Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero by W. Warde Fowler

W >> W. Warde Fowler >> Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

Let us now descend from the Janiculum, and try to imagine ourselves in
the Rome of Cicero's time, say in the last year of the Republic, 50
B.C., as we walk through the busy haunts of this crowded population.
We will not delay on the right bank of the Tiber, which had probably
long been the home of tradesmen in their gilds,[17] and where farther
down the rich were buying land for gardens[18] and suburban villas;
but cross by the Pons Aemilius, with the Tiber island on our left, and
the opening of the Cloaca maxima, which drained the water from the
Forum, facing us, as it still does, a little to our right. We find
ourselves close to the Forum Boarium, an open cattle-market, with
shops (tabernae) all around it, as we know from Livy's record of
a fire here, which burnt many of these shops and much valuable
merchandise.[19] Here by the river was in fact the market in the
modern sense of the word; the Forum Romanum, which we are making for,
was now the centre of political and judicial business, and of social
life.

We might go direct to the great Forum, up the Velabrum, or valley
(once a marsh), right in front of us between the Capitol on the left
and the Palatine on the right. But as we look in the latter direction,
we are attracted by a long low erection almost filling the space
between the Palatine and the Aventine, and turning in that direction
we find ourselves at the lower end of the Circus Maximus, which as
yet is the chief place of amusement of the Roman people. Two famous
shrines, one at each end of it, remind us that we are on historic
ground. At the end where we stand, and where are the _carceres_, the
starting-point for the competing chariots, was the Ara maxima of
Hercules, which prompted Evander to tell the tale of Cacus to his
guest; at the other end was the subterranean altar of Consus the
harvest-god, with which was connected another tale, that of the rape
of the Sabines. All the associations of this quarter point to the
agricultural character of the early Romans; both cattle and harvesting
have their appropriate myth. But nothing is visible here now, except
the pretty little round temple of a later date, which is believed to
have been that of Portunus, the god of the landing-place from the
river.[20]

The Circus, some six hundred yards long, at the time of Cicero was
still mainly a wooden erection in the form of a long parallelogram,
with shops or booths sheltering under its sides; we shall visit it
again when dealing with the public entertainments.[21] Above it on the
right is the Aventine hill, a densely populated quarter of the lower
classes, crowned with the famous temple of Diana, a deity specially
connected with the plebs.[22] The Clivus Patricius led up to this
temple; down this slope, on the last day of his life, Gaius Gracchus
had hurried, to cross the river and meet his murderers in the grove of
Furrina, of which the site has lately been discovered. If we were to
ascend it we should see, on the river-bank below and beyond it,
the warehouses and granaries for storing the corn for the city's
food-supply, which Gracchus had been the first to extend and organise.

But to ascend the Aventine would take us out of our course. Pushing
on to the farther end of the Circus, where the chariots turned at the
_metae_, we may pause a moment, for in front of us is a gate in the
city wall, the Porta Capena, by which most travellers from the south,
using the via Appia or the via Latina, would enter the city.[23]
Outside the wall there was then a small temple of Mars, from which the
procession of the Equites started each year on the Ides of Quinctilis
(July) on its way to the Capitol, by the same route that we are about
to take. We shall also be following the steps of Cicero on the happy
day September 4, 57 B.C., when he returned from exile. "On my arrival
at the Porta Capena," he writes to Atticus, "the steps of the temples
were already crowded from top to bottom by the populace; they showed
their congratulations by the loudest applause, and similar crowds and
applause followed me right up to the Capitol, and in the Forum and on
the Capitol itself there was again a wonderful throng" (_ad Att._ iv.
1).

We are now, as the map will show, at the south-eastern angle of the
Palatine, of which, in fact, we are making the circuit;[24] a and here
we turn sharp to the left, by what is now the via di San Gregorio,
along a narrow valley or dip between the Palatine and Caelian
hills--the latter the first we have met of the "hills" which are not
isolated, but spurs of the plain of the Campagna. The Caelian need not
detain us; it was thickly populated towards the end of the Republican
period, but was not a very fashionable quarter, nor one of the chief
haunts of social life. It held many of those large lodging-houses
(insulae) of which we shall hear more in the next chapter; one of
these stood so high that it interfered with the view of the augur
taking the auspices on the Capitol, and was ordered to be pulled
down.[25] Going straight on reach the north-eastern angle of the
Palatine, where now stands the arch of Constantine, with the Colosseum
beyond it, and turning once more to the left, we begin to ascend a
gentle slope which will take us to a ridge between the Palatine and
the Esquiline[26]--another of the spurs of the plain beyond--known by
the name of the Velia. And now we are approaching the real heart of
the city.

