SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  One or two did get lucky. A scrawled graffito at Pompeii records the delight of one winner at his gaming victory in a nearby town: ‘I won at Nuceria, playing dice, 855 1/2 denarii. Honestly, it’s true.’ It was, as the excitement of the scrawler makes clear, an almost unbelievable win and a substantial sum; at four sesterces to the denarius, it amounted to almost 4,000 sesterces, or roughly four times the annual salary of a Roman soldier. It must have made a big difference to the winner. He cannot have been desperately poor in the first place. As the shrewd Augustus realised, gambling always required a stake and, even in the bars and on street corners, was the pastime of those with a bit of spare cash. Presumably a win of this size would have meant improved lodgings, new clothes, faster transport (500 sesterces would buy a new mule) and better food and wine (one sesterce, according to a surviving Pompeian price list, would buy a glass, or pitcher, of the best Falernian vintage, four times the cost of the local plonk). But, whatever the paranoia of the elite, none of this was likely to undermine the foundation of the social order.

  Putting up and making do

  Four thousand sesterces was, in any case, a rare win and beyond the dreams of most small-time gamblers in local bars. Even the simplest slogans on the game boards would have been aspirational for some. ‘Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing’ might have been basic pleasures for those in country towns like Timgad, but for the men and women on the street in Rome, hunting was only a dream. For those at the top of an insula block, the races – as in ‘The Circus is packed …’ – would have been a rare treat (though more within reach than the gladiatorial shows: the capacity of the Circus Maximus, the main race track, at 250,000, was five times that of the Colosseum). Even those living at the more comfortable, lower levels of the insulae would have faced, in our terms, a risky future; their comfort was always precarious. Some modern historians have even speculated that the popularity of games of chance among ordinary Romans had something to do with the close match to the structure of their lives. For most of the Roman people, life was always a gamble, and making money not far short of a lottery.

  To be living adequately at one moment was no guarantee for the next. Those who were making a small profit today could be derailed tomorrow, by some illness that would prevent them from working, by the regular floods or fires that would wreck their homes. The grandeur of the remains of the city of Rome – and its nineteenth-century flood defences, which have largely prevented devastating inundations – can deflect our attention from the natural disasters that repeatedly fell upon the place, and unequally on the rich and the poor, even though they often lived as close neighbours. A few metres of extra height, up the slope of a hill, would have given a rich house protection from floods that inundated the nicer apartments in low-lying insulae. Fire could be a problem for anyone; in a terrible blaze in 192 CE Galen lost the contents of his lock-up storeroom near the Forum, including some of his medical writing, doctor’s instruments, medicines and other valuables (as we learn from the manuscript of his essay on the subject that was rediscovered only in 2005). But it was a particular problem in a high-rise block, especially when the residents tried to cook or keep warm with unstable braziers on the upper floors.

  Petty, and not so petty, crime might regularly have left any of these people without their savings, their precious possessions, their clothes or the tools of their trade. Then as now, the rich with their guard dogs and the equivalent of security systems (in the shape of slaves) complained most loudly about house crime and street robbery. The poor were the main victims. Some of the stories preserved in handwritten papyrus documents discovered in Roman Egypt – often even more immediate and informal than the public pronouncements inscribed on stone elsewhere in the empire – give personal accounts of the everyday crime, violence and thuggery that was endemic. One man, for example, complains of a group of lads attacking his house, beating him up (‘on every limb of my body’) and walking off with some of his clothes, including a tunic and a cloak, a pair of scissors and some beer. Another claims that some ne’er-do-well who owed him money had turned up at his house and attacked his pregnant wife, who had miscarried and was now ‘in danger of her life’. More than 3,000 miles away, in the town of Bath (then Aquae Sulis) in the province of Britain, other inscribed records point to persistent thieving of clothes and accessories, from rings to gloves and (especially) cloaks.

