The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Domitian then fell out with his former proteges, the philosophers, and during an insecure phase, in late 93, permitted accusations that they were fostering opposition, not least because they were writing biographies of their ancestors, 'opposition martyrs' under Nero. It was a grim time, when senators had to compromise in order to survive. There were also attacks on Christian sympathizers in high society at Rome and on those accused of the 'adoption of Jewish ways'. Modern attempts to rehabilitate Domitian are as one-sided as the wilder rumours from antiquity. On better evidence, we learn that Domitian would retire to his vast country palace (one of two) outside Rome in the Alban hills where he used to like relaxing on the lake. He was so irritable that he had to be towed in a separate boat behind an oared vessel so that he would not hear the noise of its oars in the water/' We can understand why his wife, a descendant of Cassius the 'Liberator', was soon found to prefer the charms of an actor. Back in Rome, Domitian was remembered for the ultimate in black humour. Senators and knights were said to have been invited at night to a dinner in a black-painted room with a black stone shaped like a tombstone behind each couch. Black-painted boys served black-painted food and the silence was only broken by Domitian who 'talked only about death and killing'.7

  Like Nero, this bald successor kept a favourite eunuch for sex; the verses which celebrate the cutting of this eunuch's golden hair and its dedication to the gods are not the most distinguished in Latin poetry. As under Nero, the gainer was Roman architecture. In Alexandria and the East, including the desert city of Petra, there had already been a bold baroque splendour to architecture which was quite at odds with the repetitive classicism of Augustan good taste. It now had a renewed chance in Rome. The list of buildings which were restored or initiated in the city in Domitian's reign is conspicuous, but the boldest was his own great palace on the Palatine hill. Ever accessible and 'civil', Vespasian had avoided living on the hill, but Domitian's new palace was completed on it in 92 by the architectural genius, Rabirius. There were two separate parts and the rooms made a remarkable use of polygonal shapes, coloured marbles from distant quarries, light-effects, exceptional height and passages. Its nearby hippodrome was apparently more a feature of the gardens than a real racecourse. Appropriately, the vast palace-complex was sited on top of Nero's earlier building and, when a thousand senators and knights sat down to dinner in the Banqueting Hall, the spectacle was not so much black, as amazing. Under a high gilded roof, 'the tired eye scarcely reached the summit', wrote the poet Statius, 'and you would think it was the golden ceiling of the sky'.8 The approach to the area was through a temple of ancient Jupiter. Comparisons between Domitian and Jupiter and their two palaces were favoured, but the emperor himself claimed the closest kinship with the goddess Minerva, mistress of the arts and war. There were mirrors, however, in the palace so that Domitian could always watch his own back.

  Domitian's insecurity and love of 'luxury' were intolerable and like Nero he was murdered by his own palace-attendants. As he had no sons, there was scope for those in the plot to choose their own candi­date. Revealingly, they chose the elderly Nerva, sixty years old, a noble patrician by birth, a respected senator and also without sons. The full Senate then approved their choice, someone who was, at last, a mature insider. It was not just that he had written admired Latin elegies in his youth. Rather, three times in the last thirty years, Nerva had been honoured highly after crises in the emperors' management of affairs. His ancestors had been lawyers and he himself probably had a knowledge of law. In 71 he had been honoured most remarkably with a consulship: perhaps it was a reward for co-ordinating work on the 'law' for Vespasian's powers in the previous year.

  It is Nerva, not Titus or Vespasian, who really is the 'good' emperor. At last, senatorial contemporaries could proclaim the reconciliation of 'freedom' and the Principate. Nerva's coins publicized 'Public Free­dom' and an inscription set in the 'Hall of Liberty' at Rome read, 'Liberty Restored'. Of course the system was not undone, but the popular assemblies at Rome did meet and exercise 'liberty' by passing laws. The hateful Domitian's statues were melted down and his name 'abolished' on monuments. But Domitian's appointments and rulings did have to be confirmed: too many people, including senators, had gained from them.

  Besides promoting freedom, Nerva understood the importance of standing out against injustice and luxury. He corrected the harsh effects of the inheritance tax on new citizens and extreme applications of the Jewish tax on Jews and sympathizers. The accusers in tax cases in his provinces could no longer be the judges too; there were no longer to be prosecutions for slandering the emperor, and philosophy was granted public support. Spectacularly, Nerva sold off land, even clothing, in imperial ownership. He forswore 'luxury', and also directed 'liberality' towards poor people in Italy: money was set aside to buy them plots of land. It was all good policy, but the imperial system did not rest only on goodness. There were the all-important soldiers and the guards in Rome.

  Optimistically, Nerva's coins proclaimed 'Concord of the Armies'. However, the troops still liked Domitian, who had raised their pay, and in autumn 97 the Praetorian guards forced Nerva to approve a brutal execution of Domitian's murderers. Someone more robust and military was manifestly needed. There was talk later of an outright coup but it was probably with Nerva's own agreement that he announced a soldier as his adopted heir. The choice was Trajan, a man from a colonial settlement in Spain with a distinguished military father and experience with the armies in Germany. Behind the adoption plan we can detect two senators, one of whom was Frontinus, a former governor of Britain, distinguished for his efforts in Wales, and the acknowledged authority on Rome's aqueducts.

