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

The simple fact was that Cicero was always regarded as a safe man to
lend money to, by the business men and the great capitalists; partly
because he was an honest man,--a _vir bonus_ who would never dream of
repudiation or bankruptcy; partly because he knew every one, and had
a hundred wealthy friends besides the lender of the moment and among
them, most faithful of all, the prudent and indefatigable Atticus.
Undoubtedly then it was by borrowing, and regularly paying interest
on the loans, that he raised money whenever he wanted it. He may have
occasionally made money in the companies of tax-collectors; we have
seen that he probably had shares in some of their ventures. But there
is no clear evidence in his letters of this source of wealth,[141] and
there is abundant evidence of the borrowing. After his return from
exile, though the senate had given him somewhat meagre compensation
for the loss of his property, he began at once to borrow and to build:
"I am building in three places," he writes to his brother,[142] "and
am patching up my other houses. I live somewhat more lavishly than I
used to do; I am obliged to do so." Here again we know from whom he
borrowed,--it was this same brother, who of course had no more certain
income than his own, probably less. But he had been governor of Asia
for three years (61-58 B.C.), and must have realised large sums even
in that exhausted province; and at this moment he was legatus to
Pompeius as special commissioner for organising the supply of
corn, and thus was in immediate contact with one of the greatest
millionaires of the day. In order to repay his brother all Marcus
had to do was to borrow from other friends. "In regard to money I am
crippled. But the liberality of my brother I have repaid, in spite of
his protests, by the aid of my friends, that I might not be drained
quite dry myself" (_ad Att._ iv. 3). Two years later an unwary reader
might feel some astonishment at finding that Quintus himself was now
deep in debt;[143] but as he continues to read the correspondence his
astonishment will vanish. With the prospect before him of a prolonged
stay in Gaul with Caesar, Quintus might doubtless have borrowed to any
extent; and in fact with Caesar's help--the proceeds of the Gallic
wars--both brothers found themselves in opulence. The Civil War, and
the repayment of his debts to Caesar, nearly ruined Marcus towards the
end of his life, but nothing prevented his contriving to find money
for any object on which he had set his heart; when in his grief for
the loss of his daughter he wishes to buy suburban gardens where a
shrine to her memory may (strange to say) attract public notice, he
tells Atticus to buy what is necessary _at any cost_. "Manage the
business your own way; do not consider what my purse demands--about
that I care nothing--but what I _want_."[144]

Such being the financial method of Cicero and his brother, we cannot
be surprised to find that the younger generation of the family
followed faithfully in the footsteps of their elders. We have seen
that the young Marcus had a large allowance at Athens and on the whole
he seems to have kept fairly well within it, in spite of some trouble;
but his cousin the younger Quintus, coming to see his uncle in
December 45, showed him a gloomy countenance, and on being asked the
meaning of it, said that he was going with Caesar to the Parthian war
in order to avoid his creditors, and presumably to make money to pay
them with.[145] He had not even enough money for the journey out. His
uncle did not offer to give him any, but he does not seem to have
thought very seriously of the young man's embarrassments.

One more example of the financial dealings of the business men of this
extraordinary age, and we will bring this chapter to an end. It is a
story which has luckily been preserved in Cicero's speech in defence
of a certain Rabirius Postumus in the year 54, who was accused under
Caesar's law de pecuniis repetundis (extortion in the provinces). It
is a remarkable revelation of all the most striking methods of making
and using money in the last years of the Republic.

The father of this Rabirius, says Cicero, had been a distinguished
member of the equestrian order, and "fortissimus et maximus
publicanus"; not greedy of money, but most liberal to his friends--in
other words, he was not a miser, for that character was rare in this
age, but lent his money freely in order to acquire influence and
consideration. The son took up the same line of business, and engaged
in a wide sphere of financial operations. He dealt largely in the
stock of the tax-companies; he lent money to cities in several
provinces; he lent money to Ptolemy Auletes, King of Egypt, both
before he was expelled from his kingdom by sedition, and afterwards
when he was in Rome in 59 and 58, intriguing to induce the senate
to have him restored. Rabirius never doubted that he would be so
restored, and seems to have failed to see the probability of such a
policy being contested or quarrelled about, as actually happened in
the winter of 57-56. He lent, and persuaded his friends to lend:[146]
he represented the king's cause as a good investment; and then, like
the investing agent of to-day who slips so easily from carelessness
into crime, he had to go on lending more and more, because he feared
that if he stopped the king might turn against him.

