The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

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  I Cf. the map of Rome on the flyleaf of this volume.

  II Vitruvius describes these hypocausta as introduced about 100 B.C..11 By A.D. 10 they were fairly common, particularly in the north, and even in Britain, which is slowly recapturing the idea.

  III The Syrians and Egyptians, some 200 years before Christ, had discovered that the fusion of sand with an alkaline substance at a high temperature produced a semitransparent liquid of greenish color (due to the iron oxide in the sand); that the addition of manganese and lead oxide rendered the product colorless and fully transparent; and that different shades could be induced by different chemicals—blue, for example, by cobalt. The fluid paste was shaped by hand or blown into molds; or the paste was allowed to harden, and then cut on a wheel.

  IV This vase of superimposed layers of glass was probably of Greek origin. It was found near Rome in 1770, was bought by the Duke of Portland, and was lent to the British Museum in 1810. In 1845 a maniac smashed it into 250 pieces, but it was so successfully restored that when the then Duke offered it for sale in 1929 he received a bid of $152,000. The bid was rejected as too low.18a

  V The largest fragments were till recently in the Museo delle Terme at Rome; others were in the Vatican, the Uffizi Gallery at Florence, and in the Louvre.

  • They portray the return of the Parthian standards, the submission of the conquered provinces, the fertility of the earth (Terra Mater) at peace, and the mantle of protection spread over all by Jove.

  VI With its pedestal, 153. The Statue of Liberty, without its base, is 104 feet in height.

  VII Some students suspect the work of being a third-century forgery, but the evidence inclines toward authenticity.28

  VIII More accurately, odometers. A peg attached to the axle of the wheel advanced by a cog a smaller wheel, whose much slower revolution caused a pebble to fall into a box.31

  IX The Roman baths provided models for many modern structures faced with like problems of covering great spaces with a minimum of obstruction. The Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal in New York are outstanding examples.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Epicurean Rome

  30 B.C.-A.D. 96

  I. THE PEOPLE

  LET us enter these dwellings, temples, theaters, and baths, and see how these Romans lived; we shall find them more interesting than their art. We must at the outset recall that by Nero’s time they were only geographically Roman. The conditions that Augustus had failed to check—celibacy, childlessness, abortion, and infanticide among the older stocks, manumission and comparative fertility among the new—had transformed the racial character, the moral temper, even the physiognomy, of the Roman people.

  Once the Romans had been precipitated into parentage by the impetus of sex, and lured to it by anxiety for the post-mortem care of their graves; now the upper and middle classes had learned to separate sex from parentage, and were skeptical about the afterworld. Once the rearing of children had been an obligation of honor to the state, enforced by public opinion; now it seemed absurd to demand more births in a city crowded to the point of redolence. On the contrary, wealthy bachelors and childless husbands continued to be courted by sycophants longing for legacies. “Nothing,” said Juvenal, “will so endear you to your friends as a barren wife.”1 “Crotona,” says a character in Petronius, “has only two classes of inhabitants—flatterers and flattered; and the sole crime there is to bring up children to inherit your money. It is like a battlefield at rest: nothing but corpses and the crows that pick them.”2 Seneca consoled a mother who had lost her only child by reminding her how popular she would now be; for “with us childlessness gives more power than it takes away.”3 The Gracchi had been a family of twelve children; probably not five families of such abundance could be found in Nero’s age in patrician or equestrian Rome. Marriage, which had once been a lifelong economic union, was now among a hundred thousand Romans a passing adventure of no great spiritual significance, a loose contract for the mutual provision of physiological conveniences or political aid. To escape the testatory disabilities of the unmarried some women took eunuchs as contraceptive husbands;4 some entered into sham wedlock with poor men on the understanding that the wife need bear no children and might have as many lovers as she pleased.5 Contraception was practiced in both its mechanical and chemical forms.6 If these methods failed there were many ways of procuring abortion. Philosophers and the law condemned it, but the finest families practiced it. “Poor women,” says Juvenal, “endure the perils of childbirth, and all the troubles of nursing . . . but how often does a gilded bed harbor a pregnant woman? So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist!” Nevertheless, he tells the husband, “rejoice; give her the potion . . . for were she to bear the child you might find yourself the father of an Ethiopian.”7 In so enlightened a society infanticide was rare.I

