-tenants of the
first lessee almost invariably had to sub-let in their turn every
room in their cenaculum which they could possibly spare. Almost
everywhere, the higher you went in a building, the more breath-
less became the overcrowding, the more sordid the promiscuity.
If the rez-de-chauss6e was divided into several tabernae, they
were filled with artisans, shopkeepers and eating-house keepers,
like those of the insula which Petronius describes. 07 If it had been
retained for the use of one privileged possessor, it was occupied
by the retainers of the owner of the domus. But whatever the dis-
position of the ground floor, the upper stories were gradually
swamped by the mob: entire families were herded together in
them; dust, rubbish, and filth accumulated; and finally bugs ran
riot to such a point that one of the shady characters of Petronius'
Satyricon, hiding under his miserable pallet, was driven to press
his lips against the bedding which was black with them. 98
Whether we speak of the luxurious and elegant domus or of the
insulae caravanserais whose heterogeneous inhabitants needed
an army of slaves and porters under the command of a servile
steward to keep order among them the dwelling-houses of the
Urbs were seldom ranged in order along an avenue, but jostled
each other in a labyrinth of steep streets and lanes, all more or
less narrow, tortuous, and dark, and the marble of the "palaces"
shone in the obsc'irity of cut-throat alleys.

3. STREETS AND TRAFFIC

If some magic wand could have disentangled the jumble of the
Roman streets and laid them end to end, they would certainly

HOUSES AND STREETS 45

have covered a distance of 60,000 passus, or approximately 89
kilometres. So we learn from the calculations and measurements
carried out by the censors Vespasian and Titus in 73 A.D." And
the elder Pliny, moved to pride by the contemplation of this im-
mense extent of streets, compares with it the height of the build-
ings they served and proclaims that there existed in all the ancient
world no city whose size could be compared to that of Rome. 100
The size is not to be denied, but if instead of admiring the
imaginary and orderly perspective which Pliny plotted in a
straight line on his parchment, we consider the actual layout of
Roman streets, we find them forming an inextricably tangled net,
their disadvantages immensely aggravated by the vast height of
the buildings which shut them in. Tacitus attributes the ease and
speed with which the terrible fire of 64 A.D. spread through
Rome to the anarchy of these confined streets, winding and twist-
ing as if they had been drawn haphazard between the masses of
giant insulae. 101 This lesson was not lost on Nero; but if in re-
building the burnt-out insulae he intended to reconstruct them
on a more rational plan with better alignment and more space
between, he failed on the whole to achieve his aim. 102 Down to
the end of the empire the street system of Rome as a whole rep-
resented an inorganic welter rather than a practical and efficient
plan. The streets always smacked of their ancient origin and
maintained the old distinctions which had prevailed at the time
of their rustic development: the itinera, which were tracks only
for men on foot, the actus, which permitted the passage of only
one cart at a time, and finally the viae proper, which permitted
two carts to pass each other or to drive abreast. 108 Among all the
innumerable streets of Rome, only two inside the old Republican
Wall could justly claim the name of via. They were the Via
Sacra and the Via Nova, which respectively crossed and flanked
the Forum, and the insignificance of these two thoroughfares re-
mains a perpetual surprise. Between the gates of the innermost
enclosure and the outskirts of the fourteen regions, not more
than a score of others deserved the title: the roads which led out
of Rome to Italy, the Via Appia, the Via Latina, the Via Ostien-
sis, the Via Labicana, etc. They varied in width from 4.80 to 6.50
metres, a proof that they had not been greatly enlarged since
the day when the Twelve Tables had prescribed a maximum
width of 4.80 metres.

46 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

The majority of the other thoroughfares, the real streets, or
vici, scarcely attained this last figure and many fell far below it,
being simple passages (angiportus) or tracks (semitae) which
had to be at least 2.9 metres wide to allow for projecting bal-
conies. 104 Their narrowness was all the more inconvenient in that
they constantly zigzagged and on the Seven Hills rose and fell
steeply hence the name of clivi which many of them, like the
Clivus Capitolinus, the Clivus Argentarius, bore of good right.
They were daily defiled by the filth and refuse of the neighbour-
ing houses, and were neither so well kept as Caesar had decreed
in his law, nor always furnished with the foot-paths and paving
that he had also prescribed. 105

Caesar's celebrated text, graven on the bronze tablet of Hera-
clea, is worth rereading. In comminatory words he commands
the landlords whose buildings face on a public street to clean in
front of the doors and walls, and orders the aediles in each quar-
ter to make good any omission by getting the work done through
a contractor for forced labour, appointed in the usual manner of
state contractors, at a fee fixed by preliminary bidding, which
the delinquent will be obliged forthwith to pay. 106 The slightest
delay in payment is to be visited by exaction of a double fee.
The command is imperative, the punishment merciless. But in-
genious as was the machinery for carrying it out, this procedure
involved a delay of ten days at least which must have usually
defeated its purpose, and it cannot be denied that gangs of sturdy
sweepers and cleaners directly recruited and employed by the
aediles would have disposed of the business more promptly and
more satisfactorily. We have, however, no indication that this
was ever done, and the idea that in this case the State should
have taken the authority and responsibility off the shoulders of
the private individual could not possibly have entered the head
of any Roman, though he were gifted with the genius of a Julius
Caesar.

It is my opinion that the Romans had been equally unsuccess-
ful in extending to the whole city the sidewalks (margines,
crepidines) or even the paving (viae stratae) with which Caesar
in his day had dreamed of furnishing them. The archaeologists
who differ from me in this matter cite in all seriousness the
wide pavements of the Italian roads, forgetting that the paving
of the Via Appia in 312 B.C. preceded by sixty-five years the

HOUSES AND STREETS 47

paving on the Clivus Publicius inside the old republican city. 107
Alternatively, they take refuge once again in the example of
Pompeii, ignoring how treacherous is this analogy. The com-
parison of Roman conditions with those of Pompeii is as invalid
in the matter of vici as in the matter of insulae. If the streets
of Imperial Rome had been as generally paved as they suppose,
the Flavian praetor of whom Martial writes would not have
been obliged to "walk right through the mud" in using them
nor would Juvenal in his turn have had his legs caked with
mud. 108 As for foot-paths, it is impossible that they lined thfe
streets, which were becoming completely submerged under the
rising tide of outspread merchandise until Domitian intervened
with an edict forbidding the display of wares on the street.
His edict is commemorated in the epigram: "Thanks to you,
Germanicus, no pillar is now girt with chained flagons, . . . nor
does the grimy cook-shop monopolise the public way. Barber,
tavern-keeper, cook, and butcher keep within their own threshold.
Now Rome exists, which so recently was one vast shop." 109

Had the above-mentioned edict any permanent effect? We
may be permitted to doubt it. The retreat of the hucksters may
have been secured, or not, by day at the will of a despotic em-
peror; it certainly took place of its own accord at night. This is
in fact one of the characteristics which most markedly distin-
guishes Imperial Rome from contemporary cities: when there
was no moon its streets were plunged in impenetrable darkness.
No oil lamps lighted them, no candles were affixed to the walls;
no lanterns were hung over the lintel of the doors, save on festive
occasions when Rome was resplendent with exceptional illumi-
nations to demonstrate her collective joy, as when Cicero rid
her of the Catilinarian plague. In normal times night fell over
the city like the shadow of a great danger, diffused, sinister, and
menacing. 110 Everyone fled to his home, shut himself in, and
barricaded the entrance. The shops fell silent, safety chains were
drawn across behind the leaves of the doors; the shutters of the
flats were closed and the pots of flowers withdrawn from the
windows they had adorned.

If the rich had to sally forth, they were accompanied by
slaves who carried torches to light and protect them on their
way. Other folk placed no undue reliance on the night watchmen
(sebaciarii), squads of whom, torch in hand, patrolled the sector

48 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

too vast to be completely guarded. Each of the seven cohorts of
vigiles was theoretically responsible for the policing of two re-
gions. No ordinary person ventured abroad without vague ap-
prehension and a certain reluctance. Juvenal sighs that to go
out to supper without having made your will was to expose
yourself to the reproach of carelessness; and if his satire goes
too far in contending that the Rome of his day was more dan-
gerous than the forest of Gallinaria or the Pontine marshes, we
need only to turn the leaves of the Digest and note the passages
which render liable to prosecution by the praefectus vigilum the
murderers (sicarii), the housebreakers (effractores) , the foot-
pads of every kind (raptores) who abounded in the city, 111 in
order to admit that "many misadventures were to be feared"
in her pitch-dark vici, where in Sulla's day Roscius of Ameria
met his death. Not all night adventures were tragic, though the
belated wanderer exposed himself to death or at least to the
danger of pollution "whenever windows opened above his head
behind which someone was not yet asleep." The least serious
kind of mishap was that which overtook the sorry heroes of
Petronius' story, who leaving Trimalchio's table very late and
slightly "merry," lost their way for lack of a lantern in the
rabbit warren of unnamed, unnumbered, unlit streets, and
reached home barely before daybreak. 112

All communications in the city were dominated by this con-
trast between night and day. By day there reigned intense ani-
mation, a breathless jostle, an infernal din. 113 The tabernae were
crowded as soon as they opened and spread their displays into
the street. Here barbers shaved their customers in the middle
of the fairway. There the hawkers from Transtiberina passed
along, bartering their packets of sulphur matches for glass
trinkets. Elsewhere, the owner of a cook-shop, hoarse with call-
ing to deaf ears, displayed his sausages piping hot in their
saucepan. Schoolmasters and their pupils shouted themselves
hoarse in the open air. On the one hand, a money-changer rang
his coins with the image of Nero on a dirty table, on another a
beater of gold dust pounded with his shining mallet on his well-
worn stone. At the cross-roads a circle of idlers gaped round a
viper tamer; everywhere tinkers' hammers resounded and the
quavering voices of beggars invoked the name of Bellona or

HOUSES AND STREETS 49

rehearsed their adventures and misfortunes to touch the hearts
of the passers-by. The flow of pedestrians was unceasing and
the obstacles to their progress did not prevent the stream soon
becoming a torrent. In sun or shade a whole world of people
came and went, shouted, squeezed, and thrust through narrow
lanes unworthy of a country village; and fifteen centuries before
Boileau sharpened his wit on the Embarras de Paris, the traffic
jams of ancient Rome provided a target for the shafts of Juvenal.
It might have been hoped that night would put an end to the
din with fear-filled silence and sepulchral peace. Not so; it was
merely replaced by another sort of noise. Ordinary men had by
now sought sanctuary in their homes, but the human stream
was, by Caesar's decree, succeeded by a procession of beasts of
burden, carts, their drivers, and their escorts. 114 The great dic-
tator had realised that in alleyways so steep, so narrow, and so
traftic-ridden as the vici of Rome the circulation by day of ve-
hicles serving the needs of a population of so many hundreds of
thousands caused an immediate congestion and constituted a
permanent danger. He therefore took the radical and decisive
step which his law proclaimed. From sunrise until nearly dusk
no transport cart was henceforward to be allowed within the
precincts of the Urbs. Those which had entered during the night
and had been overtaken by the dawn must halt and stand empty.
To this inflexible rule four exceptions alone were permitted:
on days of solemn ceremony, the chariots of the Vestals, of the
Rex Sacrorum, and of the Flamines; on days of triumph, the
chariots necessary to the triumphal procession; on days of public
games, those which the official celebration required. Lastly one
perpetual exception was made for every day of the year in
favour of the carts of the contractors who were engaged in
wrecking a building to reconstruct it on better and hygienic
lines. Apart from these few clearly defined cases, no daytime
traffic was allowed in ancient Rome except for pedestrians, horse-
men, litters, and carrying chairs. Whether it was a pauper funeral
setting forth at nightfall or majestic obsequies gorgeously carried
out in full daylight, whether or not the funeral procession was
preceded by flute-players and horn-blowers or followed by a
long cortege of relations, friends, and hired mourners (praeficae),
the dead, enshrined in a costly coffin (capulum) or laid on a

SO DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

hired bier (sandaptta), made their last journey to the funeral
pyre or the tomb on a simple handbarrow borne by the vespU-
lones

On the other hand, the approach of night brought with it the
legitimate commotion of wheeled carts of every sort which filled
the city with their racket. For it must not be imagined that
Caesar's legislation died with him and that to serve their own
customs or convenience individuals sooner or later made his
Draconian regulations a dead letter. The iron hand of the dic-
tator held its sway through the centuries, and his heirs, the
emperors, never released the Roman citizens from the restraints
which Caesar had ruthlessly imposed on them in the interests
of the public welfare. On the contrary, the emperors in turn
consecrated and strengthened them. Claudius extended them to
thcf municipalities of Italy; llfl Marcus Aurelius to every city
of the empire without regard to its own municipal statutes; 117
Hadrian limited the teams and the loads of the carts allowed to
enter the city; 118 and at the end of the first century and the
beginning of the second we find the writers of the day reflecting
the image of a Rome still definitely governed by the decrees of
Julius Caesar.

According to Juvenal the incessant night traffic and the hum
of noise condemned the Roman to everlasting insomnia. "What
sleep is possible in a lodging?" he asks. "The crossing of wag-
gons in the narrow, winding streets, the swearing of drovers
brought to a standstill would snatch sleep from a sea-calf or the
emperor Claudius himself." 119 Amid the intolerable thronging of
the day against which the poet inveighs immediately after, we
detect above the hurly-burly of folk on foot only the swaying of
a Liburnian litter. The herd of people which sweeps the poet
along proceeds on foot through a scrimmage that is constantly
renewed. The crowd ahead impedes his hasty progress, the crowd
behind threatens to crush his loins. One man jostles him with
his elbow, another with a beam he is carrying, a third bangs his
head with a wine-cask. A mighty boot tramps on his foot, a
military nail embeds itself in his toe, and his newly mended tunic
is torn. Then of a sudden panic ensues: a waggon appears, on
top of which a huge log is swaying, another follows loaded with
a whole pine tree, yet a third carrying a cargo of Ligurian

HOUSES AND STREETS 51

marble. "If the axle breaks and pours its contents on the crowd,
what will be left of their bodies?"

Thus, under the Flavians and under Trajan, just as a century
and a half earlier after the publication of Caesar's edict, the only
vehicles circulating by day in Rome were the carts of the building
contractors. The great man's law had survived its author's death,
and this continuity is symptom of the quality which guarantees
to Imperial Rome a unique position among the cites of all time
and every place. With effortless ease Rome harmonised the most
incongruous features, assimilated the most diverse forms of past
and present, and while challenging the remotest comparisons,
she remains essentially and for all time incomparable. We have
seen her arrogant and fragile sky-scrapers rise to heights which
her engineering could scarcely justify, we have seen the most
modern refinements of extravagant luxury existing side by side
with preposterous discomfort and mediaeval barbarity, and now
we are faced with the disconcerting traffic problems of her streets.
The scenes they witness seem borrowed from the suqs of an
oriental bazaar. They are thronged by motley crowds, seething
and noisy, such as might jostle us in the square Jama' Alfna of
Marrakesh, and filled with a confusion that seems to us incom-
patible with the very idea of civilisation. And suddenly in the
twinkling of an eye they are transformed by a logical and im-
perious decree, swiftly imposed and maintained generation after
generation, symbol of that social discipline which among the
Romans compensated for their lack of techniques, and which
the West today, oppressed by a multiplicity of discoveries and
the complexities of progress is for its salvation striving to imitate.

Ill

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES

i. ROMANS AND FOREIGNERS

T FIRST sight Roman society ap-
pears to be divided into water-tight
compartments and to bristle with
barriers between class and class. All
free-born men (ingenui), whether
citizens of Rome or elsewhere, were
in principle in a distinct category,
radically separated by their superi-
ority of birth from the mass of
slaves who were originally without
rights, without guarantees, without
personality, delivered over like a herd of brute beasts to the
discretion of their master, and like a herd of beasts treated
rather as inanimate objects than as sentient beings (res mancipi) .
Among the ingenui, again, there existed a profound distinction
between the Roman citizen whom the law protected and the non-
citizen who was merely subject to the law. Finally, Roman citi-
zens themselves were classified and their position on this ladder
of rank determined by their fortunes.

Whereas under the republic there had been equality for all
citizens before the law, in the empire of the second and third
centuries a legal distinction arose which divided the citizen body
into two classes: the honestiores and the humiliores, also called
plebeii or tenuiores. 1 To the first class belonged Roman senators
and knights with their families, soldiers and veterans with their
children, and men who held or had held municipal offices in towns
and cities outside of Rome, with their descendants. All other
citizens belonged to the second, and unless wealth or ability
brought them into public office, they remained there.
The humiliores were subject to the most severe and humiliating

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES S3

punishments for infraction of the laws. They might be sent to
the mines (ad metalla), thrown to the beasts in the amphitheatre,
or crucified. The honestiores, on the other hand, enjoyed certain
privileges. In case of grave misconduct, they were spared punish-
ments which would tend to degrade their position in the eyes of
the people and generally got off with banishment, relegation, or
losing their property.

The two highest groups among the honestiores were known as
"orders" (ordines) and were composed respectively of senators
and knights. The members of the lower or Equestrian Order had
to possess a minimum of 400,000 sesterces ($i 6,000). 2 If they
were honoured by the confidence of the emperor they were then
qualified to be given command of his auxiliary troops or to fulfill
a certain number of civil functions reserved for them; they could
become domanial or fiscal procurators, or governors of secondary
provinces like those of the Alps or Mauretania. After Hadrian's
time they could hold various posts in the imperial cabinet, and
after Augustus they were eligible for any of the prefectures ex-
cept that of praejectus urbi?

At the summit of the social scale was the Senatorial Order. 4
A member of this order had to own at least 1,000,000 sesterces
($40,000). The emperor could at will appoint him to command
his legions, to act as legate or proconsul in the most important
provinces, to administer the chief services of the city, or to hold
the highest posts in the priesthood. 5 An ingenious hierarchy
gradually established barriers between the different ranks of the
privileged, and to make these demarcations more evident Hadrian
bestowed on each variety its own exclusive title of nobility. Among
the knights, "distinguished man" (vir egregius) served for a mere
procurator; "very perfect man" (vir perfectissimus) for a prefect
unless he were a praetor, who was. "most eminent" (vir emi-
nentissimus) , a title later restored by the Roman Church for the
benefit of her cardinals; while the epithet "most famous" (vir
clarissimus) was reserved for the senator and his immediate rela-
tives. 8

This exact and rigid system, whose ingenious variations antici-
pate the elaborate hierarchy devised by Peter the Great, is paral-
leled by Napoleon's system of graded precedence in the army and
the Legion of Honour. In Rome, where officers and functionaries
came and went, it established assort of social pyramid on the

54 DAILY juIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

summit of which, midway between earth and heaven, the princeps
was poised in lonely, incomparable majesty.

As his title indicates, the princeps ws, in one sense, only the
First of the Senate and of the People. In another sense, however,
this primacy implied a difference not only of degree but of nature
between himself and the rest of humanity. For the emperor, as
incarnation of the law and guardian of the auspices, was closer to
the gods than to the ordinary human being, from whom he was
separated after his accession by his sacred character of "Augus-
tus." He was the offspring of the gods, and at death he would
return to them after his apotheosis to be proclaimed divus him-
self in due course. In vain Trajan repudiated with scorn Domi-
tian's claim to be addressed by the double title of "Master and
God" (dominus et deus). 7 He could not free himself from the
toils of the cult which worshipped the imperial genius as repre-
sented in his person and which bound the incongruous federation
of cities in East and West together in the universal empire (or bis
Romanus). He had to endure hearing his decrees publicly hailed
as "divine" by those whose wishes they fulfilled.

Thus Rome appears a world petrified under a theocratic aris-
tocracy, an inflexible structure composed of innumerable separate
compartments. On closer examination we find, however, that the
partitions were by no means water-tight, and that powerful
equalitarian currents never ceased to circulate, continually stirring
up and renewing the elements of a society whose divisions were
far from isolated. Not even the imperial house was proof against
these currents. When the Julian family became extinct on the
death of Nero, the principate was no longer the monopoly of one
predestined clan or even of the city. As Tacitus expressed it,
"The secret of empire was now disclosed that an emperor could
be made elsewhere than at Rome." 8

Not the blood of Caesar or of Augustus henceforth conferred
the principate, but the loyalty of the Legions. Vespasian, legate,
of the East, Trajan, legate of Germany, were carried to supreme
power, the former by the acclamations of his troops, the latter
by the fear his army inspired and the confidence he himself in-
spired. Both rose to the divine imperial throne because they had
first seized the power which had the empire in its gift, differing
in this from Caligula, Claudius, or Nero, whose claims to empire

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 55

lay in their dynasty's divinity. The legionaries who proclaimed
Vespasian, the senators who compelled Nerva to adopt Trajan,
the general of the Rhine frontier, had carried through a revolu-
tion. Thenceforward, just as every corporal of Napoleon's Grand
Army carried a. marshal's baton in his knapsack, so every army
chief was felt at Rome to be a potential candidate for the im-
perial crown, the attainment of which was the ultimate promo-
tion accorded to the greatest Roman warrior.

We need, therefore, feel no surprise that at the time when
this new idea of merit and advancement came to be applied to
the imperial dignity it should circulate through the whole body
of the empire to quicken and rejuvenate. Intercommunication
was established on every side between nations and classes, bring-
ing fresh air among them, drawing them together, fusing them.
In proportion as the ius gentium, that is to say, the law applying
to foreign nations, modelled itself more and more on the ius civile
or law of the Roman citizen, and at the same time as philosophy
taught the ius civile to take heed of the ius naturale (natural
law), the distance between Roman and foreigner, between the
citizen and the peregrinus, was lessened. Whether by personal
favour, by emancipation, or by mass naturalisations extended at
one stroke either to a class of demobilised auxiliaries or to a
municipality suddenly converted into an honorary colony, a new
flood of peregrini acquired citizenship. 9 Never had the cosmo-
politan character of the Urbs been so distinctly marked. The
Roman proper was submerged on every social plane, not only
by the influx of Italian immigrants but by the multitude of
provincials bringing with them from every corner of the universe
their speech, their manners, their customs, and their supersti-
tions.

Juvenal inveighs against this mud-laden torrent pouring from
the Orontes into the Tiber. 10 But the Syrians, whom he so greatly
despised, hastened at the first possible moment to assume the
guise of Roman civilians; even those who most loudly advertised
their xenophobia were themselves more or less newcomers to
Rome, seeking to defend their adopted home against fresh in-
cursions. Juvenal himself was probably born at Aquinum. 11 In
his house in "Pear Street" on the Quirinal, Martial sighs for
Bilbilis, his little home in Aragon. 12 Pliny the Younger, whether

S6 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

at Rome or in his Laurentine villa or on his estates in Tuscany,
remains faithful to his Cisalpine birthplace; distant Como, which
his liberality embellished, was never absent from his heart. 13

In the Senate House senators from Gaul, from Spain, from
Africa, from Asia, sat side by side; the Roman emperors, Roman
citizens but newly naturalised, came from towns or villages be-
yond the mountains and the seas. 14 Trajan and Hadrian were
born in Spanish Italica in Baetica. Their successor, Antoninus
Pius, sprang from bourgeois Stock in Nemausus (modern Nimes)
in Gallia Narbonensis; and the end of the second century was to
see the empire divided between Caesar Clodius Albinus of
Hadrumetum (Tunis) and Septimius Severus of Leptis Magna
(Tripoli). The biography of Septimius Severus records that even
after he had ascended the throne he never succeeded in ridding
his speech of the Semitic accent which he had inherited from
his Punic ancestors. 15 Thus Rome of the Antonines was a meeting
place where the Romans of Rome encountered those inferior
peoples against whom their laws seemed to have erected solid
ethnic barriers, or to be more accurate Rome was a melting
pot in which, despite her laws, the peoples were continually being
subjected to new processes of assimilation. It was, if you will, a
Babel, but a Babel where, for better or for worse, all comers
learned to speak and think in Latin.

2. SLAVERY AND MANUMISSION

Everyone learned to speak and think in Latin, even the slaves,
who in the second century raised their standard of living to the
level of the ingenui. Legislation had grown more and more humane
and had progressively lightened their chains and favoured their
emancipation. The practical good sense of the Romans, no less
than the fundamental humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts,
had always kept them from showing cruelty toward the servi.
They had always treated their slaves with consideration, as Cato
had treated his plough oxen; however far back we go in history
we find the Romans spurring their slaves to effort by offering
them pay and bonuses which accumulated to form a nest egg that
as a rule served ultimately to buy their freedom. With few ex-
ceptions, slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it lasted,
intolerable; but never had it been lighter or easier to escape from
than under the Antonines*

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 57

From the first century of the republic it had been recognised
that the slave had a soul of his own, and the free citizens had,
in practice, permitted him to join them in the service of whatever
cult he preferred. At Minturnae, for instance, as early as 70 B.C.,
the sanctuary of Spes, the Goddess of Hope, had been served by
as many slave magistri as by free and freed magistri put to-
gether. 10 Later, as culture grew spiritually richer. and the in-
fluence of philanthropic philosophies increased, slaves gathered in
ever greater numbers round the altars of the gods. In the first
century of our era epitaphs began openly to pay honour to the
manes of dead slaves; and in the second century the mystic
funeral collegia, such as that founded at Lanuvium in 133 under
the double invocation of Diana and Antinoiis, brought ingenui,
freedmen, and slaves together in brotherly communion. 17 In this
particular case the slaves engaged, if they later gained their free-
dom, to regale their fellow members with an amphora of wine
on the day of their liberation. The laws naturally kept pace with
the progress of ideas. At the beginning of the empire a certain
Lex Petronia had forbidden a master to deliver his slave to the
beasts of the amphitheatre without a judgment authorising him
to do so. 18 Toward the middle of the first century an edict of
Claudius decreed that sick or infirm slaves whom their master
had abandoned should be manumitted; 19 and a short time after-
wards an edict possibly drawn up by Nero under the inspiration
of Seneca, who had vigorously championed the human rights of
the slave, charged the praejectus urbi to receive and investigate
complaints laid before him by slaves concerning the injustice of
their masters. 20 In 83 under Domitian a senatus-consultum for-
bade a master to castrate his slaves, and fixed as the penalty for
infringement of this decree the confiscation of half the offender's
property. 21 In the second century Hadrian had to double the
penalty for this offence, which he declared a "capital crime," and
he dictated to the Senate two decrees inspired by the same hu-
manity: the first prevented masters from selling their slaves to
either the leno or the lanista; that is, either to the procurer or to
the trainer of gladiators; the second compelled a master who had
condemned his slave to death to submit the sentence for the ap-
proval of the praejectus vigilum before carrying it into execu-
tion. 22 This humanitarian evolution culminated in the middle of

58 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

the century when Antoninus Pius condemned as homicide any
slaying of a slave by the sole order of his master. 28

Altogether, at this time Roman legislation reflects rather than
imposes the humanitarian attitude which manners and customs
had adopted. Juvenal castigates with the lash of his satire the
miser who "pinches the bellies of his slaves"; 24 the gambler who
flings away a fortune on a throw of the dice and "has no shirt to
give a shivering slave"; 25 the coquette who loses her temper,
storms and takes out her ill humour on the unoffending backs of
her maids. 26 The poet's indignation is but the echo of public
opinion, which abhorred no less than he the abominable cruelties
of that Rutilus whom Juvenal withered with his scorn. 27 In his
day most masters, if they did not entirely abstain from corporal
punishment of their slaves, at most visited their faults with rods
such as Martial, without compunction, laid on his cook for a
spoiled dinner. This did not prevent the master from caring for
his slave and loving hijn even to the point of weeping for his
death. 28

In the great houses where many of the slaves were able special-
ists and some, like the tutor, the doctor, and the reader, had en-
joyed a liberal education, they were treated exactly like free
men. Pliny the Younger desires his cousin Paternus to choose
slaves for him in the .narket with discernment. 29 He watches with
anxiety over their health, going so far as to shoulder the expense
of long and costly trips for them to Egypt or to Frejus in the
Provencal plain. 30 He accedes, with good grace, to their legitimate
desires, obeying, as he says, their suggestions as if they were
commands. 81 He relied with confidence more on their devotion
than on his severity to stimulate their zeal when some relation
turned up in his house, sure that they would endeavour to please
their master by their attentions to his guest. 82 The same kindly
attitude prevailed among Pliny's friends; they felt their slaves
to be almost part of the family. When the old senator, Corellius
Rufus, was ill in bed, he liked to have hisr favourite slaves with
him in the room, and when he had to send them out in order
to talk privately, his wife withdrew with them. 88 Pliny the
Younger went even further, and did not disdain to discuss im-
portant matters with his slaves; when he was in the country he
would invite the better educated among them to join with him in

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 59

those learned discussions which at evening brightened his after-
dinner walks. 84

The slaves on their side were full of consideration for masters
such as these. Pliny the Younger was stupefied by the news of
the attack made on the senator Larcius Macedo by a party of
his household slaves. 85 His amazement is an index of the rarity
of such a crime. And the care unfortunately useless lavished
on the victim by those of his slaves who had remained faithful
proves that even in houses where they were the most severely
handled, slaves could feel that their masters treated them like
men. Indeed, a Greek who lived at Rome in the middle of the
second century was struck by the levelling which had taken place
between slaves and freemen, which to his amazement extended
even to their clothes. Appian of Alexandria, writing under An-
toninus Pius, remarks that even in externals the slave is in no
way distinguished from his master, and unless his master donned
the toga praetexta of the magistrate, the two were dressed alike. 86
Appian supplements this by recording a thing which astonished
him even more: after a slave had regained his liberty he lived
on terms of absolute equality with the Roman citizen.

Rome, alone of all cities of antiquity, has the honour of having
redeemed her outcasts by opening her doors to them. 87 It is true
that the freed slave remained bound to his former master, now his
patronus, sometimes by services due or by pecuniary indebted-
ness, and always by the duties implied by an almost filial respect
(obsequium). But once his emancipation or manumissio had been
duly pronounced, whether by a fictitious statement of claim be-
fore the praetor (per vindictam) or by the inscription of his name
on the censors > register (censu) at the solemn sacrifice of the
lustrum, or more commonly in virtue of a testamentary clause
(testamento) , the slave obtained by the grace of his master, liv-
ing or dead, the name and status of a Roman citizen. His de-
scendants of the third generation were entitled to exercise the
full political rights of citizenship and nothing further distin-
guished them from ingenui. In the course of time the formalities
of manumission were relaxed, and custom, superseding law, sub-
stituted simpler and speedier methods of procedure for the
manumission rites: a mere letter from the patron or a verbal
declaration made, for instance, in the course of some festivity

60 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

where the guests were requested to serve as witnesses. The caprice
of fashion began to take a hand, and it seemed as if some masters
took a pride in multiplying the number of manumitted slaves
round them. This practice became finally so fashionable that
Augustus, alarmed by such prodigality, made efforts to set some
limit to its indulgence. 88 He fixed eighteen as the minimum age
at which a master could exercise the right to free a slave, and
thirty as the minimum age at which a slave could be manumitted.
As regarded testamentary manumission, which was by far the
most frequent form of legal emancipation, he laid down the rule
that according to circumstances the number of slaves set free
should bear a certain ratio to the total number of slaves pos-
sessed by the deceased master, and should in any case not exceed
a maximum of a hundred.

He devised an inferior category of semicitizens, who were
known as Latini luniani, to whom was granted the partial natu-
ralisation of the lus Latiiy which, however, debarred the holder
from making or benefiting by a will. All slaves whom their mas-
ters had manumitted in violation of the imperial decrees or in
any irregular fashion outside the formal legal procedure were
flung pell-mell into the category of Latini luniani. But custom
was stronger than the emperor's will and nullified his legislation.
In an effort to counteract the falling birth rate, he released all
Latini luniani who were fathers of families from the inferiority
of second-class citizenship to which he had himself condemned
them. Then Tiberius granted the same relaxation to former
vigiles in order to stimulate enrolment in his cohorts; later,
Claudius extended full rights to liberti of both sexes who em-
ployed their capital outfitting merchant ships, Nero to those
who invested it in building, and Trajan to those who used their
money to set up bakeries. 89

Ultimately all the emperors, out of love for their own freed
slaves or those of their friends, took pains to obliterate the last
trace of their servile origin, either by utilising the legal fiction
of the natalium restitutio or by slipping onto their finger the
gold ring which might open the way to the equestrian status.
Hence in the period we are studying, the slaves who benefited by
the ever-increasing numbers of manumissions were placed on a
footing of complete equality with other Roman citizens, enabled

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 61

to secure positions and fortunes and to purchase droves .of slaves
in their turn, as we see Trimalchio doing.

An epigraphist walking through the ruins of ancient Rome
receives the impression that slaves and freedmen predominated
in the life of the imperial epoch, for three times out of four they
alone are mentioned in the inscriptions which are still to be read
on the walls. In an article remarkable for the quantity and ac-
curacy of its statistics, Tenney Frank points out that since in
the majority of cases the form of a slave name betrays its owner's
Graeco-oriental origin, it is easily proved that at least 80
per cent of the population of Imperial Rome had been eman-
cipated from more or less ancient servitude*. 40 At first sight
the observer is filled with admiration for the strength which this
constant rise seems to imply, both in a society which can unceas-
ingly assimilate new elements and in an empire which can extend
to the farthest horizon the area from which it draws new ele-
ments; and he is tempted to attribute to the Rome of the An-
tonines the free play and the deserved advantages of a perfect
democracy.

3. THE CONFUSION OF SOCIAL VALUES

Unfortunately it is impossible not to perceive also the shadows
which already darkened the brightness of this picture. In the
reign of Nerva there survived in Rome only one half of the
senatorial families which had been counted in 65 A.D., thirty-
five years before; and thirty years later only one remained of
the forty-five patrician families restored one hundred and sixty-
five years before by Julius Caesar. 41 There was urgent need there-
fore for perpetual new blood from the humbler strata of the
population to nourish and revivify the aristocracy of the Urbs.
But in drawing this new blood almost exclusively from the servile
masses, Roman society and the Roman fatherland exposed them-
selves to great dangers in the future, and in the present to in-
evitable adulteration.

Indeed, if the slave classes were to be called on continuously
to fill the gaps in the classes above, they must themselves be
continuously replenished from without. Now the wars of Trajan
especially the second Dacian campaign, from which, according
to his physician Crito, the emperor brought back fifty thousand

62 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

prisoners who were promptly put up at auction were the last
wars in which the empire was victorious without difficulty and
without disappointment. 42 After the two peaceful reigns of his
successors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, we reach the period of
the semivictories of Marcus Aurelius, victories dearly bought
after overcoming exhausting resistance, and finally the period of
reverses and invasions which dried up the main sources of slave
supply. We can already foresee the moment when slavery will be
driven back on itself, owing to the scarcity of new prisoners of
war, and will cease to be able to support the* rising column on
which the Roman economy had depended during the preceding
generations. Then Rome, if she is still to rule the world, must
force it into that heartbreaking strait jacket which came to govern
the conditions of human life under the later empire.

This particular danger, it is true, had not yet shown itself
under the Flavians or the earlier Antonines. There were, how-
ever, other more immediate ones which threatened the superficial
prosperity of their reigns.

Inasmuch as the Caesars, under cover of legal fictions which
had long ceased to deceive the most guileless, had seized and were
exercising an absolute authority, their slaves and their freedmen
took precedence of the rest of the city. 43 In theory they were still
"inanimate property," or at best semicitizens. In practice and in
fact they had daily access to the sacred person of their master,
they enjoyed his confidence, and to them he delegated some of
his far-reaching prerogatives, so that they had undisguised com-
mand alike over nobles and plebeians. Up to the time of Claudius,
the imperial "cabinet" was composed almost exclusively of
slaves. 44 They received the petitions of the empire, issued in-
structions both to provincial governors and to the magistrates
of Rome, and elaborated jurisprudence of all the tribunals in-
cluding the highest senatorial court. The emperors from Claudius
to Trajan inclusive recruited their cabinet from their freedmen.
Just as the French nobility of the seventeenth century chafed
under the domination of "la vile bourgeoisie" of ministers and
their clerks, so the senators of the empire with rage in their
hearts silently bowed before the power of an ex-slave. Elevated
at a bound to the steps of the throne, gorged with wealth and
loaded with honours, men like Narcissus and Pallas in virtue of
their mysterious services and sovereign power held authority in

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 63

the emperor's name over the advancement, the property, and
even the life of his subjects.

Nor was this all: even if the emperor went outside the circle
of his household and chose confidants and friends from among
members of the two great orders of the state, these friends and
confidants in their turn had their slaves and freedmen to whom
they were wont to delegate the labours and the conduct of their
business, and the aristocrats who appeared to reign under the
emperor governed in reality, like their master, through the medium
of their domestic staff. Thus the slaves and freedmen of the em-
peror's court joined the slaves and freedmen of the emperor in
the government of a city and an empire. How far their power
and their collusion went was seen when those whom the suspicion-
ridden despotism and insatiable cupidity of Domitian had per-
mitted to live in the Curia resolved to save their skins by getting
rid of him. The murder of the tyrant, desired and instigated by
the senators, was plotted in the antechamber of his own palace
and carried out by his "people" and the "people" of his entourage:
the small choir boy of his sacrariwn, the Greek Parthenius, his
chamberlain {praepositus a cubiculo), and the Greek Stephanus,
one of the stewards of his sister Domitilla. 45

After his death the inscription "Libertas Restituta" was indeed
stamped on the new coins, and the patres conscripti dreamed -of
resuscitating the republic by conferring the empire on one of the
most self-effacing of their colleagues, the timid, sixty-year-old
Nerva. But it is clear that this effort was nothing but a jingle of
empty words and a parade of vain appearances. The republic,
which is the Commonwealth of Citizens, and Liberty, who de-
mands of her votaries a proud apprenticeship, could not be reborn
of a conspiracy hatched by peregrini and servi, by outsiders and
slaves; and the emperors began to see the threat to stable rule
that lay in permitting men of such antecedents and of such a
type to rear their heads so near the summit of the state. Hadrian
took the initiative, which his successors respected, of reserving
all places in his cabinet for members of the Equestrian Order. 46
If he had wished to carry this reform through with thoroughness,
he should, however, have gone a step further and regulated also
the tenure of secondary posts. For in order to command obedience
and not to fear malpractices which they were powerless to stamp
out, the emperors and their great men preferred to continue, as

64 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

before, to select foreign slaves to be the procurators and m-
stitores of their administration. They imagined these men to be
in their power, while in fact, with the extension of the frontiers
and the elaboration of the fiscal system, they themselves fell
more and more into the power of their slave subordinates. It
would be unjust to deny that there were among these servi, anxious
to earn their manumission by their zeal, and among these liberti
who felt a gratitude for their manumission exceeding their obli-
gations, many conscientious servants, honest stewards, faithful
and devoted agents; and the fact that the machinery of empire
ran as smoothly as it did during the second century was due
perhaps less to the vigilance of its supervising engineers than to
the professional care and skill of its mechanics. The flock, how-
ever, was too large not to contain a proportion of black sheep:
agents too harsh in their demands and exactions and too greedy
of commissions and gratuities, administrators who were insolent,
cruel, and untruthful. It was surely a fatal paradox for a govern-
ment honestly concerned to improve its efficiency to delegate
its functions to men born in chains and destined for slavery.

Instead of witnessing a logical and gradual evolution which
would have demonstrated the value of imperial institutions, the
Romans had continually to endure the civic degradation entailed
by this arbitrary and drastic inversion of classes and of roles.
Both in town and country it demoralised the citizens. Juvenal was
infuriated to see the sons of free men in the Rome of Trajan
constrained by self-interest to pay court to the slaves of the
rich:

"Divitis hie servo claudit latus ingenuorum
Filius . . ," 47

Under Commodus free citizens, as colonist volunteers, culti-
vated the African estate of Suq al Khmis (Thursday Market),
and were mercilessly and unjustly flogged in the emperor's name
by the slave steward of his Saltus Burunitanus**

In Juvenal's day and after, it indeed seemed a happier fate to
be a rich man's slave than a poor, freeborn citizen. Nothing
more was needed to overturn the fair structure of imperial rule;
and this pernicious disequilibrium was aggravated now and hence-
forward by the fact that in a society where rank was decided
by wealth, this wealth, instead of circulating among hard-working

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 65

families and yielding the fruits of toil and husbandry, tended
more and more to become concentrated, through the favours of
the emperor and by speculation, in the hands of a very few.
While in the provinces and even in Italy there still survived a
sturdy and numerous middle class who bore the burden of mu-
nicipal government, the ranks of the middle class in the Urbs
grew ever thinner, and there was nothing between the satellite
plutocracy of the court and the mass of a plebs too poor to exist
without the doles of an emperor and the charity of the rich, and
too unoccupied to forego the spectacles which, under Trajan,
were provided every second day for its amusement.

4. LIVING STANDARDS AND THE PLUTOCRACY

Accurate figures are lacking, but certain comparisons in some
degree supply the want. We saw in the first chapter that the
number of persons receiving public assistance rose in the course
of the second century from 150,000 to 175,000. We can without
hesitation deduce from this that about 130,000 families, repre-
sented by their heads, were fed at the public expense. If we ac-
cept Martial's estimate of an average of five mouths per family, 49
the total number must have been between 600,000 and 700,000.
If we reckon only three persons per family, the total would be
400,000. Directly or indirectly then, at least one-third and pos-
sibly one-half of the population of the city lived on public char-
ity. But we should be wrong to conclude that two-thirds or one-
half of the population were independent of it, for the total of the
population includes three classes already mentioned as being
ineligible for the distributions of free grain: the soldiers of the
garrison at the lowest computation spme 12,000 men; the
peregrin* passing through Rome, whose numbers we cannot cal-
culate; and finally the slaves, whose ratio to the free inhabitants
may have been at least one to three, as was recorded for Per-
gamum about the same period. 50 If we suppose that Trajan's
Rome had a population of 1,200,000 souls, we may deduct
400,000 slaves. This leaves less than 150,000 heads of Roman
families who were sufficiently well off not to need to draw on the
largesse of Annona.

The numerical inferiority of the Haves to the horde of the
Have-Nots, sufficiently distressing 1n itself, becomes positively
terrifying when we realise the inequality of fortune within the

66 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

ranks of the minority; the majority of what we should nowadays
call the middle classes vegetated in semistarvation within sight
of the almost incredible opulence of a few thousand multimil-
lionaires. A yearly income of 20,000 sesterces ($800) was the
"vital minimum" for a Roman citizen to exist on. This is the
income which a ruined reprobate whom Juvenal draws in one of
his satirical scenes craves for his own old age. 51 In another
passage the poet, speaking on his own behalf, limits a wise man's
desire to a fortune of 400,000 sesterces ($16,000): "If you turn
up your nose at this sum," he says to his imaginary interlocutor,
"take the fortune of two equites (or even three) ; if that doesn't
satisfy your heart, neither will the riches of Croesus, nor all the
treasures of the Persian kings!" 52 It is clear that in Juvenal's
eyes a wise man ought to be happy with modest ease and comfort;
clear also that modest ease presupposes a capital of 400,000
sesterces, the property qualification for a "knight." These two
pieces of evidence corroborate and complement each other, since
we know beyond possibility of doubt, thanks to the researches
of Billeter, that in the poet's day the normal interest on money
was 5 per cent. 58 It follows that in the Rome of Trajan the
"middle classes" began with the Equestrian Order, and unless a
person was in a position to spend at least the 20,000 sesterces
which this capital yielded annually, he could not maintain even
the most modest standard of bourgeois life. Below this were the
pauperised masses, to which the "lower middle classes" approxi-
mated much more closely than to the wealthy capitalists with
whom a legal fiction classed them.

What weight could their modest little fortune of 400,000
sesterces carry, compared with the millions and tens of millions
that were at the disposal of the real magnates of the city? Senators
from the provinces, whose estates and enterprises were so ex-
tensive as to procure them a place among the "most illustrious"
(clarissimi) and a seat in the Senate House, came to Rome not
only to fulfil their civic functions or supervise the properties
which they had been obliged to acquire in Italy, but first and
foremost to render their name and the country of their origin
illustrious by the magnificence of their Roman mansion and the
distinction of the rank they had attained in the Urbs. Now how
could the capitalist with 400,000 compete with them?' or with
the equites who had reached the highest posts open to them and

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 67

grown fat as they mounted the successive rungs of the administra-
tive ladder, handling matters of finance and of supply? Or how
even compete with these liberti who, in nursing the wealth of the
emperor and his nobles, had amassed great fortunes for them-
selves? Rome, mistress of the world, drained all its riches. Making
due allowance for the difference of time and manners, I cannot be-
lieve that the concentrations of capital in Rome from the princi-
pate of Trajan onwards can have been much less than they are
in our twentieth century among the financiers of "The City" or
the bankers of Wall Street.

Some Roman capitalists owned many houses in different quar-
ters of the metropolis. Martial directed this epigram against a
certain Maximus :

You have a house on the Esquiline and another on the Hill of Diana;
the Vicus Patricius boasts a roof of yours. From one you survey the
shrine of widowed Cybele; from another the Temple of Vesta; from
here the new, from there the ancient Temple of Jove. Tell me where I
can call upon you or in what quarter I may look for you. The man,
O Maximus, who is .everywhere at home is a man without a home at
all. 54

Like the modern financier, the Roman fruitfully employed his
capital in large and innumerable loans. Another epigram, for in-
stance, shows us Afer enjoying himself by totting up the number
of his borrowers and the total of their indebtedness: "Coranus
owes me 100,000 sesterces and Mancinus 200,000; Titius 300,-
ooo; Albinus twice as much; Sabinus a million and Serranus an-
other million. . . .." 55 It may be that this Afer, like Maximus,
was only an imaginary personage; they are all the more typical
of the plutocracy which flourished in the Rome of Martial's time.
In their narrow circle, gleaming with the gold of all the earth,
we may be very sure that mortgagers were not lacking, like the
fortune-hunter Africanus with his 100,000,000 sesterces to whom
Martial alludes. 56 No one could reckon himself rich under 20,-
000,000. Pliny the Younger, the ex-consul and perhaps the great-
est advocate of his day, whose will disclosed a sum closely ap-
proaching this, contended nevertheless that he was not rich, and
makes the statement with evident sincerity. He writes in perfect
good faith to Calvina, whose father owed him 100,000 sesterces,
a debt which Pliny generously cancelled, that his means were

68 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

very limited (modicae facilitates) and that, owing to the way his
minor estates were being worked, his income was both small and
fluctuating, so that he had to lead a frugal existence. 57 It is true
that a freedman like Trimalchio, whose estate Petronius esti-
mated at 30,000,000, was better off than Pliny; 58 and the un-
known Afer whom Martial caricatures, whose income from real
estate alone amounted to 3,000,000, was three times as wealthy.
Nevertheless Pliny's fortune fifty times that of an eques was
in the same bracket as theirs, and there was really no common
measure between it and the incomes of the "middle classes." The
petit bourgeois was literally crushed by the great, and his sole
consolation was to see even these enormous fortunes of the
wealthy overborne in their turn by the incalculable riches of the
emperor.

The emperor's wealth did not consist alone in the accumulated
riches of his family or predecessors, or in the immense latijundia
he inherited here and there in Africa or Asia, or in the fact that
he everywhere annexed the bulk of all partial or total confisca-
tions decreed by the judges. Over and above all this, nothing pre-
vented his replenishing his private purse from the resources of
the imperial Exchequer, into which poured the taxes levied for
the maintenance of his soldiers, and none dared to suggest an
audit of his accounts. He could dispose at will with no need to
render account to any man of the revenues of Egypt, which
was a personal possession of the Crown, and he could plunge
open hands into the booty of war. To cite one instance: Trajan
in 1 06 pounced on the entire treasure of Decebalus and made
speed to reorganise for his personal benefit every source of profit
in the recent conquests. 59 He became an authentic millionaire,
whose authority was buttressed less on the loyalty of his legions
than on the power of unlimited action conferred by an unrivalled
private fortune, inexhaustible and uncontrolled. Almost as great
a gulf separated him from the plutocrats of Rome as yawned
between them and the "middle classes," and the same disparity
prevailed between his staff of slaves and theirs.

At the beginning of the second century B.C. houses in the
Urbs which could boast of more than one slave were rare. This
is proved by the custom of adding the suffix -por (=puer) to
the genitive of the master's name to designate a slave: Lucipor,
the slave of Lucius; Marcipor, the slave of Marcus. In contrast,

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 69

during the second century A.D. there existed practically no mas-
ters of only one slave. People either bought no slave at all for
the belly of a slave took a lot of filling or they bought and kept
several together, which is why Juvenal in the verses already
quoted uses the word "belly" in the plural: ". . . magno servo-
rum venires!"

Two slaves to carry him to the circus was the very minimum
with which the disillusioned old reprobate whose moderation we
have appreciated above 61 could manage to get along. But the
average was four or five times as many. The humblest house-
holder could not hold his head up unless he could appear with
a train of eight slaves behind him. Martial records that the
miser Cimber arranged for eight Syrian slaves to carry the micro-
scopic loads of his contemptible little gifts at the Saturnalia. 62
And according to Juvenal a litigant would have thought his case
already lost if it had been entrusted to an advocate not accom-
panied to the bar by a train of slaves of at least this size. 68 A
squad of eight was usually sufficient for a petit bourgeois. The
man of the upper .middle classes on the other hand commanded
a battalion or more. Not to be completely swamped by the num-
ber of their retainers, they divided them into two parties, one of
which they employed in the Urbs and one in the country; and
they redivided the town staff again into two, those who served
indoors (servi atrienses) and those who served without (cursores,
viatores). Finally, these different batches were again divided into
tens, each decuria being distinguished by a number. Even these
precautions were unavailing. Master and slaves ended by not
knowing each other by sight. In the very middle of his banquet
Trimalchio fails to know which of his slaves he is giving orders
to: "What decuria do you belong to?" he asks the cook. "The
fortieth," answers the slave. "Bought or born in the house?"
"Neither," is the reply. "I was left you under Pansa's will."
"Well, then, mind you serve this carefully, or I will have you
degraded to the messengers' decuria"** Reading such a dialogue,
one can easily imagine that scarcely one slave in ten among
Trimalchio's hordes really knew his master. One gathers that
there were at least 400 of them, but the fact that Petronius al-
ludes only to the fortieth decuria is no proof that there were not
many more. Pliny the Younger who, as we have seen, was at
least poorer than Trimalchio by a matter of 10,000,000 sesterces

70 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

had at least 500 slaves, for his will manumitted 100; and the
law Fufia Caninia, probably passed in 2 B.C. and still in force
in the second century A.D., expressly permitted owners of be-
tween 100 and 500 slaves to set one-fifth free, and forbade owners
of larger numbers to emancipate more than ioo. 65

It is impossible to repress our amazement in the face of figures
so .extravagant; yet it is known that in the second century they
were often exceeded. The surprise felt by the jurist Gaius a
century and a half after the passing of the law Fufia Caninia to
think that it had not extended its scale of testamentary manumis-
sion beyond ioo per 500 slaves, is a sure indication that the scale
had no longer fitted the reality. 66 Toward the end of the first
century A.D. under the Flavians the freedman C. Caelius Isidorus
left 4,1 1 6 slaves, and while this figure for a private individual
was sufficiently noteworthy to be judged worthy of mention by
the elder Pliny, 67 there is no doubt whatever that the familiae
serviles in the service of the great Roman capitalists often reached
1,000, and that the emperor, infinitely more wealthy than the
richest of them, must easily have possessed a "slave family" of
20,000.

This is the very high figure that we find in Athenaeus, 68
and from its size it could apply only to the household of the
princeps. We must, of course, deduct from this army of slaves
the groups which the domus divina of the Caesars kept dispersed
throughout the world for the collection of their taxes, the super-
vision of their general farms, the administration of their immense
country properties, their mines, and their quarries of marble and
porphyry. But even on the Palatine at Rome, where modern
research has discovered, along with the graffiti of the paeda-
gogium, the traces of their places of punishment, 69 the imperial
slaves must have been legion, if only to fulfil the incredible
number of tasks which were entrusted to them, and which are
revealed by their obituary inscriptions.

Reading these without prejudice, the student is dumbfounded
by the extraordinary degree of specialisation they reveal, the
insensate luxury and the meticulous etiquette which made this
specialisation necessary. The emperor had as many categories of
slaves to arrange and tend his wardrobe as he had separate types
of clothes: for his palace garments the slaves a veste privata, for
his city clothes the a veste jorensi, for his undress military uni-

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 71

forms the a veste castrensi, and for his full-dress parade uni-
forms the a veste triumphal*, for the clothes he wore to the
theatre the a veste gladiatoria. His eating utensils were polished
by as many teams of slaves as there were kinds: the eating ves-
sels, the drinking vessels, the silver vessels, the golden vessels,
the vessels of rock crystal, the vessels set with precious stones.
His jewels were entrusted to a crowd of servi or liberti ab orna-
mentis, among whom were distinguished those in charge of his
pins (the a fibulis) and those responsible for his pearls (the a
margaritis). Several varieties of slaves competed over his toilet:
the bathers (balneatores), the masseurs (aliptae), the hairdress-
ers (ornatores), and the barbers (tons ores). The ceremonial of
his receptions was regulated by several kinds of ushers : the velarii
who raised the curtains to let the visitor enter, the ab admissione
who admitted him to the presence, the nomenclatores who called
out the name. A heterogeneous troop were employed to cook his
food, lay his table, and serve the dishes, ranging from the stokers
of his furnaces (fornacarii) and the simple cooks' (cod) to his
bakers (pistores), his pastry-cooks (libarii) and his sweetmeat-
makers (dttlciarii) , and including, apart from the majordomos
responsible for ordering his meab (structores) , the dining-room
attendants (triclinarii), the waiters (ministratores) who carried
in the dishes, the servants charged with removing them again
(analectae) , the cupbearers who offered him drink and who dif-
fered in importance according to whether they held the flagon
(the a lagona) or presented the cup (the a cyatho), and finally
the tasters (praegustatores) , whose duty it was to test on them-
selves the perfect harmlessness of his food and drink and who
were assuredly expected to perform their task more efficiently
than the tasters of Claudius and Britannicus. Finally, for his
recreation, the emperor had an embarrassing variety of choice
between the songs of his choristers (symphoniaci) , the music of
his orchestra, the pirouettes of his dancing women (saltatrices) ,
the jests of his dwarfs (nani), of his "chatterboxes" (fatui),
and of his buffoons (moriones).

Even if the emperor had simple tastes, like Trajan, and hated
ceremony and ostentation, he could not fulfil his sacred function
in the eyes of his subjects without* the pampered splendour which
surrounded his existence in the capital. His official activity was
hedged in a semimythological pageantry in which the "King of

72 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Kings" would have felt at home. To make a straightforward al-
though a halting comparison, the court of the Valois might have
envied the delights, and the court of Versailles the pompous
magnificence and the solemn ritual of the court of Imperial Rome.
The Roman Caesar might have anticipated the Roi Soleil by
taking for his motto the nee pluribus impar of Louis XIV. The
mansions of the Roman magnates no doubt did their best to ape
the emperor's palace. But they were left far behind, and vast as
they were, and complex as was their organisation we can read
it between the lines of the epitaphs of their freedmen and their
slaves they gave but a feeble, small reflection. Caesar over-
whelmed even the mightiest of his subjects, and the feeling of his
unchallengeable superiority, of which all were conscious, helped
to reconcile the humbler of them to the great discrepancy be-
tween their own straitened and inferior state and the luxury of
the dominant classes.

For the rest, the transition between the plebs and the middle
classes was relatively easy. Prosperity had followed on the suc-
cessful campaigns of Trajan; his victories and Hadrian's
diplomacy had given an impulse to commerce by opening the
routes to the Far East; the economic liberalism of which the
first Antonines had set an example had tempered the evils caused
through the accumulation of lands in the same hands, and created
independently of and when necessary in spite of the great
landowners the right of hereditary enjoyment for those who had
the courage to clear their own fields. All these things gave stimulus
to business and multiplied the opportunities for industrious and
energetic men, farmers-general or tenant-partners of the great
estates, shipowners or bankers, wholesale or retail merchants,
honestly to acquire a comfortable fortune.

On the other hand the salutary changes which sovereigns at
last worthy of their office had imposed on all branches of their
administration, the re-establishment of a simple but vigorous
discipline in the army, the care with which civil and military
chiefs were chosen and promoted, coinciding with the larger
salaries and increased pay which rewarded their services and
preserved their independence, constituted a series of factors or
of measures favourable to the rise and prosperity of a middle
class of a new social standing. There was not a procurator who
then drew less than 60,000 sesterces a year, not a centurion or a

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 73

primipilus whose salary fell below the 20,000 to 40,000 range. 70
The former were in a position to double or treble the equestrian
fortune they already possessed; and the others to acquire it, as
so many inscriptions of the second century bear witness. The man
who best incarnates the spirit of the middle classes at this
period, Juvenal, is in fact himself one of these ex-officers who had
been able to make his little pile and secure himself a respectable
position in the bosom of the Roman bourgeoisie.

True, Juvenal sighs for the happier life which his limited means
would have enabled him to enjoy in the country but denied to
him in Rome. In this he is representative of his time. A man in
his stratum of society found in fact his real home in the cities
and provinces of Italy. In Rome people of his type were swamped
by the superabundance of riches in which they had no share, and
if a chain seemed to link them on the one hand to the plebs from
which they had risen and on the other to the great magnates who
had risen from their ranks, they were more conscious of the
weight of the latter than the support of the former, and they lost
all hope of shaking off the burden and rising to join the ranks
above. The large fortunes on the plane above increased auto-
matically or benefited from circumstances which profited the
wealthy alone: from the exercise of the office and authority which
they monopolised (a pro-consulate for instance brought in a
million sesterces per annum); from the arbitrary favour of an
emperor who might delegate his powers indefinitely to the same
favourite; from a gust of wind on the stock exchange, where
speculation was all the more unbridled since at Rome, the bank-
ing house of the world, speculation was the life-blood of an
economic system where production was losing ground day by
day and mercantilism was invading everything. Work might still
ensure a modest living, but no longer yielded such fortunes as
the chance of imperial favour or a speculative gamble might be-
stow. Middlemen and entertainers, these parasites who feed on
multitudes, raked in millions. Martial voices his indignation to
see advocates accepting their fees in kind and the fairest mental
gifts cultivated without adequate reward.

"To what master, Lupus, should you entrust your son?
I warn you ... let him have nothing to do with the works of
Cicero or the poems of Virgil. . . . Let him learn to be a harpist
or a player of the flute; or if he seems dull of intellect make him

74 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

an auctioneer (praeco) or architect." 71 In another place he ex-
claims: "Two praetors, four tribunes, seven advocates, and ten
poets recently approached an old father, suing for his daughter's
hand. Without hesitation he gave the girl to Eulogus the auc-
tioneer. Tell me, Severus, was that the act of a fool?" 72 Outside
the city, the middle classes still found it worth while to believe
in the value of work, but inside Rome they had lost all con-
fidence in it.

Let us reread the charming epigram where the "parasite" poet
has graven what I should like to call the "Plantin sonnet" of

Latin literature, which assuredly served Plantin as a model :

The things that make life happier, most genial Martial, are these:
means not acquired by labour but bequeathed; fields not unkindly, an
ever-blazing hearth; no lawsuit, the toga seldom worn, a quiet mind;
a free man's strength, a healthy body; frankness with tact, congenial
friends, good-natured guests, a board plainly spread; nights not spent
in wine but freed from cares, a wife not prudish yet pure; sleep such
as makes the darkness brief: be content with what you are and wish no
change; nor dread your last day nor long for it. 78

This poem voices no cry of happiness; it utters a sigh in which
resignation blends with content. It formulates no aspiration to-
ward the unattainable. It places happiness in the negation of
work, whose vanity it implies. The clouds of reality cast their
shadow over this dreary ideal which breathes the fatigue of an
aging world. Society, at least in Rome, was beginning to become
fossilised. The hierarchy, still fluid in the centre, was growing
petrified toward the summit. The regular inflow which should
have continuously renewed it gave way too often before acci-
dental pressure and unexpected shocks. Slowed down and diverted
from their course, the equalitarian currents tended to exaggerate
essential inequalities. The democratic order tottered with the
wavering of the middle classes, who had been its firm founda-
tion; it was crushed under the double weight of the masses,
from whom a crazed economic system had stolen all hope of
normal betterment, and of a corrupt bureaucracy which aggra-
vated the absolutism of the monarch whose fabulous wealth it
commanded and translated into acts of arbitrary omnipotence.
Thus the brilliance of the Urbs of the second century was al-
ready shrouded in the shadows which under the later empire

SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES 75

spread from Rome over the rest of the known world, and Rome
lacked the courage to shake herself free of the sinister gloom
that thickened round her. To struggle with success against the
'evils of their day, societies have need to believe in their own
future. But Roman so^'ety, cheated of its hopes of gradual and
'equitable progress, obsessed alternately by its own stagnation
and by its instability, began to doubt itself just at the time when
the conscious unity f its established families was cracked and
breaking.

IV

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY

i. THE WEAKENING OF PATERNAL AUTHORITY

N THE second century of our era
the ancient law of the gens had
fallen into disuse ("totum gentili-
cium ius in desuetudinem abisse") ;
and nothing but the memory the
"archaeological memory" one might
almost say remained of the prin-
ciples on which the patriarchal
family of ancient Rome had been
based: relationship through the
male line (agnatio) and the unlim-
ited power of the pater familias. 1

Whereas in former days the only recognised relationship was
that created by male descent (agnatio), relationship was now
recognised through the female line (cognatio) and extended be-
yond legitimate marriage.

This is clearly illustrated by the laws governing inheritance.
According to the ancient code of the Twelve Tables, a mother had
no right of succession to a son who had died intestate. Under
Hadrian, the senatus consultum Tertullianum admitted her as a
legitimate heir on the condition that she possessed the ius libero-
rum, which rested on her having had three children (four, if she
was a freed woman). Then, by the senatus consultum Orphitianum
passed under Marcus Aurelius; children were entitled to in-
herit 4rom iflfeif mother, whatever the validity of the union from
which they sprafijg, and to take precedence of other relatives
in-' this matter. 2 , *'

This completed the' development which had undermined the
ancient system of cftil inheritance, wrecking the fundamental
conception of the Reman family and recognising instead the

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 77

claims of "blood" in the sense in which our modern societies have
accepted them. The Roman family is henceforth based on the
coniunctio sanguinis, because, according to the lofty conception
of Cicero in the De Officiis, this natural tie was the best qualified
to bind human beings in affection and mutual goodwill: "et be-
nevolentia devincit homines et caritate"*

During the same period the two essential weapons of the
patria potestas were gradually blunted: the father's absolute au-
thority over his children, and the husband's absolute authority
over the wife placed "in his hand" (in manum) as if she were one
of his daughters (loco filiae). By the second century of our era
they had disappeared completely. The pater familias had 'been
deprived of the right of life or death over his children which had
been granted him by the Twelve Tables and the sacred, so-called
Royal Laws. 4 But until the beginning of the third century, when
abandoning a child was considered the equivalent of murder, 6 he
might expose his new-born child to perish of cold and hunger or
be devoured by dogs on one of the public refuse dumps, unless
it was rescued by the pity of some passer-by. 6 No doubt a poor
man still had recourse as readily as heretofore to this haphazard
form of legal infanticide, despite the isolated protests of Stoic
preachers like Musonius Rufus. 7 We may assume that he con-
tinued remorselessly to expose his bastards and his infant daugh-
ters, since the records of Trajan's reign show the entries for
public assistance given to young children for the same city and
the same year as 179 legitimate children (145 boys and 34 girls)
and only two bastards (spurii), a boy and a girl. 8 These dis-
crepancies can best be explained by assuming that a large pro-
portion of bastards and girl babies were victims of "exposure."

Having'once spared the infant at its birth, however, the pater
familias had no power afterwards to get rid of his child, either
by selling him (mancipatio) into slavery the mancipatio was
now tolerated only as a legal fiction for the contradictory objects
of adoption or manumission or by putting^jjjjjfcdb^jggth. A
father's right to slay his child was still rj
century B.C., as is proved by the case
complice of Catiline; but had later ffiofpfe a capital
Before Constantine equated with parr^
by his- father, 10 Hadrian had punished
a father who had slain his son in the cc

78 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

son was guilty of having committed adultery with his father's
second wife; 11 and the emperor Trajan had compelled another
father, guilty only of having maltreated his son, to emancipate the
youth forthwith, and when the boy died, did not allow the father
to* share in his estate. 12

Similarly, after the end of the republic, the emancipation of a
child had entirely changed in significance and effect. In ancient
days it was a punishment, less drastic than death or slavery, but
nevertheless severe enough, for in breaking the ties that bound
the child to the family, it condemned him to an exclusion from the
family .which inevitably resulted in his being disinherited. Now,
emancipation had become a benefit. Thanks to the praetorian
legislation of the bonorum possessio introduced at the beginning
of the empire, it enabled a son to acquire and administer his own
property without being deprived of his paternal inheritance.
Fathers were reluctant to have recourse to emancipation as long
as it had the appearance of a punishment. But as soon as it be-
came an advantage to the son, the cost falling only on the parent,
fathers began to practise it as a matter of course. The laws had
once more adapted themselves to public feeling which, condemn-
ing the atrocious severities of the past, asked in the days of Trajan
and of Hadrian nothing more of paternal authority than that
natural affection with which a jurist of the third century finally
identified it: "patria potestas in pietate debet non atrocitate con-
sistere." 18

This was enough completely to alter the atmosphere of the
Roman home, and to imbue the relationship between father and
son with a tenderness which was far removed from the coldness
and rigorous discipline that Cato the Elder had maintained in his
family. Reading the literature of the time, we find it full of
examples of fathers of families whose patria potestas was be-
trayed only in the indulgence shown to their children; and of
children who in their father's presence behaved as they pleased,
as though they were completely their own masters. Pliny the
Younger, whose own marriages were childless, claims for the
children of his friends an independence of conduct and manners
he would certainly not have denied to his own children, because
these things had become accepted and were for "the right sort of
people" an element of seemly behaviour. "A father," he writes,
"was scolding his son for somewhat excessive expenditure. . . .

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 79

As soon as the young man had gone I said: 'Well, well, and did
you never do anything yourself which might 'have deserved a re-
proof from your father?' " 14

Pliny the Younger preached a tolerance or, if the word is pre-
ferred, a liberalism which appeals to us. But, unhappily, the Ro-
mans failed to strike the happy mean. They were not content to
lessen the old severity; they yielded to the impulse to become
far too complaisant. Having given up the habit of controlling
their children, they let the children govern them, and took pleas-
ure in bleeding themselves white to gratify the expensive whims
of their offspring. The result was that they were succeeded by a
generation of idlers and wastrels like the Philomusus, whose -mis-
adventure Martial recounts. This young man, having inherited
his father's entire fortune, suddenly found himself much worse
off than when he had enjoyed his generous monthly allowance:
"Your father, Philomusus, arranged to allow you 2,000 sesterces
a month, and every day he handed you your allowance. . . .
Dying, he left you every penny. Your father has disinherited you,
Philomusus!" 15

Unfortunately, it was not only in money matters that the price
of overindividualism had to be paid. The fine edge of character
had been blunted in the Rome of the second century. The stern
face of the traditional pater familias had faded out; instead we
see on every hand the flabby face of the son of the house, the
eternal spoiled child of society, who has grown accustomed to
luxury and lost all sense of discipline. Worse still, we see looming
up the sinister face of the father who for love of gain does not
hesitate to blight the -hope of his race, and methodically to cor-
rupt the adolescents whom it is his duty to bring up. Such was the
case of the great advocate Regulus, the enemy and rival of Pliny
the Younger. 16 He had yielded to every caprice of his son. He
installed for him an aviary where parrots chattered, blackbirds
whistled, and nightingales sang. He bought him dogs of every
breed. He sent tc Gaul for ponies for him to ride and drive. And
at the death of the boy's mother, whose immense fortune had
paid for these expensive gifts, the father hastened to emancipate
his son, so that the young man might at once enjoy the full posses-
sion of his maternal inheritance. The youth abused it so indis-
criminately that his foolish prodigality shortened his life. He died
prematurely and what was left of his fortune reverted to his

8o DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

father. This is, no doubt, an extreme example, so singular and
monstrous that Pliny is scandalised. That it should have been
possible at all is enough. And it would not have been possible if
the women had not been emancipated, as much or even more than
the children, from the family solidarity which the exercise of the
patria potestas had imposed of old; the two perished together.

2. BETROTHAL AND MARRIAGE

While the patria potestas of the father over his children grew
progressively weaker, it also ceased to arm the husband against
his wife. In the old days, three separate forms of marriage had
placed the wife under her husband's manus: the confarreatio f or
solemn offering by the couple of a cake of spelt (jarreus panis)
in the presence of the Pontifex Maximus and the priest of the
supreme god, the Flamen Dialis; the coemptio, the fictitious sale
whereby the plebeian father "mancipated" his daughter to her
husband; and finally the usus, whereby uninterrupted cohabita-
tion for a year produced the same legal result between a plebeian
man and a patrician woman. 17 It appears certain that none of
these three forms had survived till the second century A.D. The
usus had been the first to be given up, and it is probable that
Augustus had formally abolished it by law. Confarreatio and
coemptio were certainly practiced in the second century A.D.,
but seem to have been rather uncommon. Their place had been
taken by a marriage which both in spirit and in -external form
singularly resembles our own, and from which we may be per-
mitted to assume that our own is derived.

This more modern form of marriage was preceded by a be-
trothal, which, however, carried no actual obligations. Betrothals
were so common in the Rome of our epoch that Pliny the Younger
reckons them among the thousand-and-one trifles which uselessly
encumbered the days of his contemporaries. 18 It consisted of a
reciprocal engagement entered into by the young couple with the
consent of their fathers and in the presence of a certain number
of relatives and friends, some of whom acted as witnesses, while
the rest were content to make merry at the banquet which con-
cluded the festivities. The concrete symbol of the betrothal was
the gift to the girl from her fiancd of a number of presents, more
or less costly, and a ring which was probably a survival of the
arra or earnest money, a preliminary of the ancient coemptio. 19

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 81

Whether the ring consisted of a circle of iron set in gold or a circle
of gold, the girl immediately slipped it, in the presence of the
guests, onto that finger on which the wedding ring is still normally
worn. The French speak of le doigt annulaire (anularius) with
no recollection of the reason why this finger was originally
chosen by the Romans. Aulus Gellius has laboriously explained it:

When the human body is cut open as the Egyptians do and when dis-
sections, or avaiO[xat as the Greeks phrase it, are practised on it, a very
delicate nerve is found which starts from the annular finger and travels
to the heart. It is, therefore, thought seemly to give to this finger in
preference to all others the honour of the ring, on account of the close
connection which links it with the principal organ. 20

This intimate relation established in the name of imaginary sci-
ence between the heart and the betrothal ring he cites to em-
phasise the solemnity of the engagement and above all the depth
of the reciprocal affection which contemporaries associated with
it. The voluntary and public acknowledgment of this affection was
the essential element not only of the ceremony itself but of the
legal reality of the Roman marriage.

Numerous literary allusions have preserved for us the most
minute details of the marriage ceremony. 21 On the day fixed for
the wedding the bride, whose hair had been imprisoned the night
before in a crimson net, put on the costume which custom dic-
tated: a tunic without hem (tunica recta), secured round the waist
by a girdle of wool with a double knot, the cingulum herculeum.
Over this she wore a cloak or palla of saffron colour; on her feet
sandals of the same shade; round her neck a metal collar. Her
coiffure was protected by six pads of artificial hair (sent crines)
separated by narrow bands, such as the Vestals wore during the
whole period of their service; and over it she wore a veil of flam-
ing orange hence called the ftammeum which modestly cov-
ered the upper part of her face. On top of the veil was placed a
wreath, woven simply of verbena and sweet marjoram in the time
of Caesar and Augustus, and later of myrtle and orange blossom.
After she was duly dressed she stood amid her own people and
welcomed her groom, his family, and friends. Everyone then
adjourned either to a neighbouring sanctuary, or into the atrium
of the house to offer a sacrifice to the gods. After the animal sacri-
fice had been consummated sometimes a ewe, rarely an ox, most

82 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

often a pig the auspex and the witnesses played their part. The
witnesses, probably ten in number, selected from the circles of
the two contracting parties, played a silent role and simply affixed
their seal to the marriage contract. The drawing up of a contract
was not obligatory, however. The auspex, on the other hand, was
indispensable. His untranslatable title indicated that he fulfilled
the functions of a personal, family augur without sacerdotal in-
vestiture and without official appointment. After examining the
entrails, he gave his guarantee that the auspices were favourable.
Without this, the marriage would have been disapproved by the
gods and invalid. As soon as he had solemnly made his pronounce-
ment amid respectful silence, the couple exchanged their mutual
vows in his presence, in a formula which seemed to blend into one
their wills as well as their lives: Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia. This con-
cluded the marriage rite and the guests burst into congratulations
and good wishes: Feliciterl May happiness wait upon youl

The subsequent festivities lasted until night fell and the mo-
ment had come to wrest the bride from her mother's embrace and
bear her to her husband's home. The flute-players led the pro-
cession, followed by five torch-bearers. As it marched, the cortege
indulged in cheerful and licentious singing. As they approached
the house, nuts were thrown to the children who had flocked
about. These nuts had been the playthings of the groom in his
childhood and their rattle on the pavement was a merry prophecy
of the happiness and fertility which the future promised him.
Three boys, whose parents must still be alive, accompanied the
bride. One brandished the nuptial torch composed of tightly-
twisted hawthorn twigs. The other two held the bride by the hand.
On reaching her new home, she was lifted across the threshold,
which was spread with white cloth and strewn with luxuriant
greenery. Three bridesmaids entered the house behind the nova
nupta: one of them carried her distaff and a second her spindle,
obvious emblems of her virtue and domestic diligence. After her
husband had offered her water and fire, the third and most hon-
oured bridesmaid, the pronuba, led her to the nuptial couch where
her husband invited her to recline. He then removed her palla and
proceeded to untie the nodus herculeus of her girdle, while the
bridal party hastened to retire with the speed and discretion which
propriety and custom demanded.

Except for the bleeding sacrifice and the flaming splendour of

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 83

the bridal veil, might we not well imagine that this Roman cere-
monial has survived till our own day, and that with trifling modi-
fications it has formed the model for our modern weddings? As
Monseigneur Duchesne recently remarked, with an insight all the
more striking for being rare: "Except for the taking of the
auspices, Christian ritual has preserved entire the Roman nuptial
rite. Everything is there down to the bridal wreaths. . . . The
Church is essentially conservative and in this type of ceremony
has modified only such details as are incompatible with her teach-
ing." 22 Reduced to fundamentals, Christian marriage consists in
the voluntary union of two souls. Apart from the rejoicings which
follow and even the religious service which accompanies it, the
sacrament consists in the affirmation of intimate union made by
the bridal couple in the presence of the priest who attends simply
to register their vows before God. This definition equally applies
to the Roman marriage of classic times. The kernel of the rite
is the moment when, fortified by the approval of the gods as
guaranteed by the auspex, Gaius and Gaia simultaneously declare
their solemn intention to bind themselves to one another. The
essence of the ceremony is this joint declaration; all that precedes
or follows is a superfluous and adventitious flourish. When toward
the end of the republic Cato of Utica took Marcia as his second
wife, they agreed to renounce all such accompanying ceremony.
They exchanged their vows without empty pomp and circum-
stance. They summoned no witnesses, they invited no guests.
They pledged themselves in silence under the auspices which
Brutus took:

"Pignora nulla domus; nulli coiere propinqui
lunguntur taciti contentique auspice Bruto. 23
(No members of the family and no kinsmen
assembled. Their hands were joined in silence
and they were satisfied with the presence of
Brutus as augur.)"

There is nobility in this conception that marriage is based on
a union -of hearts. There is no doubt that the progress of phi-
losophy, especially of Stoicism, which lighted the path of Cato and
Marcia, contributed to grafting on Roman law a modern ideal so
foreign to its primitive development, an ideal which ultimately
overturned the traditional legal economy.

84 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

The ancient Roman whom Gaius already speaks of as a van-
ished type condemned woman, in view of her natural frailty to
live in perpetual tutelage. 24 By the marriage cum manu she es-
caped the manus of her father and his male relations only to fall
into the manus of her husband. The marriage sine manu made her
the ward of a so-called "legitimate guardian" who had to be
chosen from among her male relations if the direct male line of
her progenitors had died out. When, however, the marriage sine
manu had completely supplanted the cum manu marriage, the
"legitimate guardianship" which had been its inseparable accom-
paniment began to lose its importance. By the end of the republic,
a ward who chose to complain of the absence of her guardian
however short that absence might have been was able to get
another appointed for her by the praetor. 25 When, at the begin-
ning of the empire, the marital laws which are associated with the
name of Augustus were passed, the "legitimate guardians" were
sacrificed to the emperor's desire to facilitate prolific marriages,
and mothers of three children were exempted from guardian-
ship. 26 In Hadrian's day a married woman did not need a guard-
ian even to draft her will, and a father no more dreamed of
forcing his daughter to marry against her will than of opposing a
marriage on which she had set her heart, for, as the great jurist
Salvius lulianus maintained, a marriage could not be made by
constraint, but only by consent of the parties thereto, and the free
consent of the girl was indispensable: "nuptiae consensu contra-
hentium fiunt; nuptiis filiam jamilias consentire oportet" 2T

3. THE ROMAN MATRON

It can be understood that this new definition of marriage revo-
lutionised its nature. There are certain causes which inevitably
entail certain consequences. In our own days we have seen the
French legislator first minimise and finally abolish all obstacles
to the triumphant wishes of a marrying couple. All remnants of
parental authority disappeared with the parents' right to oppose
a match desired by their children. The same phenomenon oc-
curred in the Roman empire. Having shaken off the authority of
her husband by adopting the marriage sine manu, the Roman
matron was freed from the leading strings of guardianship by the
free choice the times allowed her in contracting a union. She

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 85

entered her husband's home of her own free will and lived in it
as his equal.

Contrary to general opinion which colours the conditions
existing under the empire with memories of the early days of the
republic and of long-lapsed republican customs it is certain that
the Roman woman of the epoch we are studying enjoyed a dig-
nity and an independence at least equal if not superior to those
claimed by contemporary feminists. More than one ancient cham-
pion of feminism under the Flavians, Musonius Rufus for one,
had claimed for women this dignity and independence on the
ground of the moral and intellectual equality of the two sexes. 28
The close of the first century and the beginning of the second
include many women of strong character, who command our
admiration. Empresses succeeded each other on the throne who
were not unworthy to bear at their husband's side the proud title
of Augusta which was granted to Livia only after her husband's
death. Plotina accompanied Trajan through the Parthian wars
and shared alike his glories and responsibilities. When the opti-
mus princeps lay at death's door, having only in secret appointed
Hadrian to succeed him, it, was Plotina who interpreted and re-
inforced his last wishes; and it was she who ensured that Hadrian
enter in peace and without disturbance on the sovereign succession
of the dead emperor. Sabina's character remains untouched by the
ill-natured gossip of the Historia Augusta, which is refuted by a
mass of inscriptions commemorating her kindnesses, and by the
numerous statues which deified her even in her lifetime. Hadrian,
who is wrongly supposed to have been on bad terms with her,
carefully surrounded her with so much deference and gracious
consideration that the ab epistolis Suetonius forfeited overnight
his "Ministry of the Pen" for having scanted the respect due to
her. 29 The great ladies of the aristocracy in their turn were proud
to recall as immortal models the heroines of past evil reigns who,
having been the trusted confidantes of their husbands, sharing
their commands and their politics, refused to be parted from them
in the hour of danger and chose to perish with them rather than
leave them to fall uncomforted under the tyrant's blow.

Under Tiberius, Sextia would not survive Aemilius Scaurus, nor
Paxaea her Pomponius Labeo. 80 When Nero sent Seneca the fatal
command, the philosopher's young wife Paulina opened her veins

86 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

together with her husband; that she did not die of haemorrhage
like him was solely because Nero heard of her attempt to commit
suicide and sent an order to save her life at any cost; she was
compelled to let them bandage her wrists and close the wounds.
The record which the Annales have preserved for us of this mov-
ing scene, the portrait they paint of the sad and bloodless face of
the young widow who bore to her dying day the marks of the
tragedy, express the deep emotion which the memory of this
drama of conjugal love still inspired in the Romans of Trajan's
day after the lapse of half a century. 81 Tacitus felt the same ad-
miration for the loyalty of Paulina that his friend Pliny the
Yoi^fcger felt for the courage of the elder Arria, to whom he does
homage in the most beautiful of his letters.

I must be pardoned for once more borrowing at length from
Pliny's celebrated pages. 82 Arria the Elder had married the
senator Caecina Paetus. In tragic circumstances she showed of
what stoic devotion her love was capable. Both Paetus and his
son were ill, and it was believed that there was no hope for either.
The young man died. He was endowed with rare beauty and
with a moral purity rarer still, and his parents loved him even
more for his qualities than because he was their son. Arria pre-
pared her son's obsequies and herself arranged the funeral so
that her sick husband should be spared the knowledge of it.
Returning to Paetus' room she acted as if the boy were living
still and were better, and when the father asked news of him
again and yet again "she would answer that he had rested well or
had eaten with appetite." Then feeling the pent-up tears coming
in spite of her, she slipped away and gave herself to 'her sorrow.
When she had cried her fill she dried her eyes, repaired the rav-
ages to her face, nd came in again to her husband, as though
leaving every pang of bereavement on the threshold. By this
superhuman effort of self-control Arria saved her husband's life.