He had staked the mass of his substance on a desperate venture. But
time went on and Ptolemy was not restored, and without the revenues of
his kingdom he of course could not pay his creditors. At last, at the
end of the year 56, Gabinius, then governor of Syria, had pressure
put on him by the creditors--among them perhaps both Caesar and
Pompeius--to march into Egypt without the authority of the senate. He
took Rabirius with him, and, in order to secure the repayment,
the latter was made superintendent (dioikaetaes) of the Egyptian
revenues[147]. Unluckily for him, his wily debtor did after all turn
against him, and he escaped from Egypt with difficulty and with the
loss of all his wealth. When Gabinius was accused de repetundis and
found guilty of accepting enormous sums from Ptolemy, Rabirius was
involved in the same prosecution as having received part of the money;
Cicero defended him, and as it seems with success, on the plea that
equites were not liable to prosecution under the lex Julia. Towards
the end of his speech he drew a clever picture of his unlucky client's
misfortunes, and declared that he would have had to quit the Forum,
i.e. to leave the Stock Exchange in disgrace, if Caesar had not come
to his rescue by placing large sums at his disposal.

What Rabirius did was simply to gamble on a gigantic scale, and get
others to gamble with him. The luck turned against him, and he came
utterly to grief. There seems indeed to have been a perfect passion
for dealing with money in this wild way among the men of wealth and
influence; it was the fancy of the hour, and no disgrace attached to
it if a man could escape ruin. Thus the vast capital accumulated--the
sources of which were almost entirely in the provinces and the
kingdoms on the frontiers--was hardly ever used productively. It never
returned to the region whence it came, to be used in developing
its resources; the idea of using it even in Italy for industrial
undertakings was absent from the mind of the gambler. Those numberless
villas, of which we shall speak in another chapter, were homes of
luxury and magnificence, not centres of agricultural industry. There
are indeed some signs that in this very generation the revival of
Italian agriculture was beginning, and more especially the cultivation
of the olive and the vine; Varro, some twenty years later, could claim
that Italy was the best cultivated country in the world.[148] It may
be that the din of the "insanum forum" and its wild speculation has
prevented our hearing of the quiet efforts in the country to put
capital to a legitimate productive use. But of the social life of the
city the Forum was the heart, and of any prudent or scientific use of
capital the Forum knew hardly anything.

Of the two classes of business men we have been describing, the
tax-farmers and the money-lenders, it is hard to say which wrought the
most mischief in the Empire; they played into each other's hands in
wringing money out of the helpless provincials. Together too they did
incalculable harm, morally and socially, among the upper strata of
Roman society at home. Economic maladies react upon the mental, and
moral condition of a State. Where the idea of making money for its
own sake, or merely for the sake of the pleasure derivable from
excitement, is paramount in the minds of so large a section of
society, moral perception quickly becomes warped. The sense of justice
disappears, because when the fever is on a man he does not stop to ask
whether his gains are ill-gotten; and in this age the only restriction
on the plundering of the subjects of the Empire was a legal one, and
that of no great efficacy. There are many repulsive things in the
exquisite poetry of Catullus, but none of them jar on the modern mind
quite so sharply as his virulent attacks on a provincial governor in
whose suite he had gone to Bithynia in the hope of enriching himself,
and under whose just administration he had failed to do so. There
is lost also the sense of a duty arising out of the possession of
wealth--the feeling that it should do some good in the world, or at
least be in part applied to some useful purpose. Lastly, the exciting
pursuit of wealth helps to produce a curious restlessness and
instability of character, of which we have many examples in the age
we are studying. "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," are words
that might be applied to many a young man among Cicero's acquaintance,
and to many women also.