  The infertility of the moneyed classes was so offset by immigration and the fecundity of the poor that the population of Rome and the Empire continued to grow. Beloch estimated it at 800,000 for the Rome of the early Empire, Gibbon at 1,200,000, Marquardt at 1,600,000.II Beloch computed the population of the Empire at 54,000,000, Gibbon at 120,000,000.11 The aristocracy was as numerous as before, but it was almost wholly altered in origin. We hear no more of the Aemilii, Claudii, Fabii, Valerii; only the Cornelii remained of the proud clans that, as late as Caesar, had strutted their Rome. Some had vanished through war or political execution; others had faded out through family limitation, physiological degeneration, or an impoverishment that had lowered them into the plebeian mass. Their places had been taken by Roman businessmen, Italian municipal dignitaries, and provincial nobles. In A.D. 56 a senator declared that “most of the knights, and many of the senators, were descendants of slaves.”12 After a generation or two the new optimates adopted the ways of their predecessors, had fewer children and more luxuries, and surrendered to inundation from the East.

  First had come the Greeks—not so much from the mainland as from Cyrenaica, Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. They were eager, clever, facile semi-Orientals; many of them small traders or import merchants; some of them scientists, writers, teachers, artists, physicians, musicians, actors; some sincerely, some venally, devoted to philosophy; some of them able administrators and financiers, many of them without moral scruple, nearly all without religious belief. The majority had come as slaves and were not an ideal selection; freed, they kept their external servility, their internal hatred and scorn of the rich Roman who lived intellectually on the cultural leavings of ancient Hellas. The streets of the capital were now noisy with restless and voluble Greeks; the Greek language was more often heard there than the Latin; if one wished to be read by all classes he had to write in Greek. Nearly all the early Christians in Rome spoke Greek; so did the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews. A large colony of Egyptians—traders, artisans, artists—lived in the Field of Mars. Syrians, thin, affable, shrewd, were everywhere in the capital, busy with trade, handicrafts, secretarial work, finance, and chicanery.

  The Jews were already in Caesar’s time a substantial element in the population of the capital. A few had come as early as 140 B.C..;13 many had been brought to Rome as war captives after Pompey’s campaign of 63 B.C. They were rapidly emancipated, partly by their industry and thrift, partly because their strict adherence to their religious customs was inconvenient for their masters. By 59 B.C. there were so many Jewish citizens in the assemblies that Cicero represented opposition to them as political temerity.14 In general the republican party was hostile to the Jews, the populares and the emperors were friendly.15 III By the end of the first century they numbered some 20,000 in the capital.18 They lived mostly on the west side of the Tiber, where they suffered periodically from the floods. They worked on the near-by docks, engaged in handicrafts and retail business, and peddled goods through the city. There were some rich men among them, but only a few great merchants; Syrians and Greeks dominated international commerce. Synagogues were n
umerous in Rome, and each had its school, its scribes, and its gerousia, or senate of elders.19 The separatism of the Jews, their scorn of polytheism and image worship, the severity of their morals, their refusal to attend the theaters or the games, their strange customs and ceremonies, their poverty and resultant uncleanliness, led to the usual racial antagonisms. Juvenal denounced their fertility, Tacitus their monotheism, Ammianus Marcellinus their fondness for garlic.20 Bad feeling was heightened by the bloody capture of Jerusalem, and the procession of Jewish captives and sacred spoils featured in the triumph of Titus and in the reliefs on his arch. Vespasian heaped insult upon injury by ordering that the half shekel paid annually by the Jews of the Dispersion for the upkeep of the Temple at Jerusalem should henceforth be contributed yearly to the rebuilding of Rome. Nevertheless, many educated Romans admired Jewish monotheism; some were converted to Judaism, and several, even of high family, observed the Jewish Sabbath as a day of worship and rest.21