But she could not save him from the imperial vengeance when
in 42 A.D. he was implicated in the revolt of Scribonianus, and
was arrested before her eyes in Illyricum where she had accom-
panied him. She begged the soldiers to take her too. "You cannot
do less than let a consul have slaves to serve him at table, to dress
him, and to put on his shoes. All this I will do for him myself."
When her prayers proved vain she hired a fishing boat and in this
frail craft followed the ship on which they carried Paetus. It was

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 87

useless. At Rome Claudius proved adamant. Arria announced
that she would die with her husband. At first her son-in-law
Thrasea sought to dissuade her. "What," he said, "should you
agree, if I were one day to die, that your daughter should perish
with me?" Arria would not allow her stern resolution to be
weakened. "If my daughter in her turn had lived as long with
you and in the same happiness as I with Paetus, I should con-
sent," she said. To cut the argument short she flung herself head-
long against the wall and fell unconscious to the ground. When
she came to herself she said: "I warned you that I should find
some road to death, however difficult, if you refused to let me
find an easy one." When the fatal hour at last arrived she drew a
dagger from her robe and plunged it in her breast. Then, pulling
the weapon out again, she handed it to her husband with the
immortal words: "It does not hurt, Paetus."

I have dwelt on these famous episojdes because they show in a
certain type of woman of Imperial Rome one of the fairest ex-
amples of human greatness. Thanks to such women, proud and
free as Arria, ancient Rome, in the very years when she was about
to receive the bloody baptism of the first Christian martyrs, scaled
one of the loftiest moral heights humanity has conquered. Not
only had their memory become a veritable cult in the second
century of our era, but their example still from time to time found
imitators. It is true that the justice of the emperors now spared
matrons the sacrifices which the wrath of Claudius and the
ferocity of Nero had inflicted on them; but the cruelty of daily
life still left all too many opportunities for at least the aristocrats
to prove that Roman woman had not degenerated.

Pliny the Younger mentions among his own acquaintance some
whose love for their husbands prompted them to die with them. 88

I was sailing in a boat [he writes] on the Lake of Como, when an older
friend called my attention to a villa . . . which projects into the
lake. "From that room," he said, "a woman of our city once threw her-
self and her husband." I asked \yhy. Her husband was suffering from
an ulcer in those parts which modesty conceals. His wife begged him
to let her see it, for no one could give him a more honest opinion wheth-
er it was curable. She saw it, gave up hope, and tying herself to her
husband she plunged with him into the lake.

.No doubt such cases were exceptional, or if you prefer, these
are extreme cases where courage was abnormally heightened and

88 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

virtue itself began to suffer from an excess of stoicism. But side
by side with these, how many cases were there of households
tenderly united, of wives quite simply pure and noble! Even
Martial gives us a portrait gallery of accomplished women. "Al-
though sprung from tattooed Britons, " Claudia Rufina had a
truly Latin soul. Nigrina, happier than Evadne or Alcestis, "thou
hast earned by a sure pledge given in life that death was not
needed to prove thy love." 34 The transparent soul of Sulpicia
was poured out in her poems :

She claims not as her theme the frenzy of the Colchian dame; nor does
she recount Thyestes' dreadful feast . . . she describes pure and honest
love. No maid was so roguish ... no ma^'d so modest. . . . Neither as
the Thunderer's spouse, nor as Bacchus' or Apollo's mistress, were
her Calenus taken from her, would she live. 35

Similarly, the society which surrounded Pliny the Younger was
filled with honour, distinction, and devotion. The wife of his old
friend Macrinus "would have been worthy to set an example, even
if she had lived in olden times; she has lived with her husband
thirty-nine years without a quarrel, or a fit of sulks, in unclouded
happiness and mutual respect." 86 Pliny himself seems to have
tasted perfect happiness in his marriage with his third wife,
Calpurnia. He lavishes praise on her, boasting in turn of her tact,
her reserve, her love, her faithfulness, and the taste for literature
which had sprung from her sympathy for him. "How full of
solicitude is she when I am entering upon any cause ! How kindly
does she rejoice with me when it is over!" She never wearies of
reading and rereading him and learning him by heart. When he
gives a public reading she attends behind a curtain, "and greedily
overhears my praises. She sings my verses and sets them to her
lyre with no other master but Love, the best instructor." 37

Thus Calpurnia at her literary husband's side foreshadows the
modern type of wife who is her husband's partner. Her collabo-
ration is wholly free from pedantry and enhances instead of im-
pairs the charm of her youth, the freshness of the love she feels
for her husband and which he returns. The shortest of separa-
tions seems to have caused actual pain to both. When Pliny had
to go away, Calpurnia sought him in his works, caressed them,
and put them in the places where she was accustomed to see him.
And Pliny for his part when Calpurnia is absent takes up her

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 89

letters again and again, as if they had but newly arrived. At night
he sees her beloved image in waking dreams, and "his feet carry
him of their own accord" to the room where she usually lived,
"but not finding you there, I return with as much sorrow and dis-
appointment as an excluded lover." ss

Reading these affectionate letters, we are tempted to rebel
against the pessimism of La Rochfoucauld and to deny the
truth of his maxim that there was no such thing as a delightful
marriage. On reflection, however, we begin to suspect that a
trace of convention pervades these somewhat self-conscious and
literary effusions. In Pliny's world, marriages were contracted
rather from considerations of their suitability than from strength
of feeling. He cannot have chosen his wife in a spirit very differ-
ent from that in which he accepts the commission to look out
for a suitable husband for the niece of a friend: with an eye not
only to the physical and moral attributes of the young man, but
also to his fortune and family connections; "for," he confesses,
"I admit that these things certainly claim some notice: Ne id
quidem praetereundum esse videtur" 39 What he seems most to
have loved in Calpurnia was her admiration for his writings, and
we soon come to the conclusion that he was readily consoled for
the absences he complains of by the pleasure of polishing the
phrases in which he so gracefully deplores them. For, after all,
even when the couple were living under the same roof they were
not together. They had, as. we should say, their separate rooms.
Even amid the peace of his Tuscan villa, Pliny's chief delight was
in a solitude favourable to his meditations, and it was his secretary
(notarius), not his wife, whom he was wont to summon to his
bedside at dawn. 40 His conjugal affection was for him a matter of
good taste and savoir vivre, and we cannot avoid the conviction
that, taken all round, it was gravely lacking in warmth and
intimacy.

Let us revert, for instance, to the embarrassed letters which he
wrote to Calpurnia's grandfather and aunt to tell them of the
hopes of paternity with which Calpurnia had rejoiced him and of
the sad event which hadi so cruelly dashed them. 41 He announces
to Calpurnius Fabatus:

Your concern to hear of your granddaughter's miscarriage will be pro-
portionate, I know, to your earnest desire that we should make you a
great-grandfather. Calpurnia, in her inexperience, did not realise her

90 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

pregnancy, and left undone those things she should in the circumstances
have done, and did those things she should have left undone. She has
received a severe lesson, paying for this mistake by the utmost hazard
of her life.

For Calpurnia Hispulla he varies the form but not the matter of
these strange explanations:

Calpurnia has been in the utmost danger be it said without ill-omen!
not through her fault but the fault of her youth. To this must be im-
puted her miscarriage and the sad result of a pregnancy she had not
suspected. Pray excuse this accident to your father, whose indulgence
is always more readily forthcoming when solicited by one of your sex.

Indeed, it is not the grandfather but we who fail to understand
or else understand all too well how gravely Pliny was lacking in
interest in other sides of his young wife's life, while he attended
so carefully to her intellectual education. These letters reveal a
coldness which shocks us and a detachment which appears un-
natural. Such is the price paid for a liberty which merges into
indifference and an equality which sometimes leads even the best,
whom it should have drawn more closely together, into a sort of
selfish torpor, while it tempts others into fads and perversions.

4. FEMINISM AND DEMORALISATION

Alongside the heroines of the imperial aristocracy, the irre-
proachable wives and excellent mothers who were still found
within its ranks, it is easy to cite "emancipated," or rather "un-
bridled," wives, who were the various product of the new condi-
tions of Roman marriage. Some evaded the duties of maternity
for fear of losing their good looks; some took a pride in being
behind their husbands in no sphere of activity, and vied with
them in tests of strength which their sex would have seemed to
forbid; some were not content to live their lives by their husband's
side, but carried on another life without him at the price of
betrayals and surrenders for which they did not even trouble to
blush.

Whether because of voluntary birth control, or because of the
impoverishment of the stock, many Roman marriages at the end
of the first and the beginning of the second century were child-
less. The example of childlessness began at the top. The bachelor
emperor Nerva, chosen perhaps for his very celibacy, was sue-

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 91

ceeded by Trajan and then by Hadrian, both of whom were
married but had no legitimate issue. In spite of three successive
marriages, a consul like Pliny the Younger produced no heir, and
his fortune was divided at his death between pious foundations
and his servants. The petite bourgeoisie was doubtless equally
unprolific. It has certainly left epitaphs by the thousand where
the deceased is mourned by his freedmen without mention of
children. Martial seriously holds Claudia Rufina up to the ad-
miration of his readers because she had three children; 42 and we
may consider as an exceptional case the matron of his acquaint-
ance who had presented her husband with five sons and five
daughters. 48

If the Roman women showed reluctance to perform their ma-
ternal functions, they devoted themselves on the other hand,
with a zeal that smacked of defiance, to all sorts of pursuits which
in the days of the republic men had jealously reserved for them-
selves. In his sixth satire Juvenal sketches for the amusement of
his readers a series of portraits, not entirely caricatures, which
show women quitting their embroidery, their reading, their song,
and their lyre, to put their enthusiasm into an attempt to rival
men, if not to outclass them in every sphere. There are some who
plunge passionately into the study of legal suits or current
politics, eager for news of the entire world, greedy for the gossip
of the town and for the intrigues of the court, well-informed about
the latest happening in -Thrace or China, weighing the gravity
of the dangers threatening the king of Armenia or of Parthia;
with noisy effrontery they expound their theories and their plans
to generals clad in field uniform (the paludamentum) while their
husbands silently look on. 44 There are others who seek literary
fame in preference to the conspiracies of diplomats or exercises
in strategy; inexhaustibly voluble, they affect a ridiculous ped-
antry in Greek and Latin, and even at table confound their
interlocutors by the accuracy of their memory and the dogmatism
of their opinions. "Most intolerable of all is the woman who . . .
pardons the dying Dido and pits the poets against each other,
putting Virgil in the one scale and Homer in the other." There
is no appeal against her presumption. "The grammarians make
way before her; the rhetoricians give in; the whole crowd is
silenced." 45 Pliny the Younger would certainly have fallen under
the spell of woman's erudition, if we remember the praise he be-

92 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

stows on Calpurnia and the enthusiasm he expresses for the edu-
cation and good taste of the wife of Pompeius Saturninus, whose
letters were so beautifully phrased that they might pass for
prose versions of Plautus or Terence. 48 Juvenal, on the other hand,
like Moliere's good Chrysale, could not endure these "learned
women." He compares their chatter to the clashing of pots and
bells; he abhors these "prtcieuses" who reel off the Grammar of
Palaemon, "who observe all the rules and laws of language," and
adjures his friend: "Let not the wife of your bosom possess a
style of her own. . . . Let her not know all history; let there be
some things in her reading which she does not understand." 47

So much for the intellectuals. But the outdoor types arouse
even more ridicule than the blue stockings. If Juvenal were alive
today he would be pretty sure to shower abuse on women drivers
and pilots. He is unsparing of his sarcasm for the ladies who join
in men's hunting parties, and like Mevia, "with spear in hand
and breasts exposed, take to pig-sticking/' and for those who
attend chariot races in men's clothes, and especially for those
who devote themselves to fencing and wrestling. 48 He contemptu-
ously recalls the ceroma which they affect and the complicated
equipment they put on the cloaks, the armguards, the thigh-
pieces, the baldrics and plumes.. "Who has not seen one of them
smiting a stump, piercing it through and through with a foil,
lunging at it with a shield and going through all the proper mo-
tions? . . . Unless indeed she is nursing some further ambition in
her bosom and is practising for the real arena." Some, perhaps,
who today admire so many gallant female "records" will shrug
their shoulders and accuse Juvenal of poor sportsmanship and
narrow-mindedness. We must at least concede that the scandal of
his times justified the fears which he expressed in this grave
query: "What modesty can you expect in a woman who wears a
helmet, abjures her own sex, and delights in feats of strength?"
The feminism which triumphed in imperial times brought more
in its train than advantage and superiority. By copying men too
closely the Roman woman succeeded more rapidly in emulating
man's vices than in acquiring his strength.

For three hundred years women had reclined with their hus-
band at the banquets. After they became his rival in the palaestra,
they naturally adopted the regimen of an athlete and held their
own with him at table, as they disputed the palm with him in the

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 93

arena. Thus other women, who had not the excuse of sport, also
adopted the habit of eating and drinking as if they took daily
exercise. Petrohius shows us Fortunata, the stout mistress of
Trimalchio, gorged with food and wine, her tongue furred, her
memory confused, her eyes bleared with drunkenness. 49 The great
ladies or the women who posed as such on the strength of their
money-bags whom Juvenal satirizes, unashamedly displayed a
disgusting gluttony. One of them prolongs her drinking bouts till
the middle of the night and "eats giant oysters, pours foaming
unguents into her unmixed Falernian . . . and drinks out of
perfume bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round and every light
shows double." Another, still more degraded, arrives late at the
cena, her face on fire,

and with thirst enough to drink off the vessel containing full three gal-
lons which is laid at her feet and from which she tosses off a couple of
pints before her dinner to create a raging appetite; then she brings it
all up again and souses the floor with the washings of her insides. . . .
She drinks and vomits like a big snake that has tumbled into a vat.
The sickened husband closes his eyes, and so keeps down his bile. 51

No doubt such cases were repulsive exceptions. But it is bad
enough that satire should be able to draw such types and expect
readers to recognise them. Moreover, it is evident that the inde-
pendence which women at this time enjoyed frequently degen-
erated into licence, and that the looseness of their morals tended
to dissolve family ties. "She lives with him as if she were only a
neighbour : Vivit tamguam vicina mariti." 52

Before long women began to betray the troth which they should
have plighted to their husband, and which many of them in
marrying had had the cynicism to refuse him. "To live your own
life" was a formula which women had already brought into
fashion in the second century. "We agreed long ago," says the
lady, "that you were to go your way and I mine. You may con-
found sea and sky with your bellowing, I am a human being after
all.

Ut faceres tu quod vettes nee non ego possem
Indulgere mihi. Clames licet et mare caelo
Conjundas! Homo sum!"**

Not only the Epigrams of Martial and the Satires of Juvenal
bear witness to the prevalence of adultery. In the chaste cor-

94 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

respondence of Pliny the Younger a whole letter is dedicated to
relating the ups and downs of a case which came before Trajan in
his capacity as supreme commander-in-chief of the army. A
centurion was convicted of having seduced the wife of one of his
superior officers, a senatorial tribune in the same legion as him-
self. What amazes Pliny is certainly not the adultery itself, but
the unusual set of circumstances which surrounded it: the flagrant
breach of discipline it involved, which entailed the immediate
"breaking and banishing" of the centurion; the reluctance of the
tribune to vindicate his honour by demanding the condemnation
which his wife deserved and which the emperor was officially
bound to pronounce. 54

It is obvious that unhappy marriages must have been innumer-
able in a city where Juvenal as a matter of course adjures a guest
whom he has invited to dinner to forget at his table the anxieties
which have haunted him all day, especially those caused by the
carryings on of his wife, who "is wont to go forth at dawn and to
come home at night with crumpled hair and flushed face and
ears." B5

A hundred years before, Augustus had in vain tried stern
measures against adulterers by passing a law which deprived them
of half their fortune and forbade them marriage with each other
for all time. 56 From a modern point of view this marked a distinct
advance on the ancient law. In the time of Cato the Censor, for
instance, a woman's adultery was recognised as a crime which her
outraged husband was entitled to punish with death, but the man's
adultery was considered negligible, and he got off scot free as if
he were innocent. 57 The imperial legislation was both more hu-
mane, since it annulled the husband's right to take justice so
cruelly into his own hand, and more equitable, since it dealt out
equal punishment to both sexes. But the fact that the new law
submitted the offence to a special court is an indication of the
frequency with which adultery was committed, and we may be
very sure that the law did little to curb it. By the end of the first
century the Lex lulia de adulteriis had been very nearly for-
gotten. Before applying it, Domitian was obliged solemnly to
re-enact its provisions. Martial outdoes himself in sycophantic
praise of the "Greatest of Censors and Prince of Princes" who had
passed this edict, which if we are to believe him Rome prized
above triumphs, temples, spectacles, and cities: "Yet more Rome

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 95

owes thee, in that she is chaste (Plus debet tibi Roma quod pudica
est)."**

But it seems that when Domitian was gone his edict mouldered
along with the Lex lulia under the dust of the archives and the
indifference of the judges. A few years later Juvenal ventures to
scoff at Domitian as "the adulterer," who "after lately defiling
himself by a union of the tragic style, revived the stern laws that
were to be a terror to all men, ay even to Mars and Venus." 59
And two generations after Juvenal, Domitian's law had fallen into
so much discredit that Septimius Severus had to recast Domitian's
work, as Domitian had endeavoured to recast that of Augustus. 60
To be frank, if the frequency of adultery had diminished in the
second century, this was not due to the intermittent severities of
the law but because facilities for divorce had, as it were, legiti-
mised adultery by anticipation.

5. .DIVORCE AND THE INSTABILITY OF THE FAMILY

Classic Rome loved to recur in thought to the legendary days
of old where she could see an ideal image of herself, an image
which every day became less and less like the reality. But even
in those times the Roman marriage had never been indissoluble. 61
In the marriage cum manu of the first centuries of Rome, the
woman placed under the man's authority could in no wise repudi-
ate her husband, while on the other hand the husband's right to
repudiate his wife was inherent in the absolute power which he
possessed over her. In the interest, no doubt, of the stability of
the family, custom had, however, introduced some modifications
into the application of this principle ; and until the third century
B.C. as we see by specific examples which tradition has pre-
served this repudiation was in fact confined to cases in which
some blame attached to the wife. A council held by the husband's
family then solemnly condemned her. The Twelve Tables have
probably handed down a scrap of the formula of this collective
sentence which permitted a husband to demand from his wife the
surrender of the keys that had been entrusted to her as mistress of
the house from which she was now to be ejected without appeal:
claves ademit, exegit* 2 In 307 B.C. the censors deprived a senator
of his dignities because he had dismissed his wife without first
having sought the judgment of his domestic tribunal. 63 A century
later, about 236 B.C., the senator Sp. Carvilius Ruga was still

98 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

In passing these laws Augustus was prompted by the same
impulse that had made him withdraw from the husband's admin-
istration any part of the dowry which was invested in land in
Italy. In both cases his concern was to safeguard a woman's
dowry the unfailing bait for a suitor so as to secure for her
the chance of a second marriage. It turned out, however, as he
ought to have foreseen, that his measures, comformable though
they were to his population policy and socially unexceptionable,
hastened the ruin of family feeling among the Romans. The fear
of losing a dowry was calculated to make a man cleave to the wife
whom he had married in the hope of acquiring it, but nothing
very noble was likely to spring from calculations so contemptible.
In the long run avarice prolonged the wealthy wife's enslavement
of her husband. As Horace puts it:

". . . dotata regit virum
coniunx" 75

While progressively lowering the dignity of marriage, this legis-
lation succeeded in preserving its cohesion only up to the point
where a husband, weary of his wife, felt sure of capturing, without
undue delay, another more handsomely endowed. In these circum-
stances, the vaunted laws of Augustus must bear part of the
responsibility for the fact, which need surprise no one, that
throughout the first two centuries of the empire Latin literature
shows us a great many households either temporarily bound to-
gether by financial interest or broken up sometimes in spite of,
sometimes for the sake of, money.

Thus the Roman matron, mistress of her own property in virtue
of her sine manu status, was certain, thanks to the Julian laws, of
recovering the bulk if not the whole of her dowry. Her husband
was not free to administer it in Italy without her consent, nor to
mortgage it anywhere even with her acquiescence. 76 Duly primed
by her steward, who assisted her with advice and surrounded her
with obsequious attention this "curled spark" of a procurator
whom we see under Domitian always "clinging to the side" of
Marianus' wife 7T the wealthy lady dispatched her business,
made her dispositions, and issued her orders. As Juvenal predicts:
"No present will you ever make if your wife forbids; nothing will
you ever sell if she objects; nothing will you buy without her con-
sent." 78 The satirist contends that there is nothing on earth more

MARRIAGE, WOMAN, AND THE FAMILY 99

intolerable than a rich woman: "intolerabilius nihil est quam
femina dives"; while Martial for his part explains that he could
not endure to marry a~ wealthy woman and be stifled under a
bridal veil by taking a husband to him instead of a wife:

"Uxorem quare locupletem ducere nolim
quaeritis? Uxori nubere nolo meae" 80

Prisoner not of his affections but of a dowry, the husband if
his sovereign lady did not give him his conge herself sooner or
later escaped from one gilded cage into another. In the city as at
the court the ephemeral households of Rome were perpetually
being disrupted, or rather were continually dissolving to recrystal-
Use and dissolve again till age and death finally overtook them.
The freedman whom Augustus' law charged with the duty of con-
veying the written order of divorce had never suffered so little
from unemployment. Juvenal does not fail to leave us a picture of
this busybody fussing on his errand: "Let three wrinkles show
themselves on Bibula's face," and her loving Sartorius will betake
himself in haste to other loves. "Then will his freedman give her
the order: Tack up your traps and be off! You've become a
nuisance ... be off and be quick about it!' " 81 In such a case
the outraged wife had no redress; there was nothing for her to do
but to obey the order which the poet slightly paraphrases. Gaius
has preserved the legal formula for us: "Tuas res tibi agito (take
your belongings away! )." 82 She took care to take with her noth-
ing that strictly belonged to her husband, whose right to his own
goods she recognised in the parting formula she used to him:
"Keep your belongings to yourself! (tuas res tibi habeto)"

We must not imagine that it was always the man who took the
initiative in these matters. Women in their turn discarded their
husbands and abandoned them without scruple after having ruled
them with a rod of iron. Juvenal points the finger of scorn at one
of these: "Thus does she lord it over her husband. But before
long she vacates her kingdom; she flits from one home to another
wearing out her bridal veil. . . . Thus does the tale of her hus-
bands grow; there will be eight of them in the course of five
autumns a fact worthy of commemoration on her tomb!" 88
Martial's Telesilla was another such. Thirty days, or perhaps less,
after Domitipn had revived the Julian laws, "she is now marrying
her tenth husband ... by a more straightforward prostitute I

ioo DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

am offended less." 84 In vain the Caesars now tried setting an
example of monogamy to their subjects. But instead of following
in the steps of Trajan and Plotina, Hadrian and Sabina, An-
toninus and Faustina, imperial couples faithful to each other for
life, the Romans preferred to ape the preceding emperors, all of
whom, even Augustus, had been several times divorced.

Divorces were so common that as we learn from the jurists
of the time a series of them not infrequently led to the fair lady
and her dowry returning, after many intermediate stages, to her
original bridal bed. 85 The very reasons which today would doubly
bind an affectionate woman to her husband's side his age or
illness, his departure for the front were cynically advanced by
the Roman matron as reasons for deserting him. 86 It is an even
graver symptom of the general demoralisation that these things
had ceased to shock a public opinion grown sophisticated and
inhuman. Thus in the Rome of the Antonines Seneca's words were
cruelly just: "No woman need blush to break off her marriage
since the most illustrious ladies have adopted the practice of
reckoning the year not by the names of the consuls but by those
of their husbands. They divorce in order to re-marry. They marry
in order to divorce: exeunt matrimonii causa, nubunt repudii" 8T

How far removed from the inspiring picture of the Roman
family in the heroic days of the republic! The unassailable rock
has cracked and crumbled away on every side. Then, the woman
was strictly subjected to the authority of her lord and master;
now, she is his equal, his rival, if not his imperatrix** Then, hus-
band and wife had all things in common; now, their property is
almost entirely separate. Then, she took pride in her own fertility;
now, she fears it. Then, she was faithful; now, she is capricious
and depraved. Divorces then were rare; now they follow so close
on each other's heels that, as Martial says, marriage has become
merely a form of legalised adultery. "She who marries so often
does not marry; she is an adultress by form of law: Quae nubit
Miens, non nubit: adutiera lege est." B9

EDUCATION AND RELIGION

i. SYMPTOMS OF DECOMPOSITION

PART from legislation, other causes
contributed to hasten this decad-
ence or rather to determine this re-
versal of family values. Some were
economic, and derived from the
baleful influence of wealth ill-gotten
and even worse distributed, about
which we have already spoken.
Some were social, and had their
origin in the poisonous virus which
slavery injects into a free popula-
tion. Finally and above all, there were moral causes resulting from
the spiritual disorders of a cosmopolis where crude indifference
and gross superstition reigned together, both alike hampering the
upward flight of new mystic theologies.

After the first quarter of the second century, rendered illustrious
by the victories of Trajan, men and women captives in thousands
from Dacia, Arabia, and the distant shores of Tigris and Eu-
phrates flooded the markets and the mansions of the Urbs. The
drawbacks inseparable from overabundance of slaves were forth-
with intensified. The society of Imperial Rome supplied yet an-
other proof of the natural law that in every time and clime where
it has been largely practised, slavery degrades and besmirches
marriage if it does not wholly stamp it out. Even when he was not
debauched, the wealthy Roman looked askance at a life in which
every day he would have to contend or reckon with the wishes of a
legitimate wife, and he often preferred the cosy concubinage which
Augustus had recognised as a licit though inferior union, to which
public opinion attached not the slightest stigma and in which even
the imperial sage, Marcus Aurelius,"was presently to take refuge

102 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

from the loneliness of widowhood. 1 He would, therefore, expressly
manumit a favorite slave woman, convinced that the obsequium
due from a freedman or woman to the patronus would keep her
faithful and obedient, and knowing, further, that if children should
bless their relationship he could wipe out all stain of bastardy by
the simple process of adopting them. Or he might even omit the
formality of the manumission, lest it weaken his authority. The
host of epitaphs in which a husband and his liberta wife reserve
access to their tomb not to their children but to their freedmen
raises the suspicion that unless the marriage had been without
issue these inferior wives had preferred for their offspring a
simple manumission arranged for in their will to a formal act of
regular adoption. Thus we find many of the best families of the
city infected with an actual hybridisation, similar to that which
has more recently contaminated other slave-owning peoples; and
this strongly accentuated the national and social decomposition
that had set in everywhere as a consequence of the multitude of
slave emancipations.

Where such things occurred, the better Romans at least saved
their face by preserving a minimum of external decency in their
conduct. But not a few thought even the light fetters of regular
concubinage too rigid and too weighty. Preoccupied solely with
their own ease and pleasure, as indifferent to the duties of their
position as to the dignity of the honours they enjoyed, they held it
preferable to rule as pashas over the slave harems which their
riches permitted them to maintain. When the ex-praetor Larcius
Macedo, one of the Younger Pliny's colleagues in the Senate, was
assassinated by a group of discontented slaves, the whole swarm
of his odalisques was seen rushing up to the body, howling with
grief: "concubinae cum ululatu et clamore concurrunt" 2

It was not long before the presence of slaves introduced a seri-
ously disturbing element into even legitimate households. Martial
launches many a dart at home-keeping adulterers. He mocks the
master who buys back the maidservant mistress he cannot bear
to do without; 8 he makes merry over the great lady who has lost
her heart to her hairdresser and having set him free pours an
equestrian fortune into his lap; 4 he attributes Manilla's many off-
spring not to her husband Cinna but to Cinna's cook, his bailiff,
his baker, his flutist, even to his wrestler, and to his buffoon. 5 No
doubt these epigrams are aimed at the most crying scandals of the

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 103

town. But the theme would have been less popular if scandals had
been rarer, and the literature of the time gives us the impression
that there must have been many Roman houses where the abusive
dialogue which Martial's couplet presupposes might have taken
place: "Your wife calls you an admirer of servant maids, and she
herself is an admirer of litter bearers. You are a pair, Alauda:

Ancillariolum tua te vocat uxor et ipse
Lecticariola est. Estis, Alauda, pares"*

It is obvious that the abuses of slavery had introduced laxity of
morals even into the houses where supplementary love affairs were
taboo. The proximity of concubinage in even the best houses, and
the atmosphere of licentiousness and irresponsibility created by so
many slave liaisons on every side, had done more than the prosti-
tution of the "she-wolves" who stood around the circus and
haunted the suburban roads at night, lurking behind the tombs, 7 to
degrade marriage, until husband and wife in their turn considered
it only a fleeting anodyne. To resist this contagion, the Romans
would have needed an ideal such as apart from a few powerful
individual personalities, a few philosophic schools, and a few sects
of genuine believers their intelligence, weakened by a culture too
elementary, too superficial, and too purely verbal, was no longer
capable of conceiving or their feeble faith capable of realising.

2. PRIMARY EDUCATION

In the austere days of the republic, Cato the Censor claimed
that he alone had the right to educate his son and boasted that he
had himself taught the boy to read, write, fence, and swim. 8 This
accords with Pliny's statement that in the past every parent was
his child's teacher; 9 and although' the father alone is expressly
mentioned, we know from other sources of the important part
played by certain Roman matrons in the education of their chil-
dren. The outstanding example was, of course, Cornelia, the
mother of the Gracchi, but in this connection we also hear of
Aurelia, the mother of Caesar, and Ada, the mother of Augustus. 10
Under the empire, however, we meet a far different set of circum-
stances.

In the first place, people of wealth and position were very little
inclined to bother personally with their children's education.
Women were left to a complete and fatal idleness. The weaker

104 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

ones found their lack of occupation an incitement to or an excuse
for licentious excesses. The better ones tried to combat their
boredom by artificial enthusiasms, as we have seen, or passed the
time in the amusements and gossip of the "clubs." u Some killed
time at home, like old Ummidia Quadratilla who, till she died at
eighty, had spent every day when there were no public spectacles
to go to shifting about the men on a chess-board or watching the
dumb show of the mimes with whom she had filled her house. 12

A nurse, often Greek, was assigned to look after the child dur-
ing its early years. 13 As Quintilian tells us, it was the ideal of
the philosopher Chrysippus that she should be a philosopher. 14
Quintilian himself, more practical in his approach, stresseid that
she should speak correctly, since the child's first words will be
in imitation of her speech. 15 The alphabet and simple reading
were usually learned at home. In some cases this instruction
seems to have been confided to the paedagogus, a slave who served
as tutor, guardian, and servant of the child put in his care.
Quintilian demanded that the paedagogus be well educated, or
failing that, that he recognize his own limitations. 16 Equipped
with the ability to read, the child was ready for school, although
we know of families in which the education was continued in the
home until the preparation for rhetorical studies had been com-
pleted. 17

The spoiled son of a wealthy family had a splendid time
putting his so-called "master" in his place, the place suited to a
servant, whether he called himself a tutor or not. Already in the
Bacchides Plautus portrays a precocious adolescent called Pisto-
clerus who, in order to drag his tutor Lydus with him to his light
of love, needs only to remind him sharply of his servile state:
"Look here," he says, "am I your slave or are you mine?" 18 To
such a question there was only one answer and as Gaston Bois-
sier points out we need not imagine that Lydus was the only
tutor in Rome to whom it was frequently addressed. 19

Instruction in the elementary school, the Indus litter arius, was
limited to three subjects: reading, writing, and arithmetic. The
teacher (magister) had to depend entirely on the small fees paid
him by the parents of his pupils and was often constrained to
supplement his income as schoolmaster by other activities. 20
Though the State, in the person of the emperor, became increas-
ingly interested in the support of distinguished teachers and schol-

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 105

ars in the higher realms of learning, there is no evidence of any
public contribution to elementary education during the classical
period.

The Roman schoolmaster does not seem to have spoiled many
children by sparing the rod. 21 Naturally discipline had to be pre-
served when boys and girls were crowded together in one incon-
venient spot without distinction of age or sex. But Quintilian
noted the hypocrisy and cowardice which an abuse of corporal
punishment was apt to call forth in the pupil and spoke also of the
brutal teacher.

Pain and fear [he sadly testifies] drive children into doing things which
they cannot confess, and which soon cover them with shame. It is even
worse where no one has taken the trouble to investigate the morals of
the teachers and masters. I dare not speak of the abominable infamies
to which men can be degraded by their right to inflict corporal pun-
ishment, nor of the assaults, for very fear of which the unfortunate
children may sometimes provoke further assaults; I will have been
sufficiently understood: nimium est quod intellegitur. . . .**

The primary school of Rome might thus debauch the children
it was supposed to instruct; and on the other hand it rarely awoke
in them any feeling for the beauty of knowledge. School opened
at dawn and continued without a break till noon. It was held
under the awning outside some shop, and invaded by all the
noises of the street from which only a screen of tent cloth sep-
arated it. Its scanty furniture consisted of a chair for the master
and benches or stools for the pupils, a blackboard, some tablets,
and some calculating boards (abaci). Classes were continued
every day of the year with exasperating monotony, broken only
by the eighth-day pause (nundinae), the Quinquatrus, and the
summer holidays. The master's sole ambition was to teach his
pupils to read, write, and count; as he had several years at his
disposal in which to accomplish this, he made no attempt to im-
prove his wretched teaching methods or to brighten his dismal
routine. Thus, he taught his hearers the names and the order of
the letters before showing them their form a method which
Quintilian strongly condemns and when the pupils had painfully
learned to recognise the written characters by their appearance,
they had to make a fresh effort to combine them into words and
syllables. 28 They progressed as slowly as .they liked, and when
they passed on to writing they came up against a similar irra-

io6 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

tional and backward procedure. Without any preliminary train-
ing in holding or using a reed pen, they were suddenly faced with
a pattern to copy. Their fingers had to be held by the master or
guided by someone else to trace the outline of the letters placed
before them, so that innumerable lessons were necessary before
they acquired the necessary skill to make the simple copy for
themselves. 24 The study of arithmetic required no more mental
effort on their part and brought them no more pleasure than the
process of learning to write. They spent hours counting the units,
one, two, on the fingers of their right hand, and three, jour on the
fingers of their left, after which they set about calculating- the
tens, hundreds, and thousands by pushing little counters or cal-
culi along the corresponding lines of their abacus.

It is known that the emperors of the second century, Hadrian
in particular, favoured the extension of primary schools in the
most distant provinces of the empire, and that by offering tax
immunity they encouraged willing schoolmasters to set up schools
in out-of-the-way villages, in a mining district like Vipasca in
Lusitania, for example. 25 Undoubtedly the complaints of Quin-
tilian were listened to in some quarters, and the example of cer-
tain illustrious teachers of good family proved contagious. Hero-
des Atticus had secured such a tutor for his son, a man who
tried to make learning easier for his pupil by devising a pro-
cession of slaves, each of whom carried on his back an immense
placard bearing in giant size one of the twenty-four letters of the
Latin alphabet. 26 But for one master who made an effort to get
out of the rut, how many remained impenitently stuck in it! How
many of the ludi litterarii which multiplied in the second century
completely failed in the educative mission which they were sup-
posed to discharge toward the children of the citizens. On the
whole we are compelled to admit that at the most glorious period
of the empire the schools entirely failed to fulfil the duties which
we expect of our schools today. They undermined instead of
strengthened the children's morals; they mishandled the children's
bodies instead of developing them; and. if they succeeded in
furnishing their minds with a certain amount of information,
they were not calculated to perform any loftier or nobler task.
The pupils left school with the heavy luggage of a few practical
and commonplace notions laboriously acquired and of so little
value that in the fourth century Vegetius could not take for

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 107

granted that new recruits for the army would be literate enough
to keep the books of their corps. 27 Instead of happy memories,
serious and fruitful ideas, any sort of intellectual curiosity vital to
later life, school children carried away the gloomy recollection of
years wasted in senseless, stumbling repetitions punctuated by
savage punishments. Popular education then in Rome was a fail-
ure; if there was any real Roman education we must not look
for it among the elementary teachers, but among the grammarians
and orators who to a certain extent provided the aristocracy and
the middle classes of Imperial Rome with some equivalent of
our secondary and higher education.

3. THE ROUTINE TEACHING OF THE GRAMMAklAN

To listen to the initiated, swollen with pride in their knowledge
and eloquence, we might imagine that the formalist teaching of
the Roman grammarian attained perfection and led straight to
the sovereign good. One of these fine speakers, Apuleius of
Madaura, writing at the end of the second century, says:

At a banquet the first cup is for thirst, the second for joy, the third for
sensual delight, and the fourth for folly. At the feasts of the Muses on
the other hand, the more we are given to drink, the more our soul
gains in wisdom and in reason. The first cup is poured for us by the
litierator who begins to polish the roughness of our mind. Then comes
the grammatkus who adorns* us with varied knowledge. Finally it is
the rhetor's turn who puts in our hands the weapon of eloquence. 28

No one could be better pleased with himself but, unhappily, there
was many a slip between the cup and the lip and the reality in no
wise justifies the lyric enthusiasm of Apuleius.

First and foremost, grammarians and rhetoricians addressed
themselves to a very limited public and even in the second cen-
tury their teaching retained the selective character which a dis-
trustful oligarchy had imposed on it from the beginning. Early
in the second century B.C. the Conscript Fathers, whose arms
and diplomacy were now being turned against the Greeks, began
to feel the necessity of not allowing their sons to be less culti-
vated than the subjects and vassals whom they were henceforth
to govern. They therefore encouraged the foundation in Rome of
schools of the Hellenistic type to rival those which flourished in
the East, at Athens, at Pergamum, and at Rhodes, and they

io8 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

wished these schools to teach after the Greek manner everything
known to the most learried Greeks. At the same time they were
not unmindful of the political power which this superior educa-
tion would confer; they had no wish to cede an inch of their
political monopoly; they therefore contrived that these new
educational advantages should be reserved for their own social
caste. The first professors of grammar and rhetoric whom they
permitted to set up in Rome were refugees from Asia and Egypt,
victims of Aristonicus and of Ptolemy Physkon, to whom Rome
offered sanctuary. All of them taught in Greek. When later these
original teachers were superseded by Italians, the new gram-
marians and rhetoricians conformed to the Greek usage and bor-
rowed the Greek language. The grammar classes were conducted
in Greek and Latin, but the rhetoric classes almost exclusively in
Greek, and in this language all further education was continued. 29
There were, of course, a few attempts to break through this
convention which made for isolation. At the time of the demo-
cratic revolution with which the name of Marius is linked, one of
his clients, the orator Plotius Gallus, had the hardihood to address
his pupils in Latin; 30 and a few years later the Rhetorica ad
Herennium was published. 31 Interlarded with examples taken
from recent history and crammed with references to the subjects
debated in the cotpitia, it was evidently inspired by the s^me
tendency toward the liberal, the concrete, and the popular. But
the oligarchy was on the watch. It had no intention of letting
itself be robbed of its hereditary right to govern; since eloquence
dominated the assemblies which every year renewed the power
of the oligarchs, these men were determined that none but their
own sons should possess the secret of rhetoric and they set about
persecuting these unwelcome innovators. The Ad Herennium had
no imitators and we are still ignorant of its author's name. As
for the rhetor es Latini, the censors of 92 B.C. .compelled them to
stop giving lessons, affirming that their innovations were neither
pleasing nor proper. 82 To see schools of Latin eloquence re-
opened, Rome had to wait till the dictatorship of Caesar, which
was well served by the treatises of Cicero, and till the imperial
Flavian regime, which generously subsidised Quintilian, most
famous of professors. 33 But by that time the tradition had taken
root and could not be eradicated; though 'rhetoric was now taught
in Latin as well as Greek, it remained the privilege of the few.

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 109

The better to sift out the students, the grammar class, which was
the first step to rhetoric, remained bilingual till the end of the
empire.

The most important consequence of this was that eloquence,
the end and aim both of grammar and rhetoric, was emptied of all
real content. Politics deserted the Forum at the approach of the
praetorians. Legal controversies, more and more confined to
groups of specialists, ceased to furnish matter for eloquence once
the emperors made jurisprudence a monopoly of their councils
a process which Augustus began and Hadrian completed. Finally
philosophy and science, both mathematical and natural, which
had been linked with rhetoric in Greek antiquity, benefited *mly
in their countries of origin, especially at the Museum of Alex-
andria and in Athens, from the generosity of Trajan and 'Hadrian.
Vespasian had banished the philosophers from Rome and excluded
them everywhere from the privileges reserved for grammarians
and rhetoricians; 34 and the study of philosophy in Rome had
never recovered from the ancient interdict pronounced against it
by the Senate in 161 B.C. and repeated i~ 153 B.C., when in de-
fiance of the diplomatic immunity which they enjoyed, it ex-
pelled from the city the academician Carneades, the Stoic Diog-
enes, and the peripatetic Critolaus. 35 Philosophy had never ceased
to excite suspicion and sarcasm at Rome^The citizen who wanted
to might indulge in it in friendly conversations, in casual and
private conferences, or in solitary meditations in his ivory tower,
but if he wished to take it up more seriously he had either to be
rich enough to maintain a master at his own cost in his own
house, or to expatriate himself in some distant town where
philosophers were allowed to air their speculations. Physics and
metaphysics, politics and history were equally taboo in regular
and public courses of instruction; and eloquence, denied action,
divorced from pure thought and pure science, gyrated in a weary
circle of literary exercises and verbal virtuosity. Thus it hap-
pened that despite their popularity with well-to-do youth, despite
the protection granted them by the emperors, despite the place of
honour which they occupied in the city, where Caesar had allotted
them the tabernae of his Forum and Trajan a hemicycle of his, 86
the preparatory studies of grammar and rhetoric were sterilised
by the incurable formalism to which eloquence herself had been
reduced.

no DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Young people began to attend the grammarian's at an age
which naturally varied with their aptitude and family circum-
stances, but which at times, as we can see from the obituary in-
scriptions of the first centuries of our era, suggests the alarming
precocity of infant prodigies. 37 They went to him to be initiated
into literature, or rather into the two literatures whose professor
he was. With the grammaticus Greek literature was not less but
more important than Latin. In a remarkable recent book, M.
Marrou states his belief that he has detected a weakening of the
Hellenic influence in Roman culture from the days of Quintilian
onward; 38 but I am convinced that he has been the victim of a
preconception arising naturally from overconcentration on his
subject, and I suspect that he has unduly extended to Italy find-
ings which are true only for the Africa of Saint Augustine, who
was born at Tagaste, educated at Madaura and Carthage, and
who died as bishop of Hippo in 430 A.D.

A whole series of phenomena from the Rome of the second
century can easily be cited which refute M. Marrou's thesis: the
enthusiasm for Greek affected by the "beauties" whom Juvenal
and Martial turn to ridicule; 39 the successes which during the
whole course of the second century in Gaul attended the itinerant
Greek orators, of whom Lucian represents the most original
type; 40 the publication in Greek of the treatises of the "philoso-
phers" from Musonius Rufus to Favorinus of Aries; the Greek
epigrams of the emperor Hadrian and the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius; finally and above all the persistence of Greek in the
liturgy and in the apologetic writings of the Roman Christians.
The Christian Church did not adopt Latin until the great shock
which, toward the middle of the third century, rent the empire
asunder and shook the very foundations of ancient civilisation. 41
It would indeed be strange if Greek had been in retreat in Rome
at the moment when Latin literature in Italy was crumbling to
give place to it in every sphere. The inscriptions bear witness to
its vital and predominant place in the teaching curriculum f rpm
the epitaph of young Q. Sulpicius Maximus, which tells us that
he died at the age of eleven after winning the prize for Greek
poetry over the heads of fifty-two competitors at the Capitoline
games of 94 A.D., 42 to that of Delmatius' son who succumbed at
the age of seven, and had followed the courses in Greek but only
had time to learn the Latin alphabet. 43 It thus appears that the

EDUCATION AND RELIGION zix

Roman grammarians never ceased to subordinate the study of
Latin literature to that of Greek literature much in the same
way as under the ancien regime in France the study of French
was always subsidiary to Latin.

What their lessons thus lost in life and reality they may well
have gained in variety. While all the learning of the magister in
the ludus litterarius was bound up in one book, a copy of the
Twelve Tables, the letters of which his luckless little wretches
had to spell out before trying to copy them, the grammaticus had
a double library at his disposal. But the use he made of the two
was unbalanced, showing a marked predominance of foreign
wrkers and an overwhelming preference for the older ones. While
Homer, the tragic and comic playwrights above all Menander
the lyric poets, and Aesop provided him with an abundant choice
of Greek texts, he soon limited his choice of Latin authors to the
poets of earlier generations: Livius Andronicus, Ennius, and
Terence; and he expounded in Greek the meaning of these authors
whose works were more or less adapted from the Greek. It was
not until the last quarter of the first century B.C. that a freedman
of Atticus, Q. Caecilius Epirota, decided to make two revolution-
ary innovations in the grammar class he was conducting: he dared
to talk Latin and to admit to the honour of his lessons Latin
authors either still living or but recently dead Virgil and Cic-
ero. 44 His bold example was timidly followed, and during the first
centuries of the empire we see the works of famous authors a
generation or two after their death gradually added to the list
of those included in the curriculum. The treatises of Seneca in
prose, and in verse the Epistles of Horace, the Fasti of Ovid, the
Pharsalia of Lucan, and the Thebais of Statius were successively
accorded this honour. These intermittent attempts at being up to
date were not in themselves sufficient, however, to modify the
fundamental character of an education all the more justly de-
scribed as "classic" in that it clung more and more to the tradi-
tion of works whose success was already consecrated. It is even
possible that the tendency toward classicism was strengthened
by the renaissance of Attic art under Hadrian which has given us
so many statues and bas-reliefs of frigid elegance and which
was accompanied by a return of literary taste toward the
archaism preached by an emperor more deeply in love with Cato
the Elder and with Ennius than with Virgil or Cicero. 45 The school

ii2 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of grammar at Rome always fixed its eyes on the past more or
less, according to the moment and the Latin there taught was
never at any time a living language in the full sense of the term,
but, like the Greek from which it was inseparable, a language
which "the classics" had employed and which had become fixed
in the moulds they had poured it into once and for all. So much
so, indeed, that the purely bookish teaching of the grammatici
already showed symptoms of arterio-sclerosis, a disease which
their futilely complicated methods of instruction further aggra-
vated.

These methods consisted first in exercises of reading aloud, and
in reciting passages learned by heart. With an eye on the ultimate
though far-off evolution of the future orator, the grammar class
began by a course of elocution which no doubt quickened the taste
and widened the understanding of the pupils, but at the same time
developed in them a tendency toward theatrical posing and
bravura extremely damaging to genuine feeling. Next the profes-
sor introduced them to exegesis proper. As a preliminary they
had to reconcile their various manuscript texts, into which the
caprices of copyists had introduced divergencies from which our
printed editions are fortunately free. Then the emendatio, or what
we should nowadays call textual criticism, challenged the atten-
tion of the scholars. This might have proved a valuable mental
discipline if it had not been perpetually blended with discussions
of the qualities and faults of the passages examined, and falsified
by the resulting aesthetic prejudices. Finally, the lessons usually
close^ with the commentary proper, the so-called enarratio, which
aimed at a comprehensive judgment but was so long-drawn-out
that its faults were later to spoil even the work of a great com-
mentator like Servius.

The grammaticus hastily completed the analysis of the work he
had chosen, then began the explanatio, phrase by phrase or verse
by verse, dwelling with meticulous pedantry on the meaning of
each word and defining the figures of speech to which they lent
themselves and the diversity of the "tropes" into which they
entered: metaphor, metonymy, catachresis, litotes, syllepsis. The
matter of the passage was considered wholly secondary to the
function of the words which conveyed it, and the perception of
reality to the form of the statements which vaguely allowed the
meaning to peep out between the lines. Only by the digressions

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 113

which occurred in his teaching did the grammaticus introduce the
discipline of what the Romans called the liberal arts, the sum of
which, far from embracing every branch of knowledge which has
since become science, never included any but the twigs of knowl-
edge; the Greeks called them the i-ptuxXtog icatSeia, that is to say,
not encyclopaedic education, but the current, normal education
such as antiquity bequeathed almost unaltered to the Middle
Ages. The Roman grammarian had dipped into everything with-
out studying any subject thoroughly, and his pupils in their turn
did nothing more than flutter over the surface of the knowledge
enshrined in Greek literature; mythology where this was neces-
sary in order to understand poetic legend; music where the metres
depended on the odes or the choruses; geography enough to fol-
low Ulysses in the tribulations of his return home; history with-
out which many passages of the Aeneid wrfuld have been unin-
telligible; astronomy when a star rose or set to the cadence of a
verse; mathematics in so far as they bore on music and astron-
omy. Blinded by an excess of practical common sense, and with
an eye always fixed on immediate profit, the Romans saw no
long-term usefulness in disinterested research; they did not
understand its value; they did not feel its attraction; they made a
collection of the results research had achieved, and lifted science
ready-made into their books, without feeling any need to increase
it or even to verify it.

For instance, the Mauretanian state of King Juba II who had
been brought up in the household of Octavia, was infested by
troops of elephants. He preferred to trust the rubbish he had read
about them and imaginatively vulgarise it further in his own writ-
ings, rather than go out and study these monstrous beasts with
his own eyes. 46 And fifty years earlier, when Caesar appointed
Sallust governor of the new province of Africa, the historian took
so little trouble to inform himself about the towns not subject
to his authority that in his De Bello lurgurthino, wishing to local-
ise Cirta (the future Constantine), the ancient capital of Numi-
dia, which had just been raised to the rank of an autonomous
colony, he calmly placed it "not far from the sea." 47 If such was
the apathy of the most eminent minds in Rome, we can under-
stand that the average person did not rebel against a system of
education which reduced science to the handmaid of literature,
much as the Middle Ages reduced philosophy to the humble

ii4 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

auxiliary of theology. Probably nothing contributed more to de-
vitalise Roman education than this senseless subordination of
science, unless it was the vanity of the goal the Romans set before
literature itself, asking only that it should train orators for them
at a time when the art of oratory had ceased to serve any useful
purpose.

4. IMPRACTICAL RHETORIC

Oratory had lost all practical value for, as Tacitus says, great
eloquence (magna eloquentia), true eloquence which at need can
dispense with oratory, "is like unto flame; like flame she demands
fuel to sustain her; like flame she is stimulated by movement and
gives light only when she burns"; 48 and as flame dies when de-
prived of air, there can be no healthy eloquence when liberty has
perished. Now all the history which Tacitus had been able to
study confirmed this opinion; Roman eloquence could no more
survive the dissolution of the assemblies than Greek eloquence
had been able to survive the coming of despotism to the states
ruled by the Diadochi, Alexander's master, Aristotle, distin-
guished three types of eloquence: in the first the speaker sought
to influence a decision yet to be taken; in the second he justified
a resolution already acted on; and in the third he narrated past
history or awarded praise which had nothing to do with the march
of events or the conduct of men. 49 The philosopher had then
recognised the superiority of the first over the second and of the
second over the third. In the year 150 B.C. the rhetorician Herma-
goras reversed this order of values and gave pride of place to the
style which he called "epideictic," that is to say, to purely formal
eloquence; this was meritorious in his eyes in proportion as it
moved on a wholly unreal plane of its own, and its ostentatious
self-sufficiency implied a theory of ''art for art's sake" in a domain
where this doctrine is indefensible. 50 Consciously or uncon-
sciously, Hermagoras was affected by the consequences of the
revolution which had taken place in the Hellenistic kingdoms;
and the Romans willingly adopted his paradox when they them-
selves were saddled with a political regime similar to that of the
Hellenistic monarchs, a regime in which the sovereignty of the
imperator had swallowed up the independence of the republic.
Less than a generation after Cato the Censor had subordinated
eloquence to action, identifying the orator with "a good man

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 115

skilled in speaking" (vir bonus, dicendi peritus),* 1 they had wel-
comed the treatises of Greek rhetoric in which eloquence and
action were divorced; and when Caesar had bowed them to his
monarchy they accepted naturally a state of affairs which con-
demned the eloquence they taught in their schools to exert itself
in the void, fortified with an apparatus of stereotyped prescrip-
tions and the tinkling of empty words, sonorous but echoless.

The Roman professors of rhetoric uniformly forced every
speech into a strait jacket of six parts, from the exordium to the
peroration. Then they analysed the variety of combinations to
which these could eventually be adapted. Next they devised a
course of exercises by which perfection might be attained in each
part; for example, the narration, the argument, the portrayal of
character, the maxim, the thesis, the discussion. The most minute
details were foreseen and provided for, and their development
followed a series of invariable progressions leading to an almost
automatic cadence. It seemed as if they took seriously the formula
for turning out an orator complete from top to toe (fiunt ora-
tor es) and were convinced that by subjecting their pupils to these
verbal acrobatics they could convert each and every one of them
into a speaker deserving the fair name of orator.

Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of their cramped and
crabbed method than the chria, this "declension" not of the noun
but of the thought, or rather of the phrase which expresses the
thought and adds the weight of some high authority, as if the
maxim of a wise man could be enriched and given new shades of
meaning by being indefatigably "declined" in various numbers
and cases. For instance: "Marcus Porcius Cato has said that the
roots of science are bitter . . ." "this maxim of M.P.C., which
says that . . .""it appeared to M.P.C. that . . .""the
Marcus Porcius Catos have maintained that . . ." and so on
ad infinitum. In the same way, when Moli&re in the Bourgeois
Gentilhomnie was initiating M. Jourdain into the art of elegant
speech, the poor man was invited to embroider his meaning with
interminable variations, or chriae, which his instructor suggested:
"Lovely Marquise, your fieautiful eyes cause me to die of love;
of love, lovely Marquise, your beautiful eyes cause me to die.
. . ." But whereas Moli&re was making merry over M. Jourdain
and his teacher of literature, not a single rhetorician in Rome of
the first and second centuries dreamed of laughing at the chriae

n6 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

whose boring variatipns have been solemnly recorded for us by
Diomedes. 52 Quintilian also recognises the practice in his Institu-
tio Oratoria

When at last the professor of rhetoric considered his pupils
sufficiently versed in these parrot-like repetitions and variations,
he expected them to prove their accomplishments by delivering
public harangues. In the time of Cicero these attempts were still
known as causae a word from which the French chose is derived
but they lost the title under the empire. The orations now be-
came either suasoriae, in which more or less thorny questions of
conscience were discussed, or controversiae, which consisted in
imaginary indictment or defense; in either case they were never
anything but declamationes, a term which had not in those days
the derogatory meaning our "declamation" has since acquired. If
only the masters of rhetoric could have shaken themselves free
of their follies, this sort of test might have re-established contact
between their schools and the concrete realities of life. But on
the contrary they seemed determined to maintain as wide a gulf
between the two as possible. The more far-fetched and improbable
a subject was, the more eager they were to adopt it for discussion.
The fact was that in origin the grammaticus and the rhetor were
one. 54 Later, the schools of grammar and the schools of rhetoric
were separated, but the traces of their original identity were
never obliterated. The grammarian paved the way for the rhetori-
cian's lessons, and the rhetorician for his part continued to mark
time within the same narrow circle of ideas and images that had
bounded the grammarian's vision. The pupil might change his
class: the spirit of the teaching, he received remained the same,
and he was still the slave of an artificial literature and the pris-
oner of a narrow classicism.

Instead of directing the young men's thoughts to current prob-
lems, the subjects which Seneca the Elder set for the suasoriae
of his pupils were always drawn from the past, and often from a
foreign and distant past. 65 The most up to date which he has left
us are borrowed from imaginary episodes of the last weeks of
Cicero's life: in one, Cicero hesitates as to whether he will or will
not ask mercy of Anthony; in another he consents, in order to
obtain it, to burn his works. 56 In all other cases, episodes of Ro-
man history are neglected in favour of Greek; Alexander the
Great debates whether he will venture to sail the Indian Ocean, or

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 117

whether he will enter Babylon in defiance of the oracles; 57 the
Athenians discuss whether they will surrender to the ultimatum
of Xerxes, or the three hundred Spartans of Leonidas whether
they will fight to the last man to hold up the Persians at Ther-
mopylae. 58 Sometimes, however, even these singular and ancient
subjects seem to the rhetorician too new and commonplace. He
retraces history into the mists of prehistoric legend and bids his
pupils write an essay in which Agamemnon ponders whether in
order to secure a favourable wind for his fleet he will obey the
prophetic injunctions of Calchas and sacrifice his daughter
Iphigenia. 59

It is obvious how artificial these sitasoriae must hav,e been. The
controversiae, which might well have been made the means of
preparing the future advocate for his profession, were no less far
removed from real life. They deliberately turned away from cur-
rent incidents of the day and went wandering in a dream world
of weird hypotheses and monstrous events. The unnatural out-
lines which Suetonius has rescued from ancient manuals betray
this morbid leaning toward the exceptional and the bizarre. In
one of these preposterous -cases, for instance, some men were
strolling along one summer day to enjoy the sea air on the beach
at Ostia. They met some fisher folk and agreed with one of them
to buy the whole of his catch for a certain small sum. The bargain
concluded, they claimed the ownership of an ingot of gold which
an amazing chance brought up in the fisherman's net. 60 Another
case deals with a slave merchant who, when unloading at Brindisi,
wished to evade customs duty on the most valuable slave he had.
He hit on the expedient of dressing up the handsome boy in the
toga praetexta, the scarlet-bordered cloak of a young Roman
citizen. Arrived at Rome the boy refused to lay his disguise aside
and stoutly averred that it had been given him in token of his
irrevocable manumission. 61

Even these two fantastic lawsuits contain a grain of possible
truth, which is systematically banished from the controversiae
with which Seneca the Elder has dealt at such length. 62 Instead of
basing these test pleadings on the substance of contemporary
cases, the rhetorician labours ingeniously to multiply anachro-
nisms and improbabilities. He takes the utmost care to devise his
"controversies" so that they will not fit into the framework of
Roman civil law. In concocting them, he invents imaginary, dis-

n8 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

torted, overrefined and arbitrary facts which then in defiance of
any logic he co-ordinates with some antiquated and foreign code
of law, or even with some legislation manufactured solely in his
own mental laboratory. Among all the subjects recorded by Sen-
eca the Elder, I have discovered only one which was based with
negligible alteration on an episode authenticated in the Latin
annals: the prosecution of L. Quinctius Flamininus, who, when
commanding in Gaul, had been guilty of giving orders during a
banquet that the head of a prisoner should then and there be cut
off to gratify the wishes of his mistress. 88 All the other sketches
are barefaced outrages against truth. It is known, for instance,
that during the proscriptions of 43 B.C. Cicero perished at the
hand of a certain Popilius Laenas whose interests he had defended
as advocate in some case, probably a civil suit, but certainly one
of slight importance since none of our authorities has troubled
to give details of it. The rhetorician seizes on this episode, but as
the ingratitude revealed in it is not sufficiently black for his
taste, he darkens it to his liking and unblushingly proposes to his
pupils the following theme: "Popilius, accused of parricide, was
defended by Cicero and acquitted. Later, Cicero, proscribed by
Anthony, was slain by Popilius. Sustain an accusation against
Popilius on the ground of evil morals." 64 In this specific case an
actio de moribus would not have lain, so it was invented to suit
the needs of the rhetorical exercise. 65 No one has ever proved that
Popilius Laenas committed any crime other than the legal execu-
tion of Cicero. The rhetorician cared not a whit that he was
doing violence to history and confusing the legal issue so long as
his wilful misrepresentations gave substance to the harangue
which he asked of his pupils.

In this instance he condescends at least to choose a subject
with a Roman background. For the most part he prefers one
tinted with exotic colour and likes to transport his hearers to other
countries. He goes off to the Greece of long ago to cull anecdotes
which he spices to his taste. In one of them he starts from the
hypothesis that in Elis the hands of sacrilegious persons were
amputated according to law and on this fable bases the following
controversia. The people of Elis had begged the Athenians to lend
them Phidias to make a statue for them which they wished to
dedicate to Olympian Jove. Athens lent the sculptor on condition
that they should return the artist in due course or pay a fine of

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 119

one hundred talents. When Phidias had finished his work they
claimed that he had diverted to his own profit some of the gold
entrusted to him for the divine statue, judged him sacrilegious,
and cut off his hands before sending him back to Athens. The
youth representing the Athenian advocate must claim the hun-
dred talents, the Elidian advocate must refuse to pay them. 66 In a
second example the rhetorician's harebrained fictions blend the
life histories of Iphicrates and Cimon, the son of Miltiades; 67
and the better to arouse terror and pity they defy all chronology
in order to lodge an incredible indictment against Parrhasius,
transforming him most unjustly into an infamous butcher. 88 The
shocking accusation is that the painter, who was painting a pic-
ture of Prometheus for the temple of Athena, in order to render
the sufferings of Prometheus with greater fidelity, put to the tor-
ture a slave prisoner of war from Olynthus who was acting as
his model.

When the master of rhetoric refrained from falsifying history,
he had recourse to little detective stories with too many characters
and extravagant vicissitudes. His school of rhetoric knew nothing
but tyrannies and conspiracies, kidnappings, reconnoitrings, ob-
scenities, and horrors. One could hear plead there a husband who
accused his wife of adultery because a rich merchant had made
her his heir as a tribute to her virtue; 60 a father who wished to
disinherit his son for refusing to be seduced by the prospect of an
advantageous marriage and insisting on keeping as his wife the
brigand's daughter who had saved his life and helped him to re-
gain his liberty; 70 an impious but gallant soldier who, to arm
himself for victory, had pillaged a tomb near the battlefield and
robbed it of the arms that formed its trophy; 71 a virgin whom
her kidnappers had forcibly compelled to practise prostitution,
but who, loathing her hideous trade, slew a ruffian who ap-
proached her, succeeded in escaping from the house of ill fame
and after regaining her liberty sought an honourable post as
priestess in a sanctuary. 72

The masters of rhetoric were proud of these imaginings. Ob-
sessed by a desire for effect, they flattered themselves that their
success varied with the improbable and complicated nature of the
situations they invented and the remoteness of the characters
from ordinary life. They estimated the value of an oration by
the number and the gravity of the difficulties surmounted, and

120 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

prized above all the eloquence which succeeded in expounding the
inconceivable (materiae inopinabiles) and evolving as it were
something out of nothing. Favorinus of Aries, for instance,
aroused the enthusiasm of his audience one day by a eulogy of
Thersites, brawler and demagogue, notorious as the ugliest man
in the Greek camp before Troy, and on another occasion by an
oration of thanksgiving to Quartan Fever. 78 In short, they system-
atically confused artifice with art, and originality with the nega-
tion of nature; the more we reflect on their methods, the more it
seems clear that they were incapable of turning out anything but
parrots or third-rate play actors. It cannot be denied that people
have been found, and even recently among ourselves, to take up
the cudgels "to a certain extent" in their defense, speciously argu-
ing that their pedagogy had different aims from ours and that
since they sought solely to stimulate their pupils' power of inven-
tion, they had every right to imagine that the more absurd a
subject was the more credit a pupil deserved for handling it. 74
The absurdity lay in this conception itself, and such was the
judgment of the last great writers of antiquity.

Seneca disapproved of teaching methods which do not prepare
men for life, but only pupils for school: "non vitae sed scholae
discimus" 75 On the first page of his romance Petronius pokes fun
at the sonority of pompous phrases which filled the classrooms of
his day. 76 Tacitus sadly remarks that "the tyrannicides, the
plague cures, the incests of mothers which are so grandiloquently
discussed in the schools bear no relation to the 'forum' and that
all this bombast hurls defiance at the truth." 77 Juvenal scoffs at
these would-be orators, these unmitigated asses, this Arcadian
youth "who feels no flutter in his left breast when he dins his
'dire Hannibal' into my unfortunate head on every sixth day of
the week," and these unhappy teachers of rhetoric who perish of
"the same cabbage served up again and again." 78 We have no
need to be more Roman than the Romans and to try to whitewash
a system whose frenzied pedantry the best of them have reviled.

Reading just a few samples of these conventional extravagan-
zas, we can dismiss them with a shrug of the shoulders; but if
we are condemned to read a whole series of them, one after the
other, in the treatise of the elder Seneca, we fall a prey to uncon-
querable boredom, not to say nausea. Reflecting that it was on
these monotonous performances, these far-fetched and wilful ex-

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 121

aggerations, these false and unwholesome data, that the whole
edifice of higher education in Rome was reared, it is easy to
understand that toward the middle of the second century Latin
letters began to perish from such an abuse of literature. The decay
of a civilisation is heralded by these laborious eccentricities, by
the mental malnutrition to which the pick of Rome's youth was
doomed, having no other intellectual sustenance than this thin
soup. For fear of being accused of ignorance, the ambitious youth
who wished to dazzle and astonish his audience substituted mem-
ory for thought, affectation for sincerity, grimaces and contor-
tions for natural expression, and for a natural voice forced out-
bursts and calculated roars practised in advance.

A morbid passion for the unusual and the extraordinary made
common sense seem a defect, experience of real life seem weak-
ness, and the sight of real life seem ugly. But Life herself "in-
evitably took revenge, and the Romans themselves began to weary
of the fatuities of their schools. The more impetuous among them
failed to distinguish real learning from the parody of it which
disgusted them, and like Lucian resolved to doubt and make a
mock of everything, or like the common people turned their backs
on every form of culture and limited their thoughts to the satis-
faction of their needs and their desires. 79 The more inquiring
and the nobler spirits, deceived but not discouraged, turned aside
to foreign religions to seek an answer to the questions with which
the mysteries of life confronted them, to find a satisfaction for
the aspirations of their souls which neither bogus science nor
the threadbare literature of grammarians and rhetoricians had
sufficed to fill.

5. THE DECAY OF TRADITIONAL RELIGION

One great spiritual fact dominates the history of the empire:
the advent of personal religion which followed on the conquest of
Rome by the mysticism of the East. The Roman pantheon still
persisted, apparently immutable; and the ceremonies which had
for centuries been performed on the dates prescribed by the
pontiffs from their sacred calendars continued to be carried out
in accordance with ancestral custom. But the spirits of men had
fled from the old religion; it still commanded their service but
no longer their hearts or their belief. With its indeterminate gods
and its colourless myths, mere fables concocted from details sug-

122 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

gested by Latin topography or pale reflections of the adventures
which had overtaken the Olympians of Greek epic; with its pray-
ers formulated in the style of legal contracts and as dry as the
procedure of a lawsuit; with its lack of metaphysical curiosity
and indifference to moral values; with the narrow-minded banal-
ity of its field of action, limited to the interests of the city and the
development of practical politics Roman religion froze the im-
pulses of faith by its coldness and its prosaic utilitarianism. 80 It
sufficed at most to reassure a soldier against the risks of war or a
peasant against the rigours of unseasonable weather, but in the
motley Rome of the second century it had wholly lost its power
over the human heart.

The populace, it is true, still showed lively enthusiasm for the
festivals of the gods which were subsidised from public funds,
but Gaston Boissier is unduly optimistic when he attributes this
enthusiasm to piety. Among the celebrations which were most
eagerly attended there were some which pleased the humbler
people better because "they were gayer, 'noisier, and seemed to
belong more particularly to them." 81 We need be under no misap-
prehension as to the sentiments which underlay their devotion to
these celebrations. In particular, to conclude from their taste for
the drinking and dancing on the banks of the Tiber which an-
nually accompanied the festival of Anna Perenna, 82 that they
worshipped the ancient Latin goddess of the circling year with
enlightened sincerity would be as rash as to measure the extent
and vigour of Roman Catholicism in Paris today by the crowds
of Parisians who flock to the Reveillon. It may be admitted that
there is plenty of proof of the constancy with which the bour-
geoisie of Rome under the empire discharged its duties toward the
divinities recognised by the State. A "conservative" like Juvenal,
who professedly execrates all foreign superstitions, might at
first sight appear to be devoted in every fibre to the national re-
ligion; and reading the delightful opening of Satire XII, one
might well imagine that he still loved it profoundly. He paints
with charming freshness the preparations for one of the sacri-
fices to the Triad of the Capitol:

Dearer to me, Corvinus, is this day, when my festal turf is awaiting
the victims vowed to the gods, than my own birthday. To the Queen of
Heaven I offer a snowwhite lamb; a fleece as white to Pallas, the god-
dess armed with the Moorish Gorgon; hard by is the frolicsome victim

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 123

destined for Tarpeian Jove, shaking the tight-stretched rope and brand-
ishing his brow; for he is .a bold young steer, ripe for temple and for
altar, and fit to be sprinkled with wine; it already shames him to suck
his mother's milk and with his budding horn he assails the oaks. Were
my fortune large, and as ample as my love, I should have been hauling
along a bull fatter than Hispulla, slow-footed from his very bulk;
reared on no neighbouring herbage he, but showing in his blood the rich
pastures of Clitumnus, and marching along to offer his neck to the stroke
of the stalwart priest, to celebrate the return of my still-trembling friend
who has lately gone through such terrors, and now marvels to find him-
self safe and sound . . , 88
\

But let us reread these exquisite verses. Their affectionate en-
thusiasm is not for the gods but for the country scene where the
offerings are prepared, for the familiar beasts whom Juv'enal has
chosen from his flocks as worthiest of sacrifice, and whose beauty
he appreciates both as connoisseur and poet; but above all for the
friend whose unhoped-for return he celebrates and who in this
clear description will savour in advance the joyous festival to
which he is invited. As for the deities who occupy the obscure
background of the picture, they must content themselves with a
sketchy paraphrase like Minerva, or with their ritual adjective
like Juno, Queen of Heaven, or with the purely geographical
epithet attached to Jupiter, whose temple on the Capitol over-
hung, as everybody knows, the Tarpeian Rock. Juvenal would
have been at a loss to throw any greater light on them. Their
features were indeterminate to his eyes; the gods were to him no
living personalities. He rejected the whole tissue of their mythol-
ogy, for "that there are such things as Manes and kingdoms below
ground, and punt poles, and Stygian pools black with frogs, and
all those thousands crossing over in a single bark these things
not even boys believe, except such as are not yet old enough to
have paid their penny bath . . ." 84

Juvenal's scepticism, moreover, was general. It had laid hold
on the humbler classes, the best meaning of whom displayed, while
they deplored, the indifference felt by almost everyone for these
Roman gods with "gouty" feet (pedes lanatos).** Great ladies
(stolatae) no longer climbed the Capitoline Hill to pray to Jupiter
for rain. 86 The most important and most orthodox contemporaries
of Juvenal shared the same feelings of scepticism. If great gentle-
men like Tacitus and Pliny the Younger "practised" their re-

124 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

ligion as much or more than he, they "believed" every whit as
little. As praetor under Domitian, consul under Nerva and pro-
consul in Asia under Trajan, Tacitus was compelled to officiate
at the public ceremonies of polytheism; and his aversion for the
Jews was at least equal to Juvenal's. So much for proof of his
orthodoxy. But there are things that make us doubtful of it; much
as he abhors the Jews, he is not afraid indirectly to praise their
belief in one eternal and supreme God, whose image must not be
counterfeited and who cannot pass away. 87 Similarly in his
Germania he does not conceal his admiration for the barbarous
tribe who refuse to imprison their gods within walls or to repre-
sent them in human form lest they do outrage to their majesty;
who prefer to consecrate to their worship the woods and forests
of their territory, and for whom the mysterious solitudes where
they adore their unseen deities seem to become identified with
the Divine itself. 88 These two passages of obvious though un-
formulated approval reveal Tacitus as a disaffected pagan.

Tacitus' friend, Pliny the Younger, shows no less detachment
toward those religious forms to which he moulds his ways and
accommodates his acts. He respects their high antiquity and the
authority of the State which has consecrated them, but at the
same time he refuses them the intimate homage of his conscience.
Gaston Boissier quotes, in proof of the piety of Pliny, the letter
in which he describes to his friend Romanus the charm of the
springs which form the source of Clitumnus under the cypress
shade and of the old temple where the River God speaks his
oracles. 89 It is certainly a charming chapter, but in precisely the
same vein as the Juvenal verses just quoted. It has the same
freshness, it also expresses the gentle emotion which a friend of
nature feels in gazing at a lovely landscape. But it pays equally
little heed to the devotions of which this beautiful site is the
theatre and the object, and it ends with a sly thrust at the pious
folk who come here to perform them: "You will also find food for
study in the numerous inscriptions by many hands all over the
pillars and walls, in praise of the spring and its tutelar deity.
Many of them you will admire, others you will laugh at; but no,
you are too kind-hearted to laugh at any. Farewell."

In another* passage in the letters Pliny writes to his architect
Mustius that in compliance with the advice of the karuspices he is
intending to repair and rebuild a temple of Ceres which stands

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 125

on his estate. 90 The tone in which he announces this proposal
indicates less veneration for the goddess than solicitude for the
faithful. He anticipates that he will require a new Ceres, "for
ige has maimed parts of the ancient wooden one which stands
there -at present." His major concern, however, is the erection of
a colonnade near the sanctuary: "great numbers of people from
all the country round assemble there, and many cows are paid
and offered; but there is no shelter hard by against rain or sun."
Pliny is thus more set on winning the favour of his tenants than
of Ceres, and the care he was expending on adding to the pleas-
ures of their pilgrimages gives no tnore clue to his own religious
convictions than Voltaire's similar activities as seigneur of Ferney.

There is still more convincing evidence, however, of the funda-
mental indifference Pliny felt toward the rites while he dutifully
fulfilled the outward obligations. Let us look up the letter in
which he announces his recent co-option into the College of
Augurs. 91 His pleasure at the honour is wholly worldly. He barely
alludes to the sacred power which this dignity confers (sacerdo-
tium plane sacrum) ; he does not dwell on the incomparable privi-
lege which is to be his of interpreting the signs of the Divine
Will, of instructing the magistrates and the emperor himself in
the value of their auspices. On the contrary, where a pious man
would have welcomed the supernatural responsibilities with
jubilation, what seems to him the most enviable feature of his
new post is first that it is a life appointment (insigne est quod non
adimitur viventi) ; secondly, that it has been bestowed on him on
the recommendation of Trajan; thirdly, that he has succeeded "so
eminent a man as Julius Frontinus"; finally and above all, that
the prince of orators, Marcus Tullius Cicero, had held the same
preferment. There is no shadow of religious emotion in Pliny's
self-gratulation. It is the pleasure of a courtier, a man of the
world, a scholar not of a believer. Pliny the Younger rejoiced
to have been made an augur in much the same way that a modern
author feels proud to be made a member of the French Academy;
if we understand him aright the official priesthoods of the Romans
had become for their dignitaries varying types of "Academy."

Even the enthusiasm which the imperial cult had awakened at
the outset had in turn grown cold; it was now nothing more than
another cog in the great official machine which functioned in Vir-
tue of its acquired momentum but had long since lost its soul. 92

126 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

The fall of Nero and the extinction with him of the family of
Augustus had dealt a fatal blow by depriving the worship of the
emperors of its dynastic sanctity. Vespasian, the upstart who
had hoped to found a new dynasty, had posed in Egypt as a
miracle worker, but had not deigned to attempt to increase his in-
fluence in Rome by such pretence. The courageous jest about his
coming apotheosis which the dying man cracked on his deathbed
is well known: "I feel," he said laughing, "that I am beginning to
become a god." 8 The murder of his son Domitian, who, forgetful
of his origins, had insisted that even in Italy he should be ad-
dressed as "Master and Lord" (dominus et deus), suddenly
showed how well founded was his father's scepticism. 94 The wor-
ship of the emperors might perhaps have survived the crimes of
"Nero the Bald-head" if he had always handled enough wealth
to enrich his Praetorian Guard and to pamper the populace of
Rome. It was destroyed when people saw that if military revolu-
tions sufficed to create an emperor, a palace conspiracy was
enough to fell the master whom they were supposed to worship as
a god. By the time of the Antonines, emperor worship had become
no more than a pretext for revelry, a symbol of loyalty, a con-
stitutional, stylistic phrase.

On the morrow of his accession Trajan proclaimed the divinity
of his adoptive father Nerva (divus), but he was at pains to in-
troduce a note of human probability into the transaction. Not
only did he reserve the honours of apotheosis for the dead, but
he saw therein the supreme reward which the State could bestow
on its benefactors. He left it to his panegyrist to explain exactly
the secular spirit in which he carried out this formality of general
good administration; and he allowed Pliny the Younger to declare
to the Patres that the most conclusive proof of the divinity of a
dead Caesar lay in the excellence of his successor: "Certissima
divinitatis fides est bonus successor." In the formula of public
prayer addressed to the gods for his life and his health he in-
serted the reservation that the gods should heed these prayers
only if he governed the republic well and for the benefit of all:
"Si bene rem publicam et ex utilitate omnium rexerit." 05

It would be wrong to undervalue the generous inspiration of
such a policy. But at the same time it would be too ingenuous to
imagine that it still provoked transports of enthusiasm. The days
were gone when the conqueror of Actium, who had put an end to

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 127

civil war and brought to Rome both peace and universal empire,
was able to accept the homage and title of Augustus, at one bound
place himself outside and above the condition of ordinary men,
and raise himself, amid the enthusiasm of the masses and the
song of the poets, to rank among the gods. The days were gone
when popular credulity followed the march of the god Caesar
across the firmament like the path of a comet in the Roman sky;
the days when everyone from the humblest citizen to the princely
heir attributed to the auspices of his son Tiberius the power to
inspire the plans of generals and to guarantee their irresistible
success. In much that way today a Japanese admiral can at-
tribute to the spirit of his Mikado the victory of Tsushima. But
in Rome the person and the history of the princeps had descended
again to earth. If force of habit or the exigencies of ceremonial
still led humble subjects to invoke the "divine house" and the
"celestial decisions" of the emperor, the majority were perfectly
aware that there was no longer an imperial "house" properly so
called; and in their gratitude the most truthful simply praised
Caesar's indefatigable solicitude for the interests of humanity.
In the same way, the emperors themselves, sovereign servants
of the State, were conscious of ascending the throne as a last and
final promotion.

Trajan made no effort to surround his acts with a supernatural
halo, but boasted all the more of his achievement in overcoming
the Germani before his accession, at a time when none could yet
call him the son of a god: "necdum dei filius (era/)!" 06 His
Panegyric is worth reading: on every page the monarchy he had
just inaugurated is depicted as the best of republics. While pre-
serving the terminology of preceding reigns, a new regime had
come into being in which for the first time, according to Tacitus,
liberty and imperial rule were in harmony. 97 But by a fatal com-
pensation it was also a time in which the imperial religion, at
least in Rome and the neighbourhood of the Senate, was to lose
its transcendence and to become secularised. In spite of a de-
liberate return to enlightened despotism, neither the jesting
familiarity of Hadrian nor the self-effacement of Antoninus Pius
nor the stoic resignation of Marcus Aurelius to the designs of
Providence had power to rekindle in men's hearts the emotion
which the cult of the emperor had ceased to evoke.

128 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

6. THE PROGRESS OF ORIENTAL MYSTICISM

Faith, however, had not entirely disappeared from Rome. Far
from it. It had not even diminished. In proportion as the empti-
ness of an education which lacked every element of reason and
reality had impoverished and disarmed men's intelligence, faith
had extended its domain and increased in intensity. Roman faith
had merely changed its object and direction. It had turned away
from the official polytheism and taken .efuge in the "chapels"
now formed by philosophic sects and by the brotherhoods thiat
celebrated the mysteries of Oriental gods. Here believers could
at last find an answer to their questionings and a truce to their
anxieties; here were at once an explanation of the world, rules of
conduct, release from evil and from death. Thus in the second
century we observe the paradox that Rome has begun to possess
a religious life, in the sense in which we understand the word to-
day, at the very moment when her State religion had ceased to
live in men's consciences.

This transformation of such infinite consequence had been long
preparing. It was the product of Hellenistic influences to which
Rome had been unconsciously subjected for two centuries, under
which oriental revelation and Greek philosophy had interpene-
trated each other ajid ended by fusing into one. At the period we
are studying, the philosophies banished from the chairs had as-
sumed the semblance and the force of religion for the teachers
who became directors of men's consciences and for the disciples
whose actions and ways of life they controlled, dictating even the
cut of their beard and of their clothes. Even if, like Epicureanism,
these philosophies denied a future life and banished the immor-
tals to the inaction of an intermediate world, they nevertheless
proclaimed themselves saviours from death and its terrors. At
the pious feasts of their adherents the "founders" were the
"heroes," and the same hymns and sacrifices were prescribed as
for the ceremonies of the gods. 98 Whether the preachers were
Greeks from Athens or Romans speaking and writing Greek, they
could not conceal the fact that the ultimate foundations of their
dialectic were oriental speculations. Joseph Bidez has demon-
strated all that Stoicism owes not only to tie Semites who spread
it but also to the beliefs of Semitism; 99 and he is convinced that
the Neo-Pythagoreanism professed by Nigidius Figulus at Rome

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 129

was profoundly modified by Alexandrine thought. 100 On the other
hand, the resemblances which Franz Cumont has noted between
cults so diverse in origin as those of Cybele and of Attis, of
Mithra and the Baalim, of the Dea Syra, of Isis and Serapis, are
too numerous and too striking not to reveal the effects of a com-
mon influence. Whether they came from Anatolia or Iran, from
Syria or from Egypt, whether they were male or female, whether
they were worshipped with innocent or bloody rites, the "oriental"
divinities whom we meet in the Roman Empire present identical
features and conceptions which overlap and seem even to inter-
change. These are deities who, far from being impassive, suffer,
die, and rise from the dead; gods whose myths embrace the cos-
mos and comprehend its secrets; gods whose astral fatherland
dominates all earthly fatherlands and who assure to their initi-
ates alone, but to them without distinction of nationality or status,
a protection proportionate to the purity of each.

