Speaking of seduction: your sophisticated society perfectly understands and amply accommodates the more sensual necessities. Indeed, in the Roman idiom this is one popular euphemism for the male organ—“the necessity.”9 Overall, your world is, as Norman Cantor says, “a sexual paradise.”10 There are, to be sure, a few constraints. It is against the law to lie with your neighbor’s wife, for example (though such indiscretions happen, possibly quite often), and although homosexual encounters are in themselves perfectly respectable, it is shameful and unmanly to take the passive role in such an exchange. We will say more about these restrictions in due course. For now, the important point is that there are no prudish or moralistic impediments to sexual activity per se.11 On the contrary, your society unashamedly celebrates—and stimulates, and amply provides for—sexual gratification.
So your own bedroom lamps or hand mirrors are most likely decorated with erotic images—quite imaginative ones, probably.12 The walls in your atrium might exhibit a fresco similar to that restored in Pompeii—of the fertility god Priapus, with his enormous, ineluctable phallus straining to reach what appears to be a basket of fruit. Similar images adorn doorbells or doorposts, and also the walls of the changing rooms in the elegant public baths.13 And the city maintains numerous, much-frequented brothels. In these establishments, sex is eminently affordable—about the price of a loaf of bread.14
True, as a member of the aristocracy, you may have reservations about taking your pleasures in brothels. Not because they are immoral, but because they are, well, “vulgar.”15 But not to worry: your Roman society smiles on the more elegant practice of having conjugal relations with slaves, which are plentiful—probably constituting about two-fifths of the city’s population.16 As an affluent Roman, you likely own an assortment of them, perhaps hundreds,17 and since with slaves consent is conveniently not an issue,18 the opportunities for sexual fulfillment are ample.19
We are assuming here, as is no doubt already apparent, that you are not only affluent but also male. For women, opportunities for sexual fulfillment are much more limited and the strictures for deviation more severe.20 Much later—centuries later—this distinction will come to seem unfair. But the different standards make excellent sense on the premises of your own society (which we will look at more closely in a few pages). Indeed, women themselves are among the most ardent defenders of the different sexual standards for men and women.21
So it all seems very gratifying. The criterion so often invoked by modern thinkers and ethicists to characterize the good life is “human flourishing.” Just what “human flourishing” consists of is not obvious—the term is obligingly opaque—but whatever it means, wouldn’t it seem amply to fit the sort of life in the Roman Empire that we have been observing? Gibbon thought so, at any rate; as he put it, “the favourites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendour; whatever could sooth their pride or gratify their sensuality.”22
Of course, less laudatory assessments are also available. There will always be naysayers. So if we were to take our instruction from, say, the satirical poet Juvenal, writing during the period so admired by Gibbon, we might come away with a very different impression of Rome—as a city of perilous streets and fire-plagued tenement housing, a city pervasively indolent, hypocritical, and corrupt, stocked with licentious husbands and faithless, conniving wives, in which it is next to impossible to make an honest living.23 A critic might also notice the pervasive, abject poverty. Robin Lane Fox observes that “the modern cardboard cities of refugees in Egypt or Pakistan are the nearest we can come to imagining this ‘other Rome,’ although they lack Rome’s openly accepted slavery.”24 Rodney Stark describes the cities of the Roman Empire as “far more crowded, crime infested, filthy, disease-ridden, and miserable than are third world cities in the world today.”25
Or we might focus more severely on the bloody gladiatorial spectacles, in which thousands of humans and wild animals were routinely slaughtered for the entertainment of, and with the delirious enthusiasm of, spectators both noble and plebeian. Gibbon did not approve of such shows—they “degraded a civilized nation below the condition of savage cannibals”26—but, always broad-minded, he did not allow this embarrassment to interfere with his overall favorable judgment.
There was also the widespread and socially accepted practice of exposure of infants: parents of unwanted or unhealthy children would abandon the babies on a street corner or outside the town, hoping that someone might come along to rescue the infants. The hope was not utterly unrealistic: in fact, a few such foundlings might be claimed, often to be brought up as slaves or prostitutes. But more often the babies perished.27 Philo of Alexandria described how “all the beasts that feed upon human flesh visit the spot and feast unhindered on the infants.”28 Again, Gibbon did not approve29—but neither did he amend his laudatory assessment of the city. Other evaluators, of course, might be less lenient toward these societal blemishes.
But we need not try to adjudicate between Gibbon’s extravagantly positive assessment and the bleaker depictions by critics like Juvenal. Our policy here, and throughout, will be to take a sympathetic view: we come to praise Rome, not to bury it. Classical Rome, like modern Rome—or modern New York or London or Paris—had the stuff to support both favorable and less favorable appraisals; it all depends on what we choose to look at or, conversely, to excuse or ignore. Our immediate purpose here is to understand what it was in that world that could elicit the Enlightenment historian’s effusive judgment. And we see that by focusing on selected classes and aspects of the period, we can find material to support that assessment. For the “favourites of fortune,” it seems to have been a pleasant time to be alive.
