The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  IX

  The Rome of Augustus as Horace Saw It

  Through the streets of the great city Horace strolled, cocking an amused eye at a fashionable lady’s short dress, at a perfumed young elegant’s latest thing in the way of togas, at the bearers of a great personage’s litter—no carriages were allowed in the streets during the day—at his own slave on tip-toe to scan eagerly a poster of a gladiatorial show, at a grand funeral procession preceded by blaring brass horns and trumpets, and with especial delight at a fastidious poet’s latest effusion hung outside the book shop where it was being pawed over by the sweaty hands of the vulgar. He stopped before a famous painter’s work in a portico—there were miles of these roofed colonnades—had a look at a merchant’s stock of “pearls from farthest Arabia and India, giver of wealth”; at other shops where could be bought “silver and antique marble and bronze and works of art, jewels and Tyrian purple,” rare and beautiful things from everywhere in the world. “The Tiber,” a writer in the next generation wrote, “is the most placid merchant of all that is produced over the whole earth.”

  But the splendor was only part of the spectacle. The crowd—Horace’s abhorrence, “I hate the common herd and keep them off”—is so dense, he must “push and struggle and knock aside the slow,” while they shout after him with jeering impudence, “what are you after, you crazy fellow, thinking you must knock down whatever stands in your way if you’re hurrying to Maecenas.” The description, brief as it is, is full of significance. Rome was a very big city by then, but the words leave no doubt that poets were highly interesting objects there. Even the vulgar recognized Horace as he passed on his way and knew perfectly where he was probably going. It is clear, too, that if the crowd was not mannerly and good tempered, it was not submissive and servile either. Never in Rome did the rank and file—those above the slave-class, of course—reach the condition of helpless insignificance to which Europe again and again saw the common people reduced. The city crowd was something the most magnificent emperor must bear in mind. Romans, penniless, in rags, however reduced, were a force to be reckoned with. No other proletariat in all history ever got free food for themselves and free shows too.

  In the satire quoted, Horace has been to call on a man who lives on the Aventine and now must make his way to the Quirinal: “You see how convenient the distance is for a mere mortal.” (It meant a four-mile walk up and down hill.) “Every one is abroad. A canny contractor hurries by with his mules and porters; here a derrick is hoisting now a rock, now a huge beam; sad funerals struggle to pass on; there a mad dog is running away; next comes a muddy pig.” The words are a clear little vignette of a street-scene in that city which is so familiar to us and yet really so little known. They put Rome before us, her very self, as she would look if a view of her could be flashed for a moment upon the silver screen.

  All over the world and in every age a great city is a place of contrasts, but Rome was so, as even an Oriental city could hardly be today. The inner balance of the spirit was precious to Horace because all outside was unbalanced. During the empire the pendulum swung in ever wider and wider sweeps, but even in his day extremes had become the rule of life. On top absolute despotism, at bottom well-nigh hopeless slavery; splendid luxury and unspeakable squalor; monstrous forms of irresponsible pleasure and fearful misery—everywhere violent oppositions. Harmony had been the Greek ideal, life within and without in equilibrium; the world seen as beautiful and the spirit at home in it. To the Roman this idea was forever incomprehensible. Horace, akin in many ways to the Greek, never imagined such a condition even to the degree of longing for it. His search was not to adjust himself to life—nor life to himself, but to find within himself the good, which was in direct contradiction to life. The sharp division between facts, things, all that the Roman called reality exactly as we do today, and the ideas and ideals within a man was never sharper than during the Roman Empire. To Horace and his kind there were two distinct worlds, one without and one within; they were not seen as related.

