The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Reputation was everything. In this sort of society what passed for public opinion depended heavily on word of mouth. Naturally the candidate himself should speak out against his rivals. In doing everything possible to cultivate his own reputation, he should be mindful of even what the servants might say about him, since ‘in general every rumour which becomes the common gossip of the forum originates from sources within one’s own home’. This is an interesting passage for what it implies about the empowerment even of slaves, who served as domestics in the great households of Rome.

  A candidate naturally had his own money and should be willing to spend it on his campaign. If, as in eighteenth-century England, he used his own pocket to feast potential voters, he should not disdain from showing up in person on these occasions. He should try to deter rivals from trying to corrupt voters with bribes by leaving them in no doubt that he was watching them carefully, and would not hesitate to bring charges of bribery.

  There is much more in this vein, along with special advice for the addressee as a ‘new man’. Romans used this expression to mean a man who was the first member of his family to become consul. Ancient lists of names of the two annual consuls leave in no doubt that the Roman electorate favoured political lineages. The irrational appeal of a familiar name is a feature of world politics today, western democracies included. In Roman society, where behind-the-scenes patronage was rife and great families were surrounded by deferential dependants whose votes they could count on, this dynastic tendency was far more pronounced.

  That ‘new men’ did from time to time capture a consulship shows that the Roman aristocracy was not a closed caste. The ‘new man’ about whom the best information survives today is Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was murdered in 43 BC at the age of sixty-three. Cicero successfully stood for the consulship in 64 BC. He is the ostensible recipient of the electioneering treatise just discussed. Much is made there of the personal merits which should recommend him to the voters, above all his skill as a public speaker, tried and tested as an advocate in the Roman courts.

  There was another story, a deeper one, explaining Cicero’s pursuit of a career in Roman politics. It reveals something fundamental about the (relatively) inclusive nature of Roman society. Cicero’s family did not come from Rome. They lived 87 miles south-east, in a hill-top settlement called Arpinum, now the town of Arpino. By heritage the inhabitants of Arpinum were not Roman. They descended from a neighbouring Italic people in this part of central Italy called the Volsci. Yet Cicero was born a Roman citizen.

  True to their self-image as a people of mixed origins, from early on the Romans had shown a willingness to share some of their citizen rights with non-Roman neighbours within the Italian peninsula. They may have acted in this way chiefly to improve their military security by creating new oases of (they hoped) loyalty to Rome. They expected concrete services in return, above all, fighting in the Roman army. As these new citizens were not allowed to vote in the citizen assemblies at Rome, it must be wondered how they felt about the dubious honour of being awarded the obligations but not the rights of Roman citizenship.

  Still, the Roman people kept the possibility of a status upgrade in their gift. This is what happened to Arpinum. Over a century after the Romans had first made the town’s menfolk second-class citizens, in 188 BC they promoted them to full citizens. The Roman historian Livy describes this promotion, using the Latin term municipium (singular) to describe this and other townships of second-class citizens:

  Respecting the residents in the ‘municipia’ of Formiae, Fundi and Arpinum, Gaius Valerius Tappo, tribune of the people, proposed that the right to vote – for previously the citizenship without the right to vote had belonged to them – should be conferred upon them . . . The bill was passed with the provision that the people of Formiae and Fundi should vote in the tribe called Aemilia and the people of Arpinum in the Cornelia . . .

  Much later, in AD 48, no less a person than the Roman emperor was said to have boasted of the superiority of the Roman treatment of outsiders to that of the great powers of Classical Greece:

  What was the ruin of Sparta and Athens, but this, that mighty as they were in war, they spurned from them as men of alien birth those whom they had conquered? Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, was so wise that he fought as enemies and then hailed as fellow-citizens several nations on the very same day.

  A Roman historian of the years around AD 100 put these words into the mouth of the emperor Claudius. Although a specialist today would not give the emperor highest marks for his presentation of the ‘facts’, the speech does nail a lasting truth about Roman social attitudes. In the glory days of Athens and Sparta, to be a citizen of either Greek state was to belong to a closed caste which jealously guarded its privileges. The Romans on the other hand early on developed ways of incorporating outsiders into their political system.

  Within Roman society there were outsiders of a different kind. This was a class of people whom free Romans did not consider fully human beings, but could think of as ‘speaking tools’. Notwithstanding, the Romans shared their citizenship with them, too.

  On display in the British Museum is a Roman gravestone, an upright slab just under 2 feet high, wider than it is tall. It depicts a married couple who clasp hands fondly. The husband is wrapped up in the voluminous piece of fabric that the Romans called the toga, the dress of a Roman citizen. Latin epitaphs for the deceased flank the scene – one for him, one for her. His reads:

  [Lucius] Aurelius Hermia, freedman of Lucius, butcher on the Viminal Hill. She who through fate preceded me [in death], chaste of body and gifted with a loving heart, was my only wife. She lived faithful to a faithful husband, with equal devotion. She abandoned her duties through no selfishness. Aurelia, freedwoman of Lucius.

