The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  Erasure is as important as writing. Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute. . . . The best method of correction is to put aside for a time what we have written, so that when we come to it again it may have an aspect of novelty, as of being another man’s work; in this way we may preserve ourselves from regarding our writings with the affection that we lavish upon a newborn child.121

  Delivery, like composition, should touch the emotions, but avoid exuberant gesticulation. “It is feeling and force of imagination that makes us eloquent,” but “shout and bellow with uplifted hand, pant, wag your head, smite your hands together, slap your thigh, your breast, your forehead, and you will go straight to the heart of the dingier members of your audience.”122

  To all this excellent counsel Quintilian adds, in his twelfth book, the best literary criticism that has survived from antiquity. He enters with zest into the ancient and modern war between the ancients and the moderns, and finds truth precariously in the middle. He does not, like Fronto, wish to return to the rude simplicity of Cato and Ennius, but still more he would shun the “voluptuous and affected” fluency of Seneca; he prefers, as a model for students, the virile yet polished speech of Cicero, the one Roman writer who had in his line surpassed the Greeks.123 Quintilian’s own style is often that of a schoolmaster, moribund with definitions, classification, and distinctions, and rising to eloquence only in denouncing Seneca; but it is a vigorous style, whose dignity is lightened now and then with touches of humanity and wit. Behind the good sense of the words we feel always the quiet goodness of the man; it is a moral stimulus to read him. Perhaps the Romans who had the privilege of his instruction took from it some part of the moral renovation that, more than any brilliance of letters, ennobled the age of the younger Pliny and Tacitus.

  VIII. STATIUS AND MARTIAL

  We have left to the last two poets who belonged to the same epoch, sought the favor of the same emperor and the same patrons, and yet never mention each other: one the purest, the other the coarsest, poet in the history of imperial Rome. Publius Papinius Statius was the son of a Neapolitan poet and grammarian; his environment and his education gave him everything but money and genius. He lisped in numbers, startled salons with poetical improvisations, and wrote an epic, the Thebaid, on the war of the Seven against Thebes. We cannot read it today, for its movement is obstructed with dead gods, and its smooth verses have an overpowering virtus dormitiva. But his contemporaries liked it; crowds gathered to hear him recite it in a Naples theater; they understood his mythological machinery, welcomed the delicacy of his sentiment, and found that his lines ran trippingly on the tongue. The judges in the Alban poetry contest gave him the first prize; rich men became his friends and helped him stave off penury;124 Domitian himself invited him to dinner in the domus Flavia, and Statius repaid him by describing the palace as heaven and the Emperor as god.

  To Domitian and other patrons, to his father and his friends, he addressed the most pleasing of his poems, the Silvae, modest idyls and eulogies in light and happy verse. In the Capitoline games, however, another poet won the crown, Statius’ star waned in fickle Rome, and he persuaded his reluctant wife to return with him to his boyhood home. In Naples he began another epic, the Achilleid; then suddenly, in 96, he died, a youth of thirty-five. He was not a great poet; but he struck a welcome note of kindliness and tenderness amid a literature too often sarcastic and bitter, and a society corrupt and coarse beyond any precedent. He would have been as famous as Martial if he had been as obscene.

  Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Bilbilis in Spain in the fortieth year of our era. At twenty-four he came to Rome and won the friendship of Lucan and Seneca. Quintilian advised him to butter his bread by practicing law, but Martial preferred to starve on poetry. His friends were suddenly swept away in the conspiracy of Piso, and he was reduced to addressing his poems to rich men who might give him a dinner for an epigram. He lived in a third-floor garret, probably alone; for though he indites two poems to a woman whom he calls his wife, they are so foul that she must have been an invention or a bawd.126

