by Will Durant
The condition of the workers, and even of the slaves, was in some measure relieved by the collegia, or workers’ organizations. By this period we hear of these in great number and in proud specialization; there were separate guilds of trumpeters, horn players, clarion blowers, tuba players, flutists, bagpipers, etc. Usually the collegia were modeled on the Italian municipality: they had a hierarchy of magistrates and one or more favorite deities whom they honored with a temple and an annual feast. Like the cities, they asked and found rich men and women to be their patrons, and to repay compliments by helping to finance their outings, their assembly halls, and their shrines. It would be an error to think of these associations as corresponding to the labor unions of our time; we can picture them better in terms of our fraternal orders, with their endless offices and titles of honor, their brotherly hilarity and jaunts, and their simple mutual aid. Rich men often encouraged the formation of these guilds and remembered them in their wills. In the collegium all the men were “brothers” and all the women “sisters,” and in some of them the slave could sit at table or in council with freeborn men. Every “member in good standing” was guaranteed a fancy funeral.
In the last century of the Republic demagogues of all orders discovered that many collegia could be persuaded to vote almost to a man for any giving candidate. In this way the associations became political instruments of patricians, plutocrats, and radicals; and their competitive corruption helped to destroy Roman democracy. Caesar outlawed them, but they revived; Augustus dissolved all but a few useful ones; Trajan again forbade them; Aurelius tolerated them; obviously they persisted throughout, within or beyond the law. In the end they became vehicles through which Christianity entered and pervaded the life of Rome.
VIII. THE ECONOMY AND THE STATE
How far did the government, under the Empire, attempt to control the economic life? It tried, and largely failed, to restore peasant proprietorship; here the emperors were more enlightened than the Senate, which was dominated by the owners of the latifundia. Domitian sought to encourage the planting of cereals in Italy, but without success; in consequence Italy was always in fear of starvation. Vespasian forced the Senate to accept him as emperor by holding Egypt, then the chief source of Italy’s wheat; Septimius Severus would do the same by seizing north Africa. The state had to assure, and therefore supervise, the importation and distribution of grain; it offered privileges to merchants bringing grain to Italy; Claudius guaranteed them against loss, and Nero freed their ships from the property tax. The delay or wrecking of the grain fleet was now the only cause that could stir the Roman populace to revolt.
The Roman economy was a system of laissez faire tempered with state ownership of natural resources—mines, quarries, fisheries, salt deposits, and considerable tracts of cultivated land.68 The legions made the bricks and tiles needed for their buildings, and were often used on public construction, especially in the colonies. The manufacture of arms and machines of war was probably reserved for state arsenals; and there may have been, in the first century, such governmentally owned factories as we hear of in the third.69 Public works were normally let out to private contractors under such strict state supervision that they were usually well done, and with a minimum of corruption.70 About A.D. 80 such enterprises were increasingly carried out by the emperor’s freedmen with the labor of governmental slaves. At all times, apparently, the mitigation of unemployment was one purpose of these state undertakings.71
Trade was moderately burdened with a one per cent sales tax, light custom dues, and occasional tolls for the passage of goods over bridges and through towns. The aediles supervised retail trade under an excellent system of regulations, but, if we may believe an irate character in Petronius, they were no better than similar officials in other times; “they graft with the bakers and other such scoundrels . . . and the jaws of the capitalists are always open.”72 Finance was subject to governmental manipulation of the currency, and to the competition of the Treasury, which appears to have been the largest banker in the Empire; it lent money at interest to farmers on the pledge of their crops, and to city dwellers on the security of their furniture.73 Commerce was aided by wars, which opened new resources and markets and won control of trade routes; so the expedition of Gallus into Arabia secured the passage to India against the competition of Arabs and Parthians. Pliny complained that campaigns had been undertaken that Roman ladies and dandies might have a wider choice of perfumes.74
We must not exaggerate the wealth of ancient Rome. The total annual revenue of the state under Vespasian was at most 1,500,000,000 sesterces ($ 150,000,000)—less than a fifth of the budget of New York City today. The means of amassing great fortunes by large-scale production were unknown or ignored, and had not developed the immense and taxable industry and commerce of the modern world. The Roman government spent little on the navy, and nothing on servicing a national debt; it lived on its income, not on its debts. Industry being largely domestic, its products passed to the consumer with less intervening trade and taxation than today. Men produced for their own localities rather than for the general market. They did more for themselves, less for unseen others, than we do. They used their bodies more, worked longer hours less intensely, and did not miss a thousand luxuries that lay outside their dreams. They could not begin to rival the wealth of even our less affluent years; but they enjoyed a degree of prosperity such as the Mediterranean nations had not known before and, as a whole, have never known again. It was the material zenith of the ancient world.