  Found in Rome, this monument dates to around 80 BC, when Cicero was turning twenty. Here we have a very different class of person, however. The husband was an ex-slave who had married another ex-slave, both freed by the same master. He had made a success of his butcher’s business and his heirs could afford this tombstone.

  It was not that the Romans treated their slaves less brutally than other ancient societies. Years ago I remember the wife of a colleague at a Canadian university telling me that she had a part in the 1960 film Spartacus, Hollywood’s retelling of a revolt of Roman slaves in 73 BC.

  At the end of the film, a woman holding her baby wants to show it to the father, who is Spartacus, the leader of the revolt. To find him she walks through a double file of men crucified on crosses that stretches out of sight, until she stops before one of them – Spartacus, just about alive. ‘I was that baby,’ my colleague’s wife surprised me by saying.

  The film takes a liberty with the facts, in that Spartacus fell in the final battle. Otherwise, the scene of the mass crucifixion is faithful to the ancient writings:

  Since there were still a very large number of fugitives from the battle in the mountains, Crassus proceeded against them. They formed themselves into four groups and kept up their resistance until there were only 6,000 survivors, who were taken prisoner and crucified all the way along the road from Rome to Capua.

  If the ancient information is correct, this was an extraordinarily laborious, as well as savage, punishment: six thousand crosses lining an ancient highway for a distance of some 118 miles. Its steely-eyed aim, to deter at all costs, hardly needs pointing out.

  Yet there was a side to the routine Roman treatment of slaves that was unexpectedly humane, for all that it was also self-serving. To discourage work-shyness, owners allowed their slaves to save up assets and buy their freedom. Hermia perhaps started working as a butcher for his master. After accumulating his stash, he not only bought his own freedom, but maybe that of his future wife too.

  If owners chose, there were ways of formalizing the slave’s liberation in the eyes of the law. If a male, this gave the freed slave some citizen rights, and more for his freeborn sons, including the vote. Hermia’s toga showed off his u
nderstandable pride in his status while alive. In this way, a large proportion of Roman citizens must have ended up descending from people who were once slaves.

  By contrast, Cicero was an example of Roman social mobility at the vertiginous top of the social ladder. He had his personal talents, true, but he also inherited advantages. He was not just a Roman citizen by birth. As he said himself when it suited him, he was the son of a Roman ‘knight’. This term, eques in Latin, needs some explaining.

  Just as people whom the monarch ‘knights’ in the United Kingdom’s archaic system of public honours do not literally go on to fight as mounted soldiers, neither any more did the Roman knights of Cicero’s day. Instead they had evolved into a hereditary social grouping, with honorific distinctions. As a young knight, Cicero would have been entitled to wear a distinctive gold ring and to edge his Roman citizen’s toga with a narrow purple stripe.

  Because they were not members of the Senate, knights did not hold public office. Still, as a group they were influential stakeholders in the governance of the republic. This was especially true of those among them who made money as holders of lucrative state contracts. From 67 BC, the knights sat in their own reserved rows in the theatre. Here they are found expressing political opinions, for instance by standing and applauding politicians they liked.

  What the knights all had in common, apart from being ostensibly apolitical, was wealth – at a minimum, if in land, roughly the equivalent of the estate of a country squire. As today, how the money was made, and how long ago, could be a source of snobbish anxieties. Under Augustus a Roman knight who was also a poet, Ovid, prided himself on coming from old money, ‘not made yesterday from the workings of luck’.

  He mentions parvenu knights of his times ‘reared on blood’, meaning on the profits of military contracts in Rome’s recent civil wars, of which more in a later chapter. In a community like Arpinum, a centre of the wool industry in more modern times, Cicero’s forebears were presumably part of the squirearchy.

  The well-informed visitor to modern Rome who wishes to see ancient remains from the republican era is likely to end up gazing at a weathered rotunda near the banks of the Tiber which looks, somehow, disproportionate. This is because the marble colonnade of white marble columns has lost its ancient superstructure of curved blocks and the original roof above. Even so, this is a remarkable survival.

  Archaeologists date it on style and materials to the later 100s BC – one of the oldest standing buildings from the ancient city. It was clearly once a temple. Roman deities who received round shrines included Hercules. This divine strong man is a definite candidate for the original recipient of the rotunda, because it stood in a part of the ancient city where deals were done, namely, the cattle market. Roman cattle merchants respected the power of Hercules to protect them and their stock from bad things because averting evil was the specialism of Heracles. This was a Greek god whose worship the Romans had been quick to take over – but not before Latinizing his name.

  If we go back to the Greek Polybius, that intelligent and well-informed observer of Roman ways, he has some interesting comments on Roman religion in what survives today of the panoramic history that he wrote of Rome’s rise to greatness in his lifetime (the second century BC):

  For I conceive that what in other nations is looked upon as a reproach, I mean a scrupulous fear of the gods, is the very thing which keeps the Roman commonwealth together. To such an extraordinary height is this carried among them, both in private and public business, that nothing could exceed it.