The Majesty of the City
The foregoing catalogue of material comforts and carnal indulgences has been seriously misleading, though, and it has in fact understated Rome’s grandeur if it has left the impression that your life as an affluent Roman would have been entirely given over to self-gratification. On the contrary, you would have felt an acute sense of your relation and responsibilities to your city, to the public, and to the emperors (to whom you would have offered sacrifices, as deities). And you would have taken a magnanimous pride in being a citizen of Rome—the stern but benevolent master of the world.
Of Rome. The almost mystical name reached to both the city and the empire, and it embraced powerful traditions and associations not only of military conquest but also of exemplary civic achievement.
Thus, in walking to the chariot races or the theater or the baths, you would have passed some of the magnificent public buildings and monuments whose ruined remains, a millennium and a half later—or, to be precise, on October 15, 176430—would inspire Gibbon to undertake his epic historical project. These imposing edifices had been upgraded under the emperors; the founding emperor, Augustus, boasted that he had inherited a city made of brick and transformed it into a city of marble,31 and later emperors built monuments, temples, baths, and of course the spectacular Flavian Amphitheater, or Colosseum. Gibbon himself was profoundly moved by the remains of these buildings and monuments; he was impressed also that most of them were erected at private expense for public use.32 The buildings were thus elegantly tangible evidence of a public spiritedness—or of “civic virtue,” as scholars say—that has been the envy of later generations into the present.
But spectacular buildings were only one substantial manifestation of a rich public life—a form of life that contrasts dramatically with the sort of self-regarding, inwardly turned “bowling alone” culture sometimes discerned in the contemporary world.33 The fact is, as a modern historian observes, “it was not easy to be a recluse in an ancient town. Public life was conducted in specific locations, much of it out of doors in a particular area of the city (the agora, flanked by public buildings, temples, and the senate-house).” This public character was manifest in “explosions of colour, pageantry, and popular demonstrations that mark ancient games and entertainments”
(although also in “ritualized violence, . . . disorder and rioting in the cities”).34 Nor was this public life limited to the capital city; it was diffused through numerous urban centers (which Gibbon enthusiastically inventoried) and spread throughout the empire from Syria to northern Africa to Britain, all connected by thousands of miles of roads built solidly enough to survive for centuries after the empire itself had collapsed.35
To be sure, the roads had initially been constructed to permit the rapid deployment of the legions, and they thus remind us that the far-flung lands that constituted the empire had been conquered by force of arms—mostly in the latter centuries of the Roman republic before Rome had made the transition to an empire under Augustus. But this fact need not darken our appreciation of the golden age. That is because Roman rule was not oppressive, but rather beneficent; it was a means by which the blessings of Roman law and civilization had been bestowed on less fortunate peoples. Or so Gibbon insisted. “All the . . . provinces of the empire,” he declared, “were embellished by the same liberal spirit of public magnificence, and were filled with amphitheatres, theatres, temples, porticos, triumphal arches, baths, and aqueducts, all variously conducive to the health, the devotion, and the pleasures of the meanest citizen.”36
Consequently, “the tranquil and prosperous state of the empire was warmly felt, and honestly confessed, by the provincials as well as the Romans.”37 (The Jews, whom Gibbon regarded with scarcely disguised contempt38—and whose revolts in AD 66, 115, and 130 were savagely crushed by the legions,39 with Gibbon’s hearty post hoc approbation40—perhaps constituted an exception?) As support for this sanguine assessment, Gibbon quoted the elder Pliny:
They [i.e., the provincials] acknowledged that the true principles of social life, laws, agriculture, and science, which had been first invented by the wisdom of Athens, were now firmly established by the power of Rome, under whose auspicious influence, the fiercest barbarians were united by an equal government and common language. They affirm, that with the improvement of arts, the human species was visibly multiplied. They celebrate the increasing splendour of the cities, the beautiful face of the country, cultivated and adorned like an immense garden; and the long festival of peace, which was enjoyed by so many nations, forgetful of their ancient animosities, and delivered from the apprehensions of future danger.
Acknowledging that suspicions might be aroused by “the air of rhetoric and declamation” evident in Pliny’s effusion, Gibbon maintained that nonetheless “the substance . . . is perfectly agreeable to historic truth.”41
The “Image of Liberty”
In fact, the process of subjugation had extended not only to those foreign peoples who so “warmly felt” and appreciated Roman rule (as Gibbon supposed), but also to the original Romans themselves. By the time of the Antonine emperors, the republic, which had endured for almost five centuries from the expulsion of the Tarquins until the consolidation of power by Octavius (soon to be renamed Augustus), was only a distant memory, having long since been displaced by the autocracy of empire. True, the outward forms of the ancient republican constitution had been preserved. But these were a mere facade—a camouflage for the largely unconstrained power of the emperors. Thus, what Romans enjoyed in the golden age was not actually democratic liberty but rather, as Gibbon delicately put it, the “image of liberty.”42
Gibbon himself was candid about the Romans’ loss of self-governance, and he recounted how this loss had been incurred. For half a millennium after banishing the kings in the sixth century BC, the Romans had carefully guarded their rights of self-rule through a government composed of various assemblies, of which the Senate was the most central, and of officials elected by the citizens. The most important of these officials were the two consuls and the ten tribunes, who represented the common citizens. One-year terms served or at least sought to keep these officials from accumulating significant personal power. This system of governance had evolved and functioned over a period of centuries, and it sustained Rome in the conquest first of Italy, then (in the Punic Wars) of Carthage, then of the larger Mediterranean region.
