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ROMAN SOCIETY FROM NERO TO MARCUS AURELIUS
BY
SAMUEL DILL, M.A.
HON. LITT.D. DUBLIN, HON. LL.D. EDINBURGH, HON. FELLOW AND LATE TUTOR, C.C.C., OXFORD; PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN QUEEN’S COLLEGE, BELFAST; AUTHOR OF “ROMAN SOCIETY IN THE LAST CENTURY OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE”
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1925
COPYRIGHT
First Edition 1904
Second Edition 1905
Reprinted December 1905, 1911, 1919, 1920, 1925
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
[pg v]
PREFACE
There must always be something arbitrary in the choice and isolation of a period of social history for special study. No period can, from one point of view, be broken off and isolated from the immemorial influences which have moulded it, from the succession of coming ages which it will help to fashion. And this is specially true of the history of a race at once so aggressive, yet so tenacious of the past, as the Roman. The national fibre was so tough, and its tone and sentiment so conservative under all external changes, that when a man knows any considerable period of Roman social history, he may almost, without paradox, be said to know a great deal of it from Romulus to Honorius.
Yet, as in the artistic drama there must be a beginning and an end, although the action can only be ideally severed from what has preceded and what is to follow in actual life, so a limited space in the collective history of a people may be legitimately set apart for concentrated study. But as in the case of the drama, such a period should possess a certain unity and intensity of moral interest. It should be a crisis and turning-point in the life of humanity, a period pregnant with momentous issues, a period in which the old order and the new are contending for mastery, or in which the old is melting into the new. Above all, it should be one in which the great social and spiritual movements are incarnate in some striking personalities, who may give a human interest to dim forces of spiritual evolution.
Such a period, it seems to the writer of this book, is that [pg vi]which he now presents to the reader. It opens with the self-destruction of lawless and intoxicated power; it closes with the realisation of Plato’s dream of a reign of the philosophers. The revolution in the ideal of the principate, which gave the world a Trajan, a Hadrian, and a Marcus Aurelius in place of a Caligula and a Nero, may not have been accompanied by any change of corresponding depth in the moral condition of the masses. But the world enjoyed for nearly a century an almost unexampled peace and prosperity, under skilful and humane government. The civic splendour and social charities of the Antonine age can be revived by the imagination from the abundant remains and records of the period. Its materialism and social vices will also sadden the thoughtful student of its literature and inscriptions. But if that age had the faults of a luxurious and highly organised civilisation, it was also dignified and elevated by a great effort for reform of conduct, and a passion, often, it is true, sadly misguided, to rise to a higher spiritual life and to win the succour of unseen Powers. To the writer of this book, this seems to give the Antonine age its great distinction and its deepest interest for the student of the life of humanity. The influence of philosophy on the legislation of the Antonines is a commonplace of history. But its practical effort to give support and guidance to moral life, and to refashion the old paganism, so as to make it a real spiritual force, has perhaps hardly yet attracted the notice which it deserves. It is one great object of this book to show how the later Stoicism and the new Platonism, working in eclectic harmony, strove to supply a rule of conduct and a higher vision of the Divine world.
But philosophy failed, as it will probably fail till some far-off age, to find an anodyne for the spiritual distresses of the mass of men. It might hold up the loftiest ideal of conduct; it might revive the ancient gods in new spiritual power; it might strive to fill the interval between the remote Infinite [pg vii]Spirit and the life of man with a host of mediating and succouring powers. But the effort was doomed to failure. It was an esoteric creed, and the masses remained untouched by it. They longed for a Divine light, a clear, authoritative voice from the unseen world. They sought it in ever more blind and passionate devotion to their ancient deities, and in all the curiosity of superstition. But the voice came to them at last from the regions of the East. It came through the worships of Isis and Mithra, which promised a hope of immortality, and provided a sacramental system to soothe the sense of guilt and prepare the trembling soul for the great ordeal on the verge of another world. How far these eastern systems succeeded, and where they failed, it is one great purpose of this book to explain.
The writer, so far as he knows himself, has had no arrière pensée in describing this great moral and spiritual movement. As M. Boissier has pointed out, the historian of the Antonine age is free to treat paganism apart from the growth of the Christian Church. The pagan world of that age seems to have had little communication with the loftier faith which, within a century and a half from the death of M. Aurelius, was destined to seize the sceptre. To Juvenal, Tacitus, and Pliny, to Plutarch, Dion Chrysostom, Lucian, and M. Aurelius, the Church is hardly known, or known as an obscure off-shoot of Judaism, a little sect, worshipping a “crucified Sophist” in somewhat suspicious retirement, or more favourably distinguished by simple-minded charity. The modern theologian can hardly be content to know as little of the great movement in the heathen world which prepared or deferred the victory of the Church.
It will be evident to any critical reader that the scope of this book is strictly limited. As in a former work on the Society of the later Empire, attention has been concentrated on the inner moral life of the time, and comparatively little space has been given to its external history and the machinery [pg viii]of government. The relation of the Senate to the Emperor in the first century, and the organisation of the municipal towns have been dwelt on at some length, because they affected profoundly the moral character of the age. On the particular field which the writer has surveyed, Dean Merivale, Dr. Mahaffy, Professor Bury, and Mr. Capes have thrown much light by their learning and sympathy. But these distinguished writers have approached the period from a different point of view from that of the present author, and he believes that he has not incurred the serious peril of appearing to compete with them. He has, as a first duty, devoted himself to a complete survey of the literature and inscriptions of the period. References to the secondary authorities and monographs which he has used will be found in the notes. But he owes a special obligation to Friedländer, Zeller, Réville, Schiller, Boissier, Martha, Peter, and Marquardt, for guidance and suggestion. He must also particularly acknowledge his debt to M. Cumont’s exhaustive work on the monuments of Mithra. Once more he has to offer his warmest gratitude to his learned friend, the Rev. Charles Plummer, Fellow of C.C.C., Oxford, for the patience and judgment with which he has revised the proof sheets. His thanks are also due to the Messrs. R. and R. Clark’s reader, for the scrupulous accuracy which has saved the author much time and labour.
September 19, 1904.
[pg ix]
CONTENTS
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR
How far the Antonine age is marked by a moral and spiritual revolution—Light which Seneca throws on the moral condition of his class in Nero’s reign—Value of his testimony—His pessimism—Human degeneracy the result of selfish greed and luxury—Picture of contemporary society—Cruel selfishness and the taedium vitae—The Ardelio—The terror under which Seneca lived—Seneca’s ideal of the principate expounded to Nero in the De Clementia—The character of Nero—Taint in the blood of the Domitii—Nero at first showed glimpses of some better qualities—How he was injured by the ambition to be an artist—False aestheticism and insane profusion—Feeling of Tacitus as to his time—His career—Views as to his impartiality as a historian—He was under complex influences—His chief motive as a historian—He is not a political doctrinaire—He is avenging a moral, not a political ideal—His pessimism—His prejudices and limitations—His ideal of education and character—His hesitating religious faith—His credulity and his scepticism—His view of the corrupting influence of despotic power—The influence of imperial example—Profusion of the early Caesars, leading to murder and confiscation in order to replenish their treasury—Dangers of life about the court from espionage—Causes of delation—Its temptations and its great rewards—The secret of the imperial terror—Various theories of it—Was the Senate a real danger?—Its impotence in spite of its prestige and claims—The philosophic opposition—Was it really revolutionary?—“Scelera sceleribus tuenda”—The undefined position of the principate—Its working depended greatly on the character of the Emperor for the time—Pliny’s ideal of the principate—The danger from pretenders—Evil effects of astrology—The degradation of the aristocracy under Nero and Domitian illustrated from the Pisonian conspiracy—and the Year of the Four Emperors—The reign of Domitian—Its puzzling character—Its strange contrasts—The terrors of its close—Confiscation and massacre—The funereal banquet
Pages 1-57
[pg x]
CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST
Juvenal and Tacitus compared—Social position and experience of Juvenal—Juvenal and Martial deal with the same features of society—Their motives compared—Character of Martial—The moral standard of Juvenal—His humanity and his old Roman prejudices—He unites the spirit of two different ages—His rhetorical pessimism—His sweeping generalisations—Abnormal specimens become types—Roman luxury at its height—Yet similar extravagance is denounced for five centuries—Such judgments need qualification—The great social changes depicted by Juvenal, some of which he misunderstands—Roman respect for birth—The decay of the aristocracy and its causes—Aristocratic poverty and servility—How the early Emperors lowered senatorial dignity—Aristocratic gladiators and actors—Nero made bohemianism the fashion—“The Legend of Bad Women”—Its untrustworthiness and defects of treatment—High ideals of womanhood among contemporaries of Juvenal—He is influenced by old Roman prejudice—Juvenal hates the “new woman” as much as the vicious woman—The emancipation of women began in the second century B.C.—Higher culture of women and their growing influence on public affairs—Juvenal’s dislike of the oriental worships and their female devotees—This is another old movement—The influence of Judaism at Rome, even in the Imperial household—Women in Juvenal’s day were exposed to serious dangers—The corruptions of the theatre and the circus—Intrigues with actors and slaves—The invasion of Hellenism—Its history—The Hellenism of the Emperors—The lower Hellenism which Juvenal attacks—Social and economic causes of the movement—Greek tutors and professors—The medical profession chiefly recruited from foreigners—The character of the profession in those days—The astrologer and the parasite—The client of the early Empire—His degradation and his hardships—General poverty—The contempt for trade and industry—The growth of captation—The worship of wealth—The cry of the poor
Pages 58-99
CHAPTER III
THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN
The rise of the freedmen a great movement—Roman prejudice against them expressed in the literature of the age—Economic and social causes of the movement—Trade and industry despised—The freedmen occupied a vacant place—Causes of the contempt for them—Their many vices and vulgar taste—Yet their rise was a hopeful sign—The freedmen in imperial office—The policy of the early Emperors to employ freedmen in their bureaux—Vitellius the first Emperor to employ Equites as imperial secretaries—Hadrian confined the three great ministries to men of equestrian rank—The great imperial freedmen—Polybius, Claudius Etruscus, and Abascantus—Their career and their immense power described by Statius—The[pg xi] intrigues and crimes of the freedmen of Claudius—The insolence of Pallas—The wealth of the freedmen and its sources—Their luxurious display—The baths of Cl. Etruscus and the gardens of Entellus—Yet the freedmen were seldom admitted to equal rank with the aristocracy—The Senate flattered and despised them—The doubtful position of freedwomen—Plebeian Aspasias—The influence of Acte, Caenis, and Panthea—Manumission—It was often not a very abrupt change—The better side of slave life—Trusted and favourite slaves—How they could obtain their freedom—Slaves employed in offices of trust—The growing peculium—The close tie between patron and freedman—The freedman gets a start in trade—His rapid rise in wealth—His vulgar ostentation—The Satiricon of Petronius—Theories as to its motive, date and authorship—Its author probably the C. Petronius of Nero’s reign—His character in Tacitus—His probable motive—The literary character and scene of the Satiricon—The character of the Greek adventurers—Trimalchio’s dinner, to which they are invited—Sketch of Trimalchio’s career—The dinner—Carving to music—Dishes descend from the ceiling—Wine 100 years old—Confused recollections of Homer—Hannibal at the Trojan war—Rope-dancers and tales of witchcraft—The manners of Fortunata—The conversation of some of the guests—True bourgeois vulgarity—Grumbling about the management of the aediles—“Everything is going back—It all arises from neglect of religion”—The coming gladiatorial show, when there will be plenty of blood—The education of a freedman’s son—“You learn for profit”—Fast and furious—The ladies get drunk, and Trimalchio gives an unflattering account of his wife’s history—He gives directions to his friend, the stone-cutter, for the erection of his monument—He has himself laid out for dead, and the horn-blowers sound his lament
Pages 100-137
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
THE CIRCLE OF THE YOUNGER PLINY
The contrast between the pictures of society in Juvenal and in Pliny—They belonged to different worlds—They were also of very different temperaments—Moral contrasts side by side in every age—There were puritan homes in Italy, even in the worst days—Influence of old Roman tradition and country life—The circle at Como—Pliny’s youth and early training—Character of the Elder Pliny—His immense industry—Retreats of old Roman virtue—The character and reforms of Vespasian—His endowment of education—The moral influence of Quintilian on Roman youth—Pliny’s student friends—His relations with the Stoic circle—His reverence for Fannia—His career at the Bar—He idealises the practice in the Centumviral court—Career of M. Aquilius Regulus, the great delator and advocate—Pliny’s passion for fame—The crowd of literary amateurs in his day—Pliny and Martial—Pliny’s relation to the literary movement of his time—His [pg xii]admiration for Cicero—His reverence for Greece—He once wrote a Greek tragedy—His apology for his loose verses—His ambition as an orator, and canons of oratorical style—Pliny’s Letters compared with Cicero’s—The merits and fame of the Letters—Their arrangement—They are a memorial of the social life and literary tone of the time—The character of Silius Italicus—Literary coteries—Pliny’s friendship with Suetonius—The devotion of literary amateurs to poetic composition and its causes—The influence of the great Augustan models read at school—Signs of decay in literature—The growing love of the archaic style—Immense literary ambition of the time—Attempts of Nero and Domitian to satisfy it by public literary competitions—The plague of recitations—Pliny believes in the duty of attending them—The weariness and emptiness of life in the capital—The charm of the country—Roman country seats on the Anio or the Laurentine and Campanian shores—The sites of these villas—Their furniture and decorations—Doubtful appreciation of works of art—The gardens of the villa—The routine of a country gentleman’s day—The financial management of an estate—Difficulties with tenants—Pliny’s kindness to freedmen and slaves—The darker side of slavery—Murder of a master—Pliny’s views on suicide—Tragedies in his circle—Pliny’s charity and optimism—The solidarity of the aristocratic class—Pliny thinks it a duty to assist the career of promising youth—The women of his circle—His love for Calpurnia and his love letters—The charity and humanitarian sentiment of the age—Bene fac, hoc tecum feres—The wealthy recognise the duties of wealth—Charitable foundations of the emperors—Pliny’s lavish generosity, both private and public—Yet he is only a shining example among a crowd of similar benefactors in the Antonine age
Pages 141-195
CHAPTER II
MUNICIPAL LIFE