We should seek in vain to find, behind the analogies which
bind these religions together, an indefinable pre-established har-
mony between the oriental minds which gave them birth. The
truth is that none of these "oriental" religions reached Italian
soil without a long sojourn in Greece or in some Graecicised
country. Hellenism imported them after the conquests of Alex-
ander and they crossed the Greek frontiers only after having
been relieved of their coarser baggage and laden instead with
Greece's cosmopolitan philosophy. Hence the uniform colour with
which they all are tinged, the adaptation of their individual
myths to the idea of a universal divinity by a symbolism whose
elements scarcely vary. Hence also their common subordination
to an astrology which triumphs as obviously in the beamed dia-
dem of Attis at Ostia as in the majority of our mithraea and on
the ceiling of the sanctuary of Bel at Palmyra, where the eagle of
Zeus spreads his wings within a circle of zodiacal constellations.
Hence, above all, the ease with which the Romans were converted
to the gods of the East, not only because the Orient was rich and
populous but because the Hellenistic civilisation in which Rome
was steeped had moulded to one pattern cults derived from every
quarter of the East moulded them as it were in its own image
and under the pressure of its own spiritual instincts.

In the second century of our era these cults were in process
of submerging the city. The cults of Anatolia had been naturalised

130 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

in Rome by Claudius' decree . which rteformed the* liturgy of
Cybele and of Attis. 101 The Egyptian cults, banished by Tiberius,
were publicly welcomed back by Caligula; and the Temple of Isis
in Rome which was destroyed by fire in So A.D. was rebuilt by
Domitian with a luxury still testified to by the obelisks that re-
main standing in the Temple of Minerva or near by in front of
the Pantheon, and by the colossal statues of the Nile and of the
Tiber which are now divided between the museums of the Louvre
and the Vatican. 102 From the middle of the second century, Hadad
and his consort Atargatis possessed a temple at Rome, which
Paul Gauckler rediscovered in ipoy. 103 It was situated on the
right bank of the Tiber on the Janiculum below the Lucus Fur-
rinae. Atargatis, or the Dea Syra, was the only deity to whom
Nero, denier of all other gods, deigned to render homage. 104
Finally, it is certain that in Flavian times sanctuaries of Mithra
had been established at Rome as at Capua. 105

The numerous colleges devoted to these heterogeneous gods at
Rome not only co-existed without friction but collaborated in
their recruiting campaigns. There was in fact more affinity and
mutual understanding between these diverse religions than ri-
valry. One and all were served by priests jealously segregated
from the crowd of the profane; their doctrine was based on reve-
lation, and their prestige on the singularity of their costume and
manner of life. One and all imposed preliminary initiation on
their followers and periodical recourse to a more or less ascetic
regimen; each, after its own fashion, indulged in the same astro-
logical and henotheistic speculations and held out to believers the
same messages of hope. 106

Romans who had not been seduced by these exotic cults sus-
pected and hated them. Juvenal, for instance, who could not
repress his wrath to see the Orontes pour her muddy floods of
superstition into the Tiber, 107 hit out with might and main against
them all, without distinction. While Tiberius seized on the pre-
text of a case of adultery which had been abetted by some priests
of Isis to expel the lot, 10 ? the satirist raged indiscriminately
against all oriental priests, charging them with roguery and
charlatanism: Chaldean, Commagenian, Phrygian, or priest of
Isis, 'Who with his linen-clad and shaven crew runs through the
streets under the mask of Anubis and mocks at the weeping of
the people." 109 Juvenal never wearies of exposing the shameless

A LAR

A CAMILLUS

A SISTRUM

THE MAGNA MATER

[fact p.

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 131

exploitation they practice, selling the indulgence of their god to
frail female sinners "bribed no doubt by a fat goose and a slice
of sacrificial cake," or promising on the strength of their prophetic
gifts and powers of divination "a youthful lover or a big bequest
from some rich and childless man." 110 He declaims against their
obscenity, attacking "the chorus of the frantic Bejlona and the
Mother of the Gods, attended by a giant eunuch to whom his
obscene inferiors must do reverence"; 111 and "the mysteries of
Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, when the flute stirs the loins and
the Maenads of Priapus sweep along, frenzied alike by the horn
blowing and the wine, whirling their locks and howling. What
foul longings burn within their breasts! What cries they utter as
the passion beats within!" 112 He holds his sides with laughter at
sight of the penances and self-mortifications to which the male
and female devotees submit with sombre fanaticism : the woman
"who in winter will go down to the river of a morning, break the
ice, and plunge three times into the Tiber"; then, "naked and
shivering she will creep on bleeding knees right across the field of
Tarquin the Proud"; and the other who "at the command of
White lo will journey to the confines of Egypt and fetch water
from hot Meroe with which to sprinkle the Temple of Isis." 113

Juvenal's savage and inexhaustible anger need not surprise us.
He expresses with all the force of his genius the natural reaction
of the "ancient Roman," hater alike of novelty and of the for-
eigner, to whom emotion and enthusiasm were a degradation,
and who would gladly have disciplined the outpourings of faith
by such ordinances as governed a civil or military parade. At this
distance of time his prejudices necessarily appear to us gravely
unjust, first, because he traced to the oriental religions alone
superstitions whose origin goes back to prehistoric times long
before Rome was invaded by the Orient, and in whose develop-
ment oriental religion had no part; secondly, because he was so
blinded by his loathing for them that he completely ignored the
moral progress which despite their excesses and their aberra-
tions they achieved by the sheer force of their fervour and sin-
cerity.

It cannot be denied that their astrolqgy brought renewed
vitality to divination, but divination had always .been practised
in Rome. Divination was the natural offspring of a polytheism
which from the days of Homer on had conceived even Jupiter as

132 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

enslaved by the decrees of Fate; it was inextricably bound up
with the taking of the auspices and the work of the haruspex
which was performed in the name of Rome. The best minds of
the second century, indifferent or hostile to foreign religions, had
recourse to divination without embarrassment or scepticism, and
the public authorities attached so much importance to it that
they prosecuted unauthorised diviners. When Juvenal therefore
makes mock of the Chaldean adepts who trembled with fear to
learn of the conjunctions of Saturn, and of the sick woman "who
if she be ill in bed deems no hour so suitable for taking food as
that prescribed to her by Petosiris," m he was deliberately turn-
ing his blind eye to the fact that in every stratum of Roman so-
ciety the impious and the lukewarm were as much a prey to
superstition and taboo as the pious whom he despised.

The upstart f reedman Trimalchio sets his guests to dine round
a table whose centre-piece represents the zodiac. He boasts to
them that he was born under "the sign of Cancer, the Crab," a
sign so favourable that he needs only to stand firm on his two
feet "to possess property on land and sea." Then he listens open-
mouthed to tales of vampires and werewolves, and finally when
he hears the cock crow in the midst of his midnight boozing, he
trembles at the evil omen. 115 We find examples no less significant
occurring higher in the social scale. In spite of discreet reserve
and a few shafts of fugitive irony, Tacitus does not venture
formally to deny the truth of the "prodigies" which he records as
scrupulously as did his predecessors, and he confesses that he
dare not omit or treat as fables "facts established by tradi-
tion." 116 Most of his peers and contemporaries were harassed
by the same preoccupations. Suetonius had a dream which upset
him to such a point that he feared he was already losing a case
in which he was engaged. 117 Regulus, the odious rival of Pliny the
Younger at the bar, made use of horoscopes and the haruspex to
increase his reputation and obtain legacies by undue influence. 118
As for Pliny himself, he was inclined to reject the puerilities of
dream interpretation, quoting Homer to hold that: 119

"Without a sign, his sword the brave man draws,
And asks no omen but his country's cause."

At the same time he did not hesitate to write to the consul
Licinius Sura, who to his fame as a warrior added the reputation

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 133

of being a storehouse of science, asking what he ought to think
about ghosts and apparitions, and minutely detailing a series of
experiences which had led him hitherto to incline to believe in
them. 120 Pliny's letters on this subject ought to put us on our
guard against Juvenal's passionate attacks. Reading this tissue of
childish credulity, we are suddenly filled with tolerance toward
the Stoic attempt at least to legitimatise divination by assuming
the immanent action of Providence, and toward the occultism
and magic mongering which the oriental religions at least em-
ployed for the uplift of souls.

It is useless to attempt to deny that the oriental religions were
superior to the more-dead-than-alive theology which they sup-
planted. Some of their rites no doubt, like the bull sacrifice of the
Great Mother or the procession of the torn-up pine which accom-
panied the mutilation of Attis, have something both barbarous
and indecent in them, "like a whiff from slaughter-house or
latriae." m Nevertheless, the religions which practised them ex-
ercised a tonic and beneficent influence on individuals and lifted
them to a higher plane. To convince ourselves that this was so
we have only to consult the vigorous analysis made by Franz
Cumont. 122 These oriental religions dazzled the faithful by the
splendour of their festivals and the pomp of their processions;
they charmed them by their languorous singing and their enervat-
ing music. Whether through the nervous tension induced by their
prolonged mortifications and rapt contemplation, or through the
excitement of dancing and the consumption of fermented drinks
after long abstinence, they succeeded in provoking a state of
ecstasy in which "the soul delivered from the bondage of the
body and set free from pain could lose itself in exaltation."
Cumont justly remarks that in mysticism it is easy to slip "from
the sublime to the depraved." It is no less true, however, that
under the combined influence of Greek thought and Roman
discipline, oriental mysticism had been able to extract an ideal
from the depravity of these naturalistic cults, and to rise toward
those spiritual regions where perfect knowledge, flawless virtue,
and victory over sin and pain and death appeared as the glorious
fulfilment of divine promises. False as was the science incor-
porated in the "gnosis" of each cult, it both stimulated and
quenched the initiates' thirst for knowledge. The physical ablu-
tions and lustrations which religion prescribed went hand in hand

134 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

with the inward spiritual peace of renunciation and self-denial.
Above all, by teaching that liturgy was nothing without personal
piety, these religions acquired the right to prophesy for their
disciples a future state of eternal happiness such as their ever
reborn deities enjoyed in the celestial sphere. Before long they
set in motion a spiritual revival which drew to itself rebellious
consciences.

On the one hand the best spirits in the Urbs, including those
furthest removed from oriental mysticism, were vaguely con-
scious that divine favours ought to be deserved rather than merely
snatched. While Juvenal vents his wrath, he cherishes the serene
conviction that "the gods themselves know what is good for us
and what will be serviceable for our state; in place of what is
pleasing, they will give us what is best. Man is dearer to them
than he is to himself." 128 Persius at the beginning of the second
century has no doubt but that the gods whom he does not
further specify ask of him in the first instance nothing save "a
soul where secular and sacred law reign harmoniously side by
side, a spirit purified to its inmost recess, a heart filled with up-
right generosity." 124 And Statius under Domitian implicitly
formulates a confession of faith in the exclusive value of per-
sonal religion:

Poor as I am, how should I acquit myself toward the gods? I could not,
though Umbria should exhaust for me the richness of her valleys, though
the meadows of Clitumnus should furnish me with oxen white as snow;
yet the gods have frequently accepted the offering which I brought a
handful of salt and flour on a little mound of grass. 125

The poets, interpreting the minds of their countrymen, thus con-
ceived the divine favour as the reward of human virtue.

On the other hand, in the language of the second century the
Latin word solus, which originally had only the prosaic con-
notation of physical health, began to take on a moral and
eschatological meaning implying the liberation of the soul on
earth and its eternal happiness in heaven; gradually the tran-
scendental idea of "salvation" spread from the oriental cults to
all the truly religious foundations of Roman antiquity. It ani-
mated the religion suddenly founded under Hadrian in honour of
Antinoiis, the handsome Bithynian slave who had sacrificed his
life in Egypt to save the emperor's. 126 It gathered round it the

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 135

brotherhoods in which the tree-bearers of Cybele and Attis met
under Antoninus Pius, notably at Bovillae, and the simple funeral
colleges which from the reign of Hadrian on united in one family
the plebeians and the slaves of Lanuvium under the double in-
vocation of Diana of the Dead and of the saviour Antinoiis. 127
So much prestige had this idea of salvation acquired that both
the brotherhoods and the funeral colleges took a name which of
itself voiced this great hope: "collegium salutare" The emperors
themselves did not escape the spell. The coins and statues of the
second century show them eager to be assimilated to the Olym-
pians Augustus to Mars, progenitor of the founders of the
Urbs, Augusta to Venus, commen mother of the Caesars and the
Roman people or, again, to re-immerse their new-found holiness
in the sacred flood of ancient Latin legend. 128 Nevertheless, they
no longer believed that the apotheosis officially decreed them
by the Senate would suffice to ensure them the eternal personal
salvation which they craved like other men. After Hadrian had
erected statues, temples, and towns to Antinous, and before
Commodus had entered the congregation of Mithra, Antoninus
Pius bore witness by the transparent language of the reverse of
his coins that Faustina the Elder, the wife he had lost at the
beginning of his reign and whose temple still rears its symbolic
form above the Forum, had been able to mount to heaven only
in the chariot of Cybele, by the favour of the Mother of the
Gods, the Lady of Salvation (Mater deum salutaris) , 129

Thus, thanks to the collaboration of oriental mysticism and
of Roman wisdom, new and fruitful faiths were born and flour-
ished on the ruins of the traditional pantheon. In the bosom of
outworn paganism a creed arose, or rather the sketch of a creed,
which represented a genuine redemption of men by the double
payment of their merit and of divine assistance. Thus by a co-
incidence, in which the agnostic sees only a function of historical
determinism, but in which believers like Bossuet recognise the
intervention of the Divine Providence they adore, Rome created
an atmosphere favourable to Christianity at a moment when
the Christian Church was sufficiently firmly established to ex-
cavate its first collective cemeteries, to show the example and
lift up the prayers of its faithful as high even as the steps of the
imperial throne.

136 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

7. THE ADVENT OF CHRISTIANITY

Although Statius and Martial and Juvenal may perhaps not
have suspected the fact; and though Pliny the Younger who
in Bithynia had himself been up against the Christians of his
province 130 lets fall.no hint of its existence in his Letters;
though Tacitus and Suetonius speak of it only from hearsay, the
former in abusive language which excludes his having had any
first-hand knowledge, the second with confusions which prove
both the lacunae in his information and his own.lack of insight 181
it is nevertheless beyond all doubt that "Christianity" in Rome
goes back to the reign of Claudius (41-54), and that under Nero
it had become so widespread that the emperor was able to throw
the blame for the great fire of 64 onto the Christians. Using
this as a pretext, he inflicted on them atrocious refinements of
torture, the first of the persecutions which assailed yvithout de-
stroying the Church of Christ. 132 It is evident that its subter-
ranean growth had progressed with astounding rapidity. This
was perhaps due less to the importance of the Urbs in the world
than to the existence in Rome of the Jewish colony which the
goodwill of Julius Caesar had acclimatised there. 138 From the
beginning of the empire members of the Jewish colony had proved
so troublesome that in 19 A.D. Tiberius thought it necessary
to take severe measures against them, and so numerous that
he was able to ship off 4,000 Jews at one swoop to Sardinia. 184
It was through the Jewish colony that the first Christians coming
from Jerusalem penetrated into Rome, breaking up the unity
of the colony and ranging against each other the upholders of
the ancient Mosaic law and the adherents of the new faith.

The Jewish religion had cast its spell over a number of Romans,
attracted by itfe monotheism and the beauty of the Decalogue.
The religion of the Christians, which dispensed the same light
but offered in addition a splendid message of redemption and
brotherhood, was not behind in substituting its own proselyting.
Seen from the outside and from a little distance, the two re-
ligions were at first easily confused with each other, and it is
possible, for instance, that the invectives which Juvenal hurls
at the Jews were really directed at the Christians whom he had
not at this date learned to distinguish from them. 185 They also
were obedient to the commandments of their God, and might

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 137

well pass in the eyes of a superficial observer for being simply
"attached to Jewish customs." 186 But after the destruction of
the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and under the early An-
tonines, "the Church" inevitably began to be distinguished from
"the Synagogue"; and the Church's teaching, which made no
distinction of race, soon began to supplant that of the Jews.

We have, naturally, no means of estimating the number of
conversions which Christianity effected in those days in Rome,
but it would be wrong to suppose that they were confined to
the lower strata of the population. The Epistles of Saint Paul,
saluting those of the brethren who are of the household of Caesar
(in domo Caesaris), prove directly that the apostle had recruited
some of his followers from among the retainers of the emperor,
among those slaves and freedmen who, under a specious appear-
ance of humility, included the most powerful servants of the
empire. 137 A few years later a number of mutually corroborative
indications point to the probability that the Christian Church
was extending its conquests to the directing classes themselves.
Tacitus tells us that Pomponia Graecina, wife of the consul Aulus
Plautius, conqueror of the Britons who lived under Nero and
died under the Flavians, was suspected of belonging "to a religion
criminally foreign," because of her austerity, her sadness, and
her mourning garments. 138 Dio Cassius and Suetonius both
record that Domitian successively accused of the crime of atheism
M' Acilius Glabrio, consul in 91, who was put to death; 139 then
a pair of his own cousins-german, Flavius Clemens, cdnsul in
95, who was condemned to death, and Flavia Domitilla who was
banished to the island of Pandataria. 140 Finally Tacitus notes in
his Histories that Vespasian's own brother, Flavius Sabinus, who
was prefect of the Urbs when Nero turned the Christians into
living torches to light his gardens, appeared toward the end of
his life to be obsessed by the horror of the blood shed then. 141

It is true that none of these texts formally names as Christians
the illustrious personages of whom their authors speak, but it is
permissible to wonder, with M. fimile Male, whether Flavius
Sabinus in his humanity and his obsession may not have been
won over to the new religion by the courage of the early Roman
martyrs; 142 and it is still more probable that we may detect an
allusion to Christianity both in the forbidden "alien superstition"
with which Pomponia Graecina was reproached and in the ac-

138 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

cusation of atheism brought against believers whose faith was
bound to deter them from performing their duties toward the
false gods of the official polytheism. In the case of Flavius Clem-
ens and of Flavia Domitilla in particular, this probability is in-
creased by the fact that their niece, called Flavia Domitilla after
her aunt, was, according to the testimony of Eusebius, interned
in the island of Pontia for the crime of being a Christian. 143

Even if we adopt the calculations of certain radical critics and
place in the second third of the second century the catacomb of
Priscilla, where the memory of the Acilii Glabriones was pre-
served; the crypt of Lucina where a later Greek inscription had
been discovered celebrating the name of a certain Pomponius
Graecinus; and the tomb of Domitilla whose name irresistibly
calls up memories of the victims of Domitian we cannot get
rid of the strong presumption, created by the convergent evi-
dences to which De Rossi called attention, that there were
notorious conversions to Christianity as early as the end of the
first century. 144 It is proved beyond possibility of doubt that
the retainers of many of the great men of Hadrian's world (117-
138) had with the encouragement of their masters answered the
call of Christ and swollen the ranks of his "Roman Church."

No doubt the Christians of Rome still formed a small minority
of the population; a minority always exposed to the prejudice
of the masses and the hostility of the authorities, not only because
they abstained from taking part in the traditional practices, but
even because, entranced by the vision of their celestial homes
and oblivious of the city of their birth, they answered questions
about their origin with the word "Christian," and thus acquired
the reputation of being deserters and public enemies. 145 But the
penalties to which their refusal to compromise exposed them
and to which Bishop Telesphorus succumbed under Hadrian
were too intermittent to exterminate them, on the one hand, and
on the other were too heroically endured not to command the
admiration of their enemies. What contributed henceforth to in-
crease their progress was not so much the series of their Apologiae,
inaugurated by Quadratus in the reign of Hadrian, nor yet the
heroism of their martyrs, as the power of their Credo and the
Christian gentleness in which their life was steeped. Even those
who dwell most on the analogies between Christianity and the
pagan mysteries are at one in agreeing that Christianity towered

EDUCATION AND RELIGION 139

above them all. 146 And to what a height! To the polytheism of
the Graeco-Roman gods, reduced to mere symbols as they were,
to the vague and diffuse monotheism of the oriental religions,
the Christian opposed his doctrine of the One God, the Father
Omnipotent. In contrast to the various idolatries, spiritualized

though they might be by the divine ether and the eternal stars,
he offered a worship solely of the spirit, purified of astrological
aberration, of bleeding sacrifice, of mystery-ridden initiation;
for all these he substituted a baptism of pure water, prayer, and
a frugal common meal. Like the pagan religionists he gave an-
swer in the name of his sacred books to every question about the
origin of things and the destiny of man; but the Redeemer whose
"good tidings" he brought, instead of being an elusive and am-
biguous figure lost in a mythological labyrinth, was revealed in
miraculous reality in the earthly life of Jesus, the Son of God.
Like the pagan religionists, the Christian guaranteed salvation
after death, but instead of engulfing the believer in the silence

'of a starry eternity, he restored him to life in a personal resur-
rection foreshadowed by the resurrection of Christ himself. Like
the pagan, the Christian laid down a rule of life for all believers,
but while not excluding contemplation or asceticism or ecstasy,
he did not abuse them and condensed his moral teaching into
man's love of his neighbour which the gospels inculcated.

Herein lay beyond question the strongest attraction of the
new religion. The Christians were brothers and called each other
so. Their meetings were often called agape, which in Greek means
"love." They constantly assisted each other "without parade or
patronage." An unceasing interchange "of counsel, of informa-
tion, and of practical help" took place between one Christian
and the other and, as Duchesne has said, "all this was alive and
active in a fashion wholly different from that of the pagan
brotherhoods." Many observers in those days were constrained
to say of the Christians: "How simple and pure is their religion!
What confidence they have in their God and His promise! How
they love one another and how happy they are together!" 147
In the second century this evangelic happiness existed only in
small isolated groups among the crowds of the overgrown city;
but it was contagious and it had begun, unknown to the ma-
jority, to transform thousands of lives. This is a point of view
which must not be overlooked if we are to understand the life

140 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of Rome at this epoch. The Church is still almost invisible, but
she is there; she is at work; and if her beneficent doings are
not seen in the full light of day, we must nevertheless take heed
of the salutary influence she was widely and unobtrusively ex-
erting. In secret she worked out a remedy for the gravest of the
ills that were undermining the civilisation of Rome. In the name
of a new ideal she requickened ancient lost or half-forgotten
virtues: the dignity and courage of the individual, the cohesion
of the family, the value of moral truths in the conduct of adults
and in the education of the young; and above all, she imbued
all relations between man and man with a humanity which the
stern societies of ancient days had never known before. In this
Rome whose outward grandeur ill concealed the internal disinte-
gration which was in the long run to undermine her power and
dissipate her wealth,, what most strrikes the historian of the time
of the Antonines is the swarming of her crowds at the feet of
the imperial majesty, her fever for riches, the mantle of luxury
which cloaks her wretchedness, the prodigality of those spectacles
which pander to her sloth and stir up her lowest instincts, the
inanity of the intellectual gymnastics in which her scholars waste
their time, and the frenzy of carnal indulgence in which others
stupefy themselves. But we must not let either the dazzling
splendour or the sombre shadow hide the little flame pale and
flickering though it be which trembled in the souls of the elect,
like a faint dawn.

PART II
THE DAY'S ROUTINE

VI

THE MORNING

N this Rome of the earlier Antonines,
enormous, cosmopolitan, and hetero-
geneous, where the contrasts are
both so numerous and so violent, it
is nevertheless possible to get a
fairly clear idea of the ordinary
daily routine of an "average Ro-
man." Obviously, in .attempting
such a reconstruction, a large de-
gree of imagination and arbitrary

hypothesis must always come in.

But making allowance for varieties of profession and for indi-
vidual idiosyncrasies created by the wealth of the multimillion-
aires at the top and by the misery of the poor at the bottom of
the social scale, there remains a minimum of cares, occupations,
and leisure which with few variations composed the daily life of
every inhabitant of .the Urbs. It is all the easier to follow the
development and mark the most important moments of the day
in that the general conformity of manners was not enforced like
ours by the rigidity of a fixed time-table.

i. THE DAYS AND HOURS OF THE ROMAN CALENDAR

After the Julian reform of 46 B.C. the Roman calendar like
ours, which is its offspring was governed by the length of the
earth's circuit of the sun. 1 The twelve months of our year retain
the sequence, the length, the names which were assigned them
by the genius of Caesar and the prudence of Augustus. From the
beginning of the empire each of them, including February in both
ordinary years and leap year, contained the number of days to
which we are still accustomed. Astrology, moreover, had intro-
duced, in addition to the old official division of the months by the

144 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Calends (first of each month), the Nones (the fifth or seventh)
and the Ides (the thirteenth or fifteenth), 2 the division into weeks
of seven days subordinate to the seven planets whose movements
were believed to regulate the universe. 8 By the beginning of the
third century this usage had become so firmly anchored in the
popular consciousness that Dio Cassius considered it specifically
Roman. 4 With only one minoif modification the substitution of
the day of the Lord, dies Dominica (Dimanche), for the day of
the Sun, dies solis it has in most countries of Latin speech sur-
vived both the decadence of the astrologers and the triumph of
Christianity. Finally, each day of the seven was divided into
twenty-four hours which were reckoned to begin, not, as with
the Babylonians, at sunrise, nor, as among the Greeks, at sunset,
but as is still the case with us, at midnight. 5 This ends the analo-
gies between time as the ancients counted it and as we do; the
Latin "hours," late intruders into the Roman day, though they
bear the same name and were of the same number as ours, were
in reality very different.

Both word and thing were an invention of the Greeks deriving
from the process of mensuration. 6 Toward the end of the fifth
century B.C. they had learned to observe the stages performed
by the sun in its march across the sky. The sun-dial of Meton,
which enabled the Greeks to register these, consisted of a con-
cave hemisphere of stone (woXo?), having a strictly horizontal
brim, with a pointed metal stylus (YVCOJXOV) r i s i n g in the centre.
As soon as the sun entered the hollow of the hemisphere, the
shadow of the stylus traced in a reverse direction the ul *rnal
parallel of the sun. Four times a year, at the equinoxes and the
solstices, the shadow movements thus obtained were marked by a
line incised in the stone; and as the curve of the spring equinox
coincided with that of the autumn equinox, three concentric
circles were finally obtained, each of which was then divided into
twelve equal parts. All that was further needed was to join the
corresponding points on the three circles by twelve diverging
lines to obtain the twelve hours (&pat, horae) which punctuated
the year's course of the sun as faithfully recorded by the dial.
Hence the dial derived its name "hour counter" (d>poX6ftov), pre-
served in the Latin horologium and in the French horloge. Follow-
ing the example of Athens, the other Hellenic cities coveted the
honour, of possessing sun-dials, and their astronomers proved

THE MORNING 145

equal to the task of applying the principle to the position of each.
The apparent path of the sun varied of course with the latitude
of each place, and the length of the shadow cast by the. stylus
was consequently different in one city and another. At Alexandria
it was only three-fifths of the height of the stylus, at Athens
three-quarters; it was nearly nine-elevenths at Tarentum and
reached eight-ninths at Rome. As many different sun-dials had
to be constructed as there were different cities. The Romans were
among the last to appreciate the need. And just as they felt no
need to count the hours till two centuries after the Athenians,
so they took another hundred years to learn to do it accurately. 7

At the end of the fourth century B.C. they were still content
to divide the day into two parts, before midday and after. Natu-
rally the important thing was then to note the moment when the
sun crossed the meridian. One of the consul's subordinates was
told off to keep a lookout for it and to announce it to the people
busy in the Forum, as well as to the lawyers who, if their plead-
ings were to be valid, must present themselves before the tribunal
before midday. The herald's instructions were to make his an-
nouncement when he saw the sun "between the rostra and the
graecostasis" which clearly proves that his functions were of
relatively recent date. For there could be no mention of the rostra
until the speaker's tribune in the Forum had been adorned with
the beaks (rostra) of the ships captured from the Antiates by
Duilius in 338 B.C.; nor could there have been a graecostasis in-
tended for the reception of Greek envoys until the first Greek
embassy had been received in Rome, which would appear to have
been that sent by Demetrius Poliorcetes to the Senate about 306
B.C. 8

By the time of the wars against Pyrrhus -some slight progress
had been made by dividing the two halves of the day into two
parts: into the early morning and forenoon (mane and ante
meridiem) on the one hand; and on the other, into afternoon and
evening (de meridie and suprema).* But it was not until the be-
ginning of the First Punic War in 264 B.C. that the "hours" and
the horologium of the Greeks were introduced into the city. 10 One
of the consuls of that year, M' Valerius Messalla, had brought
back with other booty from Sicily the sun-dial of Catana and
set it up as it was on the comitium, where for more than three
generations the lines engraved on its icoXog for another latitude

146 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

continued to supply the Romans with an artificial time. In spite
of the assertion- of Pliny the Elder that they blindly obeyed
it for ninety-nine years, 11 we must be permitted to believe that
they persisted in ignorance rather than in wilful error. They
probably took no interest at all in Messalla's sun-dial and con-
tinued to govern their day in the old happy-go-lucky manner by
the apparent course of the sun above the monuments of their
public places, as if the horologium had never existed.

In the year 164 B.C., however, three years after Pydna, the
enlightened generosity of the censor Q. Marcius Philippus en-
dowed the Romans with their first horologium accurately calcu-
lated for their own latitude and hence reasonably accurate, and
if we are to believe Pliny the Naturalist they welcomed the gift
as a coveted treasure. 12 For thirty years their legions had fought
in Greek territory, almost without ceasing, first against Philip V,
then against the Aetolians and Antiochus of Syria, finally against
Perseus; and they had gradually become familiar with the pos-
sessions of their enemies. At times, perhaps, they had toyed, with-
out undue success, with a system of hours a trifle less erratic and
uncertain than the one that had hitherto sufficed them. So they
were pleased to have a sun-dial brought home and fitted up in
their own country. Not to be behind Q. Marcius Philippus, the
censors who succeeded him in office, P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica
and M. Popilius Laenas, completed the work he had begun by
flanking his sun-dial with a water-clock to supplement its services
at night or on days of fog. 18

It was more than a hundred years since the Alexandrians had
equipped themselves with a u&pi'ov wpoaxcnreiov which Ctesibius had
evolved from the ancient y-Xet^pa to remedy the inevitable failure
of the horologium proper. This became known in Latin as the
horologium ex aqua. Nothing could well have been simpler than
the mechanism of the water-clock. Let us imagine the clepsydra
that is, a transparent vessel of water with a regular intake
placed near a sun-dial. When the gnomon casts its shadow on a
curve of the polos, we need only to mark the level of the water
at that moment by incising a line on the outside of the water-
container. When the shadow reaches the next curve of the polos,
we make another mark, and so on until the twelve levels regis-
tered correspond to the twelve hours of the day chosen for our
experiment. This being granted, it is clear that if we give our

THE MORNING 14?

clepsydra a cylindrical form we can engrave on it from January to
December twelve vertical lines corresponding to the twelve
months of the year. On each of these verticals we then mark the
twelve hourly levels registered for the same day of each month;
and finally, by joining with a curved line the hour signs which
punctuate the monthly verticals, we can read off at once from the
level of the water above the line of the current month the hour
which the needle of the sun-dial would have registered at that
moment if the sun had happened to be shining.

Once the sun-dial had lent its services for grading the water-
clock, there was no further need to have recourse to the dial,
and it was a simple matter to extend the readings to serve for
the night hours. It is easy to imagine that the use of clepsydrae
soon became general in Rome. The principle of the sun-dial was
still sometimes applied on a grandiose scale: in 10 B.C., for in-
stance, Augustus erected in the Campus Martius the great obelisk
of Montecitorio to serve as the giant gnomon whose shadow
would mark the daylight hours on lines of bronze inlaid into the
marble pavement below. 14 Sometimes, on the other hand, it was
applied to more and more minute devices which eventually evolved
into miniature solaria or pocket dials that served the same pur-
pose as our watches. Pocket sun-dials have been discovered at
Forbach and Aquileia which scarcely exceed three centimeters in
diameter. But at the same time the public buildings of the Urbs
and even the private houses of the wealthy were tending to be
equipped with more and more highly perfected water-clocks.
From the time of Augustus, clepsydrarii and organarii rivalled
each other in ingenuity of construction and elaboration of ac-
cessories. As our clocks have their striking apparatus and our
public clocks their peal of bells, the horologia ex aqua which
Vitruvius describes were fitted with automatic floats which "struck
the hour" by tossing pebbles or eggs into the air or by emitting
warning whistles. 15

The fashion in such things grew and spread during the second
century of our era. In the time of Trajan a water-clock was as
much a visible symbol of its owner's distinction and social status
as a piano is for certain strata of our middle classes today. In
Petronius' romance, which represents Trimalchio as "a highly
fashionable person" (lautissimus homo), his confederates frankly
.justified the admiration they felt for him: "Has he not got a

148 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

clock in his dining-room? And a uniformed trumpeter to keep
telling him how much of his life is lost and gone?" 16 Trimalchio,
moreover, has stipulated in his will that his heirs shall build him
a sumptuous tomb, with a frontage of one hundred feet and a
depth of two hundred, "and let there be a sun-dial in the middle,
so that anyone who looks at the time will read my name whether
he likes it or not." 17 This quaint appeal to posterity would have
no point if Trimalchio's contemporaries had not been accustomed
frequently to consult their clocks. It is clear that the hourly di-
vision of the day had become part and parcel of their everyday
routine. On the other hand, it would be an error to suppose that
the Romans lived with their eyes glued to the needles of their
sun-dials or the floats of their water-clocks as ours are to the
hands of our watches. They were not yet like us the slaves of time,
for they still lacked both perseverance and punctuality.

In the first place, we may be very sure that the agreement be-
tween the sun-dial and the water-clock was still far from being
exact. The gnomon of the sun-dial was correct only in the degree
in which its maker had adapted it to the latitude of the place
where it stood; and as .for the water-clock, whose measurements
lumped all the days of one month together though the sun would
have lighted each differently, its makers could never prevent
certain inaccuracies in its floats creeping in to falsify the cor-
rections they had been able to make in the readings of the gnomon.
If anyone asked the time, he was certain to receive several dif-
ferent answers at once for, as Seneca asserts, it was impossible
at Rome to be sure of the exact hour; and it was easier to get
the philosophers to agree among themselves than the clocks:
"horam non possum certam tibi dicer e: facilius inter philosophos
guam inter horologia convenit" 18 Time at Rome was never more
than approximate.

Time was perpetually fluid or, if the expression is preferred,
contradictory. The hours were originally calculated for daytime;
and even when the water-clock made it possible to calculate the
night hours by a simple reversal of the data which the sun-dial
had furnished, it did not succeed in unifying them. The horologia
ex aqua was built to reset itself, that is, to empty itself afresh for
night and day. Hence a first discrepancy between the civil day,
whose twenty-four hours reckoned from midnight to midnight,
and the twenty-four hours of the natural day which was officially

THE MORNING 149

divided into two groups of twelve hours each, twelve of the day
and twelve of the night. 19

Nor was this all. While our hours each comprise a uniform
sixty minutes of sixty seconds each, and each hour is definitely
separated from the succeeding by the fugitive moment at which
it strikes, the lack of division inside the Roman hour meant that
each of them stretched over the whole interval of time between
the preceding hour and the hour which followed; and this hour
interval instead of being of fixed duration was perpetually elastic,
now longer, now shorter, from one end of the year to the other,
and on any given day the duration of the day hours was opposed
to the length of the night hours. For the twelve hours of the
day were necessarily divided by the gnomon between the rising
and the setting of the sun, while the hours of the night were con-
versely divided between sunset and sunrise; in proportion as the
day hours were longer at one season, the night hours were, of
course, shorter, and vice versa. The day hours and night hours
were equal only twice a year: at the vernal and autumnal equi-
noxes. They lengthened, and shortened in inverse ratio till the
summer and winter solstices, when the discrepancy between them
reached its maximum. At the winter solstice (December 22), when
the day had only 8 hours, 54 minutes of sunlight against a night
of 15 hours, 6 minutes, the day hour shrank to 44% minutes while
in compensation the night hour lengthened to i hour, 15% min-
utes. At the summer solstice the position was exactly reversed;
the night hour shrank to its minimum while the day hour reached
its maximum.

Thus at the winter solstice the day hours were as follows:

I. Hora prima from 7.33 to 8.17 A.M.

II. " secunda " 8.17 " 9.02 "

III. " tertia " 9.02 " 9.46 ".

IV. " quarta " 9.46 " 10.31 "
V. " quinta " 10.31 " 11.15 "

VI. " sexta " 11.15 " 12.00 noon.

VII. " septima " 12.00 " 12.44 P.M.

VIII. " octava " 12.44 " 1.29 "

IX. " nona " 1.29 " 2.13 "

X. " decima " 2.13 " 2.58 "

XI. " undecima " 2.58 " 3.42 "

XII. " duodecima " 3.42 " 4.27 "

ISO DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

At the summer solstice the day hours ran thus:

I. Hora prima from 4.27 to 5.42 A.M.

II. secunda " 5.42 " 6.58 "

III. " tertia " 6.58 " 8.13 '"

IV. " quarta " 8.13 " 9.29 "
V. " quinta " 9.29 " 10.44 "

*VI. " sexta " 10.44 " 12.00 noon.

VII. " septima " 12.00 " 1.15 P.M.

VIII. " octava . " 1.15 " 2.31 "

IX. " nona " 2.31 " 3.46 "

X. " decima 3.46 " 5.02 "

XI. " undecima " 5.02 6.17 "

XII. " duodecima " 6.17 " 7.33 "

The night hours naturally reproduced in rigorous antithesis
the equivalent fluctuations, with their maximum length at the
winter solstice and their minimum at the summer solstice.

These simple facts had a profound influence on Roman life.
For one thing, as the means of measuring the inconstant hours
remained inadequate and empirical throughout antiquity, Roman
life was never regulated with the mathematical precision which
the above schedule, drawn up according to our methods, might
suggest, and which tyrannises over the employment of our time.
Busy as life was in the Urbs, it continued to have an elasticity
unknown to any modern capital. For another thing, as the length
of the Roman day was indefinitely modified by the diversity of
the seasons, life went through phases whose intensity varied with
the dimensions of the daily hour, weaker in the sombre months,
stronger when the fine and luminous, days returned; which is
another way of saying that even in the great swarming city, life
remained rural in style and in pace.

2. THE ROMAN BEGINS THE DAY

To begin with, Imperial Rome woke up as early as any country
village- at dawn, if not before. Let us revert to an epigram of
Martial's which I have already quoted, where the poet enumerates
the causes of insomnia which in his day murdered sleep for the
luckless city dweller. Before the sun was up, he was a martyr
to the deafening din of streets and squares where the metal-
worker's hammer blended with the bawling of the children at
school: "The laughter of the passing throng wakes me and Rome

THE MORNING 151

is at my bed's head. . . . Schoolmasters in the morning do not
let you live; before daybreak, bakers; the hammers of the cop-
persmiths all day." 20 To protect themselves against the clatter,
the wealthy retired to the depths of their houses, isolated by the
thickness of their walls and the garden shrubberies which shut
them in. But even there they were assailed from within by the
teams of slaves whose duty it was to clean the house. Day had
scarcely broken when a crowd of servants, their eyes still swollen
with sleep, were turned loose by the sound of a bell and flung
themselves on the rooms, armed with an arsenal of buckets, of
cloths (ntappae), of ladders (scalae) to reach the ceilings, of
poles (perticae) with sponges (spongiae) attached to the end,
feather dusters, and brooms (scopae). The brooms were made
of green palms or twigs of tamarisk, heather, and myrtle twisted
together. The cleaners scattered sawdust over the floors; then
they swept it off again with the accumulated dirt; they dashed
with their sponges to attack the pillars and cornices; they cleaned,
they scrubbed, they dusted with noisy fervour. If the master of
the house was expecting an important guest, he would often rise
himself to bring them into action and his imperious or fretful
voice would pierce their hullabaloo, as, whip in hand, he shouted :
"Sweep the pavement! Polish up the pillars! Down with that
dusty spider, web and all! One of you clean the flat silver, an-
other the embossed vessels!" 21 Even if the master depended on
a steward to carry out this supervision, he was none the less
awakened by the racket of his servants, unless, like Pliny the
Younger in his Laurentine villa, he had taken the precaution to
interpose the silence of a corridor between his bedchamber and
the commotion of the morning. 22

In general, however, the Romans .were early risers. In the an-
cient town the artificial light was so deplorable that the rich
were as eager as the ppor to profit by the light of day. Each man
took the maxim of the elder Pliny as his motto "To live is to
be awake: profecto enim vita vigilia est." 23 Ordinarily no one
lay in bed of a morning save the young roisterers or the drunkards
who were forced to sleep off their overnight excesses. 24 Even
some of these were up and about by noon, for "the fifth hour" at
which, according to Persius, they made up their minds to go out,
normally finished about n A.M. 25 The "late morning" when
Horace betook himself in state to the Forum, 20 and which was a

IS* DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

luxury Martial could allow himself only in his distant Bilbilis, 27
meant the third or fourth hour, which in summer ended at about
8 or 9 A.M.

The habit of getting up at dawn was so deeply ingrained that
even if a person lay abed late he still woke before daybreak and
took up the thread of his normal occupations in his bed by the
flickering and indifferent light of the wick of tow and wax. From
this light (lucubrum) came the words "lucubratio" and "lucu-
brare" which have given us the English "lucubration." 28 From
Cicero to Horace, from the two Plinys to Marcus Aurelius, dis-
tinguished Romans vied with each other in "lucubrating" every
winter; and the year round the Naturalist, having closed his night
with fiis lucubrations, would wait upon Vespasian before day-
break, when the emperor likewise chose to transact business, in
order to submit reports and open his master's correspondence. 29

There was practically no interval between leaping out of bed
and leaving the house. Getting up was a simple, speedy, instan-
taneous process. There is no denying that the bedchamber (cu-
biculum) had nothing seductive to tempt the occupant to linger.
Its dimensions were habitually kept down to a minimum ; its solid
shutters when shut plunged the room into complete darkness, and
when open flooded it with sun or rain or draughts. It was rarely
adorned with works of art Tiberius almost created a scandal by
decorating his. 30 Normally it possessed no furniture but the couch
(cubile) which gave it its name; possibly a chest (area) in which
materials and denarii could be stored; the chair on which Pliny
the Youngfer would invite his friends and his secretaries to sit
when they came to visit him and on which Martial would throw
his cloak; and finally the chamber pot (lasanum) or the urinal
(scaphium)* 1 the different models are minutely described in
literature, ranging from vessels of common earthenware (matella
fictilis) to others of silver set with precious stones. 82

As for the bed however sumptuous we like to picture its
framework and its fittings the comfort it offered was far from
equalling its costliness. On a base of interwoven strips of webbing
were placed a mattress (torus) and a bolster (culcita, cervical)
whose stuffing (tomentum) was made of straw or reeds among
the poor and among the rich of wool shorn from the Leuconian
flocks in the valley of the Meuse, or even of swan's down. 88 But
there was neither a proper mattress underneath nor sheets above.

THE MORNING 153

The torus was spread with two coverings (tapetia): on one
(stragulum) the sleeper lay, the other he pulled over him (operi-
mentum)* 4 The bed was then spread with a counterpane (lodix)
or a multicoloured damask quilt (polymitum) Finally, at the
foot of the bed, ante torum as the Romans put it, there lay a bed*
side mat (toral) which often rivalled the lodices in luxury. 86

A toral on the pavement of the bedroom was almost obliga-
tory. For the Roman, though he sometimes protected his legs by
a sort of puttees (fasciae), wore nothing corresponding to our
socks or stockings and went barefoot when he had taken off his
Nsandals to go to bed. His normal footwear consisted either of
soleae, a kind of sandal such as Capuchins wear, with the sole
attached by ribbons over the instep, of crepidae, leather sandals
held by a strap passing through their eyelets, of calcei, leather
slippers with crossed leather laces, or of caligae, a type of mili-
tary boot. On the other hand he was no more accustomed to un-
dress completely before going to bed than the oriental of today.
He merely laid aside his cloak, which he either threw on the bed
as an extra covering or flung on the neighbouring chair. 87

The ancients in fact distinguished two types of clothing: that
which they put on first and wore intimately, and that which they
flung around them afterwards. This is the difference between the
Greek endumata and epiblemata; and similarly between the Latin
indumenta, which were worn day and night, and the amictus
which were assumed for part of the day only. 38

First among the indumenta came the subligaculum or licium,
not, as is sometimes supposed, a pair of drawers, but a simple
loin cloth, usually made of linen and always knotted round the
waist. In early days it was perhaps the only undergarment worn
either by nobles or by labourers. Manual workers had no other.
They flung their toga over it, as die-hard conservatives continued
to do even in the days of Caesar and Augustus, proclaiming thus
their attachment to ancient custom. 89 By the second century none
but the athletes were content to appear thus in public. 40 By this
date even workmen had acquired the habit of putting on over
the licium a tunica which became the most important of the in-
dumenta.* 1 The tunic was a kind of long shirt of linen or wool
formed of two widths sewed together. It was slipped over the head
and fastened round the body by a belt. It was draped to fall un-
equally, reaching only to the knees in front but somewhat below

154 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

them behind. 42 Fashion had introduced some variations into a
dress which had at first been uniform for both sexes and for every
social rank. The woman's tunic tended to be longer than the man's
and might even reach to the heel (tunica talaris). 43 The military
tunic was shorter than the civilian's, the ordinary citizen's than
that of the senator which was striped by a broad, vertical band
of purple (tunica laticlavia). Under the empire the Romans not
infrequently wore two tunics, one on top of the other; the under-
tunic was called subucula, and the other, the tunic properly so
called, was the tunica exterior. People sensitive to cold might
wear two subuculae instead of one, or even go the length of wear-
ing (pur tunics, as Augustus is supposed to have done, if we can
believe the details which Suetonius supplies about the caprices
of the emperor. 44 In winter as in summer the tunic had short
sleeves, just covering the top of the arm, and it was not until the
empire that this length could be exceeded with propriety. 45 This
explains why even the slaves were allowed to wear warm gloves
during the great cold, 46 and why it was necessary to have an
amictus above the indumenta.

The specifically Roman amictus of the republic and the early
empire was the cloak known as toga, a word related to the verb
tegere, to cover. It consisted of a large circle of white woolen
material 2.7 metres in diameter, which was distinguished by its
circular shape from all the later varieties derived from the
himation of the Greeks. 47 In a fine passage Leon Heuzey has re-
cently pointed out the antagonistic attitudes of mind which found
expression in these two different forms of dress. 48 With their
natural love for rectilinear architecture, "the Greeks retained
the straight edges and the right angles which the cloth had origi-
nally had in the loom"; and they procured "admirable effects
from these elementary forms whose simplicity was pleasing to
their taste and the clear-cut lines of their mind." The Etruscans,
on the other hand, and after them the Romans, who early adopted
the arch as the basis of their building and who of choice made
their temples on a circular plan, similarly rounded off the angles
of their clothing. They thus achieved "richer and more majestic
adjustments, but a less straightforward and less really beautiful
effect." This toga of unalterable character and irreducible am-
plitude remained the national costume of the Romans throughout
the heyday of the empire, the ceremonial dress inseparable from

THE MORNING 155

every manifestation of their civic activity. So unmistakable was
it, that the Roman residents of Asia took off their togas in order
to conceal their identity from Mithridates. 49

The toga was a garment worthy of the masters of the world,
flowing, solemn, eloquent, but with overmuch complication in its
arrangement and a little too much emphatic affectation in the
self-conscious tumult of its folds. It required real skill to drape
it artfully. Adjusting the toga properly was such a business that
even a magistrate as free from vanity as Cincinnatus could not
hope to achieve success without some help, which this frugal
hero demanded only of his wife Racilia. 50 It required unremitting
attention if the balance of the toga was to be preserved in walk-
ing, in the heat of a discourse, or amid the jostlings of a crowd.
The weight of it was an intolerable burden. 01 Laborious and fre*
quent washings were necessary to preserve its immaculate white-
ness, and repeated washing soon wore it threadbare and con-
demned it to be discarded. 52

In vain the emperors signed decrees attempting to insist on
the toga being worn: 53 Claudius decreed it obligatory for the
tribunal, 54 Domitian for the theatre, 55 Commodus for the amphi-
theatre. 56 At the beginning of the second century at Rome every-
one was trying to flee to the country where he could lay aside the
toga for the paUlum an imitation of the Greek himation, for the
lacerna, which was a coloured pallium, or for the paenula, which
was a lacerna completed by a hood (cucullus). Even in the Urbs
itself the synthesis was substituted for the toga for dining in
company; this was a garment combining the simplicity of the
tunic above with the fullness of the toga below. 58 Even in the
municipia the magistrates would no longer dignify their functions
by wearing the toga, and ordinary citizens wore it only on their
last bed on the day of their funeral. 59

They took good care not to wear the toga when lying on their
bed alive. Putting on the toga, or the amictus which had suc-
ceeded it in popular favour, was the sole operation which gave
trouble on rising in the morning scarcely less trouble then to
the wearers than now to the archaeologists who try to reconstruct
the process. If, like some of the provincial aediles, a man re-
nounced every kind of amictus, or if he postponed till later in the
day the bother of swathing himself artistically in one, his dress-
ing could be accomplished in the twinkling of an eye. He needed

156 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

only to slip on his footgear on the toral. The emperor Vespasian
used to drape himself unaided in half a minute, and the moment
he had put on his calcei he was ready to give audience and set
about the performance of his imperial duties. 60 The Romans of
this period were thus ready to attend to the business of their
public life within a few minutes of getting out of bed.

Their breakfast consisted of a glass of water swallowed in all
haste. 61 They did not waste time in washing for they knew they
would be going to bathe at the end of the afternoon, either in their
private balneum if they were rich enough to have had one in-
stalled in their own house, or else in one of the public thermae.

Only one single villa, that of Diomedes, has been excavated in
Pompeii where the master's bedroom included a zotheca or alcove
equipped with a table and a basin. 62 In the text of Suetonius
where we are allowed to witness the rising of Vespasian, the sub-
ject of a morning wash is passed over in silence; 63 and though
the same Suetonius mentions it in telling of the last hours of
Domitian, his allusion is too elliptic for us to attach much im-
portance to it. 64 Terrified by the prophecy that the fifth hour of
September 18, 96 A.D. the hour at which in fact he died a
bloody death was to be inexorably fatal to him, the emperor had
mewed himself in his room and had not quitted his bed the whole
morning. He remained seated on the bolster beneath which he
had a sword concealed. Then suddenly, at the false news that
the sixth hour had come, when actually the fifth had but begun,
he decided to get up and proceed to the care of his body (ad
corporis curam) in an adjacent room. But Parthenius, his cham-
berlain, who was one of the conspirators, kept him back on the
pretext that a visitor was insisting on making grave revelations
to him in person. Suetonius unfortunately has not specified what
were the cares which he was going to give his body when the
assassins' plot prevented him. The brevity of the allusion, the
readiness with which Domitian was turned aside from his in-
tention, indicate that nothing very serious was intended. The
word sapo in those days was used only for a dye, and the use of
soap in our sense was still unknown, so that at most he may
have meant to tfip his face and hands in fresh water. This was
the limit of the cura corporis of the fourth century which Ausonius
versified in a charming little ode of his Ephemeris, the Occupa-
tions of a Day: "Come, slave, up! Give me my slippers and my

THE MORNING 157

muslin mantle. Bring me the amictus you have got ready for me,
for I am going forth. And pour out the running water that I may
wash my hands, my mouth, my eyes

Da rore fontano abluam
Manus et os et luminat" 6S

After which the poet enters his chapel and, having prayed, sets
out to seek his friends.

3. THE BARBER

The real toilet of the Roman dandy was performed at the hair-
dresser^ (tonsor), to whose care he confided the cut of his beard
and the arrangement of his hair. This was already the essential
cura corporis for Julius Caesar whose fastidiousness as a dandy
Suetonius has not failed to record for us in this 'connection. 60 By
the second century the barber-hairdresser had become a tyrant.
The man who was rich enough to include tonsores in his house-
hold retinue put himself in their hands in the morning and again,
if necessary, in the course of the day.

Those unable to face the considerable expense of keeping a
private hairdresser would go at varying hours, as often as seemed
necessary, to one of the innumerable barbershops in the tabernae
of the city, or which did business in the open for their humbler
customers. 67 Idlers went frequently and dawdled there. If we
consider the time they spent and the anxieties which obsessed
them, it is perhaps hardly fair to call "idlers" men who were con-
tinually busy dividing their attention between the comb anrf
the mirror : "hos tu otiosos vocas inter pectinem speculumque oc-
cupatos?" 68 The crowd which assembled from dawn to the eighth
hour 69 was so great that the tonstrina became a rendezvous, a
club, a gossip shop, an inexhaustible dispensary of information,
a place for arranging interviews and the like. 70 On the other
hand, so motley and so composite was the crowd that few sights
were more picturesque, and from the time of Augustus lovers of
painting seized on it as a subject for genre pictures such as the
Alexandrians had loved. The hairdresser's fee was so generous
that we frequently find in Juvenal's Satires and Martial's Epi-
grams allusion to the ex-barber who has made his pile and has
transmogrified himself into an Eques or a wealthy landed pro-
prietor. 71

158 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

The hairdresser's shop was surrounded with benches on which
the waiting clients sat. Mirrors hung on the walls so that cus-
tomers might give themselves a critical glance on leaving the
chair. 72 In the centre, his clothes sometimes protected by a simple
napkin, large or small (mappa or sudarium), sometimes by a wrap
(involucrum) of cambric (linteum) or of muslin (sindon), the
victim whose turn had come would seat himself on a stool while
the barber, surrounded by his officious assistants (circitores) ,
would cut his hair or, if it had not grown too much since his last
visit, would merely dress it for him in the latest mode of the day.
The fashion of hairdressing was determined by the mode affected
by the sovereign. With the exception of Nero, who liked to mass
his hair artistically, 73 the emperors appear from their coins and
their busts to have conformed, at least down to Trajan, as much
to the example of Augustus, who never granted more than a few
hasty moments to his tonsores, 14 as to the aesthetic ideal ex-
pounded simultaneously by Quintilian and by Martial, both of
whom were equally hostile to long hair and piled-up curls. 75 At
the beginning of the second century the majority of Romans were
therefore content with a simple haircut and a stroke of the comb.
The comb was all the more necessary since the haircut was per-
formed with a pair of iron scissors (forfex) whose two blades
were as innocent of a common pivot as their base was of rings
for the operator's fingers. Its efficiency, therefore, left much to
be desired, and it could not avoid the irregularities which we
call "steps'' and which according to Horace's Epistles exposed the
victim to public derision:

"Si curatus inaequali tonsore capillos
Occurri, rides. . . ." 76

The dandies presently began to prefer curls to the straight
haircut. Hadrian, his son Lucius Caesar, and his grandson Lucius
Verus are all shown in their effigies with artificially-curled hair,
produced either by appropriate manoeuvres of the comb (ftexo
ad pectinem capillo) 11 or by the aid of a calamistrum, a curling-
iron which the ciniflones had heated in its metal sheath under
burning coals, and round which the tonsor twisted the hair with
expert hand. At the beginning of the second century this practice
had become current not only with young men, who could not be
blamed for indulging in the practice, but also among older folk

THE MORNING 159

whose scantier hair lent itself badly to a treatment too flattering
not to be ridiculous:

From one side and from the other [writes Martial] you gather up
your scanty locks and you cover, Marinus, the wide expanse of your
shining bald scalp with the hair from both sides of your head. But
blown about they come back at the bidding of the wind, and return to
themselves and gird your bare poll with big curls on this sid* and on
that. . . . Will you please in simpler fashion confess yourself old, so
as after all to appear so? Nothing is more unsightly than a bald head
with dressed hair. 78

It was part of the tensor's business to complete the youthful
illusion which his clients sought by pouring dye on the curls so
laboriously attained, 79 spraying them with perfume, spreading
make-up cream on the cheeks, and gumming on little circles of
cloth -either to conceal the flaws of an unattractive skin or to
enhance the brilliance of a poor complexion. These spots were
known as splenia lunata or, as we should call them, "patches." 80
These more obvious refinements never ceased to bring down vigor-
ous ridicule on their addicts, from the lampoons of Cicero on the
damp fringes of certain fops among his enemies 81 to the epigrams
launched by Martial against their later imitators: "Constantly
smeared darkly with cassia and cinnamon and the perfumes from
the nest of the lordly phoenix, you reek of the leaden jars of the
perfumer Niceros, and therefore you laugh at us, Coracinus, who
smell of nothing. To smelling of scent I prefer to smell of noth-
ing." 82 Or again: "There is about you always some foreign odour.
This is suspect to me, your being always well-scented." 83 Or:
"Rufus, whose greasy hair is smelt all over Marcellus' theatre
. . . while numerous patches star and plaster his brow." 84

At the particular period with which we are dealing, however,
the daily recurrent task of the tonsor was to trim or shave the
beard. This was' no doubt a custom which had become established
only comparatively late. The Romans, like the Greeks, had for
a long time worn beards as a matter of course. The Greeks cut
theirs, following the example and obeying the command of Alex-
ander. It was a hundred and fifty years before the Romans began
to imitate them. At the beginning of the second century B.C.
Titus Quinctius Flamininus on his proconsular coins and Cato
the Elder in the literary allusions to his censorship and to his
person are both represented as bearded. 85 A generation later the

160 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

number of beards had decreased. Scipio Aemilianus liked to be
shaved every day; and did not give it up even when he ought to
have renounced it in protest against the unjust accusations which
were being levelled at him. 80 Forty years later the fashion he had
set had spread under the dictatorship, as if the spirit of Greek
civilisation from which in its own despite the dictatorship drew
its inspiration had extended its ascendancy from the funda-
mentals of political government to the minutest details of every-
day life. Sulla was clean-shaven. Caesar, his true successor, at-
tached the greatest importance to appearing always freshly
shaved. 87 After he became emperor, Augustus would not have
dreamed of neglecting to submit daily to the barber's razor. By
the end of the first century B.C. nothing but the gravest or most
painful crisis would have induced the great men of the day to
omit a formality which had become for them a state duty: Caesar,
after the massacre of his lieutenants by the Eburones; 88 Cato of
Utica, after the outbreak of the civil war; 80 Anthony after his
check at Modena; 90 Augustus after the fresh disaster of Varus. 91
Under the empire, from Tiberius to Trajan, the principes never
failed to shave; and their subjects would have thought them-
selves unworthy of their imperial masters if they had not fol-
lowed suit.

To tell the truth, shaving was for the Romans a sort of religious
rite. The first time that a young man's beard fell to the barber's
razor was made the occasion of a religious ceremony: the de-
positio barbae. The dates on which the emperors and their rela-
tions performed it have duly been recorded: Augustus himself,
September, 39 B.C.; 92 Marcellus while he was taking part in the
expedition against the Cantabrians, 25 B.C.; 93 Caligula and Nero
at the time that they assumed the toga virilis* 4 Ordinary citizens
copied their doings with scrupulous exactitude. Mourning parents
recorded in an epitaph that their dead son had just "deposited
his beard," in his twenty-third year, at the same age as Au-
gustus; 95 and just as Nero had consecrated the hairs of his first
beard sacrifice in a golden casket offered to Capitoline Jove, so
Trimalchio exhibited to his guests a golden pyx, in which he had
similarly deposited his lanugo, in his private chapel between the
silver statuettes of his lares and a marble statuette of Venus. 96
Poor men for their part had to get along with a pyx of glass;
and in Juvenal's day rich and poor made this solemnity a festival

THE MORNING 161

according to and indeed often beyond their means, with re-
joicings and feastings to which all the friends of the family were
invited. 97

The barber used scissors to cut the beard which was to be
offered as "first fruits" to the divinity; and adolescents whose
chins were still covered only with a more or less abundant down
usually waited till their boyhood was well over before embarking
on their first shave. 98 But once a certain age was passed, no one
but a soldier or a philosopher could decently have ventured any
longer to shrink from the razor. 99 Martial compares unshaven men
to the African he-goats who feed by the shores of Cyniphs be-
tween the two Syrtes. 100 The very slaves were sent off to the
tonsores who operated in the open air on humbler folk, unless
their master for economy invited his own barber to try his hand
on their skin. 101 For no one shaved himself. The clumsy instru-
ments and awkward technique which were all they had at their
disposal forced the Romans to place themselves in the hands of
specialists.

The comment may be made that archaeologists have discovered
numbers of razors in prehistoric and Etruscan ruins, but that by
what at first seems a curious paradox they have found few or
none in their Roman excavations. The explanation is simple. The
razors of Terra Mare and of the Etruscans were of bronze, while
the Roman razor, whether the razor properly so called (novacula)
or the knife which served either for shaving or for cutting the
nails (culter or cultellus), was of iron and has been eaten by
rust. 102 These iron instruments, or jerramenta, to use the generic
name applied to every variety of them, were both fragile and
perishable tools. This, however, was their least serious demerit.
In vain the tonsor whetted them on his hone or whetstone a
laminitana bought in Spain, 103 which he lubricated by spitting on
it; do what he would, the edge of his razor passed ineffectively
and dangerously over a skin which had not been softened before-
hand either by soap-suds or by oil. There is, so far as I know,
but one text which throws any light on these details, and in my
opinion it establishes beyond question that the only lotion ever
applied by the Roman barber to his client's face was water pure
and simple. Plutarch tells a delightful anecdote of the prodigality
of M. Antonius Creticus, father of Anthony the Triumvir. 104 One
day a friend came to beg a loan from him. Now money had a way

162 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of burning a hole in his pocket, and the unfortunate spendthrift
had to confess that his wife held the purse-strings tightly drawn
and had not left him a penny to bless himself with. In this pre-
dicament he thought of a ruse to defeat his impecuniosity and
satisfy his friend. He called to a slave to bring him some water in
a silver bowl, and proceeded to wet his beard as if he were going
to be shaved. Then, making a pretext to dismiss the slave, he
handed the silver basin to his friend, who went off well content.
Obviously the stratagem of Antonius Creticus would have had no
point unless the barber's sole preliminary was to pass clean water
over his face.

In these circumstances it is clear that the barber needed to be
an expert of no common dexterity. It was not until he had served
a long apprenticeship to a master and had learned to handle the
blunt razors of a beginner that he obtained the right to open a
barbershop on his own account. 105 Even then his trade bristled
with difficulties and dangers. The virtuosos who excelled in it
soon acquired a fame which poets did not disdain to commemorate
in their verse. To the memory of such a one Martial composed the
following delicate epitaph:

Within this tomb lies Pantagathus, snatched away in boyhood's years,
his master's grief and sorrow, skilled to cut with steel that scarcely
touched the straggling hairs, and to trim the bearded cheeks. Gentle
and light upon him thou mayst be, O earth, as it behoves thee; lighter
than the artist's hand thou canst not be. 108

Pantagathus unfortunately belonged to the cream of his profes-
sion; most of his colleagues were far from commanding equal
skill. The tonsores of the cross-roads in particular exposed their
humble customers to most disagreeable experiences. A moment
of inattention on their part, an accident in the, street, an un-
expected push or shove from the crowd, the impact of a missile
suddenly thrown, and the barber's hand might slip, inflicting a
wound on his client for which the jurists of Augustus thought it
well to determine the responsibility and assess the damages in
advance. 107 At the beginning of the second century no progress
had been made, and the barber's victims had usually to choose
between a cautious but interminable treatment and the scars of a
speedy but dangerous and bloody operation. The most famous
barbers cultivated an incredible leisureliness. Augustus outwitted

THE MORNING 163

this by unrolling a manuscript or resorting to his stylus and
tablets while the tonsor was attending to him. 108 A hundred years
later the barber's slowness was still the subject of jest: "While
nimble Eutrapelus goes round Lupercus 7 face and trims his cheeks
a second beard grows." 109

A barber, young, but such an artist as was not even Nero's Thalamus to
whom fell the beards of the Drusi, I lent on his request to Rufus once to
smooth his cheeks. While at command he was going over the same
hairs, guiding his hand by the judgment of the mirror, and smoothing
the skin, and making a second thorough clip of the dose-cut hair, my
barber became a bearded man himself. 110

At the hands of the average tonsor the torment did not last so
long but was proportionately more painful:

He who desires not yet to go down to Stygian shades, let him, if he be
wise, avoid barber Antiochus. White arms are mangled with knives less
cruel when the frenzied throng, the votaries of Cybele, raves to Phry-
gian strains; with gentler touch the surgeon Alcon cuts the knotted
hernia and lops away broken bones with a workman's hand. . . . These
scars, what'er they are thou numberest on my chin, scars such as are
fixed on some time-worn boxer's face these a wife formidable with
wrathful talons wrought not 'tis Antiochus 1 steel and hand accursed.
Alone among all beasts the he-goat has good sense: bearded he lives to
escape Antiochus. 111

These gashes were so frequent that Pliny the Elder has pre-
served for us the receipt for the plaster which was found suitable
to staunch the bleeding, a receipt unpleasant enough: spider's
webs soaked in oil and vinegar. 112

To be honest, it required courage of no* mean order to go to
the barber's; inconvenience for inconvenience, suffering for suf-
fering, the Romans often preferred to have recourse to other
expedients, like Martial's Gargilianus: "With salve you smooth
your cheeks, and with hair-eradicator your bald pate: surely you
are not afraid, Gargilianus, of a barber?" 11S Some went daily to
the dropacista: "You stroll about sleek with curled hair . . . you
are smoothed with depilatory daily. . . . Cease to call me brother,
Charmenion, lest I call you sister!" 114 The dropax used for these
purposes was a depilatory liniment made of a resin and pitch;
alternatively the face might be rubbed with psilothrum, an in-
gredient procured from the white vine, or some other of the pastes

164 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

formed with a base of ivy gum, ass's fat, she-goat's gall, bat's
blood, or powdered viper, all of which Pliny lists for us. 115 Some
preferred to take the Naturalist's advice and combine these appli-
cations with direct epilation, and like Julius Caesar before them,
or like women nowadays, to have their hairs individually plucked
out with tweezers (volsella) . 11G Some dandies pushed endurance
to the point of begging their tonsor to use simultaneously on their
skin scissors, razor, and depilatory-pincers according to con-
venience, incurring the gibe of Martial as they left the tonstrina:
'Tart of your jaw is clipped, part is shaved, part is plucked of
hairs. Who would imagine this' to be a single head?" m

By the middle of the century the bulk of Romans were begin-
ning to revolt against their enslavement to the barber. When
therefore the emperor Hadrian either wishing, as his biographer
says, to conceal an ugly scar, or simply hoping to shake off an
intolerable yoke decided to let grow the beard which on coins,
busts, and statues decorates his chin, his subjects and successors
hastily vied with each other in following his example. 118 From that
moment, what had for two-and-a-half centuries been the essential
cura corporis of men in Rome disappeared from the daily pro-
grain, leaving no trace and causing jio regret.

4. THE MATRON DRESSES

So much for the toilet of the Roman man. This covers, however,
only half our subject. To tackle the other half and watch the
Roman woman getting up, we must move over to her quarters and
for the greater part of the time change the mise en sctne.

We may recall the amusing chapter of the Physiologic du
Manage which learnedly weighs the advantages and disadvant-
ages of the various systems a couple must choose between if
they are to maintain the harmony of their married life: one bed
in 'one room, or two beds in the same room, or two beds in two
separate rooms. Balzac tolerates the first, prefers the last, and
absolutely bans the compromise of the twin beds. It so happens
that the great French novelist has thus, without suspecting it,
codified the customs which prevailed in Imperial Rome.

Only on the first floor of one house recently excavated at
Herculaneum have we discovered some cubicula with two beds.
And in this case it seems more than probable thrt they belonged
to an inn, so there is nothing to prove that the two beds were de-

THE MORNING 165

signed for a married couple. Literary texts give no hint of several
beds together in one room except in the overcrowded cenacula
(or sub-let) apartments of the insulae. Everywhere they record
either the community of the lectus genialis or two separate rooms
for the married pair. The couple made their choice of one or the
other arrangement according to the space available in their house,
that is to say, in the last analysis, according to their social stand-
ing. Humble folk and the modest middle classes had no room to
spare in their homes and did not expect anything but a shared
bed. In one of his epigrams Martial poses as being willing to
accept the hand of a rich old woman, on the condition that they
need never sleep together: "Communis tecum nee mihi lectus
erit" 119 But on the other hand he enlarged tenderly on the mutual
affection which Calenus and Sulpicia preserved during the fifteen
years of their married life, and dwelt without undue prudery on
the amorous ecstasies which were witnessed by their nuptial bed
and by the lamp "copiously sprinkled with the perfumes of
Niceros." 12

The great aristocrats, however, organised their life in such a
way that each of the married pair could enjoy independence in the
home. Thus we always find Pliny the Younger alone in the room
when he wakes "round about the first hour, rarely earlier, rarely
later" ; in the silence and solitude and darkness which reign round
his bed behind the closed shutters, he feels himself "wonderfully
free and abstracted from those outward objects that dissipate
attention and left to my own thoughts." 121 This was his favourite
time for composition. We must, however, imagine that his beloved
Calpurnia was sleeping and getting up in another room, where
he would join her when she was under his roof, and toward which
his steps would turn of their own accord when she was absent. 122

It was evidently the right thing in the higher society of those
days for man and wife to sleep apart, and the upstarts were not
slow to copy the great in this matter. Petronius notes this eccen-
tricity in his novel. Trimalchio swaggers in front of his guests,
boasting the size of the house he has had built for himself. He has
his own bedroom where he sleeps; his wife's he calls "the nest of
this she-viper." 12S But Trimalchio is deceiving either himself or
us. Nature and habit are too strong for him; they reassert them-
selves at the gallop. In practice, one of the rooms ordered from
the architect remains unused. Whatever he may pretend, he does

166 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

not sleep by himself in haughty isolation, but shares in another
room the bed of Fortunata. Like the French husbands who
punctiliously address their wives as vous in company, but let an
occasional tu inadvertently escape them of a sudden, he ingenu-
ously betrays himself in the passage where, while indulging
liberally in smutty confidences, he blatantly attributes his in-
somnia to the unseemly noises emitted by the weighty "better
half" at his side: "Why do you laugh, Fortunata? It is you who
prevent my closing an eye the whole night." 124

It matters little either way. Whether she slept in a room of her
own or shared a room with him, the Roman woman's morning
toilet closely resembled her husband's. Like him, she kept on her
undergarments in bed at night: her loin cloth, her brassiere
(strophium, mamillare) or corset (capitium), her tunic or tunics,
and sometimes, to the despair of' her husband, a mantle over all. 125
Consequently she, like him, had nothing to do when she got up,
but to draw on her slippers on the toral and then drape herself in
the amictus of her choice; and her preliminary ablutions were as
sketchy as his. Pending the hour of the bath, the essential cur a
cor pom for her as for him consisted of attentions which we should
consider accessory. In matters of toilet the Roman lady of the
empire resembled the oriental lady of today; she considered the
superfluous thing the most necessary.

It is the jurists who, in laying down an inventory of female
inheritance, best help us to arrange in order the unequal and suc-
cessive planes on which the Roman woman's coquetry set up its
batteries. The personal objects which a woman left behind her
were legally divided into three categories; toilet articles (mundus
muliebris) 9 adornments (ornamenta), and clothes (vestis). 12 *
Under the heading vestis the lawyers enumerate the different
garments which women wore. To the toilet belonged everything
she used for keeping clean (mundus muliebris est quo mutter
mundior fit): her wash-basins (matellae), her mirrors (specula)
of copper, silver, sometimes even of glass backed not with mercury
but with lead; and also, when she was fortunate enough to be able
to disdain the hospitality of the public bath, her bathtub
(lavatio). Her "adornments" included the instruments and
products which contributed to her beautification, from her combs
and pins and brooches (fibulae) to the unguents she applied to

THE MORNING 167

her skin and the jewels with which she adorned herself. At bathing
time her mundus and her ornamenta were both needed ; but when
she first got up in the morning it was enough for her to "adorn"
herself without washing: "ex somno statim ornata non com-
mundata"

She began by dressing her hair. At the period which is now
engaging our attention this was no small affair. Women had long
since given up the simplicity of the republican coiffure restored
to honour for a space by Claudius in which a straight, even
parting divided the hair in front and a simple chignon gathered
it together at the back. They were no longer content with braids
raised on pads above the forehead, such as we see in the busts of
Li via and Octavia. With Messalina there came in those compli-
cated and high-piled methods of hairdressing which are familiar
to us from illustrations of women during the Flavian period. In
later years, though the ladies of the court who set the fashion,
Marciana, sister of Trajan, Matidia, his niece, gave up these
styles, they nevertheless preserved the custom of dressing their
hair in diadems as high as towers. "Behold," says Statius in one
of his Silvae, "behold the glory of this sublime forehead and the
stagings of her coiffure." Juvenal makes merry in his turn about
the contrast between the height of a certain fine lady and the
pretentiousness of her piled-up hair to which there seemed no
limit: "So numerous are the tiers and stories piled one upon
another on her head! In front you would take her for an An-
dromache; she is not so tall behind; you would not think it was
the same person." 127

Roman women were as dependent on their ornatrix as their
husbands on the tonsor. The skill of the tire-woman was indis-
pensable for erecting these elaborate scaffoldings, and the epitaphs
of many ornatriccs tell us the dates of their death and the fami-
lies by whom they were employed. 128 The wojnan had to devote as
much time to her stance with the ornatrix as her husband had to
give to the barber; and she suffered as much on these occasions as
he did, especially if like the Julia of whom Macrobius tells she
bade her tire-woman pitilessly tear out the greying hairs. 129 The
post of ornatrix was far from being a sinecure. Not infrequently
the torturer became a martyr, if perchance her mistress, worn out
by holding one pose everlastingly, suddenly decided that the result

i68 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of so much suffering still left much to be desired. Epigrams and
satires are full of the cries of angry matrons and the groans of
serving women in distress.

If Madame has an appointment and wishes to be turned out more nicely
than usual [writes Juvenal] ... the unhappy Psecas who does her
hair will have her own hair torn, and the clothes stripped off her
shoulders and her breasts. "Why is this curl standing up?" she asks,
and then down comes a thong of bull's hide to inflict chastisement for
the offending ringlet! 180

Martial for his part relates: "One curl of the whole round of hair
had gone astray, badly fixed by an insecure pin. This crime
Lalage avenged with the mirror in which she had observed it and
Plecusa, smitten, fell because of those savage locks!" m Happy,
in these circumstances, was the ornatrix whose mistress was bald!
With a minimum of risk she could adjust the artificial tresses
(crines, galerus, corymbium), or at need an entire wig. Sometimes
the false hair was dyed blond with the sapo of Mainz obtained by
blending goat's fat with beech ash; 132 sometimes it was an ebony
black, like the cut hair imported from India in such quantities
that the imperial government entered capilli Indict among the
commodities which had to pay customs duty. 133

The ornatrix 's duties did not end there, however. She had still
to remove her mistress's superfluous hair, and above all to "paint"
her: white on brow and arms with chalk and white lead; red on
cheeks and lips with ochre, fucus, or the lees of wine; black with
ashes (fuligo) or powdered antimony on the eyebrows and round
the eyes. 134 The tire-woman's palette was a collection of pots and
flagons, Greek vases and alabaster jars, of gutti and pyxes from
which as ordered she extracted liniments, pomades, and make-up.
The mistress of the house normally kept this arsenal locked in a
cupboard in the nuptial room (thalamus). In the morning she
spread out everything on the table beside the powdered horn
which, following Messalina's example, she used to enamel her
teeth. 185 Before calling her ornatrices to get to work, she took care
to secure the door, for she knew from Ovid that art does not
beautify a woman's face unless it be concealed. 188 When she set
out for the bath she took all her apparatus with her, each pot and
jar in its own compartment in a special little box, sometimes made
of solid silver, which was called by the generic name of capsa or
alabastrotheca; these various jars contained her daytime face,

THE MORNING 169

which she made up on rising, made up again after her bath, and
did not un-make until after nightfall at the last moment before
going to bed: "You lie stored away in a hundred caskets, and your
face does not sleep with you!" 137

Once made up, the fashionable lady, always assisted by her
ornatrices, chose her jewels, set with precious stones, and put them
on one by one: a diadem on her hair, and ear-rings in her ears; a
collar (monile) or trinkets (catettae) round her neck; a pendant
on her breast; bracelets (armillae) on her wrists; rings on her
fingers, and circlets on her ankles (periscelides) like those which
the Arab women of the sheik's tent wear. 138 Next her chamber-
women (a veste) hastened to the rescue and helped to dress her.
They slipped over her head her long upper tunic (the stola),
sign of her exalted rank, round the hem of which was stitched a
braid (instita) embroidered in gold. They tied her belt (zona),
and finally enveloped her either in a long shawl which covered her
shoulders and reached down to her feet (the supparum), or in
the palla the woman's counterpart of the man's pallium a big
square cloak with rhythmic folds and of some dazzling colour.

Woman's dress in Rome was not distinguished from man's by
the cut, but rather by the richness of the material and the bril-
liance of the colour. To linen and wool she preferred the cotton
stuffs that came from India after the Parthian peace, assured by
Augustus and confirmed by the victories of Trajan, had guaran-
teed the security of imports; above all she loved the silks which
the mysterious Seres exported annually to the empire from the
country which we nowadays call China. Since the reign of Nero
silk caravans had come by the land routes across Asia, then from
Issidon Scythica (Kashgar) to the Black Sea, or else through
Persia and down the Tigris and Euphrates to the Persian Gulf, or
by boat down the Indus and then by ship to the Egyptian ports of
the Red Sea. Silk materials were not only more supple, lighter,
and iridescent, they also lent themselves better than all others to
skilful manipulation. The affectores with their ingredients rein-
forced the original colours; the injector es denaturalised them;
and the various dyers, the purpurarii, flammarii, crocotarii,
violarii, knew cunning dyes equalling in number the vegetable,
animal, and mineral resources at their disposal; chalk and soap-
wort and salt of tartar for white; saffron and reseda for yellow;
for black, nut-gall; woad for blue; madder, archil, and purple
for dark and lighter shades of red. Mindful of Ovid's counsels/ 90

170 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

the matrons adapted their complexions to the colours of their
dresses and harmonised them so skilfully that when they went
into the city they lit the streets with the bravery of their multi-
coloured robes and shawls and mantles, whose brilliance was often
further enhanced by dazzling embroideries like those which
adorned the splendid palla of black in which Isis appeared to
Apuleius! 140

It was the matron's business to complete her costume with
various accessories foreign in their nature to man's dress, which
further accentuated the picturesqueness of her appearance. While
a man normally wore nothing on his head, or at most, if the rays
of the sun were too severe or the rain beat too fiercely down, threw
a corner of his toga or pallium over his head or drew down the
hood (cucullus) of his cloak (paenida), the Roman woman, if not
wearing a diadem or mitra, passed a simple bandeau (vitta) of
crimson through her hair, no longer imprisoned in its net, or else a
tutulus similrr to the bandeau of the fiaminicae, which broadened
in the centre to rise above the forehead in the shape of a cone. She
often wore a scarf (jocale) knotted at the neck. The mappa
dangling from her arm served to wipe dust or perspiration from
her face (orarium, sudarium). We must, however, beware of
assuming that the practice of blowing the nose came in early, for
the only Latin word which can fairly be translated as handker-
chief (muccinium) is not attested before the end of the third
century. 141 In one hand she often flourished a fan of peacocks'
feathers (flabellum), with which she also brushed away the flies
(muscarium). In fine weather she carried in her other hand, unless
she entrusted it to a serving woman by her side (pedisequa) or to
her escort, a sunshade (umbella, umbraculum), usually covered
in bright green. She had no means of closing it at will, as we can
ours, so she left it at home when there was a wind. 142

Thus equipped, "the fair" could face the critical eye of their
fellow women and challenge the admiration of the passers-by. But
it is certain that the complexity of their array, combined with a
coquetry not peculiar to their day, must have drawn out the time
demanded by their morning toilet far beyond that needed by their
husbands. This was, hqwever, a matter of no account, for the
women of Rome were not busy people like their men, and to
confess the truth they took no part in the public life of Rome
except in its hours of leisure.