In the first century BC, however, Rome had been wracked by a succession of savage civil wars: the soldiers of Sulla fought those of Marius, the legions loyal to Julius Caesar engaged those commanded by Pompey, and the armies and navies of Octavius battled and eventually defeated those of Mark Antony. Under Sulla and again under Antony and Octavius, proscriptions had been issued authorizing the slaughter of large numbers of leading citizens. Among many others, a fleeing Cicero had been captured and executed under the latter proscription; his head, hands, and eloquent tongue had been cut off and nailed to the rostra in the Roman forum—and, according to one report, spat upon and stabbed repeatedly with hairpins by Antony’s wife Fulvia.43 (To his credit, perhaps, Augustus, formerly known as Octavius, later privately praised Cicero to a grandson as “a learned man and a lover of his country.”)44
After defeating Antony at Actium in 31 BC, Octavius managed a skillfully orchestrated ceremony in which he submitted his resignation to the Senate but was then prevailed upon to accept ten-year (renewable, and renewed) appointments to a number of offices, including imperator (essentially commander in chief of the legions), proconsul, and tribune. It was then that Octavius was given his new, more majestic name. Soon thereafter were added the titles of supreme pontiff and censor; elevation to the even loftier position of god did not officially come until after Augustus’s death. Gibbon explained that the various governmental offices, especially those of consul and tribune, had constituted a sort of separation of powers that constrained governmental authority. Once those offices were united in a single man, the holder’s power became practically irresistible.45
The same arrangements were continued with Augustus’s successors. The result, Gibbon explained, was “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed” (1:93).
So, should this loss of freedom count against Gibbon’s glowing assessment of the period as a golden age? The eccentric, incorruptible Cato the Younger would surely have thought so; he had famously fallen on his sword and then pulled out his own bowels rather than submit to the impending dictatorship of Octavius’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar. Gibbon’s own response to the question of liberty was more nuanced. He acknowledged that under Augustus and his immediate successors, the loss of liberty “rendered [the Romans’] condition more completely wretched than that of the victims of tyranny in any other age or country” (1:104). But that wretchedness resulted from two contingent factors. First, the subjects of the early empire felt the loss of democratic freedom more acutely because “they for a long while preserved the sentiments, or at least the ideas, of their freeborn ancestors” (1:105). Second, Rome in that period had the misfortune of being ruled by a series of spectacularly bad emperors: “the dark unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid inhuman Domitian” (1:104).
By the time of Trajan, by contrast, early in the second century, self-governance was little more than a distant memory, so its absence was no longer resented; the “image of liberty”—or the outward trappings of constitutionalism—was sufficient. Moreover, Romans in this period had the good fortune of being governed by rulers of “virtue and wisdom” (1:103). Indeed, the Antonine era was “possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government” (1:102). In the hands of such enlightened rulers, “absolute power” was a beneficent force; “virtue and wisdom” could rule without the tedious encumbrances of assemblies and elections.
To be sure, restoration of the republic might still have been desirable “had the Romans of their day been capable of enjoying a rational freedom” (1:103), but, alas, they lacke
d such capacity. In fact, echoing a contention of one of his favorite modern authors, Montesquieu46—a contention to which James Madison famously responded in Federalist 10—Gibbon ventured that self-governance might be possible in a small republic but was not feasible for “an unwieldy multitude” (History of the Decline, 1:61).
In addition, it would be unduly harsh to say that the “image of liberty” was nothing more than a sham. True, Romans no longer governed themselves as a people, or as a polity. But they did receive the blessings of Roman law (1:64). And they enjoyed almost complete freedom in matters of religion. Or so Gibbon thought (1:56–61); we will say more on that subject in due course.
Gibbon recognized that a good life wholly dependent on enlightened absolutism was precarious. A wise and benevolent ruler might be followed by an unmoored and wicked one. And in fact, one was: the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by his depraved son Commodus (1:108–11), thus bringing the golden age to an end. So the blessed prosperity of the Antonine age was not destined to endure. Still, it was glorious while it lasted.
“The Most Religious People in the World”
Thus far, in describing Gibbon’s golden age, we have mentioned religion only obliquely (as in noting the god Priapus—he of the prodigious phallus—or the deification of the emperors). The deferral has been deliberate; after all, it was not Roman religion that led a skeptical and enlightened modern like Gibbon to regard the world under the Antonine emperors with such extravagant approval. (As a young man, Gibbon had converted to but then repudiated Catholicism; his contempt in his maturity for religion, or “superstition,” was only thinly veiled, both in his historical and in his autobiographical writings.) Nor, we might think, was religion central to the life we have been describing—to the life of opulence, culture, public entertainment (such as the gladiatorial contests), military conquest, and civic commitment. Maybe the Romans also had religion, but that was incidental.
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