  There were few resources, and almost no regular public services, to mitigate these crises. In the city of Rome, by the first century CE there was a small and rudimentary fire service, but it was equipped with only a few blankets and pails of water and vinegar to douse the flames and relied more on demolition of the surrounding properties to break the blaze – which was a good idea, unless you lived in one of those properties. And there was no police force to whom crimes could be reported or through whom redress could be sought. Most victims of crime would have relied on their own strong arms or friends, family or local vigilantes to get even with the person they believed responsible. There was no system for dealing effectively, through official channels, with ordinary wrongdoing, only a cycle of rough justice and brutal retaliation. The unfortunate pregnant wife who miscarried after her assault might have been a victim of just that, despite the tear-jerking account by her apparently innocent aggrieved husband. The story of one Roman shopkeeper hints at the start of another cycle. One dark evening he had pursued a thief who had stolen a lamp from near his counter. In the struggle that followed, the thief got out a whip and set about lashing the shopkeeper, who retaliated – and in the process knocked out one of the assailant’s eyes.

  The sophisticated edifice of Roman law, despite its extraordinary expertise in formulating legal rules and principles, deciding issues of responsibility and determining rights of ownership and contract, had little impact on the lives of those below the elite and offered little help for their problems. When they tried to use it, the system was sometimes simply overloaded. We do not know how far the complaints of those ordinary victims in Roman Egypt ever progressed, although they were aimed at officials in the province in the hope of some legal action. But we do know, from another papyrus document, that at the beginning of the third century CE one governor of Egypt (the prefect, as he was called there) had received in just three days in a single place more than 1,800 petitions from those wanting to press cases or complaints. The majority of them must have been brushed under the carpet.

  Most of the time, the official institutions of the law were not interested in the problems of the ordinary people, or vice versa. Occasionally, Roman academics and specialists in the law looked at the misfortunes of the poor as knotty case studies; they agreed, for example, that the shopkeeper had not acted unlawfully, provided the thief really had used his whip first. And even more occasionally, especially in matters of inheritance and civil status, ordinary people found it worth obtaining a legal ruling. At Herculaneum, for example, several documents have been discovered that were written on wax tablets (the pen scratches are still visible on the wood that lay under the original wax) and record a number of witness statements taken in a tricky, and now baffling, local dispute. The question turned on whether a woman from the town had been born a slave or free. Like most people in the Roman world, she had no formal proof of status, and in this case (the result is unknown) someone had the time, contacts and cash to take the issue to the very top in Rome itself. But in general the law was out of the reach of most of the population, who, as we shall soon see, often looked on trials and legal processes more as a threat to be feared than as a possible protection.

  So, if not to the law, where did the ordinary people look for help, beyond family and friends? Often it was to ‘alternative’ support systems, to the gods, to the supernatural and to those, such as cheap fortune tellers, who claimed to have access to knowledge about the future and the outcome of problems – and about whom the elite were predictably sniffy. The only reason we know about the cloak crime in Roman Bath is because people went to the sacred spring of Sulis,
the local goddess, and inscribed a curse on the thief on small lead tablets and cast them into the water. Many of these tablets have been discovered, with their angry or desperate messages: ‘Docilianus son of Brucerus to the most holy goddess Sulis, I curse whoever stole my hooded cloak, whether man or woman, slave or free, that the goddess Sulis inflict death on him and not let him sleep or have children now or in the future until he brings my cloak to the temple of her divinity’, as one runs, typical of many.

  One of the alternative resources, and one of the strangest documents to have survived from classical antiquity, takes us directly into the specific problems and anxieties that afflicted the lives of the men and women on the ancient street. Titled The Oracles of Astrampsychus, after a legendary ancient Egyptian magician (with whom it had nothing to do whatsoever), and claiming (implausibly) in its introduction to have been written by the philosopher Pythagoras and to have been the secret behind the success of Alexander the Great, it is in fact an off-the-peg fortune-telling kit, dating probably to the second century CE, centuries after either Pythagoras or Alexander. It consists of a numbered list of ninety-two questions that someone might want to ask of a fortune teller, plus a list of more than a thousand possible answers. The idea was that the questioner chose the question that best represented his or her problem and gave its number to the fortune teller, who by following the kit’s instructions – which involve a good deal of mumbo jumbo, choosing more numbers, taking away the number you first thought of and so on – was eventually directed to the single right answer out of the thousand.