* * *
III In the fourth century a fire dart filled with flaming naphtha, and shot from a bow or a catapult, was among the weapons of war. “It burns persistently wherever it falls,” says Ammianus Marcellinus; “and water poured upon it rouses the fire to greater heat; and there is no way of extinguishing it except by sprinkling it with dust.”15a
IV In 1870 the Italian government built embankments at a uniform width, with unpleasant results in the dry season.
V Apparently the Volsci had drained the Pontine marshes before 600 B.C. Their Roman conquerors neglected the drainage canals, and the region again became swampy and malarial. Caesar planned its reclamation, and Augustus and Nero made some progress on the work; but the task was not accomplished till 1931.
VI One of them, the Aqua Virgo, now feeds the Fontana di Trevi; three others have been restored, and supply Rome with water today.
VII Book III opens with an instructive remark: “The invention of engines of war has long since reached its limit, and I see no further hope for any improvement in the art.”40
VIII In referring to the period after Nero, Roman currency will be equated at two thirds its general value under the Republic: the as at two and a half, the sesterce at ten, the denarius at forty, cents, and the talent at $2400, in terms of United States currency of 1942. Since lesser variations will again be ignored, the reader will remember that all equivalents are very loosely approximate.
CHAPTER XVI
Rome and Its Art
30 B.C.-A.D.96
I. THE DEBT TO GREECE
THE Romans were not of themselves an artistic people. Before Augustus they were warriors, after him they were rulers; they counted the establishment of order and security through government a greater good and nobler task than the creation or enjoyment of beauty. They paid great sums for the works of dead masters, but looked down upon living artists as menials. “While we adore images,” said the kindly Seneca, “we despise those who fashion them.”1 Only law and politics, and, of manual arts, only agriculture (by proxy), seemed honorable ways of life. Barring the architects, most artists in Rome were Greek slaves or freedmen or hirelings; nearly all worked with their hands and were classed as artisans; Latin authors seldom thought of recording their lives or their names. Hence Roman art is almost wholly anonymous; no vivid personalities humanize its history as Myron, Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Protogenes light up the aesthetic story of Greece. Here the historian is constrained to speak of things, not men,
to catalogue coins, vases, statues, reliefs, pictures, and buildings in the desperate hope that their accumulation may laboriously convey the crowded majesty of Rome. The products of art appeal to the soul through eye or ear or hand rather than through the intellect; their beauty fades when it is diluted into ideas and words. The universe of thought is only one of many worlds; each sense has its own; each art has therefore its characteristic medium, which cannot be translated into speech. Even an artist writes about art in vain.