No sudden operation could cure these evils--they needed the careful
and gradual treatment of a wise physician. As in so many other ways,
so here Augustus showed his wonderful instinct as a social reformer.
The first requisite of all was an age of comparative peace--a healthy
atmosphere in which the patient could recover his natural tone. Next
in importance was the removal of the incitement to enrich yourself and
to spend illegally or unprofitably, and the revival of a sense of duty
towards the State and its rulers. Provincial governors were made
more really responsible, and a scientific census revealed the actual
tax-paying capacity of the provincials; tax-farming was more closely
superintended and gradually disappeared. It is true enough that even
under the Empire great fortunes were made and lost, but the gambling
spirit, the wild recklessness in monetary dealings, are not met with
again. The Roman Forum ceased to be insane, and Italy became once more
the home of much happy and useful country life. The passionate and
reckless self-consciousness of Catullus is succeeded in the next
generation by the calm sweet hopefulness of Virgil; in passing from
the one poet to the other, we feel that we are leaving behind us an
age of over-sensitive self-seeking and entering on one in which duty
and honour, labour on the land and hard work for the State, may be
reckoned as things more likely to make life worth living than all the
accumulated capital of a Crassus.

CHAPTER IV

THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY

Above the men of business of equestrian rank, in social standing
though not necessarily in wealth, there was in Cicero's time an
aristocracy which a Roman of that day would perhaps have found it a
little difficult to explain or define to a foreigner. Fortunately all
foreigners coming to Rome would know what was meant by the senate,
the great council which received envoys from all nations outside the
Empire; and the stranger might be told in the first place that all
members of that august assembly, with their families, were considered
as elevated above the equestrian order, and as forming the main body
of the aristocracy proper. But if the informant were by chance a
conservative Roman of old family, he might proceed to qualify this
definition. "There are now in the senate," he might say, "plenty of
men who are only there because they have held the quaestorship, which
Sulla made the qualification for a seat, and there are many equites
whom Sulla made into senators by the form of a vote of the people;
such men, even the great orator Cicero himself, I do not reckon as
really members of the nobility, because they do not belong to old
families who have done the State good service in past time. They have
no images of their ancestors in their houses; they come from municipal
towns, or spring from some low family in the city; they may have
raised themselves by their talents, perhaps only by their money,
but they have no guarantee of antiquity, their names are not in our
annals. All we true conservative Romans (and a, Roman is hardly a
Roman if not conservative) profoundly believe that a man whose family
has once attained to high public honour and done good public service,
will be a safer person to elect as a magistrate than one whose family
is unknown and untried--a belief which is surely based on a truth of
human nature. I should count a man who happens not to be in the senate
himself, for want of wealth or inclination, but whose family has its
images and its traditions of great ancestors, as far more truly an
"optimate" than most of these new men. Fortunately our most famous
families, whose names are known all over the Empire, are still to be
found in the senate, and indeed form a powerful body there, capable of
resisting to the last the revolutionary dangers that threaten us. The
people still elect to magistracies the Aemilii, Lutatii, Claudii,
Cornelii, Julii, and many more families that have been famous in our
history, and will, I trust, continue to elect them so long as our
Republic lasts."[149]

There was indeed a glamour about these splendid names, as there is
about the titles of our ancient noble families; their holders may
almost be said to have claimed high office as a right, like the Whig
families Of the Revolution for a century after their triumph. Though
we may use the word in a wider sense in this chapter, these grand old
families were the true aristocracy, and inspired just that respect in
the minds of men outside their circle which is still so familiar to us
in England. Cicero was to such men an "outsider," a _novus homo_; and
the close reader of Cicero's letters, if he is looking out (as he
should be) for Cicero's constantly changing attitude of mind as he
addresses himself to various correspondents, cannot fail to see how
comparatively awkward and stilted he often is when writing to one of
these great nobles, with whom he has never been really intimate; and
how easily his pen glides along when he is letting himself talk to
Atticus, or Poetus, or M. Marius, men who were outside the pale of
nobility. It is true that he is sometimes embarrassed in other ways
when writing to great personages, as, for example, Lentulus Spinther,
consul in 57, or to Appius Claudius, consul in 53; but had they been
men of his own kind he never would have felt that embarrassment in the
same degree. When writing to such men he rarely or never indulges
in those little sportive jokes or allusions which enliven his more
intimate correspondence, nor does he tell the truth so strictly, for
they might not always care to hear it.