  If we add to the Greeks, the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews some Numidians, Nubians, and Ethiopians from Africa; a few Arabs, Parthians, Cappadocians, Armenians, Phrygians, and Bithynians from Asia; powerful “barbarians” from Dalmatia, Thrace, Dacia, and Germany; mustachioed nobles from Gaul, poets and peasants from Spain, and “tattooed savages from Britain”22—we get an ethnic picture of a very heterogeneous and cosmopolitan Rome. Martial marveled at the pliable facility with which the courtesans of Rome readjusted their language and their charms to so varied and polyglot a clientele.23 Juvenal complained that the Orontes, Syria’s great river, was flowing into the Tiber,24 and Tacitus described the capital as “the cesspool of the world.”25 Oriental faces, ways, dress, words, gestures, quarrels, ideas, and faiths made up a great part of the city’s seething life. By the third century the government would be an Oriental monarchy; by the fourth the religion of Rome would be an Oriental creed, and the masters of the world would kneel to the god of the slaves.

  There were elements of nobility in this motley crowd. It showed its contempt of Nero’s mistress Poppaea when angry senators dared not speak, and it stormed the senate house to protest the wholesale slaughter of Pedanius Secundus’ slaves.26 The simple virtues of the common man were not wanting in it; the family life of the Jews was exemplary, and the little Christian communities were troubling the pleasure-mad pagan world with their piety and their decency. But most of the inflowing peoples had literally been demoralized by uprootage from their native surroundings, cultures, and moral codes; years of slavery had destroyed in them that self-respect which is the backbone of upright conduct; and daily friction with groups of different customs had worn away still more of their custom-made morality. If Rome had not engulfed so many men of alien blood in so brief a time, if she had passed all these newcomers through her schools instead of her slums, if she had treated them as men with a hundred potential excellences, if she had occasionally closed her gates to let assimiliation catch up with infiltration, she might have gained new racial and literary vitality from the infusion, and might have remained a Roman Rome, the voice and citadel of the West. The task was too great. The victorious city was doomed by the vastness and diversity of her conquests, her native blood was diluted in the ocean of her subjects, her educated classes were drawn down by the power of numbers to the culture of those who had been her slaves. Much breeding overcame good breeding; the fertile conquered became masters in the sterile master’s house.

  II. EDUCATION

  We do not know much of Roman childhood, but we can judge from Roman art and epitaphs that when children came they were loved not wisely but too well. Juvenal interrupts his wrath to write a tender passage on the good examples we must place before our children’s eyes, the evil sights and sounds we must keep from them, the respect that we should show them even in the excesses of our love.27 Favorinus, in a discourse premimicking Rousseau, begged mothers to nurse their babes.28 Seneca and Plutarch spoke to the same effect, which was slight indeed; wet-nursing was the rule in all families that could afford it, with no evident tragedies ensuing.IV

  Early education came from the nurse, who was usually Greek. There were fairy tales beginning, “Once upon a time a king and a queen . . .” Primary schooling was still entrusted to private enterprise. Rich men often hired tutors for their children, but Quintilian, like Emerson, warned against this as depriving the child of formative friendships and stimulating rivalries. Ordinarily the boy and girl of the free classes entered at the age of seven an elementary school, accompanied each way by a paedagogus (“child-leader”) to guard his safety and his morals. Such schools existed everywhere in the Empire, even in small country towns; the wall scribblings at Pompeii suggest a general literacy, and probably education was then as widespread in the Mediterranean world as at any time before or since. Both the paedagogus and the teacher (ludi magister, “schoolmaster”) were usually Greek freedmen or slaves. In Horace’s youth and native town each pupil paid the teacher eight asses (forty-eight cents) monthly; 30 350 years later Diocletian fixed the maximum fee for the elementary teacher at fifty denarii ($20) per month per pupil; we may judge from this the rise of the teacher and the fall of the as.