A special misfortune clouds Roman art: we come to it from Greek art, which seems at first Its model and master. As the art of India disturbs us by strange shapes, so that of Rome chills us by the monotonous repetition of familiar forms. We have seen long since these Doric, Ionic, Corinthian columns and capitals, these smooth idealized reliefs, these busts of poets, rulers, and gods; even the astonishing frescoes of Pompeii, we are told, were copies of Greek originals; only the “Composite” order is indigenously Roman, and it offends our notions of classic unity, simplicity, and restraint. Certainly the art of the Augustan Age in Rome was overwhelmingly Greek. Through Sicily and Greek Italy, through Campania and Etruria, finally through Greece, Alexandria, and the Hellenic East, the aesthetic forms, methods, and ideals of Hellas passed into Roman art. When Rome became mistress of the Mediterranean, Greek artists poured into the new center of wealth and patronage and made countless copies of Greek masterpieces for Roman temples, palaces, and squares. Every conqueror brought home examples, every magnate scoured the cities for the surviving treasures, of Greek workmanship. Gradually Italy became a museum of bought or stolen paintings and statuary that set the tone of Roman art for a century. Artistically Rome was swallowed up in the Hellenistic world.
All this is half the truth. In one aspect, as we shall see, the history of Roman art is a conflict between the architrave and the arch; in another it is the struggle of native Italian realism to recover from the invasion of the peninsula by a Greek art that had pictured gods rather than men, the type or Platonic idea rather than the earthly individual, and had sought a noble perfection of form rather than truth of perception and utterance. That virile indigenous art which had helped to carve the figures on Etruscan tombs hibernated between the Greek conquest and Nero’s philhellenic ecstasy; but at last it broke the Hellenistic mold, and revolutionized classic art with realistic sculpture, impressionistic painting, and an architecture of arch and vault. Through these, as well as by her borrowed beauty, Rome became for eighteen centuries the art capital of the Western world.
II. THE TOILERS’ ROME
The ancient traveler bent on making a tour of Flavian Rome, and coming northward up the Tiber from Ostia, would first of all have noted the swiftness of the muddy current, carrying along the soil of hills and valleys to the sea. In this simple fact lay the leisurely tragedy of erosion, the difficulty of two-way commerce on the river, the periodical silting of the Tiber’s mouth, and the floods that almost every spring inundated the lower levels of Rome, confined the residents to upper stories reached by boats, and often destroyed the corn stored in granaries on the wharves. When the waters fell they carried houses to ruin, and men and animals to death.2
As he neared the city I the visitor’s eye would be caught by the Emporium, which ran for a thousand feet along the river’s eastern edge, and was noisy with workers, warehouses, markets, and moving goods. Beyond it rose that Aventine hill on which the angry plebs had staged its “sit-down strikes” of 494 and 449 B.C.. On the left bank at this point were the gardens that Caesar had bequeathed to the people, and behind them the Janiculum. Near the eastern shore at the beautiful Pons Aemilius lay the Forum Boarium or Cattle Market, with its (still standing) temples to Fortune and Mater Matuta, the Goddess of the Dawn. Farther north on the right loomed the Palatine and Capitoline hills, thick with palaces and temples. On the left bank were Agrippa’s gardens, and beyond them the Vatican hill. North of the city’s center, off the eastern shore, stretched the spacious lawns and decorative buildings of the Campus Martius, or Field of Mars; here were the theaters of Balbus and Pompey, the Circus of Flaminius, the Baths of Agrippa, and Domitian’s stadium; here the legions practiced, athletes competed, chariots raced, the people played ball,3 and the Assembly gathered, under the emperors, to go through the motions of democracy’s ghost.
Disembarking at the city’s northern limits, the visitor saw some remains of the wall ascribed to Servius Tullius. Rome had probably rebuilt it after the Gallic raid of 390 B.C., but the power of Roman arms, and the apparent security of the capital, allowed the rampart to lapse into ruins; not till Aurelian (A.D. 270) would another wall rise, a symbol of security gone. Gates had been cut in the wall, usually as single or triple archways, to permit the passage of the great roads from which they took their names. Touring the boundary of the city east and then south, the visitor would see the luxuriant gardens of Sallust, the dusty camp of the Praetorians, the arches of the Marcian, Appian, and Claudian aqueducts, and on his right, in turn, the Pincian, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, and Caelian hills. Leaving the walls and walking northwest on the Appian Way, he would pass through the Porta Capena along the southern slope of the Palatine to the Nova Via (“New Street”), and then northward through a maze of arches and buildings to stand in the ancient Forum, the head and heart of Rome.