Little known of country town life from Roman literature—Yet the love of the country was strong—A relief from the strain of the capital, which, however, always maintained its attraction—The Empire a realm of cities—Immense development of urban life in the first two centuries—The rise of Thamugadi in Numidia—Great tolerance of municipal freedom under the early Empire—Yet there was a general drift to uniformity of organisation—Influence of the capital—The rage for travel—Travelling became easy and luxurious—Posting facilities on the great roads—The speed of travelling by land and sea—Growth of towns—Many sprang from the canabae legionis—History of Lambesi—Aristocratic or timocratic character of municipal organisation—Illustrated by the album Canusii—The sharp demarcation of social grades—Yet, in the first century, the Commons had still considerable power—Examples from Pompeii—The magistracies and popular election—The honorarium payable on admission to office—The power of the duumvirs—Position of the Curia—The mode of filling its ranks—Local Equites—The origin and position of the Augustales—Their organisation and their importance in the Roman world—Municipal finance—Direct taxation in the first century almost unknown—Sources of municipal [pg xiii]revenue—The objects of expenditure—Municipal mismanagement, as in Bithynia—Signs of decay in Trajan’s reign—First appointment of Curatores—Immense private munificence—Examples from Pompeii, which was only a third rate town—Other instances—Pliny—The Stertinii—Herodes Atticus, the prince of benefactors—Testimony of the Inscriptions—Example of imperial liberality—The public works of the Flavian and Antonine Emperors—Feasts to the populace—Distributions of money, graduated according to social rank—The motives of this munificence were mixed—Yet a high ideal of the duties of wealth—The better side of municipal life—Local patriotism and general kindly feeling—But there is another side to the picture—Immense passion for amusement, which was often debasing—Games and spectacles on 135 days in the year—Description of a scene in the amphitheatre in the Antonine age—Passion for gladiatorial shows especially in Campania—Remains of gladiatorial barracks at Pompeii—Advertisements of games—Pictures on tombs and on the walls—The shows in small country towns—Shows at Cremona a few days after the battle of Bedriacum—Greece was little infected with the taste—The feeling of the philosophers—Statistics as to the cost of a gladiatorial show—How the ranks of the profession were recruited—Its attractions—Organisation of the gladiatorial schools—The gladiator in retirement—How municipal benefactors were honoured—Municipal life begins to lose its attractions—The causes of this—Plutarch on municipal duty—The growth of centralisation—The beginning of the end
Pages 196-250
CHAPTER III
THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE
The plebs of the municipal town chiefly known from the Inscriptions—Great development of a free proletariat—The effects of manumission—The artisan class in the Inscriptions—Their pride in their callings—Emblems on their tombs—Early history of the Collegia—Rigorous restraint of their formation by Julius and Augustus—The evidence of Gaius—Dangers from the colleges not imaginary—Troubles in the reign of Aurelian—Yet the great movement could not be checked—The means of evading the law—Extended liberty in reigns of M. Aurelius and Alexander Severus—The social forces behind the movement of combination—The wish for funeral rites and lasting remembrance—Evidence of the Inscriptions—The horror of loneliness in death—The funerary colleges—That of Lanuvium shows how the privilege granted to them might be extended—Any college might claim it—Description of the college at Lanuvium—Its foundation deed—The fees—The grants for burial—The college of Aesculapius and Hygia—Its organisation for other objects than burial—Any college might assume a quasi-religious character—The influence of religion on all ancient social organisation—The colleges of traders—Wandering merchants organise themselves all over the world—And old soldiers—Colleges of youth for sporting purposes—Every branch of industry was organised in these societies—Evidence from Ostia, Lyons, and Rome, in the Inscriptions—Clubs of slaves in great houses, and in that of the Emperor—They were [pg xiv]encouraged by the masters—The organisation of the college was modelled on the city—Its officers bear the names of republican magistrates—The number of members limited—Periodical revision of the Album—Even in the plebeian colleges the gradation of rank was observed—Patrons carefully sought for—Meeting-place of the college—Description of the Schola—Sacred associations gathered round it—Even the poorest made presents to decorate it—The poor college of Silvanus at Philippi—But the colleges relied on the generosity of patrons—Their varying social rank—Election of a patron—A man might be a patron of many colleges—The college often received bequests to guard a tomb, and perform funerary rites for ever—The common feasts of the colleges—The division of the sportula by ranks—Regulations as to decorum at college meetings—The college modelled on the family—Mommsen’s opinion—Fraternal feeling—The slave in the college, for the time, treated as an equal—Yet the difference of rank, even in the colleges, was probably never forgotten—Were the colleges really charitable foundations?—The military colleges—Their object, not only to provide due burial, but to assist an officer throughout his career—The extinction of a college—The college at Alburnus in Dacia vanishes probably in the Marcomannic invasion
Pages 251-286
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR
The great change in the motive and character of philosophy—The schools forsook metaphysical speculation, and devoted themselves to the cultivation of character—Why faith in abstract thought declined, and the conduct of life became all important—The effect of the loss of free civic life and the establishment of world-empires—The commonwealth of man—The great ars vivendi—Spiritual directors before the imperial times—They are found in every great family—The power of Seneca as a private director of souls—How his career and experience prepared him for the office—He had seen the inner life of the time, its sensuality, degradation, and remorse—He was himself an ascetic, living in a palace which excited Nero’s envy—His experience excited an evangelistic passion—His conception of philosophy as the art of saving souls—His contempt for unpractical speculation—Yet he values Physics for its moral effect in elevating the mind to the region of eternal truth—Curious examples of physical study for moral ends—The pessimism of Seneca—Its causes in the inner secrets of his class—It is a lost world which must be saved by every effort—Stoicism becomes transfigured by moral enthusiasm—Yet can philosophic religion dispense with dogma?—Empirical rules of conduct are not enough—There must be true theory of conduct—Seneca not a rigorous dogmatist—His varying conceptions of God—Often mingles Platonic conceptions with old Stoic [pg xv]doctrine—But all old Stoic doctrine can be found in him—“The kingdom of Heaven is within”—Freedom is found in renunciation, submission to the Universal Reason—Whence comes the force of self-reform?—The problem of freedom and necessity—How man may attain to moral freedom—The struggle to recover a primeval virtue—Modifications of old Stoic theory—The ideal sapiens—Instantaneous conversion—Ideas fatal to practical moral reform—For practical purposes, Stoic theory must be modified—The sapiens a mythical figure—There may be various stages of moral progress—Aristotelian ideas—Seneca himself far from the ideal of the Stoic sage—The men for whom Seneca is providing counsel—How their weaknesses have to be dealt with—The “ars vitae” develops into casuistry in the hands of the director—Obstacles in the way to the higher life—Seneca’s skill in dealing with different cases—His precepts for reform—Necessity of confession, self-examination, steadiness of purpose, self-denial—Vivere militare est—The real victor—The mind can create its own world, and triumph even over death—Seneca’s not the Cynic ideal of moral isolation—Competing tendencies in Stoicism—Isolated renunciation and social sympathy—A citizen of two cities—The great commonwealth of humanity—The problem of serving God and man variously solved by the Stoics—Seneca’s ideas of social duty—Social instinct innate—Duty of help, forgiveness, and kindness to others—The example of the Infinite Goodness—The brotherhood of man includes the slave—Seneca’s attitude to slavery—His ideal of womanhood—Women may be the equals of men in culture and virtue—The greatness of Seneca as a moral teacher—He belongs to the modern world, and was claimed by the Church—A pagan Thomas à Kempis
Pages 289-333
CHAPTER II
THE PHILOSOPHIC MISSIONARY
Seneca the director of an aristocratic class—The masses needed a gospel—Their moral condition—The Antonine age produced a great movement for their moral elevation—Lucian’s attitude to the Cynics—His kindred with them—Detached view of human life and its vanity—Gloomy view of the moral state of the masses—The call for popular evangelism—Can philosophy furnish the gospel?—Lucian’s Hermotimus—The quarrels of the schools—Yet they show real agreement on the rule of life—The fashionable sophist—Rhetorical philosophy despised by more earnest minds—Serious preaching—The sermons of Apollonius of Tyana—Sudden conversions—The preaching of Musonius, Plutarch, and Maximus of Tyre—The mystic fervour of Maximus—Dion’s view of the Cynic preacher—The “mendicant monks of paganism”—Lucian’s caricature of their vices—Many vulgar impostors adopt the profession—It offered a tempting field—Why the charges against the Cynics must be taken with reserve—S. Augustine’s testimony—Causes of the prejudice against Cynicism—Lucian’s treatment of Peregrinus—The history of Peregrinus—The credibility of the charges which Lucian makes against him—He is about to immolate himself at Olympia when Lucian arrives—Lucian treats the self-martyrdom as a piece [pg xvi]of theatrical display—Yet Peregrinus may have honestly desired to teach contempt for death—Stoic suicide—The scene at the pyre—The last words of Peregrinus—Lucian creates a myth and sees it grow—Testimony of A. Gellius as to Peregrinus—The power of the later Cynicism—The ideal Cynic in Epictetus—An ambassador of God—Kindred of Cynicism and Monasticism—Cultivated Cynics—The character of Demetrius, a leader of the philosophic opposition—Cynic attitude to popular religion—Oenomaus a pronounced rationalist—Disbelief in oracles—The character of Demonax—His great popular influence—Prosecuted for neglect of religious observances—His sharp sayings—Demonstrations of reverence for him at his death—The career of Dion Chrysostom—His conversion during his exile—Becomes a preacher with a mission to the Roman world—The character of his eighty orations—He is the rhetorical apostle of a few great truths—His idea of philosophy—His pessimism about the moral state of the world—A materialised civilisation—Warning to the people of Tarsus—Rebukes the feuds of the Bithynian cities—A sermon at Olbia on the Black Sea—The jealousies of the Asiatic towns—Prusa and Apamea—Sermon on civic harmony—He assails the vices and frivolity of the Alexandrians—His prose idyll—Simple pastoral life in Euboea—The problems and vices of city life exposed—Dion on true kingship—The vision of the Two Peaks—The ideal king—The sermon at Olympia inspired by the Zeus of Pheidias—Its majesty and benignity—Sources of the idea of God—The place of art in religion—Relative power of poetry and sculpture to express religious truth—Pheidias defends his anthropomorphism—His Zeus a God of mercy and peace
Pages 334-383
CHAPTER III
THE PHILOSOPHIC THEOLOGIAN
The pagan revival and the growth of superstition called for a theodicy—Old Roman religion was still powerful—But there was an immense accretion of worships from the conquered countries—And an immense growth in the belief in genii, dreams, omens, and oracles—Yet amid the apparent chaos, there was a tendency, in the higher minds, to monotheism—The craving for a moral God in sympathy with man—The ideas of Apuleius, Epictetus, M. Aurelius—The change in the conception of God among the later Stoics—God no longer mere Force or Fate or impersonal Reason—He is a Father and Providence, giving moral support and comfort—The attitude of the later Stoics to external worship and anthropomorphic imagery—How was the ancient worship to be reconciled with purer conceptions of the Divine?—God being so remote, philosophy may discover spiritual help in all the religions of the past—The history of Neo-Pythagoreanism—Apollonius of Tyana—His attitude to mythology—His mysticism and ritualism—Plutarch’s associations and early history—His devotion to Greek tradition—His social life—His Lives of the great Greeks and Romans—He is a moralist rather than a pure philosopher—The tendency of philosophy in his day was towards the formation of character—The eclecticism of the time—Plutarch’s attitude to Platonism and Stoicism—His own moral system was drawn from various schools—Precepts for the formation of character—[pg xvii]Plutarch on freedom and necessity—His contempt for rhetorical philosophy—Plutarch on Tranquillity—How to grow daily—The pathos of life—The need for a higher vision—How to reconcile the God of philosophy with the ancient mythology was the great problem—Plutarch’s conception of God—His cosmology mainly that of the Timaeus—The opposition between the philosophic idea of God and the belief of the crowd was an old one—Yet great political and spiritual changes had made it a more urgent question—The theology of Maximus of Tyre—His pure conception of God, combined with tolerance of legend and symbolism—Myth not to be discarded, but interpreted by philosophy, to discover the kernel of truth which is reverently veiled—The effort illustrated by the treatise of Plutarch on Isis and Osiris—Its theory of Evil and daemonic powers—The Platonist daemonology—The history of daemons traced from Hesiod—The conception of daemons justified by Maximus—The daemonology of the early Greek philosophers—The nature of daemons as conceived by Maximus and Plutarch—The ministering spirits of Maximus—The theory of bad daemons enabled Plutarch to explain the grossness of myth and ritual—The bad daemons a damnosa hereditas—The triumphant use made of the theory by the Christian Apologists—The daemonology of Plutarch was also used to explain the inspiration or the silence of the ancient oracles—“The oracles are dumb”—Yet in the second century, to some extent, Delphi revived—Questions as to its inspiration debated—The quality of Delphic verse—The theory of inspiration—Concurrent causes of it—The daemon of the shrine may depart—The problem of inspiration illustrated by a discussion on the daemon of Socrates—What was it?—The result of the inquiry is that the human spirit, at its best, is open to influences from another world
Pages 384-440
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
SUPERSTITION
Superstition a term of shifting meaning—Plutarch’s treatise on Superstition—Why it is worse than atheism—Immense growth of superstition in the first century, following on a decay of old religion—Forgotten rites and fallen temples—The revival of Augustus—The power of astrology—The Emperors believed in it and dreaded it—Tiberius and Thrasyllus at Capreae—The attitude of Nero, Otho, and Vitellius to astrology—The superstition of the Flavian Emperors—And of Hadrian and M. Aurelius—The superstition of the literary class—The Elder Pliny—Suetonius—Tacitus—His wavering treatment of the supernatural—How it may be explained by the character of the age—Epictetus on divination—The superstition of Aelian of Praeneste—His credulity and his anathemas on the sceptics—P. Aelius Aristides—His history and character—His illness of thirteen years—Was he a simple devotee?—The influence of [pg xviii]rhetorical training on him—The temples of healing in his time—Their organisation and routine—Recipes by dreams in the temples of Asclepius, Isis, and Serapis—Medical skill combined with superstition—The amusements and cheerful social life of these temple-hospitals were powerful healers—The ailments of Aristides and his journeys in quest of health—Strange divine prescriptions astonish the medical attendants—Their own heroic remedies—Epiphanies of the Gods—The return of his rhetorical power—The debt is repaid in the Sacred Orations—The treatise on dreams by Artemidorus—His idea of founding a science of dreams—His enormous industry in collecting materials—His contempt for less scientific interpreters—His classification of dreams and methods of interpretation—The new oracles—The failure of the old was not so complete as it is sometimes represented—The revival of Delphi—The history of the oracle of Alexander of Abonoteichos—His life and character—How he played on the superstition of the Paphlagonians—The business-like management of the oracle—Its fees and revenue—Its secret methods—Its fame spreads everywhere—Oracles in many tongues—Rutilianus, a great noble, espouses Alexander’s daughter—The Epicureans resist the impostor, but in vain—The mysteries of Glycon—Alexander, a second Endymion—Immense superstition of the time—Apotheosis in the air—The cult of Antinous—And of M. Aurelius—In Croton there were more gods than men!—The growing faith in daemons and genii—The evidence of inscriptions as to the adoption of local deities all over the world—Revived honours of classic heroes—The belief in recurring miracle—Christian and pagan were equally credulous—The legend of the “Thundering Legion”—Sorcery in Thessaly—The lawless romance of Apuleius
Pages 443-483
CHAPTER II
BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY
The conception of immortality determined by the idea of God—Religion supplies the assurance denied by philosophy—Vagueness of the conception natural and universal—“It doth not yet appear what we shall be”—Confused and various beliefs on the subject in the Early Empire—The cult of the Manes in old Italian piety—The guardianship of the tomb, and call for perpetual remembrance—The eternal sleep—The link between the living and the dead—The craving for continued human sympathy with the shade in its eternal home—The Lemures and the Lemuria—Visitations from the other world—The Mundus in every Latin town—The general belief in apparitions illustrated from the Philopseudes of Lucian, from the Younger Pliny, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and Maximus of Tyre—The eschatology of Virgil a mixture of different faiths—Scenes from the Inferno of the Aeneid—Its Pythagorean elements—How Virgil influenced later conceptions of the future state—Scepticism and credulity in the first century—Perpetuity of heathen beliefs—The inscriptions, as to the future state, must be interpreted with care and discrimination—The phrases often conventional, and springing from different orders of belief—Inscriptions frankly atheistic or sensualist—Ideas of immortality among the cultivated class—The influence of [pg xix]Lucretius—The Stoic idea of coming life, and the Peripatetic—The influence of Platonism—In the last age of the Republic, and the first of the Empire, educated opinion was often sceptical or negative—J. Caesar, the Elder Pliny, Tacitus—The feeling of Hadrian—Epictetus on immortality—Galen—His probable influence on M. Aurelius—The wavering attitude of M. Aurelius on immortality—How he could reconcile himself by a saintly ideal to the resignation of the hope of a future life—His sadness and pessimism fully justified by the circumstances of the time—“Thou hast come to shore, quit the ship”—Change in the religious character long before M. Aurelius—Seneca’s theology as it moulded his conception of immortality—A new note in Seneca—The influence of Pythagorean and Platonic conceptions in modifying Stoicism—The revival of Pythagoreanism in the first century—Its tenets and the secret of its power—Apollonius of Tyana on immortality—His meeting with the shade of Achilles—Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre on immortality—Plutarch’s arguments for the faith in it—The Delays of Divine Vengeance—But, like Plato, Plutarch feels that argument on such a subject must be reinforced by poetic imagination—The myths of Thespesius of Soli and Timarchus in Plutarch—Mythic scenery of the eternal world
Pages 484-528
CHAPTER III
THE OLD ROMAN RELIGION
The decay of old religion in the last age of the Republic—Its causes—Influence of Greek philosophy and rationalism—Distinction drawn between the religion of philosophy and that of the State—The moral and religious results—Sceptical conformity or desuetude of ancient rites—The religious revival of Augustus—How far a matter of policy—Ancient temples and worships restored—The position of Pontifex Maximus—How the Emperors utilised the dignity and kept a firm hold on the old religion—The religious character of the early Emperors—The force of antiquarian sentiment in the second century—The Inscriptions plainly show that the popular faith in old Latin religion was still strong—The revival of the Arval brotherhood—Its history and ritual described—A stronghold of imperial power—How the Arval College supported and flattered the Emperors—How the cultivated class reconciled themselves to the rudest forms of the ancient religion—The philosophic reconciliation—The influence of patriotism in compelling men to support a religion which was intertwined with all social and political life—The sentiment powerful down to the end of paganism—But other religious ideas were in the air, preparing the triumph of the cults of the East
529-546
CHAPTER IV
MAGNA MATER
The fascination of the worship of the Great Mother—It was still powerful in the days of S. Augustine—Its arrival from Pessinus in 204 B.C.—The [pg xx]history of its growing influence—The taurobolium in the second century—The legend and its interpretations—The Megalesia in spring—The priesthood—The sacred colleges of the worship—Evidence of the Inscriptions—The worship in country places—Vagabond priests in Thessaly described by Apuleius—Picture of their wild orgies—The problem of these eastern cults—From a gross origin, they became transmuted into a real spiritual power—The elevation of Magna Mater—The rite of the taurobolium—Its history in Asia Minor—Its immense influence in the last age of the Empire—A challenge to the Church—The history of the taurobolium in the West from the Inscriptions—Description of the scene from Prudentius—The connection of Magna Mater with Mithra and other deities
Pages 547-559
CHAPTER V
ISIS AND SERAPIS
Their long reign in Europe—Established at Peiraeus in the fourth century B.C.—And in Asia Minor—How the Egyptian cults had been transformed under Greek influences—Greek settlers, soldiers, and travellers in Egypt from the seventh century B.C.—Greek and Egyptian gods identified—The new propaganda of the Ptolemies—Theories of the origin of Serapis—The new Egyptian Trinity—The influence of Greek mysticism—The worship probably established in Campanian towns before 150 B.C.—The religious excitement in Italy in the early part of the second century B.C.—The Bacchanalian scandal—The apocryphal books of Numa—Efforts of the Government in the first century B.C. to repress the worship—A violent struggle with varying fortunes—The triumvirs in 42 B.C. erect a temple of Isis—Persecution of eastern worships in the reign of Tiberius—Thenceforth there was little opposition—Attitude of the Flavian Emperors—Domitian builds a temple of Isis, 92 A.D.—The Egyptian worship propagated from Alexandria by slaves, officials, philosophers, and savants—Votaries in the imperial household—Spread of Isiac worship through Europe—It reaches York—The secret of its fascination—The cult appealed to many kinds of mind—Its mysticism—Its charm for women—Its pomp and ceremonial—How a religion originally gross may be transformed—The zoolatry of Egypt justified as symbolism by Greek philosophers—But there is little trace of it in the Isiac worship of the West—Isis becomes an all-embracing spiritual power—And Serapis is regarded by Aristides as sovereign lord of life—Yet the worship never broke away from the traditions of idolatry—It fostered an immense superstition—The Petosiris—But there was undoubted spiritual power in the worship—The initiation of Lucius—The faith in immortality—εὐψύχει on tombs—Impressive ritual—Separation of the priesthood from the world—Description of the daily offices—Matins and Vespers—Silent meditation—The great festivals of the Isiac calendar—Ascetic preparation—The blessing of the sacred ship—Description of the procession in Apuleius—The grades of priests—The sacred guilds—The place of women—The priesthood an aggressive power—The Isiac presbytery—Priestly rule of life—Tertullian holds it up as an example—The popular charm of the Divine Mother
Pages 560-584
[pg xxi]
CHAPTER VI
THE RELIGION OF MITHRA
The causes which in the second century A.D. prepared the triumph of Mithra—Heliolatry the natural goal of heathenism—Early history of Mithra in the Vedas and Avestas—He is a moral power from the beginning—His place in the Zoroastrian hierarchy—His relation to Ormuzd—The influence of Babylon on the Persian worship—Mithra identified with the Sun—The astral lore of Babylonia inseparable from Mithraism—Yet Mithra and the Sun are distinct in the later Inscriptions—How Mithra worship was modified in Asia Minor—The influence of Greek mythology, philosophy, and art—The group of the Tauroctonus probably first fashioned by a Pergamene artist—Mithra in literature—Herodotus—Xenophon—The Thebaid of Statius—Plutarch—Lucian may have heard the Mazdean litany—Mithra’s first coming to the West probably in the reign of Tiberius—The earliest inscriptions of Mithraism belong to the Flavian age—At the same time, the worship is established in Pannonia—The earliest temples at Ostia and Rome—The power of Mithra in the capital—The secret of the propaganda—Soldiers were the most effective missionaries of Mithra—Slaves and imperial officials of every degree propagate the Persian faith—Its progress traced around Rome and through various regions of Italy, especially to the north—Mithra’s chapels in the valleys of the Alps and on the roads to the Danube from Aquileia—Along the line of the Danube—His remains abundant in Dacia and Pannonia—Chapels at Aquincum and Carnuntum—The enthusiasm of certain legions—The splendid remains of Mithra worship in Upper Germany in the early part of the second century A.D.—Mithra passes on, through Cologne and Boulogne, to London, Chester, York and the wall of Hadrian—Mithra made least impression on W. Gaul, Spain, and N. Africa—In spite of tolerance and syncretism, Mithraism never ceased to be a Persian cult—The influence of astrology—The share of Babylonia in moulding the worship—Yet Greek mystic influences had a large part in it—The descent and ascent of the soul—Yet, although Mithraism came to be a moral creed, it never ceased to be a cosmic symbolism—The great elemental powers—The daemonology of Mithraism—Its affinity with the later Neo Platonism—The evil effect of belief in planetary influences—The struggle between formal and spiritual ideals of religion—The craving for mediatorial sympathy in the moral life was urgent—Mithra was a mediator both in a cosmic and a moral sense—He stands between Cautes and Cautopates, and between Ormuzd and Ahriman—The legend of Mithra as faintly recovered from the monuments—The petra genetrix—The adoration of the shepherds—The fountain gushing at the arrow stroke—The legend of the mystic bull—Its chase and slaughter—Its death as the source of resurgent life—The mysterious reconciliation of Mithra and the Sun—Their solemn agape—Various interpretations of the legend—Yet there was a real spiritual meaning under it all—A religion of strenuous combat—How it touched the Roman soldier on the Danube—Its eschatology—Its promise of immortality and final triumph over evil—The sacramental mystery of Mithraism—The daily offices, and the annual festivals—The [pg xxii]mysteries of Mithra and the seven grades of initiation—Symbolic ceremonies—The colleges of Mithra—Their influence in levelling social distinctions—The suspicions of the Apologists—Description of a chapel of Mithra—The form of the cave always preserved—The scene of full initiation—Mithraism as an imperial cult and a support of imperial power—Sketch of the history of imperial apotheosis—The historic causes which aided it—The influence of Egypt and Persia on the movement—The Persian attitude to kings—The Fortune of the monarch—How these ideas blended with old Roman conceptions—The influence of Sun-worship in the third century, in stimulating theocratic ideas—The Emperors appropriate the titles and insignia of the Sun—The imperial house consecrate a temple to Mithra at Carnuntum, twenty years before the conversion of Constantine—Could Mithra ever have become the god of western Europe?—His chances of success in the chaos of belief seemed promising—His syncretism and tolerance, yet his exclusive claims—His moral charm—The fears of the Fathers—Parallels between his legend and the Bible—His sacramental system a travesty of the mysteries of the medieval church—Yet there was a great gulf between the two religions—The weaknesses of Mithraism—It did not appeal to women—It had no Mater Dolorosa—It offered little human sympathy—And in its tolerance of other heathen systems lay its great weakness—A Mithraist might be a votary of all the ancient gods—Mithraism was rooted in nature-worship, and remained the patron of the worst superstitions—Mithra belonged to the order which was passing away
Pages 585-626
BOOK I.
INFESTA VIRTUTIBUS TEMPORA
[pg 1]
CHAPTER I
THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR
The period of social history which we are about to study is profoundly interesting in many ways, but not least in the many contrasts between its opening and its close. It opens with the tyranny of one of the worst men who ever occupied a throne; it ends with the mild rule of a Stoic saint. It begins in massacre and the carnage of civil strife; it closes in the apparent triumph of the philosophic ideal, although before the end of the reign of the philosophers the shadows have begun to fall. The contrast of character between the two princes is generally supposed to find a correspondence in the moral character and ideals of the men over whom they ruled. The accession of Vespasian which, after a deadly struggle, seemed to bring the orgies of a brutal despotism to a close, is regarded as marking not only a political, but a moral, revolution. It was the dawn of an age of repentance and amendment, of beneficent administration, of a great moral revival. We are bound to accept the express testimony of a contemporary like Tacitus,1 who was not prone to optimist views of human progress, that along with the exhaustion of the higher class from massacre and reckless extravagance, the sober example of the new emperor, and the introduction of fresh blood and purer manners from the provinces, had produced a great moral improvement. Even among the old noblesse, whose youth had fallen on the age of wild licence, it is probable that a better tone asserted itself at the beginning of what was recognised by all to be a new order. The crushed and servile, who had easily learnt to [pg 2]imitate the wasteful vices of their oppressors, would probably, with equal facility, at least affect to conform to the simpler fashions of life which Vespasian inherited from his Sabine ancestors and the old farm-house at Reate.2 The better sort, represented by the circles of Persius, of Pliny and Tacitus, who had nursed the ideal of Stoic or old Roman virtue in some retreat on the northern lakes or in the folds of the Apennines, emerged from seclusion and came to the front in the reign of Trajan.
Yet neither the language of Tacitus nor the testimony from other sources justify the belief in any sudden moral revolution. The Antonine age was undoubtedly an age of conscientious and humane government in the interest of the subject; it was even more an age of religious revival. But whether these were accompanied by a corresponding elevation of conduct and moral tone among the masses may well be doubted. On the other hand the pessimism of satirist and historian who had lived through the darkness of the Terror has probably exaggerated the corruption of the evil days. If society at large had been half as corrupt as it is represented by Juvenal, it would have speedily perished from mere rottenness. The Inscriptions, the Letters of the younger Pliny, even the pages of Tacitus himself, reveal to us another world from that of the satirist. On countless tombs we have the record or the ideal of a family life of sober, honest industry, and pure affection. In the calm of rural retreats in Lombardy or Tuscany, while the capital was frenzied with vicious indulgence, or seething with conspiracy and desolated by massacre, there were many families living in almost puritan quietude, where the moral standard was in many respects as high as among ourselves. The worst period of the Roman Empire was the most glorious age of practical Stoicism. The men of that circle were ready, at the cost of liberty or life, to brave an immoral tyranny; their wives were eager to follow them into exile, or to die by their side.3 And even in the palace of Nero there was a spotless Octavia, and slave-girls who were ready to defend her honour at the cost of torture and death.4 In the darkest days, the violence of the bad princes spent itself on [pg 3]their nobles, on those whom they feared, or whom they wished to plunder. The provinces, even under a Tiberius, a Nero, or a Domitian, enjoyed a freedom from oppression which they seldom enjoyed under the Republic.5 Just and upright governors were the rule and not the exception, and even an Otho or a Vitellius, tainted with every private vice, returned from their provincial governments with a reputation for integrity.6 Municipal freedom and self-government were probably at their height at the very time when life and liberty in the capital were in hourly peril. The great Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood and equality of men, as members of a world-wide commonwealth, which was destined to inspire legislation in the Antonine age, was openly preached in the reigns of Caligula and Nero. A softer tone—a modern note of pity for the miserable and succour for the helpless—makes itself heard in the literature of the first century.7 The moral and mental equality of the sexes was being more and more recognised in theory, as the capacity of women for heroic action and self-sacrifice was displayed so often in the age of the tyranny and of the Stoic martyrs. The old cruelty and contempt for the slave will not give way for many a generation; but the slave is now treated by all the great leaders of moral reform as a being of the same mould as his master, his equal, if not his superior, in capacity for virtue.
The peculiar distinction of the Antonine age is not to be sought in any great difference from the age preceding it in conduct or moral ideals among the great mass of men. Nor can it claim any literary distinction of decided originality, except in the possession of the airy grace and half-serious mockery of Lucian. Juvenal, Tacitus, and the younger Pliny, Suetonius and Quintilian, Plutarch and Dion Chrysostom, were probably all dead before Antoninus Pius came to the throne. After Hadrian’s reign pure Roman literature, in any worthy sense, is extinct; it dies away in that Sahara of the higher intellect which stretches forward to the Fall of the Empire. There is no great [pg 4]historian after Tacitus; there is no considerable poet after Statius and Juvenal, till the meteor-like apparition of Claudian in the ominous reign of Honorius.
The material splendour and municipal life of the Antonine age are externally its greatest glory. It was pre-eminently a sociable age, an age of cities. From the wall of Hadrian to the edge of the Sahara towns sprang up everywhere with as yet a free civic life. It was an age of engineers and architects, who turned villages into cities and built cities in the desert, adorned with temples and stately arches and basilicas, and feeding their fountains from the springs of distant hills. The rich were powerful and popular; and never had they to pay so heavily for popularity and power. The cost of civic feasts and games, of forums and temples and theatres, was won by flattery, or extorted by an inexorable force of public opinion from their coffers. The poor were feasted and amused by their social superiors who received a deference and adulation expressed on hundreds of inscriptions. And it must be confessed that these records of ambitious munificence and expectant gratitude do not raise our conception of either the economic or the moral condition of the age.