Here is a specimen which will give some idea of his manner in writing
to an aristocrat: he is congratulating L. Aemilius Paullus, who
secured his election to the consulship in the summer of 51 B.C.:

"Though I never doubted that the Roman people, considering your
eminent services to the Republic and _the splendid position of your
family_, would enthusiastically elect you consul by a unanimous vote,
yet I felt extreme delight when the news reached me; and I pray
the gods to render your official career fortunate, and to make the
administration of your office worthy of your own position and _that
of your ancestors_.... And would that it had been in my power to have
been at home to see that wished-for day, and to have given you the
support which your noble services and kindness to me deserved! But
since the unexpected and unlooked-for accident of my having to take
a province has deprived me of that opportunity, yet, that I may be
enabled to see you as consul actually administering the state in a
manner worthy of your position, I earnestly beg you to take care to
prevent my being treated unfairly, or having additional time added
to my year of office. If you do that, you will abundantly crown your
former acts of kindness to me."[150]

This Aemilius Paullus, like Spinther and many others, belonged to
a respectable but somewhat characterless type of aristocrat; these
formed a considerable and a powerful section of the senate, where they
were an obstacle to reform and administrative efficiency. They were
really a survival from the old type of Roman noble, which had done
excellent work in its day; men in whom the individual had been kept in
strict subordination to the State, and whose personal idiosyncrasies
and ambitions only excited suspicion. But towards the end of the
Republican period the individual had free play; at no time in ancient
history do we meet with so many various and interesting kinds of
individuality, even among the nobilitas itself. This is not merely the
result of the abundant literature in which their traits have come down
to us; it was a fact of the age, in which the idea of the State had
fallen into the background, and the individual found no restraint
on his thoughts and little on his actions, no hindrance to the
development of his capacity either for good or evil. Sulla,
Catiline, Pompeius, Cato, Clodius, Caesar, all have their marked
characteristics, familiar to all who read the history of the Roman
revolution. Caesar is the most remarkable example of strong character
among the men of high aristocratic descent, and it is interesting to
notice how entirely he was without the exclusive tendency which we
associate with aristocrats. He was intimate with men of all ranks; his
closest friends seem to have been men who were noble. While the high
aristocrats looked down as a rule on Cicero the novus homo, and for
some years positively hated him[151], Caesar, though differing from
him _toto coelo_ in politics, was always on pleasant terms of personal
intercourse with him; he had a charm of manner, a literary taste, and
a genuine admiration for genius, which was invariably irresistible
to the sensitive "novus homo." With Pompey, though he trusted him
politically as he never trusted Caesar, Cicero was never so intimate.
They had not the same common interests; Cicero could laugh at Pompey
behind his back, but hardly once in his correspondence does he attempt
to raise a jest about Caesar.

Thus in the governing or senatorial aristocracy we find men of a great
variety of character, from the old-fashioned nobilis, exclusive in
society and obstructive in politics, to the man of individual genius
and literary ability, whether of blue blood like Caesar, or like
Cicero the scion of a municipal family which has never gained or
sought political distinction. But for the purposes of this chapter
we may discern and discuss two main types of character in this
aristocracy: first, that on which the new Greek culture had worked to
advantage, not destroying the best Roman qualities, but drawing them
into usefulness in new ways; secondly, that on which the same culture
had worked to its harm by taking advantage of weak points in the Roman
armour, sapping the true Roman quality without substituting any other
excellence. We will briefly trace the growth of these two types, and
take an example of each among Cicero's intimate friends, not from
the famous personages familiar to every one, but from eminent and
interesting men of whom the ordinary student knows comparatively
little.

Ever since the Hannibalic war, and probably even before it, Roman
nobles had felt the power of Greek culture; they had begun to think,
to learn about peoples who were different from themselves in habits
and manners, and to advance, the best of them at least, in wisdom and
knowledge; and this is true in spite of the unquestioned fact that it
was in this same era that the seeds were sown of moral and political
degeneracy. We shall have abundant opportunity of noting the effects
of this degeneracy in the last age of the Republic, but it is pleasant
to dwell for a moment on that more wholesome Greek influence which
enticed the finer minds among the Roman nobility into a new region of
culture, stimulating thought and strengthening the springs of conduct.