VII

OCCUPATIONS

i. THE DUTIES OF A "CLIENT"

N Trajan's Rome women spent most
of their time indoors. If they were
poor they attended to the work of
the household, until the hour when
they could go to the public baths
which were reserved for them. If
they were rich and had a large
household staff to relieve them of
domestic cares, they had nothing to
do but go out when the fancy took
them, pay visits to their women
friends, take a walk, attend public spectacles, or later go out to
dinner. The men on the other hand rarely stayed at home. If they
had to earn their bread, they hurried off to their business, which
in all trade guilds began at dawn. Even if they were unemployed
they were no sooner out of bed than they were in the grip of the
duties inseparable from being a "client." For it was not only the
freedmen who were dependent on the good graces of a patron.
From the parasite do-nothing up to the great aristocrat there was
no man in Rome who did not feel himself bound to someone more
powerful above him by the same obligations of respect, or, to use
the technical term, the same obsequium, that bound the ex-slave
to the master who had manumitted him. 1

The patronus for his part was in honour bound to welcome his
client to his house, to invite him from time to time to his table,
to come to his assistance, and to make him gifts. To clients who
were in actual want the patron distributed food (s par tula) ; which
they carried off in a basket or more often, to avoid the trouble this
entailed, he gave them small presents of money when they called.
In Trajan's time these customs were so universal that the number

172 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of clients scarcely varied from one house to another, and a sort of
sportula tariff had become established in the Urbs: six-and-a-
quarter sesterces per head per day. 2 How many briefless bar-
risters, how many professors without pupils, how many artists
without orders reckoned this meagre dole as their main source of
revenue! 8 Clients who also practised a trade supplemented their
earnings by the patron's dole, and in order not to arrive too late
at their workshop they ran round to their patron to fetch it be-
fore daybreak. 4 As the importance of a magnate depended on the
size of his clientele, a man would have tarnished his reputation
if he had preferred a long morning in bed to the pleasure of the
mob at his morning receptions. Such relaxation might pass in the
provinces, in a distant spot like Bilbilis, for instance; but in Rome
the great man would not dare to be inattentive to the complaints
of one, the demands of another, the salutations of all. 5

A severe and meticulous code of etiquette regulated this
obligatory attendance. First, though a client was free to come on
foot rather than in a litter, he could not decently appear without
a toga; and this strict insistence on ceremonial dress weighed so
heavily on his budget that it would soon have eaten up his
sportulae if it had not become the fashion for the patron to take
advantage of some solemn occasion to present him with a new
toga in addition to the five or six pounds of silverware which he
reckoned on receiving each December, when the Saturnalian gift
giving came round. 6 Secondly, clients were bound to wait their
turn patiently, and this depended not on the order of their arrival
but on their social status; the praetor came before the tribune,
the eques before the plain citizen, the freedman before the slave. 7
Finally, the client had to take great care in addressing his patron
not to call the great man simply by his name but to give him the
title of dominus failure to observe this detail might cause him to
return home empty handed: "This morning I address you, as it
chanced, by your own name, nor did I add 'My Lord,' Caecilianus.
Do you ask how much such casual conduct has cost me? It has
robbed me of a hundred farthings." 8

Each morning, therefore, Rome awoke to the coming and going
of clients discharging these customary politenesses. The humblest
of all multiplied their attendances to collect as many sportulae as
possible; the richest were not exonerated from paying client calls
because they had first received some. For however high a man

OCCUPATIONS 173

might climb in the Roman hierarchy, there was always someone
above him to claim his homage. There was in fact no one in Rome,
save the emperor alone, who recognised none greater than himself.
The women were at least exempt from this merry-go-round of
salaams. They neither held court nor received it. In the second
century the only exceptions to this rule were widows anxious to
carry in person their tale of woe or their requests to the patron of
their dead husband, and the wives of certain rapacious beggars
who hbped by ostentatious sycophancy to cadge some supple-
mentary alms and therefore made their wives accompany them in
a litter on their round of calls. Juvenal does not stint his scorn
for these self-interested manoeuvres: "Here is a husband going
the round followed by a sickly or pregnant wife; another by a
clever and well-known trick claims alms for a wife who is not
there, pointing in her stead to a closed and empty chair, 'My
Galla's in there/ says he; 'let's be off quick' 'Galla, put out
your head!' 'Don't disturb her, she's asleep!' " 9 The ruse is so
clumsy that we wonder whether Juvenal has not merely invented
it. Real or fictitious, however, it gives us an idea that the Roman
matron may have been reluctant to follow her husband of a morn-
ing in his round of client visits.

2. BUSINESSMEN AND MANUAL LABOURERS

The role of client played, everyone got busy with the day's
work. The Imperial Rome where the court resided with the
senators and the bureaucrats of- a far-flung tentacular adminis-
tration was assuredly the city of "rentiers'' people of means,
which Rostovtzeff has called it. 10 Men of means were the large
landlords whose land wealth in the provinces had gained them
admission to the 'Curia and entailed their residence in Rome; 11
men of means, the scribes attached to the offices of the various
magistrates, whose posts were bought and sold like those of the
French monarchy under the ancien regime; 12 men of means, no
less, the administrators and shareholders of the tax-gathering
societies whose tenders were guaranteed by capital funds and
whose profits swelled their revenues; men of means, again, the
innumerable functionaries punctually paid by the Exchequer, who
impressed on every part of the imperial government the master's
seal; men of means, the 150,000 paupers whom Annona fed at
State expense, idlers chronically out of work and well satisfied to

i 7 4 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

be so, who limited their toil to claiming once a month the pro-
visions to which they had once for all established a right until their
death.

But at the same time there was another aspect of Rome. The
presence in the capital of these "men of means," officials, bureau-
crats, or proletarians, did not deprive the city of its character of
economic metropolis. Rome's political supremacy, her gigantic
urban development, condemned her to display intense and un-
remitting activity not only in speculation and trade but in varied
manufactures and productive work. Let us reflect that all the
roads of Italy led to Rome, and all the lines of Mediterranean
navigation, and that Rome, Queen of the World, attracted the
best of the earth's products. She arrogated to herself the financing
and direction of the world's activities and claimed the right to
consume the world's riches. It is obvious that she had to toil
unceasingly after her fashion to maintain this domination.

The heart-breaking comprehensiveness of this systematic ex-
ploitation is attested by the Romans themselves, and breathes
from the crumbled ruins of some of their monuments. At the very
beginning of the poem which Petronius has linked to his romance,
he has described it for us: 18

The world entire was in the hands of the victorious Romans. They
possessed the earth and the seas and the double field of stars, and were
not satisfied. Their keels, weighed down with heavy cargoes, ploughed
furrows in the waves. If there was afar some hidden gulf, some unknown
continent, which dared to export gold, it was an enemy and the Fates
prepared murderous wars for the conquest of new treasures. Vulgarised
joys had no more charm, nor the pleasures worn threadbare in the re-
joicings of the plebs. The simple soldier caressed the bronzes of
Corinth. . . . Here the Numidians, there the Seres, wove for the Roman
new fleeces, and for him the Arab tribes plundered their steppes.

Such are the images which float before our eyes as we gaze on
what remains to us of the Forum of Ostia, the port of Rome.

The Forum consists of a vast esplanade more than one hundred
metres long and over eighty metres wide. 14 In the middle rises a
temple which I was fortunate enough to identify with that of
Annona Augusta, that is to say, the Divinity of Imperial Sup-
plies. 1 * Along the side which faces the entrance to the sanctuary
runs a portico supported on columns of cipollino, which backs on
to the stage of the town's theatre, and in its shade the spectators

OCCUPATIONS 175

of long ago were wont to stretch their legs. The three other sides
were enclosed by a wall fronted by a double colonnade of brick
faced with stucco, onto which opened a series of sixty-one small
rooms separated from each other by a wooden partition resting on
a foundation of masonry. From their uniform appearance and
identical dimensions (approximately four metres by four) these
little rooms all served one and the same purpose. What this pur-
pose was has been revealed by the series of mosaics black cubes
on a white ground which paved the colonnade in front of each.
These mosaics with their figures and inscriptions introduce us into
the corresponding rooms and assign them to one or another of the
various professional associations which were installed there by
permission of <the Roman authorities. At the eastern end the
caulkers and the ropemakers had their statio; in the next room
the furriers; next came the wood merchants, whose name is en-
closed in a dovetail cartouche; then the corn measurers (the
mensores frumentarii), one of whom is shown performing his
duties, one knee on the ground, diligently trying to divide the
contents of a modius or regulation bushel exactly with his scraping
tool or rutellum. At the opposite end was the statio of the weighers
or sacomarii, whose business was complementary to that of the
mensores. In 124 B.C. the weighers here dedicated to the genius
of their office 10 a charming carved altar which is now exhibited in
the Museo Nazionale delle Terme. This leaves little doubt that
this statio and the other similar ones were formerly dedicated to
some cult. All the others belonged to the corporations of fitters
(navicularii) , who were further distinguished among themselves
only by their city of origin. There were the fitters of Alexandria,
for instance, the fitters of Narbonne and Aries in Gaul, those of
Cagliari and Porto-Torres in Sardinia. There were those, of cele-
brated or forgotten ports in northern Africa; Carthage, whose
mercantile fleet the mosaic artist has stylised; Hippo-Diarrhytus,
the modern Bizerta; Curbis, now Courba to the north of the
Gulf of Hammamet; Missua, now Sidi Daud, south-west of Cape
Bon; Gummi, now Bordj Cedria, at the base of the Gulf of
Carthage. There were the fitters of Musluvium, now Sidi Rekane,
between Ziama and Bougie, whose somewhat complicated and yet
highly instructive armorial bearings include fish, a cupid astride
a dolphin, and two female heads, one of which is almost effaced
while the other is crowned with ears of corn and has a harvest

176 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

woman's sickle at its side. And finally there were the fitters of
Sabratha, the port of the desert whence the ivory of Fezzan was
exported, symbolised by an elephant below the name of its sea-
men. Incomplete though this enumeration is, it may seem over-
detailed to the reader. But if, instead of merely reading through a
list of place-names, you decipher them yourself at Ostia, and
yourself step on these naive pictures in which each of the corpo-
rations tried by a sly touch to define its business and evoke the
memory of its distant home, you cannot fail to be seized with
admiration before the spacious and impressive reality which these
modest tokens represent. It is true that they explain to us the
purpose of the rooms on the threshold of which they lie, little
chapels of co-operative brotherhoods or, if we prefer so to in-
terpret them, simple resting-places where the ideal procession of
guilds continually passed round their goddess Annona and where
the flame of their civic religion burned. But apart from the
esplanade which they adorn, their lines embrace all the expanse
of land and sea between the Isthmus of Suez and the Pillars of
Hercules. And suddenly you see the throngs of people, strangers
to each other, born in far distant lands, rowing to meet each other
here in answer to the needs of Rome, and you feel that there
gravitates for ever round this unforgettable enclosure not only
the mass of goods which Rome appropriated for herself in every
corner of the earth but the cortege of docile nations whom she
had consecrated to her service.

Into her three ports of Ostia, Portus, and the emporium be-
neath the Aventine poured the tiles and bricks, the wines and
fruits of Italy; the corn of Egypt and Africa; the oil of Spain;
the venison, the timbers, and the wool of Gaul; the cured meats
of Baetica; the dates of the oases; the marbles of Tuscany, of
Greece, and of Numidia; the porphyries of the Arabian Desert;
the lead, silver, and copper of the Iberian Peninsula; the ivory of
the Syrtes and the Mauretanias, the gold of Dalmatia and of
Dacia; the tin of the Cassiterides, now the Scilly Isles, and the
amber of the Baltic; the papyri of the valley of the Nile; the
glass of Phoenicia and of Syria; the stuffs of the Orient; the
incense of Arabia; the spices, the corals, and the gems of India;
the silks of the Far East. 17

In the city and its suburbs the sheds of the warehouses
(horrea) stretched out of sight. Here accumulated the provisions

OCCUPATIONS 177,

that filled Rome's belly, the stores that were the pledge of her
well-being and of her luxury. The excavations undertaken in 1923
by the late Prince Giovanni Torlonia have revealed the im-
portance of the horrea of the Portus of Trajan; though only one-
third of the area covered in Hadrian's day by the horrea of Ostia
has so far been excavated, they already cover some ten hectares.
The discovery of the ancient Roman horrea, the number and
extent of which are indicated in the literature of the time, has in
fact only been begun. 18 Some of these specialised in a single type
of goods: the horrea candelaria stored only torches, candles, and
tallow; the horrea chart aria on the Esquiline were consecrated to
rolls of papyrus and quires of parchment; while the horrea
piperataria near the Forum were piled with the supplies of pepper,
ginger, and spices convoyed there by the Arabs.

Most of the horrea, however, were a sort of general store where
all kinds of wares lay cheek by jowl. They were differentiated by
the name of the place they occupied or the name they had in-
herited from their first proprietor and retained even when they
had passed into the hands of the Caesars the horrea Nervae
flanked the Via Latina; the horrea Ummidiana lay on the Aven-
tine; the horrea Agrippiniana between the Clivus Victoriae and
the Vicus Tuscus on the fringe of the Forum; others were grouped
between the Aventine and the Tiber. Then there were the horrea
Seiana, the horrea Lolliana, and the most important of all the
horrea Galbae, whose foundation went back to the end of the
second century B.C. The horrea Galbae were enlarged under the
empire and possessed rows of tabernae ranged round three large
intermediate courtyards which covered more than three hectares.
In these tabernae were stocked not only wirie and oil but all sorts
of materials and provisions, at least if we are to judge by the
inscriptions deciphered by the epigraphists indicating the mer-
chants to whom these "granaries" gave shelter: in one place a
woman fish merchant (piscatrix), in another a merchant of
marbles (marmorarius) , farther off an outfitter with tunics and
mantles for sale (sagarius).

It is clear that with such an immense extent of warehouse room
to which were added in the first years of the second century
B.C. the central halls of Trajan's market 19 the Rome of the
Antonines where antiquity had both its bank and its stock ex-
change was also the centre of the world's commerce. If Rome did

1 78 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

not know anything of what we call "Great Industry," she at least
mobilised alongside her general staff of financiers and large-scale
merchants a whole army of employees in her offices, of retailers
in her shops, of artisans in her workshops, of the labourers neces-
sary for the maintenance of her buildings and monuments, and of
dockers to unload, store, and handle her colossal imports. Finally
skilled workmen were needed to submit heavy raw materials as
well as more delicate merchandise to a final transformation before
they were handed on to the consumer. For Rome's distant sub-
ject peoples and those still more distant with whom they traded
both within and without the imperial frontiers exhausted or en-
riched themselves to provide the city with what she demanded
from every corner of the earth.

Some idea of the extent and variety of Roman trade can be
gained by merely reading through the list of the corporations of
Rome, drawn up by Waltzing at the beginning of the fourth
volume of his masterly work. 20 More than one hundred and fifty
of them have been traced and accurately defined, and this is in
itself enough to prove the mighty volume of business in which
an aristocracy of patrons and a plebs of employees collaborated
within one group, though it is impossible for us now always to
distinguish the merchant from the financier, the trader from the
master of industry, the manufacturer from the retailer. Among the
wholesalers, the magnarii of corn, of wine, and of oil; among the
shippers, the domini navium, who built, equipped, and maintained
whole fleets, the engineers and repairers of boats (fabri navales
et cur at ores navium), it is impossible to draw a hard and fast line
between the middleman and the capitalist.

The organisation of food supplies was split up in the course of
its natural development into a multitude of different specialist
lines. Some groups represented retailers who had nothing to do
but distribute their wares: purveyors of lupines (lupinarii), of
fruits (fructuarii) , and of melons (peponarii). Others were com-
posed of people who had taken the trouble to produce or procure
the goods they sold : the olitores, who were at once greengrocers
and market gardeners; the piscatores, both fishermen and fish-
mongers. The greater number of these lines involved the exercise
of a real trade. The travelling vinarii went from vicus to vicus
with a. whole battery of barrels and jars (amphorae) piled on their
carts. The tavern-keepers (thermopolae) offered in their bowls

OCCUPATIONS 179

cunning blends of wine and water which they then brought to the
required temperature. A mere glance at the bas-reliefs which
decorate the famous tomb of Eurysaches shows that in a great
bakery the baker or pistor was assisted by a miller (moll-
narius). 21 The pastry-cooks (siliginarii) , the confectioners (pastil-
larii), and the inn-keepers (caupones) won customers for their
counters or their tables only by the reputation they established
for care and skill in carrying out their receipts.

Passing to the luxury trades, we observe the labour and tech-
nical skill which they exacted at every turn: the perfumers and
druggists (pigmentarii) boasted of the mixtures they had pre-
pared; the mirror sellers had polished the mirrors hung from
their shop-fronts; the florists (rosarii, violarii) had arranged the
bouquets on their stalls to please the passers-by and had woven
the wreaths which were to be found at the coronarii's; the ivory
vendors (eborarii) knew the art of working the tusks received
from the African hunter; the sellers of rings (anularii) and pearls
(margaritarii) , the goldsmiths (brattarii inauratores) , and the
jewellers (aurifices) had all their several skills. In the prof essions
which had to do with dress, there was none where sale and manu-
facture were separate. The lintearii, for instance, stiffened their
own lawns; the robemakers (vestarii) and the cloakmakers
(sagarii), the shoemakers (sutores), the makers of men's boots
(caligarii) and of women's boots (fabri soliarii baxiarii), one and
all manufactured the goods they sold. Nor must we overlook all
the humbler, subsidiary industries which hung on the skirts of
the clothing trade, employing the washermen (fontani), the
fullers (fullones), the dyers (tinctores, afectores, infectores),
the more finely-skilled embroiderers (plumarii) and manipu-
lators of silk (serarii) who introduced threads of cotton into the
silken tissues which from the reign of Claudius on China regu-
larly sent with the monsoon.

There were a peculiarly large number of corporations in Rome
whose members themselves produced the goods which they offered
to the public; others had nothing to offer but their manual serv-
ices (operae). Among the former we may reckon the tanners
(corarii), the furriers (pelliones), the ropemakers (restiones),
the caulkers (stuppatores) , the carpenters and cabinet-makers
(citrarii), the metal workers in bronze and iron (fabri aerarii,
f errant). In the second category we may include the building

i8o DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

corporations: the wreckers (subrutor es), the masons (structores) ,
the timber workers (fabri tignarii) ; the workers responsible for
land transport: muleteers (muliones), those in charge of pack
animals (iumentarii) , waggoners (catabolenses) , carters (vec-
tuarii), drovers (cisiarii); those responsible for water transport:
boatmen (lenuncularii) , oarsmen (lintrarii), coasters (scapharii),
raftsmen (caudicarii) , towers (helicarii), ballast-loaders (sabur-
rarii) ; and filially, the corporations on whom depended the ad-
ministration and policing of the docks: the guardians (custo-
diarii), the porters (baiuli), the stevedores (geruli), the wharf-
men (saccarii). By the time you have turned the last page of
Waltzing's formidable catalogue you will assuredly have come to
the conclusion that Rome of the Antonines contained far more
workers than "men of means." The noise of the city, of which the
satires complain, which deafened the ears from one end of the
year to the other, was made up of the cadence of their tools, the
rush and hustle of their toil, their panting, and their swearing. 22

In two essential characteristics the Roman working man was
nevertheless different from his fellow-workmen in the great cities
of today.

With the possible exception of the principal dock quarter on
the banks of the Tiber and the slopes of the Aventine, the Roman
workers did not live congregated in dense, compact, exclusive
masses. Their living quarters were scattered about in almost every
corner of the city, but nowhere did they form a town within the
town. Instead of being concentrated in an immense bazaar or a
monster factory area, their dwellings formed indefinite series with
a hundred interruptions, so that in the Urbs warehouses, work-
shops, and workmen's dwellings alternated oddly with private
mansions and blocks of flats. 28

Further, these humming hives of workshops were almost ex-
clusively male. Feminism under the Antonines was an extraor-
dinary and aristocratic phenomenon peculiar to the upper classes.
The great ladies in vain took pride in emulating men in every
sphere of life; they found no imitators or disciples among their
humbler sisters, who had no mind at all to fling themselves into
the struggle for existence. The ladies might devote themselves to
music, literature, science, law, or philosophy, as they threw them-
selves into sport as a method of passing the time; they would

OCCUPATIONS 181

have thought it beneath them to stoop to working at a trade.
Among the thousands of epitaphs of the Urbs collected by the
editors of the Cor pis Inscriptionuin Latin irum I have found
scarcely any women earners: one libraria or woman secretary, 24
three clerks (amanuenses), 2 * one stenographer (notaria) two
women teachers 27 against eighteen of the other sex, 28 four women
doctors 29 against fifty-one medici. For the great bulk of Roman
women the civil registers would have required the entry less
and less familiar in ours "no profession." In the urban epigraphy
of the empire we find women either simply fulfilling the duties for
which man is by nature unfitted, of seamstress (sarcinatrix) , 31
woman's hairdresser (tonstrix? 2 ornatrix}?* midwife (obste-
Jra:), 34 and nurse (nutrix)\ or resigning themselves gradually
to those occupations for which women have always been better
qualified or more expert than men.

I have discovered only one fishwife (piscatrix) * 6 one female
costermonger (negotiatrix leguminaria)* 1 one dressmaker (vesti-
fica) 3 * against twenty men tailors or vestifici 39 three woman
wool distributors (lanipendiae) , 40 and two silk merchants
(sericariae) . 41 We need fjeel no surprise at the absence of women
jewellers; for one thing, at Rome there was no clear demarcation
between the argentarii who sold jewellery and the argentarii who
took charge of banking and exchange; and for another, all bank-
ing operations had been forbidden to women by the same prae-
torian legislation that had deprived them of the right to sue on
each other's behalf. 42 It is surely noteworthy that women never
figure in the corporations for which the emperors tried to stim-
ulate recruitment: naval armament in the time of Claudius 43
and baking under Trajan. 44 I could find no pistrix amongst the
pistores of the city; 45 nor has any woman's name crept into the
lists of shippers which have survived to our times. If any matrons
yielded to the exhortations of Claudius, who had gone so far as to
promise the privileges pertaining to the mother of three children
(ius trium liber orum) to any wealthy woman, whether married or
childless or single, who would consent to outfit a cargo boat at her
own expense, 46 they can have done so only indirectly, through the
intermediary of some man of straw, a procurator, or some other
business agent. Nothing gives stronger proof that the Roman
woman, despite all the moral and civil emancipation which had

i82 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

fallen to her under the empire, preferred to remain in the sheltered
security of her own home, far from the hurly-burly of the Forum
and the noise of trade.

The Roman woman of those days was so deeply rooted in
indolence that she apparently was not much oftener seen in shops
as a purchaser than as an employee. It was beyond a doubt
the proletarian husband himself, not his wife, who went on the
stated day to knock at the portico of Minucius and receive the
card, or rather the little wooden tablet (tessera), which proved
him entitled to the bounty of Annona. 47 A historical bas-relief in
the Museo dei Conservator!, which in all probability commemo-
rates the liberal distributions of Hadrian, shows the emperor
standing on a dais announcing his largesse to the Roman people,
who are typified by three figures representing citizens of various
ages: a child, a youth, and a grown man. The relief suggests no
female recipient, nor was there probably any in the actual dis-
tributions of the imperial largesse. 48 Women are equally absent
from most of the paintings of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and
from the funerary bas-reliefs where the sculptor has pictured
scenes in the streets and represented to the life the animation of
buyers and sellers. We find woman depicted only in scenes where
her presence was more or less obligatory and inevitable: where
the fuller brought back the clean clothes to the lady of the
house; 49 when a widow came to the marble merchant (marmora-
rius) to order a tomb for her dead husband; 50 when the boot-
maker tried on shoes one by one; 51 and lastly at the dressmaker's
and in the novelty shops which the Roman lady of the time of
Trajan appears to have frequented diligently and eagerly. Some-
times she is shown making her choice while her husband sits on
a bench at her side as in the bas-reliefs of the Uffizi Museum at
Florence 52 sometimes with a chosen companion or a whole train
of women friends, as in certain frescoes, from the Campagna. 58

On the other hand, in the Saepta lulia, which the lethargy of
the Comitia had turned into a promenade where the bronze
founders, the jewellers, and the antique dealers exhausted their
ingenuity in fleecing the amateur, the bargainers and the passers-
by were only men: Eros the collector, the miserly Mamurra, aged
Auctus. 54 And in the bakery, 55 at the butcher's, 56 in the eating
shop, 57 we find only men as buyers and sellers.

OCCUPATIONS 183

In the pictures of public places which the Pompeians have left
us, the women pass in their finery, sometimes alone, sometimes
as in the famous painting from the house known as Livia's on the
Palatine accompanied by a child. 58 But their hands are empty,
unencumbered by either shopping bag or basket; they are ob-
viously idle, walking about for pleasure, without care and with-
out responsibility. We must accept the facts. In Imperial Rome
women mixed in outdoor affairs as little as the Moslem woman of
today in the cities of Islam. It was the Roman husband's business,
as it is today among middle-class Mussulmans, to do the shopping
and supply the provisions for the house. 59

But if this idleness of the Roman woman lends the Urbs an
exotic, oriental air, the conditions under which the Roman man
worked recall the most advanced Western practices of today.
The Romans were wide awake and well organised and not over-
whelmed by their tasks. They were not wholly absorbed in work.
They had learned to compress it within limits which were strictly
observed. The system of their corporations, co-ordinated by
Augustus' legislation and the edicts of his successors, permitted
each trade body to set up rules valid for all its members. The laws
of Nature herself and the workings of the Roman solar calendar
had prevented their extending the working day beyond eight of
our hours in winter. Not only is it probable that they had con-
trived so to arrange matters that the eight-hour day would not be
exceeded even in summer, but in my opinion by the second cen-
tury of our era they had succeeded in shortening the working day
even further. It would have been unjust if the transport workers
whom the law compelled to work their convoys during the night
had had a heavier nocturnal task than their daytime fellow-
workers. And in fact dawn was still far off when Trimalchio's
guests, reeling home after the overgenerous supper which he had
set before them, and incapable of finding their way in a darkness
rendered thicker by the fumes of their own intoxication, were
suddenly set on the right road by their host's carters who were
returning at the head of their convoy, having evidently finished
their night's work. 60 We possess further indications that at that
same period the stalls and booths and shops which opened, it is
true, before daybreak, used to close long before sundown. When,
for instance, a starveling parasite came far too soon to Martial's

184 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

house to get an invitation for dinner, the fifth hour was not yet
gone, but "unwashed slaves" were already off duty and on their
way to the bath. 61

The free artisans were certainly not worse off in such matters
than the slaves. Apart from certain people like the tavern-keepers
or the "antiquaries" who wished to tempt the strollers in the
Saepta lulia until the last moment, and who therefore did not
shut down till the eleventh hour, 02 or the tonsores who had to fit
their work into their customers 7 leisure and who kept open till the
eighth hour, 63 by far the greater number of Roman workers
downed tools either at the sixth or the seventh hour; no doubt the
sixth in summer and the seventh in winter:

"In quintam varios extendit Roma labores
Sexta quies lassis, septima finis erit" 64

If one bears in mind that the "hour" at the winter solstice
equalled forty-five minutes according to our reckoning and
seventy-five minutes at the summer solstice, these data bring the
Roman working day down to about seven hours in summer and
less than six in winter.

Summer and winter alike, Roman workmen enjoyed freedom
during the whole or the greater part of the afternoon, and very
probably our forty-hour week with its different arrangement
would have weighed heavily on them rather than pleased them.
Their rural habits, in the first place, and in the second their sense
of their incomparable superiority, guarded them against un-
remitting labour and harassing tasks. So much so that at the time
when Martial was writing, the merchants and shopkeepers, the
artisans and labourers of the imperial race, upheld by their
vital professional unions, had succeeded in so organising their
work as to allow themselves seventeen or eighteen of our twenty-
four hours for the luxury of repose and enjoyed what we may
call if we care to the leisure of people of means.

3. JUSTICE AND POLITICS

The intellectuals, as far as we can judge, were the people who
had the worst of it; they were far worse off than either the
businessmen or the. workers. I am not thinking only of such
monomaniacs as the elder Pliny, who were at once the heroes and
the victims of a morbid appetite for work. 65 It is notorious that

OCCUPATIONS 185

the Naturalist toiled over his writing for sheer love of it twenty
hours out of the twenty-four, beginning his work by candlelight
even in the month of August, and sometimes at one o'clock in the
morning. No sooner had he got back from paying his daily hom-
age at court than he went at it hammer and tongs with prodigious
energy, only allowing himself a moment's relaxation as noon
approached to snatch a little food. Then he stretched himself in
the sun while a secretary read some author aloud to him as the
last item of the morning's work. After this, he took a cold and
hasty bath, followed by a short siesta and a rapid meal. Then
once more to work again, passionate and indefatigable, putting
in a second day's obstinate, concentrated, uninterrupted work
till evening supper. Pliny the Elder was an exception, the unique
specimen of Roman encyclopaedist, devoured by a lust for knowl-
edge purchased even at the cost of life itself for he died at the
age of fifty-six. The researches to which he devoted himself body
and soul were entirely free and disinterested and were in Latin
characterised by the fair name of "leisure." Obviously he can not
be taken as the measure of the normal activity of his con-
temporaries.

Though they could not be compared even from afar to Pliny,
yet the learned bourgeois who practised what we should nowadays
call the liberal professions in Imperial Rome were generally ab-
sorbed in the duties of public life. We lack information about the
diligence demanded of the officiates who filled the administrative
offices and we have no means of precisely assessing the output of
the imperial ministries. We find, however, enough suggestive
details scattered through the literature of the time to give some
idea of the weight of the obligations which rested in particular on
the judicial world, and the still heavier burden which at certain
periods of the year lay on the shoulders of a senator who was
conscientiously bent on fulfilling the duties of his high office.

A valuable hint of Martial's teaches us that on the dies fasti
consecrated to civil suits the ordinary tribunals sat without a
break from dawn to the end of the fourth hour. 60 At first sight
this would seem to limit the hearings to three of our hours in
winter and not more than five hours at a stretch in summer. But
when we look into the question it is clear that the text does not
exclude the possibility of any adjournment, and other testimony
compels us to believe that the session was resumed after an inter-

186 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

val. In the Twelve Tables it is already laid down that a case which
had been taken up before noon might be continued, if both parties
were present, until sunset. 67 In Martial's day it was not unusual
for an advocate on one side to claim and obtain from the judges
"six clepsydrae' 9 for himself alone. 68 We may fairly deduce from
a passage of Pliny the Younger that these clepsydrae, the reg-
ularity of whose time-keeping indicates their close relation to
the equinoctial time-table, took twenty minutes of our time to
run out; 09 hence the claim was for a period of up to two hours.
If it was the custom for one advocate to take up in winter almost
the ( whole of one session, it is reasonable to suppose that at least
one other session for the reply and the hearing of witnesses must
have been necessary to complete the case.

There were advocates, moreover, who protested the time limit
of six clepsydrae. Martial has pilloried one of these windbags in
an epigram :

Seven water-clocks' allowance you asked for in loud tones, Caecilianus,
and the judge unwillingly granted them. But you speak much and long,
and with back-tilted head, swill tepid water out of glass flasks. That
you may once for all sate your oratory and your thirst, we beg you,
Caecilianus, now to drink out of the water-clock! 70

If this jesting suggestion had been adopted, twenty minutes would
have been subtracted from the two hours and a half rashly granted
by the judge to this insatiable talker. But they were granted only
in the poet's imagination; on the other hand, if the advocate on
the other side had demanded the same fine, the case which Martial
cited or invented would have lasted at least five of our hours,
whether interrupted or not by an adjournment.

We may rightly admire the profundity and delicacy of the
judicial powers possessed by the Romans who have taught the art
of law to all the world. But let us not disguise the fact that this
legal genius was saddled with an accompanying evil demon, and
that the Romans, jurists and pettifoggers, like the Normans of
France, fell an easy prey to their passion for litigation. This mania
is already discernible in the astute law speeches of Cicero. It
was disastrous that it got the Urbs in its grip just at a time when
the Caesars had prescribed political discussion. From the reign
of one emperor to another, litigation was a rising tide which noth-
ing could stem, throwing on the public courts more work than

OCCUPATIONS 187

men could master. To mitigate the congestion of the courts Au-
gustus, as early as the year 2 B.C., was obliged to resign to their
use the forum he had built and which bears his name. 71 Seventy-
five years later congestion had recurred and Vespasian wondered
how to struggle with the flood of suits so numerous that "the life
of the advocates could scarce suffice" to deal with them. 72 In the
Rome of the opening second century the sound of lawsuits echoed
throughout the Forum, round the tribunal of the praetor urbanus
by the Puteal Libonis, 73 and round the tribunal of the praetor
peregrinus between the Puteal of Curtius and the enclosure of
Marsyas; 74 in the Basilica lulia where the centumviri assembled;
and justice thundered simultaneously from the Forum of Augus-
tus, where the praejectus urbi exercised his jurisdiction, from
the barracks of the Castra Praetoria where the praejectus prae-
torio issued his decrees, from the Curia where the senators in-
dicted those of their peers who had aroused distrust or displeas-
ure, and from the Palatine where the emperor himself received
the appeals of the universe in the semicircle of his private basilica,
which the centuries have spared.

During the 230 days of the year open for civil cases and the
365 days open for criminal prosecutions, 76 the Urbs was con-
sumed by a fever of litigation which attacked not only lawyers,
plaintiffs, defendants, and accused, but the crowd of the curious
whose appetite for scandal or taste for legal eloquence held them
immobile and spellbound hour after hour in the neighbourhood
of the tribunals.

The hearings were not easy or proper. They exhausted every-
body: pleaders and witnesses, judges and advocates, not excepting
the spectators. Let us attend for a moment a sitting of the cen-
tumviri who exercise their jurisdiction in the Basilica lulia, their
chosen domicile. 77 Leaving the Via Sacra, which flanks the build-
ing planned and erected by Julius Caesar and reconstructed by
Augustus, we mount the seven steps leading to the marble portico
which framed it. Then two further steps take us into the huge
hall, divided into three naves by thirty-six brick columns faced
with marble. The central nave, which was also the widest, meas-
ured eighteen metres by eighty-two. The tribunes on the first
story which dominated the nave and the side-aisles that flanked it
accommodated the male and female spectators who had not been
fortunate enough to find places closer to the parties and in the

188 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

more immediate neighbourhood of "the court." The centumviri
who composed the court were not 100 in number as their name
might seem to imply, but 180, divided into four distinct "cham-
bers." 78 They took their seats either in separate sections or all
four together, according to the nature of the cases which were
brought before them. In the latter case the praetor hastarius in
person presided, on an improvised dais, with his ninety assessors
seated on either side of his curule chair. On benches at their feet
sat the parties to the suit, their sureties, their defenders, and tljeir
friends. These formed the corona, or, as we might call it, the
"dress circle." Farther off stood the general public. When the four
chambers worked separately each had forty-five assessors with a
decemvir as president, and the same arrangement was repeated
four times, each chamber in session divided off from its neighbour
by screens or curtains.

In either case, magistrates and the public were closely packed
and the debates took place in a stifling atmosphere. To complete
the discomfort, the acoustics of the hall were deplorable, forcing
the advocates to strain their voices, the judges their attention, and
the public their patience. It frequently happened that the thun-
der of one of the defending counsel filled the vast hall arid
drowned the controversies in the other chambers. In one notorious
instance Galerius Tracalus (who had been consul in 68 A.D.),
whose voice was extraordinarily powerful, was greeted with the
public applause of all four chambers, three of which could not
see him and ought not to have heard him. 79 Matters were made
worse and the noise increased by the enthusiasm of "a low rout
of claqueurs," whom shameless advocates, following the example
of Larcius Licinus, were in the habit of dragging round after them
to the hearing of any case they hoped to win, as much to impress
the jury as to enhance their own reputation. 80 In vain Pliny the
Younger protested against this practice. One day when Domitius
Afer was pleading in Quintilian's presence and rejoicing one
chamber of the centumviri by his impressive speech and calm
delivery, his ears were deafened by immoderate clamour from
outside. He stopped speaking in surprise. When silence was re-
stored he resumed the thread of his discourse. New cries. Re-
newed silence on his part. The same interruption came a third
time. Finally he inquired who was pleading next door. "Licinus,"
was the answer. Then he gave up all attempt to continue and

OCCUPATIONS 189

abandoned the suit. "Centumviri," he said, "it is all over with our
profession." It was not all over with these bravo criers, these
<jo<poxAet<;, as they were called in Greek, "signifying that they were
applauders by profession/' or these "supper praisers" (laudiceni)
as the Romans called them. 81 Whether it was good or bad, the
speech they acclaimed at command brought them their bread and
butter; and they could, without breaking the terms of their con-
tract, withdraw their attention from the case as soon as some
counsel who had not hired them took the floor. They remained,
on 'the chance of being further wanted, but returned to their
favourite pastimes, such as the games for which crude "boards"
were scratched on the steps of the Basilica lulia. 82 But the hired
applauders were the only people in the hall who enjoyed them-
selves. It is easy to imagine the discomfort and annoyance which
a case inflicted on an attentive judge and a conscientious counsel
when it had to be conducted in the middle of this mob, to the
accompaniment of a continual uproar and periodic outbursts of
mechanical applause.

Pliny the Younger flatters himself that he had established his
reputation by pronouncing before the centumviri the longest and
best of his speeches. 83 But at what a price in mental and physical
exhaustion! Recalling at the end of his career his early triumphs
in the Basilica lulia, he gives the impression that he remembered
them with horror, 84 and that he would have said of them, as of
his sojourn at Centumcellae (Civita-Vecchia) in attendance on
the tribunal which Trajan had set up in his villa there "What
honorable days! But what exhausting ones! : Vides quam honesti,
quam severi dies!" 8 *

When the emperor was obliged to summon before him the cases
over which he had direct jurisdiction or those which had been
appealed from the provinces, he was as much a victim of over-
work as the ordinary judges. We get light on this from the ses-
sion in which Pliny took part during one of the emporer's coun-
try visits to his Centumcellae villa. 80 It lasted only three days.
The three cases on the list were of no great importance. The first
was an unfounded accusation brought by jealous slanderers
against a young Ephesian, Claudius Ariston, "a nobleman of great
munificence and unambitious popularity," who was honourably
acquitted. The next day Gallitta was tried on a charge of adul-
tery. Her husband, a military tribune, was on the point of stand-

i 9 o DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

ing for office when she disgraced both him and herself by an
intrigue with a centurion. The third day was devoted to an
inquiry "concerning the much-discussed will of lulius Tiro, part
of which was plainly genuine, while the other part was said to be
forged." Though Trajan would call and hear only one case a day,
it nevertheless wasted the greater part of his time. The probate
case in particular gave him a great deal of trouble. The authen-
ticity of the codicils was challenged by Eurythmus, the emperor's
freedman and one of his procurators in Dacia. The heirs, mis-
trusting the local courts, wrote a joint letter to the emperor
petitioning him to reserve, the case to his own hearing. After this
request had been granted, however, some of the heirs pretended
to hesitate out of respect for the fact that Eurythmus was the
emperor's own freedman, and it was only on Trajan's formal in-
vitation that two of them appeared at the bar to lodge accusa-
tions in their turn. Eurythmus asked leave to speak to prove his
charges. The two heirs who had received permission to state their
case refused to take the opportunity of doing so, pleading that
loyalty to their co-heirs debarred them from representing the in-
terests of all when only two were present. Delighted by these
manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres, counsel played hide-and-
seek to their hearts' content amid the jungle of legal procedure.
Again and again the emperor recalled them to the point at issue,
which he was determined not to lose sight of. Finally, worn out
by their chicanery, he turned at last to his own counsel and
begged him to put an end to their cavilling, after which he de-
clared the session closed and invited his assessors to the delightful
distractions (iucundissimae remissiones) which he had prepared
for them, but which he could not offer them before the dinner
hour.

All the while none of the people concerned had overstepped the
deference due to the emperor's sovereign majesty. We cannot
claim that it was always so. Sometimes the accused did not hesi-
tate to abuse the Caesar, and the imperial judicial session ended
with what we may rightly call "a scene." One of the Oxyrhynchus
papyri records that an Egyptian of the name of Appianus, hymn-
asiarch and priest of Alexandria, had the pride and audacity to
stage such a scene with Commodus who had just sentenced him
to death. 87 The emperor had barely pronounced the sentence when
Appianus rose in scandalous defiance: "Do you realise whom you

OCCUPATIONS 191

are addressing?" asked Commodus. "Certainly; a tyrant." "Not
so," retorted Commodus, "you are speaking to the emperor."
"Certainly not," was the reply. "Your father, the divine Marcus
Aurelius Antoninus had every right to call himself emperor, be-
cause he cultivated wisdom, despised money, and loved what was
good. But you have no such right, for you are the antithesis of
your father: you love tyranny, vice, and brutality."

Thus the princeps was liable not only to be deafened and ex-
hausted by the speechifyings and intrigues of his litigants like
any simple centumvir, but to be abused by them in the bargain.
While the court of the emperor recalls the magnificence and splen-
dour of Louis XIV, his tribunal suggests more the familiarity
and popular tumult which surround the justice of an Eastern
pasha seated on his divan in the patio of his seraglio; but it is
endlessly complicated in addition by the subtleties and sojiorities
of the long-drawn-out Roman procedure.

Absorbing and exacting as might be the duties of judges and
counsel, however, there were times when a senator could even
less call his soul his own. True, since the days of Augustus the
number of ordinary sessions of the Senate (dies legitimi) had been
greatly reduced. The months of September and October were de-
creed to be a compulsory vacation; during the rest of the year the
Senate was normally convoked only twice a month on the Calends
and the Ides; 88 and the legislative activity of the Caesars left
the law-making functions of the Senate to lie dormant. But from
time to time the Senate had to reckon with extraordinary sessions,
all the more overladen with business for being infrequent, espe-
cially such as compelled or permitted the princeps to perform
terrible acts of vengeance for political crimes, for which he pre-
ferred nominally to evade responsibility. At such moments the
Fathers were condemned, to forced labour, and they had no means
of escaping the slavery of these sensational convocations unless
they could find some pretext for absence that would be accepted
as valid and would not cast doubt on their motives for abstention.

The Senate assembled in the Curia of Julius Caesar. 89 Its re-
construction under Diocletian has in all probability preserved the
original plan and dimensions. It measured 25.5 metres in length
and 67.6 in width. It could scarcely have provided space for more
than 300 seats distributed in three rising tiers, as Professor Bar-
toli has recently discovered by his excavations beneath the floor

192 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of the ancient church of Sant' Adriano. On great occasions, when
at least one-third of the total 900 members of the Senate re-
sponded to the summons, they must have been as tightly packed
as the English Parliament in the House of Lords when the Com-
mons attend to hear the Speech from the Throne. After a sacrifice
and preliminary prayers, the senators entered the Curia at the
first hour of the day, and did not escape till night was falling. 90
They sat again next day, and the day after, and the day after
that again, and for several days more. They could not possibly
have endured this penitential overcrowding if the rules of the
assembly, or rather the customary practice which served instead,
had not implicitly permitted them to come and go, vanish and re-
appear at will. In the hall there was an endless series of discus-
sions, a continual deluge of eloquence and knavery.

Pliny the Younger gives accounts of several sessions of the
Senate transformed into a High Court: those where Marius
Priscus, proconsul of Africa, appeared with his rivals in the art of
prevarication; 91 those which investigated and punished the ex-
tortions of Caecilius Classicus, ex-governor of Baetica. 92 These
reports call forth our pity for the senator chained to his curule
chair. The first of these cases, over which Trajan presided in his
capacity of consul, lasted from dawn to dusk through three con-
secutive days. On one of them Pliny the Younger, who had been
entrusted with the prosecution of one of Priscus' accomplices,
spoke for five hours without intermission, and toward the close his
fatigue became so manifest that the emperor sent him more than
once the advice "to spare his voice and breath." When he had
finished, Claudius Marcellinus replied for the accused in a speech
of the same length. When this second orator had reached his pero-
ration Trajan adjourned the court till next day for fear a third
harangue "might be cut in two by nightfall."

In comparison with the impeachment of Priscus the case of
Classicus, in which Pliny's role was confined to listening and
offering an opinion, appeared much easier to endure and seemed
really "short and easy: et circa Classicum quidem brevis et ex-
peditus labor." Easy it certainly was, for the Spaniards had
broken the back of the business for the prosecution, and mined
in advance all the positions of the defense by laying hands on the
intimate and cynical correspondence of the accused; in particular
on a letter in which, blending his. love affairs and his extortions,

OCCUPATIONS 193

he announced his return to Rome to one of his mistresses in terms
which inculpated him beyond hope of salvation: "Hurrah I Hur-
rah 1 I am coming back to you a free man, for I have raised four
million sesterces by selling out the Baetici." But short the Clas-
sicus case certainly was not, despite the overwhelming nature of
the facts established by this damning evidence. Like the Priscus
case it took up three sessions of the Senate, and though Pliny
the Younger had played a less spectacular part in it, he came
out exhausted, when it was over, just as after the Priscus affair:
"You will easily conceive," he writes to his dear friend Cornelius
Minicianus, ". . . the fatigue we underwent in speaking and de-
bating so long and so often, and in examining, assisting, and con-
futing such a number of witnesses; not to mention the difficulties
and annoyance of the defendants' friends: Concipere animo poles
quam simus fatigati!" 93 We can indeed conceive it, but what
seems inconceivable to us is that the Romans should have toler-
ated this exhausting system with no attempt to modify or lighten
it. Are we to believe that their heads and nerves were more re-
sistant to strain than ours? Or that, having been inured by a
century of public readings, they had become case-hardened
against exasperation, weariness, and boredom?

4. PUBLIC READINGS

The habit of giving and hearing public readings and recitations,
which was the absorbing occupation and perpetual distraction
of cultivated Romans, is so foreign to our manners that it de-
mands a few words of explanation.

Scholars and men of letters in Rome knew nothing for two
centuries of what we mean by "publishing." Down to the end of
the republic, they made copies of their works in their own houses
or in the house of some patron, and then distributed the manu-
scripts to their friends. Atticus, to whom Cicero had entrusted
his speeches and his treatises, had the inspiration of converting
the copying studio he had set up for himself into a real industrial
concern. 04 At the same time Caesar, no less a revolutionary in
things intellectual than in things material, helped to procure him
a clientele by founding the first State Library in Rome, on the
model of the great library which existed in the museum at Alex-
andria. The completion of the Roman library was due to Asinius
Pollio, and it soon begot daughter libraries in the provinces. 95

194 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

The multiplication of public and municipal libraries resulted in
the rise of publishers (bibliopolae, librarii). The new profession
soon had its celebrities: the Sosii, of whom Horace speaks, who
had opened a shop for volumina at the exit of the Vicus Tuscus on
the Forum, near the statue of the god Vertumnus, behind the
Temple of Castor; 96 Dorus, to whom one went for copies of
Cicero and Livy; 97 Tryphon, who sold Quintilian's Institutio
Oratorio, and Martial's Epigrams;** and rivals of Tryphon Q.
Pollius Valerianus; Secundus, not far from the Forum of Peace;
and Atrectus in the Argiletum."

These book merchants, who assembled and trained teams of
expert slaves, sold their copies dear enough 2 or 3 sesterces for
a text which would correspond to about 20 pages of our duo-
decimo; 5 denarii or 20 sesterces for a liber, which would make
somewhat less than 40 similar pages but had been elaborately
gotten up. 100 They were often paid by unknown writers for
carrying out the work to order, but even in the case of famous
authors they did not even buy the original manuscript which they
condescended to "publish." 101 They were also exempt from
making any subsequent payment to the author for the jurists had
vaguely extended to all writings on papyrus or on parchment the
old legal principle that solo cedit superficies, that is to say, the
ownership of every addition follows the ownership of the basis
to which it is added. 102 Thus the publishers grew rich by dis-
patching all over the world, "to the confines of Britain and the
frosts of the Getae," the verses "which the centurion hummed in
his distant garrison," but the poet's "money-bag knew nothing
of it" as he starved in his poverty. 108

In these conditions it was inevitable that literary beginners
and impecunious authors should seize the opportunity given by a
public recitation of their prose or of their poems either to escape
the demands of the librarius or to force his hand. They had no
hesitation in thus deflowering a subsequent edition which would
never bring them in a penny. It was also natural that the im-
perial government, which hoped to control literary production
but shrank from the scandal caused by the autos-da-fe decreed
by Tiberius, 104 or the death sentence which Domitian had pro-
nounced against Hermogenes of Tarsus and his publishers, 105
preferred to arrive unobtrusively at the same result by under-
ground methods which had proved effective in the valley of the

OCCUPATIONS 195

Nile. The prefects and procurators placed in charge of the public
libraries already possessed the power to effect the slow but certain
disappearance of dangerous or suspect books to which they had
closed the doors of their bookcases. 106 They claimed the right to
sow the good seed of writings favourable to the regime and com-
positions useful as propaganda. We need, therefore, feel no sur-
prise if Asinius Pollio, who gave his name to the first library in
Rome, was the first to recite his works before his friends. 107 This
practice was too well suited to the condition of writers and the
desires of government not to become the fashion quickly. Thus
the conjunction of omnipotent publishers and servile libraries
gave birth to a monster, the public recitatio, which soon grew to
be the curse of literature. The calculations of the politicians and
the vanity of authors set the fashion. After that nothing could
stop it.

From the very beginning of his reign, Augustus' enthusiasm for
recitations helped their progress; he would listen "with as much
goodwill as endurance to those who read aloud to him not only
verses or history but also speeches and dialogues." 108 A few
years later things had gone even further. Claudius, who at Livy's
instigation had started to write history, delighted to declaim his
chapters one by one as he finished them. 109 Since he was of the
blood royal, he had no difficulty in getting a full house. But he
was shy and a stammerer, and at one of his experimental readings
a grotesque incident occurred a bench collapsed under the
weight of a fat member of the audience, provoking volleys of
laughter that were not on the agenda. After this he gave up read-
ing aloud himself. But he did not abandon the pleasure of hearing
his lucubrations declaimed in the cultured, voice of a freedman.
Later, when he became emperor, he put his palace at the disposal
of others for their readings, and was only too happy if he could
find leisure to be present as an ordinary listener. He would sud-
denly appear among an audience startled at this unexpected
honour, a trick he played one day on the ex-consul Nonianus. 110
Domitian in his turn affected a passionate love of poetry and on
more than one occasion himself read his own verses in public. 111
It is probable that Hadrian followed suit; at least he set his seal
on public readings by consecrating a building for this exclusive
purpose: the Athenaeum, a sort of .jniniature theatre, which he
had built with his own money on a site which is unknown to us. 112

196 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

His subjects were as grateful to Mm for this as if he had at last
decided to house the "liberal arts" (ludus ingenuarum artium)
in a building worthy of them. 113

The building of the Athenaeum was merely an indication of
the importance public readings had acquired in the Urbs, which
was now submerged under a flood of talent. There was nothing
new about its architecture ; it simply added an official monument
to the numerous other halls which had long been filled with the
eloquent murmur of these recitals. Any well-educated man who
was moderately well off cherished the ambition of having a room
in his house, the auditorium, especially for readings. More than
one friend of Pliny the Younger embarked light-heartedly on this
considerable expense Calpurnius Piso, for instance, and Titinius
Capito. 114 - The plan of these auditoria varied little from house to
house: a dais on which the author-reader would take his seat after
having attended to his toilet, smoothed his hair, put on a new
toga, and adorned his fingers with all his rings for the occasion.
He was then prepared to entrance his audience not only with the
merit of his writing but by the distinction of his presence, the
caress of his glances, the modesty of his speech, and the gentle-
ness of his modulations. 115 Behind him hung the curtains which
hid those of his guests who wished to hear him without being seen,
his wife for example. 116 In front of the reader the public who had
been summoned by notes delivered at their homes (codicilli) were
accommodated, in armchairs (cathedrae) for people of the higher
ranks and benches for the others. Attendants told off for the pur-
pose distributed the programs of the seance (libelli). 117

All this mise en sc&ne was not within the reach of everybody's
purse. Poor writers depended on the goodwill and generosity of
the rich. Great gentlemen like Titinius Capito, animated by the
best spirit of good-fellowship, were very ready to lend their
auditorium. 118 Rich men, less generous but more practical, hired
theirs out for cash down. Juvenal pours contempt on these Harpa-
gons wearing the mask of a Maecenas who exacted large sums for
the brief enjoyment of a "tumbledown house in some distant
quarter . . . with tiers of seats resting on hired beams and chairs
in the front rows which will have to be returned when done
with." 119

An auditorium was, however, not indispensable to a public
recital unless the author was anxious to cut a dash and influence

OCCUPATIONS 197

opinion. The more fastidious author whose reputation was already
well established preferred a select audience of connoisseurs like
himself. Pliny the Younger, for instance, took pride in inviting
only a handful of friends whom he could accommodate in his
triclinium, or dining-room, some stretched on the couches which
were the permanent furniture of the room, and the others in
chairs carried in for the occasion. 120 As for the poor devils who
had neither triclinium nor the money to hire a room, they con-
trived to find an audience all the same. As soon as they spied a
group of people anywhere whose curiosity at least they might
pique, they would mingle with them and unblushingly unroll
their manuscript in the forum, under a portico, or among the
crowd at the baths. 121 The recitatio had invaded even the cross-
roads. Examining the contemporary literature, we soon get the
impression that everyone was reading something, no matter what,
aloud in public all the time, morning and evening, winter and
summer.

If you were in search of a large audience it was wise to avoid
the hot months when many Romans had withdrawn to their coun-
try villas. But if you attached more importance to the quality
than to the quantity of your hearers, the summer months were
perhaps the best. Pliny the Younger "read" in July, because he
hoped that the closing of the courts would allow him more free-
dom of mind and would permit his rivals at the bar to grace his
performance with their presence. 122 For the same reason, most
readings took place in the afternoon when busy men had leisure
at their disposal. But there were some insatiables who did not
find an afternoon enough to pour forth their masterpieces and
flattered themselves that they could keep an audience spellbound
for a whole day (to turn diem impendere) without prejudice to
the morrow and the days following. 123 Surely we need not con-
tinue to wonder at the compulsory overwork the Romans toler-
ated in their tribunals and in the Senate when we consider the
docility with which the idlers of Rome submitted to the optional
overwork of the auditoria.

It is true that the audience did not stand on ceremony with
their host, and that their attention was often more or less politely
casual and intermittent. Pliny the Younger in his letters tells a
number of anecdotes that give us insight into the liberties in
which the listening public indulged. In the course of a certain

198 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

April, for instance, "scarce a day has passed wherein we have
not been entertained with the recital of some poem." 124 The
public was at its last gasp. People continued mechanically to
attend the seances from force of habit, but they seat themselves
in the antechambers; spend the time of the recitation in talk and
send in every now and then to inquire whether the author has
come in, whether he has read the preface or whether he has almost
finished the piece. . . .' Then they just look in and withdraw
again before the end, some by stealth and others without cere-
mony. On one occasion Pliny the Younger arrived late and found
a crowd of younger men. 125 He noted with a mixture of pride and
embarrassment that his entry recalled those present to a sense
of courtesy, cut short the jests they had been interchanging and
re-established silence as if by magic. At other times he came upon
audiences who, though they strove to maintain the appearance
of decent manners and refrained from making a noise, neverthe-
less showed a coolness and lack of interest which bordered on
insolence, if they did not abandon themselves to the refreshment
of a well-earned snooze. At one recitatio the celebrated jurist
Javolenus Priscus, a friend of the reader, was among the audi-
ence. 126 The host unrolled his volumen and read the first line of
his poem which^happened to begin.

"Priscus, thou dost command . . ."

Javolenus roused himself with a start from the daydream in
which his thoughts had been wandering leagues away and hastily
ejaculated: "But I don't command anything!" "Think," says
Pliny, "what a peal of laughter and what numerous sallies this
droll accident occasioned."

In other cases the listeners pretended to devote their attention
to the proceedings, but their behaviour roused Pliny to "a little
fit of anger." 127 There were some "men of eloquence in their
own estimation" among the audience and although "the work
read to us was a highly finished performance . . . they sat like
so many deaf-mutes, without so much as moving a lip or a hand
or once rising to their feet, even by way of relief from a seated
posture." Pliny unleashed his wrath at "this indolence, this arro-
gance, this gaucherie, nay idiocy, that will be at the expense of a
whole day merely to affront and leave as your enemy the man
you visited as a particular friend."

OCCUPATIONS 199

But the power of concentration had its limits even for the
Romans, and nothing is more exhausting in any language than
continuous eloquence. It was surely unreasonable on the author's
part to inflict on an audience a whole day's reading of any work,
however excellent; its beauties were bound to wither under
fatigue and boredom. A recitation continued without pause and
without end could produce only nausea; the hearers' one escape
was inattention. Instead of promoting a love of literature, these
public readings produced mental indigestion and must more
often have deadened than stimulated the love of letters. Their cor-
rupting influence was only increased by the introduction of an
incoherent variety of items to lessen the monotony. They became
a chaos of deafening sound. Lawyers re-edited their speeches for
them, and politicians polished up their harangues. 128 Men of the
world who had never written in their lives, save in the course of
their professional duties or to keep up family and social rela-
tions, did not hesitate to reproduce the eulogy they had pro-
nounced at the funeral of a relative. 129

As for professional writers, they foresaw a future for their
most trifling composition . and proved themselves inexhaustible.
When pleadings and speeches were used up, they read books of
history, which were best received when they dealt with a past so
distant that no one present need feel embarrassment "for men
are ashamed to hear those actions repeated which yet they do
not blush to commit!" 13 In verse, the audiences were treated to
a medley of Pliny's banter, Calpurnius Piso's mythology of the
constellations, the elegies of Passennus Paulus, the Thebais of
Statius, and a rigmarole of banal epics compounded of echoes of
Statius and reminiscences of Virgil, "tales about Hercules or
Diomedes, or the bellowing in the labyrinth, and the lad Icarus
who crashed his flying machine into the sea." 131 To these must
be added tragedies without scenery and comedies without ac-
tors. 132 One sort of literary composition succeeded another on
the tribunes of the auditoria, with little of taste or relevance.

In vain Pliny the Younger seeks to beguile himself by extolling
the excellence and value of a type of performance in which he
knew he excelled, and tries to convince himself that a public
reading stimulates him to revise and perfect his speeches, and that
its object is to evoke the criticisms which will enable him to
polish away its flaws. 133 These are only the pretexts, albeit sin-

200 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

cere, and the quibblings, albeit ingenious, of a spoiled child who
would be inconsolable if his pet toy were lost or forbidden. These
slender benefits and problematical advantages could not outweigh
the inconvenience, the danger, and the harm that Horace from
the outset had foretold. 134 How horrified the poet would have
been if he could have returned to Rome a hundred years after his
death when the disastrous practice of recitations had brought a
rich crop of all the ills he had only dimly foreseen ! By that time
the recitatio was well on the way to become the last straw among
the evils of a purely formal education. The habit of writing and
then of reading from volumina, whose unrolling never permitted
attention to more than one passage at a time, with as little heed
to what had gone before as to what was afterwards to come, had
already induced such fragmentary and scrappy composition that
even the best of Roman authors, judged by our standards, more
or less deserve the condemnation Caligula pronounced on Seneca:
"sand without mortar (arena sine calce)" 1 These public read-
ings in which the author aimed to dazzle his audience more by the
brilliance of the detail than by the beauty of the general plan
aggravated the evil influence of the volumen and hastened the
disastrous evolution which culminated in a taste so perverted
that it responded only to tirades aimed at effect and to epigram-
matic conceits (sententiae). By detaching the works they seized
on from their natural setting pleadings from the law court,
political speeches from the Curia, tragedy and comedy from the
theatre these public recitations completed the severance of
such links as still existed between literature and life, and drained
literature of that genuine human content without which no mas-
terpiece is possible. 186 They were peculiarly noxious in a manner
of their own, to which the moderns have hitherto been no less
blind than the ancients, and which helped to kill literature itself.
For one thing, the opportunity they gave the author of gratifying
his vanity gradually turned writers aside from ambitions nobler
than the attainment of immediate intoxicating success before an
audience stimulated to artificial enthusiasm by the presence of
complaisant friends and of colleagues hoping to secure reciprocal
admiration. It may still be a matter of dispute how much harm
has been or will be caused to literature by the extension of the
radio, but there is no reason to doubt that when the public-reading
mania was at its height it did enormous damage to the production

OCCUPATIONS 201

of volumina. And it is equally undeniable that the disease de-
voured like a cancer hordes of people who had developed through
it a false belief in their literary vocation.

When once the public reading became an established fashion
in Rome, and yras recognised as the main and almost exclusive
occupation of people of letters, literature lost all dignity and all
serious purpose. The fashionable world adopted a currency which
became more and more alloyed as the circle of amateurs was
enlarged. Those who were invited wished to be the inviters in
their turn, and when everybody mounted the dais in rotation, it
ended by every listener becoming an author. This was in appear-
ance the triumph of literature. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, an
insensate inflation which foreshadowed bankruptcy. When there
were as many writers as listeners, or, as we should say, as many
authors as readers, and the two roles were indistinguishable, lit-
erature suffered from an incurable, malignant tumour.

VIII

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES

i. "PANEM ET CIRCENSES"

things bread and circuses.

VERYBODY knows by heart Ju-
venal's tirade against his degener-
ate contemporaries, "the mob of
Remus," a laconic indictment which
throbs more with scorn than anger:
"Now that no one buys our votes,
the public has long since cast off its
cares; the people that once be-
stowed commands, consulships, le-
gions, and all else, now meddles no
more and longs eagerly for just two

. duas tantum res anxius opt at,

panem et circenses

99 1

Famous though they are, it is well to recall these verses at the
beginning of the chapter which explains them. Their vehement
invective, which scorches like a branding iron, voices the noblest
republican protest that was raised under *fc empire. They state
an incontestable and dominant fact; they note a historic truth
which Pronto was to record forty years later with the calm ob-
jectivity of the historian faced by irrefutable evidence: "the
Roman people is absorbed by two things above all others, its
food supplies and its shows (populum Romanum duabus prae-
cipue rebus, annona et spectacidis teneri)"*

The Caesars had in fact shouldered the dual task of feeding
and amusing Rome. Their monthly distributions at the Portico
of Minucius assured the populace its daily bread. By the shows
and spectacles they provided in various public places, religious
or secular, in the Forum, at the theatres, in the Stadium, in the

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 203

Amphitheatre, in mock sea fights (naumachiae) , they occupied
and disciplined its leisure hours. They kept the plebs expectantly
awaiting the ever-renewed entertainments, and even in lean years,
when treasury shortages compelled them to ration their expendi-
ture, they exhausted their ingenuity to provide the public with
more festivals than any people, in any country, at any time, has
ever seen.

Let us examine the calendars deciphered for us by the epi-
graphists which note the dates of the Roman festivals. 8 In the
first place we should keep in mind that the Roman year in general
was divided into two kinds of days, the dies fasti and the dies
nefasti.* On the former, civil and judicial business might be
transacted without fear of offending the gods; on the latter such
business was suspended. Here we need not take into account the
fourteen days of a mixed nature when civil affairs might proceed
normally after certain rites had been performed or during a cer-
tain limited part of the day.

Among the dies nejasti, we find a certain number character-
ised as jeriae or public holidays, as well as another group set
apart for ludi or public games. Such days are usually marked in
surviving calendars with the letters NP and scholars do not
agree as to the difference, if any, between the days marked with
these two letters and those characterised by the single letter N,
meaning nejas? Yet it is certain that jeriae and days set aside for
games were public holidays in the present sense of the word,
when work was relaxed or suspended altogether, and men gave
themselves over to rest and pleasure. It is with these days that
we are primarily concerned.

Let us begin with the days on which performances were held at
public expense in the circus or the theatre, carrying our compu-
tations down to the time of Claudius, when the evidence of stone
calendars breaks off. There were, first of all, the games which the
republic at grave crises in its history had decreed in honour of the
gods, and which were destined to minister to the ambition of the
dictators and the policy of the Caesars: the Ludi Romani, in-
stituted in 366 B.C. and ultimately lasting from September 4 to
19; the Ludi Plebei, which made their appearance somewhere
between 220 and 216 B.C. and were then held from November 4
to 17; the Ludi Apollinares, which dated from 208 B.C. and went
on from July 6 to 13; the Ludi Ceriales, consecrated to Ceres in

204 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

202 B.C., which fitted in between April 12 and 19; the Ludi
Mcgalenses, in honour of the Great Idaean Mother of the Gods,
Cybele, whose sanctuary was dedicated on the Palatine in 191
B.C., and whose games had since been held every year from April
4 to 10; the Ludi Florales, whose homage the goddess Flora
seems regularly to have enjoyed only after 173 B.C., and whose
celebration was attended by special ceremonies from April 28
to May 3. All in all, then, we find 59 days devoted to these tradi-
tional games of the Roman Republic before the time of Sulla. 6

The first addition to this group is connected with his name. It
is the Ludi Victoria^ Suttanae in the title we can detect Sulla's
pretensions to divinity which for two hundred years after his
death continued to be held from October 26 to November i. Next,
we learn of the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris, which from July 20-30
continued to recall to Roman memory the exploits of the con-
queror of Gaul; and the Ludi Fortunae Reducis, which Augus-
tus instituted in n B.C. and which lasted for 10 days from
October 3 to 12. To these we must add the 3 days of the Ludi
Palatini instituted by Livia in memory of Augustus; 7 the 2 days
of the Ludi Martiales celebrated on May 12 and August i in con-
nection with the dedication of the shrine and temple of Mars
Ultor; and the day of games celebrating the birthday of the em-
peror. The sum total for this post-Sullan group is 34 days, which,
added to the 59 days of pre-Sullan games, gives us 93 public
holidays when the Roman was entertained at spectacles at the
expense of the State.

But this is not all. Our calendars also record the forty-five
feriae publicae, the origins of which are lost in the mists of early
Latin history but which were kept up under the empire: among
others, the Lupercalia in February; the Parilia, Cerialia, and
Vinalia in April; the Vestalia and Matronalia in June; the Vol-
canalia in August; and the Saturnalia in December. Ceremonies
having the nature of games were connected with some of the
holidays in this ancient group : for instance, the dance of the Salii
which took place on the festival of the Quinquatrus (March 19)
and the Armilustrium (October 19), the foot races of the Robi-
galia (April 25), the races on foot and muleback of the Con-
sualia (August 21 and December 15). But since these festivals
were essentially religious and their chief purpose was not the en-
tertainment of the people, we may conveniently set them aside

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 205

from the days devoted primarily to games. Allowing, then, for
overlapping, in that six of these ancient festivals were celebrated
on days when games were being held, we have 39 new holidays to
add to the previous 93 game days, making a total of 132 days
in all.

Finally, in the time of Caesar, we meet a new kind of public
holiday, decreed by the Senate to commemorate a significant
event in the life of the emperor. The first of these to appear were
Caesar's birthday and the anniversaries of five of his most im-
portant military victories. The precedent was followed under
Augustus and 18 new holidays were proclaimed commemorating
secular and religious events of his reign or connected with his
memory after death. 8 To these we must add 6 more days per-
taining to events extending into the reign of Claudius. But of these
30 new holidays, only 18 do not coincide with days otherwise
celebrated, so that our sum total of all holidays reaches an even
150. Finally, 8 of the Ides dedicated to Jupiter and i of the
Calends dedicated to Mars do not fall on other holidays and must
be added to our list. 9

In other words, at the time of Claudius the Roman calendar
contained 159 days expressly marked as holidays, of which 93
were devoted to games given at public expense. The list does not
include the many ceremonies for which the State took no respon-
sibility and supplied no funds, but which were much in favour
among the people and took place around the sanctuaries of the
quarters in the chapels of foreign deities whose worship was
officially sanctioned, and in the scholae or meeting places of the
guilds and colleges. Even less does it take account of the feriae
privatae of individuals or family groups.

After Claudius, we have very little precise information as to
public holidays. To be sure, a number of jerialia are still extant
lists giving a selected number of days which were celebrated with
religious ceremonies by a limited group of people. 10 But in many
cases it is difficult to conjecture whether these days were desig-
nated as public holidays in the city of Rome. Naturally the list
of holidays changed from reign to reign, but the additions seem
to have outnumbered the subtractions, for we know that Clau-
dius, 11 Vespasian, 12 and Marcus Aurelius 13 all found it necessary
to cut down the number of holidays. Marcus Aurelius, his biogra-
pher tells us, restored the business year to 230 days; and from

206 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

later evidence it has been reasonably conjectured that most of
the remaining 135 were devoted to public spectacles. For the
manuscript Calendar of Philocalus, written in 354 A.D. and re-
flecting conditions of the third century, records 175 days of games
out of about 200 public holidays, as against 93 out of 159 for the
early empire, an increase from about 59 per cent to 87 per cent
in the proportion of game days. 14

We have, moreover, been speaking of ordinary years during
which nothing remarkable had happened and the normal program
was not combined with the recurrence of quadrennial cycles such
as the earlier Actiaca and the later Agon Capitolinus, and at
longer intervals with the return of the "renewal of the century"
prolonged over a series of days, such as took place in 17 B.C.
and in 88 and 204 A.D., or of the "centenaries" of the Eternal
City as in 47, 147, and 248. 15 Above all, we must not overlook
the festivals which defy exact computation because they were
dependent on imperial caprice and might be suddenly inserted in
the calendar at any moment. These the Caesars decreed in quan-
tities. They grew in importance with the prosperity of an em-
peror's reign, and their unexpectedness greatly intensified the
interest they aroused. They were the triumphs which an emperor
made the Senate decree for him; the munera or gladiatorial com-
bats which he decreed on some arbitrary pretext. These gladia-
torial displays soon came to equal the ludi in frequency, and in
the second century they sometimes went on for months. 16 The
reality, therefore, fir exceeded our statistics; and in attempting
to analyse it, we are driven to conclude that in the epoch we are
studying Rome enjoyed at least one day of holiday for every
working day.

2. THE EMPLOYMENT OF LEISURE

At first sight the discovery of this proportion is almost stupefy-
ing. On reflection, however, it is obvious that it was the inevitable
consequence of the political and social evolution which had led
the masters of the empire to make use of and extend the old
religious festivals as a means of consolidating their power over the
masses who crammed the city and swarmed round their palace on
every side.

Religion presided at the birth of every one of these Roman
"holidays," and was more or less inseparably bound up with

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 207

each. An outcrop of the religious substratum is visible on the
surface of the ancient ceremonies which the Romans never
omitted to perforrti though they had long since forgotten their
significance. Thus the fishing contest of June 7, over which the
city praetor presided in person, ended on*the Vulcanal rock with
a fish fry for the prize winners. 17 But a note of Festus which can-
not be challenged indicates that this offering of fried fish repre-
sented a sacrifice in which the god Vulcanus accepted the substi-
tution of fish for human victims: pisciculi pro animis humanist
Similarly, there was a horse-race in the Forum on October 15,
the result of which betrays its primitive origin. 19 Woe to the
winner! The ftamen of Mars sacrificed the luckless race-horse
immediately after it had won the victory. Its blood was collected
in two vessels, and the contents of one were straightway poured
over the hearth of the Regia the traditional palace of Numa
and home of the Pontifex Maximus while the other was sent to
the Vestals who kept it in reserve for the year's lustrations. As
for the horse's head, which had been severed by the knife of the
sacrificing priest, the dwellers by the Sacred Way and the in-
habitants of the Subura fought savagely to decide which of their
respective quarters should have the honour of exhibiting on the
wall of one of its buildings the trophy of the "October Horse."
The significance of these strange customs is revealed at once
when we turn back to the distant past in which they had their
origin. Each year on their return from the annual military cam-
paigning, which began in spring and continued until autumn, the
Latins of ancient Rome offered a horse-race to the gods by way
of thanksgiving; and they sacrificed the winning Tiorse that the
city might be purified by the shedding of its blood and protected
by the fetish of its skeleton.

These two immemorial usages at once disclose the ancestral
rituals. But religion is not less present for being less evident in
the more recent games of the republic. The games designed to
call Olympus to the rescue in hours of crisis had been instituted
successively in Jionour of Jupiter, of Apollo, of Ceres, of Cybele,
and of Flora. When, later, the dictators lengthened the list of
games in honour of their military victories, they designed to raise
these victories, and therewith themselves, to a more than human
plane. In the combats as in the races, in the dramatic representa-
tion as in the imperial purple, the underlying idea 'was not merely

208 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

to appease the gods but to capture something of their strength,
momentarily incarnate in the magistrate celebrating his triumph,
in the actors of the drama, and in the victors of the contests.
When, in 105 B.C., the State for the first time inaugurated on its
own behalf gladiatoriaf combats such as private individuals had
been wont to hold beside the graves of their relations, it gave
these displays the name of munera, which they retained through
tlje ages following. 20 This word, implying a favour, gift, or funeral
honours, connotes the sinister function of these shows : to appease
the wrath of the gods by the death of men and to assuage the un-
rest of the dead by fresh slaughter of the living. Festus defined
them in the time of Augustus as "an oblation dictated by duty." 21
"An honour we are bound to render to the spirits of the dead,"
declared Tertullian at the end of the second century. 22 "Blood
poured on the ground to calm the scythe-bearing god in the heav-
ens," Ausonius was to call it, under the later empire. 23

It would almost seem that this horrible conception of human
sacrifice, inherited by the Romans from the sombre Etruscan
genius, had survived the centuries unaltered and unweakened.
This is only apparently the case. In imperial times any such
erudite explanation would have passed over the head of a public
which in its heart and for its own pleasure had completely secu-
larised its sacred games. No doubt the public went to the circus
as to a service and put on its festal toga for the occasion, for an
edict of Augustus had made the wearing of a toga obligatory. 24
No doubt, again, the public was bound under pain of expulsion
to observe the proprieties and to refrain, for instance, from eat-
ing or drinking during the races. 25 But in these matters the Ro-
mans had the feeling not of following a liturgy but of complying
with a rule of etiquette. When, in compliance with the rule, they
rose to their feet to acclaim the inaugural procession in which the
statues of the Dim accompanied the official gods, they were dem-
onstrating not their religious fervour but their fidelity to the
dynasty, their attachment to their professional group under the
patronage of this god or that goddess, and thei* admiration for
the organisation of so magnificent a parade. 20 If there chanced to
be anyone among the crowd so ingenuously pious* as to imagine
that the divinity dear to his heart had made a sign of understand-
ing or a protective movement in his direction, his unwonted

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 209

credulity attracted the curiosity of his neighbours and excited the
humour of the gossips. 27

The ancient religion of Rome was still able to lend the hal-
lowed association of its traditions to the splendour of the imperial
spectacles and shows. But the public knew little of it and cared
less; if they respected it at all, it was unconsciously. In this do-
main as in others, new beliefs had driven the old into the back-
ground, if they had not entirely eradicated them. If any living
faith made the spectators' hearts beat faster it was a faith in
astrology. They would gaze entranced at the accidental patterns
formed in the sand of the arena; in the moat (euripus) which sur-
rounded it they would read symbols of the seas; in the obelisk
or spina they would see an emblem of the sun darting his rays to
highest heaven; in the twelve stalls (car ceres) from which the
chariots started the constellations of the Zodiac; in the seven
tracks of the race courses the circuit of the seven planets in the
heavens and the succession of the seven days of the week; in the
circus itself a miniature projection of the universe and, as it were,
an epitome of its destiny. 28 If any enthusiasm exalted the public
soul it was that evoked by the passing of the sacred cortege with
the sculptured images of dead emperors, and the simultaneous
appearance in his pulvinar or couch of the living emperor, to
whose benevolence they owed the number and the splendour of
their entertainments.

A salutary contact was thus established between the princeps
and the mob, which prevented him on the one hand from shutting
himself off in dangerous isolation and prevented them on their
part from forgetting the august presence of the Caesar. The
moment he entered the circus or the theatre or the amphitheatre,
the crowd leapt spontaneously to their feet and greeted him with
a waving of handkerchiefs, as the faithful today greet the Holy
Father in the basilica of the Vatican, offering a moving salutation
that had the modulation of a hymn and the accent of a prayer. 20
This sort of adoration did not, of course, exclude more human
sentiments, at once stronger and more intimate. The immense
concourse had the happiness, as Pliny says in his Panegyric, not
only "of perceiving the princeps in the midst of his people," 80
but also of feeling drawn to him by the vicissitudes of the race,
the fight, or the drama, sharing his emotions, his wishes, his

2io DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

pleasure, and his fears. Authority relaxed in the familiarity en-
gendered by emotions felt in common, and at the same time
drew new strength from bathing again in the waves of popularity
which broke .around its feet. At a time when the Comitia were
silent and the Senate merely repeated the lesson prescribed to it,
it was only amid the merriment of the ludi and the munera that
public opinion could take shape and express itself in petitions
suddenly echoed by thousands of voices demanding from Tiberius
the Apoxyomenus of Lysippus, 81 and obtaining from Galba the
death of Tigellinus. 32 The emperors developed skill in canalising
this mass emotion and directing its currents, and often succeeded
in transferring to the multitude the responsibility for acts of
vengeance which they had already planned but preferred to
execute under an appearance of popular duress. 88 Thus the spec-
tacles of Rome, though not forming an integral part of the gov-
ernmental system of the empire, helped to sustain its structure,
and without becoming incorporated in the imperial religion,
fanned whatever flame still burned in it.

Nor was this all: they formed a barrier for autocracy against
revolution. In the city there were 150,000 complete idlers sup-
ported by the generosity of the public assistance, and perhaps an
equal number of workers who from one year's end to the other
had no occupation after the hour of noon and yet were deprived
of the right to devote their spare time to politics. The shows
occupied the time of these people, provided a safety valve for their
passions, distorted their instincts, and diverted their activity. A
people that yawns is ripe for revolt. The Caesars saw to it that
the Roman plebs suffered neither from hunger nor ennui. The
spectacles were the great anodyne for their subjects' unemploy-
ment, and the sure instrument of their own. absolutism. They
shrewdly buttressed their power by surrounding the plebs with
attentions and expending fabulous sums of money iff the process.

Dio Cassius records that Augustus one day reproached the
pantomime actor Pylades for deafening Rome with the noise of
his quarrels and rivalries. 84 Pylades had the audacity to reply:
"It is in your interest Caesar, that the people should keep their
thoughts on us!" The artist's witty retort voiced the unspoken
thought of Augustus and penetrated one of the secrets of his
government. Games were the great preoccupation of his reign at
home. He never failed to take a share in them, with ostentatious

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES , 211

zeal and deliberate seriousness. He took his seat in the centre of
his pulvinar between his wife and children. If he had to withdraw
before the end, he excused himself and designated someone else
to preside. If he stayed to the end, he was never seen to let his
attention wander, whether he really enjoyed the performances for
their own sake as he frankly confessed, or whether he wished to
avoid the murmurs which his father Caesar had called forth by
starting to read reports and to reply to them while the spectacle
was in progress. He wanted to enjoy himself with his people, and
he spared nothing to give them pleasure, so that the spectacles
of his reign surpassed in splendour and in variety anything which
had been admired before. 85 In his own Res Gestae he recalls with
gratification that he had four times given games in his own name,
and twenty-three times in the name of magistrates on whom the
expense should have fallen, but who either were absent at the
time or were not in a financial position to undertake them. 86

Consuls and praetors were crushed under the burden of the
expenditure entailed by their honourable promotion, and Martial
has invented an amusing anecdote of a young woman, Proculeia,
who as soon as her husband was appointed to the praetorship an-
nounced her intention of divorcing him:

What, I ask, is the matter, Proculeia? What is the reason of this sud-
den resentment? Do you answer me nothing? I will tell you: your hus-
band was praetor. The purple robe of the Megalesian festival was like
to cost a hundred thousand sesterces, even if a man gave a penurious
show, and the plebeian festival would have run off with twenty thou-
sand. This is not divorce, Proculeia: it is good business. 87

The princeps was driven more and more to come to the rescue
of his magistrates, and as each Caesar succeeded the last he bet-
tered the example of Augustus, in order that it might not be said
that the spectacles of his reign were less brilliant than those of
former emperors. If we except Tiberius this crowned republican
whose incurable misanthropy extended alike to plebeian and
patrician all the emperors vied with each other to enlarge the
program of the traditional games, lengthening them sometimes
till sunrise, and duplicating them with innumerable extra shows
not in the calendar. Even the niggardly did not dare to shirk this
expenditure. Under Claudius, who was economical, the Roman
games cost 760,000 sesterces; and the Apollinarian games, which

212 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

had cost their founder in his day 3,000 sesterces, ran to 38o,ooo. 88
Even under the upstart Vespasian, son of a clerk, whose reputa-
tion for economy is well established, the building of the Flavian
amphitheatre began. The magnitude of its own dimensions even
more than its proximity to the colossal statue of the sun earned it
eventually the name of the "Colosseum." The wiser emperors vied
with the worst in this debauchery of pleasure and squandering of
money; and the most ostentatious, the most apparently foolish 4n
the matter was perhaps Trajan, the model emperor (optimus
princeps) whose perfection was held to be worthy of Jupiter. In
reality, as Fronto saw it, "his wisdom never failed to pay atten-
tion to the stars of the theatre, the circus, or the arena, for he well
knew that the excellence of a government is shown no less in its
care for the amusements of the people than in serious matters,
and that although the distribution of corn and money may satisfy
the individual, spectacles are necessary for the contentment of
the masses." 89

These last words give us the key to the problem. The policy
of the Caesars was prescribed by the necessity which compels
those who would govern the masses. We have recently seen the
same principles being applied, in Germany by the Kraft durch
Freude, in Italy by the Dopo Lavoro, in France by the Ministry
of Leisure. But these contemporary attempts to cater to men's
leisure do not approach the scale of those undertaken by the
Roman Empire. By means of them the empire preserved its
existence, guaranteed the good order of an overpopulated capital,
kept the peace among more than a million men. The zenith of its
greatness at the beginning of the second century coincides with
the maximum magnificence of its races and its games, the per-
formances in its theatre, the real combats of its arena', the artificial
battles, the literary and musical competitions of its agones.