At this point starts the Sacra via,[27] so called because it is the
way to the most sacred spots of the ancient Roman city,--the temples
of Vesta and the Penates, and the Regia, once the dwelling of the Rex,
now of the Pontifex Maximus; and it will lead us, in a walk of about
eight hundred yards, through the Forum to the Capitol. It varied in
breadth, and took by no means a straight course, and later on was
crowded, cramped, and deflected by numerous temples and other
buildings; but as yet, so far as we can guess, it was fairly free and
open. We follow it and ascend the slope till we come to a point known
as the _summa sacra via_, just where the arch of Titus now stands, and
where then was the temple of Jupiter Stator, and where also a shrine
of the public Penates and another of the Lares (of which no trace is
now left) warn us that we are close on the penetralia of the Roman
State. Here a way to the left leads up to the Palatine the residence
then of many of the leading men of Rome, Cicero being one of them.

But our attention is not long arrested by these objects; it is soon
riveted on the Forum below and in front of us, to which the Sacred Way
leads by a downward slope, the Clivus sacer. At the north-western end
it is closed in by the Capitoline hill, with its double summit, the
arx to the right, and the great temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva
facing south-east towards the Aventine. It is of this view that
Virgil must have been thinking when he wrote of the happy lot of the
countryman who

nec ferrea iura
insanumque forum aut populi tabularia vidit.[28]

For the Forum is crowded with bustling human figures, intent on the
business of politics, or of the law-courts (ferrea iura), or of
money-making, and just beyond it, immediately under the Capitol, are
the record-offices (tabularia) of the Roman Empire. The whole Sacra
via from this point is crowded; here Horace a generation later was to
meet his immortal "bore," from whom he only escaped when the "ferrea
iura" laid a strong hand on that terrible companion. Down below, at
the entrance to the Forum by the arch of Fabius (fornix Fabiana), the
jostling was great. "If I am knocked about in the crowd at the arch,"
says Cicero, to illustrate a point in a speech of this time, "I do not
accuse some one at the top of the via Sacra, but the man who jostles
me."[29]

The Forum--for from this point we can take it all in, geologically and
historically--lies in a deep hollow, to the original level of which
excavation has now at last reached. This hollow was formed by a stream
which came down between the Esquiline and the Quirinal beyond it,
and made its exit towards the river on the other side by way of the
Velabrum. As the city extended itself, amalgamating with another
community on the Quirinal, this hollow became a common meeting-place
and market, and the stream was in due time drained by that Cloaca
which we saw debouching into the Tiber near the bridge we crossed.
The upper course of this stream, between Esquiline and Quirinal, is a
densely populated quarter known as the Argiletum, and higher up as the
Subura,[30] where artisans and shops abounded. The lower part of its
course, where it has become an invisible drain, is also a crowded
street, the vicus Tuscus, leading to the Velabrum, and so to our
starting-point at the Forum Boarium.

Let us now descend the Clivus sacer, crossing to the right-hand side
of the slope, which the via Sacra now follows, and reach the Forum by
the fornix Fabiana. Close by to our left is the round temple of
Vesta, where the sacred fire of the State is kept ever burning by its
guardians, the Vestal Virgins, and here too is their dwelling, the
Atrium Vestae, and also that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose
potestas they were; these three buildings, then insignificant to look
at, constituted the religious focus of the oldest Rome.[31] A little
farther again to the left is the temple of Castor and the spring of
Juturna, lately excavated, where the Twins watered their steeds after
the battle of the lake Regillus. In front of us we can see over the
heads of the crowd the Rostra at the farther end of the Forum, where
an orator is perhaps addressing a crowd (_contio_) on some political
question of the moment, and giving some occupation to the idlers
in the throng; and to the right of the Rostra is the Comitium
or assembling-place of the people, with the Curia, the ancient
meeting-hall of the senate. In Cicero's day the mere shopman had been
got rid of from the Forum, and his place is taken by the banker and
money-lender, who do their business in _tabernae_ stretching in rows
along both sides of the open space. Much public business, judicial and
other, is done in the Basilicae,--roofed halls with colonnades, of
which there are already five, and a new one is arising on the south
side, of which the ground-plan, as it was extended soon afterwards by
Julius Caesar, is now completely laid bare. But it is becoming evident
that the business of the Empire cannot be much longer crowded into
this narrow space of the Forum, which is only about two hundred yards
long by seventy; and the next two generations will see new Fora
laid out larger and more commodious, by Julius and Augustus in the
direction of the Quirinal.