The glory of classic art had almost vanished; and yet, without being able to produce any works of creative genius, the inexhaustible vitality of the Hellenic spirit once more asserted itself. After a long eclipse, the rhetorical culture of Greece vigorously addressed itself in the reign of Hadrian to the conquest of the West. Her teachers and spiritual directors indeed had long been in every family of note. Her sophists were now seen haranguing crowds in every town from the Don to the Atlantic. The influence of the sophistic discipline in education will be felt in the schools of Gaul, when Visigoth and Burgundian will be preparing to assume the heritage of the falling Empire.8 From the early years of the second century can be traced that great combined movement of the Neo-Pythagorean and Platonist philosophies and the renovated paganism which made a last stand against the conquering Church in the reigns of Julian and Theodosius. Philosophy became a religion, and devoted itself not only to the private direction of character and the preaching of a higher life, but [pg 5]to the justification and unification of pagan faith. In spite of its rather bourgeois ideal of material enjoyment and splendour, the Antonine age, at least in its higher minds, was an age of a purified moral sense and religious intuition. It was, indeed, an age of spiritual contradictions. On the one hand, not only was the old ritual of classical polytheism scrupulously observed even by men like Plutarch and M. Aurelius, but religious imagination was appropriating the deities of every province, almost of every canton, embraced by the Roman power. At the same time the fecundity of superstition created hosts of new divinities and genii who peopled every scene of human life.9 On the other hand syncretism was in the air. Amid all the confused ferment of devotion a certain principle of unity and comprehension was asserting itself, even in popular religion. The old gods were losing their sharp-cut individuality; the provinces and attributes of kindred deities tended to fade into one another, and melt into the conception of a single central Power. The religions of Egypt and the remoter East, with their inner monotheism, supported by the promise of sacramental grace and the hope of immortality, came in to give impetus to the great spiritual movement. The simple peasant might cling to his favourite god, as his Neapolitan descendant has his favourite saint. But an Apuleius, an Apollonius, or an Alexander Severus10 sought a converging spiritual support in the gods and mysteries of every clime.
Platonist philosophy strove to give rational expression to this movement, to reconcile cultivated moral sense with the worships of the past, to find a bond between the vagrant religious fancies of the crowd and the remote esoteric faith of the philosophic few. On the higher minds, from whatever quarter, a spiritual vision had opened, which was strange to the ancient world, the vision of One who is no longer a mere Force, but an infinite Father, Creator, Providence and Guardian, from whom we come, to whom we go at death. Prayer to Him is a communion, not the means of winning mere temporal blessings; He is not gratified by bloody sacrifice; He is dishonoured by immoral legend.11 He cannot be imaged in gold or ivory graven [pg 6]by the most cunning hand, although the idealised human form may be used as a secondary aid to devotion. These were some of the religious ideas current among the best men, Dion Chrysostom, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, which the Neo-Platonic school strove to harmonise with the rites and legends of the past. The means by which they tried to do so, and the measure of their success, it is one purpose of this book to explain.
The Antonine age saw for a brief space the dream of Plato realised, when kings should be philosophers, and philosophers should be kings. Philosophy had given up its detached and haughty reserve, or outspoken opposition to imperial power. In the second century it lent all its forces to an authority which in the hands of the Antonine princes seemed to answer to its ideals.12 The votaries of the higher life, after their persecution under the last cruel despot, rose to an influence such as they had never wielded save in the Pythagorean aristocracies of southern Italy. Philosophy now began to inspire legislation and statesmanship.13 Its professors were raised to the consulship and great prefectures. Above all, it was incarnate, as it were, in the ruler who, whatever we may think of his practical success, brought to the duties of government a loftiness of spiritual detachment which has never been equalled by any ruler of men. Whether there was any corresponding elevation of conduct or moral tone in the mass of men may well be doubted by any one who has studied the melancholy thoughts of the saintly emperor. Lucian and M. Aurelius seem to be as hopeless about the moral condition of humanity as Seneca and Petronius were in the darkest days of Nero’s tyranny.14 Such opinions, indeed, have little scientific value. They are often the result of temperament and ideals, not of trustworthy observation. But it would be rash to assume that heightened religious feeling and the efforts of philosophy had within a hundred years worked any wide-spread transformation of character. It was, however, a great step in advance that the idea of the principate, expounded by Seneca, and the younger Pliny, as a clement, watchful, infinitely [pg 7]laborious earthly providence had been realised since the accession of Trajan. It was easier to be virtuous in the reign of M. Aurelius than in the reign of Nero, and it was especially easier for a man of the highest social grade. The example of the prince for good or evil must always powerfully influence the class who are by birth or office nearest to the throne. And bad example will be infinitely more corrupting when it is reinforced by terror. A fierce, capricious tyranny generates a class of vices which are perhaps more degrading to human dignity, and socially more dangerous, than the vices of the flesh. And the reign of such men as Caligula, Nero, and Domitian not only stimulated the grossness of self-indulgence, but superadded the treachery and servility of cowardice. In order to appreciate fully what the world had gained by the mild and temperate rule of the princes of the second century, it is necessary to revive for a moment the terrors of the Claudian Caesars.
The power of Seneca as a moral teacher has, with some reservations, been recognised by all the ages since his time. But equal recognition has hardly been given to the lurid light which he throws, in random flashes, on the moral conditions of his class under the tyranny of Caligula and Nero. This may be due, perhaps, to a distrust of his artificial declamation, and that falsetto note which he too often strikes even in his most serious moments. Yet he must be an unsympathetic reader who does not perceive that, behind the moral teaching of Seneca, there lies an awful experience, a lifelong torture, which turns all the fair-seeming blessings of life, state and luxury and lofty rank, into dust and ashes. There is a haunting shadow over Seneca which never draws away, which sometimes deepens into a horror of darkness. In whatever else Seneca may have been insincere, his veiled references to the terrors of the imperial despotism come from the heart.
Seneca’s life almost coincides with the Julio-Claudian tyranny. He had witnessed in his early manhood the gloomy, suspicious rule of Tiberius, when no day passed without an execution,15 when every accusation was deadly, when it might be fatal for a poet to assail Agamemnon in tragic verse, or for a [pg 8]historian to praise Brutus and Cassius,16 when the victims of delation in crowds anticipated the mockery of justice by self-inflicted death, or drank the poison even in the face of the judges. Seneca incurred the jealous hatred of Caligula by a too brilliant piece of rhetoric in the Senate,17 and he has taken his revenge by damning the monster to eternal infamy.18 Not even in Suetonius is there any tale more ghastly than that told by Seneca of the Roman knight whose son had paid with his life for a foppish elegance which irritated the tyrant.19 On the evening of the cruel day, the father received an imperial command to dine. With a face betraying no sign of emotion, he was compelled to drink to the Emperor, while spies were eagerly watching every expression of his face. He bore the ordeal without flinching. “Do you ask why? He had another son.” Exiled to Corsica in the reign of Claudius,20 Seneca bore the sentence with less dignity than he afterwards met death. He witnessed the reign of the freedmen, the infamies of Messalina, the intrigues of Agrippina, and the treacherous murder of Britannicus; he knew all the secrets of that ghastly court. Installed as the tutor of the young Nero, he doubtless, if we may judge by the treatise on Clemency, strove to inspire him with a high ideal of monarchy as an earthly providence. He probably at the same time discovered in the son of Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina the fatal heritage of a vicious blood and the omens of a ghastly reign. The young tiger was held on leash for the famous quinquennium by Burrus and Seneca. It seemed only the device of a divine tragic artist, by a brief space of calm and innocence, to deepen the horror of the catastrophe. And, for Seneca, life darkened terribly towards its close. With high purposes for the commonweal, he had probably lent himself to doubtful means of humouring his wayward pupil, perhaps even to crime.21 His enormous wealth, whether won from imperial favour, or gained by usury and extortion,22 his power, his literary brilliance, aroused [pg 9]a host of enemies, who blackened his character and excited the fears or the jealousy of Nero. He had to bear the unenviable distinction of a possible pretender to the principate.23 He withdrew into almost monastic seclusion, and even offered to resign his wealth.24 He strove to escape the evil eyes of calumny and imperial distrust by the most abject renunciation. But he could not descend from the precipice on which he hung; his elevation was a crucifixion.25 Withdrawn to a remote corner of his palace, which was crowded with the most costly products of the East, and surrounded by gardens which moved the envy of Nero,26 the fallen statesman sought calm in penning his counsels to Lucilius, and bracing himself to meet the stealthy stroke which might be dealt at any moment.27 In reading many passages of Seneca, you feel that you are sitting in some palace on the Esquiline, reading the Phaedo or listening to the consolations of a Stoic director, while the centurion from the palace may at any moment appear with the last fateful order.
Seneca, like Tacitus, has a remarkable power of moral diagnosis. He had acquired a profound, sad knowledge of the pathology of the soul. It was a power which was almost of necessity acquired in that time of terror and suspicion, when men lived in daily peril from seeming friends. There never was a period when men more needed the art of reading the secrets of character. Nor was there ever a time when there were greater facilities for the study. Life was sociable almost to excess. The Roman noble, unless he made himself deliberately a recluse, spent much of his time in those social meeting-places of which we hear so often,28 where gossip and criticism dealt mercilessly with character, where keen wits were pitted against one another, sometimes in a deadly game, and where it might be a matter of life or death to pierce the armour of dissimulation.29 Seneca had long shone in such circles. In his later years, if he became a recluse, he was also a spiritual director. And his Letters leave little doubt that many a restless or weary spirit laid bare its secret misery to him, for advice or [pg 10]consolation. Knowing well the wildest excesses of fantastic luxury, all the secrets of the philosophic confessional, the miseries of a position oscillating between almost princely state and monastic renunciation, the minister of Nero, with a self-imposed cure of souls, had unrivalled opportunities of ascertaining the moral condition of his class.
Seneca is too often a rhetorician, in search of striking effects and vivid phrase. And, like all rhetoricians, he is often inconsistent. At times he appears to regard his own age as having reached the very climax of insane self-indulgence. And yet, in a calmer mood, he declares his belief that the contemporaries of Nero were not worse than the contemporaries of Clodius or Lucullus, that one age differs from another rather in the greater prominence of different vices.30 His pessimism extends to all ages which have been allured by the charm of ingenious luxury from the simplicity of nature. In the fatal progress of society, the artificial multiplication of human wants has corrupted the idyllic innocence of the far-off Eden, where the cope of heaven or the cave was the only shelter, and the skin-clad savage made his meal on berries and slaked his thirst from the stream.31 It is the revolutionary dream of Rousseau, revolting from the oppression and artificial luxury of the Ancien Régime. Seneca’s state of nature is the antithesis of the selfish and materialised society in which he lived. Our early ancestors were not indeed virtuous in the strict sense.32 For virtue is the result of struggle and philosophic guidance. But their instincts were good, because they were not tempted. They enjoyed in common the natural bounties of mother earth.33 Their fierceness of energy spent itself on the beasts of the chase. They lived peaceably in willing obedience to the gentle paternal rule of their wisest and best, with no lust of gold or power, no jealousy and hatred, to break a contented and unenvious harmony. The great disturbers of this primeval peace were avarice and luxury.34 The moment when the first nugget flashed its baleful temptations on the eyes of the roaming hunter was the beginning of all human guilt and misery.35 Selfish greed, developing into insatiable appetite, is [pg 11]the original sin which turned the garden into wilderness. In individualist cravings men lost hold on the common wealth of nature. Luxury entered on its downward course, in the search for fresh food and stimulus for appetite, till merely superfluous pleasures led on to those from which untainted nature recoils.36 Man’s boasted conquests over nature, the triumphs of his perverted ingenuity, have bred an illimitable lust, ending in wearied appetite; they have turned those who were brothers into cunning or savage beasts.
Such a theory of society has, of course, no value or interest in itself. Its interest, like that of similar à priori dreams, lies in the light which it sheds on the social conditions which gave it birth. Like the Germany of Tacitus, and the Social Contract of Rousseau, Seneca’s theory of the evolution of humanity is an oblique satire on the vices of his own age. And not even in Tacitus or Suetonius are to be found more ghastly revelations of a putrescent society, and the ennui and self-loathing which capricious sensualism generates in spirits born for something higher. It may be worth noting that the vices which Seneca treats as most prevalent and deadly are not so much those of sexual impurity, although they were rife enough in his day, as those of greed, gross luxury, treacherous and envious cruelty, the weariness of jaded nerves and exhausted capacities of indulgence.37 It is not the coarse vices of the Suburra, but the more deadly and lingering maladies of the Quirinal and the Esquiline which he is describing. There is a universal lust of gold:38 riches are the one ornament and stay of life. And yet in those days a great fortune was only a splendid servitude.39 It had to be guarded amid perpetual peril and envy. The universal greed and venality are worthily matched by the endless anxiety of those who have won the prize. Human life has become a scene of cruel and selfish egotism, a ferocious struggle of beasts of prey, eager for rapine, and heedless of those who go down in the obscene struggle.40 It is an age when men glorify the fortunate and trample on the fallen. The cunning and cruelty of the wild beast on the throne have taught a lesson of dissimulation to the subject. [pg 12]At such a court it is a miracle to reach old age, and the feat can only be accomplished by accepting insult and injury with a smiling face.41 For him who goes undefended by such armour of hypocrisy there is always ready the rack, the poisoned cup, the order for self-murder. It is characteristic of the detachment of Seneca that he sees the origin of this hateful tyranny. No modern has more clearly discerned the far-reaching curse of slavery.42 Every great house is a miniature of the Empire under a Caligula or Nero, a nursery of pretenders capable of the same enormities. The unchecked power of the master, which could, for the slightest faults, an ill-swept pavement, an unpolished dish, or a sullen look, inflict the most brutal torture,43 produced those cold hearts which gloated over the agony of gallant men in the arena, and applauded in the Senate the tyrant’s latest deed of blood. And the system of household slavery enervated character while it made it heartless and cruel. The Inscriptions confirm Seneca’s picture of the minute division of functions among the household, to anticipate every possible need or caprice of the master.44 Under such a system the master became a helpless dependent. There is real truth, under some ludicrous exaggeration, in the tale of a Roman noble, taking his seat in his sedan after the bath, and requiring the assurance of his slave that he was really seated.45
It is little wonder that on such lives an utter weariness should settle, the disgust of oversated appetite, which even the most far-fetched luxuries of the orient, the most devilish ingenuity of morbid vice, could hardly arouse. Yet these jaded souls are tortured by an aimless restlessness, which frets and chafes at the slow passing of the hours,46 or vainly hopes to find relief in change of scene.47 The more energetic spirits, with no wholesome field for energy, developed into a class which obtained the name of “Ardeliones.” Seneca,48 Martial,49 and the younger Pliny50 have left us pictures of these idle [pg 13]busybodies, hurrying round the forums, theatres, and great houses, in an idle quest of some trivial object of interest, waiting on patrons who ignore their existence, following some stranger to the grave, rushing pell-mell to the wedding of a much-married lady, or to a scene in the law courts, returning at nightfall, worn out with these silly labours, to tread the same weary round next day. Less innocent were they who daily gathered in the circuli,51 to hear and spread the wildest rumours about the army on the frontier, to kill a woman’s reputation with a hint, to find a sinister meaning in some imperial order, or to gloat in whispers over the last highly-coloured tale of folly or dark guilt from the palace. It was a perilous enjoyment, for, with a smiling face, some seeming friend was probably noting every hint which might be tortured into an accusation before the secret tribunal on the Palatine, or angling for a sneer which might cost its author a fortune, or send him to the rocks of Gyarus.