  Horace’s Rome is first of all a place where money rules—“Queen Money” is his phrase. He who cared little for it by nature, lived in an atmosphere so permeated by it, that it is perpetually on his lips; the age, as it were, superinduced an attitude alien to Horace himself. Here is a notable change from the age of Cicero, distant by so short a space of actual time. Horace as a boy must often have had the great orator pointed out to him. But in Cicero money is completely in the background; it is almost never mentioned. Cicero was a lover of the good things of life it can buy as Horace was not; money was actually far more important to him. The different part it plays in the writings of each is due only to the difference between the aristocrat and the self-made man. Cicero, not by birth, nor indeed by nature, but perfectly by acquisition, had the tone of the old republican aristocracy where money was taken for granted and never talked about. Why should it be? It was always there and no more interesting as a subject of conversation than the tides of the sea or any other fixed phenomenon of nature. But all that was changed with the coming of Augustus. No intelligent despot allows an old aristocracy to continue. Very skillfully, very swiftly and with complete finality the great families of Rome were removed to the far background. In the society Horace was familiar with there was no settled class of any sort. The man who got rich got all the other prizes, too; he was the one to be admired and emulated and chosen for office. His birth mattered not at all. He might be a freedman, born a slave, with no tradition behind him and no education to fit him for high responsibilities. Horace delights in holding up to scorn the vulgar new-made millionaire to whose exquisite dinners men of fashion and men of letters will flock and as they enjoy his chef’s triumphs, make use of their napkins to conceal irrepressible amusement at their host’s ostentatious display.

  There are two curious little letters among his Epistles which illustrate better than anything else he wrote how all-important money had become. In each of them he tells a young man how to better his fortunes, and the advice he gives is to make friends with the rich. A morose Greek philosopher, Horace observes, may say, “If I can live contentedly on poor fare, I can dispense with people who have money,” but a wiser view of life is that of the man who says, “If I can make use of people who have money, I can dispense with poor fare.” In point of fact, he declares, the latter is really the one to be respected, the man of energy and enterprise, who is determined to get on and will not sit down lazily, contented with a little. He ends his letter with a warning to be tactful: Those who are silent about their poverty in the presence of the rich get more than he who keeps asking. Remember to take modestly and not be greedy, even though the end and aim of your friendship is to be enriched. In the second letter which is addressed, seriously, without a touch of irony, to “Lollius, most independent of men,” he writes that the inexperienced are apt to think it will be a simple matter to cultivate a powerful friend, but the man who has tried it knows there are many hazards. Lollius must above all guard against that independence of his. If the great man wants to go a-hunting, up with you; leave your bed; put by your books; yield always to his wishes. As he is grave or gay so do you be, nor for heaven’s sake when he feels like doing something else, try to read him poetry. The concluding exhortation, that while the young man is making himself agreeable, he must not forget to cultivate his higher powers by the study of philosophy, is also spoken in all seriousness and with no idea of irony.

  They are illuminating letters. One can see the young men, faced with the problem of what they are to do, asking advice from a conspicuously successful older friend to whose career they are inclining. Horace’s father had been born a slave; he himself was ranked with the great, and the reason was that he had made himself acceptable to a rich and powerful man. No one who reads him can doubt that he had a deep affection for Maecenas. It appears, indeed, to have been the great affection of his life, but to his worldly common sense friendship with the rich as a career had nothing to do with the emotions. He would neve
r have been guilty of the sentimentality of urging the young men to love those whose dependents they became. There was no hypocrisy in him ever. The methods he recommended to them were undoubtedly those he had himself practiced toward Maecenas; what he had felt while doing so, his genuine devotion, seemed to him quite beside the point. It was all a clear matter of business. It never entered his mind that there was anything objectionable in a show of devotion for the purpose of getting money from a man. Nature did not originally incline the Roman character to servility. Horace and his young friends were the product of an age where it was important so far beyond everything else to have a good deal of money, and where it had become so difficult to get it, that the sense of honor in its pursuit had been lost even to a man like Horace, in other ways highly honorable.