Now making our way towards the Capitol, we pass the famous temple or
rather gate of the double-headed Janus, standing at the entrance
to the Forum from the Argiletum and the Porta Esquilina; then the
Comitium and Curia (which last was burnt by the mob in 52 B.C., at the
funeral of Clodius), and reach the foot of the Clivus Capitolinus,
just where was (and is) the ancient underground prison, called
Tullianum, from the old word for a spring (_tullus_), the scene of the
deaths of Jugurtha and many noble captives, and of the Catilinarian
conspirators on December 5, 63. Here the via Sacra turns, in front of
the temple of Concordia, to ascend the Capitol. Behind this temple,
extending farther under the slope, is the Tabularium, already
mentioned, which is still much as it was then; and below us to the
south is the temple of Saturnus, the treasury (_aerarium_) of the
Roman people. Thus at this end of the Forum, under the Capitol,
are the whole set of public offices, facing the ancient religious
buildings around the Vesta temple at the other end.

The way now turns again to the right, and reaches the depression
between the two summits of the Capitoline hill. Leaving the arx on the
left, we reach by a long flight of steps the greatest of all Roman
temples, placed on a long platform with solid substructures of
Etruscan workmanship, part of which is still to be seen in the garden
of the German Embassy. The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, with
his companions Juno and Minerva, was in a special sense the religious
centre of the State and its dominion. Whatever view he might take of
the gods and their cults, every Roman instinctively believed that this
great Jupiter, above all other deities, watched over the welfare of
Rome, and when a generation later Virgil placed the destiny of Rome's
mythical hero in the hands of Jupiter, every Roman recognised in this
his own inherited conviction. Here, on the first day of their office,
the higher magistrates offered sacrifice in fulfilment of the vows of
their predecessors, and renewed the same vows themselves. The consul
about to leave the city for a foreign war made it his last duty to
sacrifice here, and on his return he deposited here his booty. Here
came the triumphal procession along the Sacred Way, the conquering
general attired and painted like the statue of the god within the
temple; and upon the knees of the statue he placed his wreath of
laurel, rendering up to the deity what he had himself deigned to
bestow. Here too, from a pedestal on the platform, a statue of Jupiter
looked straight over the Forum,[32] the Curia, and the Comitium; and
Cicero could declare from the Rostra, and know that in so declaring he
was touching the hearts of his hearers, that on that same day on which
it had first been so placed, the machinations of Catiline and his
conspirators had been detected.[33] "Ille, ille Iupiter restitit;
ille Capitolium, ille haec templa, ille cunctam urbem, ille vos omnes
salvos esse voluit."

The temple had been destroyed by fire in the time of Sulla, and its
restoration was not as yet finally completed at the time of our
imaginary walk.[34] It faced towards the river and the Aventine, i.e.
south-east, according to the rules of augural lore, like all Roman
public buildings of the Republican period. From the platform on which
it stands we look down on the Forum Boarium, from which we started,
connected with the Forum by the Velabrum and the vicus Tuscus; and
more to the right below us is the Campus Martius, with access to the
city by that Porta Carmentalis which Evander showed to Aeneas. This
spacious exercise-ground of Roman armies is already beginning to be
built upon; in fact the Circus Flaminius has been there for more than
a century and a half, and now the new theatre of Pompeius, the first
stone theatre in Rome, rises beyond it towards the Vatican hill. But
there is ample space left; for it is nearly a mile from the Capitol
to that curve of the Tiber above which the Church of St. Peter now
stands; and on this large expanse, at the present day, the greater
part of a population of nearly half a million is housed. I do not
propose to take the reader farther. We have been through the heart of the
city, as it was at the close of the Republican period, and from the
platform of the great temple we can see all else that we need to keep
in mind in these chapters.