In reading Seneca’s writings, especially those of his last years, you are conscious of a horror which hardly ever takes definite shape, a thick stifling air, as it were, charged with lightning. Again and again, you feel a dim terror closing in silently and stealthily, with sudden glimpses of unutterable torture, of cord and rack and flaming tunic.52 You seem to see the sage tossing on his couch of purple under richly panelled ceilings of gold, starting at every sound in the wainscot,53 as he awaits the messenger of death. It is not so much that Seneca fears death itself, although we may suspect that his nerves sometimes gave the lie to his principles. He often hails death as welcome at any age, as the deliverer who strikes off the chain and opens the prison door, the one harbour on a tempestuous and treacherous sea.54 He is grateful for having always open this escape from life’s long torture, and boldly claims the right to anticipate the executioner. The gloom of Seneca seems rather to spring from a sense of the terrible con[pg 14]trast between wealth and state and an ignominious doom which was ever ready to fall. And to his fevered eye all stately rank seems at last but a precipice overhanging the abyss, a mark for treacherous envy or the spitefulness of Fortune.55 “A great fortune is a great servitude,”56 which, if it has been hard to win, is harder still to guard. And all life is full of these pathetic contrasts. Pleasure is nearest neighbour to pain; the summer sea in a moment is boiling in the tempest; the labour of long years is scattered in a day; there is always terror lurking under our deepest peace. And so we reach the sad gospel of a universal pessimism; “nothing is so deceitful and treacherous as the life of man.”57 No one would knowingly accept such a fatal gift, of which the best that can be said is that the torture is short, that our first moment of existence is the first stage to the grave.58 Thus to Seneca, with all his theoretical indifference to things external to the virtuous will, with all his admiration for the invulnerable wisdom, withdrawn in the inner citadel of the soul, and defying the worst that tyrants or fortune could inflict, the taedium vitae became almost unendurable. The interest of all this lies, not in Seneca’s inconsistency, but in the nightmare which brooded on such minds in the reign of Nero.
Something of the gloom of Seneca was part of the evil heritage of a class, commanding inexhaustible wealth and assailed by boundless temptations to self-indulgence, which had been offered by the conquest of East and West. The weary senses failed to respond to the infinite sensual seductions which surrounded the Roman noble from his earliest years. If he did not succeed in squandering his fortune, he often exhausted too early his capacity for healthy joy in life, and the nemesis of sated appetite and disillusionment too surely cast its shadow over his later years. Prurient slander was rife in those days, and we are not bound to accept all its tales about Seneca. Yet there are passages in his writings which leave the impression that, although he may have cultivated a Pythagorean asceticism in his youth,59 he did not [pg 15]altogether escape the taint of his time.60 His enormous fortune did not all come by happy chance or the bounty of the emperor.61 His gardens and palace, with all its priceless furniture, must have been acquired because at one time he felt pleasure in such luxuries. A soul so passionate in its renunciation may, according to laws of human nature, have been once as passionate in indulgence. In his case, as so often in the history of the Church, the saint may have had a terrible repentance.
It is probable, however, that this pessimism is more the result of the contrast between Seneca’s ideal of the principate, and the degradation of its power in the hands of his pupil Nero. Seneca may have been regarded once as a possible candidate for the throne, but he was no conspirator or revolutionary.62 He would have condemned the visionaries whose rudeness provoked even the tolerant Vespasian.63 In a letter, which must have been written during the Neronian terror, he emphatically repudiates the idea that the votaries of philosophy are refractory subjects. Their great need is quiet and security. They should surely reverence him who, by his sleepless watch, guards what they most value, just as, on a merchantman, the owner of the most precious part of the cargo will be most grateful for the protection of the god of the sea.64 Seneca would have his philosophic brethren give no offence by loud self-assertion or a parade of superior wisdom.65 In that deceitful dawn of his pupil’s reign, Seneca had written a treatise in which he had striven to charm him by the ideal of a paternal monarchy, in the consciousness of its god-like power ever delighting in mercy and pity, tender to the afflicted, gentle even to the criminal. It is very much the ideal of Pliny and Dion Chrysostom under the strong and temperate rule of Trajan.66 Addressed to one of the worst emperors, it seems, to one looking back, almost a satire. Yet we should remember that, strange as it may seem, Nero, with all his wild depravity, appears to have had a strange charm for many, even to the end. The men who trembled [pg 16]under the sombre and hypocritical Domitian, regretted the wild gaiety and bonhomie of Nero, and each spring, for years after his death, flowers were laid by unknown hands upon his grave.67 The charm of boyhood, with glimpses of some generous instincts, may for a time have deceived even the experienced man of the world and the brooding analyst of character. But it is more probable that the piece is rather a warning than a prophecy. Seneca had watched all the caprices of an imperial tyrant, drunk with a sense of omnipotence, having in his veins the maddening taint of ancestral vice,68 with nerves unstrung by maniacal excesses, brooding in the vast solitudes of the Palatine till he became frenzied with terror, striking down possible rivals, at first from fear or greed,69 in the end from the wild beast’s lust for blood, and the voluptuary’s delight in suffering. The prophecy of the father as to the future of Agrippina’s son70 found probably an echo in the fears of his tutor. But, in spite of his forebodings, Seneca thought the attempt to save him worth making. He first appeals to his imagination. Nero has succeeded to a vicegerency of God on earth.71 He is the arbiter of life and death, on whose word the fortunes of citizens, the happiness or misery of whole peoples depend. His innocence raises the highest hopes.72 But the imperial task is heavy, and its perils are appalling. The emperor is the one bond by which the world-empire is held together;73 he is its vital breath. Man, the hardest of all animals to govern,74 can only be governed long by love, and love can only be won by beneficence and gentleness to the frowardness of men. In his god-like place, the prince should imitate the mercy of the gods.75 Wielding illimitable power, he is yet the servant of all, and cannot usurp the licence of the private subject. He is like one of the heavenly orbs, bound by inevitable law to move onward in a fixed orbit, unswerving and unresting. If he relies on cruel force, rather than on clemency, he will sink to the level of the tyrant and meet [pg 17]his proper fate.76 Cruelty in a king only multiplies his enemies and envenoms hatred. In that fatal path there is no turning back. The king, once dreaded by his people, loses his nerve and strikes out blindly in self-defence.77 The atmosphere of treachery and suspicion thickens around him, and, in the end, what, to his maddened mind, seemed at first a stern necessity becomes a mere lust for blood.
It has been suggested that Seneca was really, to some extent, the cause of the grotesque or tragic failure of Nero.78 The rhetorical spirit, which breathes through all Seneca’s writings, may certainly be an evil influence in the education of a ruler of men. The habit of playing with words, of aiming at momentary effect, with slight regard to truth, may inspire the excitable vanity of the artist, but is hardly the temper for dealing with the hard problems of government. And the dazzling picture of the boundless power of a Roman emperor, which Seneca put before his pupil, in order to heighten his sense of responsibility, might intoxicate a mind naturally prone to grandiose visions, while the sober lesson would be easily forgotten. The spectacle of “the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of them” at his feet was a dangerous temptation to a temperament like Nero’s.79 Arrogance and cruelty were in the blood of the Domitii. Nero’s grandfather, when only aedile, had compelled the censor to give place to him; he had produced Roman matrons in pantomime, and given gladiatorial shows with such profusion of cruelty, as to shock that not very tender-hearted age.80 The father of the emperor, in addition to crimes of fraud, perjury, and incest, had, in the open forum, torn out the eye of a Roman knight, and deliberately trampled a child under his horse’s feet on the Appian Way.81 Yet such is the strange complexity of human nature, that Nero seems by nature not to have been destitute of some generous and amiable qualities. We need not lay too much stress on the innocence ascribed to him by Seneca.82 Nor need we attribute to Nero’s initiative the sound or benevolent measures which characterised the beginning of his reign. But he showed [pg 18]at one time some industry and care in performing his judicial work.83 He saw the necessity, in the interests of public health and safety, of remodelling the narrow streets and mean insanitary dwellings of Rome.84 His conception of the Isthmian canal, if the engineering problem could have been conquered, would have been an immense boon to traders with the Aegean. Even his quinquennial festival, inspired by the Greek contests in music and gymnastic,85 represented a finer ideal of such gatherings, which was much needed by a race devoted to the coarse realism of pantomime and the butchery of the arena. Fierce and incalculably capricious as he could be, Nero, at his best, had also a softer side. He had a craving for love and appreciation86; some of his cruelty was probably the revenge for the denial of it. He was singularly patient of lampoons and invective against himself.87 Although he could be brutal in his treatment of women, he also knew how to inspire real affection, and perhaps in a few cases return it. He seems to have had something of real love for Acte, his mistress. His old nurses consoled him in his last hour of agony, and, along with the faithful Acte, laid the last of his race in the vault of the Domitii.88 Nero must have had something of that charm which leads women in every age to forget faults, and even crimes in the men whom they have once loved. And the strange, lingering superstition, which disturbed the early Church, and which looked for his reappearance down to the eleventh century, could hardly have gathered around an utterly mean and mediocre character.89
When Nero uttered the words “Qualis artifex pereo,”90 he gave not only his own interpretation of his life, he also revealed one great secret of its ghastly failure. It may be admitted that Nero had a certain artistic enthusiasm, a real ambition to excel.91 He painted with some skill, he composed verses not without a certain grace. In spite of serious natural defects, he took endless pains to acquire the technique of a singer. Far into the night he would sit in rapt enthusiasm listening to [pg 19]the effects of Terpnus, and trying to copy them.92 His artistic tour in Greece, which lowered him so much in the eyes of the West, was really inspired by the passion to find a sympathetic audience which he could not find at Rome. And, in spite of his arrogance and vanity, he had a wholesome deference for the artistic judgment of Greece. Yet it is very striking that in the records of his reign, the most damning accusation is that he disgraced the purple by exhibitions on the stage. His songs to the lyre, his impersonation of the parturient Canace or the mad Hercules, did as much to cause his overthrow as his murders of Britannicus and Agrippina.93 The stout Roman soldier and the Pythagorean apostle have the same scorn for the imperial charioteer and actor. A false literary ambition, born of a false system of education, was the bane of Roman culture for many ages. The dilettante artist on the throne in the first century had many a successor in the literary arts among the grand seigneurs of the fifth. They could play with their ingenious tricks of verse in sight of the Gothic camp-fires. He could contend for the wreath at Olympia when his faithful freedman was summoning him back by the news that the West was seething with revolt.94
Nero’s mother had dissuaded him from the study of philosophy; his tutor debarred him from the study of the manly oratory of the great days.95 The world was now to learn the meaning of a false artistic ambition, divorced from a sense of reality and duty. Aestheticism may be only a love of sensational effects, with no glimpse of the ideal. It may be a hypocritical materialism, screening itself under divine names. In this taste Nero was the true representative of his age. It was deeply tainted with that mere passion for the grandiose and startling, and for feverish intellectual effects, which a true culture spurns as a desecration of art.96 Mere magnitude and portentousness, the realistic expression of physical agony, the coarse flush of a half-sensual pleasure, captivated a vulgar taste, to which crapulous excitement and a fever of the senses took the place of the purer ardours and visions of the [pg 20]spirit.97 Nero paid the penalty of outraging the conventional prejudices of the Roman. And yet he was in some respects in thorough sympathy with the masses. His lavish games and spectacles atoned to some extent for his aberrations of Hellenism. He was generous and wasteful, and he encouraged waste in others,98 and waste is always popular till the bill has to be paid. He was a “cupitor incredibilium.”99 The province of Africa was ransacked to find the fabled treasure of Dido.100 Explorers were sent to pierce the mysterious barrier of the Caucasus, and discover the secret sources of the Nile. He had great engineering schemes which might seem baffling even to modern skill, and which almost rivalled the wildest dreams of the lunatic brain of Caligula.101 His Golden House, in a park stretching from the Palatine to the heights of the Esquiline, was on a scale of more than oriental magnificence. At last the master of the world was properly lodged. With colonnades three miles long, with its lakes and pastures and sylvan glades, it needed only a second Nero in Otho to dream of adding to its splendour.102 To such a prince the astrologers might well predict another monarchy enthroned on Mount Zion, with the dominion of the East.103 The materialist dreamer was, like Napoleon I., without a rudimentary moral sense. Stained with the foulest enormities himself, he had a rooted conviction that virtue was a pretence, and that all men were equally depraved.104 His surroundings gave him some excuse for thinking so. He was born into a circle which believed chiefly in “the lust of the eye and the pride of life.” He formed a circle many of whom perished in the carnage of Bedriacum. With a treasury drained by insane profusion, Nero resorted to rapine and judicial murder to replenish it.105 The spendthrift seldom has scruples in repairing his extravagance. The temples were naturally plundered by the man who, having no religion, was at least honest enough to deride all religions.106 The artistic treasures of Greece were carried off by the votary of Greek art; the gold and silver images of her shrines were [pg 21]sent to the melting-pot.107 Ungrateful testators paid their due penalty after death; and delation, watching every word or gesture, skilfully supplied the needed tale of victims for plunder. It is all a hackneyed story. Yet it is perhaps necessary to revive it once more to explain the suppressed terror and lingering agony of the last days of Seneca.
The impressions of the Terror which we receive from Seneca are powerful and almost oppressive. A thick atmosphere of gloom and foreboding seems to stifle us as we turn his pages. But Seneca deals rather in shadowy hint and veiled suggestion than in definite statement. For the minute picture of that awful scene of degradation we must turn to Tacitus. He wrote in the fresh dawn of an age of fancied freedom, when the gloom of the tyranny seemed to have suddenly vanished like an evil dream. Yet he cannot shake off the sense of horror and disgust which fifteen years of ignoble compliance or silent suffering have burnt into his soul. Even under the manly, tolerant rule of Trajan, he hardly seems to have regained his breath.108 He can scarcely believe that the light has come at last. His attitude to the tyranny is essentially different from that of Seneca. The son of the provincial from Cordova views the scene rather as the cosmopolitan moralist, imperilled by his huge fortune and the neighbourhood of the terrible palace. Tacitus looks at it as the Roman Senator, steeped in all old Roman tradition, caring little for philosophy, but caring intensely for old Roman dignity and the prestige of that great order, which he had seen humbled and decimated.109 The feeling of Seneca is that of a Stoic monk, isolated in a corner of his vast palace, now trembling before the imperial jealousy, which his wealth and celebrity may draw down upon him, and again seeking consolation in thoughts of God and eternity which might often seem to belong to Thomas à Kempis. The tone of Tacitus is sometimes that of a man who should have lived in the age of the Samnite or the Carthaginian wars, before luxury and factious ambition had sapped the moral strength of the great aristocratic caste, while his feelings are divided between grim anger at [pg 22]a cruel destiny, and scornful regret for the weakness and the self-abandonment of a class which had been once so great. The feelings of Seneca express themselves rather in rhetorical self-pity. The feelings of Tacitus find vent in words which sometimes veil a pathos too proud for effusive utterance, sometimes cut like lancet points, and which, in their concentrated moral scorn, have left an eternal brand of infamy on names of historic renown.