  His poems, he lets us know, were read throughout the Empire, even among the Goths; he rejoices to learn that he was almost as famous as a racehorse, but he fretted to see his publisher enriched while he himself received nothing from the sale of his books. He descended to suggesting, in an epigram, that he badly needed a toga; the Emperor’s rich freedman Parthenius sent him one; he replied in two stanzas, one of which celebrated the newness of the garment, the other its cheap worthlessness. In time he found some more generous patrons; one gave him a little farm at Nomentum, and somehow he raised funds to buy a simple home on the Quirinal hill. He became a “client” or retainer to one rich man after another, waited upon them in the morning, and received an occasional gift; but he felt the shame of his situation and mourned that he did not have the courage to be contentedly poor and therefore free.127 He could not afford to be poor, for he had to mingle in the society of men who could reward his verse. He showered Domitian with lauds and announced that if Jupiter and Domitian were to invite him to dinner on the same day he would turn down the god; but the Emperor preferred Statius. Martial became jealous of the younger poet and suggested that a live epigram was worth more than a dead epic.128

  The epigram had till now been a pretty conceit on any passing subject, sometimes a dedication, a compliment, an epitaph; Martial molded it into a briefer, sharper form, barbed with satiric sting. We do him injustice when we read these 1561 epigrams in a few sittings; they were issued in twelve books at divers times, and the reader was expected to use them in small portions as hors d’oeuvres, not as a prolonged feast. Most of them seem trivial today; their allusion was local and temporary, too well timed to endure. Martial does not take them very seriously; the bad ones, he agrees, outnumber the good, but he had to fill a volume.129 He is a master of versification, knows all the meters and all the tricks of the poetic trade; but he avoids rhetoric as proudly as his prose patrician analogue, Petronius. He cares nothing for the mythological furniture that littered the literature of his age; he is interested in real men and women and their intimate life and describes them with relish and spite; “my pages,” he says, “taste of men.”130 He can “take down” some stiff aristocrat or stingy millionaire, some pompous lawyer or famous orator; but he likes better to tell of barbers, cobblers, hawkers, jockeys, acrobats, auctioneers, poisoners, perverts, and prostitutes. His scenes are laid not in ancient Greece but in the baths, the theaters, the streets, the circus, the homes, and tenements of Rome. He is the poet laureate of worthless men.

  He is more interested in money than in love, and most often thinks of the latter in one gender. There is some sentiment in him, and he speaks very tenderly of a friend’s child just dead; but there is no gallant line in his books, not even a noble wrath. He chants a litany of evil smells, and adds, “All these stenches I prefer to yours, Bassa.”131 He describes one of his mistresses:

  Your tresses, Galla, are manufactured far away; you lay aside your teeth at night as you do your silk dresses; you lie stored away in a hundred caskets, and your face does not sleep with you; you wink with an eyebrow brought to you in the morning. No respect moves you for your outworn carcass, which you may now count as one of your ancestors.132

  He writes with unmanly vengefulness of the women who have refused him, and flings his epigrammatic mud at them with the delicacy of a scavenger. His love lyrics are addressed to boys; he climbs to ecstasy over the fragrance of “thy kisses, cruel lad.”133 One of his love poems begot a famous English counterpart:

  I do not love you, Sabidius, the reason I cannot tell;

  This only I can say—I dislike you very well.II

  Indeed there are many whom Martial does not like. He describes them under transparent pseudonyms and in language that can be found today only on the most private public walls.135 He is always libeling his enemi
es, as Statius is always celebrating his friends. Some of his victims retaliated by publishing under his name poems filthier than his own, or attacking the men whom Martial was anxious to please. From these technically perfect epigrams one could construct a full vocabulary of barroom urology.

  But Martial’s obscenity sits on him lightly. He shares it with his time, and never doubts that even highborn maidens in palace bowers will like it. “Lucretia blushed and laid down my volume, but Brutus was present. Brutus, go away; she will read it.”136 The poetic license of the age allowed indecencies, provided the meter and diction were correct. Sometimes Martial boasts of his lubricity; “no page of mine is without wantonness.”137 More often he is a bit ashamed of it, and begs us to believe that his life is cleaner than his verse.