  The new pair of Nerva and 'son' might have worked very well for some years, each complementing the other. However, after three months Nerva unexpectedly died. In the footsteps of Vespasian's Flavian dynasty, he bequeathed to his successor a governing class at Rome which, inevitably, was much changed in tone and composition. Not only had prominent Greek-speakers from the East entered the Senate (Domitian's patronage had been important here, in keeping with his cultural tastes). Vespasian, from 'little Italy', had helped to replenish the Senate with yet more members from 'little Italy' too. The legal statement of his powers had been acceptable to these new men, but then Domitian had elevated himself too far above them. By defying their moral values and standards, Domitian had shown up both the strengths and limitations of what such people stood for. After his death senators were quick to dare to condemn him, but they were equally quick to justify themselves and their recent compromises. As under Nero, there was so much which was best left unsaid. As a

  principled dinner-guest once aptly remarked to Nerva, if the worst of Domitian's informers had still been alive, they would doubtless have been dining in their company with Nerva too.9

  51

  The Last Days of Pompeii

  If you felt the fires of love, mule-driver,

  You would make more haste to see Venus.

  I love a charming boy, so I beg you, goad on the mules; let's go.

  You have had a drink, so let's go. Take up the reins and shake them.

  Take me to Pompeii where love is sweet.

  Inscribed in the peristyle courtyard of House IX.v.ii, Pompeii

  The new men promoted from the towns of Italy in the 70s were credited with a new frugality and restraint, quite unlike the excess and debauchery of Nero's reign and those who had taken part despite 'traditional' Roman values. For a glimpse of small-town Italian life, we can turn to archaeology's great survivors, Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum. On 24 August 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted. A thick shower of dust and pumice rose over the surrounds, with earthquakes, flames and a cloud (said the eye-witness Pliny) shaped like the head of an umbrella pine, a type of tree still so familiar around the ruins. The cloud rose some twenty miles high and to judge from similar recent explosions of Mount St Helen's in north-west America, the explosions in Vesuvius released a force five hundred times greater than the atom b
omb at Hiroshima. At Pompeii we can trace the effects in three awful stages. First of all, a shower of white pumice, some three yards deep, blocked the daylight, then grey pumice blackened streets and buildings. On the following morning, 25 August, by about 7.30 a.m., a great 'burning cloud' of hot gas rolled into the streets, suffocating and burning those who had stayed or been trapped. This very powerful ground surge was followed by the pyroclastic flow of

  hot liquified rock and pumice which destroyed buildings and rolled on far past the town; then 'surge' and 'flow' came in four waves of increasing ferocity until 8 a.m. They caused the death of the spectacle's most learned observer, Pliny the Elder: as his nephew's letters recall, Pliny had boated across the Bay of Naples to have a closer look. Inside the town, bodies of the dead continue to be found. They range from mules, trapped by their mangers near the millstones which they used to turn, to the young lady, dressed in jewels, whose breasts had left their imprints in the mud where she died. At Herculaneum, the surge and flow struck earlier in the morning and hit the town in six waves, running out into the sea. The town was buried even more deeply than Pompeii and not, it now seems, from the secondary effects of rain and floods. The entire disaster was massive, and we can well understand why it was a strain and expense on the Emperor Titus' first year in power.

  Pompeii and Herculaneum were close to the Bay of Naples, where so many of the grandest Romans had built spectacular villas. Even at the height of the Bay's luxury (in the first century bc), neither place had been a city of the first rank; by the 70s the Bay had lost a little of its predominance. Pompeii, the better known, would have covered about 3 50 acres and contained a population of perhaps 8,000-12,000 in its last days. The town was laid out on a plateau of volcanic lava, the relic of a former eruption, and various types of volcanic rock had helped to build it. But the inhabitants did not know the risk they ran: Vesuvius' last eruption was more than a thousand years in the past, and the stone probably seemed harmless. Pompeii itself had grown up in layers, through clear phases of history since the sixth century bc: Etruscan (with Greeks), Samnite, colonial Roman (from 80 bc onwards) when Cicero had had one of his houses there. By ad 79 its roots, like modern London's, were at least two centuries old, and the residents continued to build and rebuild over them right until the end.

  One result is that the best-preserved ancient town is in many ways still hard to understand. It never stood still, and after the fatal eruption the looting began promptly. It has been continuing ever since exca­vation began again in the 1740s. Fortunately, one-third of Pompeii has been reserved for future archaeology, although so much has been destroyed, sold or dispersed meanwhile.