  Money under one guise or another appears perpetually in his writing. The miser, now almost dropped from literature, plays a large part. He was evidently a most familiar figure in Augustan days and Horace knows his readers will not blame him for exaggeration when he shows him hardly willing to spend a few pennies from his great hoard on medicine necessary to save his life. And, of course, side by side with him is his invariable foil, the spendthrift and the gambler. Money always, well to the fore. “Everything,” is Horace’s ironical summary, “virtue, honor, fame, everything human and divine, obey beautiful riches. He who has heaped them up is renowned, brave, just. A wise man, too? Yes, and a king.”

  Throughout the poems, too, keep recurring the things money can buy, all manner of expensiveness, ivory couches, mosaic floors, hangings of Tyrian purple, embroideries, inlay, rare antiques, jewels, silver dishes, golden vases, in complete contrast to Greek literature where furniture and furnishings play no part at all. It is as impossible to conceive of Pindar’s describing the menu and the dining table of Hieron of Sicily, his familiar host and, no doubt, a sovereign surrounded by magnificence, or of Plato in the Symposium moved either to admiration or disapproval by Agathon’s tablecloth, as it is to think of Horace apart from his keen interest in the way people did their houses and served their dinner parties. It is true that he never praised luxury or enjoyed it much, but he was always keenly aware of it. Agathon and his guests no doubt ate carelessly what was set before them and took all the details incidental to the meal with complete indifference as a matter of course. But who could take it as a matter of course if he saw as Horace did, a slave enter the dining room bearing a peacock roasted in its feathers, the gorgeous tail outspread, so that the glowing creature looked as if it had but alighted for a moment on the silver dish? Or when a whole boar, bending the great platter with its weight, was presented to the company? In the eyes of Plato’s Athenian gentlemen a dinner party was chiefly an occasion for conversation; to Horace’s friends it was a matter of spectacular display and extraordinarily elaborate and overwhelmingly abundant food.

  Cooking and serving and bills of fare occupy a great deal of Horace’s attention. No less than the whole of two poems, and long ones at that, and the half of another are about nothing else: Horace: “How did you fare at the grand dinner party?” Friend: “Never better in my life.” Horace: “Do tell me if it won’t bore you, what were the hors d’oeuvres?” And a hundred lines follow which make fun of the menu, indeed, but give it nevertheless in greatest detail, together with a number of receipts for cooking the especially delicious dishes. On that occasion those Roman gentlemen ate: cold wild boar with all sorts of pickled vegetables; oysters and shell fish with a marvellous sauce; two varieties of turbot; a wonderful dish where a great fish seemed to be swimming among shrimp, with a relish made of fish from Spain, wine from Greece, vinegar from Lesbos and white pepper; then wild fowl served with corn; the liver of a white goose fattened on ripe figs; shoulder of hare (“so much more succulent than the lower part”); broiled black birds and wood pigeons. Sweets are not mentioned and of fruit only bright red apples, but elsewhere Horace speaks of dainties for dessert as beneath the attention of a true epicure and advises a final course of black mulberries—but they must be gathered before the sun is high.

  “We rise from table,” he remarks, “pale from over-eating,” and the modern reader understands why the early Christians put gluttony among the seven deadly sins. The practice of using emetics to make more and more eating possible seems to have become the fashion only at a later date. Horace does not mention it and it is so exactly the sort of thing he most enjoyed holding up to scorn, he would never have passed it over. But to those who desire to understand the quality of Rome it offers a profitable subject for meditation.

  Indeed, along with the elegance and even magnificence of Horace’s dinner parties there might be on occasion a lack of the most ordinary decency. Horace was so aware of tablecloths because they were so often dirty, exceedingly dirty. He sends an invitation to a friend with the promise that if he will come and dine with him neither cloth nor napkins will be in such a condition as to make him wrinkle his nose in disgust. Why should such things be, he laments, when cleanliness is so easy and so cheap. All the same, he ends the letter with the simple statement that his guest may count on plenty of room at table and not fear objectionable odors, as happens when people are seated too close to one another. And this is Rome of the stupendous Roman baths.