More than forty years had passed between the date of Seneca’s last letters to Lucilius and the entry of Tacitus on his career as a historian.110 He was a child when Seneca died.111 His life is known to us only from a few stray glimpses in the Letters of Pliny,112 eked out by the inferences of modern erudition. As a young boy, he must have often heard the tales of the artistic follies and the orgies of Nero, and the ghastly cruelties of the end of his reign. As a lad of fifteen, he may have witnessed something of the carnival of blood and lust which appropriately closed the régime of the Julio-Claudian line. He entered on his cursus honorum in the reign of Vespasian, and attained the praetorship under Domitian.113 A military command probably withdrew him from Rome for three years during the tyranny of the last Flavian.114 He was consul suffectus in 97, and then held the proconsulship of Asia. It cannot be doubted from his own words that, as a senator, he had to witness tamely the Curia beset with soldiery, the noblest women driven into exile, and men of the highest rank and virtue condemned to death on venal testimony in the secret tribunal of the Alban Palace. His hand helped to drag Helvidius to the dungeon, and was stained with the blood of Senecio. He lived long enough under a better prince to leave an unfading picture of the tragedy of solitary and remorseless power, but not long enough to forget the horrors and degradation through which he had passed.
The claim of Tacitus to have been uninfluenced by passion [pg 23]or partiality115 has been disputed by a modern school of critics.116 Sometimes, from a love of Caesarism and strong government, sometimes from the scholarly weakness for finding a new interpretation of history, the great historic painter of the Julio-Claudian despotism has been represented as an acrid rhetorician of the Senatorial reaction, a dreamer who looks back wistfully to the old Republic, belonging to one of those haughty circles of the old régime which were always in chronic revolt, which lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and poisonous gossip, and nourished its dreams and hatreds till fiction and fact melted into one another in gloomy retrospect.117 He is the great literary avenger of the Senate after its long sanguinary conflict with the principate, using the freedom of the new order to blacken the character of princes who had been forced, in the interests of the world-wide empire, to fight and to crush a selfish and narrow-minded caste.118
The weakness of all such estimates of Tacitus lies in their failure to recognise the complex nature of the man, the mingled and crossing influences of training, official experience, social environment, and lofty moral ideals119; it lies even more in a misconception of his aims as a historian. Tacitus was a great orator, and the spirit of the rhetorical school, combined with the force and dexterity of style which it could communicate, left the greatest Roman historians with a less rigorous sense of truth than their weakest modern successors often possess.120 No Roman ever rose to the Thucydidean conception of history. Moreover Tacitus, although originally not of the highest social rank,121 belonged to the aristocratic class by sympathy and associations. Like Suetonius, he necessarily drew much of his information from the memories of great houses and the tales of the elders who had lived through the evil days.122 He acquired thus many of the [pg 24]prejudices of a class which, from its history, and still more from its education, sought its ideals in the past rather than in the future. He mingled in those circles, which in every age disguise the meanness and bitterness of gossip by the airy artistic touch of audacious wit, polished in many social encounters. He had himself witnessed the triumph of delation and the cold cruelty of Domitian. He had shared in the humiliation of the Senate which had been cowed into acquiescence in his worst excesses. And the spectacle had inspired him with a horror of unchecked power in the hands of a bad man, and a gloomy distrust of that human nature which could sink to such ignoble servility.123 Yet on the other hand Tacitus had gained practical experience in high office, both as soldier and administrator, which has always a sobering effect on the judgment. He realised the difficulties of government and the unreasonableness of ordinary men. Hence he has no sympathy with a doctrinaire and chimerical opposition even under the worst government.124 However much he might respect the high character of the philosophic enthusiasts of the day, he distrusted their theatrical defiance of power, and he threw his shield over a discreet reserve, which could forget that it was serving a tyrant in serving the commonwealth.125 Tacitus may at times express himself with a stern melancholy bitterness, which might at first seem to mark him as a revolutionary dreamer, avenging an outraged political ideal. Such an interpretation would be a grave mistake, which he would himself have been the first to correct. The ideal which he is avenging is not a political, but a moral ideal.126 The bitter sadness is that of the profound analyst of character, with a temperament of almost feverish intensity and nervous force. The interest of history to Thucydides and Polybius lies in the political lessons which it may teach posterity. Its interest to Tacitus lies in the discovery of hidden motives and the secret of character, in watching the stages of an inevitable degeneracy, the moral preparation for a dark, inglorious end. And the analyst [pg 25]was a curiously vivid painter of character, the character of individuals, of periods, and of peoples. His portraits burn themselves into the imaginative memory, so that the impression, once seized, can never be lost. Tiberius and Claudius and Nero, Messalina and Agrippina, in spite of the most mordant criticism, will live for ever as they have been portrayed by the fervid imagination of Tacitus. Nor is he less searching and vivid in depicting the collective feeling and character of masses of men. We watch the alternating fury and repentance of the mutinous legions of Germanicus,127 or the mingled fierceness and sorrow with which they wandered among the bleaching bones on the lost battlefield of Varus,128 or the passion of grief and admiration with which the praetorian cohorts kissed the self-inflicted wounds of Otho.129 Or, again, we follow the changing moods of the Roman populace, passing from anger and grief to short-lived joy, and then to deep silent sorrow, at the varying rumours from the East about the health of Germanicus.130 In Tacitus events are nearly always seen in their moral setting. The misery and shame of the burning of the Capitol by the Vitellians are heightened by the thought that the catastrophe is caused by the madness of civil strife.131 In the awful conflict which raged from street to street, the horror consists in the mixture of cruelty and licence. The baths and brothels and taverns are crowded at the very hour when the neighbouring ways are piled with corpses and running with blood; the rush of indulgence paused not for a moment; men seemed to revel in the public disasters. There was bloodshed enough in the days of Cinna and Sulla, but the world was at least spared such a carnival of lust.132 Even in reporting or imagining the speech of Galgacus to his warriors on the Grampians,133 even in the pictures of the German tribes,134 the ethical interest is always foremost. The cruel terror of the prince, the effeminacy and abandoned adulation of the nobles, the grossness and fierceness of the masses, contrasted with the loyalty, chastity, and hardihood of the German clans, seem to have dimly foreshadowed to Tacitus [pg 26]a danger from which all true Romans averted their eyes till the end.135
The key to the interpretation of Tacitus is to regard him as a moralist rather than a politician. And he is a moralist with a sad, clinging pessimism.136 He is doomed to be the chronicler of an evil time, although he will save from oblivion the traces and relics of ancient virtue.137 He has Seneca’s pessimist theory of evolution. The early equality and peace and temperance have been lost through a steady growth of greed and egotistic ambition.138 It is in the past we must seek our ideals; it is from the past we derive our strength. With the same gloomy view of his contemporaries as M. Aurelius had,139 he holds vaguely a similar view of cycles in human affairs.140 And probably the fairest hope which ever visited the mind of Tacitus was that of a return to the simplicity of a long gone age. He hailed the accession of Vespasian and of Trajan as a happy change to purer manners and to freedom of speech.141 But the reign of Vespasian had been followed by the gloomy suspicious despotism of Domitian. Who could be sure about the successors of Trajan? Tacitus hardly shared the enthusiasm and exuberant hopes expressed by his friend Pliny in his Panegyric. It was a natural outbreak of joy at escaping from the dungeon, and the personal character of Trajan succeeded in partially veiling the overwhelming force of the emperor under the figment of the freely accepted rule of the first citizen. Tacitus no doubt felt as great satisfaction as his friend at the suppression of the informers, the restored freedom of speech, the recovered dignity of the Senate, the prince’s respect for old republican forms and etiquette.142 He felt probably even keener pleasure that virtue and talent had no longer to hide themselves from a jealous eye, and that the whole tone of society was being raised by the temperate example of the emperor. But he did not share Pliny’s illusions as to the prince’s altered position under the new régime. The old Republic was gone for ever.143 It was still the rule of one man, on whose character [pg 27]everything depended. He would never have joined Plutarch and Dion in exalting the emperor to the rank of vicegerent of God. With his experience and psychologic skill, he was bound to regard all solitary power as a terrible danger both to its holder and his subjects.144 “Capax imperii, nisi imperasset” condenses a whole disquisition on imperialism. In truth, Tacitus, like many thoughtful students of politics, had little faith in mere political forms and names.145 They are often the merest imposture: they depend greatly on the spirit and social tone which lie behind them. In the abstract, perhaps, Tacitus would have given a preference to aristocracy. But he saw how easily it might pass into a selfish despotism.146 He had no faith in the people or in popular government, with its unstable excitability. He admitted that the conquests of Rome, egotistic ambition, and the long anarchy of the Civil Wars had made the rule of one inevitable. But monarchy easily glides into tyranny, and he accepts the Empire only as a perilous necessity which may be justified by the advent of a good prince. The hereditary succession, which had been grafted on the principate of Augustus, had inflicted on the world a succession of fools or monsters. The only hope lay in elevating the standard of virtue, and in the choice of a worthy successor by the forms of adoption.147 The one had in his own time given the world a Domitian, and was destined within three generations to give it a Commodus. The other secured to it the peace and order of the age of which Tacitus saw the dawn.148
The motive of Tacitus was essentially ethical, and his moral standard was in many respects lofty. Yet his standard was sometimes limited by the prejudices of his class. He cherished the old Roman ideal of “virtus” rather than the Stoic gospel of a cosmopolitan brotherhood of man.149 Like Pliny, he felt little horror at gladiatorial combats,150 although he may have had a certain contempt for the rage for them. He had probably far less humane feelings than Pliny on the subject of slavery.151 [pg 28]While he admired many of the rude virtues of the Germans, he prayed Heaven that their tribal blood-feuds might last for ever.152 He has all the faith of Theognis in the moral value of blood and breeding. He feels a proud satisfaction in recording the virtues of the scion of a noble race, and degeneracy from great traditions moves his indignant pity.153 He sometimes throws a veil over the degenerates.154 The great economic revolution which was raising the freedman, the petty trader, the obscure provincial, to the top, he probably regarded with something of Juvenal’s suspicion and dislike. The new man would have needed a fine character, or a great record of service, to commend him to Tacitus.155 But, with all these defects of hard and narrow prejudice, Tacitus maintains a lofty ideal of character, a severe enthusiasm for the great virtues which are the salt of every society.
Of the early nurture of Tacitus nothing is directly known. But we may be permitted to imagine him tenderly yet strictly guarded from the taint of slave nurses156 by a mother who was as unspotted as Julia Procilla, the mother of his hero Agricola.157 What importance he attached to this jealous care of a good woman, what a horror he had of the incitements to cruelty and lust which surrounded the young Roman from his cradle, are to be traced in many a passage coming from the heart. His ideal of youthful chastity and of the pure harmony of a single wedded union, reveals to us another world from the scene of heartless, vagrant intrigue, on which Ovid wasted his brilliant gifts. His taste, if not his principles, revolted against the coarse seductions of the spectacles and the wasteful grossness of the banquets of his time.158 He envies the Germans their freedom from these great corrupters of Roman character, from the lust for gold, and the calculating sterility which cut itself from nature’s purest pleasure, to be surrounded on the deathbed by a crowd of hungry, shameless sycophants. While Tacitus had a burning contempt for the nerveless cowardice and sluggishness which degraded so many of his order,159 he may have valued [pg 29]even to excess, although it is hardly possible to do so, the virtues of the strenuous soldier. Proud submission to authority, proud, cold endurance in the face of cruel hardship and enormous odds, readiness to sacrifice even life at the call of the State, must always tower over the safe aspirations of an untried virtue. The soldier, though he never knows it, is the noblest of idealists. The ideal of Tacitus, although he sees his faults of temper,160 was probably the character of his father-in-law, Agricola, grave, earnest and severe, yet with a mingled clemency, free from all vulgar avarice or ostentation of rank, from all poisonous jealousy, an eager ambitious warrior, yet one knowing well how to temper audacious energy with prudence.161 Tacitus would probably have sought his ideal among those grey war-worn soldiers on a dangerous frontier, half warrior and half statesman, just and clement, stern in discipline, yet possessing the secret of the Roman soldier’s love, the men who were guarding the Solway, the Rhine, and the Danube, while their brethren in the Senate were purchasing their lives or their ease by adulation and treachery. Yet, after all, Tacitus was too great for such a limited ideal. He could admire faith and courage and constancy in any rank.162 With profound admiration and subdued pathos, he tells how the freedwoman Epicharis, racked and fainting in every limb with the extremity of torture, refused to tell the secret of the Pisonian conspiracy, and by a voluntary death shamed the knights and nobles who were ready to betray their nearest kin.163 The slave girls of the empress, who defiantly upheld her fair fame, under the last cruel ordeal, are honoured by a like memorial.164
The deepest feeling of Tacitus about the early Empire seems to have been that it was fatal to character both in prince and subject. This conviction he has expressed with the burning intensity of the artist. He could never have penned one of those laborious paragraphs of Suetonius which seem transcribed from a carefully kept note-book, with a lifeless catalogue of the vices, the virtues, and the eccentricities of the subject. For Tacitus, history is a living and real thing, not a matter of mere antiquarian interest. He has seen a single [pg 30]lawless will, unchecked by constitutional restraints or ordinary human feeling, making sport of the lives and fortunes of men. He has seen the sons of the proudest houses selling their ancestral honour for their lives, betraying their nearest and dearest, and kissing the hand which was reeking with innocent blood.165 When he looked back, he saw that, for more than fifteen years, with brief intervals, virtue had been exiled or compelled to hide itself in impotent seclusion, and that power and wealth had been the reward of perfidy and grovelling self-abasement.166 The brooding silence of those years of humiliating servitude did not extinguish the faith of Tacitus in human virtue, but it almost extinguished his faith in a righteous God. Tacitus is no philosopher, with either a reasoned théodicée or a consistent repudiation of faith.167 He uses popular language about religion, and often speaks like an old Roman in all things touching the gods.168 He is, moreover, often as credulous as he is sceptical in his treatment of omens and oracles.169 But, with all his intense faith in goodness, the spectacle of the world of the Caesars has profoundly shaken his trust in the Divine justice. Again and again, he attributes the long agony of the Roman world to mere chance or fate,170 or the anger of Heaven, as well as to the madness of men.171 Sometimes he almost denies a ruling power which could permit the continuance of the crimes of a Nero.172 Sometimes he grimly notes its impartial treatment of the good and the evil.173 And again, he speaks of the Powers who visit not to protect, but only to avenge. And so, by a curse like that which haunted the Pelopidae in tragic legend, the monarchy, cradled in ambition and civil strife, has gone on corrupting and corrupted. The lust of despotic power which Tacitus regards as the fiercest and most insatiable of human passions, has been intensified by the spectacle of a monarchy commanding, with practically unlimited sway, the resources and the fortunes of a world.