3. THE RACES

The games par excellence at Rome were those of the circus
(cir censes). 40 They cannot be considered apart from the build-
ing they took place in and drew their name from. The circuses
were built expressly for them, and whatever their dimensions
their plan was uniform, consisting of a long rectangle, rounded
off at one end into a semicircle. The Circus Flaminius, built in
221 B.C. by the censor Flaminius Nepos on the site correspond-

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 213

ing to the present Palazzo Caetani, was 400 metres by 26o; 41
the Circus Gai which Caligula built on the Vatican was 180
metres by 90; its central obelisk now adorns the Piazza San
Pietro; 42 the oldest and the largest of all was the Circus Maximus,
which served as a model for the other two. 48 Nature had almost
laid it out herself in the depression of the Vallis Murcia lying be-
tween the Palatine on the north and the Aventine on the south.
The successive embellishments which it received mark the grow-
ing passion of the Romans for the cir censes; the site is now used
for the exhibitions of Mussolini's Rome.

The track was originally formed by the low ground of the
valley, and its soft, swampy nature eased the competitors' falls;
the part containing the spectators' seats (cavea) was at first
formed simply by the slopes of the adjacent hills, to which groups
of the onlookers clung. In the centre of the field itself two wooden
posts (metae) were staked, the more westerly one, the meta
prima, rising in front of the trench which sheltered the subter-
ranean altar of the god Consus, which was uncovered only during
the games. 44 In 329 B.C. stables of car ceres (for a long time
simply removable stalls) were installed to the west of and facing
the meta prima** The two metae were joined by a longitudinal
embankment which indicates that the valley bottom had dried
out. The Romans considered this embankment the "backbone"
(spina) of the arena, and broke up its monotony first with statues
of divinities supposed to look with favour on competitive sports
such as that of Pollentia, Goddess of Might, which was acci-
dentally knocked down in 189 B.C. 40 and later, in 174 B.C.,
with the septem ova, seven large wooden eggs which were moved
so as to indicate to the spectators which of the seven laps of the
race was now in progress. 47 It was not, however, until the last
century B.C. and the first century A.D. that the Circus Maximus
began to be honoured with the magnificent monuments which
made it famous in the ancient world, and of which archaeology
has unearthed only the remains.

For the protection of the public at the games which he cele-
brated in 55 B.C., Pompey erected iron barriers round the arena
where twenty elephants were pitted against armed Gaetulians.
But to the terror of the spectators the iron bars buckled in many
places under the impact of the terrified monsters. To avoid a
similar panic in future, Caesar in 46 B.C. enlarged the arena to

214 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

the east and west and surrounded it with a moat filled with
water. 48 At the same time he built, or rebuilt, the carceres in
volcanic tufa stone, and carved out the face of the hillsides so as
comfortably to accommodate in tiers 150,000 spectators, seated
at their ease. 49 His adopted son was to complete the work. In
consultation with Octavius, Agrippa in 33 B.C. doubled the sys-
tem of signals by alternating seven bronze dolphins (delphini)
with the seven eggs along the spina, and having them reversed at
each fresh lap. 50 Later Augustus brought from Heliopolis the
obelisk of Rameses II, which today graces the Piazza del Popolo,
to occupy the centre of the circus. 51 And above the cavea on the
Palatine side he set up for himself, his family, and his guests the
"royal enclosure" (the pulvinar) which he mentions in his Res
Gestae?* From the beginning of the empire the pulvinar showed
the Romans, overwhelmed by the sight of so much imperial
majesty, a sort of first sketch of the future kathisma from which
the kings would one day command the Hippodrome of Constan-
tinople. 53

It seems to have been Claudius who first introduced stone seats
for the senators, at the same time replacing the wooden metae
by posts of gilded bronze and the tufa of the carceres by marble. 54
More stone seats were erected by Nero, this time for the Equites,
when he rebuilt the circus after the great fire of 64 and took the
opportunity to enlarge the track by filling in the euripus Later
Trajan completed the enlargement of the cavea by deepening the
excavations into the hills, a work- which Pliny the Younger
claimed in his Panegyric had increased the number of spectators'
seats by s,ooo. 56

By this time the Circus Maximus had reached the colossal di-
mensions of 600 by 200 metres, and had achieved its final im-
posing form. Its curving exterior displayed three arcades faced
with marble, superimposed like those of the Colosseum. Under
these arcades wine merchants, caterers and pastry-cooks, astrolo-
gers and prostitutes had their place of business. Inside, the track
was now covered with a bed of sand which sparkled with bright
mineral grain. The most striking thing, however, was the cavea,
whose treble tiers faced each other along the Palatine beneath the
imperial pulvinar and along the Aventine. The lowest tier of seats
was of marble; the second of wood; while the third seems to have
offered standing places only. The Regionaries of the fourth cen-

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 215

tury compute 385,000 places in all. 57 We must perhaps allow for
some exaggeration in their estimate, but it is safe to pin our faith
to the 255,000 seats which we can deduce from the testimony of
the elder Pliny for the Flavian period, plus the additional 5,000
attributed to Trajan by Pliny the Younger.

Even with these allowances the figure is staggering. Like the
Olympic Stadium at Berlin, the Circus Maximus when in use
seemed a city in itself, ephemeral and monstrous, set down in the
middle of the Eternal City. The most surprising thing about the
giant structure was the ingenuity of the details which fitted it
to perform its functions. At the two ends were two corresponding
arched enclosures. That on the east, toward the Mons Caelius,
was broken by the three-bayed triumphal arch which the Senate
and the Roman people consecrated in 81 A.D. to the victory of
Titus over the Jews, 58 and beneath which filed the procession of
the Pompa Circensis. That on the west, toward the Velabrum, con-
tained, on the ground floor, the twelve car ceres where chariots and
horses waited to begin the race as soon as the rope that was
stretched between the two marble Hermes outside each of the
twelve doors should fall; the story above was occupied by the
. tribune reserved for the curule magistrate who was presiding over
the games, and for his imposing suite.

The truth is that the Roman crowd revelled in these spectacles
where everything combined to quicken their curiosity and arouse
their excitement: the swarming crowd in which each was carried
off his feet by all, the almost incredible grandeur of the setting,
the perfumes and gaily-coloured toilets, the sanctity of the ancient
religious ceremonies, the presence of the august emperor, the
obstacles to be overcome, the perils to be avoided, the prowess
needed to win, the unforeseen vicissitudes of each of the contests
which brought out the powerful beauty of the stallions, the rich-
ness of their accoutrements, the perfection of their training, and
above all the agility and gallantry of drivers and riders.

As the size of the circus had been increased and its equipment
perfected, the series of contests had become extended and en-
riched. Every ludus had enlarged its program; and games lasting
one day gave place to those of seven or nine or fifteen days. Each
race consisted of seven laps. But the number of races held in one
day was increased in the early empire. Under Augustus it was
customary to have a dozen a day. Under Caligula the number

2i6 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

was doubled and a day of twenty-four races became the most
common after that. 59 Let us reckon it up: seven laps or spatia
for each race (missus) makes seven times 568 metres, or 3,976
metres per chariot per race. Twenty-four races covered a distance
of 85 kilometres (about 55 miles)! When we remember the rest
at noon and the pause which necessarily intervened between the
missus, we must admit that the circus day was filled to overflow-
ing.

But the Romans could never have too much, and moreover the
variety of the Indus prevented any feeling of satiety. The interest
of the horse-races was heightened by all sorts of acrobatic tricks.
In the desultores the jockeys guided two horses at once and leaped
from one to the other; again they flourished* weapons and made
mimic warfare on horseback; now they sat astride, knelt, and lay
down on their horses at the gallop; now snatched a piece of cloth
from the track or jumped over a chariot harnessed to four horses.
As for the chariot races, they were diversified by the teams of
horses; sometimes two horses (bigae) drew them, sometimes three
(trigae), most commonly four (quadrigae), occasionally even
six or eight or ten (decemiuges) . Each race was enhanced by the
solemnity of its start and its brilliant equipment. The signal for
the trumpet to sound the start was given by the presiding consul,
praetor, or aedile, who threw a white napkin from the height of
his tribune into the arena. The gesture was critical and the great
personage in himself was a sight worth seeing. Over a tunic,
scarlet like Jupiter's, he had draped an embroidered Tyrian toga.
Like a living statue, he held in his hand an ivory baton sur-
mounted by an eagle on the point of flight, and on his head he
wore a wreath of golden leaves so heavy that a "slave or player
at his side had to help him to hold it up." 60

At the president's feet, the chariots came to take up the place
which the draw had allotted to them for the start, ranging them-
selves in perfect order and shining trim. Each upheld the honour
of the party or jactio to which it belonged. 61 The factiones had
been founded to defray the enormous co^t entailed by the selec-
tion and training of the competitors, man and beast, and the mag-
istrates who gave the games had to contract with them for the
performers. It may well be questioned whether the dimensions
of the track could conveniently permit the management of more
than four quadrigae at a time; it is certain that there were

A GLADIATOR'S GREAVLS

A GLADIATOR'S HKLMKT

CHARIOTEERS OF THE FOUR FACTIONS

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 217

normally only four factiones, and that these at any rate after the
beginning of the second century were usually allied in pairs.
On the one hand were the Whites (factio albata) and the Greens
(jactio prasina), and on the other the Blues (factio veneta) and
the Reds (jactio russata). The stables of all four factions were
in the ninth region; that of the Greens seems to have been near
the spot now occupied by the Palazzo Farnese. 62 Each factio
maintained a numerous staff of stable-boys and trainers (doctores
et magistri), veterinary surgeons (medici), tailors (sarcinatores) ,
saddlers (sellarii), grooms (succunditores) , stable-guards (con-
ditores), dressers and waterers (spartores), who accompanied the
animals into the carceres, and of iubilatores whose duty it was
to rouse their teams to eagerness by joyous cries. As for the
chariot-drivers (aurigae, agitator es), the various factiones vied
with each other to secure the best at whatever cost.

While the horses pawed the ground, branches on their heads,
tail held in air by a tight knot, mane starred with pearls, breast-
plate studded with plaques and amulets, neck bearing a flexible
collar and a ribbon dyed with the colours of their party, the
auriga among his servants was the cynosure of all eyes. He stood
upright in his chariot, helmet on head, whip in hand, leggings
swathed round calf and thigh, clad in a tunic the colour of his
factio, his reins bound round his body, and by his side the dagger
that would sever them in case of accident.

The public was tense even before the contest began. Each
scanned with anxious eye the turn-out to which he had pinned his
faith. In the packed cavea conversation hummed; neighbours of
both sexes, piled on top of each other, animatedly compared their
prophecies. This crowded gathering, seated according to the
chance order of their entry, was not lacking in attraction either
for women in search of a husband or for a libertine in search of
adventure. It once happened under the republic that a beautiful
young divorcee, Valeria, sister of the orator Hortensius, sur-
reptitiously plucking a thread from the toga of Sulla in the hope
of participating in his infallible good fortune, attracted the atten-
tion and won the last affections of the great dictator. 03 And Ovid,
love poet of the empire, advised his disciples to learn to enjoy
attendance at the circus, where the pleasant conversions which
preceded the races and the fever of excitement which they roused
offered so many opportunities for gallantry. 6 *

2i8 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Excitement seized the public the moment dust began to fly be-
neath the chariot wheels, and until the last lap was ended the
spectators panted with hope and fear, uncertainty and passion.
What. anguish at the slightest hitch, and thrills when the posts
were turned without mishap! As the metae were always on the
left of the chariots, the success of the turning manoeuvre de-
pended on the strength and handiness of the two outside horses
called funales. They were not harnessed to the shaft like the two
middle ones but more loosely attached by a trace (funis), the off-
funalis swinging out on the right and the still more vital near-
junalis acting as pivot on the left. If the chariot hugged the turn-
ing post too closely, it ran the risk of crashing into it; if, on the
other hand, it swung out too far, it either lost position or was run
into by the chariot following and again ran the risk of being
wrecked. The agitator was subjected to a double strain: looking
ahead, he must encourage and guide his horses; looking behind,
avoid the impact of the chariot which was trying to pass him. He
could breathe freely again only when he had safely reached the
goal, after having fourteen times steered clear of the turning
posts, kept or improved his place, escaped the snares of the track,
and outwitted the stratagems of his competitors. The inscriptions
which commemorate his victories conceal none of the difficulties
he had overcome in achieving them he had kept the lead and
won: occupavit et vie it; he had passed from second to first
place and won: successit et vicit; he had been the "dark horse"
whom no one expected to win and who in a supreme moment had
triumphed: erupit et vicit The winner was greeted with a
storm of applause and the winning driver and his beasts were
overwhelmed by the outburst of the crowd's enthusiasm.

Purchased in the stud farms of Italy, Greece, Africa, and more
especially of Spain, put into training at the age of three and
making their first appearance in the races at five, the chariot race-
horses included mares which were harnessed to the shaft and
stallions which were usually attached by traces. Each of them
possessed its pedigree, its list of victories, its individual fame, so
widespread that its name was heard from one end of the empire to
the other, so imperishable that the echo of it has come down to
us. The famous names were incised on the rim of the earthen
lamps the potters turned 66 and on the mosaic pavements dis-
covered by moderns in provincial houses, like those in the

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 219

Numidian thermae whose proprietor Pompeianus confessed his
affection for the horse Polydoxus: "Winner or not, we love you,
Polydoxusl Vincas, non vincas, te amamus, Polydoxet"* 1 They
can still be read, carved in stone like the name of the immortal
Tuscus, who won the prize 386 times, 68 and Victor, 69 who on 429
occasions justified his surname of good augury; or engraved on
sheets of bronze which the losing betters loaded with curses and
consigned to the vengeance of the infernal gods in the bottom of
the tombs which have yielded them up to us. 70

The charioteers knew glory too and more. Though they were
of low-born origin, mainly slaves emancipated only after recurrent
success, they were lifted out of their humble estate by the fame
they acquired and the fortunes they rapidly amassed from the
gifts of magistrates and emperor, and the exorbitant salaries they
exacted from the domini jactionum as the price of remaining with
the colours. 71 At the end of the first century and in the first half
of the second, Rome prided herself on the presence of her star
charioteers, whom she called miliarii, not because they were
millionaires, but because they had won the prize at least a thou-
sand times: Scorpus 2,048 times, Pontius Epaphroditus 1,467,
Pompeius Musclosus 3,559, and lastly Diocles who, after having
competed 4,257 times and won 1,462 victories, had the wisdom to
retire from the arena in 150 A.D. with a fortune of 35 million
sesterces. 72 Friedlander compares these performances and these
gains with those of the Epsom jockeys at the end of the nineteenth
century: 78 for example, Fred Archer, who won 1,172 prizes during
six years' racing and died at 29 a multimillionaire. But while the
Roman charioteer equalled the modern jockey in the number of
his successes and the sums he won, he far excelled him in prestige
and honour.

In the city their escapades were admired rather than deplored,
and if one day, for instance, a charioteer had a mind to trounce or
rob a passer-by, the police turned a blind eye. 74 On 'the walls of
the streets, in the flats of the insulae, innumerable copies of their
portraits were exhibited, and the golden nose of Scorpus twinkled
everywhere: Aureus ut Scorpi nasus ubique micet Their names
flew from lip to lip, 76 and if one of the champions happened
to die, the poets of the court, skilled in grinding out praises of
the emperor, did not think it beneath their dignity to dedicate a
pathetic and well-turned farewell to the dead charioteer:

220 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Let Victory sadly break her Idumaean palms; beat, Favour, with cruel
hand thy naked breast; let Honour change her garb; and do thou,
sorrowful Glory, cast on the cruel flames the offering of thy crowned
locks. Ah, crime of Fate! Robbed, Scorpus, of thy first youth, art thou
fallen, and so soon dost yoke Death's dusky steeds! That goal whereto
thy car sped ever in brief course, and swiftly won, why to thy life also
was it so nigh? 77

The extraordinary honour which the charioteers enjoyed at
Rome was evidently due to the physical and moral qualities their
calling demanded : their strength and imposing presence, their
agility and coolness; also to the severe and early training to
which they had been subjected; still more perhaps to the dangers
implicit in their calling these bloody "shipwrecks" which they
faced with such light hearts and which so often cut them off in the
flower of their youth. Fuscus was killed at 24 after 57 victories;
Crescens at 22 after having earned 1,558,346 sesterces; M.
Aurelius Mollicius at 20 after 125 victories. 78 But the passionate
devotion which they inspired in a whole people was fed also from
more tainted sources. It was related to the passion for gambling
for which the race course gave the opportunity and of which the
charioteers were the masters. The shows of which they were the
heroes and the arbiters were inseparable from the sponsio or
wager. Martial exhorts his book: "Make for Quirinus' Colonnade
hard by ... there are two or three who may unroll you . . .
but only when the bets on Scorpus and Incitatus are disposed
of." T9 "All Rome today is in the circus," writes Juvenal, "such
sights are for the young, whom it befits to shout and make bold
wagers with a smart damsel by their side." 80

The victory of one chariot enriched some, impoverished others;
the hope of winning unearned money held the Roman crowd all
the more tyrannically in its grip in that the larger proportion was
unemployed. The rich would stake a fortune, the poor the last
penny of their sportula, on the colours of a stable, the jactio of
theif choice. Hence these explosions of exuberant joy, the out-
bursts of rage when the victor was proclaimed. Hence this chorus
of obtrusive praise and of stifled imprecation round the favorite
horses and the trusted charioteers. Hence also the banquet,
epulum, served at the close of the day's show to mitigate too vivid
disappointments and nip in the bud any inclination toward riot-
ing; hence also these spar stones and these missilia, the hail of

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 221

eatables, of filled purses, of "raffle tickets" for a ship, a house, a
farm, which were rained down on the spectators in the circus at
the bidding of Agrippa, of Nero, and of Domitian, and brought
the more resourceful some requital and some consolation. 81 Hence
too that intense partiality for one jactio or another which tne
abandoned gamblers among the Caesars manifested notably
that of Vitellius and Caracalla for the "Blues." 82

At the period we are studying, neither Trajan nor Hadrian had
succumbed to this criminal mania; and the day was at hand when
the philosopher Marcus Aurelius would congratulate himself on
his indifference to "gaming." 8S But the multitude of their sub-
jects was possessed by the passion for gambling, and even the best
of the emperors turned it to his own advantage. The excitement
which people had sought in politics they sought now in the races.
Their stakes were laid no longer in the Forum but in the circus,
whose "factions" had become a substitute for the ancient political
parties. This mania was unquestionably the symbol of a moral
decline, and we can well understand that it cast a cloud on the
patriotic pride of a Juvenal and the lofty wisdom of a Marcus
Aurelius. At the same time we must recognise that it sprang from
the need of the masses for something to stir their blood, and that
the imperial regime showed skill in diverting it to the maintenance
of its own stability and the preservation of the public peace.

4. THE THEATRE

If we are to believe certain scholars, the great cycles of games
included under the republic more theatrical representations than
races. 84 It is by no means easy to draw the line between them,
and even if we accept this relative proportion as having obtained
at the start, we must admit that it was reversed under the empire.
By that time the circenses had surpassed in popularity the trage-
dies, comedies, and other types of drama which succeeded them.
Pliny the Younger, who says nothing about his contemporaries'
passion for the theatre, deplores their craze for the circus: "Such
favour, such weighty influence, hath one worthless (charioteer's)
tunic I say nothing of the vulgar herd, more worthless than the
tunic but with certain grave personages. When I observe such
men thus insatiably fond of so silly, so low, so uninteresting, so
common an entertainment, I congratulate myself that I am in-
sensible to these pleasures." 85

222 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

If in his day the races had won such popularity among the
better educated classes, it is not hard to imagine the attraction
they had for the man in the street, who aspired only to possession
of an income sufficient to support "a couple of stout Moesian
porters on whose hired necks I may be taken comfortably to my
place in the bawling circus." 86 There is no doubt that Trajan
understood the wishes of the majority of his subjects when in 112,
to gratify them with some extra ludi, he paid the expenses of the
circus for thirty days running, but of the theatre for only a fort-
night. 87 It is true that the Ostian Fasti, to which we owe this piece
of information, add that the theatrical performances were given
on three stages at once. But huge as the Roman theatres were, the
audiences of all three could have been accommodated five times
over in the cavea of the Circus Maximus alone.

To the north-west of the Flaminian Circus, where the curves of
the Piazza di Grotta Pinta still sketch the ground plan, was the
semicircle of the theatre of Pompey, dedicated in 55 B.C. It was
1 60 metres in diameter, and it was reckoned that its hemicycle
provided 40,000 loca, which probably limits its seating capacity to
about 27,ooo. 88 The hemicycle of the theatre of B^lbus, laid out
in 13 B.C. under the present Monte dei Cenci, contained only
11,510 loca, or perhaps 7,700 seats. 80 Finally, there was the
theatre of Marcellus, designed by Julius Caesar's architects, and
finished in n B.C. by those of Augustus, on the site now occupied
by the Palazzo Sermoneta. The remarkable excavations of the
Via del Mare have shown that it was an imposing mass of traver-
tine, harmoniously designed in a semicircle 150 metres in di-
ameter; yet it had only 20,500 loca, or some 14,000 seats. 90 At
the very most, therefore, these three theatres together could have
accommodated about 50,000 spectators, an insignificant number
as compared with the 255,000 of the Circus Maximus but im-
pressive when set beside the largest theatres of the modern world:
the Opera in Paris with 2,156 seats, the San Carlo in Naples with
2,900, the Scala in Milan with 3,600, or even the 5,000 seats of
the Colon at Buenos Aires. The smallest theatre of Imperial Rome
was still twice the size of the largest modern American theatre;
and these dimensions would bear witness if nothing else did
to the fact that the Roman's love of the theatre, though less con-
suming than his passion for the .races, was still manifest. To
satisfy it, the emperors commissioned or financed the construe-

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 223

tion of stone theatres, a significant undertaking in view of the
fact that the "season," which fell between the ludi Megalenses
and the ludi Plebei, lasted only from April to November, and that
during it performances could take place only on certain days. And
since, despite its rapid decline, this passion for the theatre sur-
vived the empire, the Theatre of Pompey, restored under Domi-
tian, under Diocletian, under Honorius, was once again restored,
for the last time, by the benevolence of Theodoric the Ostrogoth
between 507 and 511.

At first sight we feel tempted to admire this persistence and to
deduce from it that the Roman people had a natural vocation for
this art which had been the glory of ancient Greece and which the
names of Accius and Pacuvius and the works of Plautus and
Terence had made illustrious in Latin. But in reality the same fate
which overtook the Athenian drama lay in wait for the Roman.
Permanent theatres, whose ample dimensions and perfect curves
still amaze us, were erected throughout the empire not only in
Italy and Gaul but in Lycia, in Pamphylia, at Sabratha in
Tripoli. 91 But the art to which they were dedicated was already
on its deathbed, as if the drama was by nature unsuited to the at-
tendance of the masses. Competitive performances filled the days,
but they pitted against each other .only the leaders of the troupe,
domini gregis. Production had dried up. The last writer of tragedy
whose plays we know for certain were acted on the stage was P.
Pomponius Secundus in the principate of Claudius. 92

From the time of Nero, authors who persisted in writing plays
wrote them most probably only to be read in an auditorium, to
an audience of fellow-authors. After the first century B.C. the
public battened almost exclusively on its old repertoire. In the
immense open-air theatres, moreover, amid the conf usioiv and
hubbub of a huge crowd, the spectator could not conceivably
follow a delicate intrigue in verse unless he knew every detail of
it in advance he had to have seen it played many times before,
and his memory of the plot had to be jogged by the hints supplied
in the prologue and the stereotyped symbols which assisted his
understanding. The brown or white colour of the tragic and comic
masks indicated the sex of the actor, while costumes draped in
Greek or Roman fashion gave an immediate clue to the nationality
and social status of the dramatis personae: white for an old man,
multicoloured for a youth, yellow for a courtesan, purple for the

224 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

rich, red for the poor, a short tunic for the slave, a chlamys for
the soldier, a rolled pallium for the parasite, and a motley one for
the go-between. 98 Because of these stereotyped fictions, however,
the play lost most of its interest and the public, who either remem-
bered or gave up hope of understanding, concentrated their atten-
tion on the by-play of the actors or some subsidiary detail of the
mise en seine. The theatre was, in fact, too big for the play.
Drama perished in the classic form which it had worn for nearly
three centuries and which circumstances over which it had no con-
trol rendered no longer tolerable. It persisted, after undergoing a
radical transformation, in a new form which banished it from
literature.

At the end of the first century, probably under the influence of
the Hellenistic theatre, 94 tragedy had evolved in a manner leading
inescapably to ballet forms. From the earliest antiquity, Roman
tragedy had been divided into dialogues (diverbia) and recita-
tives or lyrics (cantica), which the Roman public welcomed for
variety's sake. 05 The producers of republican days placed the
orchestral choirs on the stage, so that they might take more share
in the action. The empire producer did not hesitate to incorporate
the choir completely, thereby running the risk of submerging the
play under the lyrical chanting and the phantastic scenic decora-
tion. He mercilessly cut the traditional texts of the plays he pro-
duced each year and clipped the dialogue, so that after his scis-
sors had done their worst a tragedy consisted of little but lyrics
more or less skilfully punctuated by scraps of dialogue. If we
imagine Corneille's Cid or Racine's Athalie reduced to their poems
and choruses, we get some idea of the metamorphosis which drama
had suffered on the stage of Imperial Rome.

Naturally, the more famous of these cantica were known to
everyone, from repetition by generation after generation. At
Caesar's funeral, the crowd sang a verse from a canticum of the
Armorum Indicium of Pacuvius, which seemed to have been com-
posed two centuries before expressly to voice their present sorrow:
"Have I saved them only to perish at their hands?

Men 9 servasse ut essent qui me perderent?" 9e

And it was by means of a canticum that Britannicus evaded the
trap Nero laid for him during the Saturnalia of 55 A.D. 97 The
emperor had invited the young prince to a banquet with several

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 225

of his riotous companions, and suddenly commanded him to step
into the centre of the dining-hall and sing a song, hoping in this
way to discomfit him. Britannicus was unruffled. Instead of keep-
ing an embarrassed or resentful silence, he countefed with a poem
in tune with his own tragic position, in that its hero was supposed
to sing it after the theft of his paternal throne and royal rank.
Justus Lipsius conjectures that it was a canticum from the An-
dromache of Ennius, whose most beautiful lines have been pre-
served for us in Cicero's Tusctdan Disputations:

"O Pater! O Patrial O Priami domus!" 98

The effect was irresistible, and even at the emperor's table it
evoked "an emotion all the more sincere in that night and merry-
making had banished pretence."

This was the sort of emotion that was produced by the cantica
of the plays. By modulating the chants which had so long stirred
or soothed the hearers, accompanying them with the blended
music of many instruments, emphasizing their salient features
with a wonderful setting, and above all by bringing them to life
through pathetic intonation and passionate gesture, the spectacle
roused the audience from its apathy. The power of these songs was
multiplied by the presence of thousands of men and women re-
membering them together, vibrating to them in unison, hearing a
universal echo which moved or soothed them and ended by
awaking in them feelings sad and strong and eternal. Born of the
incomparable Greek tragedy, the Roman drama lay shattered to
fragments amid the marble of scenic decoration. But as these
operatic airs rose above the ruins of great tragedy, the pure
intoxication which the ancient masterpieces had inspired once
again touched the listening masses.

By a disastrous blunder this Roman opera, however, cast off
every bond which still linked it to true poetry. From of old the
law of this genre demanded that the actor of the cantica should
be a soloist." The cantica were more and more trimmed to the
measure of the star singer on whom fell the burden of the effort
and the honour of success. More and more he refused to have any
but supernumeraries round him, the "pyrrhicists" who swayed to
his cadence and to his command, the symphoniaci who replied to
him and took up his motifs, the instrumentalists of the orchestra
who relieved or accompanied him; zither players, trumpeters,

226 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

cymbalists, flutists, and castanet-players (scabettarii) . All were
but satellites revolving round one sun. It was the soloist alone who
filled the stage with his movement and the theatre with his voice.
He alone incarnated the entire action, whether singing, miming,
or dancing. He prolonged his youth and preserved his slimness by
a strict diet which banned all acid foods and drinks and which
called for emetics and purgatives the moment his waistline was
threatened. Faithful to the most severe training, he exercised un-
remittingly to preserve the tone of his muscles, the suppleness of
his joints, and the volume and charm of his voice. Skilled in
personifying every human type, in representing every human
situation, he became "the pantomime" par excellence, whose
imitations embraced the whole of nature, and who created a
second nature with his phantasy. 100

Though the law still called him an "actor" and labeled him
"infamous," 101 the star of the Roman stage inevitably became the
hero of the day and the darling of the women. In Augustus' time
the city was full of the fame, pretensions, and squabbles of the
pantomime Pylades. 102 Under Tiberius the mob came to blows
over the comparative merits of rival actors and the riot became
so serious that several soldiers, a centurion, and a tribune were
left dead on the streets. 108 Dearly as Nero envied their notoriety,
he had nevertheless to issue a decree of banishment against them,
to put an end to the bloody affrays caused by their rivalries. 104
But neither emperor nor public could do without them. Soon after
exiling them, he recalled them and admitted them to the intimacy
of his court, 105 thus providing the first example of what Tacitus
called histrionalis favor, 10 * this incurable idolatry which toward
the end of the first century drew the empress Domitia into the
arms of the pantomime Paris. 107

It cannot be denied that there were some great artists among
these actor-idols of the Roman populace. Pylades I, for instance,
certainly ennobled "the pantomime," a genre which he introduced
into Rome. Several anecdotes illustrate his conscientiousness and
the thought he gave to his art. 108 One day his pupil and rival, the
pantomime Hylas, while rehearsing before him the role of
Oedipus, was displaying a fine self-confidence. Pylades chastened
him by saying simply: "Don?t forget, Hylas, you are blind." An-
other day Hylas was playing a pantomime whose last line, "Great
Agamemnon," was in Greek. Wishing to give full force to his final

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 227

verse, he drew himself up to his full height as he delivered it.
Pylades, seated among the stalls of the cavea as an ordinary spec-
tator, could not refrain from calling out: "Ah, but you are making
him tall, not great!" The audience, catching the comment, in-
sisted on his mounting the stage to reenact the scene; when
Pylades came to that passage he merely assumed the attitude of
a man sunk in meditation for it is the duty of a chief to think
beyond his fellows and for everyone.

Pylades' successors were not worthy of him. Most of them
abandoned all attempt to excel equally in the arts of singing and
dancing. Livius Andronicus, who played in his own tragedies in
the early days of Roman drama, gave up delivering the lyrics be-
cause the strain had cracked his voice, and confined him-
self thereafter to making the gestures appropriate to his part
while a singer sung the words to the sound of a flute. 109 And so
the pantomime-actors of Domitian's and Trajan's day were con-
tent for the most part to be dancers, leaving it to the choir to chant
the cantica which their steps, their attitudes, and their gestures
were intended to interpret. Though song had come to dominate
tragedy, in pantomime it became subservient to the dance, the
actors' talent was displayed only in the mute language of their
movements. Everything about them spoke, except their voice
head, shoulders, knees, legs, and, above all, hands. Their elo-
quence commanded the admiration of Quintilian: "Their hands,"
he said, "demand and promise, they summon and dismiss; they
translate horror, fear, joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, repent-
ance, restraint, abandonment, time, and number. They excite and
they calm. They implore and they approve. They possess a power
of imitation which replaces words. To suggest illness, they imitate
the doctor feeling the patient's pulse; to indicate music they
spread their fingers in the fashion of a lyre." no By the second
century, a pantomime had reached such a state of perfection that
he was able without words to represent, amid the applause of a
public capable of appreciating every point, Atreus and Thyestes
in turn, or Aegisthus and Aerope, in the same day. 111

Terpsichore is assuredly one of the Muses. But the breath-
taking performances of Fregoli were far from inspired by Terpsi-
chore, and we cannot doubt that the extravagant acrobatics of
the Roman pantomimes killed the art of dancing.

In the first place, they unwisely reversed the order of values.

228 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

t first they used their miming as a commentary on the cantica,
but they went on to subordinate the cantica to their miming. They
thought not of serving a work of art, but of exploiting it. There-
after, the leaders of the troupe, musicians, and librettists were
reduced to the level of artisans. The Roman poet thought himself
lucky if the dancer give him an order, and he was privileged to
"sell his virgin A gave to Paris"; 112 but this piece of good fortune
cost him his creative freedom. The pantomimes laid down the law,
dictated the mise en sc&ne and the verses, prompted the music,
and chose the subjects with an eye to exploiting their own talents
and disguising their defects from a public too numerous to be dis-
criminating. Finally, and worst of all, they aimed more and more
at catching the eye and gratifying the senses rather than at touch-
ing the heart. The plays were either stark tragedies or sensual
productions guaranteed to titillate an audience quickly responsive
to their eroticism. Lueian has recorded most of the elements in
the repertory of both categories. 113 In the first, The Banquet of
Thyestes; Niobe, distraught with grief for her massacred chil-
dren; the Wraths of mythology and epic legend the Wrath of
Ajax and the Wrath of Hercules, in which Pylades already dis-
played exaggeration. 114 As for the second category, the list is
inexhaustible : the hapless or guilty loves of Dido and Aeneas, of
Venus and Adonis, of Jason and Medea; the ambiguous stay of
Achilles, dressed as a woman, among the daughters of Lycomedes
at Scyros. There were tales of incest, like Cinyras and Myrrha 9
a story of father and daughter, which was first produced in Rome,
Josephus records, the night before Caligula was murdered; 115 or
like Procne and Tereus. Tereus had ravished his sister-in-law,
Philomela, and cut out her tongue to ensure her silence. His wife
Procne avenged her by serving him at table the body of Itys, his
legitimate son. Nero himself in one of his scandalous exhibitions,
did not blush to play the role of the sister, Canace, in Macaris and
Canace 9 although she was confined on the stage and her incestuous
bastard was flung to the hounds. 116 And last of all the bestial
Pasiphae, in the play of that name, offered herself to a bull in the
Cretan labyrinth.

Such subjects could not but brutalise or corrupt the spectators,
now shuddering with a terror purely physical, now feeling a
sterile desire flow through their veins. These shocking dumb shows
threw women into ecstasy. Lascivious gestures moved them:

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 229

"Tuccia cannot contain herself; your Apulian maiden heaves a
sudden and longing cry of ecstasy as though she were in a man's
arms; the rustic Thymele is all attention, she learns her
lesson." m It is easy to see why Trajan, out of respect for the
sanctity of his own office, should have forbidden the actors on a
stage given over to lasciviousness to interrupt their obscene ballets
in order to dance, after their fashion, the praises of the reigning
emperor; 118 yet it was rumored that Trajan cherished only too
much affection for Pylades II, the great pantomime of his time. 119
Tragedy, by transforming herself first into opera and then into
ballet, had ended by degrading the Roman theatre to the level of
a music hall.

The decadence of comedy, though perhaps somewhat less rapid,
was no less complete. In the second century people still went to
see Plautus and Terence played, but rather out of deference to
tradition than for pleasure. If, as Roberto Paribeni has put it,
the Romans had turned from tragedy because "to their palates
accustomed to burning curries" Oedipus Coloneus and Iphigenia
in Tauris would have "tasted like a draught of camomile tea," 12
it is obvious that the temperate spicing of the Menaeckmi or the
Andria would have seemed equally insipid. Bathyllus' attempt to
rejuvenate comedy in Augustus' day by introducing music and
dancing 121 did not survive the dramatist himself. Unable to re-
generate comedy, the theatres replaced it by the mime, which had
already proved a success in Eastern capitals. The Romans brought
it home in the first century B.C. and soon discovered how to adapt
it to the taste of their mass public.

Mime (Greek ni|*o<;, Latin mimus) is a word used to denote
both a type of show and the actor in it. It was a farce, modelled
as closely as possible on reality. It was, properly speaking, a
"slice of life" which was transported hot and spicy onto the stage,
and its success depended on its realism, or naturalism, if the term
is preferred, which grew steadily more and more marked.

In the mime, conventions were abolished. The actors had no
masks and wore the contemporary dress of the town. Their
number varied with the play, and they formed a homogeneous
troupe. Women's roles were taken by actresses whose reputation
for light virtue was well established by the time of Cicero. He
himself was not insensible to the talent of Arbuscula or the charms
of Cytheris, and was prepared to take up the defence of a citizen

230 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of Atina guilty of abducting a mimula, in the name of a right
consecrated by the custom of the municipia 2 The subjects of
the mimes were taken from the commonplace events of daily life,
with a distinct leaning toward the coarser happenings and the
lower human types: "a diurna imitatione vilium rerum et levium
personarum." 12 * The treatment was usually caricature, which
was pushed, as we shall see, to the limit of accuracy and impu-
dence. Politics were permitted. Under the republic the mime was
often critical of the government, and Cicero expected to gauge
from its comments the reaction to the murder of Caesar. 124 Under
the empire, however, the mime had no option but to range itself
on the side of the princeps, lampooning those who were in bad
odour at court. The mime-actor Vitalis boasted of being par-
ticularly successful in this sort of target practice: "The man
whom I took off and who saw his own image doubled under his
very eyes was horrified to see that I was more truly he than he
himself." 125 In my opinion it is no accident that the mime most
often played from 30 to 200 A.D., the Laureolus of Catullus,
which was staged under Caligula and well known to Tertullian,
demonstrated by the fate which overtook the brigand hero that
under a good government the wicked are punished and the police
always have the last word. 126

The whole conception of the mime, with its flaunting of con-
vention and its aiming at simplicity, certainly contained fertile
seeds of theatrical reform. Two at least of the authors of mimes
at the end of the first century B.C., Decimus Laberius and
Publilius Syrus, lifted their pieces to the dignity of literature. But
the more popular the mime became, the smaller was the part the
text played in it. The great mimes I have quoted were those in
which the authors played their own plays. The imperial mime
actors brought to their sketchy plot "words and action which they
had mentally pieced together, and according to the mood of the
moment and the temper of the public embroidered them with
improvisations on the theme announced.

The Urbs delighted in the mimes acted by Latinus and Pan-
niculus, which were filled with stories of kidnappings, cuckolds,
and lovers hidden in convenient chests. 127 In these plays the
actresses were permitted to undress entirely (ut mimae nudaren-
tur) which had formerly been tolerated only during the midnight
games of the Floralia. 128 The alternative was roughhouse, where

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 231

loud words resounded and actual blows were exchanged, until
finally the scrapping became serious and blood was shed copi-
ously. The fact that the Laureolus remained popular for nearly
two centuries is explained by the ferocity of its brigand murderer
and incendiary and by his hideous punishment. Domitian al-
lowed the play to end with a scene in which a criminal condemned
under the common law was substituted for the actor and put to
death with tortures in which there was nothing imaginary. The
spectators were not revolted by the ignoble spectacle of a pitiable
Prometheus derided, torn by the nails which pinned his palms
and ankles to the cross, or seared by the claws of the Caledonian
bear to which he had been flung as prey; in fact, Martial sings
the praises of the prince who made these things possible. 129 So
performed, the mime seemed to the Romans of the time to reach
the highest perfection attainable by the means and the effects at
its disposal ; and indeed, this slice of life cut from the living flesh
leaves far behind the most graphic horrors portrayed today. As
the mime reached the height of its achievement, it drove human-
ity as well as art off the Roman stage. It plumbed the depths of
a perversion which had conquered the masses of the capital. They
were not sickened by such exhibitions because the ghastly butch-
eries of the amphitheatre had long since debased their feelings
and perverted their instincts.

5. THE AMPHITHEATRE

Revisiting the arenas of Rome after nearly two thousand years
of Christianity, we feel as if we were descending into the Hades
of antiquity. The amphitheatre demands more than reproach.
It is beyond our understanding that the Roman people should
have made the human sacrifice, the munus, a festival joyously
celebrated by the whole city, 130 or come to prefer above all other
entertainment the slaughter of men armed to kill and be killed
for their amusement. As early as 160 B.C. the public deserted
the theatre where the Hecyra of Terence was being performed,
for one of these gladiatorial combats. 131 By the first century B.C.
the populace had grown so greedy for these sights that candidates
sought to win votes by inviting the people to witness spectacular
scenes of carnage. In order to put an end to corrupt practices the
Senate in 63 B.C. passed a law disqualifying for election any
magistrate who had financed such shows for the two years pre-

232 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

ceding the voting. 182 It was natural that aspirants for the imperial
throne should play on the people's passion to promote their own
ambitious aims. Pompey even sated his fellow-citizens with com-
bats; 133 Caesar freshened their attraction by the luxury with
which he surrounded them. 134 Finally the emperors, deliberately
pandering to the murderous lust of the crowds, found in gladia-
torial games the most sure, if also the most sinister, of their
instruments of power.

Augustus was the first. Outside the city itself, he adhered to
the posthumous Ikws of Julius Caesar and continued to limit the
municipal magistrates to offering one annual munus* Within
the city, he ordered the praetors to give annually two munera
limited to 120 gladiators. 136 In 27 A.D., Tiberius forbade any
private person with a fortune less than an "equestrian capital" of
400,000 sesterces to give a munus. 137 Claudius transferred the
duty of providing the public gladiatorial shows from the prae-
tors to the more numerous quaestors, at the same time again
limiting them to 120 gladiators per spectacle. 138

This restriction aimed less at curbing the passion of his sub-
jects than at enhancing the prestige of their sovereign. For while
thus regulating the giving of the public munera, Augustus rec-
ognized no limit save his own caprice to the number of "extraor-
dinary" munera, which he offered the people three times in his
own name and five times in the names of his sons and grand-
sons. 189 By the incomparable splendour of these private gladia-
torial spectacles, he practically monopolized the right to provide
"extraordinary" munera, which was accomplished later by the
formal prohibitions of the Flavians. 140 Thus the decrees of Augus-
tus made the munera the imperial show par excellence, as official
and obligatory as the ludi of the theatre and the circus. At the
same time the empire provided grandiose buildings specially
suited to their purpose. The design of these buildings, improvised
more or less by chance, and repeated in hundreds of examples,
seems to us today a new and mighty creation of Roman architec-
ture the amphitheatre.

Up to the time of Caesar those providing munera had either
used the circus or hastily rigged up in the Forum palisades which
were removed on the morrow. 141 In 53 or 52 B.C. Curio the
Younger, whose candidature for the office of tribune Caesar sur-
reptitiously supported with Gaulish money, hit upon a new cam-

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 233

paigning scheme. 142 On the pretext of rendering honour to the
manes of his lately deceased father, he announced that he would
give scenic games supplemented by a munus. Ingeniously he or-
dered not one but two wooden theafres to be constructed, both
very spacious and identical in shape but set back to back with
their curves touching, and mounted on a swivel. Up to noon they
were left in this back -to-back position, so that the noise of the one
representation should not disturb the other. The munus was
scheduled to take place in the afternoon an arrangement of the
program which indicates that people who had been at work in the
morning would forego their afternoon comedy for a gladiatorial
show. Suddenly the two theatres turned on their axes and came
face to face to form an oval, while their respective stages vanished
to give place to one arena. This ingenious manoeuvre roused the
curiosity of the public, more thrilled by taking part in such a
magic transformation than disturbed by any possible incidental
danger to themselves. A century later Pliny the Elder was still
exasperated by the imprudence of the proceeding: "Behold this
people, conquerors of the earth and masters of the universe, poised
in a machine and applauding the danger they incur." 14S The
form, however, was not new, for the amphitheatre at Pompeii
probably goes back to the time of Sulla and may originally have
come from Capua. 144

When Caesar offered a munus to the plebs in 46 B.C. to cele-
brate his quadruple triumph, he adopted the plan of -the wooden
double theatre. 145 It was reserved to C. * Augustan Age to trans-
late it into the more durable medium of stone and to coin the
word which was to denote this new type of monument amphi-
theatrum. 14 *

The first permanent amphitheatre was that built in 29 B.C.
at Rome by a friend of the princeps C. Statilius Taurus. It was
situated to the south of the Campus Martius and was destroyed
in the great fire of 64 A.D. 147 The Flavians decided almost at
once to replace it by a larger one of the same design. 148 It was
started by Vespasian, completed by Titus, and decorated by
Diocletian. Since 80 A.D. neither earthquakes nor the Renais-
sance plunderers who carried off its blocks of stone to build the
Palazzo Venezia, the Palazzo Barberini, and the Palazzo Capi-
tolino have seriously damaged it. Though scarred a little, its
beauty still reigns over the ancient site where it first rose more

234 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

than eighteen-and-a-half centuries ago. It stands between the
Velia, the Caelius, and the Esquiline, near the colossus of the
sun within the domain of the Golden House, Domus Aurea, where
one of the costly fish-ponds of Nero (stagnum Neronis) was ex-
pressly filled in for the purpose. This is the Flavian amphitheatre,
better known since the Middle Ages as the Colosseum. By the
year 2 B.C. Augustus, after much costly labour on the right bank
of the Tiber, had supplemented the amphitheatre of Taurus,
which had been built only for land combats, by a naumachia
intended for the representation of naval battles. 149 Its exterior
ellipse, with axes of 557 and 536 metres, enclosed not an arena
of beaten earth covered with sand, but a sheet of water cut by an
artificial island and curving through thickets and gardens. Though
the naumachia of Augustus covered an area almost treble that of
the Colosseum, which itself might have served at first either as an
arena or a naumachia, the public soon became dissatisfied, and
Trajan was forced to build first the supplementary Amphithea-
trum Castrense, not far from the present site of the Church of
the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, 150 and then the supplementary
Naumachia Vaticana, to the north-west of the Castle of S. An-
gelo. 151 Of the two naumachiae and of the Amphitheatrum Cas-
trense almost nothing but the memory remains. But the ruins of
the Colosseum suffice to show the typical arrangement of the
Roman amphitheatre in its most perfect form.

The Colosseum was built of blocks of hard travertine stone
extracted from the quarries of Albulae near Tibur (the modern
Tivoli) and brought to Rome by a wide road specially constructed
for the purpose. The building forms an oval, 527 metres in cir-
cumference, with diameters of 188 and 156 metres, and rears its
four-storied walls to a height of 57 metres. Obviously modelled
on the rotunda of the theatre of Marcellus, the first three stories
are formed of three superimposed tiers of arcades, originally
ornamented with statues. The three stories differ from each other
only in the style of their columns, which are Doric, Ionic, and
Corinthian, respectively. The fourth story, which did not exist
in Marcellus' theatre, consists of a plain wall, divided by half-
engaged pilasters into compartments alternately pierced by win-
dows and fitted with shields of bronze whicji Domitian set up
and which have naturally disappeared. Above each of the win-
dows were fastened three projecting corbels corresponding to

THLATRE OF MARCKLLUS

COLOSSEUM AND ARCH OF CONSTANTINE

[face p.

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES . 235

three hales in the cornice. These corbels supported the bases of
the masts to which on days of strong sun a detachment of sailors
from the fleet of Misenum was detailed to attach the strips of
giant awning (velaria) which sheltered the fighters in the arena
and the spectators in the cavea. The seats began four metres
above the arena with a terrace or podium protected by a bronze
balustrade. On the podium were ranged the marble seats of the
privileged, whose names have been handed down to us. Above
these were the tiers for the ordinary public, divided into three
zones or maeniana. The lower two were separated from the
podium and from each other by circular horizontal corridors
(praecinctiones) running between low walls. Vertically the circle
of seats was divided by vomitoria or sloping corridors which "dis-
gorged" the floods of spectators. The first zone of seats contained
twenty rows, the second sixteen. The second was separated from
the third by a wall five metres high, pierced by doors and win-
dows. The women were seated here below the terrace which
linked it with the outer wall, while on the terrace stood the pere-
grini and slaves who, excluded from the distribution of entrance
tokens, or tesserae, had not been able to secure places on the tiers.
While the Regionaries reckon that the Colosseum contained
87,000 loca, it is calculated that the number of sitting places was
45,000 and of standing places 5,000. It is still possible to trace in
the architecture of the building the ingenious devices by which
the comings and goings of this multitude were facilitated. There
were 80 entrance arches in the circuit of the building; of these,
the four at the extremities of the two axes were forbidden to the
public and not numbered. The others were numbered I to LXXVI.
Each guest of the emperor or the magistrates had only to direct
his steps to the entrance corresponding to the number on his
tessera, then to the corresponding maenianum, the section and
row. Between the cavea and the outer wall two concentric walls
formed a colonnade on the ground floor and on the upper stories
a gallery. These walls buttressed and supported the cavea, gave
entrance to the staircases which led to the vomitoria, served as a
"foyer" where the crowd could walk about before the show and
between the acts, and gave shelter against sun and shower. The
best places on the level of the podium were, of course, those which
faced the two ends of the shorter axis: the pulvinar 6f the em-
peror and the imperial family on the northern side, and on the

236 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME.

southern the seats of the praefectus urbi and the magistrates.
But it is certain that even the puttati, that is to say the poor
people, clad in brown stuffs, who rubbed elbows in the top gal-
lery, were able to follow the vicissitudes of the mortal dramas
which succeeded each other in the arena.

The arena, 86 by 54. metres in diameter, enclosed an area of
3,500 square metres. It was surrounded by a metal grating, 4
metres in front of the base of the podium, which protected the
public from the wild beasts which were loosed into the arena.
Before the gladiators entered through one of the arcades of the
longer axis, the animals were already imprisoned in the under-
ground chambers of the arena. This basement was originally
fitted with a water system which in 80 A.D. could flood the arena
in a twinkling and transform it into a naumachia. Later no
doubt at the time when Trajan built his Naumachia Vaticana it
was provided with cages of masonry, in which the animals could
be confined, and also with a system of ramps and hoists, so that
they could either be quickly driven up or instantaneously
launched into the arena. It is impossible not to admire the
Flavian architects who, after draining the stagnum Neronis, had
the skill to raise on the site of the old lake a monument so colos-
sal and so perfect. Every detail of its internal arrangement is a
triumph of technical ingenuity. Its solidity has defied the cen-
turies and it still inspires the beholder with the sense of utter
satisfaction that one feels in gazing on the Church of Saint Peter
the sense of a power so great as to be overwhelming, an art so
sure that the infallible proportions blend into perfect harmony.
But if its charm is to hold us, we must forget the inhuman ends
for which this monument was raised, the spectacles of unpardon-
able cruelty for which the imperial architects of old created it.

At the period which we are studying, the organisation of these
bloody games left no room for improvement. 152 In the Italian
municipia and in the provincial towns, the local magistrates whose
duty it was annually to provide the munera called in the expert
advice of specialist contractors, the lanistae. These contractors,
whose trade shares in Roman law and literature the same infamy
that attaches to that of the pander or procurer (leno), were in
sober fact Death's middlemen. 153 The lanista would hire out his
troupe of gladiators (familia gladiatoria) , at the best figure he
could command, to duumvir or aedile for combats in which about

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES ' 337

half were bound to lose their lives. He maintained his "family"
at his own expense, under a system of convict discipline which
made no distinction between the slaves he had purchased, starv-
ing wretches whom he had recruited, and ruined sons of good
faftiily. These young ne'er-do-wells were lured by the rewards
and fortune they would win from the victories he would ensure
them, and by the certainty of being well and amply fed in his
"training school," the Indus gladiatorius. They discounted the
premium which he was to pay them if they survived the term of
their contract, and hired themselves out to him body and soul,
abandoning all their human rights (auctorati) and stealing them-
selves to march at his command to the butchery.

At Rome on the other hand there were no longer any lanistae.
Their functions were performed exclusively by the procuratores
of the princeps. These agents had special official buildings on the
Via Labicana at their disposal the barracks of the Indus mag-
nus, probably erected under Claudius, and those of the Indus
matutinus, constructed by Domitian. 154 They were also in charge
of the wild and exotic animals which subject provinces and client
kings, even to the potentates of India, sent to fill the emperor's
menagerie, or vivarium, just outside the Praenestine Gate. 155
Their gladiators, constantly recruited from men condemned to
death and from prisoners taken in war, formed an effective army
of fighters.

The body of gladiators was divided into pupils and instructors,
who were assigned according to their physical aptitudes to the
different "arms": 166 the Samnites carried the shield (scutum)
and sword (spat ha) ; the Thracians protected themselves with a
round buckler (parma) and handled the dagger (sica) ; the mur-
millones wore a helmet crowned with a sea fish; the retiarii, who
were usually pitted against the murmillones, carried a net and a
trident.

Like the games, the munera usually lasted from dawn to dusk,
although sometimes, as under Domitian, they were prolonged
into the night. It was, therefore, all important to vary the fight-
ing, and the gladiators were trained to fight on water in a nauma-
chia as readily as on the firm arena of the amphitheatre. They
were not, however, pitted against wild animals; such contests
were reserved for the bestiarii.

Writers and inscriptions on monuments tell of several types

238 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of animal contests or hunts (venationes) , 157 There were some
relatively innocent ones to break the monotony of massacre
tame animals doing incredible circus turns which surprised and
amused Pliny the Elder and Martial: 158 teams of panthers obe-
diently drawing chariots; lions releasing from their jaws a live
hare they had caught; tigers coming to lick the hand of the
tamer who had just been lashing them; elephants gravely kneel-
ing before the imperial box or tracing Latin phrases in the sand
with their trunks. There were terrible spectacles, in which fero-
cious beasts fought duels to the death: bear against buffalo, buf-
falo against elephant, elephant against rhinoceros. There were
disgusting ones in which the men, from the safe shelter of iron
bars or from the height of the imperial box like Commodus
later let fly their arrows at animals roaring with baffled rage,
and flooded the arena with the blood of butchery. Some were
given a touch of beauty by living greenery planted in the arena
which ennobled the courage and the skill of the fighters. They
risked their lives, it is true, in battle with bulls, panthers and
lions, leopards and tigers; but they were always armed with
hunting spears and glowing firebrands, with bows, lances and
daggers, and often accompanied by a pack of Scotch hounds, so
that they were exposing themselves no more than the emperor
himself in the hunts, which were in those days a kind of minor
war. They made it a point of honour to redouble the danger by
their daring, stunning the bear with their fists instead of their
weapons, or blinding the lion by flinging over his head the folds
of their cloak; or they would quicken the spectators' pleasure by
waving a red cloth in front of the bull, as the Spanish toreadors
still do, or by eluding his charge with deft feints and skilful
ruses. Sometimes to escape the beast's attack they would scale a
wall or leap onto a pole, slip into one of the partitioned turnstiles
(cochleae) which had been prepared beforehand in the arena,
or hastily disappear into a spherical basket fitted with spikes
which gave it the forbidding appearance of a porcupine (ericius).
Such venationes, however, usually provided an added attrac-
tion to the main spectacle of gladiators. 1 * 9 They were but a
slight exaggeration of the stern reality of ancient hunting, and
can hardly be held a reproach to the amphitheatre, for the Prae-
torian cavalry sometimes took part in them as in military
manoeuvres. 160 What revolts us is the quantity of victims, the

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 239

bath of animal blood: 5,000 beasts were killed in one day of the
munera with which Titus inaugurated the Colosseum in 80
A.D.; 161 2,246 and 443 in two munera of Trajan. 162 The extent
of this carnage nauseates us today, but it served at least one
practical purpose. Thanks to this large-scale slaughter the Caesars
purged their states of wild beasts; the hippopotamus was driven
out of Nubia, the lion out of Mesopotamia, the tiger from Hyr-
cania, and the elephant from North Africa. By the venationes of
the amphitheatre the Roman Empire extended to civilisation the
benefit of the labours of Hercules.

But the Roman Empire also dishonoured civilisation with all
the forms of hoplomachia and with a variety of venatio as cow-
ardly as it was cruel.

Hoplomachia was the gladiatorial combat proper. Sometimes
the battle was a mimic one, fought with muffled weapons, as our
fencing matches are staged with buttons on the foils. In such
cases it was called prolusio or lusio, according to whether it was
merely the prelude to a real fight or whether it filled the entire
program or even several days. These mock battles were only a
foretaste of the munus, a sequence or simultaneous performance
of serious duels in which the weapons were not padded nor the
blows softened, and in which each gladiator could hope to escape
death only by dealing it to his opponent. The night before, a
lavish banquet, which was destined to be the last meal of many,
united the combatants of the morrow. The public was admitted
to view this cena lib era, and the curious circulated round the
tables with unwholesome joy. Some, of the guests brutalised or
fatalistic, abandoned themselves to the pleasures of the moment
and ate gluttonously. Others, anxious to increase their chances by
taking thought for their health, resisted the temptations of the
generous fare and ate with moderation. The most wretched,
haunted by a presentiment of approaching death, their throats
and bellies already paralysed by fear, gave way to lamentation,
commended their families to the passers-by, and made their last
will and testament. 163

On the following day the munus began with a parade. The
gladiators, driven in. carriages from the Indus magnus to the
Colosseum, alighted in front of the amphitheatre and marched
round the arena in military array, dressed in chlamys dyed
purple and embroidered in gold. They walked nonchalantly, their

240 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

hands swinging freely, followed by valets carrying their arms;
and when they arrived opposite the imperial pulvinar they turned
toward the emporer, their right hands extended in sign of homage,
and addressed to him the justifiably melancholy saluation: "Hail,
Emperor, those who are about to die salute thee! Ave, Imperator,
morituri te salutantf" 1 * 4 When the parade was over, the arms
were examined (probatio armorum) and blunt swords weeded out,
so that the fatal business might be expedited. Then the weapons
were distributed, and the duellists paired off by lot. Sometimes it
was decided to pit against each other only gladiators of the same
category, while at other times gladiators were to oppose each
other with different arms: a Samnite against a Thracian; a mur-
millo against a retiarius; or, to add spice to the spectacle, such
freak combinations as negro against negro, as in the munus with
which Nero honoured Tiridates, king of Armenia; or dwarf
against woman, as in Domitian's munus in 90 A.D.

Then at the order of the president the series of duels opened,
to the cacophonies of an orchestra, or rather a band, which com-
bined flutes with strident trumpets, and horns with a hydraulic
organ. The first pair of gladiators had scarcely come to grips
before a fever, like that which reigned at the races, seized the
amphitheatre. As at the Circus Maximus the spectators panted
with anxiety or hope, some for the Blues, others for the Greens,
the spectators of the munus divided their prayers between the
parmularii (men armed with small shields) whom Titus pre-
ferred, or the scutarii (men armed with large shields) whom
Domitian favored. Bets or sponsioncs were exchanged as at the
ludi; and lest the result be somehow prearranged between the
fighters, an instructor stood beside them ready to order his
lorarii to excite their homicidal passion by crying "Strike! (ver-
bera)"\ "Slay! (fcjiifa)"; "Burn him! (ure)"-, and, if neces-
sary, to stimulate them by thrashing them with leather straps
(lora} till the blood flowed. .At every wound which the gladiators
inflicted on each other, the public trembling for its stakes re-
acted with increasing excitement. If the opponent of their cham-
pion happened to totter, the gamblers could not restrain their
delight and savagely counted the blows* "That's got him!
(habet)"; "Now he's got it! (hoc habet)"\ and they thrilled
with barbaric joy when he crumpled under a mortal thrust.

At once the attendants, disguised either as Charon or as Hermes

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 241

Psychopompos, approached the prostrate form, assured them-
selves that he was dead by striking his forehead with a mallet,
and waved to their assistants, the libitinarii, to carry him out
of the arena on a stretcher, while they themselves hastily turned
over the blood-stained sand. Sometimes it happened that the com-
batants were so well matched that there was no decisive result;
either the two duellists, equally skilful, equally robust, fell simul-
taneously or both remained standing (st antes). The match was
then declared a draw and the next pair was called. More often
the loser, stunned or wounded, had not been mortally hit, but
feeling unequal to continuing the struggle, laid down his arms,
stretched himself on his back and raised his left arm in a mute
appeal for quarter. In principle the right of granting this rested
with the victor, and we can read the epitaph of a gladiator slain
by an adversary whose life he had once spared in an earlier en-
counter. It professes to convey from the other world this fiercely
practical advice to his successors: "Take warning by my fate.
No quarter for the fallen, be he who he may! Moneo ut quis
quern vicerit, occidat!" 1G5 But the victor renounced his claim in
the presence of the emperor, who often consulted the crowd before
exercising the right thus ceded to him. When the conquered man
was thought to have defended himself bravely, the spectators
waved their handkerchiefs, raised their thumbs, and cried:
"Mitte! Let him go!" If the emperor sympathised with their
wishes and like them lifted his thumb, the loser was pardoned
and sent living from the arena (missus). If, on the other hand,
the witnesses decided that the victim had by his weakness de-
served defeat, they turned their thumbs down, crying: "lugulat
Slay him!" And the emperor calmly passed the death sentence
with inverted thumb (pollice verso).*'

The victor had, this time, escaped and he was rewarded on the
spot. He received silver dishes laden with gold pieces and costly
gifts, and taking these presents in his hands he ran across the
arena amid the acclamations of the crowd. Of a sudden he tasted
both wealth and glory. In popularity and riches this slave, this
decadent citizen, this convicted criminal, now equalled the fash-
ionable pantomimes and charioteers. At Rome as at Pompeii,
where the graffiti retail his conquests, the butcher of the arena
became the breaker of hearts : "decus fiuellarum, suspirium puel-
larum" ie7 But neither his wealth nor his luck could save him.

242 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

He usually had to risk his own life again and sacrifice other lives
in new victories before he could win, not the palms which sym-
bolised success, but the more coveted wooden sword, the rudis,
which signified his liberation and was granted as a title of honour.
At the period which we have reached, the emperors inclined
to cut short the period of service which delayed the liberation of
the best duellists. Martial praises the magnanimity of the in-
vincible Domitian:

"O dulce invicti principis ingenitim"

because he had cried a halt to a fight between two gladiators who
had reached a deadlock, and handed to both the rudis of liberty
along with the palm of victory. 168 Similarly Trajan if I have
not misinterpreted the Fasti of Ostia displayed his generosity
by ordering that all the combatants who had not fallen by the
end of the performance in his naumachiae and munera of 109
A.D. should be released. 169

There are therefore occasional gleams of humanity in this
business of wholesale butchery. At first the gladiator often begged
leave to decline the emperor's clemency; he had fallen so low
morally that he preferred to resume his trade of slayer rather
than renounce the luxurious life of his barracks, the thrill of
danger, and the intoxication of victory. We possess the epitaph of
such a one, Flamma by name, who, after bearing off the palm
twenty-one times, had four times received the rudis and each
time "signed on again." 170 Later the munera developed to as-
tounding proportions. I shall quote only the figures in the recently
discovered fragment of the Fasti Ostienses which covers the
period extending from the end of March, 108 A.D., through April,
113 A.D. There we find mention of two minor shows, one of 350
pairs of gladiators, the other of 202, while the major event was a
munus lasting 117 days in which 4,941 pairs of gladiators took
part. 171 Even the assumption that Trajan granted the survivors
their liberty en bloc does little to assuage the memory of a field
strewn with corpses. Cicero indeed assures us that although there
may be other methods of teaching contempt for pain and death,
there is assuredly none which speaks more eloquently to the eye
than a munus; 1 ' 12 and later Pliny the Younger contended that
these massacres were essentially calculated to engender courage
by showing how the love of glory and the desire to conquer could

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 243

lodge even in the "breast of criminals and slaves. 178 These are
specious excuses. The thousands of Romans who day after day,
from morning until night, could take pleasure in this slaughter
and not spare a tear for those whose sacrifice multiplied their
stakes, were learning nothing but contempt for human life and
dignity.

These feigned combats, moreover, were often made the cloak
of sordid murders and ruthless executions. Rome and even the
municipia retained until the end of the third century the practice
of proclaiming munera sine missione, that is to say, gladiatorial
combats from which none might escape alive. No sooner had one
of the duellists fallen than a substitute, tertiarius or suppositicius,
was produced to fight the conqueror, until the entire body of
combatants was exterminated. Then, too, there were moments in
the normal full-day program at Rome when exceptional atrocities
were committed. The gladiatores meridiani, whose account was
squared at the noon pause, were recruited exclusively from rob-
bers, murderers, and incendiaries, whose crimes had earned them
the death of the amphitheatre: noxii ad gladium ludi damnati.
Seneca has described this shameful procedure for us. 174 The
pitiable contingent of the doomed was driven into the arena. The
first pair were brought forth, one man armed and one dressed
simply in a tunic. The business of the first was to kill the second,
which he never failed to do. After this feat he was disarmed and
led out to confront a newcomer armed to the teeth, and so the
inexorable butchery continued until the last head had rolled in
the dust.

The morning massacre was even more hideous. Perhaps it was
Augustus who unintentionally invented this spectacular punish-
ment when he erected in the Forum a pillory which collapsed and
dropped the victim, the bandit Selurus, into a cage of wild
beasts. 175 Later the idea was taken up and made general. Crimi-
nals of both sexes and all ages, who by reason of their villainy
real or supposed and their humble status had been condemned
ad bestias, were dragged at dawn into the arena to be mauled by
the wild animals loosed from the basement below. This spectacle
in which the victims were thrown defenseless to savage animals is
graphically represented in a Tripolitan mosaic. 176

This was the kind of torture heroically undergone by the virgin
Blandina in the amphitheatre at Lyons, by Perpetua and Felicita

244 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

in Carthage, and in the Eternal City itself by so many Christians,
anonymous or canonised, of the Roman Church. In memory of
these martyrs a cross now rises in the Colosseum in silent protest
against the barbarism which cost so many of them their lives
before the spirit of Christianity succeeded in abolishing it. Today
we cannot see this emblem without a shudder.

In vain we seek to find some shadow of extenuation in the fact
that the amphitheatre had scarcely begun to fill in time for the
dawn venatio, and that the hour assigned to the gladiatores
meridiani was the moment when the theatre was three parts
empty (dum vacabat arena) because the workers had not yet
come to take their seats and the idlers had already gone to snatch
a bite at home. If this arrangement of the program shows on the
part of the Romans a sort of shamed apology for these night-
mare scenes, there were among them all too many connoisseurs
of horror who would not for the world have missed them. Rather
than lose a moment of either they preferred, like Claudius, to
make a rule of arriving before dawn and going without midday
lunch. 177 Despite all the extenuations we may urge, the Roman
people remain guilty of deriving a public joy from their capital
executions by turning the Colosseum into a torture-chamber and
a human-slaughter house.

6. LATE OPPOSITION

We must, however, credit the flower of Rome with terror at
the progress of this dread disease and more than one attempt to
reduce its virulence.

Augustus, for example, following the distant precedents of the
great-hearted Philhellenes of the second century B.C., and re-
suming the spasmodic attempts of Sulla, of Pompey, and of
Caesar, tried to acclimatise Greek games at Rome. These con-
tests strengthened the body instead of destroying it, and included
artistic as well as physical competitions. Both to commemorate
his victory over Anthony and Cleopatra and to give thanks for
it to Apollo, Augustus founded the Actiaca, which were to be cele-
brated every fourth year both at Actium and Rome. 178 But by 16
A.D. the Actiaca are no longer recorded. Nero wished to revive
them in his Neronia, which were to be periodic festivals com-
prising tests of physical endurance and competitions of poetry
and song. 179 The senators deigned to take part in the former; but

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 245

in the latter none dared to dispute the crown with the emperor,
who believed himself an unrivalled artist. Despite their august
patronage, however, the Neronia fell quickly into abeyance, and
it was Domitian who at length succeeded in endowing Rome with
a lasting cycle of games in the Greek style. In 86 A.D. he in-
stituted the Agon Capitolinus, whose prizes the emperor awarded
alternately for foot races and for eloquence, for boxing and
Latin poetry, for discus-throwing and Greek poetry, for javelin-
casting and for music. 180 He built the Circus Agonalis, on the site
of the Piazza Navona, especially for his sports ; and for the more
"spiritual" contests erected the Odeum, whose ruins are now
hidden beneath the Palazzo Taverna on Monte Giordano. 181 In
his reign the Greek games which his bounty maintained enjoyed
an ephemeral popularity, and Martial sang the praises of the
prize winners. 182 The games survived their founder, but though
we have proof that they were celebrated in the fourth century
and that the jurists never ceased to emphasise the high honour
they deserved, they never seriously rivalled the muncra in fa-
vour. 183 For one thing the Agon Capitolinus recurred only once in
four years. Furthermore, Domitian designed them to appeal to a
select and limited public, for his Odeum provided only 10,600
loca and his Circus Agonalis only 30,088 say 5,000 and 15,000
seats respectively so that the two together were less than half
the size of the Amphitheatrum Flavium alone.

There is no denying the fact that the Greek games were never
very popular. The crowd, addicted to the thrills of the Colosseum,
looked on them as colourless and tame; and they enjoyed no
greater favour among the upper classes, who professed to detect
an exotic degeneracy and immorality in their nudism.

Pliny the Younger applauds the Senate's decision under Trajan
to forbid the scandal of the gymnastic games at Vienne in Gallia
Narbonensis and complacently quotes his colleague Junius Mauri-
cus, "who in resolution and integrity has no superior," as saying,
"and I would that they could be abolished in Rome, too!" for
"these games have greatly infected the manners of the people of
Vienne, as they have universally had the same effect among
us." 184 The incompatibility between the eurhythmy of Greek
games and the brutality of gladiatorial combats was bound to be
irreconcilable. It is significant that while the majority of provin-
cial towns imitated Rome by building amphitheatres, whose ruins

246 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

have been found in South Algeria and on the. banks of the
Euphrates, 185 Greece herself fought tootfc and nail against the
contagion, and in Attica, at least, apparently succeeded. This one
exception is a poor make-weight to the general infatuation. In
Italy the Greek games took refuge in Naples and Pozzuoli, 186 but
were crushed to death by the munera in Rome.

It seemed indeed that the munus was not to be eradicated. Good
emperors, therefore, sought to humanise it. While Hadrian for-
bade impressment of slaves into gladiatorial troupes, 187 Trajan
and Marcus Aurelius exerted themselves to the utmost to extend
the part played in their festivals by the mimic combats (lusiones),
at the expense of the munus proper. On March 30, 108, Trajan
finished a lusio which had lasted thirty days and involved 350
pairs of gladiators. 188 Marcus Aurelius, obeying the dictates of
his Stoic philosophy, exhausted his ingenuity in reducing the
regulations and budgets of the munera and in this way lessening
their importance, and whenever it fell to him to offer entertain-
ment to the Roman plebs he substituted simple lusiones. 189 But
philosophy lost the round in this struggle against spectacles
where, as Seneca phrased it, man drank the blood of man: "iuvat
humano sanguine jrui" 19

After Marcus Aurelius, whose son Commodus himself aspired
to gladiatorial fame, 191 the Romans, not contented with the dis-
continuation of lusiones, inclined to desert the theatre for the am-
phitheatre. From the second century on we find the theatre archi-
tects in the provinces, notably in Gaul and Macedonia, modifying
their building plans to accommodate gladiatorial duels and vena-
tiones. At Rome the representation of sinister drama was trans-
ferred to the arena, and it became usual to play the most terrifying
mimes at the Colosseum Laureolus, who was crucified alive for
the amusement of the public, 192 Mucius Scaevola, who plunged his
right hand into the burning coals of a brazier, 193 and the Death
of Hercules, whose hero in the last act writhed in the flames of his
pyre. 194 As the amphitheatre henceforth sufficed for the more lurid
dramatic representations, no attempt was made to repair the
ruined theatres, and in the reign of Alexander Severus (235 A.D.)
the theatre of Marcellus was abandoned. 195

It might have been predicted that the munera would be ever-
lasting and that nothing henceforward could stop their invading
growth. But where Stoicism had failed the new religion was to

SHOWS AND SPECTACLES 247

succeed. The conquering Gospel taught the Romans no longer to
tolerate the inveterate shame. Racing continued as long as the
races of the circus were maintained, but the butcheries of the
arena were stopped at the command of Christian emperors. On
October i, 326, Constantine decreed that condemnation ad bestias
must be commuted to forced labour ad metalla, and dried up at
one blow the principal source of recruitment for the gladiatorial
schools. 196 By the end of the fourth century gladiatorial shows
had disappeared from the East. In 404 an edict of Honorius sup-
pressed gladiatorial combats in the West. 107 Roman Christianity
thus blotted out the crime against humanity which under the
pagan Caesars had disgraced the amphitheatre of the empire.

IX

AFTERNOON AND EVENING

N DAYS when no spectacles or
shows were provided, the Roman
filled up the time until supper with
strolling or gambling, exercise, or
a bath at the thermae.

i. STROLLING, GAMING,
AND PLEASURE

At first sight the crowded streets
of Imperial Rome might seem ill
suited for walking. The pedestrian
was hampered by the outspread stalls of "audacious hucksters," *
jostled by passers-by, spattered by riders on horseback; harassed
by "hoarse-throated beggars" who stationed themselves along
the slopes, under the arcades, and on the bridges; 2 trampled by
the military who held the middle of the road and advanced as if
marching in conquered territory, planting the hobnails of their
boots on the foot of any civilian rash enough not to have made
way for them. 3 But this never-ending and motley crowd was in-
teresting in itself. The flow of traffic which bore the Roman along
bore with him all the nations of the habitable globe: "the farmer
of Rhodope ... the Sarmatian fed on draughts of horse's blood,
the Egyptian who quaffs at its spring the stream of first-found
Nile ... the Arab, the Sabaean, the Cilician, drenched in his
own saffron dew . . . the Sygambrian with knotted hair, the
Ethiopian with locks twined otherwise"; 4 and even if he had no
use for their cheap-Jack wares, the "tramping hawker's" readi-
ness of tongue delighted him, and so did the conjurors and snake
charmers with their uncanny skill. 3 The general prohibition
against carriages held good by day, but if he had the good luck to

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 249

be mounted he could enjoy this welter of activity without being
inconvenienced by it. He might prance along on his own mule or
one lent him by the kindness of a friend or hired from a Numidian
muleteer, part of whose duty was to lead it by the bridle. 6 Or he
might prefer to loll in the depths of an immense litter (lectica),
panelled with "transparent stone" through which he could see
without being seen as his six or eight Syrian porters cut their way
through the crowd. He might be borne in a carrying chair (sella),
such as matrons were wont to use for paying calls ; in this he could
read or write as he went along. 7 Or again he might be content
with a sort of wheelbarrow (chiromaxium) like the one Trimal-
chio had presented to his favourite. 8

But if his aim was to escape the hurly-burly of the streets, the
Roman had only to seek the quiet regions which were the "prom-
enades" of the city: the fora and the basilicas, when once the
judicial hearings were over; the gardens belonging to the em-
perors, which were left open to the public, even though they were
not all, like Caesar's, bequeathed to the people. These he sought
out "when on the threshold of the city so rich was the beauty of
spring and the charm of fragrant Flora, so rich the glory of Paes-
tan fields; so ruddy, where'er he turned his footsteps, or his eyes,
was every path with twining roses." 9 And the Campus Martius
with its marble enclosures (the Saepta lulia), its sacred halls and
porticos, provided a shelter from the sun, a refuge from the
rain, and in all weathers, as Seneca puts it, "a place where the
most wretched could take his ease: cum vilissimus quisque in
campo otium suum oblcctet" 10

We still possess the entrance to one of these porticos which
Augustus dedicated in the name of his sister Octavia and which
enclosed within its marble columns a space 118 by 135 metres
containing the twin temples of Jupiter and Juno. 11 But there were
many other porticos to the north, and Martial mentions some of
them in describing the route taken by the parasite Selius in quest
of a friend who might be induced to ask him to dinner: the Por-
tico of Europa, the Portico of the Argonauts, the Portico of a
Hundred Pillars with its alley of plantains, the Portico of Pompey
with its two groves. 12 These saepta were not only set amid re-
freshing shade and grass, but filled with works of art: frescos
covered their inner walls, statues adorned the spaces between their
columns and their interior courts. In the Portico of Octavia alone

250 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Pliny the Elder enumerates, apart from a certain number of com-
mand pieces executed by Pasiteles and his pupfil Dionysius, the
group of Alexander and his generals at the battle of the Granicus
by Lysippus, a Venus of Phidias, a Venus of Praxiteles, and the
Cupid which Praxiteles had destined for the town of Thespiae. 18

The walks of the imperial people were indeed set amid prodi-
gious collections of booty. But among the Romans who stopped
to contemplate these masterpieces, there were some who sought
only to draw amusement from the familiar rarities. Martial tells
an illuminating little anecdote. 14 Among other statues of wild
beasts in the Portico of a Hundred Pillars stood a bronze bear,
which one day attracted the attention of the idlers: "While Hylas
was in play challenging its yawning mouth he plunged his youth-
ful hand into its throat. But an accursed viper lay hid in the
dark cavern of the bronze, alive with a life more deadly than that
of the beast itself. The boy perceived not the guile, until he felt
the pang and died." This was the folly of a mischievous lad, but
we shall see that it was not only boys who played under the
porticos, in the gardens, the fora, and the basilicas.

In the shadow of their colonnades the idle Romans loafed or
gathered to gossip. They ogled the passers-by, both men and
women. When a sale was being held in the saepta, they leisurely
attended, assessed the value of the objects offered, and haggled
over the price. Everywhere they eagerly inquired the latest news,
and everywhere they found some boastful busybody ready to
satisfy their curiosity. Martial vividly describes such a braggart
who invents as he goes along the "secrets' 7 with which he regales
his auditors:

By such arts as these, Philomusus, you always earn your dinner; you
invent much and retail it as truth. You know what counsel Pacorus,
king of Parthia, takes in his Arsacian palace; you estimate the Rhenish
and Sarmatian armies . . . you know how many ships set sail from
Libya's Shores ... for whom Capitoline Jupiter designs his chaplets. 18

But the best of conversations palls at last; and at this point they
turned to gaming.

The Romans frankly confessed to their passion for gambling,
They had always been possessed by it; but never before had the
mania held them in so tyrannical a grip. In the second century
Juvenal writes: "When was gambling so reckless? Men come

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 251

not now with purses to the hazard of the gaming table, but
with a treasure chest beside them. What battles will you there see
waged with a steward for armour bearer!" ltt And he sadly con-
tinues: "Is it a simple form of madness to lose 100,000 sesterces
and not have a shirt to give a shivering slave?" In the attempt to
put a brake on this suicidal passion, the Caesars had kept up
the prohibitions of republican days. Except during the Saturnalia,
which Martial expressly mentions, and which Juvenal implies in
the above-quoted passage (for "shivering slave" suggests the
cold of Bruma or the winter solstice at the end of December,
which was the season of the Saturnalia), games of chance were
forbidden under penalty of a fine fixed at four times the value
of the stakes; and a senatus consultant, of uncertain date con-
firming the Lex Titia, the Lex Publicia, and the Lex Cornelia
renewed the prohibition of betting (sponsiones), except in the
case of wagers laid on physical exercises. 17 We saw in the last
chapter the popularity which this curious privilege won for the
chariot races of the circus and the gladiatorial combats. It left
a breach in apparently repressive legislation, through which many
games of chance and sponsiones managed to slip.

Playing dice games with tali or tesserae which were thrown
from the dice-box (jritittus) onto the ground or gaming table
(alveus) would certainly have been an imprudent thing to do in
public. 18 Neither would it, probably, have been acceptable for
two friends to play navia aut capita (heads or tails) or par intpar
(odd or even) under the porticos. Yet Augustus used to invite
his family to play par impar in the palace, alloting them 250
denarii apiece so that they might throw themselves into the fun,
of the game without anxiety or bitter afterthoughts. 19 As played
by the imperial family, the game consisted only of a monotonous
series of bets on the odd or even number of pebbles, nuts, or
knuckle-bones hidden in the other player's hand.

There was another variety of game derived from "Odd or
Even" in which the element of mere chance was somewhat cor-
rected, limited by the quickness of sight and speed of the player, a
calculation of probabilities, and a certain psychological flair.
This was micatio the still popular morra of southern Italy to-
day. The two players "each raise the fingers of the right hand,
varying each time the number raised and the number kept down
and call aloud the total of the fingers raised by both," until one

252 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

or other wins the round by guessing right. 20 Micatio could cer-
tainly be played openly in the Rome of the Antonines. From
Cicero through the times of Petronius and Frontinus down to
Saint Augustine, Latin tradition unanimously used to indicate a
man of integrity by the phrase, "You could play micatio with
him in the dark." 21 Not until the fourth century did the prae-
jectus urbi feel compelled to banish micatio from the Forum. 22

While the Roman game of backgammon (duodecim scripta),
in which the moves of the men (calculi} were determined by
numbers thrown with dice or bonesas in our game, may have fallen
under the ban of the law, chess (latrunculi) was exempt, since
the moves depended only on the foresight and skill of the play-
ers. 23 This game of calculated combinations, which in the first
century delighted both the Stoic Julius Canus and the consul
Piso, 24 and in which in Martial's day intellectuals took pride in
competing for the championship, 25 never lost honour with the
public; it absorbed both those who played and the idlers who
stood around commenting on their moves. When the players felt
chess to be too complicated or the necessary apparatus for it too
cumbersome a chess-board of sixty squares and men of different
colour and shape they would fall back on an elementary game
of draughts, whose tabulae lusoriae could be improvised any-
where with lines scratched in the ground or cut into the pave-
ment. 26 Many graffiti of such draught-boards have been ex-
cavated under the arcades of the Basilica lulia and the forum.