  At last he tired of purveying compliments and insults as a source of food; he began to long for a quieter, wholesomer life, and the haunts of his native Spain. He was now fifty-seven, with gray head and bushy beard, so swarthy that anyone, he tells us, could see at a glance that he had been born near the Tagus. He addressed a poetical bouquet to the younger Pliny and received in return a sum that paid his fare to Bilbilis. The little town welcomed him, forgiving his morals for his fame; he found simpler patrons there, but more open-handed than those at Rome. A kindly lady presented him with a modest villa, and there he spent his few remaining years. In 101 Pliny wrote: “I have just heard of Martial’s death. The news has deeply grieved me. He was a man of wit, piquant and mordant, who mixed in his verse salt and honey, and not least of all, candor.”138 There must have been some secret virtue in the man if Pliny loved him.

  * * *

  I Many farmers today plant according to the phases of the moon.

  II Non amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare; Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.134

  CHAPTER XV

  Rome at Work

  A.D. 14-96

  I. THE SOWERS

  TO the Silver Age belongs the classic Roman work on agriculture—the De Re Rustica (65) of Junius Columella. Like Quintilian, Martial, and the Senecas, he came from Spain; he farmed several estates in Italy and retired to a residence in Rome. The best lands, he found, were taken up by the villas and grounds of the rich; the next best by olive orchards and vineyards; only inferior soils were left for tillage. “We have abandoned the husbanding of our soil to our lowest slaves, and they treat it like barbarians.” The freemen of Italy, he thought, were degenerating in cities when they should have been hardening themselves by working the earth; “we ply our hands in circuses and theaters rather than among crops and vines.” Columella loved the soil, and felt that the physical culture of the earth is saner than the literary culture of the town; farming “is a blood relative of wisdom” (consanguinea sapientiae). To lure men back to the fields he adorned his subject with polished Latin, and when he came to speak of gardens and flowers he fell into enthusiastic verse.

  It was in this period that Pliny the naturalist pronounced a premature epitaph: latifundia perdidere Italiam—“the large farms have ruined Italy.” Similar judgments occur in Seneca, Lucan, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal. Seneca described cattle ranches wider than kingdoms, cultivated by fettered slaves; some estates were so large, said Columella, that their masters could never ride around them.1 Pliny mentions an estate with 4117 slaves, 7200 oxen, and 257,000 other animals.2 Land distributions by the Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus had raised the number of small holdings, but many of these had been abandoned during the wars and bought in by the rich. When imperial administration reduced plunder in the provinces, much patrician wealth went into large farms. The latifundia spread because greater profits flowed from producing cattle, oil, and wine than from growing cereals and vegetables, and the discovery that ranching, to be most profitable, required the operation of large areas under one management. By the close of the first Christian century these advantages were being offset by the rising cost of slaves and their slow and uninventive work.3 The long transition now began from slavery to serfdom. As peace diminished the flow of war captives into bondage, some owners of large estates, instead of operating them with slaves, divided them into small holdings and leased these to free tenants (coloni, cultivators) who paid in rent and labor. Most of the ager publicus belonging to the government was now worked in this way. So were the extensive properties of the younger Pliny, who describes his tenants as healthy, sturdy, good-natured, talkative peasants—precisely such as one finds throughout Italy today, unchanged after all-changes.

  The modes and tools of tillage were essentially as they had been for centuries. Plow, spade, hoe, pick, pitchfork, scythe, rake, have preserved their forms almost unaltered for 3000 years. Corn was ground in mills turned by water or by beasts. Screw pumps and water wheels raised water out of mines or into irrigation canals. Soils were protected by crop rotation, and fertilized by manure, alfalfa, clover, rye, or beans.4 Seed selection was highly developed. Skillful care drew three, sometimes four, harvests per year from the rich fields of the Campagna and the valley of the Po;5 from one planting of alfalfa four to six crops could be cut yearly for ten years.6 All but the rarest European vegetables were grown, some of them in greenhouses for the winter trade. Fruit and nut trees of every sort abounded, for Roman generals and merchants, and alien merchants and slaves, had brought in many new species: the peach from Persia, the apricot from Armenia, the cherry from Pontic Cerasus (whence its name), the grape from Syria, the damson (pruna damascena) from Damascus, the plum and filbert from Asia Minor, the walnut from Greece, the olive and fig from Africa. . . . Clever arboriculturists had grafted the walnut upon the arbutus, the plum upon the plane tree, the cherry upon the elm. Pliny enumerates twenty-nine varieties of figs grown in Italy.7 “Through the zeal of our farmers,” said Columella, “Italy has learned to produce the fruits of almost the whole world.”8 In turn it transmitted these arts to western and northern Europe. Our rich dietary has a wide geography and a long history behind it, and the very food that we eat may be part of our Oriental and classical heritage.