  With those urbane gentlemen of the great Augustan age coarseness lay just beneath the polished surface and often it came out on top. If a friend reclining next him at table, Horace writes, drinks rather too much, lets fall the precious old china, then does unprintable—in English—things, and lastly leans across him and snatches away his piece of chicken, will he hold him less dear or less agreeable on that account? No, indeed, the reader is swift to conclude. Horace and the people he was writing for were perfectly accustomed to these little faux pas and had only a tolerant smile for them.

  Horace went a journey once with some very great personages. Maecenas was one of them and “the most learned of Greeks” another, two prominent diplomats also, of whom Horace describes one as “an exquisite finished to a hair,” and three well-known men of letters, Virgil among them. It was a distinguished company such as the world has not often seen. Three of them after nineteen hundred years are still familiar household names. On their way a night is spent at a friend’s villa where they are entertained while at dinner by a little play, a dialogue between “Sarmentus, a buffoon, and Messius, nicknamed the Cock,” the former, as appears, a thin little man and the latter a huge, phenomenally ugly peasant. This was the diversion they offered that gathering: Sarmentus: “I say, you’re like a wild horse” (laughter from the audience). Messius (shaking his head ferociously): “So I am—Look out.” Sarmentus (eyes fixed on a hideous great hairy scar that marks Messius’ forehead): “Aha, if your horn hadn’t been cut out from your head, what wouldn’t you do, if you threaten like that, all mutilated.” He goes on to press the point still nearer home by jokes on the kind of diseases that leave such disfigurements and on Messius’ pleasant vices, and the big man is urged to “dance the Cyclops” for the company, as he looks just like one. But he on his side scores as well: “Oh, you—you’re just a slave. Whatever made you run away from your mistress? It couldn’t be because she starved you—why, you’re tiny enough to grow fat on next to nothing.” It was a delightful entertainment, Horace concludes. And the grave and witty gentlemen of the Symposium come to mind, who dismiss the flute girl and her “noise” so that they may have no disturbance in the entertainment they want for their dinner of high discourse.

  Of course the comparison is not quite fair: Horace is apparently recounting what really did happen, Plato probably only imagining what might have; all the same, it holds good fundamentally as regards the quality of the Greek and the Roman. “Tell me how you amuse yourself and I will tell you what you are.” The very élite of Rome made up that little gathering who were so diverted by the clowning and the diseases and the big hairy scar. They were for the Augustan age what Socrates and Aristophanes and the others in the Symposium were for the age of Pericles, and it is d
ifficult to think of any of the Athenians transferred to the Roman table finding much amusement there. Ugliness and deformity and disease were not the subjects Aristophanes chose for his jokes, nor was he given to dialogue of the “you’re another and worse too” variety. And Horace and Virgil at the Greek supper would very soon have been bored by the long speeches about nothing real in all the world. That kind of fine-spun theorizing would have seemed to them a pure waste of time, neither pleasurable nor profitable. Horace has given us his ideal of first-rate talk: “Let us discuss what is important to us, not other people’s houses or villas or whether Lepos dances badly or not, but whether riches or virtue make men happy, and whether motives of right or utility should influence us in seeking friends.” Conversation of that kind, a Roman thought, got people somewhere. It helped them to be good citizens. If they wanted to be amused, there were the fools and the clowns and the gladiators too.

  None of the dinners Horace describes were enlivened by the spectacle of a pair of men or several pairs, fighting to kill each other, with the divertissement a failure if neither of them did. These were the invention of a later day, but to public gladiatorial contests Rome had been accustomed for two hundred years and more before Horace’s time, and it is hardly surprising that he found nothing to object to in them. He was in good company: Cicero took them as complacently. Horace never indeed describes a fight or speaks of having been present at one, but gladiators he mentions more than once and always in as matter-of-fact a way as he would an actor or a singer. In one of his Satires he reports a little talk with Maecenas, where in between a question as to what o’clock it is and a remark about the weather, they discuss the chances of two favorites billed to fight each other: “Is the Chicken with Thracian armour (a very small shield) a match for Syrus?”