Originally it had been a market place, some 600 by 200 feet; now (A.D. 96) the sellers had retired into the near-by streets or into other forums, but in the adjoining basilicas men sold shares in the publicans’ corporations, made contracts with the government, defended themselves in the courts, or consulted lawyers on how to escape the law. Around the Forum had been built, as around New York’s Wall Street, some modest temples to the gods, and some larger ones to Mammon. A population of statues adorned it, and the colonnades of great edifices provided the shade that could hardly come from a few ancient trees. From 145 B.C.. till Caesar it had been the meeting place of the assemblies. At either end stood a speaker’s platform, named rostrum because an earlier stand had been decorated with the rostra or prows of ships captured from Antium in 338 B.C.. At the western end was the Millenarium Aureum, or Golden Milestone, a column of gilded bronze set up by Augustus to mark the junction and origin of several consular roads; on it were inscribed the major towns reached and their distances from Rome. Along the southwest side ran the Sacra Via, or Sacred Way, which led up to the temples of Jupiter and Saturn on the Capitoline hill. North of this Forum the visitor would find a larger one, the Forum Iulium, built by Caesar to relieve the older area; near by were additional forums laid out for Augustus and Vespasian; and soon Trajan would clear and adorn the greatest of them all.
Even in so hasty a circuit the ancient tourist would have felt the crowded diversity of the city’s population and the tortuous inadequacy of its haphazard streets. A few of these were from sixteen to nineteen feet wide; most of them were meandering alleys in the Oriental style. Juvenal complained that carts rumbling over the uneven pavements at night made sleep impossible, while the jostling crowds made daytime walking a form of war. “Hurry as we may, we are blocked by a surging host in front, and by a dense mass of people pressing upon us from behind. One digs an elbow into me, another a sedan pole; one bangs a beam, another a wine cask, against my head. My legs are beplastered with mud; huge feet trample upon me from every side; a soldier plants his hobnail boot squarely upon my toes.”4 The main thoroughfares were paved with large pentagonal blocks of lava stone, sometimes so firmly set in concrete that a few have remained in place till our time. There was no street lighting; whoever ventured out after dark carried a lantern, or followed a torchbearing slave; in either case he ran the gauntlet of many thieves. Doors were fastened with locks and keys; windows were bolted at night, and those on the ground floor were guarded—as now—by iron bars. To these perils Juvenal adds the objects, solid or liquid, thrown from upper-floor windows. All in all, he thought, only a fool would go out to dinner without making his will.5
Since there were no public vehicles
to transport workers from their homes to their toil, most of the plebs lived in brick tenements near the heart of the town, or in rooms behind or above their shops. A tenement usually covered an entire square, and was therefore called an insula, or island. Many of these buildings were six or seven stories high, and so flimsily built that several collapsed, killing hundreds of occupants. Augustus limited the frontal height of buildings to seventy Roman feet, but apparently the law permitted greater elevations in the rear, for Martial tells of “a poor devil whose attic is 200 steps up.”6 Many tenements had shops on the ground floor; some had balconies on the second; a few were connected at the top with tenements across the street by arched passages containing additional rooms—precarious penthouses for particular plebeians. Such insulae almost filled the Nova Via, the Clivus Victoriae (Victory Hill) on the Palatine, and the Subura—a noisy brothel-ridden district between the Viminal and the Esquiline. In them dwelt the longshoremen of the Emporium, the butchers of the Macellum, the fishmongers of the Forum Piscatorium, the cattlemen of the Forum Boarium, the vegetable vendors of the Forum Holitorium, and the workers in Rome’s factories, clerkships, and trades. The slums of Rome lapped the edges of the Forum.