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It was a dazzling prize, offering frightful temptations both to the holder and to possible rivals and pretenders. The day on which a Nero or a Caligula awoke to all the possibilities of power was a fateful one. And Tacitus, with the instinct of the tragic artist, has painted the steady, fatal corruption of a prince’s character by the corroding influence of absolute and solitary sway. Of all the Caesars down to his time, the only one who changed for the better was the homely Vespasian. In Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, some of this deterioration of character must be set down to the morbid strain in the Julio-Claudian line, with its hard and cruel pride, and its heritage of a tainted blood, of which Nero’s father knew the secret so well. Much was also due to the financial exhaustion which, in successive reigns, followed the most reckless waste. It would be difficult to say whether the emperors or their nobles were the most to blame for the example of spendthrift extravagance and insane luxury. Two generations before the foundation of the Empire, the passion for profusion had set in, which, according to Tacitus, raged unchecked till the accession of Vespasian.174 Certainly, the man who would spend £3000 on a myrrhine vase, £4000 on a table of citrus-wood, or £40,000 on a richly wrought carpet from Babylon, had little to learn even from Nero.175 Yet the example of an emperor must always be potent for good or evil. We have the testimony of Pliny and Claudian,176 separated by an interval of three hundred years, that the world readily conforms its life to that of one man, if that man is head of the State. Nero’s youthful enthusiasm for declamation gave an immense impulse to the passion for rhetoric.177 His enthusiasm for acting and music spread through all ranks, and the emperor’s catches were sung at wayside inns.178 M. Aurelius made philosophy the mode, and the Stoic Emperor is responsible for some of the philosophic imposture which moved the withering scorn of Lucian. The Emperor’s favourite drug grew so popular that the price of it became almost prohibitory.179 If the model of Vespasian’s homely habits had such an effect in reforming society, we may be sure that [pg 32]the evil example of his spendthrift predecessors did at least as much to deprave it.
And what an example it was! The extravagance of the Claudian Caesars and the last Flavian has become a piece of historic commonplace. Every one has heard of the unguent baths of Caligula, his draughts of melted pearls, his galleys with jewel-studded sterns and gardens and orchards on their decks, his viaduct connecting the Palatine with the Capitoline, his bridge from Bauli to Puteoli, and many another scheme of that wild brain, which had in the end to be paid for in blood.180 In a single year Caligula scattered in reckless waste more than £20,000,000.181 Nero proclaimed that the only use of money was to squander it, and treated any prudent calculation as meanness.182 In a brief space he flung away nearly £18,000,000. The Egyptian roses for a single banquet cost £35,000.183 He is said never to have made a progress with less than a thousand carriages; his mules were shod with silver.184 He would stake HS.400,000 on a single throw of the dice. The description of his Golden House is like a vision of lawless romance.185 The successors of Galba were equally lavish during their brief term. Otho, another Nero, probably regarded death in battle as a relief from bankruptcy.186 Within a very few months, Vitellius had flung away more than £7,000,000 in vulgar luxury.187 Vespasian found the exhaustion of the public treasury so portentous188 that he had to resort to unpopular economies and taxation on a great scale. Under Domitian, the spectacles and largesses lavished on the mob undid all the scrupulous finance of his father,189 and Nerva had to liquidate the ruinous heritage by wholesale retrenchment, and the sale even of the imperial furniture and plate,190 as M. Aurelius brought to the hammer his household treasures, and even the wardrobe and jewels of the empress, in the stress of the Marcomannic war.191
But the great imperial spendthrifts resorted to more [pg 33]simple and primitive methods of replenishing their coffers. Self-indulgent waste is often seen linked with meanness and hard cruelty. The epigram of Suetonius on Domitian, inopia rapax, metu saevus,192 sums up the sordid history of the tyranny. The cool biographer of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, when in his methodical fashion, he has recorded their financial difficulties, immediately proceeds to describe the unblushing rapine or ingenious chicanery by which the needy tyrants annexed a coveted estate. The emperors now generally protected the provinces from plunder,193 but they applied all the Verrine methods to their own nobles. It was not hard with the help of the sleuth hounds who always gather round the despot, to find plausible grounds of accusation. The vague law of majesty, originally intended to guard the security of the commonwealth, was now used to throw its protection around the sacrosanct prince in whom all the highest powers of government were concentrated.194 The slightest suspicion of disloyalty or discontent, the most insignificant act or word, which a depraved ingenuity could misinterpret, was worked up into a formidable indictment by men eager for their share of the plunder. To have written the memoir of a Stoic saint or kept the birthday of a dead emperor, to possess an imperial horoscope or a map of the world, to call a slave by the name of Hannibal or a dish by that of Lucullus, might become a fatal charge.195 “Ungrateful testators” who had failed to remember the emperor in their wills had to pay heavily for the indiscreet omission.196 The materials for such accusations were easily obtained in the Rome of the early Caesars. Life was eminently sociable. A great part of the day was spent at morning receptions, in the Forum, the Campus Martius, the barber’s or bookseller’s shops, or in the colonnades where crowds of fashionable idlers gathered to relieve the tedium of life by gossip and repartee. It was a city, says Tacitus, which knew everything and talked of everything.197 Never was curiosity more eager or gossip more reckless. Men were almost ready to risk their lives for a bon mot. And in the [pg 34]reign of Nero or Domitian, the risk was a very real one. The imperial espionage, of which Maecenas in Dion Cassius recognised at once the danger and the necessity,198 was an organised system even under the most blameless emperors It can be traced in the reigns of Nerva, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius.199 But under the tyrants, voluntary informers sprang up in every class. Among the hundreds of slaves attached to a great household, there were in such times sure to be spies, attracted by the lure of freedom and a fortune, who might report and distort what they had observed in their master’s unguarded hours. Men came to dread possible traitors even among their nearest of kin, among their closest friends of the highest rank.200 Who can forget the ignominy of those three Senators, one of them bearing the historic name of Cato, who, to win the consulship from Sejanus, hid themselves between the ceiling and the roof, and caught, through chinks and crannies, the words artfully drawn from the victim by another member of the noble gang? The seventh book of the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus is a revelation of the mingled caution and truculence of the methods of Domitian. Here at least we have left the world of romance behind and are on solid ground. We feel around us, as we read, the hundred eyes of an omnipresent tyranny. We meet in the prison the magistrate of Tarentum who had been guilty of a dangerous omission in the public prayers, and an Acarnanian who had been guilty of settling in one of the Echinades.201 A spy glides into the cells, to listen to the prisoners’ talk, and is merely regaled by Apollonius with a description of the wonders he has seen in his wanderings. When we are admitted to the secret tribunal on the Palatine, after Domitian has paid his devotion to Athene, we have before us a cruel, stealthy despot, as timid as he is brutally truculent. In spite of all scepticism about Philostratus, we are there at the heart of the Terror.
Compared with this base espionage, even the trade of the delator becomes almost respectable. Like everything in Roman social organisation, delation had a long history, too [pg 35]long to be developed within the space of this work. The work of impeachment, which might be wholesome and necessary under the Republic, in exposing the enormities of provincial government, became the curse of the Empire. The laws of Augustus for the restoration of social morality gave the first chance to the professional delator. The jealous, secretive rule of Tiberius welcomed such sinister support,202 and although the dark, tortuous policy of the recluse of Capreae might punish the excess of zeal in the informers, it was also ready to reward them for opportune displays of energy.203 The open and daring tyranny of Caligula and Nero often dispensed with the hypocrisy of judicial forms of assassination. It was reserved for the last Flavian to revive the methods of Tiberius.204 Domitian was at once timid and cruel. He was also a pedant who concealed from himself his own baseness by a scrupulous devotion to ancient forms even in religion. The obscene libertine, who chose the Virgin Goddess as his patroness,205 could easily make the forms of old Roman justice a cloak for confiscation and massacre. In theory the voluntary accuser, without a commission from authority, was a discredited person. And successive emperors punished or frowned upon the delators of a previous reign.206 Yet the profession grew in reputation and emolument. It is a melancholy proof of the degradation of that society that the delator could be proud of his craft and even envied and admired. Men of every degree, freedmen, schoolmasters, petty traders, descendants of houses as old as the Republic, men from the rank of the shoemaker Vatinius207 to a Scaurus, a Cato, or a Regulus, flocked to a trade which might earn a fabulous fortune and the favour of the prince. There must have been many a career like that of Palfurius Sura, who had fought in the arena in the reign of Nero, who had been disgraced and stripped of his consular rank under Vespasian, who then turned Stoic and preached the gospel of popular [pg 36]government, and, in the reign of Domitian, crowned his career by becoming a delator, and attempting to found a juristic theory of absolute monarchy.208
The system of Roman education, which was profoundly rhetorical, became a hot-bed of this venal oratory. It nourished its pupils on the masterpieces of free speech; it inflamed their imaginations with dreams of rhetorical triumph. When they went forth into the world of the Empire, they found the only arena for displaying their powers to be the dull court of the Centumviri, or the hired lecture hall, where they might dilate on some frigid or silly theme before a weary audience. It was a tempting excitement to exert the arts learnt in the school of Quintilian in a real onslaught, where the life or liberty of the accused was at stake. And the greatest orators of the past had never offered to them such a splendid material reward. One fourth of the estate of the condemned man had been the old legal fee of the accuser.209 But this limit was left far behind in the judicial plunder of the early Caesars. Probably in no other way could a man then so easily make himself a millionaire. The leading accusers of Thrasea and Soranus in the reign of Nero received each £42,000 as their reward.210 These notorious delators, Eprius Marcellus and Vibius Crispus, accumulated gains reaching, in the end, the enormous amount of £2,400,000. The famous, or infamous, Regulus, after the most prodigal expenditure, left a fortune of half a million.211 His career is a striking example of the arts by which, in a debased society, men may rise to fortune, and the readiness with which such a society will always forgive anything to daring and success. Sprung from an illustrious but ruined race,212 Regulus possessed shameless audacity and ruthless ambition,213 which were more valuable than birth and fortune. He had every physical defect for a speaker, yet he made himself an orator, with a weird power of strangling his victims.214 He was poor, but he resolved to be wealthy, and he reached the fortune which he proposed to himself as his goal. He was vain, cruel, and insolent, a slave of superstition,215 [pg 37]stained with many a perfidious crime. He was a peculiarly skilful and perfectly shameless adept in the arts of captation.216 Yet this cynical agent of judicial murder, who began his career in the reign of Nero, lived on in peace and wealth into the reign of Trajan. He even enjoyed a certain consideration in society.217 The humane and refined Pliny at once detested and tolerated him. The morning receptions of Regulus, in his distant gardens on the Tiber, were thronged by a fashionable crowd.
The inner secret of the imperial Terror will probably always perplex the historian. The solution of the question depends, not only on the value which is to be attached to our authorities, but on the prepossessions and prejudices which are brought to their interpretation. To one critic Tacitus, although liable to the faults which spring from rhetorical training and fervid temperament, seems fairly impartial and trustworthy.218 Another treats the great historian as essentially a partisan who derived his materials from the memoirs and traditions of a class inflamed with reactionary dreams and saturated with a hatred of monarchy.219 Some regard the tragedy of the early Empire as the result of a real peril from a senatorial conspiracy which perpetually surrounded the emperor. Others trace it to the diseased brains of princes, giddy with the sense of omnipotence, and often unstrung by vicious excesses, natures at once timorous and arrogant, anticipating danger by a maniacal cruelty which ended in creating the peril that they feared. Is it not possible that there may be truth in both theories? It may be admitted that there probably was never a powerful opposition, with a definitely conceived purpose of overthrowing the imperial system, as it had been organised by Augustus, and of restoring the republican rule of the Senate. It may be admitted that, while so many of the first twelve Caesars died a violent death, the violence was used to rid the world of a monster, and not to remodel a constitution; it was the emperor, not the Empire, that was hated. Yet these admissions need to be qualified by some reservations. The effect of the rhetorical character of Roman education in moulding the temper and ideals of the upper classes, down to the very end [pg 38]of the Western Empire, has hardly yet been fully recognised. It petrified literature by the slavish imitation of unapproachable models. It also glorified the great ages of freedom and republican government; it exalted Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus and Cassius, to a moral height which might suggest to generous youth the duty or the glory of imitating them. When a rhetor’s class, in the reign of Caligula or of Nero, applauded the fall of a historic despot, is it not possible that some may have applied the lesson to the reigning emperor? Although it is evident that philosophic debates on the three forms of government were not unknown, yet probably few ever seriously thought of a restoration of the republic. None but a maniac would have entrusted the nerveless, sensual mob of Rome with the destinies of the world. As a matter of fact, the mob themselves very much preferred the rule of a lavish despot, who would cater for their pleasures.220 But the Senate was still a name of power. In the three or four generations which had passed since the death of the first Caesar, men had forgotten the weakness and perfidy which had made senatorial government impossible. They thought of the Senate as the stubborn, haughty caste which had foiled the strategy of Hannibal, which had achieved the conquest of the world. The old families might have been more than decimated; new men of doubtful origin might have filled their places.221 But ancient institutions possess a prestige and power which is often independent of the men who work them. Men are governed largely through imagination and mere names. Thus the Senate remained an imaginative symbol of the glory of Roman power, down to the last years of the Western Empire. The accomplished Symmachus cherishes the phantasm of its power under Honorius. And although a Caligula or Nero might conceive a feverish hatred of the assembly which they feared,222 while they affected to despise it, the better emperors generally made almost a parade of their respect for the Senate.223 The wisest princes had [pg 39]a feeling that, although they might have at their back the devotion of the legions, and an immense material force, still it was wiser to conciliate old Roman feeling by a politic deference to a body which was surrounded by the aureole of antiquity, which had such splendid traditions of conquest and administration.
The Senate was thus the only possible rival of the Emperor. The question is, was the Senate ever a dangerous rival? The true answer seems to be that the Senate was dangerous in theory, but not in fact. There can be little doubt that, in the reigns of Caligula and Nero, there were men who dreamed of a restored senatorial power.224 It is equally certain that the Senate was incapable of asserting it. Luxury, self-indulgence, and conscription had done their work effectually. There were many pretenders to the principate in the reign of Nero, and even some in the reign of Vespasian.225 But they had not a solid and determined Senate at their back. The world, and even the Senate, were convinced that the Roman Empire needed the administration of one man. How to get the one man was the problem. Hereditary succession had placed only fools or monsters on the throne. There remained the old principle of adoption. An emperor, feeling that his end was approaching, might, with all his vast experience of the government of a world, with all his knowledge of the senatorial class, with no fear of offence in the presence of death,226 designate one worthy of the enormous charge. If such an one came to the principate, with a generous desire to give the Senate a share of his burdens and his glory, that was the highest ideal of the Empire, and that was the ideal which perhaps was approached in the Antonine age. Yet, outside the circle of practical statesmen, there remained a class which was long irreconcilable. It has been recently maintained with great force that the Stoic opposition was only the opposition of a moral ideal, not the deliberate propaganda of a political creed.227 This may be true of some of the philosophers: it is certainly not true of all. Thrasea was a genial man of the world, whose severest censure expressed itself in silence and absence from the Senate,228 who could even, on occasion, speak with deference of Nero. But his son-in-law, [pg 40]Helvidius Priscus, seemed to exult in flouting and insulting a great and worthy emperor such as Vespasian.229 And the life of Apollonius by Philostratus leaves the distinct impression that philosophy, in the reign of Nero and Domitian, was a revolutionary force. Apollonius, it is true, is represented by Philostratus as supporting the cause of monarchy in a debate in the presence of Vespasian.230 But he boasted of having been privy to conspiracies against Nero,231 and he was deeply involved with Nerva and Orfitus in a plot against Domitian.232 He was summoned before the secret tribunal to answer for speeches against the emperor delivered to crowds at Ephesus.233 It may be admitted that the invective or scorn of philosophy was aimed at unworthy princes, rather than at the foundations of their power. Yet Dion Cassius evidently regards Helvidius Priscus as a turbulent agitator with dangerous democratic ideals,234 and he contrasts his violence with the studied moderation, combined with dignified reserve, displayed by Thrasea in the reign of Nero. The tolerant Vespasian, who bore so long the wanton insults of the philosophers, must have come at length to think them not only an offence but a real danger when he banished them. In the first century there can be little doubt that there were members of the philosophic class who condemned monarchy, not only as a moral danger, but as a lamentable aberration from the traditions of republican freedom. There were probably some, who, if the chance had offered itself, might even have ventured on a republican reaction.