CHAPTER II

THE LOWER POPULATION (PLEBS URBANA)

The walk we have been taking has led us only through the heart of
the city, in which were the public buildings, temples, basilicas,
porticos, etc., of which we hear so much in Latin literature. It was
on the hills which are spurs of the plain beyond, and which look down
over the Forum and the Campus Martius, the Caelian, Esquiline, and
Quirinal, with the hollows lying between them, and also on the
Aventine by the river, that the mass of the population lived. The most
ancient fortification of completed Rome, the so-called Servian wall
and _agger_, enclosed a singularly large space, larger, we are told,
than the walls of any old city in Italy;[35] it is likely that a
good part of this space was long unoccupied by houses, and served to
shelter the cattle of the farmers living outside, when an enemy was
threatening attack. But in Cicero's time, as to-day, all this space
was covered with dwellings; and as the centre of the city came to be
occupied with public buildings, erected on sites often bought from
private owners, the houses were gradually pushed out along the roads
beyond the walls. Exactly the same process has been going on for
centuries in the University city of Oxford where the erection of
colleges gradually absorbed the best sites within the old walls, so
that many of the dwelling-houses are now quite two miles from the
centre of the city. The fact is attested for Rome by the famous
municipal law of Julius Caesar, which directs that for a mile outside
the gates every resident is to look after the repair of the road in
front of his own house.[36]

As a general rule, the heights in Rome were occupied by the better
class of residents, and the hollows by the lower stratum of
population. This was not indeed entirely so, for poor people no doubt
lived on the Aventine, the Caelian, and parts of the Esquiline. But
the Palatine was certainly an aristocratic quarter; the Carinae, the
height looking down on the hollow where the Colosseum now stands, had
many good houses, e.g. those of Pompeius and of Quintus Cicero, and
we know of one man of great wealth, Atticus, who lived on the
Quirinal.[37] It was in the narrow hollows leading down from these
heights to the Forum, such as the Subura between Esquiline and
Quirinal, and the Argiletum farther down near the Forum, that we meet
in literature what we may call the working classes; the Argiletum, for
example, was famous both for its booksellers and its shoemakers,[38]
and the Subura is the typical street of tradesmen. And no doubt the
big lodging-houses in which the lower classes dwelt were to be found
in all parts of Rome, except the strictly aristocratic districts like
the Palatine.

The whole free population may roughly be divided into three classes,
of which the first two, constituting together the social aristocracy,
were a mere handful in number compared with the third. At the top of
the social order was the governing class, or _ordo senatorius_: then
came the _ordo equester_, comprising all the men of business, bankers,
money-lenders, and merchants (_negotiatores_) or contractors for the
raising of taxes and many other purposes (_publicani_). Of these two
upper classes and their social life we shall see something in later
chapters; at present we are concerned with the "masses," at least
320,000 in number,[39] and the social problems which their existence
presented, or ought to have presented, to an intelligent Roman
statesman of Cicero's time.

Unfortunately, just as we know but little of the populous districts of
Rome, so too we know little of its industrial population. The upper
classes, including all writers of memoirs and history, were not
interested in them. There was no philanthropist, no devoted inquirer
like Mr. Charles Booth, to investigate their condition or try to
ameliorate it. The statesman, if he troubled himself about them at
all, looked on them as a dangerous element of society, only to be
considered as human beings at election time; at all other times merely
as animals that had to be fed, in order to keep them from becoming an
active peril. The philosopher, even the Stoic, whose creed was by far
the most ennobling in that age, seems to have left the dregs of the
people quite out of account; though his philosophy nominally took the
whole of mankind into its cognisance, it believed the masses to be
degraded and vicious, and made no effort to redeem them.[40] The Stoic
might profess the tenderest feeling towards all mankind, as Cicero
did, when moved by some recent reading of Stoic doctrine; he might say
that "men were born for the sake of men, that each should help the
other," or that "Nature has inclined us to love men, for this is the
foundation of all law";[41] but when in actual social or political
contact with the same masses Cicero could only speak of them with
contempt or disgust. It is a melancholy and significant fact that what
little we do know from literature about this class is derived from the
part they occasionally played in riots and revolutionary disorders.
It is fortunately quite impossible that the historian of the future
should take account of the life of the educated and wealthy only; but
in the history of the past and especially of the last three centuries
B.C., we have to contend with this difficulty, and can only now and
then find side-lights thrown upon the great mass of mankind. The
crime, the crowding, the occasional suffering from starvation and
pestilence, in the unfashionable quarters of such a city as Rome,
these things are hidden from us, and rarely even suggested by the
histories we commonly read.