Nor were these the sum of the games : a number of bas-reliefs
show children apparently playing "nuts," the ancient equivalent
of our marbles. 27 This would explain the Saturnalian custom of
presenting grown-ups with bags of nuts for the festival ; and it is
tempting to suppose that adults often amused themselves in the
squares and porticos with trying either to split a nut without
crushing it, to throw one onto a heap without knocking the rest
down, or as in our game of marbles to hit the opponent's men, or
shoot the nut into a hole.

Such harmless relaxations brought a whiff of fresh air into
the feverish atmosphere of the Imperial City. Yet in the course
of time these pastimes must have lost much of their innocence,
and often been made the pretext for clandestine bets. In any case
there is no doubt that the idler had but to make a slight detour in
his daily walk to find an opportunity of secretly indulging the

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 253

vice to which the emperor thought he had given sufficient rein in
the circus and the amphitheatre. Not infrequently the inns (cau-
ponae) and taverns (popinae and tkermopolia) , whose front
counters served cooling draughts or hot wine, concealed in their
back premises gambling dens where year in and year out, not
only during the Saturnalia, bets could be exchanged and dice and
knuckle-bones rattled. The imperial laws which bore as hard on
gamblers (aleatores) as on thieves could not reach out an arm
long enough to catch the susceptor, the keeper of the den who
sheltered them; the most the law could do was to deny him the
right to sue for any violence done him or the furnishings of his
tavern by clients in the excitement of their gaming or despair at
their losses. 28 With this relative impunity, the keeper was all the
more tempted to equip his shop for seductive, forbidden parties,
and by installing prostitutes as barmaids, to convert his gambling
den into a bawdy-house. 29

A frequently quoted inscription from Aesernia tells of a passing
traveller who, settling with the hostess of the local inn, acquiesces
in an item of eight asses (about twelve cents) charged for the
favours accorded him by the maid-servant during his one-night
stay. 30 We might also cite the popina, recently unearthed in the
Via delP Abbondanza at Pompeii, which bears a suggestive poster
notifying the passer-by that the establishment boasts three young
ladies (asellae) on its staff. 31 It would be an illusion to imagine
that Rome itself was in any way behind the Italian muncipia in
such conveniences. 32 There, as elsewhere, the cauponae, the
popinae, and the thermopolia were currently equated with "dives"
(ganeae}\ and while the authorities out of consideration for the
young Roman's morning exercise decreed that brothels should
remain closed until the ninth hour, 33 the Roman tavern offered
its attractions to every comer both morning and afternoon. The
shady bar was perhaps not quite so omnipresent in Rome as in
modern capitals, but it was common, winked at by the aedile
police, and freely open to passers-by. Seneca records how many
wastrels turned into these dens instead of finding their way to
the palaestra to spend their leisure: "Cum illo tempore vilissimus
quisque . . . in popina lateat" 34

254 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

2. THE BATHS

Happily for the Roman people, there was a more wholesome
way for a man to enjoy his liberty, and the Caesars, in building
thermae for the citizens, had provided them with "recreation" in
the full and best sense of the word. The word for baths is Greek;
but it represented a specifically Roman reality the association
for the first time of the sports of the palaestra which exercised the
body and the thermae which cleansed it. The baths are one of the
fairest creations of the Roman Empire. They not only benefited
civilisation, after their fashion, but also served art, which has
been permanently enriched by monuments whose spaciousness,
proportions, and .technical perfection command our profound ad-
miration even in their decay. In building the thermae the em-
perors put personal hygiene on the daily agenda of Rome and
within reach of the humblest; and the fabulous decoration lav-
ished on the baths made the exercise and care of the body a
pleasure for all, a refreshment accessible even to the very poor.

Since the middle of the third century B,C. wealthy Romans
had built bathing halls in their town houses and country villas. 35
But this luxury was for the very rich and the republican austerity
which forbade Cato the Censor to take a bath in the presence of
his son 86 prevented the building of baths outside the family do-
main. In the long run, however, the love of cleanliness triumphed
over false pruderies. In the course of the second century B.C.
public baths the men's and women's separate, of course, unlike
later times made their appearance in Rome; the feminine
plural balneae denoting the public, as opposed to the neuter bal-
neum, or private, bath. 87 Philanthropists endowed baths in their
quarter of the city. Contractors built others as a speculation and
charged entrance fees. In 33 B.C. Agrippa had a census of baths
taken; there were 170 and the number grew steadily as time
went on. 88 Pliny the Elder gave up trying to count those of his
time, 39 and later they approached a thousand. 40 The fee charged
by the owner or by the operator to whom he had leased the
place was microscopic: a quadrant, quarter of an as, or roughly
half a cent and children entered free. 41 In 33 B.C. Agrippa was
aedile and one of his duties was to supervise the public baths,
test their heating apparatus, and see to their cleaning and polic-
ing. In order to mark his term of office by a sensational act of

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 255

generosity he undertook to pay all entrance fees for the year of
his aedileship. 42 Not long after, he founded the thermae which
bear his name, and these were to be free in perpetuity. 43 This was
a revolutionary principle in keeping with the paternal role which
the empire had assumed toward the masses. It brought with it a
revolution both in architecture and in manners; and buildings
modelled on Agrippa's grew ever larger with succeeding reigns.

After the baths of Agrippa, the thermae of Nero were erected
on the Campus Martius. 44 Then Titus built his beside the ancient
Domus Aurea, with an external portico facing the Colosseum. 45
The brick cores of several columns of this portico are standing to
this day. Next Trajan built on the Aventine the thermae which
he dedicated to the memory of his friend Licinius Sura; and to
the north-west of those of Titus, on the site of part of the Golden
House which had been destroyed by fire in 104, he erected others
to which he gave his own name and which he was able to inaugu-
rate on the same day as his aqueduct, June 22, xog. 46 Later there
came the thermae which we call the baths of Caracalla, but which
ought to be known by their official designation of "Thermae of
Antoninus," for while Septimius Severus laid the foundations in
206, and they were prematurely inaugurated by his son Antoninus
Caracalla, they were completed by the last Antonine of the dy-
nasty, Severus Alexander, between 222 and 235. 47 The ruins of
the baths of Diocletian today house the National Roman Mu-
seum, the Church of Saint Mary of the Angels, and the Oratory
of Saint Bernard; 48 and the plan of their giant exedra can be
traced by the curves of the piazza, which preserves the name.
Last of all, in the fourth century the thermae of Constantine
were built on the Quirinal. 49 The best preserved of these great
baths are those of Diocletian, covering an area of thirteen hec-
tares, and those of Caracalla, spreading over eleven hectares,
both of which belong to the wonders of ancient Rome. These
grandiose, bare ruins impress even the most insensitive tourist.
Both, however, lie outside the limits of the chronological frame-
work within which we are striving to keep our attention. -But
the ruins of the baths of Trajan have within the last few years
been sufficiently excavated to allow us to follow the master lines
of their plan and establish the fact that it corresponds to the plan
of the baths of Caracalla. 50 There is only a difference of scale
between the two. It is comparatively simple, therefore, to divine

256 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

the typical arrangement of these monumental buildings in the
day when Martial grew enthusiastic over them, and take stock of
the innovations they had introduced. 51

The primary feature of these thermae was every type of bath
that ingenuity could devise: hot, cold, and hot-air baths, the
swimming bath, and the tub bath. Externally the enormous quad-
rilateral was flanked by porticos full of shops and crowded with
shopkeepers and their customers; inside it enclosed gardens and
promenades, stadia and rest rooms, gymnasiums and rooms for
massage, even libraries and museums. The baths in fact offered
the Romans a microcosm of many of the things that make life
attractive.

In the centre of the thermae rose the buildings of the baths
proper. None of the balneae could rival them, either in the volume
of water led from aqueducts into their reservoirs, which in the
baths of Caracalla occupied two-thirds of the south side with
their sixty-four vaulted chambers; or in the complex precision
of their system of furnaces, of hypocauses and hypocausta, which
conveyed, distributed, and tempered the warmth of the halls.
Near the entrance were the dressing-rooms where the bathers
came to undress (the apodyteria). Next came the tepidarium, a
large vaulted hall that was -only gently warmed, which inter-
vened between the frigidarium on the north and the caldarium
on the south. The jrigidarium, which was probably too big to be
completely roofed in, contained the pool into which the bathers
plunged. The caldarium was a rotunda lit by the sun at noon and
in the afternoon, and heated by vapour circulating between the
suspensurae laid beneath its pavement. It was surrounded by
little bathing boxes where people could bathe in private; and a
giant bronze basin of water in the centre was kept at the required
temperature by the furnace immediately below in the middle of
the hypocausis that underlay the entire hall. To the south of
the caldarium lay the sudatoria, or laconica, whose high tem-
perature induced a perspiration like the hot room of a Turkish
bath. Finally the whole gigantic layout was flanked by palaestrae,
themselves backing on recreation rooms, where the naked bathers
could indulge in their favorite forms of exercise.

This was not all: this imposing group of buildings was sur-
rounded by an esplanade, cooled by shade and playing fountains,
which gave space for playing grounds and was enclosed by a con-

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 257

tinuous covered promenade (the xystus). Behind the xystus
curved the exedrae of the gymnasiums and the sitting-rooms, the
libraries, and the exhibition halls. This was the truly original
feature of the thermae. Here the alliance between physical cul-
ture and intellectual curiosity became thoroughly Romanised.
Here it overcame the prejudice which the importation of sports
in the Greek style had aroused. 52 No doubt conservative opinion
continued to look askance at athletics, as encouraging immoral-
ity by exhibitionism and diverting its devotees from the virile
and serious apprenticeship required by the art of war, teaching
them to think more of exciting admiration for their beauty than
of developing the qualities of a good foot soldier. 53 But opinion
presently ceased to be offended at nudism in the baths, where it
was obligatory, and admitted almost all athletic games to equal
honour, as long as they were not practiced as a spectacle, but
for their own sake and served the same salutary purpose as the
baths themselves. Games prefaced and reinforced the tonic effect
of the baths on bodily health and fitness.

In the last chapter we had to record the partial failure of the
Agon Capitolinus. In vain Augustus, Nero, and Domitian had
tried to effect a revolution in manners by transplanting to Rome
a copy of the Olympic games. It was reserved to the thermae to
succeed where the emperors had failed, for at the period of
which we are writing the Roman people had contracted the habit
of attending the baths daily and spending the greater part of
their leisure there.

Our authorities unanimously state or imply that the thermae
normally closed at sunset; 54 but the only indications we have as
to when they opened seem at first sight "to contradict each other.
A line of Juvenal's suggests before noon, as early as the fifth
hour; 55 and this is confirmed by an epigram of Martial's in
which the poet, choosing the most opportune moment for his
bath, decides on the eighth hour which "tempers the warm baths;
the hour before breathes heat too great, and the sixth is hot with
excessive heat." 56 On the other hand, the Historia Augusta in the
Life of Hadrian records that a decree of the emperor forbade
anyone, except in case of illness, to bathe in the public baths be-
fore the eighth hour; 57 while the Life of Severus Alexander re-
calls that in the preceding century bathing was not permitted
before the ninth hour. 58 Finally, several of Martial's Epigrams

258 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

seem to imply that many people took their bath at the tenth
hour or later, 59 and that whatever might be the hour formally
fixed for the opening of the baths and announced by the tintinna-
bulum of the bell, people were allowed to enter the exercise
grounds before it sounded. 60 One thing only can in my opinion
help to clear up this confusion and reduce or even reconcile the
discrepancies in our data: the consideration of the plan of the
thermae and the administrative regulations which governed the
segregation of the sexes.

In the days of Martial and Juvenal, under Domitian, and still
under Trajan, there was no formal prohibition of mixed bathing.
Women who objected to this promiscuity could avoid the thermae
and bathe in balneae provided for their exclusive use. But many
women were attracted by the sports which preceded the bath in
the thermae, and rather than renounce this pleasure preferred to
compromise their reputation and bathe at the same time as the
men. 61 As the thermae grew in popularity, this custom produced
an outcropping of scandals which could not leave the authorities
undisturbed. To put an end to them, sometime between the years
117 and 138 Hadrian passed the decree mentioned in the Historia
Augusta which separated the sexes in the baths: "lavacra pro
sexibus separavit." 62 But since the plan of the thermae included
only one jrigidarium, one tepidarium, and one caldarium, it is
clear that this separation could not be achieved in space, but only
in time, by assigning different hours for the men's and women's
baths. This was the solution enforced, at a great distance from
Rome, it is true, but also under the reign of Hadrian, by the
regulations of the procurators of the imperial mines at Vipasca
in Lusitania. 68 The instructions issued to the conductor or lessee
of the balnea in this mining district included the duty of heating
the furnaces for the women's baths from the beginning of the
first to the end of the seventh hour, and for the men's from the
beginning of the eighth hour of day to the end of the second
hour of night. The dimensions of the Roman thermae made im-
possible the lighting which an exactly similar division of times
would have required. But there is in my opinion not the slightest
doubt that Rome adopted the same principle, modifying the de-
tail to suit the conditions imposed by the size of her thermae. We
need only take account of the plan of the Roman thermae, with
the baths proper in the centre and the huge annexes surrounding

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 259

them, and co-ordinate this with the scattered indications found in
the writers of the time, to be able to reconstruct a likely picture of
the procedure.

From the statements of Juvenal we know that the doors of the
annexes were opened to the public, irrespective of sex, from the
fifth hour of the morning. At the sixth hour the central building
was opened, but to women only after Hadrian's decree. 64 At the
eighth or ninth hour, according to whether it was winter or sum-
mer, the bell sounded again. It was now the men's turn to have
access to the baths, where they were allowed to stay till the
eleventh or twelfth hour. From this division of the time, it is per-
missible to assume that women and men undressed successively
inside the central baths, and that the palaestrae within their con-
fines were the only places where nude athletics were permitted.
This conclusion need not surprise us; and it tallies with the de-
ductions we draw from texts describing the games in which the
Romans indulged in their thermae.

We may, for instance, recall Trimalchio's encounter with the
shady characters whom he was presently to invite to dine. It
took place at bath time in the thermae the thermae of a Cam-
panian village it is true, but copied from those of the capital.
Encolpius and his companions begin by mingling with the groups
which had gathered here and there in the palaestra. Suddenly they
spy "a bald old man in a reddish shirt playing at ball with some
long-haired boys. . . . The old gentleman, who was in his house
shoes, was busily engaged with a green ball. He never picked it
up if it touched the ground. A slave stood by with a bagful and
supplied them to the players." 65 This was a ball game for three,
called a trigon, in which the players, each posted at the corner of
a triangle, flung the balls to and fro without warning, catching
with one hand and throwing with the other. 66 The Romans had
many other kinds of ball games, including "tennis" played with
the palm of the hand for a racquet (as in the Basque game of
pelote) ; 67 harpastum, in which the players had to seize the ball, or
harpastum, in the middle of the opponents, despite the shoving,
bursts of speed, and feints 68 a game which was very exhausting
and raised clouds of dust; and many others such as "hop-ball,"
"ball against the wall," etc. 69 The harpastum was stuffed with
sand, the paganica with feathers; the folKs was blown full of air
and the players fought for it as in basket ball, but with more ele-

26o DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

gance. 70 Sometimes the ball was enormous and filled with earth
or flour, and the players pommelled it with their fists like a
punching bag, 71 in much the same way that they sometimes
lunged with their rapiers against a fencing post. 72 These were
some of the games which formed a prelude to the bath. Martial
alludes to them in an epigram addressed to a philosopher friend
who professed to disdain them: "No hand-ball, no bladder-ball,
no feather-stuffed ball makes you ready for the warm bath, nor
the blunted stroke upon the unarmed stump; nor do you stretch
forth squared arms besmeared with sticky ointment, nor, dart-
ing to and fro, snatch the dusty scrimmage-ball." 73

This enumeration is far from complete and we must add simple
running, or rolling a metal hoop (trochus) , 74 Steering the capri-
cious hoop with a little hooked stick which they called a "key"
was a favorite sport of women; and so was swinging what Martial
called "the silly dumb-bell" (haltera), though they tired at this
more quickly than the men. 75 When playing these games both
men and women wore either a tunic like Trimalchio's, or tights
like those of the manly Philaenis when she played with the har-
pastum or a plain warm cloak of sports cut like the endromis
which Martial sent to one of his friends with the gracious mes-
sage : "We send you as a gift the shaggy nursling of a weaver on
the Seine, a barbarian garb that has a Spartan name, a thing
uncouth but not to be despised in cold December, . . whether
you catch the warming hand-ball, or snatch the scrimmage-ball
amid the dust, or bandy to and fro the featherweight of the flac-
cid bladder-ball." 77

For the wrestling match, on the other hand, the wrestlers had
to strip completely, smear themselves with ceroma (an unguent of
oil and wax which made the skin more supple), and cover this
with a layer of dust to prevent their slipping from the opponent's
hands. Wrestling took place in the palaestrae of the central build-
ing near some rooms which in the baths of Caracalla archaeolo-
gists have identified with the oleoteria and the conisteria. 78 Here
not only wrestler but wrestleress whose perverse complaisance
under the masseur's attentions roused the wrath of Juvenal 79
came to submit to the prescribed anointings and massage.

The bath which followed the games or the wrestling match
was thus closely linked with sport. The bath itself usually con-
sisted of three parts. First, the bather, drenched in sweat, went off

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 261

to undress if he had not already done so in one of the dressing-
rooms or apodyteria of the baths. Then he entered one of the
sudatoria which flanked the caldarium, and encouraged the sweat-
ing process in this hothouse atmosphere: this was "the dry bath."
Next he proceeded to the caldarium, where the temperature was
almost as warm and where he could sprinkle hot water from the
large tub known as the labrum on his sweating body and scrape
it with the strigil. Cleansed and dried, he retraced his steps to
the tepidarium to cool off gradually, and finally he ran to take a
plunge in the cold pool of the jrigidarium. These were the three
phases of the hygienic bath as recommended by Pliny the Elder, 80
as experienced by the bathers in Petronius' novel, 81 and as sug-
gested in the Epigrams of Martial. 82 Martial, however, allows his
imaginary interlocutors the option of cutting out one of the bath-
ing processes: "If Lacedaemonian methods please you, you can
content yourself with dry warmth and then plunge in the natural
stream." 83

It was in practice impossible for the bather to rub himself
down properly with the strigil. An assistant of some sort was in-
dispensable, and if he had not taken the precaution of bringing
some slaves of his own with him, he discovered that such as-
sistance was by no means furnished gratis. An anecdote recorded
in the Historia Augusta proves that people thought twice before
they embarked on this expense. 84

Hadrian^s biographer relates that the emperor often bathed in
the public baths with everyone else. One day he saw there an
old soldier whom he had known in the army, busily rubbing him-
self against the marble with which the brick walls of the caldarium
were faced, and asked why he was doing this. The old man re-
plied that you had to have money to keep slaves, whereupon the
princeps provided him with both slaves and money. Not unnatu-
rally, the next day when the emperor's presence was announced
a number of old men set to rubbing against the marble. Hadrian
merely advised them to rub each other down.

We are safe in assuming that only the poor took the emperor's
advice. Rich people could afford to have themselves served,
rubbed, massaged, and perfumed as they would. When Trimal-
chio's future guests left the jrigidarium, they found their acci-
dental host inundated, with perfumes and being rubbed down not
with an ordinary cloth but with napkins of the finest wool, by

262 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

three masseurs who, after quarrelling for the honour of grooming
him, "rolled him up in a scarlet woollen coat and put him in his
litter." 85 Trimalchio, duly dried by these specialists, was hoisted
on the shoulders of his retainers and carried straight home where
his dinner was awaiting him.

The majority of the bathers, however, especially those whose
houstf was less luxurious and whose table was less well set than
Trimalchio's, lingered in the thermae and enjoyed their amenities
until closing time. Groups of friends gathered in the public halls
and nymphaea for conversation, or perhaps went to read in the
libraries. The sites of the two libraries of the baths of Caracalla
have been rediscovered at the two extremities of the line of cis-
terns. They are at once recognisable from the rectangular niches
hollowed in the walls for the plutei, or wooden chests, which con-
tained the precious volumina.** Others walked quietly to and fro
in the ambulatories of the xystus among the masterpieces of
sculpture with which the emperors had systematically peopled
the thermae. We must not forget that modern excavation has res-
cued from the baths of Caracalla the Farnese Bull, Flora, and
Hercules; the Belvedere Torso, and the two basins into which
Roman fountains play in the square of the Palazzo Farnese. All
of these stood of old on the mosaic pavements beneath the cof-
fered vaults, between the marble-covered walls and the colon-
nades with capitals decorated with heroic figures which graced
.the baths. 87 The thermae of Trajan were not less richly endowed,
and from them was retrieved, among other treasures, the famous
group of the Laocoon, now in the Vatican. 88 It is impossible
not to believe that the Romans, in the physical well-being and
pleasant lassitude induced by exercise and bath, felt the beauty
which surrounded them sink quietly into their souls.

It is true that the Romans themselves found evil to say about
their thermae, and that many abuses flourished there. It is all too
well established that there lurked under the stately porticoes
vendors of food and drink and procurers of both sexes; 80 that
many congregated there to overeat and drink and indulge other
disreputable tastes; 90 that many heated themselves merely in
order "to raise a thirst," 91 and found bathing a stimulant for
other excesses: "You will soon pay for it, my friend,' if you take
off your clothes, and with distended stomach carry your peacock
into the bath undigested! This leads to death and an intestate

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 263

old age!" 92 Such overindulgence in bathing as Commodus prac-
ticed who took up to eight baths a day, could only soften the
muscles and exasperate the nerves. 98 We may fairly condemn
abuses which the victims cynically acknowledged: "baths, wine,
and women corrupt our bodies but these things make life itself
(balnea, vina, Venus corrumpunt corpora nostra sed vitam
faciunt)."* 4

Nevertheless I am convinced that the imperial baths brought
immense benefit to the people. In their dazzling marble grandeur
the thermae were not only the splendid "Palace of Roman
Water," 95 but above all the palace of the Roman people, such as
our democracies dream of today. In them the Romans learned to
admire physical cleanliness, useful sports, and culture; and thus
for many generations they kept decadence at bay by returning
to the ancient ideal 'which had inspired their past greatness and
which Juvenal still held before them as a boon to pray for: "a
healthy mind in a healthy body (orandum est ut sit mens sana in
cor pore sano)" 9 *

. 3. DINNER

After the fatigue of the sports and tonic of the bath came
dinner. The sun is sloping toward its setting and still we have
not seen the Romans eat. Yet we know that some among them
demanded four ample meals a day, 97 and our texts frequently
mention three daily meals, whose names vary with the centuries.
Just as our own names for meals lunch, dinner, supper have
tended to shift, so the Roman jentaculum, cena, and vesperna
became and remained throughout the classic period the jentacu-
lum, prandium, and cena, while the vesperna disappeared. 98 In
the period which concerns us, some Romans had kept the habit
of all three Pliny the Elder, for instance, among them, though
he was anything but a great eater. 99 Old men tended also to keep
up the three, as contemporary doctors prescribed. 100 But some
people took a drink of water on rising, 101 and omitted one or other
of the first two meals on the advice of their "hygienists." Galen
notably took a jentaculum only about the fourth hour, 102 while
the Roman plebs enjoyed its prandium at noon. 108 In any case,
neither the jentaculum nor the prandium was a very nourishing
or formidable meal. Martial's jentaculum consisted of bread and
cheese; 104 prandium was often nothing more than a piece of

264 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

bread, 105 but was more usually accompanied by cold meat, vege-
tables, and fruits washed down with a little wine. 106 Pliny the
Elder's jentaculum was a very slight affair: "cibum levem et
facilem." 107 His prandium was merely a snack (deinde gustabat).
Both jentaculum and prandium were so quickly disposed of that
there was no need to set a table beforehand (sine mensa) or to
wash the hands afterwards: "post quod non sunt lavandae
manus" 108 They were both evidently cold meals unceremoni-
ously taken; the only serious meal, worthy of the name, was for
everyone the evening dinner, the cena. In reading the lives of
Vitellius and his like, it would be easy to imagine that the Romans
passed their whole life at table. When we look more closely at
the facts, however, we see that for the most part they did not
sit down to table till their day was done, anticipating the prac-
tice of that connoisseur, the Prince of Beneventum, at the French
Embassy in London a century ago. 109 They have been misrepre-
sented as insatiable gourmands, when in fact they ate rather
lightly until evening.

It is true that they then made up for lost time by doing full
justice to their victuals. But here again it is prudent to avoid
hasty generalisations and distrust superficial judgments. To pic-
ture the cenae of the Romans as so many eating orgies would be
like imagining an Arab's feast the measure of his usual fare, or
supposing that the long, lavish, hospitable meal offered at a
country wedding represented the peasant's normal standard of
living. The truth is that in similar settings and with identical cus-
toms and etiquette, there was a great difference between one cena
and another according to the circumstances, personal tastes, and
moral standards of individuals. The Romans might make their
one and only proper dinner a vulgar eating contest or a dignified
meal of delicacy and distinction.

Apart from such historic monsters as Vitellius and Nero who
sat down to table at noon, 110 the hour of dinner was approxi-
mately the same for all; after the bath, that is to say, at the end
of the eighth hour in winter and of the ninth in summer. This was
the usual time in Pliny the Younger's circle for their "elegant
and frugal repast." nl It is the time suggested by Martial to his
friend lulius Cerialis whom he invites to meet him at the eighth
hour at the baths of Stephanus, the nearest to his house, pro-
posing to take him home for dinner afterwards. 112 On the other

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 265

hand the time the cena ended depended on whether it was an
ordinary meal or banquet, on whether the host was temperate
or a glutton. When Pliny the Elder rose from table it was still
light in summer and in winter the first hour of the night was not
yet past. 113 Nero's cena lasted until midnight, 114 and Trimalchio's
till the small hours; 115 the revellers to whom Juvenal addresses
his reproaches "began their sleep' with the rise of Lucifer, the
morning star, at an hour when our generals of old would be mov-
ing their standards and their camps." nc

Whatever the length of the dinner, well-to-do people always
served it in a special room of their house or flat, the triclinium,
whose length was twice its breadth. 117 The dining-room took its
name from the couches with three reclining places each (triclinia)
on which the guests reposed. This is an important detail of pro-
cedure to which we should have difficulty in adapting ourselves,
and one nearer to the oriental custom of using cushions and di-
vans, than to our practice. Nothing would have induced the
Romans of the empire to eat otherwise. They considered the re-
clining position indispensable to their physical comfort, but also
a mark of elegance and of social distinction. In the old days it
was good enough for a woman to eat, seated at her husband's
feet. 118 But now that the Roman matron took her place beside the
men on the triclinia, to eat sitting was suitable only for children,
who sat on stools in front of their parents' couch, 319 6r for slaves,
who received permission to recline like their masters only on
holidays; 120 for village rustics or provincials from distant Gaul, 121
or the passing customers of inns or taverns. 1 - 2 Whether or not
they had donned for dinner the correct loose synthesis of light
muslin which was suited to the warmth engendered by a cere-
monial meal and was sometimes changed between the courses, 123
the Romans would have thought it unseemly not to dine reclining,
men and women side by side. Opinion approved the austerity of
Cato of Utica who, in mourning the rout of the senatorial army,
made on the eve of Pharsalus a vow which he kept to the day
of his suicide : to eat seated as long as the tyranny of Julius Caesar
should be triumphant. 124

Three sloping couches were ranged around a square table, one
side of which was left free for the service. 125 The slope of the
couches was so contrived that the edges came slightly above the
level of the table. Each couch, more or less luxurious in its equip-

266 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

ment, was spread with a mattress and with coverings, while
cushions divided the central place from the other two. The ill-
bred host who was not minded to put himself out for his guests
sometimes occupied the central couch alone, or tolerated only
one companion beside or rather "below" him. For the places had
a sort of hierarchic precedence, and their allotment was dictated
by punctilious etiquette. The couch of honour was that opposite the
empty side of the table (lectus medius) ; and on it the most hon-
ourable position was the right hand one, "the consular" (locus
consularis). Next in honour came the couch to the left of the
central one (lectus summus), and last that on the right (lectus
imus) . On each of these couches the most privileged position was
that to the left nearest the fulcrum or head of the couch. The other
places were filled later. The guests reclined crosswise on the
couches, their left elbow resting on a cushion, their feet, which
they had freed from shoes or slippers and washed on entering, 126
at the foot o* the couch. Not infrequently a round table was
preferred to a square one, and the three couches replaced by one
(stibadium) forming an arc of a circle or, as the phrase was, in
the form of a "lunar sigma" The most important personages oc-
cupied the two ends of the stibadium, on which nine people could
recline at a pinch, but which normally accommodated only seven
or eight. 127 If more than nine persons were to dine, other stibadia
or triclinia had to be brought (triclinia sterner e) into the dining-
room, usually planned for thirty-six guests around four tables or
for twenty-seven around three. 128

An usher (nomenclator) announced the guests and showed
them to their couch and place. Several waiters (ministratores)
brought in the dishes and the bowls and placed them on the
tables. Since the time of Domitian it had been the fashion to
cover the table with a cloth (mappa or mantile); 12 * before this
it had been the custom merely to wipe the marble or wooden
table top after each course. 180 The guests were provided with
knives and toothpicks and spoons of various shapes: 181 the ladle
or trulla; the Iigula 9 holding rather more than a centilitre (quarter
of a cyathus) ; and a little pointed spoon or cocleare with which
eggs and shell-fish were eaten. 182 The Romans knew no more of
forks than the Arabs of today or the Europeans at the beginning
of modern times. They ate with their fingers and this entailed
frequent hand washings before the meal began, and after each

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 267

course. Slaves went round the couches with ewers and poured
fresh perfumed water over the diners' hands, wiping them with
the towel they carried over their arm. 133 .Each guest was provided
with a napkin for his personal use, which he spread in front of
him so as not to stain the covering of the couch. A man had no
hesitation in bringing his own napkin with him, for good man-
ners permitted him to carry it away filled with titbits (apopho-
re fa) 134 which he had not had time to consume. -

It would certainly have required a Gargantuan appetite to
polish off some of the menus recorded in literature. The full dress
cena consisted of at least seven courses or fercula "which of
our grandfathers dined by himself off seven courses?" asks Juve-
nal, "quis fercula septem secreto cenavit avus?" 135 the hors
d'oeuvres, or gustatio, three entrees, two roasts, and the dessert or
secundae mensae. We see the procession of courses pass, with a
supplementary roast thrown in, at Trimalchio's feast a "ridicu-
lous meal," not because of the excess of food, which is scarcely
more horrifying than the menu of certain official banquets
Macrobius records for us three centuries later, 136 but for the com-
placent folly of the master, his childish excitement over his in-
ventions, and the pretentious eccentricities of his dishes.

A donkey in Corinthian bronze stood on the sideboard with panniers
holding olives, white in one side, black in the other. Two dishes hid
the donkey; Trimalchio's name and their weight in silver was engraved
on their edges. There were also dormice rolled in honey and poppy
seed, and supported on little bridges soldered to the plate. Then there
were hot sausages laid on a silver grill, and under the grill damsons and
seeds of pomegranate. 187

The guests were still busy with the hors d'oeuvres "when a
tray was brought in with a basket on it, in which there was a
hen made of wood, spreading out her wings as they do when
they are setting. . . . Two slaves came up and began to hunt in
the straw. Peahen's eggs were pulled out and handed to % the
guests." Each egg was found to contain a "fat becafico rolled up
in spiced yolk of egg." 188 The second entree arrived on a dish
of monumental and puerile design.

Its novelty drew every eye to it. There was a round plate with the
twelve signs of the Zodiac set in order, and on each one the artist had
laid some food fit and proper to the symbol ; over the Ram, ram's head

268 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

pease, a piece of beef on the Bull, kidneys over the Twins, over the
Crab a crown, an African fig over the Lion, a barren sow's paunch over
Virgo, over Libra a pair of scales with a muffin on one side and a cake
on the other, over Scorpio a small sea fish, over Sagittarius a bull's eye,
over Capricorn a lobster, over Aqdarius a goose, over Pisces two mul-
lets. 189

Underneath the top part of the dish "we saw in the well of it fat
fowls and sowg' bellies and in the middle a hare got up with
wings to look like Pegasus," while at the corners of the dish
"four figures of Marsyas also caught the eye; they let a spiced
sauce run from their wine skins over the fishes which swam
about in a mkiiature Euripus." 14 After this the roasts came in,
in corresponding style:

A tray was brought in with a wild pig of the largest size upon it
wearing a cap of freedom, with two little baskets woven of palm twigs
hanging from its tusks, one full of dry dates, the other of fresh.
Round it lay sucking pigs made of simnel cake with their mouths
to the teats, thereby showing that we had a sow before us.

A bearded man came who drew a hunting knife which he plunged
into the pig's side, whereupon "a number of thrushes flew out." 141
Presently the slaves who were dressed up as Homeric heroes
stood back

to let a boiled calf on a presentation dish be brought in. There was
a helmet on its head. Ajax followed and attacked it with his sword
drawn as if he were mad; and after making passes with the edge and
the flat he collected slices on the point, and divided the calf among
the astonished company. 142

Finally came the dessert: "A Priapus made by the confectioner
standing in the middle, holding up every kind of fruit and grapes
in his wide apron." 148 Between the cena proper and the secundae
mensae or dessert, the tables were taken away and replaced by
others, and while the dining-room attendants were engaged on
this task, others "sprinkled about sawdust coloured with saffron
and vermilion and what I had never seen before powdered
talc." 144

It might have seemed that at this point the satiated guests
would think of nothing but taking their leave and going home
to bed. But just as the banquet seemed about to close, it began

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 269

afresh. Trimalchio made his guests take a red-hot bath, and led
them into a second dining-room where wine flowed in rivers, and
where those weary of eating could at least continue to drink
according to the rites of the commissatio, the popular conclusion
of such dinners. 145

A first libation inaugurated the meal. After the hors d'oeuvre
a honey wine (mulsum) was served. Between the other courses
the ministratores, while replenishing the guests' supply of little
hot rolls, solicitously filled their drinking cups with every sort of
wine, from those of Marseilles and the Vatican not highly
esteemed up to the "immortal Falernian." 14 Wine blent with
resin and pine pitch was preserved in amphorae whose necks were
sealed with stoppers of cork or clay and provided with a label
(pittacium) stating the vintage. 147 The amphorae were uncorked
at the feast, and the contents poured through a funnel strainer
into the mixing-bowl (crater a) from which the drinking-bowls
were filled. Anyone who drank these heavy wines neat was con-
sidered abnormal and vicious, a mark for contumely. 148 It was in
the cratera that the wine was mixed with water and either cooled
with snow or in certain circumstances warmed. The proportion
of water was rarely less than a third and might be as high as
four-fifths. 149 The commissatio that followed dinner was a sort
of ceremonial drinking match in which the cups were emptied
at one draught. It was the exclusive right of the master of cere-
monies to prescribe the number of cups, imposed equally on all,
and the number of cyathi that should be poured into each,
which might vary from one to eleven. 150 He also determined the
style in which the ceremony should be performed: whether a
round should be drunk beginning with the most distinguished
person present (a summo}, whether each in turn should empty his
cup and pass it to his neighbour with wishes for good luck, or
whether each should drink the health of a selected guest in a
number of cups corresponding to the number of letters in his
tria nomina of Roman citizen. 151

We may well wonder how the sturdiest stomachs could stand
such orgies of eating, how the steadiest heads could weather the *
abuses of the commissationes !

Perhaps the number of victims was sometimes smaller than
the number of invited guests. There were often, in fact, many
called but few chosen at these ostentatious and riotous feasts.

270 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Out of vanity, the master of the house would invite as many as
possible to dine; then from selfishness or miserliness he would
treat his guests inhospitably. Pliny the Elder criticises some of
his contemporaries who "serve their guests with other wines than
those they drink themselves, or substitute inferior wine for better
in the course of the repast." 152 Pliny the Younger condemns
severely a host at whose table "very elegant dishes were served
up to himself and a few more of the company; while those placed
before the rest were cheap and paltry. He had apportioned in
small flagons three different sorts of wine," graduated according
to the social status of his friends. 158 Martial reproaches Lupus
because his mistress "fattens, the adultress, on lewdly shaped
loaves, while black meal feeds your guest. Wines of Setia are
strained to inflame your lady's snow; we drink the black poison
of aCorsicanjar." 154

Finally Juvenal devotes more than a hundred lines to the kind
of dinner Virro would offer a poor client 155 This low-born upstart
"himself drinks wine bottled from the hills of Alba or Setia whose
date and name have been effaced by the soot which time has gath-
ered on the aged jar"; for him "a delicate loaf is reserved, white
as snow and kneaded of the finest flour," for him

the huge lobster, garnished with asparagus ... a mullet from Cor-
sica ... the finest lamprey the Straits of Sicily can purvey ... a
goose's liver, a capon as big as a house, a boar piping hot, worthy of
Meleager's steel . . . truffles and delicious mushrooms . . . apples
whose scent would be a feast, which might have been filched from the
African Hesperides.

Round him the while his humble guests must be content with the
coarse wine of this year's vintage, "bits of hard bread that have
turned mouldy," some "sickly greens cooked in oil that smells of
the lamp," "an eel, first cousin to a water-snake ... a crab
hemmed in by half an egg . . . toadstools of doubtful quality
. . . and a rotten apple like those munched on the ramparts by a
monkey trained by terror of the whip." In vain Pliny the Younger
protested against "this modern conjunction of self-indulgence and
meanness . . . qualities each alone superlatively odious, but still
more odious when they meet in the same person." 156 Evidence
from many sources places it beyond doubt that these practices

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 271

were widespread. They had at least the advantage of limiting the
damage wrought by gluttony at dinner parties.

The evils of gluttony were somewhat lessened also by the very
leisurcjliness which characterised the long-drawn program of the
elaborate cena. Many banquets lasted eight or ten hours, like
Trimalchio's dinner. They were divided into acts, as it were: in
the interval after the entrees a concert was accompanied by the
gesticulations of a silver skeleton; after one roast there was an
acrobatic turn and Fortunata danced the cordex; before dessert
there were riddles, a lottery, and a surprise when the ceiling
opened to let down an immense hoop to which little flasks of per-
fume were attached for immediate distribution. 157 It was very
generally felt that no dinner party was complete without the
buffooneries of clowns, antic tricks of wantons around the
tables, 158 or lascivious dances to the clatter of castanets, for
which Spanish maidens were as renowned in Rome as are the
Aulad Nail among the Arabs of Algeria today. 159 Pliny the
Younger found nothing amusing in such entertainments: "I con-
fess I admit nothing of this kind at my own house, however I
bear with it in others." 16 The Pantagruelian feast which such
interruptions helped the diners to digest often ended in an orgy
whose indecency was aggravated by the incredible lack of embar-
rassment displayed.

As among the Arabs still, belching was considered a politeness,
justified by philosophers who thought the highest wisdom was to
follow the dictates of nature. 161 Pushing this doctrine even
further, Claudius had considered an edict authorising other emis-
sions of wind from which even Arabs refrain, 162 and the doctors of
Martial's day recommended that people take advantage of the
liberties championed by a well-meaning but ridiculous emperor. 163
Music of this kind was not wanting at Trimalchio's table. After
explaining his own state of health "I have such rumblings inside
me you would think there was a bull there" he adjured his
guests not to risk injury to their health by self-restraint: "As far
as I am concerned anyone may relieve himself in the dining-
room." lfl4 Even Trimalchio had the good taste to quit his couch
and leave the triclinium when pressed by more urgent need. But
not all Roman parvenus were so scrupulous. Martial tells of more
than one who simply clicked his fingers for a slave to bring him

272 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

"a necessary vase" into which he "remeasured with accuracy the
wine he had drunk from it," while the slave "guides his boozy
master's drunken person." 165 Finally it was not infrequent dur-
ing the cena to see priceless marble mosaics of the floor defiled
with spitting. 160 The best way, in fact, to make sure of being able
to eat throughout the incredible carousal was to make use of the
small room next door: "vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant." 1 * 1
It is impossible to repress disgust on reading these descriptions,
or to deny that wealthy Rome which drained the resources of her
empire was saddled with all too many gluttons and topers, even
in the circles in which Pliny the Younger moved.

To appreciate the consummate skill of the Roman chef, past
master in the art of so disguising dishes that none could guess
their ingredients (ut nemo agnoscet quid manduces) , 168 we need
only hear Petronius vaunt the exploits of his chef: "If you want
it, he will make you a fish out of a sow's belly, a wood pigeon out
of bacon, a turtledove out of a ham, and a chicken out of a
knuckle of pork. There could not be a more valuable fellow." 169
To realise the progress of gastronomy in his day and the excel-
lence and variety of the food supplies which were at the gourmet's
disposal for varied combinations, we may read the Thirteenth
Book of Martial's Epigrams. 170 Fish were caught in the gulfs
and bays adjacent to the city; shell-fish, large and small, in the
Mediterranean. Game abounded in the Laurentine and Ciminian
forests. The open country near at hand supplied from its flocks
and herds meat and milk in every form, the cheeses of Trebula
and Vestini, and also vegetables of every sort: cabbages and
lentils, beans and lettuce, radishes and turnips, gourds and pump-
kins, melons and asparagus. Picenum and the Sabine country
were renowned for the quality of their oils. The pickles with which
eggs were seasoned came from Spain. Pork came from Gaul,
spices from the East; wines and fruits from all the sections of
Italy and the world; apples, pears, and figs from Chios, lemons
and pomegranates from Africa, dates from the oases, plums from
Damascus. Every kind of food had its amateurs and connoisseurs.
From Juvenal alone a collection could be made of gourmands
whose mouths watered to see the abundance of the market: "the
dirty ditch digger who remembers the savour of tripe in the reek-
ing cookshop"; 371 "the youth who has learned from the hoary
gluttony of a spendthrift father to peel truffles, to preserve mush-

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 273

rooms, and to souse becaficos in their own juice"; 172 the prodigal
who for 6,000 sesterces bought a mullet that he coveted; 178 the
gourmet Montanus, who "could tell at the first bite whether an
oyster had been bred at Circeii or on the Lucrine rocks." 174

It would be a mistake, however, to believe that every senator
was a Montanus; and just as false to imagine that every Roman
dinner was like the orgies we have cited. While these grotesque
scenes were taking place, many other Romans were partaking of
a discreet and charming meal at which the mind had as much
play as the appetite, and the disciplined service excluded neither
moderation nor simplicity. Thanks to a letter of Pliny the
Younger we know the kind of cena Trajan presided over in his
villa at Centumcellae (Civitk Vecchia): 175 "We were every day
invited to Caesar's supper, which for a prince was a modest
(modica) repast; there we were either entertained with interludes
(acroamata) , or passed the night in the most pleasing conversa-
tion." Pliny himself accepts as a rare and welcome gift the "very
fine thrushes" sent him by Calpurnius 170 and the pullet which
reached him from Cornutus: "Weak as my eyes still are, they are
strong enough to discern that it is extremely fat." 177 He accepted
an invitation to dinner from Catilius Severus (consul in 115),
"but I must make this condition beforehand, that you dismiss
me soon and treat me frugally. Let our table abound only in
philosophical conversation, and let us enjoy even that within
limits." 178 A letter of his preserves the menu he had prepared
for Septicius Clarus in which he jestingly boasts of

the expense I was at to treat you which let me tell yoi' was no
small sum. I had prepared, you must know, a lettuce and three snails
apiece; with two eggs, barley water, some sweet wine and snow . . .
Besides all these curious dishes, there were olives, beets, gourds, sha-
lots, and a hundred other dainties equally sumptuous. You should
likewise have been entertained either with an interlude, the rehearsal
of a poem or a piece of music, as you like best; or (such was my
liberality) with all three. But the oysters, chitterlings, sea-urchins,
and Spanish dancers of a certain were, it seems, more to your
taste! 179

The same good taste reigned among the humbler middle classes.
Let us inspect, for instance, the cena which Martial arranged for
seven guests:

274 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

My bailiff's wife has brought me mallows that will ease the stomach,
and the various wealth the garden bears; among which are squat let-
tuce and clipped leek, and flatulent mint is not wanting nor the
salacious herb (eruca); sliced eggs shall garnish lizard-fish served
with rue and there shall be a paunch dripping with the tunny's brine.
So much for your hors d'oeuvre. The modest dinner shall be served
in a single course a kid rescued from the jaws of a savage wolf,
and meat balls to require no carver's knife, and beans, the food of
artisans, and tender young sprouts; to these a chicken, and a ham
that has already survived three dinners, shall be added. When you
have had your fill I will give you ripe apples, wine without lees from
a Nomentan flagon which was three years old in Frontinus* second
consulship [98 A.D.]. To crown these there shall be jests without gall,
and a freedom not dreaded next morning, and no word you would
wish unsaid. 180

Even simpler and more amusing is the dinner which Juvenal
proposes to his friend Persicus:

And now hear my feast, which no meat market shall provide. From
my Tiburtine farm there will come a plump kid, tenderest of the flock,
innocent of grass, that has never yet dared to nibble the twigs of the
dwarf willow, and has more of milk in him than blood; some wild
asparagus, gathered by the bailiff's wife when done with her spindle,
and some lordly eggs warm in their wisps of hay together with the
hens that laid them. There will be grapes too, kept half the year, as
fresh as when they hung upon the vine; pears from Signia and Syria,
and in the same baskets fresh-smelling apples that rival those of
Picenum. 181

It is pleasing to think it was menus like these that were enjoyed
during his holidays at Pompeii by the townsman who had painted
on the walls of his triclinium the wise mottoes which we still read
there, breathing decency and dignity: 182

Let the slave wash and dry the feet of the guests, and let him be
mindful to spread a linen cloth on the cushions of the couches.

Abluat unda pedes puer et deter geat udos;
Mappa torum velet tinted nostra cave!

Spare thy neighbour's wife lascivious glances and ogling flatteries,
and let modesty dwell in thy mouth.

Lascivos voltus et blandos aufer ocellos

Coniuge ab alterius; sit tibi in ore pudor.

AFTERNOON AND EVENING 275

Be amiable and abstain from odious brawlings if thou canst. If not,
let thy steps bear thee back again to thine own home.

Utere blandiis odiosaque iurgia differ

Si potes, aut gressus ad tua tecta refer.

We may be very sure that similar restraint was generally
observed by the plebeians in their Guild banquets. Let us call to
witness the regulations of the Funeral College founded at Lanu-
vium in 133 A.D. 183 The college organised six feasts a year: two
on the respective anniversaries of the sanctuaries of Antinoiis
and Diana, the hero and the goddess under whose protection this
"College of Salvation" was placed; four on the anniversaries of
the deaths of its benefactors, the three Caesennii and Cornelia
Procula. The rule was that the president of the banquet (the
magister cenae) should see to it that each guest received as his
share a loaf costing two asses, four sardines, and an amphora of
heated wine. The magister decided the order in which his col-
leagues should take their seats in accordance with the list of
precedence or album. Finally it was his duty to prescribe penalties
for any who misbehaved: "If anyone leaves his seat and takes
another in order to create a disturbance, he shall pay a fine of
four sesterces; if anyone insults another or makes a noise he shall
pay twelve sesterces; if it is the master of the ceremonies who is
insulted the offender shall be fined twenty sesterces." The virtues
of ancient Rome seem to revive in this association of the humble
folk of a Roman suburb in the time of Hadrian. We seem to see a
new feeling come to birth, which is all to the honour of the
"Brothers" of Lanuvium: a sense of brotherhood which unites
them in life as it will afterwards reunite them in death, while in
anticipation of their death they meet together to subscribe jointly
for the cost of their respective obsequies and to win salvation in
another world. x

This same feeling of brotherhood, even stronger because nour-
ished by a higher ideal and enlightened by the truths of the
Gospel, drew together the Christians of Rome at the end of their
day's work, in those cenae to which their communities had given
the Greek name of "love" (?**)). Since the first century they
had been wont to sup together, "praising God and eating'their
meat with gladness and in singleness of heart." 184 At the end of
the second century they displayed among each other the charity

276 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

of brothers, for "the poor shared in the provisions of the rich,
but they suffered nothing vile and nothing immodest therein."
Thus, as Tertullian writes, they do not recline to eat till they
have offered a prayer to God. They eat according to the measure
only of their hunger. They drink only as is seemly for chaste
people. They satisfy their hunger as people mindful that they
must adore God in the night. They converse as knowing that God
is listening. 185

The pictures of Petronius, the Epigrams of Martial, the Satires
of Juvenal only too clearly impress upon us all the sordid and
depraved side of Roman life. But now, alongside this, we see a
certain nobility in the everyday conduct of the best people in
Rome that commands our admiration: in the daily life of the
humble citizen and the plebeian, in the modesty of Trajan's
court, in the frugality of the meals to which Pliny the Younger
andthe poets invited their friends, in the good-humoured cenae
where the faithful of Antinoiis and Diana crowded fraternally
round their tables; and above all in those serene "agapes" where
the Christians lifted up their hearts in the joy of knowing the
divine presence in their midst.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

USED IN SOURCES OF INFORMATION

AND NOTES

A/A American Journal of Archaeology

Ann. epigr. Annee 6pigraphique

Atti-CNSR Atti delCongresso nazionale di studi Roman*

BC Bullettino della Commissione archeologica comunale di Roma

CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

Class. Phil. Classical Philology

CRAI Comptes Rendus de I'Acadtmie des Inscriptions et Belles

Lettres
DS Daremberg-Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques et

romaines
JQA Jahreshefte des osterreichischen archdologischen Instituts in

Wien

JRS Journal of Roman Studies

MA G. Lugli, / Monumenti Antichi di Roma e Suburbio, Vols. II

and III. Rome, 1934-1938

MAAR Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome

MAI Memoires de VAcademie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres

Mel. Melanges d'archtologie et d'histoire de I'ficole franfaise de

Rome

ML Memorie della reale Accademia nazionale dei Lincei

NS Notizie degli Scavi di Antichitd

PA S. B. Platner and T. Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of

Ancient Rome. Oxford, 1929

RAP Rendiconti dell 9 Accademia Pontificia

RE Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll, Real-Encydopddie der classischen Al-

ter tumswissenscha ft

RhM Rheinisches Museum fur Phttologie

RL Rendiconti della reale Accademia dei Lincei

SG L. Friedlaender, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms

(reference is made to the loth edition edited by Georg

Wissowa, Leipzig, 1922)

Skrifter Skrifter utgivna av svenska institutet i Rom

TAP A Transactions of the American Philological Association

ZA G. Lugli, / Monumenti Antichi di Roma e Suburbio, Vol. I,

"La Zona Archeologica." Rome, 1930

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

[WORD may be appropriate explain-

ing the method which I have adopted

f:ri |in editing this book before the im-
mediate subject of sources is ap-
proached. First of all, M. Carcopino
^5|l granted me generous permission to
settle all matters pertaining to the
present English edition without fur-
ther consultation. I take this occa-
sion to express publicly my apprecia-
tion of his confidence, and accept, at
the same time, full responsibility for the form in which the book
now appears.

Comparison with the original French edition will show the
changes which have been made. They consist chiefly in additions.
The notes have been greatly augmented, illustrations, which were
entirely lacking in the original, have been added, and M. Car-
copino's short bibliographical introduction has been expanded into
the present chapter. In carrying out the work which these addi-
tions entailed, I have kept one purpose uppermost in mind: to
make the book as a whole more useful to lay reader and classical
scholar alike, while respecting the author's views and interpreta-
tions of the evidence. Hence, the alterations in the text have been
made chiefly to present more complete and precise descriptions of
the matters discussed, and the conclusions drawn from the data
by M. Carcopino have remained virtually untouched. In some
cases, I should have preferred to consult M. Carcopino with re-
gard to a few of the changes before undertaking them, but the
circumstances under which the revision was made did not allow
lengthy or swift correspondence.

With regard to the notes, they consist of references to the an-
cient sources and to modern books and articles dealing in a com-
prehensive way with matters discussed in the text. Wherever in

278 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

the text direct reference is made to an ancient source, the docu-
ment is cited. On the other hand, where a problem is involved
depending on a large mass of scattered evidence which must be
carefully analysed and combined in order to reach valid conclu-
sions of a general nature, it seemed best to cite a book or article
in which the complete evidence had been so handled by a compe-
tent scholar. Needless to say, I have attempted to cite the most
recent studies of the subjects in question, especially those which
contain a bibliography of earlier works and an evaluation of the
conclusions reached therein. It will seem in some cases that the
point of view expressed in the works which I have cited differs
from that of M. Carcopino, but this, of course, is the unavoidable
result of evidence which is often fragmentary or contradictory
and which must be interpreted necessarily with a certain amount
of hypothesis.

To begin with the information given us by the ancient authors,
classical literature, both Greek and Roman, has long been thor-
oughly examined for references to all the different aspects of
Roman daily life, from such purely material objects as clothes and
furniture to the customs and institutions which governed the
Roman in his relation with his fellow individuals and with society
as a whole. From the time of Trajan we have the Satires of Juve-
nal, the Epigrams of Martial, and the Letters of Pliny the
Younger as our most important sources of information. But earlier
and later authors supply us with many details from their own
times which we may apply safely to the period with which this
book is primarily concerned. Of these, Petronius and Seneca,
both of whom wrote in the reign of Nero, deserve particular men-
tion, the former for the realistic picture which he paints of the
lower strata of Roman society, the latter for his many allusions
to the life led in the circle in which he moved the circle of the
court and the nobility. Furthermore, the distinctly biographical
character of the history written by the Roman historians of the
empire especially Suetonius and the later writers known collec-
tively as the Script ores Historiae August ae makes their works a
far richer source with regard to daily life and manners than we
might expect from historians inspired by a more profound and
philosophical concept of their task. All in all, then, although they
often fail us, our literary documents must be the starting point
for any serious study of daily life in ancient Rome.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION 279

With the authors, moreover, we must also consider the informa-
tion conveyed by documents incised or engraved on stone or metal.
The information afforded by inscriptions is particularly valuable
in the field covered by this book. Many of its aspects could not
have been discussed in more than a cursory manner had not
inscriptions furnished the details. Whether in treating the racial
composition of the population of Rome, the constitution of a
guild or religious sect, or the regulations governing the use of
vehicles within city limits, the most reliable information will be
found preserved on stone or bronze and in many cases it will be
the only information available.

Furthermore, we cannot even afford to neglect the simple epi-
taph of a few lines. Whereas the literary text is apt to give us
general information about social customs and the behaviour of
the individual, the epigraphical document almost always fur-
nishes a fact or facts, even if it is no more than the name given
a man who exercises a certain trade, the age at which a girl
married, or the street in which a certain product was sold. It can
readily be seen that when thousands of these inscriptions have
been divided into categories and compared, even the shortest and
least informative, when viewed by itself, has contributed to a
statistical piece of information which could not have been ob-
tained through any other source.

Finally, our epigraphical material is continually increasing as
excavations bring new inscriptions to light, while it is only
through new interpretations or combinations of well-known liter-
ary passages that the authors can be made to throw new light on
the field.

Like the epigraphical material, the archaeological is constantly
growing and for the same reason. The monuments uncovered in
all parts of the Roman Empire, from the Rhine to the Euphrates
and the Sahara to the Black Sea, both illuminate and are illu-
minated by literary texts and inscriptions. For our immediate
subject, the life lived by the Roman in Rome, the remains and
excavations of the city proper, together with those of the Italian
towns of Pompeii, Ostia, and Herculaneum, are natujally of the
greatest importance. Much of ancient imperial Rome has sur-
vived in the Rome of the new Italian Empire and we can see
today with our own eyes many of the buildings which were fa-
miliar to the ancient citizen. In other words, the remains of Rome

280 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

give us an adequate conception of the public background against
which the Roman moved.

But Rome, which since the days of the old republic has been
of such vital importance, for spiritual or material reasons, to the
development of Western civilization, tells us less archaeologically
about the private life of her citizens under the empire. When
many of the most splendid and impressive public monuments of
the ancient city perished utterly, it could hardly be expected that
dwelling houses would survive the building and rebuilding of some
two thousand years. Thus, although we have remains of dwelling
houses, either buried under later construction or unearthed by
excavation, these remains are scanty in comparison with those of
ancient Ostia.

As a suburb of Rome whose history ended with classical an-
tiquity, Ostia gives us a clear conception of how people were
housed in the Rome of the empire. As M. Carcopino has pointed
out in the text, a serious mistake prevailed among classical schol-
ars for many years, in that the Pompeian private house or domus
was assumed to have been as typical of Rome as it was of Pom-
peii. The unearthing of Ostia has shown up the mistake and the
apartment house or instda which is barely mentioned in the manu-
als of twenty years ago is receiving by now the attention it de-
serves as the most important type of dwelling in the city.

This does not mean, however, that we can dispense with Pom-
peii and Herculaneum in reconstructing daily life in Rome. The
most abundant and illuminating supply of the household objects
used in Italy under the early empire has come from the ruins of
Pompeii, and now that excavations have been resumed at Her-
culaneum, we may expect a substantial increase in our knowledge
of instrumenta domestica. Moreover, we need not assume that the
same wide divergence existed between the household objects of
Pompeii and those of Rome as existed between housing condi-
tions in the two cities. The problem of sheltering masses of peo-
ple varying in size within given localities is vitally affected in its
solution by a number of factors, economic, geographic, and clim-
atic, which do not apply with the same force to the cultural
implements used within different groups of a society which enjoys
fundamentally the same cultural patterns throughout. This was
as true of antiquity as it is of modern times and as the same
basic forms of household implements prevail among us, whether

SOURCES OF INFORMATION 281

in the metropolis or the country town, so may we use the furnish-
ings of the Pompeian house to reconstruct the private background
of the Roman of Rome.

To summarize, then, no complete or relatively complete picture
of Roman life in the city of Rome under the empire can be pieced
together without combining the information provided by the three
fields of literature, epigraphy, and archaeology. Preference must
be given, wherever possible, to material which is directly con-
nected with the city: inscriptions and monuments from Rome and
literary references which mention life in the city specifically.
Where these fail us, we must have recourse to the smaller Italian
towns. But we must here remember to exercise discrimination and
to select the kind of material which appears applicable to the
larger city not only on the basis of its intrinsic character but also
with regard to the local peculiarities of its place of origin.

It is not the purpose of this chapter to give a comprehensive
list of modern works dealing with the various aspects of Rome
and Roman life treated in this book. Pertinent discussions are
cited in the notes at the appropriate place where the nature of
their connection with the subject under discussion is easily under-
stood something which cannot always be deduced from the mere
citation of a book or article in a bibliographical list.

There are certain books, however, of a general nature to which
the author and editor are particularly indebted and wish to
acknowledge their debt. They are works which deserve to be
recommended to all those who may care to undertake further
study or reading in the field. Although frequently cited and well
known to the classical scholar, a few words about them may be
of interest from the point of view from which the present book
was written.

The two great classical encyclopaedias

PAULY-WISSOWA-KROLL: Real-Encyclopadie der classischen Alter-

tumswissenschaft
DAREMBERG-SAGLIO: Dictionnaire des antiquitls grecques et romaines

will be found as indispensable for work in the field of Roman
daily life as in any other aspect of Classical Antiquity. M. Car-
copino in his bibliographical note to the French edition, freely
admits his great indebtedness to the Dictionnaire and for that

282 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

reason, I have seen fit to cite it more often in the notes than the
Real-Encyclopadie. In all cases I have compared the correspond-
ing articles in both publications, and where they "have seemed
equally reliable and complete I have not burdened the notes with
a double reference. On the other hand, in cases where the German
work seemed superior, either in the material collected or its inter-
pretation, I have not hesitated to refer to both works, or in cases
where the French work was plainly incorrect or antiquated, to
the German work alone. In this connection, it will be noted that
most of the articles cited from the Real-Encyclopadie are of fairly
recent date.

Among genetal works on Roman daily life, there are two man-
uals which are outstanding as compilations of factual informa-
tion:

J. MARQUANDT: Das Privatleben der Romer (2nd ed. by A. Mau,

Leipzig, 1886).
H. BLUMNER: Die romischen Privat-Altertiimer (Munich, 1911).

Both authors have made a thorough examination of classical liter-
ature for information pertaining to their subject, and their docu-
mentation, so far as written evidence is concerned, leaves little
or nothing to be desired. From our present point of view, archae-
ology and epigraphy are somewhat slighted, but it must be remem-
bered that material in both these fields has increased vastly within
recent years and that with the increase has come both a keener
realization of the importance of such material and a greater knowl-
edge of , how to use it. Both authors confine themselves strictly to
facts and ignore the social and philosophical implications of the
customs and institutions which they describe; but as source-books
their works remain invaluable.
Of a somewhat different nature is

L. Friedlaender, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms (loth
edition by Georg Wissowa, Leipzig, 1922; English translation
from the yth German edition by J. H. Freese and L. A. Magnus,
London, 1908-13).

Friedlaender, whose enormous learning in the field is also pre-
served in a series of brilliant commentaries to Juvenal, Martial,

SOURCES OF INFORMATION 283

and Petronius, presents a number of comprehensive monographs
in book form on different manifestations of Roman life under the
empire. The documentation is complete and many subjects are
treated which are fascinating in themselves and exceptional
enough not to have found a place in the general manuals which
deal with customs and institutions common to the average Roman
sight-seeing and tourist travel, for instance, or the ways in
which the very wealthy managed to spend their money. What is
more, Friedlaender does not hesitate to draw instructive com-
parisons between Roman and later times, which in many cases has
a salutory effect on traditional judgments, which were first made,
as it would seem, in vacuo, and thence kept inviolate from any
healthy light which comparison might have cast upon them.
Finally, we must turn to

SAMUEL DILL: Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (Lon-
don, 1925)

for a general exposition and estimate of what was thought and
felt in Rome during this period. While admitting the unadulter-
ated materialism which strikes us forcibly in our chief literary
sources, we must recognize at the same time that religious and
philosophic trends were in motion which were not only of over-
whelming importance for the future history of Western civiliza-
tion, but part also of the "mentality" of anyone who lived among
them, whether he was conscious of them or not. For the influence
on the Roman mind of religion, both traditional and Oriental,
superstition, and philosophy in the period with which this book
deals, the book of Dill is to be highly recommended.

These general books, however, fail us in one regard: they tell
very little about the city of Rome as the physical milieu of its
inhabitants, and we must turn to a different type of work for this
information.

The archaeological remains of ancient Rome are bewildering
in their magnitude and complexity. Innumerable articles and
monographs have been published dealing with individual monu-
ments or the problems which they present and this material is
widely scattered in the many journals devoted to the study of
classical antiquity. Fortunately the greater part of this material
was gathered together and summarized within recent years by

284 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Samuel Ball Plainer, whose unfinished manuscript was completed,
revised, and published by Thomas Ashby in

A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1929).

The work is arranged alphabetically. Under each heading the
description and history of the monument in question are given,
based upon the complete ancient evidence, existing remains, and
scholarly reconstruction. With regard to modern works, reference
is made not only to specialized articles, but also to the books and
manuals in which the monument is discussed. The bibliography
is remarkably complete and as one eminent topographer has
stated, the book constitutes a new foundation for all discussion
of ancient Rome.

Of a somewhat different character are the three volumes of
Giuseppe Lugli,

/ Monumenti Antichi di Roma e Suburbio (Rome, 1930, 1934, and
1938).

The first volume represents a second, revised edition of Professor
Lugli's La zona archeologica di Roma which appeared in 1925.
The work is written for the general reader by an expert, whose
more specialized investigations in the field are well known to the
student of Roman archaeology. The first volume deals with the
section of Rome which contains the most important remains of
the ancient city which lie on or about the Capitoline and Palatine
hills and extend to the Tiber at the jorum Holitorium and the
jorum Boarium and to the southern outskirts of the city along
the Appian Way. The second volume takes up the monuments
which can be treated as types better than topographically. A
prefatory chapter gives a history of Roman building activities
from the period of the kings to the first barbarian invasions. This
is followed by chapters on the city walls, fountains, bridges, aque-
ducts, etc. The topographical method is adopted again in the
third volume which covers the parts of Rome not described in the
first. These are chiefly the campus Martius, the remaining hills,
and the region across the Tiber.

On the whole the documentation is thin and the work must be
used with some caution. But the opinions of a scholar of Lugli's
experience and eminence deserve careful consideration and his

SOURCES OF INFORMATION 285

work should be used 'in connection with the more factual and
conservative dictionary of Platner-Ashby.

In the text of this book, mention is found of two important
sources of information which need a separate word of explanation.
One is the

Forma Urbis Romae.

At the beginning of the third century A.D., a marble plan of
the city of Rome was affixed to the north wall of the templum
sacrae urbis which faced the Forum of Vespasian. The temple
had burned down in 191 A.D. and been restored by the Emperor
Septimius Severus. It is probable, although direct evidence is
lacking, that an earlier plan was set up in the same place by Ves-
pasian when he built the original temple. This plan may have
served as a model for the one erected by Severus and his son
Caracalla, but contemporary allusions in the later plan prove
that it was more than a servile copy of its predecessor.

Since the middle of the sixteenth century, many fragments have
been found. All those which had come to light by 1874 were col-
lected and published with an exhaustive commentary by

H. JORDAN: Forma Urbis Romae (Berlin, 1874).

New fragments, however, have since been discovered and a much
needed new edition has been promised. At present all extant frag-
ments are being studied and pieced together in the Antiquarium
Comunale at Rome. On the Forma, beside Jordan's work cited
above, see

O. RICHTER: Topographic von Rom (2nd ed., Berlin, 1901) 1-8.
G. LUGLI: RAP XIII (1937) 86, n. 27.

The Regionaries

The Regionaries are two descriptions of the city of Rome
according to the fourteen administrative regions into which it was
divided by Augustus. One is called the Curio sum, a name found
in the oldest manuscripts, the other the Notitia, a name given it
in the Renaissance. They both derive from a common original,

286 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

now lost, which appears to have been cotnpiled in the reign of
Constantine between the years 312 and 315 A.D. It is likely that
the compiler of the original drew upon an earlier description of
the city written under Diocletian. The view is generally accepted
that the Notitia, as it has come down to us, was written after
334 A.D. and before 357 A.D. while the Curiosum falls within the
period extending from 357 A.D. to the reign of Hbnorius. The
failure of both documents to mention any Christian monument is
striking and makes a date later than the fourth century rather
improbable.

Both Regionaries are divided into three parts. The first con-
tains a list of the most important monuments by regions, begin-
ning with the first and continuing through the fourteenth. At the
end of each regionary section, the number of private houses,
apartment houses, public fountains, etc., within the pertinent re-
gion is given.

The second section contain^ a list of monuments by categories.
It gives the number of libraries and the height and location of the
obelisks in Rome. These are followed by the number and names
of the bridges, hills, campi, fora, basilicae, public baths, aque-
ducts, and roads.

The last part is a breviarium or summary in which the sum
total is given for the monuments already enumerated region by
region, in the first part, with the notable addition of certain groups
previously omitted.

The Regionaries were used as a source by the author of an
ecclesiastical history from Constantine to Justinian. The work,
written in Syrian, is commonly attributed to Zacharias of Myte-
lene and one of the books now lost contained a description of
Rome which has survived as an excerpt.

On the Regionaries, see

L. PRELLER: Die Regionen der Stadt Rom (Jena, 1846).

H. JORDAN: Topographic der Stadt Rom II (Berlin, 1871) 1-236;

540-574-

O. RICHTER: Topographic von. Rom, 6-9; 371-389.
GRAPFUNDER: RE IA 477-480.

The text is also printed in
L. URLICHS: Codex Urbis Romae Topograpkicus, 1-27.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION 287

On Zacharias, see
JORDAN: op. cit. 149-152; 174-178.
Translations of the Syrian text are given in

H. JORDAN: op. cit. 575-577 (Latin).

F. G. HAMILTON, E. W. BRADY: The Syriac Chronkle Known as
That of Zachariah of Mytelene (London, 1899) 317-319 (Eng-
lish).

Ostia and Roman Housing

I have mentioned above the importance of Ostia for our knowl-
edge of housing conditions in ancient Rome. For a selected
bibliography on Ostia in general, we have

A. W. VAN BUREN: A Bibliographical Guide to Latium and Southern
Etruria (4th ed., Rome, 1938) 31.

Of the more recent discussions of Roman housing, the follow-
ing is a selected list of those which have seemed most pertinent.

A. MAIURI: Atti I CNSR VII (1929) 161-172

A. BOETHIUS: Skrifter II (1932) 84-97

R. C. CARRINGTON: Antiquity VII (1933) I 33~ I 5 2

A. BOETHIUS: AJA XXVIII (1934) 158-170

P. HARSH: MAAR XII (1935) 7-66

A. BOETHIUS: Skrifter IV (1935) 164-195

A. BOETHIUS: Scritti in onore di B. Nogara 21-31 (1937)

G. LUGLI: RAP XIII (1937) 73-98

Pompeii and Herculaneum

With regard to the antiquities of Pompeii and Herculaneum,
we are fortunate in having a recent edition of

A. W. VAN BUREN: A Companion to the Study of Pompeii and Her-
culaneum (2nd ed., Rome, 1938).

In dealing with Pompeii, the author has divided his work into
sections covering the various aspects of the city and its life. The
ancient evidence, literary or epigraphical, is cited and reference

288 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

is made to the latest books or articles devoted to the subject under
discussion. To the general bibliography on page 13, I would add

HELEN H. TANZER, The Common People of Pompeii (Baltimore,
1939)-

This book, by presenting a well-documented picture of daily life
in Pompeii, invites a comparison between the business and social
activities of a relatively small Italian town and those of the city
of Rome as described by M. Carcopino. It also contains an excel-
lent bibliography.

To Professor Van Buren's bibliography of Herculaneum on
page 36, we may add two articles.

H. MARROU: Annales de l'cole des Hautes Etudes de Gand I (1937)

81-107.
R. HORN: Die Antike XIV (1938) 355-366.

Both of these works pretend to be no more than general surveys,
but they are particularly welcome in view of the dearth of detailed
technical reports on the discoveries of recent years.

Finally, the latest archaeological publications on Rome, Ostia,
Pompeii, and Herculaneum can be found most conveniently in the

Bibliographic zum Jahrbuch des deutschen archdologischen Instituts.

This is an annual publication, the second section of which is
organized topographically so that the books and articles pertain-
ing to a given locality are gathered together under the appropri-
ate place name.

HENRY T. ROWELL

NOTES

PREFACE

i. Juvenal, u, 78-79.

PART I

CHAPTER I

1. On the Forum of Trajan, see PA 237-245; ZA 58-85; Paribeni, Optimus
Princeps II 65-100; and Ricci-Colini-Mariani, Via dett' impero (No. 24 of the
Itinerari dei musei e monwncnti d' Italia} 122-130. The plan is given opposite p. 4.

2. This information is contained in a recently found fragment of the "Fasti
Ostienses," Ann. epigr. 1933, No. 30, 11. 54-56. It covers events from 108 to 113 A.D.
The more important commentaries are those of Calza, NS 1932, 188-202; Car-
copino, CRA1 1932, 363-381; Huelsen, RhM. LXXXII (1933) 362-380; and Groag,
JO A XXIX (1935), Beiblatt 177-204. On the gladiatorial games mentioned in this
fragment, see Degrassi, RAP XII (1936) 183-184.

3. The most recent publication of the column is that of K. Lehmann-Hartleben,
Die Trajansaulc (1926), with 73 photographic plates. The author is primarily inter-
ested in the monument as a work of art. For its value as an historical document,
see the earlier publications of C. Cichorius, Die Reliefs der Traiansdvle (volumes II
and III of the text refer to volumes I and II of the plates, respectively), and E.
Petersen, Trajan's dakischc Kriege nock dem Saulenrelief endklt.

4. On Trajan's burial within the pomerium reported by Eutropius, VIII 5, 2,
see the views of Labrousse (Mel. LIV [1937] 191-192) which reaffirm the validity
of the ancient source.

5. CIL V 960; cf. 959. The many interpretations of this text in connection with
Dio's notice, LXVIII 16, 3, are summarized by Lehmann-Hartleben, op. cit. 4-7.

6. The final official publication of the market has not yet appeared. A monograph
by Ricci, // Mercato di Traiano (Rome, 1929), is summarized in Capitottum V
(1929) 541-555. See also Ricci-Colini-Mariani, Via dett' impero 1x5-120. For other
discussions, mostly of a popular nature, see the Bibliography in BC LXI (1933)
353-257.

7. See Boethius, Roma IX (1931) 446-454-

8. Amm. XVI 10, 15.

9. The wealth furnished the empire by the conquest of Datia has been discussed
in detail by Carcopino, Dacia I (1924) 28-34. Some of his views have been attacked
by Syme, JRS XX (1930) 53~7o, and accepted by Degrassi, RAP XII (1936) 182.

10. Marrou, Mel. XLIX (1932) 93-110.

zi. This interpretation was first advanced in detail by Theodor Birt, Die Buck- '
rotte in der Kunst 269-282; cf. RhM LXIII (1908) 39-57. But see Lehmann-
Hartleben, op. tit. 3.

12. Lehmann-Hartleben, op. cit. pi. XXXVH.

290 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

13. On Trajan's public works apart from the Forum, see Paribeni, op. tit. II
23-64.

14. Lipsius, De Magnitudine Romana III 3.

15. Bureau de la Malic, conomie poUtique des Remains I 340-408.

16. Lot, La fin du monde antique 80.

17. On the pomerium and its extension, there are two detailed discussions of
recent date: J. Oliver, MAAR X (1932) 145-182 and M. Labrousse, Mil. LIV
d937) 165-199; cf. PA 392-396.

18. G. Saefiund's masterful work on the Servian Wall, Le mura di Roma reppub-
Ucana (Lund, 1932), supersedes all previous discussions.

19. Orosius, V 18, 27. This notice probably has nothing to do with Sulla's exten-
sion of the pomerium attested by Gellius, XIII 14, 4; Seneca, Brev. Vit. 13, 8; and
Tacitus, Ann. XII 23.

20. CIL I 206, 11. 20; 24; 50.

21. See F. Clemuti, Roma imperiale nette XIV regioni Augustee; PA 444-447;
and under Regionaries in chapter on Sources.

22. Res Gestae, 13.

23. The latest comprehensive discussion of the Aurelian Wall is I. Richmond,
The City Watt of Imperial Rome (Oxford, 1930).

24. A. Blanchet, Les enceintes de la Gaule romaine.

25. For the extent of the city beyond the Aurelian Wall, see the figure in PA
394 and the discussion of the several regions, ibid. 445-447.

26. Paulus, Digest L 16, 2: " t Urbis t appelatio muris f 'Romae' autem continentibus
aedtficus finitur, quod latins patet"; cf. ibid. 87; 147. Also Macer, ibid. 154: "Mtile
passus non a miUario urbis t sed a continentibus aedificus numerandi sunt."

27. On the religious significance of this institution, see L. R. Taylor, The Divinity
of the Roman Emperor 184-190.

28. Pliny, NH III 66.

29. For the Regionaries, see chapter on Sources. The number 307 for the vici is
the sum total of the vici given region by region, a figure more reliable than the 324
given by the breviarium of the Curio sum and Zacharias. Even so, our manuscript
tradition does not allow exact numbers. Cf. Calza's table, RL XVI (1917) 67, where
the total is given as 305.

30. The numbers varied from time to time, but it is dear that Caesar, at the
end of his reign, reduced the number of those on the corn-dole to 150,000 (Sue-
tonius, Julius 41; cf. Dio, XLIII ax, 4. Plutarch, Caesar 55, 3 and Livy, Epit. 115,
confuse this dole list with the complete population) . The distributions of Augustus,
usually affecting over 250,000 citizens, went as high as 320,000 in 5 B.C. (Res Gestae
15), but the one provided by his will sank to 150,000 (Suetonius, Augustus 101;
Tacitus, Ann. I 8; Dio, LVII 14, 2). In general, see Kahrstedt, SG IV 10-21, who
discusses Beloch's conclusions, Die Bevottverung der griechisch-romischen Welt
39^-4x2. On the class of citizens who received Augustus' donations, see Ensslin,
RhM LXXXI (1932) 345-350.

31. Dio, LXXVI i, x, speaks of 200,000 men including the troops in Rome. These
last may be estimated at 25,000 and must be subtracted from the whole as not
belonging to the civil population.

32. Carcopino, Roma XVI (1938) 493-498.

33- Eusebius, Ckron. II p. 133 ed. Schoene.

34- The scholiast on Lucan (PharsaUa I 319 = IH P- 53 ed. Weber) says that
Rome needed 80,000 modn of grain per day (29,200,000 m. per year). Assuming a
consumption of 5 mod* per month per person or 60 modu per year, we arrive at a
figure (486,666) slightly higher than the one given in the text.

35- Cicero, Verr. II 3, 72. He speaks of 33,000 medimni (198,000 modn) as a

NOTES 291

month's supply for the plebs Roman*. At 5 modn per month per individual, we
get a little under 40,000 people.

36. See n. 30 above.

37. Suetonius, Julius 41. *

38. Aurelius Victor, Epitome I 5-6; Josephus, BeUum ludaeicum H 383-386. On
the relation of grain consumption to the population, see Gates, Class. Phil. XXIX
(1934) 101-116.

39. Res Gestae 15.

40. Cuq, MAI XI (1915) 2797335-

41. Lot, La fin du monde antique 80; 85.

42. Suetonius, Julius 41.

43. Tacitus, Ann. XV, 41.

44. SHA Pius 9, i.

45. Dates, op. cit. (see n. 38 above) reaches the figure 1,250,000 for the Augustan
Age.

46. Martial, XII 8, 1-2.

CHAPTER H

z. On Roman housing in general, see chapter on Sources.

2. Carcopino, Mel. XXX (1910) 397-446.

3. On Ostia in general, see chapter on Sources.

4. See pp. 6-7 above.

5. Munoz, CampidogUo (1930) 45-52; MAAR XII (1935) 61.

6. AJA XXXI (1927) 406-410; ZA 402.

7. NS 1917, 9-20.

8. PA 156-158; Z<A 260-279. -

9. MAAR XII (1935) 29-30.

10. On the Forma Urbis Romae, see chapter on Sources,
xi. Livy, XXI 62.

12. Cicero, De Leg. Agr. II 96.

13. Vitruvius, II 8, 17.

14. Strabo, V 3, 7.

15. Ibid. XVI 2, 23.

16. Juvenal, 3, 190-196.

17. Gellius, XV i, 2.

18. Aristides, Or XIV p. 324 ed. Dindorf.

19. Aurelius Victor, Ep. 13, 13; cf. Digest XXXIX i, i, 17.

20. Tertullian, Adv. Vol. 7.

21. Martial lived on the Quirinal ad pirum (I 117, 6) near the temple of Flora
(V 22, 4; VI 27, 1-2) in a rented apartment (I 108, 3). Later, he acquired a
house (IX 97, 8), also on the Quirinal (X 58, xo).

22. Juvenal, 3, 108-202.

23. In CIL IV, 138, the following parts of the insula Arriana Polliana at Pompeii
are offered for rent: "tabernae cum pergulis suis et cenacula equestria et domus";
cf. ibid. 1136.

24. Cicero, Pro Marco Caetio 7.

25. For a unit composed of shop and living apartment, see Digest XXXIII 7, 7 ;
cf. L 16, 183.

26. Digest XII 2, 9; XIII 7, n, 5. On the renting of houses and apartments, see
Herdlitczka, RE, Suppl. VI 385-3*7; Genco and Massano, Atti III CNSR 1 (1935)

292 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

27. Cicero, Ear. Resp. 49; Vefldus, II 77 (cf. Dio, XLVHI 38); Suetonius,
T. 15.

28. Suetonius, Julius 46.

29. On the korti Maecenatis, see 'PA 269.

30. Pofflo: Frontinus, De Aquaeductibus 21; Sura: Martial, VI 64, 13; cf. Merlin,
L'Aventin dans I'antiqvM 327 ; 332 ; 341-342.

31. Flavius Sabinus, CIL VI 29788; Martial, see n. 21 above.

32. SHA Commodus 16, 3; Pertinax 5, 7; cf. Dio, LXXII 22, 2.

33. On the Nova Urbs which was built after the fire of 64 A.D., see Boethius,
Skrifter II (1932) 84-97; Lugli, RAP XIII (1937) 83-93.

34. Martial, I 108; IV 64; cf. VII 17.

35* Boethius in Scritti m onore di B. No gar a 21-32; cf. Calza, "Le origin! latine
dell' abitarione moderna," Architettura e arti decorative III (1923).

36. Pliny, NH XIX 59; cf. Martial, XI 18.

37. Augustine, Confessiones IX 23.

38. Petronius, 60.

39. Pliny, Nff XXXIII 57-

40. Calza, RL XXV (1917) 75, followed by Lugli, RAP XIII (1937) 97, assumes
an average area of 200 square meters per insula.

41. Vitruvius, II 8, 17.

42. Juvenal, 3, 190-196.

43. Digest XIX 2, 3; cf. n. 26 above.

44. Plutarch, Crassus 2, 5.

45. On the vigilcs, see P. K. B. Reynolds, The Vigil* s of Imperial Rome.
, 46. Juvenal, 14, 305-308.

' 47- Ibid. 3, 199-207.

48. Ibid. 197-198.

49. Digest I 15, 2.

50. Juvenal, 3, 198-199; cf. Martial, XII 32.

51. N. 46 above.

5^. Cf. Caroline L. Ransom, Couches and Beds of the Greeks, Etruscans and
Romans, and Gisela M. A. Richter, Ancient Furniture 130-135.