Even the old Cato himself, most rigid of Roman conservatives, was not
unmoved by this influence,[152] and it was to him that Rome owed the
introduction of Ennius, the greatest literary figure of that age, into
Roman society[153]. But the first genuine example of the new culture,
of the Hellenic enthusiasm of the age, is to be found in Aemilius
Paullus, the conqueror of Macedonia, a true Roman aristocrat who was
delighted to learn from Greeks. Plutarch's _Life_ of this man is a
valuable record of the tendencies of the time. After his failure to
obtain a second consulship, Plutarch tells us[154] that he retired
into private life, devoting himself to religious duties and to the
education of his children, training these in the old Roman habits in
which he had himself been trained, but also in Greek culture, and that
with even greater enthusiasm. He had about them Greek teachers, not
only of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, but of the fine arts, and
even of out-door pursuits, such as hunting (to which the Romans were
not greatly addicted), and of the care of horses and dogs; and he made
a point of being present himself at all their exercises, bodily and
mental. The result of this wholesome Xenophontic education is seen in
his son, the great Scipio Aemilianus, who was adopted into the family
of the Scipios in the lifetime of his father. Whatever view we may
take of this great man's conduct in war and politics, there can hardly
be a doubt that the Romans themselves were right in treasuring his
memory as one of the best of their race. When we put all the facts of
his life together, from his early youth, of which his friend Polybius
has left us a most beautiful picture,[155] to his sudden and probably
violent death in the maturity of his powers, we are compelled to
believe that he was really a man of wide sympathies, a strong sense of
justice which guided him steadily through good report and ill, perfect
purity of life, and hatred of all that was low and bad, whether
in rich or poor. He was not, like his father, a Roman aristocrat
patronising Greek culture;[156] in him we see a perfectly natural
and mature combination of the noblest qualities of the Roman and the
wholesomest qualities of the Greek. "It was an awakening truth,"
says a great authority, "in the minds of Romans like Scipio, that
intellectual culture must be built upon a foundation of moral
rectitude: and such a foundation they could find in the storehouse of
their own domestic traditions."[157] When Cicero, who held him to
be the greatest of Romans, wrote his dialogue on the State (_de
Republica_), with the new idea pervading it of the moral and political
ascendancy of a single man, he made Scipio the hero and the one
ascendant figure in his work, and ended it with an imitation of the
Platonic "myth," in the form of a "dream of Scipio."

Scipio gathered round him a circle of able and cultured men, both
Roman and Greek, including almost every living Roman of ability, and
among the Greeks the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius,
of whom we shall have more to learn in the course of this volume. Of
this circle the best and ablest men of Cicero's earlier days were
mentally the children, and his own views both of literature and
politics were largely formed upon the Scipionic tradition. Indeed to
understand the mental and moral furniture of the Roman mind in the
Ciceronian age, it is absolutely necessary to study that of the
generation which made that mind what it was; but here space can only
be found to point out how the enlightenment of the Scipionic circle
opened out new ways in manners, in literature, in philosophical
receptivity, and lastly in the study of the law, which was destined to
be Rome's greatest contribution to civilisation.

Manners, the demeanour of the individual in social intercourse, are a
valuable index, if not an entirely conclusive one, of the mental and
moral tone of society in any age. Ease and courteousness of bearing
mean, as a rule, that the sense of another's claims as a human being
are always present to the mind. Whatever be the shortcomings of the
last age of the Republic, we must give due credit to the fact that in
their outward demeanour towards each other the educated men of that
age almost invariably show good breeding. It is true enough that
public vituperation, in senate or law-courts, was a fact of every day,
and the wealth of violent personal abuse which a gentleman like Cicero
could expend on one whom for the time he hated, or who had done
him some wrong, passes all belief.[158] But the history of this
vituperation is a curious one; it was a traditional method of hostile
oratory, and sprang from an old Roman root, the tendency to defamation
and satire, which may itself be attributed in part to the Italian
custom of levelling abuse at a public man (e.g. at his triumph) in
order to avert evil from him.[159] To single out a man's personal
ugliness, to calumniate his ancestry in the vilest terms,--these were
little more than traditional practices, oratorical devices, which the
rhetorical education of the day encouraged, and which no one took
very seriously.[160] But we are concerned in this chapter mainly with
private life; and there we find almost universal consideration and
courtesy. In the whole of the Ciceronian correspondence there is
hardly a letter that does not show good breeding, and there are many
that are the natural result of real kindly feeling and true sympathy.

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