  Olive orchards were numerous, but vineyards were everywhere, beautifully terraced on the slopes. Italy produced fifty famous kinds of wine, and Rome alone drank 25,000,000 gallons per year—two quarts per week for each man, woman, and child, slave or free. Most wines were produced by capitalistic organization—by large-scale operations financed from Rome.9 Much of the product was exported and taught the graces of wine to beer-drinking countries like Germany and Gaul. During this first century Spain, Africa, and Gaul began to grow their own grapes; Italian vintners lost one provincial outlet after another, and glutted their domestic market in one of the few “overproduction” crises of Roman economy. Domitian tried to ease the situation, and restore cereal culture, by prohibiting the further plantings of vines in Italy and ordering half of all vineyards in the provinces destroyed.10 These edicts aroused a fury of protest and could not be enforced. In the second century the wines of Gaul and the oil of Spain, Africa, and the East began to crowd Italian products out of Mediterranean markets, and the economic decline of Italy began.

  A large part of the peninsula was given over to grazing. The cheapest soils and slaves could be used for the raising of cattle, sheep, and swine. Careful attention was paid to scientific breeding. Horses were bred chiefly for war, hunting, and sport, seldom as draft animals; oxen drew the plow and the cart, mules bore burdens on their backs. Cows, sheep, and goats gave three kinds of milk, from which the Italian made delectable cheeses then as now. Swine were herded in woods rich with acorns and nuts; Rome, said Strabo, lived chiefly on pork fattened in the oak forests of northern Italy. Poultry fertilized the farmyard and helped feed the family, while bees provided the ancient and honorable substitute for sugar. If we add some acres of flax and hemp, a little hunting and much fishing, we get a picture of the Italian countryside as it was nineteen hundred years ago, and is today.

  II. THE ARTISANS

  There was not in Roman life—and perhaps there would not be in a healthy economy—so g
eographical a division between agriculture and industry as in our modern states. The ancient rural home—cottage, villa, or estate—was literally a manufactory, where the hands of men carried on a dozen vital industries, and the skill of women filled the house and its environs with a score of wholesome arts. There the woods were turned into shelter, fuel, and furniture, cattle were slain and dressed, grain was milled and baked, oil and wine were pressed, food was prepared and preserved, wool and flax were cleaned and woven; sometimes clay was fired into vessels, bricks, and tiles, and metal was beaten into tools; life there had an educative fullness and variety that come to few of us in our time of wider movement and narrowing specialties. Nor was this diversity of occupation the sign of a poor and primitive economy; the wealthiest households were the most self-sufficient, and prided themselves on making the largest part of what they needed. A family was an organization of economic helpmates engaged in the united agriculture and industry of a home.

  When an artisan undertook to do a certain task for several families, and set up his shop at some center within reach of them all, village economy supplemented, but did not supersede, domestic industry. So the miller took and ground the grain of many fields; later he baked the bread, and finally he delivered it. Forty bakeries were unearthed at Pompeii, and at Rome the pastrymakers were a separate guild. There were likewise contractors who bought an olive crop on the trees and gathered the fruit;11 most estates, however, continued to process their own oil and bake their own bread. The clothing of peasants and philosophers was homespun, but the well-to-do wore garments that, though woven at home, were carded, cleaned, bleached, and cut in a fullery. Some delicate woolen fabrics were woven in factories; and such flax as was not made into sails or nets was turned by factories into linen garments for women and handkerchiefs for men.12 In its next stage the cloth might be sent to a dyer, who not only colored it but impressed upon it such delicate designs as we find on the costumes in Pompeian murals. Tanning of leather had also reached the factory stage, but shoemakers were usually individual craftsmen, making shoes to order; some were specialists who made only fancy slippers for feminine feet.