53. Richter, op. cit. 137-142.

54. Ibid. 119-124; 127-129.
55- Juvenal,. 6, 91.

56. Seneca, De Clementia I 9, 7.

57. Pliny, Ep. H 17, ax; cf. VII 21, 2.

58. Juvenal, 7, 203; Martial, I 76, 14; Seneca, Dial. X xo, x.

59. Henzen, Ada Fratrum Arvalium p. 14.

60. Richter, op. cit. 125-127.
6x. Martial, Vn 53; cf. II 44.

62. On the silver vessels with gold rims (ckrysendeta) t see Martial, II 43, n;
VI 94, x; XI 29, 7; XIV 97.

63. Mau-Kelsey, Pompeii 202 ; 204. In general, see Chipiez in DS II 1035-1040.
Window-panes, which were comparatively rare in Italy, were quite common in
the villae of Gaul; Cumont, Comment la Belgique fut romanisSe 44, n. 3.

64. Pliny, Ep. DC 36, x; cf. VI 21, 2.

65. On heating arrangements, see Thldenat, DS III 345-350.

66. Via deW impero 40.

67. On stoves and braziers, see Gachon, DS II 1194-1197.

68. Frontinus, De Aquaeductibus 65-73; cf. the table in Ashby, Aqueducts of
Ancient Rome 30. The Tepula, then fed from other aqueducts, and the Traiana,
not opened until 109 AJD. f are not included in the estimate.

NOTES 293

69. The date is given in the "Fasti Ostienses," Ann. ipigr. IQ33, No. 30, 11. 11-12.
On the aqueduct, Ashby, op. til. 298-307.

70. Frontinus, op. cit. 103; 105.

71. Ibid. 108-109.

72. Martial, IX 17, 5-6.

73. Juvenal, 6, 332.

74. Paulus, Sententiae III 6, 58; cf. Digest XXXIII 7, 12, 42.
7$. Digest I 15, 3, 5-

76. Pliny, NH XXXVI 104-108.

77. On the Cloaca Maxima, PA 126-127.

78. MAAR XII (1935) 25.

79. DS III 988.

80. Suetonius, Vespasian 23.

81. On public latrines in general, see SG IV 310-311.

82. See n. 66 above.

83. Martial, XI 77, 1-3.

84. In this connection, we may recall the amusing frescoes recently discovered
in Ostia (Calza, Die Antike XV [1939] 99-"5)- On the goddess Fortuna, see Car-
copino, Journal des savants (1911) 456-457.

85. A. Ballu, Lcs ruines de Timgad I 112-114.

86. See the description in DS III 988.

87. Suetonius, Vespasian 23.

88. Attested for the Insula Sertoriana; CIL VI 29791.

89. Livy, XXXIX 44 5.

90. Lucretius, IV 1026.

91. Juvenal, 6, 602, On abandoning babies there, see Carcopino, Memoires de la
Societe des Antiquaires LXXVII (1928) 58-86, esp. 76-85; cf. Cumont, gyptc des
astrologues 187, n. i.

92. Juvenal, 3, 269-272.

93. Digest IX 3, 5, x-a.

94. Ibid. 3, 5, 7.

95. Diodorus, XXXI 18, 2.

96. Juvenal, 3, 223-225.

97. Petronius, 95.

98. Ibid. 98.

99- Pliny, NH III 66.

100. Ibid. 67.

101. Tacitus, Ann. XV 38; 43.

102. See n. 33 above.

103. On the terminology, see Chapot, DS V 781-783.

104. On vici within the city, see Grenier, DS V 861-863. On the balconies, Codex
Just. VIII 10, 12, sb.

105. CIL r 593, 1. 54-

106. Ibid. 11. 32-49.

107. Varro, De Lingua Latina V 158.

108. Martial, VII 61; Juvenal, 3, 247.

109. Martial, VII 61.

no. On the perils of the night at Rome, see Juvenal, 3, 268-314.
in. Digest 1 15.

112. Petronius, 79.

113. On the congestion and noise of Rome, Juvenal, 3, 232-267; Martial, I
41; XII 57; Seneca, De dementia 1 6, i.

114. CIL r 593, 11. 56-67; cf. SG IV 22-25.

294 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

1x5. See Cuq, DS U 1390.

116. Suetonius, Claudius 25, 2.

117. SHA Marcus 23, 8.

1 1 8. Ibid. Hadrian, 22, 6.

119. Juvenal, 3, 236-259; cf. Martial, Xn 57.

CHAPTER m

x. On the honestiorcs and hum&ores, see Mommsea, Romisckes Strafrccht 1031-

1049.

2. On the composition and the social and economic position of the equestrian
order under the empire, see Arthur Stein, Der rom. Ritterstand (1927). especially
chap. II, in, and VI.

3. On the political career open to knights, see Hirschfeld, Die kaiscrlicken Vcr-
waltungsbeamtcn* 4 x 1-465 .

4. On the order and its qualifications, see O'Brien-Moore, J? Suppl. VI 760-766.

5. Offices open to senatorial alone are summarized by O'Brien-Moore, ibid. 777-
778.

6. On such titles, see Hirschfeld, Kleine Sckriftcn 647-655; cf. SG IV 77-81.

7. Suetonius, Domitian 13 ; cf. Aurelius Victor, Caesares xi, 2 ; Pliny, Panegyricus
45J 55 J Martial, X 72, 3-4.

8. Tacitus, Hist. I 4-

9. On the propagation of Roman citizenship, under the empire, see the recent
book of A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship 167-227.

xo. Juvenal, 3, 62-65; cf." Seneca, Ad Helviam 6.

xi. See the recent discussion of his life by G. Highet, TAJPA LXVIII (1937)
480-506.

12. Martial, IV 45; I 49; 61; X 103; 104. On Martial's home in Rome, see
chap. H, n. 21.

13. On Pliny and Como, see Mommsen, &tude sur Pline le Jeune 74-77.

14. On the origin of senators under Trajan, see P. Lambrechts, L'AntiqviU clas-
sique V (1936) 105-1x4; under later emperors, the same author's La composition
du senat romain de V accession au trdne d'Hadrien a la mort de Commode.

15. SHA Severus 19.

16. See the analysis of the evidence by Jotham Johnson, Excavations at Min-
turnae; II Inscriptions: part I 49-113.

17. CIL XIV 21x2.

18. Digest XLVIII 8, xx.

19. Suetonius, Claudius 27; Digest XL 8, 2.

20. Digest I i2, x. On Seneca's attitude toward slaves, see Ep. 47; Clem. 1 18; Ira
III 35 ; Benef. HI x8.

21. Suetonius, Domitian 7; cf. Digest XLVIII 8, 4, 6.

22. SHA Hadrian 18, 7-8.

23. Gaius, 1 53.

24. Juvenal, 14, 126; x, 92; 6, 475-^4*4-

25. Ibid, x, 92.

26. Ibid. 6, 475-484.

27. Ibid. 14, 15-22.

28. Martial, VIII 23; I xox.

29. Pliny, Ep. I 21, 2.

30. Ibid. V 19, 6-4.

31. Ibid. VIII x6.

32. Ibid. I 4, 4-

NOTES 295

33. Ibid. 1 12, 7.
34- Ibid. IX 36, 4-

35. Ibid. Ill 14.

36. Appian, B.C. II 120.

37. On freedmen in general, see the comprehensive study of A. M. Duff, Freed-
men in the Early Roman Empire.

38. Suetonius, Augustus, 40; Dio, LV 13. The laws were the Fufia Caninia and
the Aelia Sentia; cf. Duff, op. cit. 31-35.

39. Gaius, I 29-320; cf. Duff, op. cit. 74-85.

40. Frank, American Historical Review XXI (1916) 689-708.

41. The evidence has been compiled by Stech, Klio Beiheft X (1912) 127-130.

42. See chap. I, n. 9.

43. On imperial slaves and freedmen, SG I 35-74.

44. On the "cabinet/ 1 Hirschfeld, Verwaltungsbeamten 318-342.

45. Suetonius, Domitian 14; Dio, LXXVII 15.

46. On Hadrian's equestrian "cabinet," Hirschfeld, op. cit. 476-479.

47. Juvenal, 3, 131-132.

48. CIL VIII 10570; 14464.

49. Martial, XIII 12, speaks of 300 modii of grain, presumably per annum.
At 5 modii per month per person, we get a family of five people.

50. Galen, De Affectuum Dignotione 20, 13 = V 49 Kuhn.

51. Juvenal, 9, 140-141.

52. Ibid. 14, 322-328.

53. G. Billeter, Geschichte des Zinsfusses im griechisch-rotnischen Altertum 170-
228.

54. Martial, VII 73.

55. Ibid. IV 37.

56. Ibid. XII 10.

57. Pliny, Ep. II 4, 3-

58. Petronius, 71.

59. See chap. I, n. 9.

60. Juvenal, 3, 166-167; cf. 14, 126.

61. Ibid. 9, 142-144.

62. Martial, VII 53.

63. Juvenal, 7, 141.

64. Petronius, 47; cf. 37.

65. See n. 38 above.

66. Gaius, I 43.

67. Pliny, NH XXXIII 135.

68. Athenaeus, VI 272 e.

69. PA 161-162.

70. On the pay of these civil and military officials, see V. Domaszewski, Banner
Jahrbucker CXVII (1908) HI; 1x8; 139; 141-169.

71. Martial, V 56.

72. Ibid. VI 8.

73. Ibid. X 47.

CHAPTER IV

x. Gaius, III 17. On the patria potestas, see W. W. Buckland, A Text-Book of
Roman Law 3 100-141, and the recent studies of Kaser, Zcitschrijt der Savigny
Stiftung Rom. Abt. LVIII (1938) 62-87; 88-135.

a. Buckland, op. dt. 372-374.

296 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

3. Cicero, De Offices I 54.

4. Dionysius, Ant. Rom. II 26-27; Gellius, V 19; Digest XXVIII 2, u.

5. Digest XXV 3, 4-

6. See chap. II, n. 91.

7. Musonius, 158; cf. Powell, Archiv fur Papyrus] or schung XII (1937) 175-178.

8. CIL XI 1147. See F. G. de Pachtere, La table hypotktcaire de Veleia; cf.
Carcopino, Revue des etudes anciennes XXIII (1921) 287-303.

9. Sallust, Catiline 39; Dio, XXXVII 36; Val. Max. V 8, 5.

zo. Codex Justinianus 9, 17, i. But cf. Ulpian, Digest XLVIII 8, 2.
u. Digest XLVIII 9, 5.

12. Ibid. XXXVII 12, 5.

13. Ibid. XLVIII 9, 5 (from the middle of the third century).

14. Pliny, Ep. DC 12.

15. Martial, III 10.

16. Pliny, Ep. IV 2.

17. On the different forms of marriage, see E. P. Corbett, The Roman Law of
Marriage 68-106.

1 8. Pliny, Ep. I 9.

19. Pliny, NH XXXIII 28; Juvenal, 6, 25; Digest XXIV i, 36; cf. Corbett,
op. cit. 1-23.

20. Gellius, X 10.

21. For detailed descriptions, see Bliimner, Romische Privat-Altertumer 349-361 ;
or Leer wain, DS III 1655-58. On marriage and the gens, see Rose, The Roman
Questions oj Plutarch, XX 101-108.

22. Duchesne, Origines du culte Chretien 445.

23. Lucan, Pkarsalia II 370-371.

24. Gaius, I 144; cf. Cicero, Pro Murena 27.

25. Gaius, I 173; Ulpian, Reg. XI 22.

26. Gaius, I 145.

27. Digest XXIII i, ii ; cf. L 17, 30.

28. Cf. Favez, Butt. Soc. t. des Lettres de Lausanne (Oct. 1933) 1-9.

29. SHA Hadrian n, 3.

30. Tacitus, Ann. VI 29.

31. Ibid. XV 62-64; cf. Carcopino, Points de vue sur I'impirialism r amain
247-248.

32. Pliny, Ep. HI 16.

33. Ibid. VI 24.

34. Martial, XI 53 (Rufina) ; IV 75 (Nigrina).

35. Ibid. X 3 S; cf.38.

36. Pliny, Ep. VIII 5.

37. Ibid. IV 19.

38. Ibid. VI 4; L

39. Ibid. I 14.

40. Ibid. IX 36.

41. Ibid. VIII 10; u.

42. Martial, XI 53.

43. Ibid. X 63.

44- Juvenal, 6, 39^-412.

45. Ibid. 434-456.

46. Pliny, Ep. I 16, 6.

47. Juvenal, 6, 44&-45I-

48. Ibid, i, 22-23 1 61-62 ; 6, 246-264.

49. Petronius, 67; 70-76.

NOTES 297

50. Juvenal, 6, 300-305.

51. Ibid. 42S~433.

52. Ibid. 509.

53. Ibid. 282-284.

54. Pliny, Ep. VI 31.

55. Juvenal, n, 185-189.

56. On the Lex luUa de Adulteriis, see Corbett, The Roman Law of Marriage
133-146, esp. 146.

57. Cato in Gellius, X 23.

58. Martial, VI 4.

59. Juvenal, 2, 29-33.

60. Dio, LXXVI 16, 4.

61. On divorce in early Rome, see Corbett, op. cit. 218-228.

62. Cicero, Philippics II 69

63. Val. Max. II 9, 2.

64. Ibid, i, 4; Gellius, X 15.

65. Val. Max. V 3, 10-12. Of the names cited by Valerius, one is completely
unknown (Antistius Vetus). The two others could belong to people of the second
half of the third century B.C., if Valerius' source was the second decade of Livy,
now lost.

66. By the second century A.D., women had acquired the same privilege even in
a marriage cum manu; Gaius, I 137 A.

67. On the fifth marriage of Sulla, see Carcopino, Sylla ou la monarchic manquec
217.

6*8. Plutarch, Pompey 4; 10; cf Carcopino, op. cit. 190-191.

69. Cf. Plutarch, Caesar 10, 6.

70. Ibid., Cato Minor 36; 52.

71. Ibid., Cictro 41; cf. Dio, XL VI 18, 3.

72. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum I 48; Pliny, NH VII 158.

73. Dio, LIV 16; Suetonius, Augustus 34.

74. The general conclusions are those of . Cuq, Les institutions juridiques des
Romains 172. On the dowry, see Corbett, op. cit. 182-198.

75. Horace, Odes III 24, 19.

76. Paulus, Sent. II 2iB, 2; Justinian, Inst. II 8.

77. Martial, V 61.

78. Juvenal, 6, 212-213.

79. Ibid. 460.

80. Martial, VIII 12.

81. Juvenal, 6, 142-148.

82. Digest XXIV 2, 2, i.

83. Juvenal, 6, 224-230.

84. Martial, VI 7.

85. Digest XXIV 3, 64.

86. Ibid. I 61.

87. Seneca, De BeneficUs III 16, 2.

88. Juvenal, 6, 224.

89. Martial, VI 7, 5.

CHAPTER V

z. On concubinage in general, see J. Plassard, Le concubinat remain sous le ffaut
Empire. For Marcus Aurelius, SHA Marcus 29, 10. Vespasian had already set a
precedent for such behavior; Suetonius, Vespasian 3.

a 98 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

2. Pliny, Ep. Ill 14, 3.

3. Martial VI 71.

4. Ibid. VII 64.

5. Ibid. VI 39-

6. Ibid. XII 58.

7. Juvenal, 3, 65-66; Martial, I 34.

8. Plutarch, Cato Motor 20. Cf. the example of Aemilius Paulus who was always
present at the studies and exercises of his sons unless prevented by public business ;
Plutarch, Aemilius 6.

9. Pliny, Ep. VIII 14, 6.

10. The three are mentioned together by Tacitus, Dialogus 28. On Cornelia, see
also Plutarch, Gracchi i; Cicero, Brutus 104; 211; Quintilian, I i, 6.

11. Such clubs are attested from the first to the fourth century; Suetonius, Galba
5, i; Jerome, Ep. 43, 3; cf. CIL VI 997; XIV 2120.

12. Pliny, Ep. VII 24.

13. Tacitus, Dialogus 29.

14. Quintilian, I i, 4.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid. I x, 8.

17. Pliny, Ep. Ill 3.

z8. Plautus, B ace hides 162.

19. Boissier, Fin du paganism I 149.

20. On the fees collected by such teachers, see Horace, Satires I 6, 75 ; Ovid, Fasti
III 829; Macrobius, 12, 7. A magister ludi of Capua eked out his fees by writing
wills; CIL X 3969.

21. Although, plagosus Orbilius was properly a grammaticus, we may cite him
here as the best-known example; Horace, Ep. II i, 70; cf. Suetonius, DC Grammati-
cis 9. On his successors, Juvenal, i, 15; Martial, X 62, 10; XIV 80. In general,
Plutarch, Caesar 61, i.

2?. Quintilian, I 3, 16-17.

23. Ibid. I i, 24-26.

24. Seneca, Ep. 94, 51.

25. On education and the State under the empire, see Barbagallo, Lo Stato e
I'educazione pubbtica. On Vipasca, CIL II 5181, 1. 57: "ludi magistros a procura-
tore metallorum immu-es eslse placet].'' It should be noted that the schoolmaster
follows the shoemaker, barber, and fuller in the list of regulations governing their
activities.

26. Philostratus, Vitae II i, 10. Quintilian, I i, 25, suggests alphabets of ivory
or of pastry.

27. Vegetius, DC Re M Hit art II 19.

28. Apuleius, Florida 20.

29. On the first Greek teachers in Rome, see Gwynn, Roman Education from
Cicero to Quintilian 34-58. For Greek influence on the intellectual life in general
and the reaction to it, see F. Leo's masterful chapter, Gesckichte d. romischen
Literatur, 259-368.

30. Suetonius, Rhct. 2. ,

31. See Marx's ed., 153.

32. Suetonius, Rhct. i ; Gellius, XV xi; cf. Cicero, De Or. Ill 93. For the under-
lying political motives, see Gwynn, op. cit. 65-66.

33* On Caesar, Carcopino, Cesar 974. On Quintilian, Eusebius, Chron. a. Abr.
2104, II p. 161 ed. Schoene.

34* Dio, LXV 12-13; Suetonius, Vespasian x8. On the intellectual policy of
Vespasian, see Hertzog's commentary to Ann. epigr. 1936 nr. 128 in Sitzungsberichte

NOTES 299

d. Preussichcn Akademit, phil.-hist. Klasse XXXII (1935) 968-1019; cf. Levi,
Romano. 1937, 361-367.

35. Suetonius, Rhet x; Plutarch, Cato motor 22.

36. Car-copino, Ctsar 974-975 ; cf. chap. I, n. 10.

37. On child prodigies under the empire, sec Marrou, Mo/urucds d^p (Paris,
1937) 196-207.

38. Marrou, Saint-Augustin et la fin de la culture classique (Paris, 1937). Sec
esp. chap. II.

39. Juvenal, 6, 184-199; Martial, X 68.

40. On Lucian and his lecture tours, see Croiset, 5501 sur la vie et les oeuvres
de Lucien.

41. On the substitution of Latin for Greek in the Roman Church, see P. Mon-
ceaux, Histoire de la literature chretienne 42 ; A. Puech, Histoire de la UtUrature
grecque chretienne II 8. In contradistinction to Rome proper, Roman Africa hatf
been very superficially Hellenized; see W. Thieling, Der Hellenism us in Kleinafrica.

42. IG XIV 2012.

43. C/Z, VI 33929 jcf. XI 6435.

44. Suetonius, Gram. 16.

45. SHA Hadrian 16.

46. On Juba as writer and scholar, see S. Gsell, Histoire ancienne de I'Afrique
VIII 251-276.

47. Sallust, De Bell. lug. 21, 2.

48. Tacitus, Dialogus 36, i.

49. Aristotle, Rhet. I 3.

50. On Hermagorus, see RE VIII 693-695.

51. Cato, fr. 14.

52. Diomedes, De Declinatione Exercitationis Chriarum, I 310 Keil.

53. Quintilian, I 9, 3. v

54. Suetonius, Gram. 5.

55. For an annotated edition of the Suasoriae, see William A. Edward, The
Suasoriae of Seneca the Elder.

56. Seneca, Suasoriae 6; 7.

57. Ibid, i ; 4.

58. Ibid. 5; 2.

59. Ibid. 3.

60. Suetonius, Rhet. i.
6x. Ibid.

62. See the edition of H. Borneque, Senece le rheteur Contravenes et Suasoires.

63. Seneca, Controversiae IX 2.

64. Ibid. VII 2.

65. On the part played by mores in Roman law, see Steinwenter, RE XV 290-
298.

66. Seneca, Controversiae VIII 2.

67. Ibid. DC i.

68. Ibid. X 5.

69. Ibid. II 7.

70. Ibid. I 6.

71. Ibid. IV 4.

72. Ibid. I 2.

73. Gellius, XVII 12.

74. Marrou, Saint Augustin 53-54.

75. Seneca, Ep. 106, 22.

76. Petronius, 1-4.

300 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

77. Tacitus, Dialogus 33.

78. Juvenal, 7, 150-170.

79. On the base materialism attested by dozens of epitaphs, see Brelich, Aspetti
delta morte nelle iscrizioni sepolcrali dell' impero romano (Budapest, 1937) 50.

80. Cf. F. Cumont's admirable analysis of the official and traditional religion,
Les religions orientates dans le paganism remain* (Paris, 1929) 25-27.

8 1. Boissier, La religion romaine d* August c aux Antonins, II 141-142.

82. See Ovid's lively description; Fasti III 523-542.

83. Juvenal, 12, 1-16.

84. Ibid. 2, 149-152.

85. Petronius, 44.

86. Ibid.

87. Tacitus, Hist. V 5.

88. Tacitus, Gennania 9.

89. Pliny, Ep. VIII 8; Boissier, Religion II 171.

90. Ibid. IX 39.

91. Ibid. IV 8.

92. On the beginnings of the imperial cult, see L. R. Taylor, The Divinity of the
Roman Emperor; on its development under the Flavians, K. Scott, The Imperial
Cult under the Flavians.

93. Suetonius, Vespasian 23. Cf. the cynical words of Caracalla about his
brother Geta whom he had had assassinated: "Geta sit divus dum non sit vivus";
SHA Geta 2.

94. Suetonius, Domitian 13 ; cf . Martial, V 8 ; VII 34 ; IX 66.

95. Pliny, Panegyricus n, 3; 68, i; cf. 67, 4.

96. Ibid. 14, i.

97. Tacitus, Hist. I i.

98. See Boyance*, Le culte des Muses, for this "religious" aspect of the philo-
sophical schools.

99. J. Bidez, La cite du monde et du soleil chez les stoiciens.

100. On Figulus, see Carcopino, La basilique pythagoricienne de la Porte Majeure
196-206.

101. Lydus, De Mensibus IV 59 (p. 113 Wtinsch).

102. PA 283-286.

103. Gauckler, Le sanctuaire syrien du Janicule (Paris, 1912):

104. Suetonius, Nero 56.

105. On the cult of Mithra at Capua, NS 1924, 353-375; at Rome, OIL VI 732.

106. See Cumont's brilliant conclusions in Le s religious orientates 181-194; also,
Alda Levi, La patera d'argento di Parabiago (Rome, 1936) .

107. Juvenal 3, 62.

108. Josephus, Antiquities XVIII 3, 4-5; cf. Tacitus, Ann. II 85.

109. Juvenal, 6, 532-534J cf. 550; 553 J 585.

1 10. Ibid. 540-541; S48-SSO.
in. Ibid. 512-516.

112. Ibid. 313-317.

113. Ibid. 522-529.

114. Ibid. 580-581.

115. Petronius, 39; 62; 74.

116. Tacitus, Hist. II 50; Boissier, Tacite 146.

117. Pliny, Ep. I 18.

1 1 8. Ibid. II 20.

119. Ibid. I 18.

120. Ibid. VII 27.

NOTES 301

121. Lagrange, Revue biblique XXXI (1919) 480.

122. Cumont, op, cit. 23-41.

123. Juvenal, 10, 346-350.

124. Persius, 2, 71-75.

125. Statius, Silvae I 4, 128-131. The profoundly inspired prayer of the Stoic
Demetrius recorded by Seneca, De Providentia 5, 5, has been compared to the
suscipe which ends the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius; cf. Father Delehaye,
Legendes hagiographiques 170, n. i.

126. On the religion of salvation of Antinous, see Dietrichson, Antinoos (Oslo,
1884). I prefer his conclusions to those of Pirro Marconi, ML XXIX (1923) 297-
300.

127. On the collegium salutare of Bovillae, see Carcopino, RAP IV (1925-26)
232-246. For the one at Lanuvium, CIL XIV 2112.

128. On this imperial policy which continues throughout the second century, see
Aymard, Mil. LI (1934) 178-196.

129. See Graillot, Le culte de Cybele (Paris, 1913) 151.

130. Pliny, Ep. X 96.

131. Tacitus, Ann. XV 44; Suetonius, Claudius 25; Nero 16.

132. On the famous passage of Suetonius, Claudius 25, 4: ludaeos, impulsore
Chresto, assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit (Claudius), see Duchesne, Hist. anc.
de V&glise I 55, and Janne, Melanges Bidez (Brussels, 1934) I 531-532. Christians
did not have their own quarter; Abbe" Vielliard, Bull. Soc. Antiq. (1937) 104.

133. Josephus, Ant. XIV, 8-10; cf. Suetonius, Caesar 84.

134. Tacitus, Ann. II 85; cf. Suetonius, Tiberius 36. The details are given by
Josephus, Ant. XVIII 3, 5.

135. Juvenal, 14, 96-106.

136. Dio, LXVII 14, speaks thus of Flavius Clemens.

137. St. Paul, Phil. 4, 22.

138. Tacitus, Ann. XIII 32.

139. Suetonius, Domitian 10; Dio, LXVII 12.

140. Suetonius, Domitian 15 ; Dio, LXVII 14.

141. Tacitus, Hist. Ill 65; 75.

142. Male, Revue des deux mondes XLIII (1938) 347.

143. Eusebius, Chron. a. Abr. 2110, II p. 143 ed. Schoene; Hist. eccl. Ill 18;
cf. Duchesne, op. cit. 217 N. 2.

144. But on this early dating, see P. Styger, Die rom. Katakomben (Berlin,
1933) esp. o-io.

145. On the initial illegality of Christianity, see Carcopino, Rev. etudes Latines
(1936) 230-231.

146. Cf. Loisy, Les mysteres patens et le mystere Chretien (Paris, 1922) 363.

147. Duchesne, op. cit. 198.

PART II

CHAPTER VI

z. On the Julian calendar, see Kubitschek, Grundriss d. antiken Zeitrechnung
90-109; Bickerraann, in Gercke-Norclen, Einleitung in d. Altertumswissenschaft
III 5, pp. 19-21.

2. The Ides fell on the fifteenth in March, May, July, and October; on the
thirteenth in the remaining months ; the Nones fell on the fifth in the months when
the Ides were the thirteenth, and on the seventh in the other four months.

302 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

3. E. Maass, Die Tagesgotter in Rom. und den Provinzen 265-283. For dating
by market days (nundinae), see W. F. Snyder, JRS XXVI (1936) 13-18.

4. Dio, XXXVH 18, 2.

5. On the civil day of the Romans, Greeks, and Babylonians, Macrobius, I 3,*2;
Gellius, HI 2, 2. In general see Sontheimer, RE 8A, 2011-2023, esp. 2020-2033.

6. On ancient ways of measuring time, see Ardaillon, DS III 256-264 ; Rehm, RE
VIII 2416-2433.

7. On the late introduction of the "hours" into Rome, Censorinus, XXIII 6. On
the primitive division of the day into two, Pliny, NH VII 212 ; Gellius, XVII 2, 10.

8. On the Graecostasis, Varro, L.L. V 135. Apart from an embassy of Alexander
the Great, which is probably a fiction of the annalists, the Greeks sent no deputa-
tion to Rome before the victories of Demetrius Poliorcetes (Strabo, V 2, $).

9. On the division of the day into four, cf. Censorinus, XXIV 3.

10. On the first solar sun-dial which dates not from 293 but from 263 B.C.,
Pliny, NH VII 213-214.

11. Cf. ibid. 214: "nee congruabant ad koras tins lineae . . . paruerunt tamcn ei
annis undecentum."

12. Ibid.: ". . . donee Q. Marcius Philip pus, qui cum L. Paulo fuit censor, dili-
gentius ordinamentum iuxta posuit, idque munus inter censoria opera gratissima
acceptum est."

13. On the first water-clock introduced into Rome, cf. Ibid. 215.

14. On the great solarium situated between the Ara Pacts and the Aurelian Col-
umn, CIL VI 702 ; Pliny, NH XXXVI 73 J PA 366-367.

15. Vitruvius, IX 9, 5.

16. Petronius, 26.

17. Ibid. 71.

18. Seneca, Apocolocyntosis 2.

19. On the discrepancies between the Roman civil day and the natural day,
Ccnsorinus, XXIII 2.

20. Martial, XII 57.

21. Juvenal, 14, 59-63; cf. Horace, Sat. II 4, 81-82. On the various kinds of
brooms, Pliny, NH XVI 108; XXIII 166; Martial, XIV 82. On the ladders, Digest
XXXIII 7, 16.

22. Pliny, Ep. II 17, 9.

23. Pliny, NH Praef. 18.

24. On men who turned night into day, Seneca, Ep. 122.

25. Persius, 3, 1-7.

26. Horace, Sat. I 6, 122.

27. Martial, XII 18, 13.

28. Isidor, Origines XX 10, 8.

29. Pliny, Ep. Ill 5, 8; cf. Suetonius, Vespasian 21.

30. On the Apoxyomenus of Lysippus and the Bride of Parrhasius which adorned
the cubiculum of Tiberius, Carcopino, Mel. XL (1923) 267-307.

31. Aero on Horace, Sat. I 6, 109; Juvenal, 6, 264.

32. Martial, XIV 119; XI n, 5; Digest XXXIV 2, 27, 5.

33. On the stuffing used for cushions, Martial, XIV 159, 160, 161; cf. Juvenal, 6,
88. On cushions, Petronius, 32; 78..

34. On the stragula and operimenta (or opertoria), Varro, L.L. V 167; Seneca,
Ep. 87, 2.

35. For the tapetia, Martial, XIV, 147; Digest XXXIII 10, 5. For lodices and
polymita, Martial, XIV 148; 150.

36. Varro, L.L. V 167; Digest XXXIII 10, 5.

37. Martial, XII 18, 17-18; cf. Arnobius, Adv. Nat. II 68.

NOTES , 303

38. On Roman clothing in general, see the recent book of L, M. Wilson, The
Clothing of the Ancient Romans (Baltimore, 1938).

39. Like Cato of Utica (Asconius on Cicero, Pro Scauro p. 29 ed. StanRl) and
the Cethegi (Horace, A. P. 50 and Porphyrio ad loc.). Varro, in Nonius XIV p. 867-
868 Lindsay, states that when Roman dress consisted solely of a licium and a toga,
it was customary to wear the toga to bed.

40. Martial, VII 67, who, however, is referring to a woman athlete.

41. With the exception, perhaps, of agricultural laborers, whence the name
cam pe stria commonly given to the subligaria of workers; Pliny, NH XII 59.

42. Quintilian, XI 3, 138. *

43. The tunica talaris when worn by a man was considered a sign of effeminacy;
Cicero, Verr. II 5, 31; 86; Cat. II 22.

44. Suetonius, Augustus 82.

45- Gellius, VI 12; cf. Nonius, XIV p. 860 ed. Lindsay.

46. Pliny, Ep. Ill 5, 15.

47. On the toga, see L. M. Wilson, The Roman Toga, and the observations of
V. Chapot, Mtmoires de la socitti des Antiquaires de France, LXXX (193?) 37-66.

48. L. Heuzey, Histoire du costume antique, 232. On the final triumph of Roman
costumes over Greek and its cultural significance, see M. Biebcr, Entwickelungs-
geschichte der griechischen Tracht 44.

49. Athenaeus, V 2138.

50. Livy, III 26.

51. Tertullian, De Poll. 5; ita kominem sarcina vestiat.

52. Juvenal, 3, 147; Martial, I 103, 5; VII 33, i; X n, 6; X 96, n.

53. Augustus always kept a toga in readiness in his bedroom in case of being
summoned out hastily on public business; Suetonius, Augustus 73.

54. Suetonius, Claudius 15, but only in cases where Roman citizens were in-
volved.

55. Martial, XIV 124.

56. SHA Commodus 16.

57. Martial, X 51, 6; cf. Juvenal, 3, 171-172.

58. On the appearance of the synthesis, see McDaniel, Class. Phil. XX
(1925) 268-270. As a festive garment, it was also worn insead of the toga during
the Saturnalia; Martial, VI 24, XIV i; XIV 141.

59. Juvenal, 3, 171-172.

60. Suetonius, Vespasian 21.

61. Martial, XI 104, 3-4.

62. Mau-Kelsey, Pompeii 358.

63. Suetonius, Vespasian 21.

64. Suetonius, Domitian 16.

65. Ausonius, Ep. 2.

66. Suetonius, Caesar 45. On the barber in antiquity, see F. W. Nicolson, Harvattf
Studies in Classical Philology II (1891) 41-56.

67. On the disadvantages of open-air barber shops, Digest IX 2, u. On the bar-
bers of the Subura, Martial, II 17; on those of the Carenae, Horace, Ep. I 7, 45-51.
They also congregated near the temple of Flora: ad Florae templum ad tons ores.

68. Seneca, De Brev. Vit. XII 3.

69. Horace, Ep. I 7, 46-51.

70. This is implied in Horace, Sat: I 7, 3.

71. Martial, VII 64, 1-2; Juvenal, 10, 225-226. In the price-fixing edict of Dio-
cletian, a visit to the barber cost two denarn (32 cents).

72. Plutarch, De Audiendis Poetis 8.

73. Suetonius, Nero 51.

304 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

74. Suetonius, Augustus 79.

75. Quintfflan, XII 10, 47; Martial, II 36, z.

76. Horace, Ep. I i, 94-95.

77. SHA Hadrian, 26, i.

78. Martial, X 83.

79. Ibid. Ill 43.

80. Ibid. II 29, 9-10.

81. Cicero, Pro Sestio 18.

82. Martial, VI 55-

83. Ibid. II 12.

84. Ibid. 29.

8$. Horace, Odes II 15, 10.

86. Gellius, III 4.

87. Suetonius, Caesar 45.

88. Ibid. 67.

89. Plutarch, Cato Minor 53.

90. Plutarch, Antonius z8.

91. Suetonius, Augustus 23.

92. Dio, XLVIII 34, 3; cf. Carcopino, Revue kistorique CLXI (1929) 228-229.

93. Crinagoras in the Palatine Anthology VI 161.

94. Suetonius, Caligula 10; Nero 12; cf. Dio, LXI 19, z.

95. NS Z900, p. 578.

96. Suetonius, Nero 12; Petronius, 29.

97. Juvenal, 3, 186; 8, 166.

98. Ovid, Ars Amatoria I 517.

99. Many bearded soldiers are depicted on Trajan's Column. A long beard was
part of the unkempt appearance affected by many professional philosophers under
the empire; Seneca, Ep. 5, 2; Persius i, 133; Musonius, p. 88 ed. Heuse. It was
worn also by charlatans and beggars who posed as philosophers; Gellius, IX 2.

100. Martial, VII 95, 9-Z3.
zoz. Digest IX 2, zz.

zo2. On the straight razor of the empire, see M. Delia Corte, Ausonia IX (1914)
I39-IS4.
Z03. Pliny, NH XXXVI z6s.

104. Plutarch, Antonius z. It is significant that the shaving-brush never appears
among the equipment of tonsores depicted on funeral bas-reliefs.

105. Petronius, 94.
zo6. Martial, VI 52.
zo7. Digest IX 2, zz.

zo8. Suetonius, Augustus 79.
109. Martial, VII 83.
_zzo. Ibid. VIII 52.
zzz. Ibid. XI 84.
zz2. Pliny, NH XXIX zz4.
113. Martial, III 74.
ZZ4. Ibid. X 65, 8.

zzs. Juvenal, zs, sz and schol. ad. loc.; Pliny, NH XXVIII 250; 255 ; XXX Z32 ;
133 ; XXXII 136.

xz6. Suetonius, Caesar 45; cf. Pliny NH XXXII Z36.
zz7. Martial, VIII 47.
zz8. SHA Hadrian 26; cf. Dio, LXVIII 45-

119. Martial, XI 23,6.

120, Ibid. X38;cf.35.

NOTES 305

121. Pliny, Ep. DC 36.

122. Ibid. VII 5-

123. Petronius, 77.

124. Ibid. 47.

125. Martial, XI 104, 7-8.

126. Digest XXXIV 2, 25.

127. Juvenal, 6, 501-504.

128. CIL VI 5S39J 7297; 8959; 937o; 33784.

129. Macrobius, II 5, 7.

130. Juvenal, 6, 487-493-

131. Martial, II 66.

132. Pliny, NH XXVIII 191; Martial, XIV 27; cf. 26.
133- Digest XXXIX 4, 16, 7.

134. Ovid, Ars Amatoria III 211; Juvenal, 2, 93; Martial, DC 37, 6.

135. Ovid, Ars HI 216; 197; I 515; Martial, XIV 56; Scribonius Largus, 59-60.

136. Ovid, Ars III 229.

137. Martial, DC 37.

138. Petronius, 66.

139. Ovid, Ars III 187-192.

140. Apuleius, Met. XI 3.

141. Arnobius, Adv. Nat. II 23.

142. On sunshades, Juvenal, 9, 50; Martial, XI 73, 6; XIV 28.

CHAPTER VII

1. On clients in general, SG I 225-235.

2. Martial, VI 88; cf. I 59; Juvenal, i, 121.

3. Juvenal, i, 95-126.

4. Pliny, Ep. Ill 12, 2.

5. Martial, I 49, 35-36.

6. Ibid. IX 49; X ii ; 73; 96. On Saturnalias gifts, ibid. V 19; 84; VII 53.

7. Juvenal, i, 101 ; cf. 3, 126-130.

8. Martial, VI 88.

9. Juvenal, i, 120-126.

10. Rostovtzeff, Storia economics, 40; 238-239.

11. See pp. 56, 66 above.

12. See Carcopino, La lot de Hieron 188-189.

13. Petronius, 119.

14. Calza, Gidda; Carcopino, Ostie 13-18. For th$ inscriptions, CIL XIV 4549.

15. Carcopino, op. cit. 18. The identification is accepted by Wickert, CIL XIV,
Suppl. p. 844.

1 6. CIL XIV 51, revised and restored ibid. p. 844. On the altar, Paribeni, Guida
del museo dette Terme* 264.

17. On imports, see the recent book of Helen J. Loane, Industry and Commerce
of the City of Rome (so B.C. -200 A.D.) 11-59.

18. On the horrea, PA 260-263.

19. See p. 6 above. It is clear that the building of this market dealt a mortal
blow to all the special markets, forum otttorium, cvppedinis, piscatorium, mentioned
almost exclusively in texts relating to the republican period.

20. Waltzing, Corporations professionnettes IV 1-49.

21. PA 479- The bas-reliefs are reproduced and described in Rostovtzefif, Storia
economica pi. IV.

22. See p. 48 above.

306 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

23. Sec p. 27 above.

24. C1L VI 9525.

25. Ibid. 9540-9542.

26. Ibid. 33892.

27. Ibid. 9758; 9759-

28. Ibid. 9739-9757-

29. 7W<f. 9614-9617. The last three, being freedwomen, were perhaps domestic
servants.

30. Ibid. 9562-9613. In the imperial household, we find two medicae (6851, 7581)
as against fifteen medici (8895-8910).

31. Ibid. 9875-9884; 33907.

32. Ibid. 9493 ; 9941 (as against six tonsores, 9937~994 2 )

33. Ibid. 9726-9736 (eleven in all).

34. Ibid. 9720-9724 (five in all).

35. Ibid. 9901 b.

36. Ibid. 9801.

37. Ibid. 9683.

38. Ibid. 9980.

39. Ibid. 9961-9979 (vestifici or vesticarii).

40. Ibid. 9496-9498.

41. Ibid. 9891-9892.

42. Gide, Etude sur la condition privte de la femme 152 ; cf. Buckland, A Text-
Book of Roman Law 9 167.

43. Suetonius, Claudius 18-19; Gaius, I 32.

44. Gaius, I 34.

45. The word pistrix is even missing from Dessau's indices, ILS IV p. 739. Legis-
lation concerning adultery classed saleswomen with prostitutes; Paulus, Sent. II 26,
ii : "cum his quae publice mercibus vel tabernis exercendis procurant adulterium
fieri non placuit"

46. See n. 43 above.

47. On the porticus Minucia as the place where grain tesserae were distributed,
see B. Wall, Skrifter II (1932) 31-54-

48. Reinach, Repertoire de reliefs grecs et romains I p. 375.

49. W. Helbig, Wandgemdlde No. 1502.

50. Reinach, op. cit. Ill p. 405.

51. Helbig, op. cit. No. 1496.

52. Reinach, op. cit. HI p. 44.

53. Helbig, op. cit. Nos. 1496, 1497, 1498.

54. Martial, X 80; IX 59; VIII 6.

55. Helbig, op. cit. No. 1501 ; Reinach, op. cit. Ill p. 403.

56. Helbig, Fuhrer* II No. 1837.

57. Helbig, Wandgemalde No. 1500.

58. Ibid. Nos. 1493, 1495.

59. In Apuleius, Metamorphoses I 24-25, Lucius does his own shopping.

60. Petronius, 79.

61. Martial, VIII 67.

62. Ibid. IX 59, 21.

63. See above p. 157. This was also the hour for relieving the guard; Martial,
X 48, 1-2.

64! Martial, IV 8, 3-4. The same conclusions may be drawn about the miners of
Vipasca from CIL II 5181, 1. 19.

65. Pliny, Ep. Ill 5.

66. Martial, VIII 67, 3.

NOTES 307

67. Gellius, XVII 2, 10 = XII Tables I 6.

68. This can be inferred from Martial, VI 35, where seven water-clocks are men-
tioned as an exception.

69. Pliny, Ep. II n, 14, states that in a case in January he was granted sixteen
water-clocks, which allowed him to speak almost five hours,

70. Martial, VI 35.

71. Suetonius, Augustus 29.

72. Suetonius, Vespasian 10.

73. On the location of this tribunal, see Mommsen, Ges. Schr. Ill 319-326.
74- See Seston, Mel. XLIV (1927) 154-183.

75. See Vigneaux, Essai sur I'histoire de la Praefectura Urbis (Paris, 1896) 125.

76. SHA Antoninus 10.

77. On the Basilica lulia, PA 78-80; C. Huelsen, The Forum and the Palatine
(trans, by H. H. Tanzer) 15-18.

78. Pliny, Ep. VI 33, 3J cf. I 18, 3; IV 24, i; II 14 and V 9.

79. Quintilian, XII 5, 6.

80. Pliny, Ep. II 14, 9.

81. Ibid. 14, 5.

82. See p. 252.

83. Pliny, Ep. VI 33, x; 7-8-

84. Ibid, II 14, i.

85. Ibid. VI 31, 13-

86. Ibid.

87. P. Oxy. 33. The document together with a newly discovered fragment is
discussed by C. B. Welles, TAPA LXVII (1936) 7-23.

88. Suetonius, Augustus 35; cf. O'Brien-Moore. RE Suppl. VI 766-767.

89. PA 143-146, Huelsen, op. cit. 30-31.

90. Seneca, De Provid. V 4,* contrasts the idleness of the street loafers with the
industry of the Senate which per totum diem sac PC consulitur.

91. Pliny, Ep. II ix.

92. Ibid. Ill 4; 9.

93. Ibid. 9, 23.

94. Nepos, Atticus 13; Pronto p. 20 ed. Naber.

95. On the libraries in Rome, see C. . Boyd, Public Libraries and Literary Cul-
ture in Ancient Rome; on provincial libraries, R. Cagnat, Lcs bibliotheques munic-
ipales dans V Empire romain.

96. Horace, Ep. I 20, 1-2.

97. Seneca, De Beneficns VII 6, i.

98. Martial, IV 72 ; XIII 3, cf. Quintilian, Praej.

99. Martial, I 2; 113; 117.

100. Ibid. I 117, 13-17; XIII 3, 3; cf. I 66, 4.

xoz. This can be inferred from Juvenal, VII 86, where he says that Statius
win starve unless he sells his virgin Agave to the mime Paris.
xo2. Gaius, II 73 77-

103. Martial, XI 3 ; cf. XI 108; XIV 219.

104. Suetonius, Tiberius 61, 3.

105. Suetonius, Domitian xo, x.

106. Suetonius, Caesar 56, 7; Caligula 34, 2. See also Carcopino, Journal dcs
savants CXXI (1936) 115.

107. Isidor, Origines VI 52; Seneca, 'Controvtrsiac, IV Preface 2.

1 08. Suetonius, Augustus 89, 3.

109. Suetonius, Claudius 41.
no. Pliny, Ep. I 13, 3. (

308 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

zzz. Suetonius, Domitian 2, 2.

ix 2. On the Athenaeum in general, PA 56.

113. Aurelius Victor, Caesares 14, 3.

114. Pliny, Ep. V 17; VIII 12.

115. Persius, i, 15-21; Pliny, Ep. V 17; DC 34.

116. Pliny, Ep. IV 19, 3.

117. Juvenal, 7, 39-47J Pliny. Ep. Ill 18, 4; Tacitus, Dialogus 9.

118. Pliny, Ep. V 17.

119. Juvenal, 7, 40-47-

120. Pliny, Ep. VIII 21; cf. Ill 18, 4.

121. Petronius, 90; Horace, Sat. I 4, 74-75-

122. Pliny, Ep. VHI 21.

123. Ibid. VI 17, 3; cf. VIH 21, 4; in 18, 4.

124. Ibid. I 13.

125. Ibid. 18, 2.

126. Ibid. VI 15.

127. Ibid. 17.

128. Ibid. VII 17, i; III 18; V 5, 2-4.

129. Ibid. Ill 10; IV 7.

130. Ibid. IX 27.

131. Ibid. VIII 21 ; V 17; VI 15; Juvenal, 7, 82-87; i. 52-54-

132. Pliny, Ep. VII 17.
133- Ibid. V3J VII 17.

134. Horace, Sat. I 4, 76-78.

135. Suetonius, Caligula 53, 2. On this point, see E. Albertini, La composition
dans les ouvrages philosophiqucs de Stnlqut, esp. 298-325.

136. Cf. the opinion of Petronius, 1-5.

CHAPTER Vm

1. Juvenal, 10, 77-81.

2. Pronto, Princip. Hist. p. 210 ed. Naber.

3. The fundamental work on the Roman calendar is by Mommsen, CIL P pp.
205-339. It is based on the complete evidence known up to 1893. For later evidence,
see Leuze's report in Bursian's Jahresbericht 227 (1930) 97-139, which covers the
new discoveries through 1928. The most convenient survey, indicating day by
day when games and holidays were celebrated both in the early and the later
empire, is contained in Wissowa's Religion und Kultus der Rdmer 568-593. For
the religious festivals, see Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals, under the appropriate
date, as well as Frazer's commentary to the Fasti of Ovid when the festival falls
within the months of January- June inclusive. Finally, we must mention the
comprehensive study of the Feriale Duranum which has just been published by
Fink, Hoey, and Snyder in Volume VII of the Yale Classical Studies. It is the
latest and most comprehensive work dealing with parts of the imperial calendar
and contains much useful general information in the introductory sections.

4. On the kinds of days and their designations, see Mommsen, op. cit. pp. 289-
290; Wissowa, op. cit. 434-439 J Fowler, op. cit. 8-10.

5. Since the discovery of the pre-Julian calendar of Antium published by Man-
tini, NS 1921, 73-126, the designation NP which appears there can no longer be
considered an innovation connected with Caesar's reform of the Roman year.
Mandni's suggestion, op. cit. 81, that it served to distinguish the joyous holidays
from those commemorating sad events is as reasonable as any.

6. The computations in this section are chiefly based on the calendar as given

NOTES 309

in Wissowa, op. cit. 568-593, and arc adjusted to later evidence where necessary.

7. They probably began on January 17 instead of January 21 as held by
Mommsen and Wissowa; see Carcopino, CRAI 1923, 71.

8. For the holidays commemorating the events of Caesar and Augustus, see the
convenient list in J. Gagl's edition of the Res Gestae Divi August* 163-185.

9. In making this computation, no day was included which was not expressly
designated as feriae in an official calendar except the forty-five traditional religious
holidays and the days devoted to public games.

10. For a list of extant feriatta, see Yale Classical Studies VII (1940). The most
important is the feriale Duranum, there published for the first time, which con-
tains a list of the days celebrated by the Roman army under Severus Alexander
with religious rites.

11. Dio, LX 17, i.

12. Tacitus, Hist. IV 40.

13. SHA Marcus Aurelius 10, 10.

14. Mommsen, op. cit. p. 300.

15. On these games, see Gag6, Recherches sur les jeux stculaires.

16. 4,941 pairs of gladiators fought in the games lasting 117 days which Trajan
gave to celebrate his conquest of Dacia (Ann. ipigr. 1933, No. 30, 11. 13-14; cf.
Dio, LXVIII 15, i and De Grassi, RPA XII [1936] 182-184).

17. These ludi piscatorii are not mentioned in the ancient calendars. It was ap-
parently a holiday for the fishermen alone; cf. Ovid, Fasti VI 239: "festa dies ittis
qui Una madentia ducunt."

18. Festus, s.v. Piscatori ludi pp. 274; 276 ed. Lindsay. On the meaning of the
passage, see Carcopino, Virgtte et les origines d'Ostie 119-120, and Frazer on Ovid's
Fasti IV 169-171.

19. On the October Horse, see Fowler, op. cit. 241-250; on its place in the his-
tory of horse sacrifice in antiquity, see Hubbell, Yale Classical Studies I (1927)
181-192.

20. On gladiatorial games in general, see. Schneider, RE Suppl. Ill 760-784; SG
II 50-76; on their religious origin, Piganiol, Recherches sur les jeux remains 126-
136; on the role of the state in the munera, Carcopino, Cesar 515.

'21. Festus s.v. munus p. 125 ed. Lindsay.

22. Tertullian, De Sped. 12.

23. Ausonius, Eel. 23, 35-36.

24. Suetonius, Augustus 40.

25. Quintilian, VI 3, 63, relates that Augustus rebuked a Roman knight for
drinking during the games, saying: "If I want refreshment, I go home." The
knight is said to have retorted not without wit: "But if you go home, Caesar,
you are sure to find your place again when you come back." On the division of
spectators according to social categories, see D. Van Berchem, Distributions de
bit et fargcnt sous l f empire 61-62.

26. On the drcus pompa, see Piganiol, op. cit. 15-31.

27. Ovid, Amores III 2, 43-62.

28. On these superstitions, see the extremely curious texts collected by P. Wuil-
leumier in his article on "Le cirque et 1'astrologie," Mil. XLIV (1927) 184-209,
and notably Cassiodorus, Var. Ill 51; Isidor of Seville, XVIII 36; Anthol. Lat. I
197.

29. Pliny, Ep. VI 5: propitium Caesar em ut in ludicro precebantur; cf. Dio
LXXVIII 2, 3; on the handkerchiefs, SHA Aurelian 48, 5.

30. Pliny, Pan. 51.

31. Pliny, NH XXXIV 62 ; cf. Suetonius, Tiberius 47.
3*. Plutarch, Galba 17, 5.

3io DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

33. Titus thus got rid of Vespasian's enemies; Suetonius, Titus 6.

34. Dio, LIV 17, 4-5; cf. Suetonius, Augustus 45> 5-

35. Suetonius, Augustus 43-45.

36. Res Gestae 22.

37. Martial, X 41.

38. The figures are given in the Fasti Antiates, C1L I 1 p. 248.

39. Fronto, Princip. Hist. p. 210 ed. Naber.

40. On these games in general, see SG II 21-50.

41. PA 111-113.

42. Ibid. 113-114; 370-371.

43. Ibid. 114-120.

44. On Consus, God of the Circus, see Piganiol, op. cit. 1-14.

45. Livy, VIII 20, 21 ; cf. Ennius, fr. 47 Vahlen.

46. Livy, XXXIX 7, 8.

47. Livy, XLI 27, 6.

48. Pliny, NH VIII 20-21; Suetonius, Caesar 39.

49. Pliny, NH XXXVI 102, says 250,000, but this figure undoubtedly refers to
the circus of his own time after the enlargements of Nero. Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus, III 68, who wrote under Augustus, reckons 150,000 places. Modern esti-
mates of the seating capacity vary from 140,000 to 385,000 spectators; cf. PA 119.

50. Dio, XLIX 43, 2.

51. Pliny, XXXVI 71; PA 367.

52. Res Gestae 19. It is mentioned by Augustus in a letter to Livia, Suetonius,
Claudius 4.

53. Cassiodorus, Var. Ill 51, 4.

54. Suetonius, Claudius 21, 3.

55. Pliny, NH VIII 21.

56. Pliny, Pan. 51; cf. Dio, LXVIII 7, 2; Pausanias V 12, 6; CIL VI 955.

57. Jordan, Topographic II 558.

58. CIL VI 944-

59. Dio, LIX 7, 2-3 ; LX 2?, 2. It was an exceptional occasion, the ludi saeculares,
on which Domitian gave 100 races in a day. To fit them all in, he had to reduce
the laps obligatory for each race from 7 to 5; Suetonius, Domitian 4, 3.

60. Juvenal 10, 36-40.

61. On the factions, see SG II 32-40.

62. Jordan, op. cit. 551; 595; cf. Le Blant, Mel VI (1886) 327-328.

63. Plutarch, Sulla 35, 3-5.

64. Ovid, Ars Am. I 135-164.

65. See the detailed analysis of these inscriptions by Drexel in SG IV 179-196.

66. CIL XV 6250 on the horse Corax; cf. Pliny, NH VIII 160.

67. Cf. Recueil de Constantine 1880 and the figure in DS I 1198.

68. CIL VI 10048.

69. CIL VII 10047-

70. Audollent, Tabettae Defixionum Nos. 15; 159.

71. Juvenal, 7, 112-114; Martial, IV 67; X 74.

72. CIL VI 10048; see the analysis in SG IV 179-196.
73- SG II 28-29.

74. Suetonius, Nero 16.

75. Martial, V 25, 10.

76. Ibid., XI i.

77. Ibid., X 50.

78. CIL VI 33950; 10050; 10049.

79. Martial, XI i, 9-16.

NOTES 3"

80. Juvenal, 11, 193-202.

81. See Statius' description o! a day at the circus under Domitian (Silvac I 6;
cf. Suetonius, Domitian 4, 5)>

82. Suetonius, ViteUius 7, x; Dio, LXV 5, i. For Caracalla, see Dio, LXXVU
10 ; cf. LXXVIII 8, 2.

83. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I 5.

84. On the number of dramatic performances under the Republic, see L. R.
Taylor, TAPA LXVIII (1937) 284-304.

85. Pliny, Ep. IX 6, 3.

86. Juvenal 9, 142-144.

87. Ann. epigr. 1933, No. 30, 11. 35-37-

88. PA 515-517; Liigli (ZA 346; cf. 390-391) assumes with Ashby that each
of the loco, reckoned in the Regionaries represents only one square foot, whereas
the minimum space necessary for a seated spectator is a foot and a half (44 cm.) .

89. PA 513.

90. Ibid. 513-515.

91. On Roman theatres in Italy and the provinces during the empire, see M.
Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 356-390.

92. Tacitus, Ann. XI, 13; XII 28, cf. Quintilian, X i, 98.

93. On masks and costumes, see M. Bieber, Die Denkmaler zum Theaterwesen im
Altertum 155-174; for masks alone, Bieber, RE XIV 2093-2105; 2076-2083; for
costumes/ C. Saunders, Costume in Roman Comedy.

94. On the Hellenistic, probably Alexandrine, origin of the pantomime, see L.
Robert, Hermes LXV (1930) 106-122.

95. On Roman tragedy, see the recent article of Ziegler, RE 12 A 1981-2008,
esp. 1994-1998; 2001-2004. On plays under the empire, Bieber, History 391-428.

96. Suetonius, Caesar 84, 2-frg. XV Ribbeck.

97. Tacitus, Ann. XIII 15.

98. Cicero, Tusc. Disp. Ill 44-frg. V Vahlen.

99. Diomedes, p. 491 Keil.

100. See Bieber, History 315-325.

101. On the civil status of actors, see Warnecke, Neue Jahrbb. f. d. klassische
Altertum XXXIII (1914) 95-109.

102. Dio, LIV 17, 4-5; Suetonius, Augustus 45, 5; Marcobius, Sat. II 7, 12-19.

103. Tacitus, Ann. I 77; cf. Suetonius, Tiberius 37.

104. Tacitus, Ann. XIII 25; 28; Suetonius, Nero 16, 2.

105. Tacitus, Ann. XIV 21.

106. Tacitus, Dialogus 29.

107. Suetonius, Domitian 3 ; Dio, LXVII 3, i.

108. Macrobius, Sat. II 7, 12-19.

109. Livy VII 2 ; Val. Max., II 4, 4.
no. Quintilian, XI 3, 86-88.

in. Lucian, De Saltatione 67.

112. Juvenal, 7, 86-87.

113. Lucian, op. cit. 37-61.

114. Macrobius, Sat. II 7, 16.

115. Josephus, Ant. XIX i, 13.

1 1 6. Suetonius, Nero 21, 3.

117. Juvenal 6, 64-66.

118. Pliny, Pan. 54.

119. Dio, LXVIII 10.

120. Paribeni, Dioniso VI (1938) 210.

X2i. Plutarch, Qwest. Convivalcs VII 8, 3.

312 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

122. Cicero, Ad. Fam. IX 26; Ad Attic. IV 15; Pro Planch 30.

123. Euanthius, IV i p. 21 ed. Wessncr. On the Roman mime in general, see SG

II 113-118; Wiist, RE XV 1 749-1761; Boissicr, DS III 1903-1907. A scene from
a mime is reproduced in a relief from the theatre at Sabratha (Guidi, Africa Italiana

III [1930] 38-39-Bieber, History, 421).

124. Cicero, Ad Attic. XIV 3, 3; cf. Macrobius, Sat. II 7, 4.

125. Poetae Latini Minores III p. 245.

126. Suetonius, Caligula 57; Juvenal 8, 187-188; TertuUian, Adv. Vol. 14.

127. On the plots, see SG II 113-114.

128. Val. Max., II 10, 8; Martial, III 86; cf. SG 115-116.

129. Martial, Spect. 7.

130. On the munus as a human sacrifice, see Piganiol, Recherckes swr Us jeux
remains 126-136.

131. Terence, Hccyra, Prologue II 31-34.

132. Cicero, In Vatinium 37.

133. Cicero, Ad Fam. II 3, x.

134. Pliny, NH XXXIII 53 ; cf . Plutarch, Caesar 5, 4 and Suetonius, Caesar xo.

135. C1L I* 594 (Lex col. Genetivae luliae) LXX; LXXI.

136. Dio, LIV 2, 4 ( B.C.).

137. Tacitus, Ann. IV 63.

138. Suetonius, Claudius 24; cf. Tacitus, Ann. XI 22.

139. Res Gestae 22.

140. The last of the magistrates' extraordinary munera which our sources record
are those offered in 70 A.D. for the natalis of Vitellius by the consuls of that
year; Tacitus, Hist. II 95.

141. This method of presentation continued in small towns into the age of the
Antonines; cf. C1L V 7637.

142. Pliny, NH XXXVI 116-120.

143. Ibid. 118.

144. SG IV 208.

145. Dio, XLIII 22, 3.

146. The word amphitheatrum first appears in Vitruvius, I 7, i; then in Res
Gestae 22; cf. SG IV 209.

147. PA ii.

148. On the Amphitheatrum Flavium '(Colosseum), see PA 6-xx.

149. Ibid. 357-

150. Ibid. 5-6; Lugli, MA III 490.

151- PA 358-

152. On gladiatorial games in general, see SG II 54-76; Schneider, RE Suppl.
Ill 760-784; Lafaye DS II 1563-1599. The best illustration of imperial munera
is the superb mosaic from Zliten published by Aurigemma, / mosaici di Zliten
131-201.

153. CIL I* 593, 1. 123; SHA Hadrian 18, 8; Seneca, Ep. 87, 15; Juvenal, 6,
2x6.

154. On the gladiatorial training schools, see PA 319-320.

155. Ibid. 582.

156. See the detailed discussion in SG IV 258-267.

157. On these contests, see SG II 77-92; IV 268-275.

158. See Martial, Liber Spettaculorum, where the venationes given at the dedica-
tion of the Colosseum are described.

159. This is indicated by Pompeian inscriptions where the venatio is classed with
such extra attractions as athletae, vela, and sparsiones; cf. CIL IV p. 71.

160. Suetonius, Claudius 21, 3; Dio, LXI 9, x.

NOTES 313

. 161. Suetonius, Titus 7.

162. C1L XIV 4546.

163. Plutarch, Non Posse Suav. XVII 6; Tertullian, Apol. 42.

164. Suetonius, Claudius 2Z, 6.

165. C1L V 5933-

166. Juvenal, 3, 36.

167. CIL IV 4280.

168. Martial, Spect. 20.

169. Carcopino, CRAI 1932 pp. 375~377-

170. CIL X 7297.

171. Ann. epigr. 1933, No. 30, 11. 1-2; 13-14; 54 J cf. n. 16 above.

172. Cicero, Tusc. II 41.

173. Pliny, Pan. 33.

174. The disgust felt by Seneca in describing one of these contests is obvious;

EP- 7.

175. Strabo, VI 2, 6.

176. Aurigemma, Mo said 182; 184; 192; cf. CRAI 1913 pp. 444-447.

177. Suetonius, Claudius 34.

178. On the Actiaca, see Gagt, Mel. LIU (1936) 37-100.

179. Hartke, RE XVII 42-48.

180. SG IV 276-280.
z8z. PA 495-496; 37i.

182. Martial, IV 54; XI 9; cf. DC 35, 9-10.

183. Digest III 2, 4, i.

184. Pliny, Ep. IV 22.

185. For a list of amphitheatres in Italy and the Provinces, see SG IV 205-240.

186. Cf. L. Robert, Revue de phUologie LVI (1930) 36-38.

187. SHA Hadrian 18; cf. Digest XLVIII 8, n.

188. Ann. Ipigr. 1933, No. 30, 11. 1-2.

189. CIL II 6278 and Mommsen's commentary, Ges. Schr. VIII 499ff.; SHA
Marcus u, 4.

190. Seneca, De TranquiUtate Animi II 13.

191. Dio, LXXII 22, 2; SHA Commodus 12.

192. Martial, Spect. 7; cf. n. 126 above.

193. Martial, VIII 30.

194. Tertullian, Apol. 15.

195. SHA Sev. Alex. 44; cf. Lugli, ZA 346.

196. Cod. Tkeodos. XV za, z.

197. Theodoretus, Hist. Eccl. V 26.

CHAPTER DC

z. Martial, VII 6z.

2. Ibid. X 5.

3. Juvenal, z6, 7-34-

4. Martial, Spect. 3, z-zo; Juvenal, 3, 60-72.

5. Martial, I 41, 7-

6. Ibid. VIII 61; XI 79; IX 22, 14 (the last a reference to horseback).

7. The elder Pliny was carried about Rome in a setta so that his literary studies
might not be interrupted. He rebukes his nephew for wasting time in walking;
Pliny, Ep. Ill 5, 16. On the lectica and setta (gestatoria) in general, see Girard,
DS III 1004-1006; the history of the lectica in Rome is given in detail by Lamer,
RE XII zo76~zo83. Particularly pertinent to this period are Juvenal, 3, 240-242 ; 6,
349-3Si; Martial, EC zz.

314 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

8. Petronius, 28.

9. Martial, VI 80.

10. Seneca, De Provid. V 4.
xi. PA 427; ZA 1334-

12. Martial, II 14, i-io; cf. Ill 19.

13. Pliny, NH XXXIV 31 ; XXXV 114, I39J XXXVI 15, 22, 24, 28, 34, 35-

14. Martial, III 19.

15. Ibid. IX 35-

16. Juvenal, i, 87-93.

17. The laws are given in the Digest XI 5, 2 and 3; cf. Cicero, Phil. II 56,
Horace, Odes III 24, 58; Ovid, Tristia II 472. For the exception made during the
Saturnalia, see Martial, XI 9. On gaming in general, see Humbert, DS I 180.

18. Tali had only four marked faces, tesserae six as in our modern dice. For
methods of playing, see the two articles of Lafaye, DS V 28-31; 125-128.

19. On capita aut Navia, see Saglio, DS I 897; on par impar, Lafaye, DS IV
322. For Augustus, Suetonius, Augustus 71.

20. Described by Lafaye, DS III 1889-1890.

21. Cicero, De Off. Ill 77, cf. De Fin. II 52; Petronius, 44; Fronto, Ep. I 5 p.
13 ed. Naber; St. Augustine, De Trin. VIII 5, 8.

22. C1L VI 1770.

23. There is an excellent description of these games in Owen's commentary to
Ovid's second book of the Tristia, pp. 250-259. For the latruncuU see also Lafaye,
DS HI 992-995; for duodecim scripta, Saglio, DS II 414-415.

24. On Canus, see Seneca, De Tranq. An. 14, 7; on Piso, Laus Pisonis, 190-208;
cf. schol. to Juvenal (Valla) V 109.

25. Martial, VII 71, 7; C1L XIII 444-

26. Over one hundred of these impromptu playing boards have been found in
the city of Rome; cf. Lamer, RE XIII 2003.

27. See Lafaye, DS IV 115-116. The most complete source is Ovid, Nux 73-86.

28. Digest XI 5, i.

29. Ibid. XXIII 2, 43, i.

30. CIL IX 2689.

31. NS 1911, 431; 457. If we recall that the ass was famous in antiquity for its
sexual appetite, the cognomen of these young women (asettae) is not unintel-
ligible; cf. Mallardo, Rivista di Studi Pomp. (1934) 121-125; (i935) 224-228.

32. The emperor Nero had similar inns set up along the Tiber when he sailed
down to Ostia; Suetonius, Nero 27.

33. Schol. to Persius, I 133.

34. Seneca, De Provid. V 4. The ttlo tempore as shown by the context is the
equivalent of the entire day, totum diem.

35. On baths, public and private, see the articles of Saglio, DS I 648-664 and
Benoit, DS V 214-219, and Bliimner, Privat-AJtertutner, 420-435.

36. Plutarch, Cato Motor 20, 5. This attitude was still prevalent in the time of
Cicero, De Off. I 129.

37. Varro, LJ,. IX 68; cf. Blumner, op. cit. 421.

38. Pliny, NH XXXVI 121.

39. Loc. cit.

40. The Regionaries give 856; Jordan, Topographic II 573.

41. Seneca, Ep. 86, 9; Martial, III, 30, 4; VIII 42 ; Horace, Sat. I 3, 137. Juvenal,
2, 152 with schol., informs us that children were admitted free, but that women
had to pay more than men (6, 447). This is confirmed by the fees' charged at
Vipasca in Lusitania, where women paid an as as against half an as for men,
while children were free of charge; cf. CIL II 5181, 1. 19.

NOTES 315

42. Pliny, NH XXXVI 121; cf. Dio, XLIX 43 and Blumner, op dt. 421, n. 8.

43. On the thermae in general, see PA 518-5*0. On free access, Dio, LIV 29.
With reference to Martial, III 36, 6, Mau doubts that free access was granted in
perpetuity, RE II 2749; but Pronto states expressly that the public thermae were
free to all, Epistulae Graecae V p. 247 ed. Naber.

44- PA 531-532.

45. Ibid. 533-534-

46. Ibid. 534-536. The date of dedication is given by the "Fasti Ostienses," Ann.
epigr. 1933, No. 30 1. zo.

47- PA 520-524-

48. Ibid. 527-530.

49. Ibid. 525-526.

50. ZA I 4x9.

51. Of the tripUces thermae (the baths of Agrippa, Nero, and Titus) frequented
by Martial, X 51, 21, he had the greatest admiration for those of Nero, VII 34,
5;cf. II 48, 8.

52. It was the gymnasium and the palaestra as places of moral corruption that
the Romans censured particularly; Cicero, Tusc. IV 70, De Rep. IV 4; cf. Plutarch,
Quaest. Rom. 40. Roman youths had always exercised on the Campus Martius to
prepare themselves for the hardships of military service.

53. For condemnation of Greek methods of exercise under the empire, cf. Pliny,
NH XXDC 26, XXXV 168; Seneca, Ep. 88, 18; Tacitus, Ann. XIV 20.

54. SHA Sev. Alex. 24; Tacitus 10. But at Vipasca in Lusitania the bath was
kept open until the second hour of the night; CIL II 5181, 1. 19.

55. Juvenal, n, 205.

56. Martial, X 48, 3.

57. SHA Hadrian 22.

58. SHA Sev. Alex. 24.

59. Martial, III 36, 6.

60. Ibid. XIV 163.

61. Pliny, NH XXXIII 153; Quintilian, V 9, 14; Martial, III 51 and 72; VII
35; XI 47; Juvenal, 6, 419 (but here we may be dealing with a private bath; cf.
Friedlaender's commentary ad loc.).

62. SHA Hadrian 18; cf. Dio, LXIX 8. Another part of Hadrian's general
regulations for bathing is contained in 22 of the Life. CIL VI 57-9, which warns
women against entering the men's pools, does not seem to have come from a
public bath.

63. CIL II 5181, 1. i9ff: "omnibus diebus calefacere et praestare debeto (sell.
conductor) a prima luce in horam septimam did mulieribus et ab hora octavo,
in horam secundam noctis viris"

64. This assumes that Hadrian's decree prohibiting public bathing before the
eighth hour applied to men alone.

65. Petronius, 27.

66. On ball games in general, see Lafaye, DS IV 475-478. Section 9 of the
article, p. 477, deals with the trigon.

67. Op. cit. section 7.

68. Op. cU. section 3.

69. Op. cit. section 4.

70. Op cit. 476. According to Martial, XIV 47, the fottis is the ball for young
boys and old men, not for young men.

71. On the punching-bag (Corycus), see Saglio, DS I 1541.

72. Fencing against a dummy or stake (ad palum) was an important part of
the training of new recruits and gladiators; Vcgctius, I zi and 12. But it was

3 i6 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

also practiced by those who fenced for sport alone; Juvenal, 6, 274 (in this
case, a woman) ; Martial, VII 32.

73. Martial, VII 32.

74. On the trockus, see Lafaye, DS V 492-493.

75. Juvenal, 6, 421 ; Martial, VII 67; XIV 49-

76. Martial, VH 67, 4-5.

77. Ibid. IV 19; cf. XIV 126 and Pettier, DS II 6x6.

78. ZA I 425.

79. Juvenal, VI 422-423.

80. Pliny, NH XXVIII 55-
8z. Petronius, 28.

82. Martial, V 42.

83. Ibid.

84. SHA Hadrian 17.

85. Petronius, 28.

86. On these libraries, see IA I 420. For libraries in the baths of Diocletian, cf.
SHA Probus 2.

87. ZA I 417-418.

88. Ibid. 207.

89. Seneca, Ep. 56, 2; Martial, XII 19; Digest III 2, 4.

90. Martial, XII 70; Quintilian, I 6, 44; Seneca, Ep. 122, 6.

91. Columella, I 16; Juvenal, 6, 419-429; Seneca, Ep. 15, 3; Pliny, NH XIV 139.

92. Juvenal, i, 143-144.
93 SHA Commodus xx, 5.

94. CIL VI 15258; cf. Palatine Anthology X 112.

95. Octave Homberg, L'Eau romaine (Paris, 1935)-

96. Juvenal, 10, 356. t

97. The emperor Vitellius, for example; cf. Suetonius, Vitellius 13; Dio, LXV

4, 3-

98. Festus, s.v. cena p. 49 ed. Lindsay.

99. Pliny, Ep. Ill 5, xo-ii.

ico. Galen, DC Sanitate Tuenda V 332, p. 143 ed. Koch in the Corpus Medi-
corum Graecorwn; cf. Paulus Aegineta, I 23.

101. Martial, XI 104, 4.

102. Galen, op. cit. VI 412, p. 181 ed. Koch. It consisted of bread alone.

103. Suetonius, Claudius 34.

104. Martial, XIII 31. For Martial's breakfast hour, cf. VIII 67.

105. Seneca, Ep. 83, 6.

106. Fronto, Ep. IV 6 p. 69 ed. Naber; Galen, op. cit. V 332-334; Martial, I 49,
14; XIII 13.

107. Pliny, Ep. Ill 5, 10.

108. Seneca, Ep. 83, 6.

109. See Revue de Paris (June i, 1938), 8858.

no. Suetonius, Nero 27; for Vitellius, see n. 97 above.

in. Pliny, Ep. HI i, 8-9.

112. Martial, XI 52; cf. X 48-

1x3. Pliny, Ep. HI 5, 13-

1x4. Suetonius, Nero 27.

115. Petronius, 79, where some of the guests leave at midnight.

xx6. Juvenal, 8, 9-12.

117. Vitruvius, VI 3, 8.

xx8. Val. Max., n x, 2.

1x9. Suetonius, Claudius 32; cf. Tacitus, Ann. XHI 16. This custom was pre-

NOTES

served in a conservative ceremony such as the banquet of the Arval Brotherhood
as late as the third century, CIL VI 2104, 1. 12; but Plutarch already knew of
children reclining at table, Quaest. Convivales VII 8, 4.
xao. Columella, XI 19.

121. In Gaul there does not seem to have been any fixed custom, since we find
both men and women seated and reclining at the banquets depicted on the funeral
reliefs p see Esp6randieu ? Recueil des bas-reliefs de la Gaule romaine VI, Nos. 5154;
5155; Vm 6449; 6489.

122. Martial, V 70. See the painting from Pompeii depicting a tavern scene re-
produced in DS I 973.

123. Martial, V 79.

124. Plutarch, Cato Minor 56.

125. On the triclinium in general, see the recent article of Hug, RE XIIIA
92-101.

126. Petronius, 31.

127. Martial mentions stibadia seating seven and eight persons, X 48, 5-6, XIV
87; cf. SHA Elagabalus 29. A couch for twelve was an exception; Suetonius,
Augustus 70, SHA Verus 5.

128. Vitruvius, VI 7,3; Athanaeus, II 47f.

129. Martial, XII 29, 12; XIV 138.

130. Horace, Satires II 8, 10.

131. Juvenal, iz, 133, mentions knives with ivory and bone handles. According
to Martial, XIV 22, cf. Ill 82, 9, the best toothpicks (dentiscalpia) were made of
mastic wood, but a feather might be used. Trimalchio had one of silver; Petronius,
33-

132. Both these types are mentioned by Martial, XIV 120 and 121; cf. VIII
71, 9-10 ; 33, 23-24.

133. Petronius, 31.

134. Ibid. 60; Martial, II 37, 7; VH 20, 13.

135. Juvenal, i, 94~9$.

136. Macrobius, Sat. Ill 13, loff. He describes a banquet of the pontifices on the
occasion of the inauguration of Lentulus as flamen MartiaKs. It is analysed in DS
I 1282.

137. Petronius, 31.

138. Ibid. 33.

139. /W. 35-

140. Ibid. 36.

141. Ibid. 40.

142. Ibid. 59.

X43> Ibid. 60; there seem to have been two desserts, cf. 68.

144. Ibid. 68.

145- /Wrf. 72-73.

146. On ancient wines in general, see the excellent article of Jferde* DS V 912-924.
Martial had a particularly low opinion of wine from Marseilles; X 36, XIII
123, XIV 1x8. He classes Vatican wine with vinegar, X 45. Falemum, however,
he twice characterises as immortal* ; DC 93; XI 36, 5.

, 147. The label of one of Trimalchio's wines read: "Falemum Opimianum an-
norum centum"; Petronius, 34.

148. Martial,! n; VI 89.

149. See Jardt, op. dt. 921.

150. On the eomissatio, see DS I 1373.

151. Martial, I 71; VIII 51, 21; XI 36, 7; XIV 170.

152. Pliny, NH XIV 91.

318 DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

153. Pliny, Ep. II 6.

154. Martial, IX a.

155. Juvenal, 5, 24^55.

156. Pliny, Ep. 11 6.

157- Petronius, 34-35; 5*-53; 5** o.

158. Pliny, Ep. DC 17.

159. On these dancing girls from Cadiz, see Juvenal, zz, 162-164; Martial, V
78, 26-28.

160. Pliny, Ep. DC 17, 2.

161. Cicero, Ad Fam. X 22, 5; Juvenal, 3, 107; Martial, X 481 ">; Pliny,
Panegyricus 49.

162. Suetonius, Claudius 32.

163. Martial, VH 18, 9-10.

164. Petronius, 47.

165. Martial, III 82, 15-18; cf. VI 89, 1-2; XVI 119; Petronius, 27.

166. Juvenal, iz, 175; cf. Pliny, NH XIV 146; Vitruvius VII 4, 5.

167. Seneca, Cons, ad Helviam X 3; cf. Juvenal 6, 425-433; Martial, VII 67,
9-zo.

z68. Apicius, IV 2^32).

169. Petronius, 70.

170. On Roman food in general, see Fournier, DS I 1141-1169; Orth, RE XI,
944-982. See also Bilabel's discussion of Roman cook-books, ibid. 941-943.

Z7z. Juvenal, zx, 7$-8z.
172. Ibid. 14, 6-10.
Z73. Ibid. 4, Z5~z6.
174. Ibid. 140-142.
Z7S. Pliny, Ep. VI 31, Z3.
Z76. Ibid. V 2.
Z77. Ibid. V 2Z, 4.
178. Ibid. Ill 12, z.

z8o. Martial, X 48.

181. Juvenal, xz, 66-74.

182. NS 1927, 93-94; cf. Delia Corte, Case e abUanti a Pompei, pp. 120-121.

183. CIL XIV 2112; cf. G. Boissier, La religion romaine II 283.

184. Acts of the Apostles II 46.

185. Tertullian, Apologeticus 39, 17-18.

INDEX

ACCIUS, 223
Achilles, 228

Arilii Glabiiones, 137, 138

Acquatacclo (River Almo), 15.

Actiaca, games founded by Augustus,
206, 244

Actio rei uxoriae, 97

Actium, 126, 244

Adultery, 93-95, 189; Lex lutia de
adult criis, 94, 95; re-enactment by
Domitian, 94, 95 ; recast by Septimius
Severus, 95

Aedis Martis, 15

Aegisthus, 227

AeUa Sentia, 295, n. 38

Aelius Aristides, 25

Aemilia, wife of Pompey, 96

Aemilius Paulus, 298, n. 8

Aemilius Scaurus, 85

Aeneas, 228

Aerope, the wife of Atreus, 227

Aesop, in

Aetolians, Roman campaign against the,
146

Afer, 67, 68

Africa, province of, grain, 18, 176; Saint
Augustine, no; governed by Sallust,
113; elephants, 239

Africanus, fortune-hunter, 67

Agamemnon, 117, 226

Agape (Aydm,), 139, 275, 276

Agave, 228

Ager Romanus, 12

Agnatio, 76

Agon Capitolinus, 206, 245, 257

Agrippa, improvements in Roman sew-
ers, 39; innovations at chariot races,
214, 221; founding of the baths of
Agrippa, 254-255

Albulae, quarries of, 234

Album, census list, 17; list of preced-
ence, 275

Alcestis, 88

Alexander the Great, 1x4, 116, 129;
command regarding beards, 159;
statue and group by Lysippus, 250

Alexander Severus, 246, 255; Life of,
257

Alexandria, 145, 175; water-dock, 146;
Museum of, 109, 193; Library of,
193

Alexandrine thought, and neo-Pytha-
goreanism, 128

Alphabet, method of teaching, 104, 105,
106

Alps, province of the, 53

Ammianus Marcellinus, record of Con-
stantine's admiration of the Forum of
Trajan, 7

Amphitheatre, punishnfent of criminals,
53; imperial shows and spectacles,
203, 231-244, 245; Pompeii, 233; of
Taurus, 234; Amphitheatrum Cas-
trense, 234; Flavian Amphitheatre,
see the Colosseum

Anatolia, cults of, 129

Avarotial, dissections

Andromache, 167

Animals, sacrifice as part of marriage
ceremony, 81; sacrifice of the "Oc-
tober hbrse," 207; wild beasts used
in the arena, 236; emperor's menag-
erie, 237 ; tame animals used in circus
acts, 238; numbers slaughtered in the
arena, 239; punishment of criminals,
ad bcstias, 243

Anna Perenna, festival of, 122

Annona, mythical personification of the
year's food supplies, 16; numbers fed,
16, 17, 65, 173; amount of grain
needed each year, 18; temple of An-
nona Augusta, 174; worship by the
guilds, 176; tessera entitling one to
her bounty, 182

Anthony, Marc, 116, 160, z6x, 244

Antiates, ships captured from the, 145

3*0

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

AntinoUs, Bithynian slave in whose
honor Hadrian founded a religion,
134; obelisk of, 15; college of sal-
vation, 57 134, 135, 275-276

Antiochus of Syria, 146

Antiquaries, 184

Antiquarium Comvnale, 285

Antistia, divorced wife of Pompey, 96

Antoninus Pius, 19, 59, 62, 127, 135;
originated in Nemausus (Nimes), 56;
decree condemning slaying of slave
as homicide, 58; example of monog-
amy, 100 ; tribute to wife, 135

Antonius Creticus, 161, 162

Anubis, 130

Apollo, 244

Apollodorus of Damascus, architect of
the Trajan group, 7, 8

Apoxyomenus,- the, of Lysippus, 210

Appian of Alexandria, on the position
of the Roman slave, 59

Appianus, defiance of Commodus, 190

Apuleius, owner of House of Gamala,
23

Apuleius, 107; to whom Isis appeared,
170

Aqua Trauma, 39, 255

Aqueducts, connected with market fish-
ponds, 7; built by Trajan, 9, 38; as
part of the fortification, 15 ; overflow
used to flush sewers, 39; listed in
Rcgionarits, 286

Aquileia, discovery of pocket sun-dials
at, 147

Aquinum, birthplace of Juvenal, 55

Ara Coeli, discovery of ruins under the,

23

Arabia, conquest of 109, ix, 101; por-
phyry and incense, 176

Aragon, home of Martial, 55

Arbuscula, mimic-actress, 229

Ardeatine Gate, 15

Argiletum, district devoted to handi-
craftsmen and booksellers, 194

Aristonicus, 108

Aristotle, the three types of eloquence,
114

Arithmetic, method of teaching, 104,
106

Aries, no, 120, 175

Armenia, 240

Armilustrium, festival of the consecra-
tion of arms, 204

Arria the Elder, wife of Caecina Paetus,

86-87
Arriana Polliana, msida rentals, 291, n.