  He gives as an example the probity of Roman magistrates among whom financial corruption was extremely rare. This, he thought, was because they took their oaths of office, sworn by the gods, so seriously. The religious mindset of the Romans of republican times also emerges in an area for which the ancient evidence happens to be quite good, that of portents, or ‘prodigies’ as the Romans called them. Here is an entertaining ancient list of them for the year 203 BC:

  And new religious fears were aroused in men’s minds by portents reported from a number of places. On the Capitol ravens were believed not only to have torn away gilding with their beaks but even to have eaten it. At Antium mice gnawed a golden wreath. The whole region around Capua was covered by an immense number of locusts, while there was no agreement as to whence they had come. At Reate a colt with five feet was foaled. At Anagnia there were at first shooting-stars at intervals and then a great meteor blazed out. At Frusino a halo encircled the sun with its slender circumference, and then the ring itself had a greater circle bright as the sun circumscribed about it. At Arpinum in an open meadow the earth settled into a huge depression. One of the consuls on sacrificing his first victim found the lobe of the liver lacking. These prodigies were expiated by full-grown victims; the gods to whom sacrifices should be offered were announced by the college of the pontiffs.

  The reader will spot that at least some of this list is amenable to rational explanation – the people of Arpinum seem to have reported a sinkhole, for instance. The Romans, faced with what to them was bizarre and inexplicable, saw signs of divine anger. It was the job of the state’s representatives to carry out the delicate task of interpreting the signs. They then decided the correct measures to be taken, if any, in order to keep the gods on side (‘the peace of the gods,’ as Romans said).

  This meant as here, deciding what kind of animal sacrifice was needed (full-grown animals in this case, not, say, calves) and which divinities needed propitiation. For expert advice the senators – the responsible body – turned to fellow members of the governing stratum serving as ‘pontiffs,’ from a Latin word for a priest. If need be the senators summoned the Etruscan soothsayers, hereditary specialists in this area.

  Returning to Polybius, he explained this god-fearing morality as coming about not through deep personal conviction but because the Roman authorities recognized the force of religion as the glue of social cohesion:

  In my opinion their object is to use it [religious awe] as a check upon the common people. If it were possible to form a state wholly of philosophers, such a custom would perhaps be unnecessary. But seeing that every multitude is fickle, and full of lawless desires, unreasoning anger, and violent passion, the only resource is to keep them in check by mysterious terrors and scenic effects of this sort.

  This was the sophisticated view of an educated Greek who thought that the philosophical training of the mind to think and act in the right way was beyond the reach of the masses, for whom the cult of the gods must suffice. It was the condescending view of a well-to-do Greek landowner contemplating ‘the multitude’. The interesting question here is whether the religious mindset of the governing class of the Roman republic really was, as Polybius seems to have believed, sceptical (as he was) about divine influence on human affairs, but prepared to manipulate popular beliefs for political ends.

  It was certainly the case that state priests whose job it was to interpret the signs could interrupt public business such as citizen assemblies on the basis of the omens, extraordinary though this may seem today. As just seen with the consuls in 203 BC, magistrates themselves had religious duties.

  In 59 BC one of the consuls opposed his colleague’s attempt to put a particular bill before the citizen assembly. He then retired home, where he spent the rest of his term exercising his consular right to observe the heavens for omens, an activity that would normally have caused public business to be suspended for the duration. Obviously enough, this manipulation of ritual was politically motivated.

  If it were not for the religious dimension, this would seem like a filibuster, comparable to the British members of parliament who drone on for hours in the chamber, in the hope that the parliamentary day will run out of time before a vote can be taken. It is probably unwise to infer personal religious attitudes from the behaviour of the consul, a certain Bibulus, any more than personal levels of respect for the mother of parliaments from the behaviour of Westminster filibusters.

  The histor
y of the Roman Livy, writing late in the first century BC, is the main source for the annual lists of ancient portents which the republican senators were required to ponder, including the list of 203 BC just cited. Modern classicists have combed what is left of this major source for the history of the republic for signs of its author’s personal religiosity.

  Since Livy the historian was also a creative writer, his treatment of religious material cannot be supposed to be a straightforward reporting of the facts at his disposal. That said, recent scholars who have looked into this question tend to recognize in the author’s presentation of prodigies the conflicting signs of someone who was both a believer and a sceptic.

  The American philosopher William James (died 1910) seems to sum up the problem, which arguably has to do with the fundamental nature of human ‘belief’:

  The whole distinction of real and unreal, the whole psychology of belief, disbelief, and doubt, is thus grounded on mental facts – first, that we are liable to think differently of the same; and second, that when we have done so, we can choose which way of thinking to adhere to and which to disregard.

  After this quality of mysteriousness to Roman, perhaps all, religion, there remains one quintessentially Roman activity yet to be explored since it was the key to their imperial success and all that flowed from it in terms of changing the course of world history. It is time now to go to war, Roman-style.

  CHAPTER 14

  BOOTS ON THE GROUND

  BUILDING THE ROMAN EMPIRE