The three questions to which I wish to make some answer in this
chapter are: (1) how was this population housed? (2) how was it
supplied with food and clothing? and (3) how was it employed?

1. It was of course impossible in a city like Rome that each man,
married or unmarried, should have his own house; this is not so even
in the great majority of modern industrial towns, though we in England
are accustomed to see our comparatively well-to-do artisans dwelling
in cottages spreading out into the country. At Rome only the wealthy
families lived in separate houses (_domus_), about which we shall have
something to say in another chapter. The mass of the population lived,
or rather ate and slept (for southern climates favour an out-of-door
life), in huge lodging-houses called islands (_insulae_), because they
were detached from other buildings, and had streets on all sides of
them, as islands have water.[42] These _insulae_ were often three or
four stories high;[43] the ground-floor was often occupied by shops,
kept perhaps by some of the lodgers, and the upper floors by single
rooms, with small windows looking out on the street or into an
interior court. The common name for such a room was _coenaculum_, or
dining-room, a word which seems to be taken over from the _coenaculum_
of private houses, i.e. an eating-room on the first floor, where there
was one. Once indeed we hear of an _aedicula_, in an insula, which was
perhaps the equivalent of a modern "flat"; it was inhabited by a young
bachelor of good birth, M. Caelius Rufus, the friend of Cicero, and
in this case the insula was probably one of a superior kind.[44]
The common lodging-house must have been simply a rabbit-warren, the
crowded inhabitants using their rooms only for eating and sleeping,
while for the most part they prowled about, either idling or getting
such employment as they could, legitimate or otherwise.

In such a life there could of course have been no idea of home, or of
that simple and sacred family life which had once been the ethical
basis of Roman society.[45] When we read Cicero's thrilling language
about the loss of his own house, after his return from exile, and then
turn to think of the homeless crowds in the rabbit-warrens of Rome, we
can begin to feel the contrast between the wealth and poverty of that
day. "What is more strictly protected," he says, "by all religious
feeling, than the house of each individual citizen? Here is his altar,
his hearth, here are his Di Penates: here he keeps all the objects
of his worship and performs all his religious rites: his house is
a refuge so solemnly protected, that no one can be torn from it by
force."[46] The warm-hearted Cicero is here, as so often, dreaming
dreams: the "each individual citizen" of whom he speaks is the citizen
of his own acquaintance, not the vast majority, with whom his mind
does not trouble itself.

These insulae were usually built or owned by men of capital, and were
often called by the names of their owners. Cicero, in one of his
letters,[47] incidentally mentions that he had money thus invested;
and we are disposed to wonder whether his insulae were kept in good
repair, for in another letter he happens to tell his man of business
that shops (tabernae) belonging to him were tumbling down and
unoccupied. It is more than likely that many of the insulae were badly
built by speculators, and liable to collapse. The following passage
from Plutarch's _Life of Crassus_ suggests this, though, if Plutarch
is right, Crassus did not build himself, but let or sold his sites and
builders to others: "Observing (in Sulla's time) the accidents that
were familiar at Rome, conflagrations and tumbling down of houses
owing to their weight and crowded state, he bought slaves who were
architects and builders. Having collected these to the number of more
than five hundred, it was his practice to buy up houses on fire, and
houses next to those on fire: for the owners, frightened and anxious,
would sell them cheap. And thus the greater part of Rome fell into
the hands of Crassus: but though he had so many artisans, he built no
house except his own, for he used to say that those who were fond of
building ruined themselves without the help of an enemy."[48] The
fall of houses, and their destruction in the frequent fires, became
familiar features of life at Rome about this time, and are alluded to
by Catullus in his twenty-third poem, and later on by Strabo in his
description of Rome (p. 235). It must indeed have often happened that
whole families were utterly homeless;[49] and in those days there
were no insurance offices, no benefit societies, no philanthropic
institutions to rescue the suffering from undeserved misery. As we
shall see later on, they were constantly in debt, and in the hands of
the money-lender; and against his extortions their judicial remedies
were most precarious. But all this is hidden from our eyes: only now
and again we can hear a faint echo of their inarticulate cry for help.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23