23

Artisans, condition of, 178, 184
Arx, the Citadel, 13
Asia, senators from, 56
.Asinarian Gate, 15
Asinius Pollio, 27-28; completion of

Roman library, 193, 195
Astrology, Roman faith in, 129, 131,

209; introduction of seven-day week,

144

Astronomy, 1x3
Atargatis (Dea Syra), temple of, 129,

130

Athena, temple of, 119
Athenaeum, built by Hadrian hi Rome,

iQS, 196

Athenaeus, estimate of slaves in house-
hold, 70

Athens, educational model for Rome,
107, 109; sun-dials, 144* MS

Atia, mother of Augustus, 103

Atina, Cicero's defence of a citizen of,
230

Atrectus, bookseller, 194

Atreus, 227

Atrium, entrance hall, 24, 36; house-
hold place of sacrifice, 81

Attic art, renaissance under Hadrian,
in

Atticus, copying studio, 193

Attis, liturgy of, 129, 130, 133, 135

Auctus, 182

Auditoria, 196, 197

Augurs, participation in dedication of
City of Rome, 12; Pliny's election to
College of Augurs, 125

Augusta, feminine imperial title granted
Livia, 85, 135

"Augustus," imperial title of divinity, 54

Augustus (Octavius), 9, 3i, 34, S3, 54,
81, 100, 127, 157, 169, 191, 226, 229;
Forum of, 3; organizes fourteen di-
visions of Urbs, 13-14, is, 285; old
fortifications dismantled, 14; spedal
administration of the vicus, 16; ad-
vance in population, 18; Res Gcstae,
18, 211, 214; generosity, 18, 20; re-
strictions on height of houses, 2$, 26;
incorporation of outside districts, 28;
fire-fighting night watchmen, 33; on

INDEX

321

manumission of slaves, 60; marriage
by "usus," 80; marital laws and
guardianship, 84; laws against adul-
tery, 94, 95; on divorce, 97, 98, 99;
concubinage, 101; education, 103;
jurisprudence, 109, 162, 187; extinc-
tion of his family line, 126; divinity
of emperor, 135; establishing the
twelve months, 143; obelisk of
Montecitorio a sun-dial, 147; cloth-
ing, 153, 154; hairdressing and shav-
ing, 158, 1 60; legislation on corpora-
tions, 183; enthusiasm for public
readings, 195; Ludi Fortunae Re-
ducts f 204; holidays, 205; on wearing
the toga, 208; buttressing power by
use of games and spectacles, 210, 211,
232; obelisk of Rameses II, 214;
races, 215; Theatre of Marcellus, 222;
naumachia, 234; criminals ad bcstias,
243; Greek games, 244, 257; Portico
of Octavia, 249; gambling games, 251

Aulus Gellius, 25, 81

Aulus Fulvius, 77

Aulus Plautius, 137

Aurelia, mother o r Caesar, 103

Aurelian Wall, 10, n, 14; fortification,
14, 15

Aurelius Victor, Egyptian grain supplied
Rome, 18

Ausonius, Ephemeris, occupations of a
day, 156; appeasement by gladiatorial
slaughter, 208

Auspcx, 54, 82, 83

Authors, condition under Roman sys-
tem of publishing, 194

Aventine Hill, 13; residence of Asinius
Pollio, and meeting place of Roman
plebs, 28; within the Roman sewer-
age system, 39, 42; system of ware-
houses, 176, 177; Circus Maximus,
213; 214; thermae dedicated by Tra-
jan, 255

BABYLON, 117, 144
Baetica, birthplace of Trajan and
Hadrian, 56; meats to Rome, 176;
extortions of tlassicus, and his trial,

i9* 193
Bakeries, at Pompeii, 37; inducements

to set up Roman shops, 60, 181
Baltic, amber from the, 176
Balzac, Physiologic du Manage, 164

Banishment, punishment of honestiores,

53; of early Christians, 137, 138
Banking, 177; banking operation for-
bidden to women, 181
Banquet of Tkyestes, 88, 228
Barbers and barbershops, 48, 157; ap-
prenticeship, 162

Bartoli, Professor, excavations beneath
the Church of Sant' Andriano, 191-
192

Basilica lulia, description, 187; assem-
bly of the centumviri, 187; draught
boards scratched on the steps, 189,
252

Basilica Ulpia (Trajan), 4, 8, 9
Basilicae, 249; enumerated in Region-

arics, 286

Baths, public, x, 254-263; baths of
Caracalla (thermae of Antoninus), 8,
255, 256, 260, 262; largest public
baths built by Trajan, 9, 255, 262;
Herculaneum and Pompeii, 35-36;
thermae, 156, 248; women's attend-
ance, 171, 258, 259; built by the
Caesars, endowed by philanthropists,
254; census of baths, 254; baths built
by Agrippa, 254-255 ; thermae erected
by Nero, 255; baths of Titus, 255;
thermae built by Trajan in memory
of Licinus Sura, 255 ; thermae of Con-
stantine, 255; baths of Diocletian,
255; description and types of baths,
255-257; hours for bathing, 257, 258;
mixed bathing, 258; restrictions, 258;
games at the bath, 257, 259, 260; evils
of the bath, 262; "Palace of Roman
Water," 263; baths of Stephanus,
264; enumerated in the Regionaries,
258, 286

BathroomSf 37
See also Balneum

Bathyllus, Mime, 229

Beds and furnishings, 34, 152-153, 164-
165

Bel, 129

Bellona, 48, 131

Belvedere Torso, 262

Betrothal, 80-81; decree by Augustus
against breach of, 97

BibUopolae, 193, 194

Bibliothecae Ulpiae, libraries of Tra-
jan, 5, 9

Bidez, Joseph, demonstration of the

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

debt of Stoicism to the Semites, 128

Bilbilis, Aragon home of Martial, 55,
152, 172

Billeter, researches of, 66

Birth rate, falling, in upper classes, 97

Bithynia, 136

Bizerta ( Hippo -Diarchy t us ), 175

Blanchet, Adrien, study of walled towns
in Gaul, 14

Blandina, torture of, 243

Boethius, A., 29

Boileau, Embarras de Paris, 49

Boissier, Gaston, story of the tutor-
slave, 104; piety of the pagan Ro-
mans, 122, 124

Bona Dea, 131

Bossuet, 135

Bovillae, 12, 135

Bridges, enumerated in Regionaries, 286

Brindisi, 117

Britannicus, 71, 224, 225

Britons, 137

Brothels, 253

Brutus, 83

Bruma, 251

Building, regulation of, under Trajan,
9; incentive to building, under Nero,
60

Buildings, frequent collapse of, 25, 31,
32, 49; restrictions on height, 25

Burial forbidden within pomerium, 6,
12

Businessmen, 173; hours of business,
183

CABINET, Imperial, slaves and

^jt freedmen, 62-63; Hadrian's reser-
vation for members of the Equestrian
Order, 63

Caecina Paetus, 86-87

Caelian Hill (Caelius), 28; (Mons
Caelius), 215; (Caelius), 234

Caelius Rufus, annual rent, 26

Caere, 13

Caesar, Julius, 42, 81, 108; congestion
of Forum, 9; enlargement of Urbs,
13; population, 16; triumph 45 B.C.,
17; Censor Morum, 17; residence in
Rome, 27; gold stool, 35; decree on
care of streets, 46; decree regarding
night traffic, 49, 50, 51; loyalty of
Legions, 54 ; patrician families, 61 ;
marriages, 96; mother's interest in his

education, 103; interest in grammar
and rhetoric, 109, 115; appoints Sal-
lust governor of province of Africa,
113; the god Caesar, 127; Jewish
colony in Rome, 136; twelve months
of the year, calendar reform, 143 ; the
toga, 153; fastidiousness, 157; clean
shaven, 160, 164; Curia, 191; first
State Library in Rome, 193; Ludi
Victoriae Cacsaris, 204; holidays to
commemorate significant events in his
life, 205; inattention at spectacles,
21 1 ; improvements in Circus Maxi-
mus, 213, 214, 232; Theatre of Mar-
cellus, 222; canticum from Pacuvius'
Armorum Indicium sung at his fu-
neral, 223; assassination, 230; Greek
games, 244; gardens bequeathed to
the people, 249
See also Lex Julia

Caesennii, benefactors of "College of
Salvation, 1 ' 275

Calchas, 117

Calendar, days and hours, 143-150;
Julian reform, 143; solar calendar,
183; stone calendars, 203; calendars
of festivals, jeriatia, 203-206
See also Fasti

Calendar of Philocalus, record of games
and public holidays, 206

Calends, the, 144, 191, 205

Calenus, 165

Caligula, 230; claims to dynastic divin-
ity , 54~55; Egyptian cults welcomed
back, 130; shaving as a religious rite,
160; pronouncement on Seneca, 200;
building of the Circus Gai, 213; races
under, 215; assassination of, 228

Calpurnia, wife of Pliny the Younger,
88, 89, 92, 165

Calpurnia Hispulla, 90

Calpurnius Fabatus, 89

Calpurnius Piso, 196; mythology of the
constellations, 199

Calvina, 67

Calza, Guido, research on houses, 23;
reconstruction of Casa dei Dipinti,
30

Campagna, the, suburban villas, 28;

frescoes, 182
Campij enumerated in Regionaries, 286

Campus Jftartius, 233, 284; plain dedi-
cated to military exercises, 13 ; a por-

INDEX

323

tion released for dwelling-houses, 13;
temples, tombs, etc., 22; obelisk of
Montetitorio, a sun-dial, 147; Saepta
lulia, 249 ; thermae of Nero, 255

Cantabrians, campaign against, 160

Cantica, recitatives or lyrics, 224, 225,
227, 228; canticum from Pacuvius'
Armorum Indicium sung at Caesar's
funeral, 224

CapiUi Indict, 168

Capitol, the, 13 ; Temple of Jupiter, 67,
123, (Capitoline Jove), 160, 249
See also Capitoline Hill; Citadel

Capitoline games, no

Capitoline Hill, 6, 13, 284

Ccpua, 13, 130, 233

Caracalla, 221; baths (thermae of An-
toninus), 255, 256, 260, 262; plan of
Rome, 285

Carinae, the, 27

Carneades, academician, 109

Carthage, no, 175; Christian martyrs,
244

Casa del Dipinti (House of Paintings),
Ostia, reconstruction, 30

Cassiterides (Scilly Isles), tin from the,
176

Castle of S. Angelo, 234

Castra Praetoria, 187

Catachresis, in grammar, 112

Catiline, insurrectionist, 77; destroyed
by Cicero, 47

Catilius Severus, 273

Cato the Elder (the Censor): sanita-
tion, 42; treatment of his plough
oxen, 56; rigorous family discipline,
78. 103; penalty for adultery, 94;
admired by Hadrian, in; influence
on oratory, 114; represented as
bearded, 159; attitude to the public
baths, 254

Cato the Younger (of Utica), marriage
to Marcia, 83; divorce and re-mar-
riage to Marcia, 96; shaven daily,
1 60; vow on defeat of the senatorial
army, 265

Catullus, Laureolus, 230, 231, 246

Cavea, spectators' seats, 213; descrip-
tion, 214, 217, 227, 235; Circus
Maximus, 222

Ccna, 263, 264

Cenae, religious, 275

Cenacula, dwelling apartments, used as

a basis for computing Roman popu-
lation, 19, 20; description, 24, 29;
confined to upper stories of buildings.
26; danger in case of fire 26, 33;
lack of heating arrangements, 36;
lack of water, 39 ; sanitation, 40 ; sub-
letting, 43, 44, 165

Census, Rome, January, 1939, n; cen-
sus of vici, 16; census of 86 B.C.
abandoned, 17; catalogue of different
categories of population substituted
and made standard, 17, 18, 19
See also Regionaries
"Centenaries" of the Eternal City, 206
Centumcellae (Civita-Vecchia), Tra-
jan's country house, 189, 273
Centumviri, 187-189, 191
Centurion, annual salary, 72
Ceres, temple of, rebuilt by Pliny, 124-

"5

Cerialia, public holidays, 204

Cess trenches, 40, 42

Chaldean cult, 130, 132

Chariot races, 212-221, 247, 251

Charon, 240

Children, parental authority over, 77-
78, 79; emancipation, 78

China, silk from, 169, 179

Chios, fruit from, 272

Christian Church, martyrs, 87, 136, 137,
138, 244; Latin adopted by the,
no; converts in the directing classes,
137; requickening of virtue, 140;
Christian emperors stop arena butch-
eries, 247; ccnae, 275; failure to men-
tion Christian monuments in Region-
ones, 286

Christianity, advent of, 135, 136-140;
analogies between Christianity and
the pagan mysteries, 138-139

Chrysippus, Stoic philosopher, 104

Church of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem,
234; of Saint Mary of the Angels,
255; of Saint Peter, 236; of Sant*
Adriano, excavations beneath, 192

Cicero, 25, 42, 73, "6, 193, 229, 252;
In V err em, free grain, 17; and Cati-
line, 47; De Officus, the Roman fam-
ily, 77; divorce, 96-97; treatises, 108;
study of his works in classes, xxx;
murdered by Popilius Laenas, 118;
College of Augurs, 125; lucubration,
152; mania for litigation, z86; pub-

324

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

lished works, 194; Tusculan Dispute*
lions, 225; defence of a citizen of
Atina, 230; popular reaction to the
murder of Caesar, 230; opinion on
gladiatorial combat, 242

Cimber, Martial's miser, 69

Ciminian forests, 272

Cimon, son of Miltiades, 119

Cincinnatus, 155

Cinna, 13, 96

Cinyras and Afyrrka, 228

Circuses, 212-221; Agonalis, 245; Fla-
minius, 14, 28, 212-213,^222; Gai,
213; Maximus, 213-215, 222, 240

Cirta (Constantine), capital of Nu-
midia, 113

Citadel, the, 13
See also The Capitol

Citizens, classifications of, 52, 55;
manumission of slaves and rights of
citizenship, 59

City-State. See Urbs

Civita-Vecchia (Centumcellae) , 1 79,

273 *

Civil cases, 185, 187, 203

Claqueurs, 188

Classicus, Caecilius, trial and punish-
ment for extortion, 192-193

Claudia Rufina, 88, 91

Claudius, ix, 179, 223, 271; Caesar's
decree regarding night traffic, 50;
emperor by his dynasty's divinity,
54; decree regarding sick or infirm
slaves, 57; outfitting merchant ships,
60, 181 ; cabinet recruited from freed-
men, 62; murder, 71; treatment of
wife of Senator Caecina Paetus, 87;
reformation of religious cults, 130;
Christianity, 136; decree regarding
toga, 155; women's hairdress, 167;
writer of history, 195; holidays, 203,
205; cost and equipment of games,
2xi, 2x4; gladiatorial shows, 232, 237,
244

Claudius Ariston, 189

Claudius Marcellinus, 192

Cleopatra, 244

Clepsydra, 146, 147, 186

"Client," 171-173

Clitumnus, river of, and adjacent pas-
tures, 123, 124, 134

Clivus Argcntarius, 46 ; Capitolinus, 46 ;
Publidus, 47; Victoriae, 177

Cloaca Maxima, 39

Cloacae, 39, 42

Clodius Albinus, of Hadrumetum, 56

Clothing, 265, 278; men's, 153-156;
women's, 154, 166

Coemptio. See Marriage

Cognatio, 76

Colleges devoted to the gods, 57, 130,
135; collegium salutare, 135, 275

Colonnade of Quirinus, 220

Colosseum (Amphitheatrum Flavium),
8, 212, 214, 234-239, 245; cross, in
memory of the. Christian martyrs, 244

Colossus of the Sun, 234

Column of Marcus Aurelius, 8, 25

Column of Trajan, 4, 5, 7, 8-9; Trajan's
ashes deposited in the base, 6

Columns of Theodosius and Arcadius,
Constantinople, 8

Comitia, 12, 108, 182, 210

Commagenian priests, 130

Commentary, as taught in grammar
class, 112

Commissatio, drinking match, 269

Commodus, attends gladiatorial school,
28, 246; flogging of colonist volun-
teers, 64; congregation of Mithra,
135; decree on use of toga, 155;
abused by a condemned man, 190-
191; slaughter of arena animals,
238; overuse of the bath, 263

Como, 56; Lake Como, 87

Concubinage, 101-103
'Condemnation ad bfstias, 247; ad
metatta, 53, 247

Confarreatio. See Marriage

Confiscation, as a punishment, 53; im-
perial enrichment by, 68

Congjaria, 7, 16, 18, 65, 77
See also Annona

Coniunctio sanguinis, 77

Conscript Fathers. See Patres Con-
scripti

Constantine, city of (Cirta), 113

Constantine, Emperor, admiration of
Trajan's Forum, 7; decree on the
murder of a son by his father, 77;
supply of victims for arena stopped,
247; compilation of the Rcgionaries,
286

Consualia, 204

Consus, altar to, 2x3

Cooking arrangements, 37, 48

INDEX

325

Copyists, vagaries of, 19, 112; copying
studio of Atticus, 193

Corellius Rufus, 58

Corinth, bronzes of, 174

Corneille, 34; Cid, 224

Cornelius Minicianus, 193

Cornelia Procula, 275

Cornutus, 273

Corporations, 1 75-201

Cotton stuffs from India, 169

Country villas, 197

Courts, congestion of, 186; description
of a hearing, 187-189

Crassus, 32, 33

Cretan Labyrinth, 119, 228

Creticus, M. Antonius, 161-162

Criminal prosecutions, 187

Crito, physician to Trajan, 61

Critolaus, 109

Crucifixion of humiliores, 53

Ctesibius, inventor of water-clock, 146

Cumont, Franz, analysis of Roman
cults, 129, 133

Cuq, fidouard, research into the popu-
lation of Rome, 19, 20

Cura corporis, men, 156, 157; women,
166

Curia of Julius Caesar, 63, 173, 191,
192, 200

Curio the Younger, 232

Curtius, Putcal of, 187

Curio sum. See Regionaries

Curius Dentatus, ix

Curule chair, 35, 188, 192

Curule magistrate, 215

Cybele (Great Idaean Mother of the
Gods; Lady of Salvation; Mater
deum salutaris), cult of, 129, 130, 131,
133, J35 163, 204, 207

Cyniphs, 161

Cytheris, 229

DACIA, 190; conquest of, ix;
plunder used to build Trajan's
Basilica, 4-5; episodes pictured on
Column of Trajan, 5; second cam-
paign, 61; captives, 62, 101; gold, 176
See also Decebalus

Dalmatia, gold from, 176

Damascus, fruit from, 272

Dancing, 227

Day, division of the, 144-145
See also Calendar

Dea Syra. See Atargatis

Death of Hercules, 246

Decalogue, the, 136

Decebalus, 5, 68

Decimus Laberius, 230

Delmatius, no

Demetrius Poliorcetes, 145

Depilatories, 163

Depositio barbae, 160

De Rossi, G.-B., on conversions to
Christianity, 138

Diadochi, the, 114

Diana, double invocation with An-
tinoiis, 57, 135, 275, 276

Diana, Hill of, 67

Dice games, 251

Dido, 91, 228

Dies Dominica, 144; fasti, 185, 203;
legitimi, 191; nefasti, 203; softs, 144

Digest, on refund of rent in case of
tearing down an insula, 32; on dam-
ages in case of slops thrown from
windows, 42; prosecution of crim-
inals, 48

Dinner, 263-276

Dio Cassius, congiarium, 16; Christian
martyrs, 137; seven-day week, 144;
shows and spectacles a barrier against
revolution, 210

Diocles, 219

Diocletian, reconstruction of the Curia,
191; of Theatre of Pompey, 223;
decoration of Campus Martius, 233;
baths, 255; early description of Rome,
286

Diogenes, 109

Diomedes, 116, 156

Dionysius, 250

Divi, 54, 126, 208

Divination, 131-133

Divorce, 95-100

Doles, x, 65

See also Annona; Congiaria; Sportu-
lae

Dominus et deus, 54, 126

Domitia, Empress, 226

Domitian, 44, 57, 98, 124, 134, 227, 237,
258, 266; edict against street display
of merchandise, 47; assassination, 63,
126, 156; law against adultery, 94,
95 > 99; Temple of Isis, 130; persecu-
tion of Christians, 137, 138; decree
regaiding use of toga, 155; action

326

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

against literary production, 194; as a
poet, 195; munificence at the races,
221; Theatre of Pompey, 223; Lau-
rcolus, 231; Colosseum, 234; gladia-
torial combat, 240, 242; Greek
games, 245, 257

Domitilla, sister of Domitian, 63

Domitius Afer, 188

Domus, enumeration in Regionaries, 18,
19, 20; etymology, 19; description of
house, 24, 31, 280; ground floor
apartment, 26, 29, 38, 44; sanitation,
40

Domus Aurea, 234, 255

Domus divina of the Caesars, 70

Dorus, publisher of Cicero and Livy,
194

Dowry, action of a divorced wife to
reclaim it, 97 ; propter liber os t impen-
sas, res amotas, mores, 97 ; legal safe-
guard, 98; hold on the husband, 99

Drama, death of the Roman, 223, 224

Duchesne, Monseigneur, 83; compari-
son of Christian ritual with Roman
nuptial rite, 83; Christian and pagan
brotherhoods, 139

Duilius, 145

Dureau de la Malle, distribution of
population of ancient times, 10, n

MANUBIIS, legend on Trajan's
Basilica, 4

Eburones, the, massacre of Caesar's
lieutenants, 160

Economic liberalism of the first An-
tonines, 72

Economic system and condition of the
masses, 74

Education, 101-121; primary, 103-107;
popular education a failure, 107, 114;
Greek influence, 107, 108, no, in,
113, 245; schools of Hellenistic type
in Rome, 107; political power of
superior education, 108

Egypt* 53, 248; grain supplied Rome,
18, 176; imperial revenues, 68; reli-
gious cults, 129, 130; Far East cara-
van ports, 169

Elephants, 113, 213

Elis, a fable of the people of, 118

Eloquence, 245 ; a threat to government,
1 08; emptied of all real content, 109;
three types, 114; condemnation of

eloquence, 115; prizes at the Agon
Capitolinus, 245 '

Encolpius, 259

Ennius, in; Andromache, 225

Epicureanism, 128

Epirota, Q. Caecilius, in

Epitaphs and obituary inscriptions, 57,
70, 72, 91, 102, no, 279

Equestrian Order (Equitcs}, amount of
fortune necessary, 53, 66, 68, 73,
232; symbol, a gold ring, 60; place
in imperial cabinet, 63; etiquette of
a "client," 172; seats at the Circus
Maximus, 214

Esquiline, fifth region of Rome, 14;
gardens of Maecenas, 27

Esquiline Hill, 13, 67, 234; warehouses,

177
Etruscans, experience in drainage of

marshes, 40; clothing, 154; bronze

razors, 161 ; human sacrifice, 208
Euphrates, 169; captives from, 101;

amphitheatres, 246
Eurysaches, tomb of, 179
Eurythmus, 190
Eusebius, 138
Evadne, 88
Exegesis, 112

ir*ACTIONES, 216, 217, 221
JL Familia gladiatoria, 236
Familiae servile s, 70
Family instability through divorce, 95-

100
Far East, riches to Rome, ix; pepper

and spices, 7; routes to the, 72;

silks, 176
Farnese Bull, 262

Farnese Palace. See Palazzo Farnese
Fasti of Ovid, in
Fasti Osticnscs, 222, 42
Faustina the Elder, wife of Antoninus

Pius, loo, 135

Favorinus of Aries, no, 120
Felicita, Christian martyr, 243
Feminism, 85, 90-95; confined to upper

classes, 180

Feriae, 203 ; publicac, 204 ; privatae, 205
Ferialia, 205
Festus, 207, 208
Fez, 41

Fezzan, ivory, 176
Ficulea, 12

INDEX

327

Fidenae, 12

Fire, danger from, 28, 32, 33; Juvenal,
26; precautions against, 39; fire of
64 A.D., 19, 45, 136, 214, 233; 80
A.D., 130; 104 AX)., 255; 191 A.D.,
285; in the reign of Antoninus
Pius, 19

Fishing contest, 207

Fishponds, market, 7; Nero's, 234

Flamen Dialis, So

Flamines, the, 49

Flamininus, L. Quinctius, 118

Flaminius Nepos, 212

Flamma, the gladiator, 242

Flavia Domitilla, aunt, 137, 138

Flavia Domitilla, niece, 138

Flavian Amphitheatre. See the Colos-
seum

Flavian period, 9, 51, 62, 70, 8$, 108,
130, 137, 167, 215

Flavius Clemens, 137, 138

Flavius Sabinus, 137

Flora, games in honor of (Floralia),
204, 207, 230; statue, 262

Food supply, organization of, 178, 202
See also Annona

Foot races, 204, 245

Footwear, 153, 156

Foreigners in Rome, 52, 248
See also Peregrini

Forma Vrbis Romae, 285

Fortifications dismantled by Augustus,

14
Fortunata, wife of Petronius' Trimal-

chio, 93, 1 66
Fortunes, 66, 67
Forum, Roman, 37, 39, 41, 45, 109, 151,

194, 202; for a enumerated in Re-

gionarics, 286
Forum of Augustus, 3
Forum Boarium, 284
Forum of Caesar (Forum luUum), 37,

41, 109

Forum HoUtorium, 284
Forum of Ostia, 174-17$
Forum of Peace (Vespasian), 194, 285;

sur/ey register of the Urbs, 23-24
Forum of Trajan, x, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9*

109
Frank, Tenney, on tne emancipated

population of Rome, 6z
Fregenae, 12
Frejus, in the Provencal plain, 58

Friedlaendcr, L., 219; documentation

on Roman life, 282-283
Frontinus, 38, 252
Fronto, 202, 212
Frusino, estates at, 44
Fufia Cantata, 70, 295, n. 38
Funeral college, Lanuvium, 57, 135, 275

See also Colleges
Funeral processions, 49-50
Furniture, 33-35, 152-153, 196, 278
Fuscus, charioteer, 220

GABII, 12
Gaetulians, 213

Gaius, jurist, 84; on manumission of
slaves, 70; on divorce, 99

Galba, 210

Galen, 263

Galerius Tracalus, 188

Gallia Narbonensis, 56, 245

Gallinaria, forest of, 48

Gallitta, tried on charge of adultery,
189

Gambling, 220-221, 250-253

Games, 49, 202-221; attempt to ac-
climatise Greek games in Rome, 244-
245, 251-252; in baths, 259-260
See also Ludi

Garrison, Rome, 18, 65, 290, n. 31

Gauckler, Paul, 130

Gaul, defence against Germanic hordes,
13, 14; senators from, 56; wool, 176;
Caesar, the conqueror, 204; theatres,
223, 246; pork from, 272

Gismondi, I., reconstruction of Casa del
Dipinti, 30

Gladiatorial combats (koplomachia) t
206, 208, 231-232, 236, 239, 245, 246,
251; restrictions on, 232; gladiatorial
troupes, 236, 246; training schools,

237

See also Muncra
Gladiators, 237-244
Glass, trinkets, 48; from Phoenicia,

176; none for windows, 35, 36
Gnomon, 146, 147, 148
Golden House. See Domus Aurea
Gracchi, the, 103
Grain, distribution of free, 16, 17, 65

See also Annona
Grammar of Palaemon, 92
Grammarian, routine teaching, 107-114,

xx6; bilingual, 109

328

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Granicus, battle of, 250

Greece, influence on Roman education,
107, 108, no, in, 113, 245; on
Roman culture, no; Greek revolu-
tion, 114; influence on religion, 128,
129; divisions of day and year, 144;
clothing, 154; marble, 176; influence
of the Hellenic theatre, 223-224

Greek, use of, in the Christian liturgy
and writings, no

Guilds, 171; banquets, 275

HADAD and Atargatis, temple of,
130

Hadrian, ix, 62, 84, 91, 127, 135, 158
177, 221; erection of commercial city
of Ostia, x ; command of army against
the Parthians, 6; burial of Trajan's
ashes in the Column, 6; remission of
taxes, 8; insulae of Ostia, 31; Roman
traffic decree, 50; titles of nobility,
53; born in Spanish Italica, 56; re-
strictions on abuse of slaves^ 57, 246;
cabinet, 63 ; Far East, 72 ; inheritance
of a son's estate by his mother, 76;
murder of a son by his father, 77-78 ;
affection for his wife, Sabina, 85,
100 ; schools, 106; jurisprudence, 109;
Greek epigrams, no; renaissance of
Attic art, in; cult of Antinous, 134,
13;; Christianity, 138; bearded, 164;
generosity, 182; public readings, 195;
Life of Hadrian, 257; conduct of the
baths, 258, 259, 261

Hadrumetum (Tunis), 56

Haghrab, 41

Hairdressing, 158-159; women, 167, 168

Hammamet, Gulf of, 175

Hannibal, invasion of, 13, 24, 120

Heating, 36-37

Heliopolis, 214

Heraclea. See Table of Heraclea

Herculaneum, ruins of, -archaeological
evidence, x, 279, 280,^287; country
houses, 23; baths, 35-36; cooking ar-
rangements, 37; sanitation, 40; bed-
rooms, 164, absence of women in
paintings, 182

Hercules, 199, 239; Death of Hercules,
246; statue of, 262

Hermagoras, the rhetorician, 114

Hermes, 215

Hermes Psychopompos, 240-241

Hermogenes, of Tarsus, 194

Herodius Atticus, 106

Heuzey, L6on, on the Roman style of

dress, 154
Hills of Rome, 13, 286

See also each by name
Hippo, 1 10

Hippo-Diarrhytus, 175
Hippodrome of Constantinople, 214
Historia Augusta, 19, 85, 257, 258, 261,

278

Holidays, 203, 204-205, 206
Homer, 91, in, 131, 132
Honestiores, a class of the citizen body,

52-53; senators and knights, 53

See also Senators; Equestrian Order
Honorius, 223, 247, 286
Hoplomachia. See Gladiatorial combats
Horace, 98, 151, 152, 194, 200; Epistles,

in, 158

Horologium, "counter of hours," sun-
dial or water-clock, 144, 145, 146;

korologium ex aqua, water-clock

(clepsydra), 146, 148
Horoscopes, 132
Horrea, 176, 177
Hortensius, the orator, 96, 217
Hour, variations in the Roman, 144,

145, 148, 149, 184
House of Livia, 23; of Gamala, Ostia,

23

Household objects, 151, 266, 269, 280

Houses, 22-51; release of land for
dwelling purposes, 13; modern as-
pects, 23-30; archaic aspects, 31-51

Human sacrifice, 208, 231

HumiUores, 52

Hylas, pantomime-actor, 226

Hypocausis, 36-37* 4*i 256

IBERIAN Peninsula, 176
Ibn Khaldun, Berber sociologist, 10
Icarus, 199

Ides, the, 144, 191, 205
Incitatus, charioteer, 220
Income, 66, 68, 72, 73
India, riches to Rome, ix, 176
Indus River, 169
Infant prodigies, no
Infants, abandonment of, 42, 77
Ingenui, 52, 56, 57, 59
Inheritance laws, 76
Insula of Felicula, 20, 25, 26, 28

INDEX

329

Insulae, apartment houses, 45, 47, 280;
enumerated in Regionaries, 18-19,
23, 28, 286; confusion in interpreta-
tion of the Latin words, 19, 20; com-
parison with the domus, 24; height,
24; description, 29; Ostia, 31; heat-
ing, 37; Roman ground plans, 31;
sub-letting, 32, 33, 43, 165; sanita-
tion, 40 .

See also Building regulations; Build-
ings

Io, 131

Iphicrates, 119

Iphigenia, 117

Iphigenia in Tauris, Euripides, 229

Iran, 129

Isidorus, C. Caelius, 70

Isis, cult of, 129, 130; Temple of, 130,
131

Itys, 228

lulius Cerialis, 264

lulius Tiro, 190

lus civile, 55

lus gentium, 55

lus Latii, 60

lus trium liberorwn, 76, 181

lus naturale, 55

JANICULUM, 28, 130
Janus, Temple of, 14

Jason, 228

Javolenus Priscus, 198

Jerusalem, Temple of, destroyed, 137

Jews, 124, colony in Rome, 136; Tibe-
rius' shipment of 4,000 Jews to Sar-
dinia, 136; victory of Titus, 215

Josephus, record of grain, 18 ; first pro-
duction of Cinyras and Myrrha, 228

Juba II, Mauretania, 113

Julia, wife of Pompey, 96

Julian family extinct on death of Nero,

54

Julius Canus, the Stoic, 252

Julius Frontinus, 125

Junius Mauricus, 245

Juno, 123; Temple of Juno, 249

Jupiter, 118, 132, 212; Temple of Jupi-
ter, 67, 123, 160, 249; games, 207

Jurisprudence, 109

Justice and politics, 184-193

Justinian, 286

Juvenal, Satires, x, 122, 278; fire in
Rome, 26, 33; collapse of houses, 32;

indolence of great ladies, 34; water-
carriers, the scum of the slaves, 38;
injury from missiles from windows,
42; muddy streets of Rome, 47;
night-time perils, 48; traffic jams, 49;
night traffic, 50; on provincial im-
migrants, 55, 130; born at Aquinum,
55; treatment of slaves, 58, 251; deg-
radation of paying court to slaves,
64; an adequate income, 66; a law-
yer's standing judged by his slave
retinue, 69; himself an ex-officer of
limited means, 73 ; on learned women,
91-92 ; women as gluttons, 93 ; adul-
tery, 93-95; to the husband of a
wealthy wife, 98; divorce, 99; en-
thusiasm for Greek, no; on would-be
orators, 120; religion, 122, 123, 124,
134; scepticism, 123; aversion for
the Jews, 124, 136; on exotic cults,
130, 131, 132, 133; Christianity in
Rome, 136; hairdressers and barbers,
157, 1 60; ladies' hairdressing, 167,
168; etiquette of the "client," 173; on
the renting of private auditoria, 196;
bread and circuses, 202 ; at the circus,
220; gambling, 221, 250, 251; baths,
257, 258, 259; women athletes, 260;
mens sana in corpore sano, 263 ; self-
indulgence, 271; gourmands, 272;
idea of a pleasing dinner, 274; sordid
side of Roman life, 276; commentary
by Friedlaender, 282

KASHGAR (Issidon Scythica), 169
Knights, 53
See also Equestrian Order

LABOURERS, 175, 178, 179; hours
of labour and recreation, 184

Labour, forced, at the mines, 53, 247

Lady of Salvation, 135
See also Cybefe

Laenas, M. Popilius, 146

Lanuvium, funeral college, 57, 135, 275

Laocoon group, 262

Larcius Licinus, retinue of claqueurs,
188

Larcius Macedo, assassinated by house-
hold slaves, 59, 102

Latin language and literature, 56;
superseded by Greek under gram-
marians and rhetoricians, 108, no,

330

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

izz, i 12; adopted by Christian
Church toward middle of third cen-
tury, no; training of orators, 114;
trained in an artificial literature, 116;
decay of Latin letters, 121; prizes for
Latin poetry, 245; literature as a
source of information, 281, 287

Latin* luniani, 60

Latinus, pantomimist, 230

Latrines, 37, 40-41, 42

Laurentine forest, 272

Laurentine villa of Pliny the Younger,
56, 151

Laureolus. See Catullus

Lavinium, 12

Lectus, 33, 266; beds made of gleaming
exotic woods, 34; single beds, 34; a
double bed, 34, 165

Leges Juliae, on adultery, 94, 95; on
divorce, 97; on dowry, 98, 99

Legionaries, power to proclaim em-
perors, 54, 55

Leisure, employment of, 206-212

Leonidas, 117

Leptis Magna (Tripoli), 56

Leuconian flocks, 152

Lex Cornelia, against gambling, 251

Lex Petronia, forbidding a master to
deliver his slaves to the beasts with-
out a judgment, 57

Lex Publicia, against gambling, 251

Lex Titia, against gambling, 251

Liberal arts, 113, 196

Libcrtas Restituta, 63

Liberti, 60, 64, 67

Libraries, public and municipal, 194;
librarians as propagandists, 195;
gathering places, 262; enumerated in
the Regionaries, 286

Libraries built by Trajan. See Bib-
liothccae Ulpiae

Library of the Museum of Alexandria,
193

Library of Rome, State, 68

Lirinius Sura, 28, 132

Lighting arrangements, 35, 151-152, 258

Ligurian marble, 50

Lipsius, Justus, 10, 225

Litigation, 186, 187, 191

Livia, wife of Augustus, 167; granted
title of "Augusta/ 1 85; house of on
the Palatine, 183; Ludi Palatini in
memory of Augustus, 204

Livius Andronicus, in, 227

Livy, 195; incident of the ox which

climbed to the third story, 24-25;

works published, 194
Loans, 67
Lot, Ferdinand, estimate of Roman

population, n, 19, 20
Lucan, 17; Pharsalia, in
Lucian, no, 121, 228
Lucifer, 265
Lucina, crypt of, 138
Lucius Caesar, 158
Lucius Verus, 158
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 42
Lucus Furrinae, 130
Ludi, 203-204, 206, 207, 210, 211, 215,

216, 222, 223, 232, 240; Apollinares,

203, 207, 211 ; Ccrialcs, 203, 207;

Florales, 204; Fortunae Reducis, 204;

Martiaks, 204 ; Megalenses, 204 (Meg-

alesian festival), 211, 223; Palatini,

204; Plcbci, 203, 223; Romani, 203;

Victoriac Cat saris, 204; Victoria^ Sul-

lanae, 204

Ludus gladiatorius, 237
Ludus ingenuarum artium, 196
Ludus litter arius, 104, 106, in
Lupercalia, 240

Lupus, character by Martial, 73, 270
Lusitania, 106
Lustrum, 16, 59
Lycia, 223

Lycomedes, daughters of, 228
Lydus, slave-tutor, 104
Lyons, amphitheatre, 243
Lysippus, the Apoxyomenus of, 210;

group, Alexander and his generals,

250

Jl/TACARlS and Canace, 228

J.VJL Macedonia, 246

Macrinus, 88

Macrobius, 167, 267

Maecenas, 27, 196

Maenads of Priapus, 131

Madaura, 107, no

Magistcr, head of each of fourteen re-
gions of Rome, 16; serving at the
sanctuary of a god, 57; teacher in a
school, 104, ii i ; trainer in a gladia-
torial ludus t 217; magister cenae,
president of a banquet, 275

Mate, Smile, 137

INDEX

Manes, 57, 123, 233

Manumission, various methods, 59; re-
strictions regarding testamentary
manumission, 60, 70; manumission of
a slave concubine and her children,
102; toga praetexta, a symbol of
manumission , 117

Marcellus, 159, 160; theatre of Mar-
ceflus, 2-22, 234, 246

Marcia, wife of Cato of Utica, 83, 96

Martiana, sister of Trajan, 167

Marcus Aurclius, wealth given into pub-
lic treasury, 8; decrees on night traf-
fic extended, 50; semivictories, 62;
inheritance by children from their
mother, 76 ; concubinage, 101 ; Medi-
tations, no; stoicism, 127, 246; lucu-
bration, 152; wisdom and goodness as
an emperor, 191; deduction in num-
ber of holidays, 205; personal indif-
ference to gambling, 221; effort to
humanize gladiatorial combat, 246

Marianus, 98

Marius, 108

Marius Priscus, 192, 193

Market of Trajan, 4, 8, 29, 35, 177;
excavations, 23

Marriage, 76-100; three types: con-
farreatio, coemptio, usus, 80 ; the cere-
mony, 81; cum manu, 84, 95; sine
manu, 84, 96, 98
See also Betrothal

Mars, 95, 135; sacrifice of the race- '
horse, 207

Mars Ultor, temple of, 204

Marsyas, enclosure of, 187

Martial, Epigrams, x; home in an m-
svla on the Quirinal, 26, 28, 55, 291,
n. 21 ; Saturnalian gifts, 35, 69; lack
of household water, 38; muddy
streets, 47; Bilbilis, home in Aragon,
55> 152; flogging of slaves, 58; esti-
mate of size of a family, 65 ; epigram
on one man's many houses, 67; for-
tune-hunting mortgagers, 67, 68; lost
confidence in the value of work, 73-
74; wastrel sons, 79; gallery of ac-
complished women, 88, 91; adultery,
93) 94* 102, 103; comment on mar-
riage to a wealthy woman, 99, 165;
on divorce and re-marriage, 100;
ridicule of Greek enthusiasm, no;
Christianity, 136; insomnia and night

traffic, 150; a visit to Pliny, 152 ; hour
of rising, 152 ; the ex-barber who be-
came a wealthy landowner, 157;
opinion regarding hairdressing, 158,
159; on the perfumes used by a man,
159; on shaving, 161, 163, 164;
epitaph to a barber, 162; woman's
hairdressing, 168; hours of labour,
183-184; the judicial world, 185, 186;
publication of the Epigrams, 194;
expenditures by consuls and praetors,
21 1 ; gambling, 220; use of con-
demned criminals in plays ending in
their deaths, 231; tame animal acts,
238; on the liberation of best of the
duellists, 242; Greek games, 245;
porticos and their works of artj 249,
250; gambling allowed during the
Saturnalia, 251 ; chess, 252 ; monu-
ments and buildings, 256; hour for
bathing, 257-258; mixed bathing,
258; games at the bath, 260; gift of
a cloak, 260; three phases of the hy-
gienic bath, 261 ; hour of dinner, 264;
on practice of grading quality of food
to standing of guest, 270; unpleasant
manners, 271; on the excellence of
food, 272; a dinner he served, 273-
274; Epigrams show a sordid and
depraved side of Roman life, 276;
source of information, 278

Manilla, 102

Mathematics, 109, 113

Matidia, niece of Trajan, 167

Matron, Roman, 84-90

Matronalia, the, 204

Mauretania, 53, 113, 176

Maximus, Martial's epigram against a
certain, 67

Maximus, Q. Sulpicius, infant prodigy,
no

Mainz, dyes from, 168

Meals, 263-276

Medea, 228

Medici, doctors, 181; veterinary sur-
geons, 217

Menander, in

Menus, 267-271

Merchant ships, outfitting of, 60,

* 181

Meroe, 131

Messalina, 167, 168

Messalla, M. Valerius, 145, 146

332

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Metaphysics, taboo in the curriculum,

109

Melon, sun-dial of, 144
Metrovian Gate, 15
Mevia, 92

Middle class, condition of, 65, 66, 72, 74
Miltiades, 119
Mimes, 229-230, 246
Minerva, 123; festival of Quinquatrus,

105, 204; Temple of Minerva, 130
Minturnae, 57

Minucius, Portico of, 182, 202
Misenum, fleet of, 235
Mithra, cult of, 129, 130, 135
Mithridates, 155
Modena, 160
Moliere, 92; Bourgeois Gentilkomme,

"?

Mollicius, M. Aurelius, 220

Montanus, 273

Monte dei Cenci, 222

Monte Giordano, 245

Monteritorio, obelisk of, 147

Months, naming of the, 143

Mucza, wife of Pompey, 96

Mucius Scaevola, 246

Munidpia, 155, 230, 236, 243

Muncra, gladiatorial combats decreed
for an emperor, 206, 208 ; a method of
directing mass emotion, 210; human
sacrifice, 231; restrictions on number,
232 ; contractors of gladiator troupes,
236; dawn to dusk, 237; venationcs,
238; numbers of animals slaughtered,
239; description, 239-^42; a means
of revenge and murder, 243; munera
sine missione, combats from which
none escaped alive, 243; the morning
massacre, 243-244; opposition, 244;
efforts to humanize, 246-247

Museo Nazionale delle Tenne, 175, 255

Museum of Alexandria, 109, 193

Music, 113, 245

Musonius Rufus, 77, 85, no

Mustius, Pliny's architect, 124

Mysticism, Oriental. See Religion

J^ythology, taught by the grammarian,

NAPLES, 246
Narbonne, 175

Narcissus, slave of Caesar, 62
Nasica, P. Cornelius Sdpio, 146

Natatium restitutio, in the manumission
of slaves, 60

Nautnackia, 9, 203, 234, 236, 237, 242

Naumachia Vaticana, 234, 236

Neo-Pythagoreanism, 128

Nero, ix, 278; attempt at re-planning
city, 45; Julian family extinct at his
death, 54, 126; imperial claim by vir-
tue of dynasty's divinity, 55; on
treatment of slaves, 57; inducement
to capital for building purposes, 60;
treatment of Seneca's wife, 85, 86,
87; goddess Atargatis, 130; Chris-
tianity and Christian martyrs, 136,
137; hairdressing, 158; shaving, 160;
consecration of first beard, 160; silk
caravans, 169; rebuilding of the cir-
cus, 2 14 ; generosity at the charioteers'
banquet, 221; public readings, 223;
.trap for Britannic us, 224; banish-
ment of actors, 226; himself an actor,
228; gladiatorial combat of opposing
categories, 240; Neronia, 244, 245,
257; public baths, 255; length of din-
ners, 264, 265

Neronia, Nero's revival of Greek games,
244, 245, 257

Nerva, 124; congestion of Forum, 9;
adoption and succession of Trajan,
55, 90; survivors of senatorial fam-
ilies, 61; successor of Domitian, 63;
proclaimed divine by his son Trajan,
126

Niceros, perfumes of, 159, 165

Nigidius Figulus, 128

Nigrina, 88

Nile, statue of, 130; papyri from, 176

Nimes (Nemausus), 56

Niobe, 228

Non-citizen. See Peregrin*

Nonianus, 195

Notaria, 181 ; Notarius, 89

Notitia. See Regionaries

Nubia, hippopotami of, 239

Numa, palace of, 207

Numidia, 113, exploitation by Romans,
174; marble, 176

OBELISKS, Temple of Minerva, and
the Pantheon, 130; enumerated
in Regionaries, 286; of Antinoiis, 15;
of Montecitorio, 147; of Rameses II,

"4

INDEX

333

Obsequium, 59, 102, 171

Occupations, 171-201

Octavia, sister of Augustus, 113, 167,
249; Portico of Octavia, 249

Octavius, 214.
'See also Augustus

"October Horse," sacrifice of the, 207

Odeum, the, 245

Oedipus, 226; Oedipus Coloneus, 229

Officiates, 185

Oil, storehouses, 7; from Picenum, 272

Olympians, the Roman pantheon's like-
ness to the Greek, 122

Olympic games, 257

Oratory in popular education, 107, 112,
114, 115, "6

Oratory of Saint Bernard, 255

Or dines, 53

Ormisda, Persian ambassador, 7

Ornamcnta, 166-170

Ornatores, ornatrices, 71, 167-169, 181

Ostia, 117; recent excavations, x, 23,
279, 280, 287; sea water to the Ro-
man market fishponds, 7; municipal
individuality, 12; docks, 23; House
of Gamala, 23; tabemae, 26; like-
ness of buildings to modern ones, 29 ;
an inn surrounded by green trees, 30;
insulae, 31; Casa dei Dipinti, 35;
heating arrangement of houses, 37;
lack of running household water, 38;
sanitation, 40, 41 ; public latrines, .41 ;
Hellenistic influence on religion, 129;
Forum of Ostia, 174; port of Rome,
174, 176; warehouses, 177; Fasti
Ostienses, 22, 242

Ovid, Fasti, in; suggestions on wom-
en's makeup, 168, 170; the circus,
217

Oxyrhynchus papyri, 190

PACUVIUS, 223; Armorum Indi-
cium, 224

Paestan fields, 249

"Palace of Roman Water," 263

Palaemon, Grammar, 92

Palaestra, x, 19, 32, 92, 253, 254, 256,
259, 260

Palatine Hill, reserved for emperor, 22;
excavations, 23, 284; House of Livia,
23, 183; decorated forica, 41; im-
perial slaves, 70; hearings in the em-
peror's basilica, 187; sanctuary of

Cybele, 204; adjoined by the Circus
Maximus, 213, 214

Palazzo Barberini, 233; Caetani, 213;
Capitolino, 233; Colonna, 13; Far-
nese, 8, 27, 217,* 262; Sermoneta, 222;
Taverna, 245; Venezia, 233

Pallas, imperial slave, 62

Palmyra, 129

Pamphylia, 223

Pandataria, island of, a place of banish-
ment for condemned Christians, 137

Panniculus, pantomime-actor, 230

Pantagathus, Martial's epitaph to his
barber, 162

Pantheon, the building, 25, 130; Ro-
man pantheon, the cult, 121 ,

Pantomime-actors. See Mimes

Pantomime plays, 226, 227, 228

Paribeni, Robert, Column of Trajan, 8 ;
Roman tragedy, 229

Parilia, the, 204

Paris, markets, 9; population density,
ii ; area, 13; transport, 22; maisons,
24; Opera, 222

Paris, pantomime-actor, 226, 228

Parrhasius, 119

Parthenius, Greek chamberlain to Do-
mi tian, 63, 156 ^

Parthians, Roman campaign against, ix,
6, 85, 169

Pasiphae, 228

Pasiteles, 250

Passennus Paulus, elegies of, 199

Pastillarii, 179
'Pater familias, authority of the, 76-80

Paternus, cousin of Pliny, 58

Patres conscripti, 63, 107, 126

P atria potestas, 77, 78, 80

Pair onus, 59, 102, 171

Paulina, wife of Seneca, 85, 86

Paulus, praetorian prefect, 39

Paxaea, wife of Pomponius Labeo, 85

Pax Romana, 16, 17

Peregrini, 18, 52, 55, 63, 65, 23$

Pergamum, 65, 107

Peristyle, 24

Perpetua, Christian martyr, 243

Perseus, 146

Persia, silk caravans, 169

Persicus, 274

Persius, 134, 151

Petosiris, 132

Petronius, 252; satirical romance, x; the

334

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

touvla, 44; Satyricon, 44; ridicule of
the schoolroom's pompous phrases,
120; Roman exploitation of con-
quered territory, 174; skill of Roman
chef, 272; pictures sordid side of Ro-
man life, 276, 278; Friedlaender's
commentary, 282-283
See also Trimalchio

Pharsalus, eve of, 265

Phidias, 118-119; statue of Venus, 250

Philaenis, 260

Philhellenes, 244

Philippus, Q. Marcius, 146

Philomela, 228

Philomusus, Martial's wastrel, 79, 250

Philosophy, banished from Rome, 109,
128; publication in Greek of the
philosophers, no; treatment during
the Middle Ages, 113
See also Stoicism

Phoenicia, glass from, 176

Phrygian cult, 130

Phrygian marbles, 33

Physics, taboo in the curriculum, 109

Piazza Colonna, 23; del Cinqueccnto,
13; del Popolo, 214; di Grotta Pinta,
222; Navona, 245; San Pietro, 213

Picenum, oil from, 272

Pinrian Hill, 15, 22, 28

Piso, consul, 252

Pistoclerus, 104

Plantin, 74

Plautus, 92, 223; Menaechmi, 229

Plebs, the, Sulla's release of dwelling,
space for, 13; public assistance, 16;
Augustus' gift of 60 denarii each, 18 ;
plebeii (the humitiores), 52; need for
the dole and spectacles, 65, 203, 210;
prosperity after the campaigns of
Trajan, 72; rise of great magnates
from the ranks, 73; funeral colleges,
135; the munus, 233; lusiones, 246;
noon prandium, 263; guild banquets,
275

Pliny the Elder (the Naturalist), vici
in the lustrum of 73 A.D., 16;
flowered balconies, 30; admiration of
Roman houses and streets, 45 ; quoted
on familiae servile s, 70; the sun-dial
of Catana, and the first horologium
in Rome, 146; profccto enim vita
vigitia est, 151; lucubration, 152,
185; on shaving, 163-164; hours spent

in writing, 184-185 ; Circus Maadmus,
215; exasperation at Caesar's trick
theatre, 233; amusement at trained
animals, 238 ; sculpture in the Portico
of Octavia, 249-250; number of pub-
lic baths, 254; three phases of hy-
gienic bath, 261 ; daily meals, 263, 264,
265; on gluttony and selfishness in a
host, 270

Pliny the Younger, ^6, 102; Letters, x;
room furnishings, 34 ; Cisalpine birth-
place, 56; Laurentine villa, 56, 151;
estates in Tuscany, 56; treatment of
slaves, 58; friendship with his slaves,
5fr; amount of his estate, 67-68, 70;
manumission of slaves, 69-70 ; liberal-
ism with regard to friends' children,
78-80; encumbrance of betrothals,
80; letter regarding the elder Arria,
86; love of wife and husband, 87-88;
his wife, Calpurnia, 88-90, 92, 165;
division of his wealth, 91; education
and good taste in women, 91-92;
letter regarding a centurion in Tra-
jan's army, 94; every parent his
child's teacher, 103; "piety" and
scepticism, 123-125; the divinity of
a Caesar, 126; superstition, 132-133;
Christianity, 136; lucubration, 152;
independence of -each of the married
pair in their home, 165; clepsydrae,
1 86; feeling against the "low rout of
claqueurs," 188; speeches before the
centumviri, 189; on the Senate trans-
formed into a High Court, 192, 193;
public readings, 196-199; Panegyric,
209, 214; appearance of the emperor
at the .games, 209 ; Circus Maximus,
214, 215; deplores craze for circus,
221 ; opinion on human sacrifice at
the combats, 242; feeling against
Greek games, 245; time for dinner,
264 ; gluttony and selfishness in a host,
270; disgust at dinner entertainments,
271; charming and frugal meals, 273,
276; Letters a source of information
on Roman life, 278

Plotina, wife of Trajan, 85, 100

Plotius Callus, 108

Plutarch, 161

Plutocracy, and living standards, 65-

75
Policing arrangements, 48

INDEX

335

Politics, political power of good edu-
cation! 108; taboo as a course of
public instruction, 109; justice and
politics, 184-193; discussion pro-
scribed, 186; excitement of races a
substitute for politics, 221; per-
mitted in a pantomime, 230

Pollentia, goddess of might, 213

Polydoxus, race-horse, 219

Polytheism, 128, 131

Pomerium, Trajan's burial within the
boundaries, 6; burial of ordinary
mortals forbidden, 6; not the defi-
nite limits of Imperial Rome, n, 12,
13; the sacred orbit, 12; religious
character, 12; overflow of popula-
tion, 13; Aurelian Wall, 14

Pompa Circensis, 215

Pompeia, wife of Caesar, 96

Pompeii, archaeological evidence, x, 23,
279, 280, 287; country houses, 23;
frescoes, 30; area of domus, 31;
baths, 36; heating arrangements, 37;
bakeries, 37 ; sanitation, 40, 41 ; street
paving, 47; washroom, 156; absence
of women in the paintings, 182; wall
mottoes, 274

Pompeius Musclosus, 219

Pompeius Saturnius, wife of, 92

Pompey, feeding of 486,000 people in
57 B.C., 17; residence in the Carinae,
27; several wives, 96; Circus Maxi-
mus, 213; plethora of combats, 232;
Greek games, 244

Pomponia Graecina, suspected of being
a Christian, 137

Pomponius Graecinus, 138

Pomponius Labeo, 85

Pone mwros. See Pomerium

Ponte Rotto, 39

Pontia, island of, internment of Chris-
tians, 138

Pontifex Maximus, 80, 207

Pontine marshes, 48

Pontius Epaphroditus, charioteer, 219

Popilius Laenas, 118

Population of Rome, 9-11, 65; growth,
1 6-2 1 ; racial composition, 279
See also Census

Porta Capena, first region of Rome,
*4 IS

Portico of the Argonauts, 249; of
Europa, 249; of a Hundred Pillars,

249, 250; of Minudus, 202; of Oc-

tavia, 249; of Pompey, 249
Portrayal of character, in rhetoric, 115
Portus, port of Rome, 176
Praefectus praetorio, 187; urbi, 53, 57,

187, 236, 252; vigUum, 48, 57
Praeficae, 49
Praeneste, 13, 32
Praenestine Gate, 15, 237
Praetor kastarius, 188; peregrinus, 187;

urbanus, 187

Praetorian Guard, 109, 126, 238
Praxiteles, statues of Cupid and Venus,

250
Precincts of Rome, 10-15

See also Regions
Priapus, 131

Priesthood, highest posts held by Sen-
atorial Order, 53
Princeps, the, First of the Senate and

the People, incarnation of gods,

guardian of the auspices, 54; descent

to earth, 127

Priscilla, catacomb of, 138
Prisoners of 'war, 61-62
Probate case, 190
Procne and Tcreus, 228
Proculeia, Martial's anecdote about, 21 z
Procurators, 64, 237; salary, 72
Professions, liberal, 185
Prometheus, 119, 231
Proscriptions of 43 B.C., 118
Provincials, effect of immigration on the

social plane, 55, 130
Ptolemy Physkon, 108
Public assistance. See Congiaria; Doles;

Sportulae; Annona
Public funds, subsidy for festivals of

the gods, 122

Publilia, wife of Cicero, 97
Pubtilius Syrus, 230
Publishers, the rise of, 193, 194
Pulvinar, 209, 211, 214, 235, 240
Punic War, First, 145
Punishment, graded to type of citizen,

52-53; in the schoolroom, 105, 107
Puteal of Curtius, 187
Puteal Libonis, 187
Pydna, battle of, 146
Pylades I, pantomime-actor, 210, 226,

227, 228
Pylades II, 229
Pyrrhus," Roman* wars against, 145

336

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

QUADRATUS, Apologia, 138
Quartan Fever, an oration by
Favorinus of Aries in honor of,
120

Quinquatrus, festival in honor of
Minerva, 105, 204

Quintilian, on the qualifications of a
child's nurse, 104; the tutor, 104; on
schoolroom punishment, 105; teach-
ing the alphabet, 105; improvement
in teachers, 106; most famous of pro-
fessors, subsidized by the imperial
regime, 108; weakening of Hellenic
influence, no; Institutio Oratoria,
1 1 6, 194; feeling towards elaborate
hairdressing, 158; crowding of law
courts, -i 88; on the pantomime-actor,
227

Quirinal Hill, 6, 7, 9; Martial's quarters,

26, 28, 55 ; Vespasian, 28 ; thermae of
Const an tine, 255

RACES. See Chariot races; Foot
races

Racilia, wife of Cincinnatus, 155
Racine, AtkaUe, 224
Rameses II, obelisk of, 214
Reading, the teaching of, 104, 112

See also Recitationes
RecitationeSf 193-201; the curse of
literature, 195, 200, 201; building of
the Athenaeum in Rome, 195-196
Red Sea, the route from the Far East,

169

Refugees from Asia and Egypt, first
professors of grammar and rhetoric,
1 08

Regia, the, residence of Julius Caesar,
27; sacrifice of the "October Horse,"
207

Regio Transtiberina. See Transtiberina
Rcgionarics, 285, 286 ; record of vici, 16 ;
population, 16, 17, 20; jorica, 41;
loca at the Circus Maximus, 214-215;
at the amphitheatre, 235; source ma-
terial, 286; used by Zacharias of
Mytelene, 18, 19, 286, 287
Notitia, begun 334 A.D., 16, 285;
dwelling-houses, domus and in-
sulae, 18, 19, 20, 23, 28; vagaries
of the copyist, 19
Cwriosum, 357 A.D., 16, 285
Regions (administrative) of the Urbs,

285; position and extent, 14, 15;
census of the vici, 16; other streets,
45; described in Regionaries, 285

Regulus, advocate, 79, 132

Relationship, agnatio and cognatie, 76

Religion, of slaves, 57; decay of tra-
ditional religion, 121-127; Oriental
mysticism, 121, 128-136; festivals,
122, 206-209; respect for religious
forms, but personal scepticism, 123-
125; imperial divinity, 126, 208;
Greek influence, 128, 129

Rentals of houses and apartments, 43,

44

Republican Wall, 12-13, 28, 45

Research, Roman attitude towards dis-
interested, 113

Rex sacrorum, chariot of the, 49

Rhetores Latini, compelled to stop
teaching, 108

Rhetoric, study of, 104, 107-109; use
of Latin interdicted, 108; impractical
rhetoric, 114-121; Greek rhetoric,
115; forced into a strait jacket of six
parts, 115; falsification of history,
117-120

Rhetorica ad Herennium, 108

Rhodes, 107

Ricci, Corrado, excavations, 3, 6

Roads, enumerated in Regionaries f 286

Robigalia, festival of the, 204

Romanus, Pliny's letter to his friend,
124

Roscius of Ameria, 48

Rostovtzeff, M, x, 173

Royal Laws. See Twelve Tables

Ruga, Sp. Carvilius, 95

Rutilus, 58

SABINA, wife of Hadrian, 85, 100
Sabine country, 272
Sabratha, Tripoli, 176, 223
Saepta lulia, 182, 184; in the Campus

Martius, 249

Saint Augustine, 30, no, 252
Saint Jerome, Chronicle, census of

Rome, 17
Saint Monica, 30
Saint Paul, Epistles, greetings in domo

Caesaris, 137
Saint Peter, statue on the Column of

Trajan, 5, 7; "Chair of St. Peter," 35
Salarian Gate, 15

INDEX

337

Salii, dance of the, 204

Sallust, married to Terentia, Cicero's
divorced wife, 97; governor of the
province of Africa, 113; De BeUo
lurgurthino, 113

Saltus Burunitanus, 64

Salvation, idea of, spread to religious
foundations, 134, 135, 139
See also Collegium Salutare

Salvius lulianus, 84

Samnites, 237, 240

San Pietro, excavation of a cess trench,
40

Sardinia, shipment of 4,000 Jews by
Tiberius to, 136; ship outfitters, 175

Saturn, conjunctions of, 132

Saturnalia, 204, 224, 251 ; gifts, 35, 69,
172; gambling allowed, 253

Scepticism of .Juvenal and his con-
temporaries, 123

Schola, use of chairs, 35; meeting place
of a guild or college, 35

Scholars and teachers supported by the
State, 104

Scipio Aemilianus, 160

Scorpus, a charioteer, 219; on his death,
219-220

Scribonianus, revolt of, 86

Sculpture, .Roman, use of brilliant
colors, 6; renaissance of Attic art
under Hadrian, in

Scyros, 228

Secundus, book publisher, 194

Secundus, P. Pomponius, 223

Selius, 249

Sclla curulis, 35
See also Curule

Selurus, the bandit, 243

Semitism, Stoic debt to, 128

Senatorial Order, armies mobilized
against the democratic government of
Rome, 17; one of the orders of the
honestiores, 53; vir clarissimus, 53; ,
headed by the emperor, 54; compels
Nerva to adopt Trajan, 55 ; made up
of Romans and provincials, 56, 66;
senatorial families, 61; subserviency
to "slave" cabinet, 62; assassination
of Domitian, 63; decree of imperial
divinity, 135; heavy duties of a sen-
ator, 185, 191, 192; seats at the
circus, 214; arch consecrated by the
Senate to Titus' victory, 215; votes

won by spectacular scenes at the
amphitheatre, and law passed dis-
qualifying any magistrate so elected,
231; Senate participation in the
Neronia, 244

Senatus-consttlta, on the treatment of
slaves, 57; confirming laws against
gambling, 251

Senatus consultum Orpkitianum, right
of children to inherit from the
mother, 76

Scnatus consultum Tcrtullianum, ad-
mits a mother's right under certain
conditions to inherit from her son,
76

Seneca, champion of human rights of
slaves, 57; Nero's fatal command, 85-
86 ; on divorce, 100 ; treatises included
in the curriculum, HI; Roman
"time," 148; condemnation of his
writings by Caligula, 200; munera
sine missione, 243, 246; Campus
Martius, 249; on the temptation of
dives, 253; source of information on
the court and nobility, 278

Seneca the Elder, teacher of rhetoric,
116; suasoriac, 116, 117, 118, 120

Septicius Clarus, 273

Septimius Severus, recipients of the
congiarium, 16; survey register of
the Urbs, 23-24; Insula of Felicula,
25; cadastral survey, 31; born in
Tripoli, 56; recasts law against
adultery, 95; thermae of Antoninus,
255; restoration of tempium sacrae
urbis, 285

Serapis, 129

Seres,- 169, 174

Servi, 56; conspirators against Domi-
tian, 63; servi atrienses, indoor serv-
ants, 69
See also Slaves

Servian Walls, 24

Servius, commentator, 112

Servius Tullius, 11, 12

Seven Hills of Rome, 46

Sewers and sewage, 39
See 'also Cloacae

Sextia, wife of Aemilius Scaums, 85

Shaving, a religious right, 160, 161

Ship outfitting, 60, 181

Shows and spectacles, x, 202-247

Silk caravans from China, 169

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Silverware, usual Saturnalian gift, 35,
172

Slaves, considered in estimating popu-
lation of Rome, z8, 65; water-car-
riers, 38; night attendants, 47; res
mancipi, 52; humanity displayed to-
wards slaves, 56; slavery and manu-
mission, 56-61; epitaphs, 57, 70, 72;
replenishment through the wars, 61-
62, 101; Roman reverses and in-
vasions, and drying up of slave
sources, 62; ineligible for grain dis-
tribution, 65; suffix -Por added to
owner's name, designation of a slave,
68 ; growth in number per household,
68-69 5 testamentary manumission,
70; categories of slaves by name of
specialty, 70-71; concubinage, 101-
102; tutors, guardians, and servants
of children, 104; tale of a slave boy
and the toga praetexta, 117; col-
legium salvtare, 135; cura cor ports,
161, 184; duties to the pair onus, 172;
place at the circus, 235; impressment
into gladiatorial troupes forbidden,
246

Slums, 43, 44

Social discipline, 51

Social values, confusion of, 61-65

Social War, 91 B.C., 17

Social classes, 52-75

Solaria, 147

Solstice, 149-150

Sosii, the, book publishers, 194

Spain, senators from, 56; oil exports to
Rome, 176; pickles, 272

Spanish Italica, birthplace of Trajan
and Hadrian, 56

Spes, goddess of hope, 57

Spice market, 7

Spina, 209, 213

Sponsion* s, 220, 240; repressive legis-
lation, 251

Sportulae, 171, 172, 220
See also Doles; Congiaria

Stadium, the, 202

Stationes arcariorum Caesarianorum, 7

Statius, Silvae t x, 167; Tkebais, in,
199; a confession of faith in the value
of personal religion, 134 ; Christianity,
136

Stephanus, participant in murder of
Domitian, 62 ; baths of, 264

Stock exchange, 73, 177

Stoicism, influence on Roman law, 83;
debt to Semitism, 128; divination,
133; Marcus Aurelius' effort to re-
duce importance of the munus, 246

Stolata, 123

Strabo, on the height of the houses of
Tyre, 25

Streets and traffic, 44-51; fire hazard,
45; categories of, 45-46; Caesar's
order regarding clean streets, 46 ; pav-
ing, 46-47 ; hucksters, and Domitian's
edict, 47, 48; lighting, 47; dangers of
night travel, 47-48; Caesar's decree
regarding night traffic, 49-50

Strigil, 261

Suasoriae, 116; Seneca the Elder, 116;
artificiality, 1x7

Sub-letting, practice of, 43, 44, 165

Subura, the, 6, 27, 207

Suetonius, Caesar's order regarding
census forms, 19; forfeits "Ministry
of the Pen" for his disrespect for
Hadrian's wife, 85; fuasoriac, 117;
belief in dreams, 132; Christianity,
136, 137; details of Augustus' ca-
prices, 154; the morning rising of
Vespasian, 156; last hours of Domi-
tian, 156; fastidiousness of Julius
Caesar, 157 ; biographical character of
histories as source material, 278

Sulla, 233; release of portion of Cam-
pus Martius for dwelling purposes,
13; growth of population, 16; dark
streets, 48; marries Valeria, sister of
Hortensius, 96, 217; clean shaven,
1 60; pretensions to divinity, 204;
Greek games, 244

Sulpicia, poems of, 88; wife of Calenus,
165

Sun-dial of Catena, captured in Sicily,
145; set up in Rome, 145-146

Sun-dial of Meton, 144

Sun-dials, 145-150; used in setting up
the water-clock, 146-147; obelisk of
Montecitorio, gnomon of a giant dial,
147; Trimalchio's fantastic idea of a
tomb, 148; pocket dials (solaria),
147
See also Horologium; Clepsydra

Synthesis, 155, 265

Syria, legionaries, ix; haste of Syrians
to assume citizenship, 55; religious

INDEX

339

influence, 129; Roman campaign
against, 146; glass from, 176
Syrtes, the, 161; ivory from, 176

rABERNAE, market booths, Tra-
jan's market, 6; ground floor of
humbler insidae, 26, 44; description,
26; entrance to upper floors, 27, 29;
single room used to house tenant's
family as well as his wares, 27;
crowds, 48; allotted by Caesar to
studies, 109; horrea Galboc, 177; type
of merchant, 177; barbershops, 157

Taboos for protection of pomerium, 12

Tacitus, fire of 64 A.D., 19, 45 ; on the
choice of emperors, 54 ; the tragedy of
Seneca's wife, 85-86; loss of practical
value of rhetoric, 114, 120; scepticism,
with respect for religious rites, 123;
praetor, consul, and proconsul, 124;
Jews, 124; Germania, 124; under
Trajan, liberty and harmonious rule,
127; superstitions, 132; Christianity,
136, 137; Histories, Christian martyrs,
137; histriondUs favor, 226

Tagaste, birthplace of Saint Augustine,
no

Tali, 251

Tarentum, 145

Tarpeian Rock, 123

Tarquin the Proud, 131

Taurus, C. Statilius, 233

Taxes, replenishment of imperial purse
from the maintenance of, 68; im-
munity for primary school, 106

Teachers, State subsidy of, 104, 108;
refugee-teachers, 108; women, 181

Telesilla, 99

Teksphorus, Bishop, 138

Temple of Annona Augusta, 174;
Atargatis (Dea Syra) and Hadad,
129, 130; Athena, 119; Castor, 194;
IMS* 130, 131; Janus, 14; Jerusalem,
destroyed 70 A.D., 137; Jupiter
(Jove), 67, 123, 160, 249; Juno, 249;
Mars Ultor, 204; Minerva, 130;
Vesta, 67

Templum sacrae urbis, 12, 285

Terence, 92; works used in the school-
room, ixx; the theatre, 223, 229;
Andria, 229; Hecyra, 231

Terentia, wife of Cicero, 97

Textullian, 230; absurdity of the Val-

entinians, 25; on human sacrifice in
gladiatorial combat, 208; the Chris-
tians, 276

Terpsichore, 227

Terra Mare, 161

Testamento, manumission by, 59

Tesserae, 182, 235, 251

Textual criticism, 112

Thalamus, Nero's barber, 163

Theatre of Balbus, 222; Marcellus, 223,
234, 246; Pompey, 222, 223

Theatres, 202, 221-231; expenses paid
by the State, 203, 222 ; description of
Roman theatres, 222; too big for the
play, 223, 224; degradation of the
Roman theatre, 229; Caesar's double
theatre changeable into an arena, 233

The'denat, Abb, on cloacae and in-
sidae, 40

Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, 223

Thermae. See Baths

Thermopylae, 117

Thersites, 120

Thespiae, 250

Thracian gladiators, 237, 240

Thrasea, son-in-law of Caetina Paetus,

87

Thyestes' feast, 88, 227, 228

Tiber, the, 22, 55, 130; canalised by
Trajan, 9; Campus Martius, 13;
regio Transtiberina, 14, 15; deposi-
tary of dty sewage, 39; dancing on
the banks, festival of Anna Perenna,
122; temple to Atargatis excavated,
130

Tiberius, decrees regarding second-class
citizenship, 60; accompanied to wars
by his wife, 85; ebbing belief in im-
perial divinity, 127; banishes Egyp-
tian cults, 130 ; measures against Jews,
136; decoration of his bedchamber,
152; clean shaven, 160; decree con-
cerning literary works, 194; manipu-
lation of petitions by mass emotion,
210; misanthropy, 211; riots over
rival actors, 226; restrictions on giv-
ing a munus, 232

Tibur (Tivoli), 12, 234

Tiburtine farm, Juvenal's, 274

Tigellinus, death of, 210

Tigris, the, xox, 169

Timgad, 41

Tlridates, King of Armenia, 240

340

DAILY LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Titinius Capito, 196

Titles of nobility, 53

Titus, censor, 16, 45; imperial victory
over the Jews, 215; completion of
amphitheatre, 233; Colosseum in-
augurated, 239; combats at Cir-
cus Maximus, 240; public baths,

255

Tivoli (Tibur), 12, 234

Toga, the, 153; description and varia-
tions, 154-155; essential in a client's
attendance on his patron, 172; Au-
gustus' decree for the wearing of the
toga, 208; toga praetexta, 59, 117;
toga virilis, 160

Tonsores, barbers, 71; hairdressers, 157,
158, 159, 181; perils of attending the
wayside barber, 162 ; hours of labour,
184

Torlonia, Prince Giovanni, 177

Trade, extent and variety, 178
See also Corporations

Traffic congestion, 2, 48-49; decree con-
cerning night traffic, 49-51

Tragedy, transformed to opera and to
the ballet forms, 224, 229; born of
Greek tragedy, 225; decline, 225

Trajan, x, 21, 28, 38, 42, 44, 64, 65,
67, 77, 91, 124, 147, 167, 171, 221, 227,
245, 278; group of buildings, 4;
equestrian statue in Forum, 4, 7;
death, 5, 6; Trajan's inscription on
the Column, 6; description of the
group, 7; renovation of the Urbs, 9;
restriction on height of buildings, 25-
26; policy of the Urbs, 33; night
traffic, 51; feeling with regard to im-
perial divinity, 54; loyalty of the
Legion, 54; adopted by Nerva, 55;
born in. Spanish Italica, 56; induce-
ment to set up bakeries, 61, 181 ; cam-
paigns, 61, 72; cabinet recruited from
freedmen and slaves, 62; confiscates
treasure of Decebalus, 68; simple
tastes, 71 ; punishment of a father for
treatment of his son, 78; Trajan's
wife's loyalty, 85, 100; decree punish-

ing adultery, 94; victories, 101, 169;
generosity to education, 109; recom-
mends Pliny to the College of Augurs,
125 ; proclaims divinity of his adopted
father Nerva, 126; no especial claims
to personal divinity, 127; Panegyric,

127; hairdressing, 158; dean shaven,
160; Portus of Trajan, 177; tribunal
at Centumcellae, 189, 190; presides at
Senate High Court in trial of Clas-
sicus, 192; interest in the Colosseum,
212 ; Circus Maximus, 214, 215 ; caters
to circus tastes of his subjects, 222;
restrictions on actors, 229; Amphi-
theatre Castrense, 234; Naumachia
Vaticana, 236; slaughter of animals,
239; release of surviving gladiators,
242; mimic combats, 246; thermae as
memorial to Licinius Sura, 255;
modesty of his court, 276
See also Aqua Traiana; Basilica Ul-
pia; Bibliothecae Ulpiae; Column of
Trajan ; Forum of Trajan ; Market of
Trajan

Transtiberina (Trastevere), fourteenth
region of Rome, 14; street hawkers,
48

Trastevere (Transtiberina), 14

Transylvanian mines, ix

Trebula, cheeses of, 272

Tribunicia potestas, 18

Trimalchio, wealthy freedman, hero of
Petronius' satirical romance, elaborate
dining-room, 30; bed of solid silver,
34; guests who lost their way home,
48, 183; estimate of his estate, 68;
vast number of slaves, 69; gluttony
of his mistress Fortunata, 93; super-
stitions, 132; dining-room clock, 147-
148 ; instructions as to tomb and sun-
dial, 148; golden pyx, 160; sleeping
arrangements, 165; present of a
Mromaxium to his favorite, 249 ; at
the bath, 259, 260, 261, 262; dinners,
265, 267-268, 269, 271; table man-
ners, 271

Tripoli (Leptis Magna), 56, 223; mo-
saic, 243

Tropes, 112

Tryphon, 194

Tunica, clothing, 8z, 153-154

Tuscany, Pliny's estates in, 56; marbles
of, 176

Tuscus, race-horse, 219

Twelve Tables, width of streets, 45; a
mother's inability to inherit from her
intestate son, 76; father's right of life
and death over his children, 77 ; right
to divorce a wife without appeal, 95 ;

INDEX

34i

part of school curriculum, HI; on
the conduct of civil suits, 186
Tyre, height of houses, 25

T TCALEGON, Juvenal's, 33
\J Ulpian, on fires in Rome, 33 ; mis-
siles dropped from chamber windows,
43,43

Ulysses, 113

Ummidia Quadratilla, 104

Urine, industrial use of, 42

Usus. See Marriage.

VALENTINIANS, 25, 26
Valeria, wife of Sulla, 96, 217
Valerianus, Q. Pollius, book publisher,

194
Vallis Murcia, site of Circus Maximus,

213

Varus, defeat of, 160

Vatican Hill, Circus Gai, 213

Vegetius, on literacy among new re-
cruits, 106

Vehicles, regulations governing use of,
within Urbs 49-5 1 279

Veii, 12

Velabrum, the, 13, 215

Velia, the, 234

Venationes, 238, 239, 244, 246

Venus, 95, 135* 228

Vertumnus, statue of the god, 194

Vespasian, 28; censor, 16; licensed
rights to sewage, 40, 42; aggregate
length of streets, 45; loyalty of the
Legion, 54, 55; exile of philosophers,
109; jest about his divinity as em-
peror, 126; Christianity* *37; early
waking hours, 152, 156; congestion of
the courts, 187; reduces number of
holidays, 205; Flavian amphitheatre,
212, 233; an original forma urbis
Romae, 285

Vestals, the, 49, 81, 207

Vestalia, festival. of, 204

Vestini, cheese of, 272

Vestis. See Clothing

Vesuvius, eruption of 79 A.D., x, 23

Via Appia, 45, 46, 284; Biberatica, 7,
23, 26, 35; dei Cappellari, 29; dei
Cerchi 23; dei Tribunali, 29; dell'
Abbondanza, 253; delle Finanze, 12;
del Mare, 222; Labicana, 45, 237;

Lata, .seventh region of Rome, 14 ;
Latina, 45, 177; Nova, 45; Ostiensis,
45; Sacra, 45, 187, 207

Victor, race-horse, 219

Vicus, separate administration, 16;
census, 16; enumerated in Region-
aries, 16; insulae per vicus, 28; con-
gestion, and decree of Caesar, 49

Vicus Tuscus, 177, 194

Vienne in Gallia Narbonensis, 245

Villa Ludovisi, 27

Vinalia, festival of the, 204

Vipasca, imperial mines, 106, 258

Virgil, the Acntid, 33, 113; poems of, 73,
91; in the schoolroom, HI; reminis-
cences of, 199

Virro, Juvenal's, 270

Vitalis, pantomime-actor, 230

Vitellius, interest in factioncs of chariot
races, 221; hour of dinner, 264

Vitruvius, on height of Roman houses,
25 ; law on thickness of walls, 31 ; de-
scription of water-clock, 147

Vivarium, 237

Volcanalia, festival of Vulcan, 204

Volsinii, 32

Volumen, 9; at th_ booksellers, 194;
harmed by public readings, 200-201;
chests for the protection of, 262

Vulcanus, fish sacrifice to, 207

WALTZING, catalogue of corpo-
rations, 178, 180

Water-clock, 146, 147, 148
See Clepsydra; Horologium ex aqua

Water system, aqueducts, municipal
channels and private conduits, 38;
lack of household system, 32, 39

Weapons, of gladiators, 237, 240

Wells, 38

Wills, under Hadrian, women permitted
to draft, 84

Windows, lack of glass, 35, 36

Wine, storehouses, 7; wine from Italy,
176; used at commissatio, 269

Women, right to make wills under
Hadrian, 84 ; guardianship, 84 ; stand-
ing during empire, 85; loyalty as
confidantes of their husbands, 85-88;
gallery of accomplished women, 88-
90; feminism and demoralization, 90
95; and marriage, 164-166; clothing,
164; toilet of, 166-170; daytime

342 DAILY LIFE EN ANCIENT ROME

hours, 171, 182; in professions and "yERXES, 1x7

occupations, 180-183 * -A.

See also Betrothal; Marriage; Matron
Workmen's living quarters, 180

Writing, in the school curriculum, 104, /7 ACHARIAS of Mytclene, Region-

105-106 M-J arics used by, 18, 19, 286, 287