  Whoever compiled the Oracles thought those ninety-two questions summed up the problems that were most likely to send people to the cheap local clairvoyant. One or two may suggest some relatively upmarket customers: ‘Will I become a senator?’ was hardly a concern for many – though it may have been the kind of fantasy question that ‘Will I marry a handsome prince?’ has been in the modern world, posed by those unlikely to meet, still less marry, a member of any royal family. Most of the questions focus on much more ordinary anxieties. Some, predictably, are about health, marriage and children. Number 42, ‘Will I survive the illness?’, must have been a common choice, though it is interesting that ‘Have I been poisoned?’ also appears on the list, a suspicion obviously not restricted to the imperial house. Number 24, ‘Is my wife having a baby?’, is nicely balanced by the guilty query ‘Will I soon get caught as an adulterer?’ and by ‘Will I rear the baby?’, pointing to the ancient dilemma of whether to expose a newborn. It is clear also that slaves were among the intended customers (‘Will I be freed?’ and ‘Will I be sold?’) and that travel was seen as one of life’s pressing dangers (‘Is the traveller alive?’ and ‘Will I sail safely?’). But the main preoccupation is money and livelihood, appearing in question after question: ‘Will I be able to borrow the money?’, ‘Will I open a workshop?’, ‘Will I pay back what I owe?’, ‘Are my belongings going to be sold at auction?’, ‘Will I inherit from a friend?’ The law, when it is present, tends to be a looming menace: from ‘Am I safe from prosecution?’ to ‘Will I be safe if someone informs on me?’

  The complicated system could produce good, bad and ambivalent answers to all these questions. Assuming that the customers took the responses seriously (and some might have been as sceptical as many horoscope readers now), ‘You won’t be caught as an adulterer’ was obviously rather better than ‘You will be caught as an adulterer, but not for some time’. ‘You haven’t been poisoned, but you have been bewitched’ would merely have raised another anxiety, while ‘The traveller is alive, he is on his way’ would in most circumstances have been cause for celebration. Throughout, there is a lingering tone of resignation about the responses: ‘Wait’, ‘Not yet’, ‘Be patient’ and ‘Don’t expect it’ are repeated words of advice.

  This is a tone also captured in the only genre of mainstream Roman literature that can claim an origin outside the world of the elite: the animal fable. The most famous of these stories were attributed to Aesop, supposedly a Greek slave from centuries earlier, who still gives his name to many modern collections of them (Aesop’s Fables). But in Rome another key figure, who adapted earlier versions and composed new ones, with a specifically Roman spin, was Phaedrus, an ex-slave from the imperial household who wrote during the reign of Tiberius, in the early first century CE. Many of these stories sharply encapsulate the inequities of Roman society and the point of view from the bottom up, by pitting the little animals of the world, such as foxes, frogs and sheep, against the creatures of power, in the shape of lions, eagles, wolves and hawks.

  Very occasionally the underdog manages to win. A mother fox, for example, recovers her babies, which a mother eagle had snatched as food for her own young; the fox starts a fire, and the eagle releases the cubs to rescue her own brood. But usually the dice are stacked against the powerless. In one story, a cow, a goat and a sheep go into partnership with a lion, but when they together capture a large, tasty stag, the lion takes it all and refuses to share. In another, a crane puts her head down the throat of a wolf to remove a bone on which the animal was choking but is cheated of the promised reward (wasn’t it enough, the wolf demands, that she did not get her head bitten off?). Overall, the message is a striking contrast with the optimistic fantasies of gambling. The only real option, many of these fables insist, is to put up with one’s lot. The frogs ask Jupiter to give them a king, and he gives them a log; when they ask for a better one, they are given a snake, which eats them up. A little jackdaw, who dresses himself up in fine feathers as a grand peacock, is rejected as an imposter by the peacocks and rejected again, this time as a bird getting above himself, when he tries to return to the jackdaws. It is the Trimalchio story in a very different guise and from a very different point of view.