  About the age of thirteen the successful student, of either sex, was graduated into a secondary or high school; Rome had twenty of these in A.D. 130. Here the scholars studied more grammar, the Greek language, Latin and Greek literature, music, astronomy, history, mythology, and philosophy, generally through lecture-commentaries on the classic poets. Up to this point the girls seem to have taken the same courses as the boys, but they often sought additional instruction in music and dancing. Since the secondary teachers (grammatici) were nearly always Greek freedmen, they naturally emphasized Greek literature and history; Roman culture took on a Greek tint, until by the end of the second century almost all higher education was given in Greek, and Latin literature was swallowed up in the general Hellenic koiné and culture of the age.

  The Roman equivalent of our college and university education was provided in the schools of the rhetors. The Empire bristled with rhetoricians who spoke for their clients in court, or wrote speeches for them, or gave public lectures, or taught their art to pupils, or did all four. Many of them traveled from city to city, speaking on literature, philosophy, or politics, and giving exhibitions of how to handle any subject with oratorical skill. The younger Pliny tells of the Greek Isaeus, then sixty-three years old:

  He proposes several questions for discussion, gives his audience liberty to call for any they please, and sometimes even to say what side of it he should defend; whereupon he rises, dons his gown, and begins. . . . He introduces his theme with great propriety, his narrative is clear, his controversy ingenious, his logic forcible, and his rhetoric sublime.31

  Such men might open a school, employ assistants, and gather a large student body. Pupils entered about their sixteenth year, and paid fees as high as 2000 sesterces per course. The chief subjects were oratory, geometry, astronomy, and philosophy—which included much that is now termed science. These constituted a “liberal education”—i.e., one designed for a well-to-do freeman (homo liber), who would presumably have no physical work to perform. Petronius complained, as every generation does, that education unfitted youth for the problems of maturity: “The schools are to blame for the gross foolishness of our young men, since in them they see or hear nothing at all of the affairs of everyday life.”32 We can only say that they gave the assiduous student that clarity and quickness of thought which have distinguished the legal profession in all ages, and that capacity for unscrupulous eloquence which marked the orators of Rome. Apparently no degrees were granted in these schools. The student might stay as long, and take as many courses, as he liked; Aulus Gellius remained till he was twenty-five. Women also attended, some after marriage. Those who wished further instruction went to Athens for philosophy at its bubbling source, to Alexandria for medicine, or to Rhodes for the last subtleties of rhetoric. Cicero spent $4000 a year maintaining his son in the university of Athen
s.

  By Vespasian’s time the schools of rhetoric had so grown in number and influence that the wily Emperor thought it advisable to bring the more important ones in the capital under governmental control by paying their head professors a state salary—the highest being 100,000 sesterces ($10,000) a year. We do not know to how many teachers or cities Vespasian extended this subsidy. We hear of private endowments for higher education, such as the younger Pliny established at Comum.33 Trajan provided scholarships for 5000 boys who had less money than brains. By the reign of Hadrian governmental financing of secondary schools had been adopted in many municipalities throughout the Empire, and a pension fund had been set aside for retired teachers. Hadrian and Antoninus exempted the leading professors of each city from taxation and other civic burdens. Education reached its height while superstition grew, morals declined, and literature decayed.

  III. THE SEXES

  The moral life of youth was carefully guarded in the girl, leniently supervised in the young man. The Roman, like the Greek, readily condoned the resort of men to prostitutes. The profession was legalized and restricted; brothels (lupanaria) were by law kept outside the city walls and could open only at night; prostitutes (meretrices) were registered by the aediles and were required to wear the toga instead of the stola. Some women enrolled as prostitutes to avoid the legal penalties of detected adultery. Fees were adjusted to bring promiscuity within the reach of every pocketbook; we have heard of the “quarter-of-an-as woman.” But there was now a rising number of educated courtesans who sought to win patrons by poetry, singing, music, dancing, and cultured conversation. One did not have to go outside the walls to find these or other ladies of easy persuasion; Ovid assures us that they could be met under the porticoes, at the circus, in the theater, “as numerous as stars in the sky”;34 and Juvenal found them in the precincts of temples, particularly that of Isis, a goddess lenient to love.35 Christian authors charged that prostitution was practiced within the cellas and between the altars of Roman temples.36