  One side of Pompeian life seems appealingly modern. There was a planned street-system to exclude wheeled traffic from areas in the town centre. There are well-preserved wine-bars with 'pub signs' of a phoenix or a peacock. There are theatres and a so-called 'sports complex' and a special market-building for fish, meat and delicacies for people doing the shopping. Many of the houses have big paintings or frescos on their walls, and there was a definite cult of 'house and garden'. Trompe l'oeil paintings seem to enlarge the gardens' space and even show exotic birds and the flowers which grew in pots and borders, whether roses or bushes of myrtle. Owners would eat out around a shaded table in their 'room outside': 118 pieces of silver were found stored in one big house's basement, including a set for dinner parties of eight people.1 There were also graffiti and well-written inscriptions. Forty-eight graffiti of Virgil's poetry have been found (including some in a brothel). On the street-fronts of the bars, houses and public buildings, election-posters - some 2,800 in all - advertised support for particular candidates for civic office. About forty of these posters name women's support, although women themselves could not vote.2

  Through painted portraits we feel we know these people, the young ladies with a pen to their lips and blond, classicizing features, or the men beside them with dark eyes and a shifty sort of look. But so much of this time warp is not our idea of a cosy town at all. Images and shrines of the gods were all over the place, quite apart from the big formal temples on the main forum. Slaves were essential to the households and crafts, although the loss of the buildings' upper storeys makes it hard to visualize where many of them lived. Ex-slaves, freed-men, were also essential to the economy and the social structure. After being freed, most of them still worked for their former owners (as they did in Rome) who could thus profit 'from' business without being tied down 'to' it. There were no high-street banks (moneylending was a personal transaction) and there were no hospitals or public surgeries. There were brothels, but no moral 'zoning' into red-light districts. There were no street-signs, either. There are well-preserved lavatories behind discreet partitions, but two, even six, people would be accom­modated on them side by side, wiping their backsides with commu­nally provided sponges.

  Despite the theatres, the main sports complex was an amphitheatre for blood sports, both human and animal: it is the earliest one to survive, dating back to the 70s bc when Pompeii's population had been changed by the arrival of Roman veteran-colonists. Gladiatorial shows are announced and applauded in many of the town's surviving graffiti: 'the girls' idol, Celadus the Thracian gladiator!'3 Nor were the town's big houses the inward-looking centres of privacy which we now cherish. Like a Roman's, a Pompeian's home was not his castle and 'home life' was not a concept which men prized for its own sake. It is not that the Roman family was an extended family by definition, somehow sprawling in one house across generations and between siblings. It was nuclear, like ours, but it was embedded in a different set of relationships. If the head of the household, or paterfamilias, was an important person, he was also a patron to many dependants and 'friends' who both gave and expected favours. Every morning, a string of visitors went in and out of the house, which was itself a sort of reception centre. Many of the older, bigger houses thus gave visitors an impressive view through them from the entrance, as they looked down the straight main axis of their central rooms: this axis was supported on huge timber cross-beams, some thirty feet long.

  In the last decades of the city, this type of plan was far from universal. Big houses now included workshops for craftsmen, shops or even bars adjoining the street, obscuring the 'view through'. The Latin word familia included household slaves, and in these work­spaces they and their owner's freedmen would be put to profitable use. Inside, in the household proper, we would be struck by the relative absence of furniture, the multi-purpose use of many of the rooms and the consequent absence of our ideas of privacy. Even the plants in the bigger gardens were often there for their economic value, not for useless gardening. In the southern sector, houses with quite large vineyards inside their plots have now been excavated, while even roses might be grown for the important industry of scent.

  As the identity of so many houses' owners is still uncertain, their connections with outlying farmhouses and country villas are still uncertain too. Was Pompeii a town based on consumer-spending, where property-owners simply spent their rents and other income and consumed goods, including crops, which were only produced locally? It seems most unlikely, not just because of casual long-range imports found in the city (a pack of fine pottery from Gaul or a superb ivory statuette of a nude Indian goddess), but also because Pompeian produce is discovered so far abroad in Gaul or Spain. The town's wine was not high class, but it was widely known and widely drunk as a result: its good millstones were famous too, as was its salty fish sauce whose use is also widely attested outside the town. In the years before 79, the king of fish sauce was the freedman Umbricius Scaurus whose product was exported out into Campania: he even commemor­ated it in prominent mosaics in his house. Continuing excavations of the villa-farmhouses nearby confirm their role as centres of storage and production, often on an impressive scale: it was presumably not all produced for local consumption. Nor was such production 'undignified' for the town's ruling class. A big vineyard, surely a commercial one, has been found down near the
amphitheatre with holes for more than 2,000 vines: the production was surely sold in the street shops and perhaps even sent outside. Prominent families in Pompeii's civic life were even remembered for giving their names to particular types of grape (the 'Holconian'). Profits from wine-growing surely mattered to them, though the workforce were their slaves and freedmen: perhaps those villa-houses with the most florid paintings of vines and grapes really were owned by keen profit-making wine­growers.4 There must have been frequent connections between the place in town, the big house for social and political obligations, and another place in the country, a landed centre of produce. Unfortu­nately, the inter-connections are seldom attested by what survives. But Pompeii was excellently sited above the navigable river Sarno, with fine access to the sea. It was important to the town's outward-looking economy.