  One thing is for certain: there is no help for any of these poor creatures in the forces of the law. That is horribly demonstrated in the story of a swallow returning from abroad, who had built her nest in the wall of a courtroom and hatched seven eggs there. A serpent came along while the mother was away and devoured all the nestlings. The law might protect the rights of some, so the fable’s moral runs, but not of the poor young swallows, whose murder took place under the judges’ noses.

  Swallows and serpents

  Given the huge gulf between the haves and the have-nots in the Roman world, why was there not more open social and political conflict? How was it that in the city of Rome, the emperor and a few thousand of the wealthy, plus their slave staff, managed to monopolise acres of land, including sprawling mansions and spacious pleasure parks around the city’s edge, when close to a million people were crammed into the space left over? Why, to put it in terms of the fable, did the swallows not rise up in revolt against the serpents?

  One answer is that there was probably more conflict than is recorded, even if it was for the most part guerrilla warfare rather than outright revolt: rotten eggs thrown at the curtains of passing sedan chairs rather than coordinated assaults on the gates of the imperial palace. Roman writers did not have much of an eye for moderate levels of unrest. But emperors were certainly anxious about the kind of reception they would receive when they went to public games and spectacles. And, although public order did not repeatedly break down under the rule of the emperors as it had in the conflicts of the late Republic, there is evidence of occasional violent riots in Rome and in other towns of the empire. The main cause was disruption to the food supply. In 51 CE Claudius was pelted with bread in the Forum (an odd weapon in a food shortage, you might think) and had to be smuggled into the palace by a back door. At roughly the same time, in Aspendus in modern Turkey, one local official only narrowly escaped being burned alive by an angry crowd protesting against the landowners who had locked their grain away, intending it for export. But food was not the only issue.

  In 61 CE, a leading senator was murdered by one of his slaves, and the senate decided to follow the traditional rules for such a crime, which insisted that all of the victim’s
slaves be put to death along with the guilty party (the threat of such a punishment was meant to encourage slaves to inform on one another). On this occasion, there were 400 of them altogether, all innocent. The people took to the streets in outrage at the severity of what was proposed and in a display of solidarity between the slaves and the free population, many of whom would have once been slaves themselves. But even though a significant number of senators were on the side of the rioters, the emperor Nero brought the troops in to prevent trouble and had the sentence carried out.

  Another answer is that, despite the vast disparities of wealth, the disdain of the elite for the less fortunate, and the glaring double standards, there was a greater cultural overlap between the rich and at least the ‘middling’ people of Rome, or those on the lower floors of the insula blocks, than we might imagine. Scratch the surface, and the two cultures prove to be more permeable than they first seem, the outlook of the swallows not always so drastically different from the outlook of the serpents.

  We have already seen some hints of that. The speech bubbles in the bar and the cleverly written epitaphs (sometimes composed as poetry, with all the complex rules governing that in Latin) suggest a world where the ability to read and write was taken for granted. There have been endless, inconclusive debates in recent years about exactly how many of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were literate. Across the Roman world as a whole, country and town, the number may have been very low, well under 20 per cent of adult men. But it must have been much higher than that in urban communities, where many small traders, craftsmen and slaves would have needed some level of basic literacy and numeracy to function successfully in their jobs (taking the orders, counting the cash, organising deliveries and so on). There are indications too that ‘functional literacy’ of that sort gave even the ‘middling’ people some stake in what we would think of as high classical culture.