With a gloomy recognition of the realities of life, Domitian used to say that conspiracy against an emperor was never believed till the emperor was killed.235 Of the first twelve Caesars seven died a violent death. Every emperor from Tiberius to M. Aurelius was the mark of conspiracy. This was often provoked by the detestable character of the prince. But it sometimes sprang from other causes than moral disgust. The mild rule of Vespasian was generally popular; yet even he had to repel the conspiracy of Aelianus and Marcellus.236 The [pg 41]blameless Nerva, the emperor after the Senate’s own heart, was twice assailed by risings organised by great nobles of historic name.237 The conspiracy of Nigrinus against Hadrian received formidable support, and had to be sternly crushed.238 M. Aurelius had to endure with sad resignation the open rebellion of Avidius Cassius.239 The better emperors, strong in their character and the general justice of their administration, might afford to treat such opposition with comparative calmness. But it was different in the case of a Nero or a Domitian. The conspiracy of Piso and the conspiracy of Saturninus formed, in each case, a climax and a turning-point. Springing from real and justified impatience, they were ruthlessly crushed and followed up with a cruel and suspicious repression which only increased the danger of the despot. “Scelera sceleribus tuenda” sums up the awful tale, in the words of Tacitus, “of the wrath of God and the madness of men.”
There were many causes which rendered the tragedy of the early Empire inevitable. Probably the most potent was the undefined position of the prince and the dreams of republican power and freedom which for ages were cherished by the Senate. Carefully disguised under ancient forms, the principate of Augustus was really omnipotent, through the possession of the proconsular imperium in the provinces, and the tribunician prerogative at home.240 In the last resort there was no legal means of challenging the man who controlled the legions, nominated the magistrates, and manipulated a vast treasury at his pleasure. The fiction of Augustus, that he had restored the Republic to the hands of the Senate and people, is unlikely to have deceived his own astute intellect.241 The hand which, of its grace could restore the simulacra libertatis, might as easily withdraw them. The Comitia lost even the shadow of constitutional power in the following reign.242 Henceforth the people is the army.243 The holders of the great republican magistracies are mere creatures of the prince and obedient ministers of his power. The Senate alone retained some vestiges of its old [pg 42]power, and still larger pretensions and antiquarian claims. In theory, during a vacancy in the principate, the Senate was the ultimate seat of authority, and the new emperor received his prerogatives by a decree of the Senate. In the work of legislation, its decisions divided the field with the edicts of the prince,244 and it claimed a parallel judicial power. But all this was really illusory. The working of such a system manifestly depends on the character and ideas of the man who for the time wields the material force of the Empire. And “the share of the Senate in the government was in fact determined by the amount of administrative activity which each emperor saw fit to allow it to exercise.”245
The half-insane Caligula had really a clearer vision of the emperor’s position than the reactionary dreamers, when he told his grandmother Antonia, “Memento omnia mihi in omnes licere.”246 He did not need the lessons of Agrippa and Antiochus to teach him the secret of tyranny.247 Yet institutions can never be separated from the moral and social forces which lie behind and around them. The emperor had to depend on agents and advisers, many of them of social rank and family traditions equal to his own. He had by his side a Senate with a history of immemorial antiquity and glory, which cast a spell on the conservative imagination of a race which recoiled from any impiety to the past. Above all, he was surrounded by a populace which took its revenge for the loss of its free Comitia by a surprising licence of lampoon and epigram and mordant gossip and clamorous appeal in the circus and theatre.248 And even the soldiers, who were the sworn supporters of the prince, and who often represented better than any other class the tone of old Roman gravity and manly virtue, could sometimes make their Imperator feel that there was in reserve a power which he could not safely defy. Hence it was that, with the changing character of the prince, the imperial power might pass into a lawless tyranny, only to be checked by assassination, while again it might veil its forces under constitutional forms, adopt the watchwords of the Republic, exalt the Senate to a place beside the throne, and make even accomplished statesmen fancy for the time that the days of ancient liberty had returned.
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Such a dream, not altogether visionary, floated before Pliny’s mind when he delivered his Panegyric in the presence of Trajan. That speech is at once an act of thanksgiving and a manifesto of the Senate. The tone of fulsome extravagance is excused by the joy at escaping from a treacherous tyranny, which drove virtue into remote retreat, which made friendship impossible, which poisoned the security of household life by a continual fear of espionage.249 The confidence which Pliny expresses in the majestic strength, mingled with modesty and self-restraint, which Trajan brought to the task of the principate, was amply justified. The overwhelming force of the emperor seemed, in the new age, to pass into the freely accepted rule of the great citizen.250 Pliny indeed does not conceal from himself the immense actual power of the emperor. He is the vicegerent of God, an earthly Providence.251 His power is not less than Nero’s or Domitian’s, but it is a power no longer wielded wildly by selfish or cruel self-will; it is a power inspired by benevolence, voluntarily submitting itself to the restraints of law and ancient sentiment.252 Founded on service and virtue, it can fearlessly claim the loving support of the citizens, while it recalls the freedom of the old Republic. A prince who is hedged by the devotion of his people may dispense with the horde of spies and informers, who have driven virtue into banishment and made a crowd of sneaks and cowards. Free speech has been restored. The Senate, which has so long been expected to applaud with grovelling flattery the most trivial or the most flagitious acts of the emperor, is summoned to a share in the serious work of government.253 A community of interest and feeling secures to it a free voice in his counsels, without derogating from his dignity.254 All this is expressed by a scrupulous observance of old republican forms. The commander of conquering legions, the Caesar, Augustus, Pontifex Maximus, has actually condescended to take the oath of office, standing before the consul seated in his chair!255 Here we seem to have the key to the senatorial position. They were ready to recognise the overwhelming power of the prince, if he, for his part, would only respect in form, if not in substance, the ancient dignity of the Senate. Tolerance, affability, [pg 44]politic deference to a great name, seemed to Pliny and his kind a restoration of the ancient freedom, almost a revival of the old Republic. Fortunately for the world a succession of wise princes perceived that, by deference to the pride of the Senate, they could secure the peace of their administration, without diminishing its effective power.
Yet, even from Pliny’s Panegyric, we can see that the recognition of the prerogatives, or rather of the dignity, of the Senate, the coexistence of old republican forms side by side with imperial power, depended entirely on the grace and tolerance of the master of the legions. Nothing could be more curious than Pliny’s assertion of the senatorial claims, combined with the most effusive gratitude to Trajan for conceding them. The emperor is only primus inter pares, and yet Pliny, by the whole tone of his speech, admits that he is the master who may equally indulge the constitutional claims or superstitions of his subjects or trample on them. In the first century a power, the extent of which depended only on the will of the prince, and yet seemed limited by shadowy claims of ancient tradition, was liable to be distrustful of itself and to be challenged by pretenders. In actual fact, the prince was so powerful that he might easily pass into a despot; in theory he was only the first of Roman nobles, who might easily have rivals among his own class. Pliny congratulates Trajan on having, by his mildness and justice, escaped the terror of pretenders which haunted the earlier emperors, and was often justified and cruelly avenged.256 In spite of the lavish splendour of Nero or Caligula, the imperial household, till Hadrian’s reorganisation, was still modelled on the lines of other great aristocratic houses. Nero’s suspicions were more than once excited by the scale of establishments like that of the Silani, by wealth and display like Seneca’s, by the lustre of great historic traditions in a gens like the Calpurnian.257 The loyalty of Corbulo could not save him from the jealousy aroused by his exploits in eastern war.258 And the power of great provincial governors, in command of great armies, and administering realms such as Gaul or Spain or Syria, was not an altogether imaginary danger. If Domitian seemed distrustful of Agricola [pg 45]in Britain, we must remember that he had in his youth seen Galba and Vindex marching on Rome, and his father concentrating the forces of the East for the overthrow of Vitellius in the great struggle on the Po.
The emperor’s fears and suspicions were immensely aggravated by the adepts in the dark arts of the East. The astrologers were a great and baneful power in the early Empire. They inspired illicit ambitions, or they stimulated them, and they often suggested to a timorous prince the danger of conspiracy. These venal impostors, in the words of Tacitus, were always being banished, but they always returned. For the men who drove them into temporary exile had the firmest faith in their skill. The prince would have liked to keep a monopoly of it, while he withdrew from his nobles the temptation which might be offered to their ambition by the mercenary adept.259 Dion Cassius and Suetonius, who were themselves eager believers in this superstition, never fail to record the influence of the diviners. The reign of Tiberius is full of dark tales about them.260 Claudius drove Scribonianus into exile for consulting an astrologer about the term of his reign.261 On the appearance of a flaming comet, Nero was warned by his diviner, Bilbilus, that a portent, which always boded ill to kings, might be expiated by the blood of their nobles.262 Otho’s astrologer, Seleucus, who had promised that he should survive Nero,263 stimulated his ambition to be the successor of Galba. Vitellius, as superstitious as Nero or Otho, cruelly persecuted the soothsayers and ordered their expulsion from Italy.264 He was defied by a mocking edict of the tribe, ordaining his own departure from earth by a certain day.265 Vespasian once more banished the diviners from Rome, but, obedient to the superstition which cradled the power of his dynasty, he retained the most skilful for his own guidance.266 The terror of Domitian’s last days was heightened by a horoscope, which long before had foretold the time and manner of his end.267 Holding such a faith as this, it is little wonder that the emperors should dread its effect on rivals who were equally [pg 46]credulous, or that superstition, working on ambitious hopes, should have been the nurse of treason. Thus the emperor’s uncertain position made him ready to suspect and anticipate a treachery which may often have had no existence. The objects of his fears in their turn were driven into conspiracy, sometimes in self-defence, sometimes from the wish to seize a prize which seemed not beyond their grasp. Gossip, lampoon, and epigram redoubled suspicion, while they retaliated offences. And cruel repression either increased the danger of revolt in the more daring, or the degradation of the more timorous.
In the eyes of Tacitus, the most terrible result of the tyranny of the bad emperors was the fawning servility of a once proud order, and their craven treachery in the hour of danger. He has painted it with all the concentrated power of loathing and pity. It is this almost personal degradation which inspires the ruthless, yet haughtily restrained, force with which he blasts for ever the memory of the Julio-Claudian despotism. It was in this spirit that he penned the opening chapters of his chronicle of the physical and moral horrors of the year in which that tyranny closed. The voice of history has been silenced or perverted, partly by the ignorance of public affairs, partly by the eagerness of adulation, or the bitterness of hatred. It was an age darkened by external disasters, save on the eastern frontier, by seditions and civil war, and the bloody death of four princes. The forces of nature seemed to unite with the rage of men to deepen the universal tragedy. Italy was overwhelmed with calamities which had been unknown for many ages; Campania’s fairest cities were swallowed up; Rome itself had been wasted by fire; the ancient Capitol was given to the flames by the hands of citizens. Polluted altars, adultery in high places, the islands of the sea crowded with exiles, rank and wealth and virtue made the mark for a cruel jealousy, all this forms an awful picture.268 But even more repulsive is the spectacle of treachery rewarded with the highest place, slaves and clients betraying their master for gain, and men without an enemy ruined by their friends. When the spotless Octavia, overwhelmed by the foulest calumnies, had been tortured to death, to satisfy the jealousy of an adulteress, offerings were voted to the [pg 47]temples.269 And Tacitus grimly requests his readers to presume that, as often as a banishment or execution was ordered by Nero, so often were thanksgivings offered to the gods. The horrors of Nero’s remorse for the murder of Agrippina were soothed by the flatteries and congratulations of his staff, and the grateful sacrifices which were offered for his deliverance by the Campanian towns.270 Still, the notes of a funereal trumpet and ghostly wailings from his mother’s grave were ever in his ears,271 and he long doubted the reception which he might meet with on his return to the capital. He need not have had any anxiety. Senate and people vied with one another in self-abasement. He was welcomed by all ranks and ages with fawning enthusiasm as he passed along in triumphal progress to return thanks on the Capitol for the success of an unnatural crime.
The Pisonian conspiracy against Nero was undoubtedly an important and serious event. Some of the greatest names of the Roman aristocracy were involved in it, and the man whom it would have placed on the throne, if not altogether untainted by the excesses of his time, had some imposing qualities which might make him seem a worthy competitor for the principate.272 But, to Tacitus, the conspiracy seems to be chiefly interesting as a damning proof of the degradation of the aristocracy under the reign of terror. Epicharis, the poor freedwoman of light character, who bore the accumulating torture of scourge and rack and fire, and the dislocation of every limb, is brought into pathetic contrast with the high-born senators and knights, who, without any compulsion of torture, betrayed their relatives and friends.273 Scaevinus, a man of the highest rank, knowing himself betrayed by his freedman and a Roman knight, revealed the whole plot.274 The poet Lucan tried in vain to purchase safety by involving his own mother. But Nero was inexorable, and the poet died worthily, reciting some verses from the Pharsalia, which describe a similar end.275 The scenes which followed the massacre are an awful revelation of cowardly sycophancy. While the streets were thronged with the funerals of the victims, [pg 48]the altars on the Capitol were smoking with sacrifices of gratitude. One craven after another, when he heard of the murder of a brother or a dear friend, would deck his house with laurels, and, falling at the emperor’s feet, cover his hand with kisses.276 The Senate prostrated themselves before Nero when, stung by the popular indignation, he appeared to justify his deed. The august body voted him thanksgivings and honours.277 The consul elect, one of the Anician house, proposed that a temple should be built with all speed to the divine Nero! Tacitus relieves this ghastly spectacle of effeminate cowardice by a scene which is probably intended, by way of contrast, to save the tradition of Roman dignity. Vestinus, the consul of that fatal year, had been a boon companion of the emperor, and had shown contempt for his cowardice in dangerous banter. Nero was eager to find him implicated in the plot, but no evidence of his guilt could be obtained. All legal forms at length were flung aside, and a cohort was ordered to surround his house. Vestinus was at dinner in his palace which towered over the Forum, surrounded by guests, with a train of handsome slaves in waiting, when he received the mandate. He rose at once from table, and shut himself in his chamber with his physician, lancet in hand, by his side. His veins were opened, and, without a word of self-pity, Vestinus allowed his life to ebb away in the bath.278
Vestinus, after all, only asserted, in the fashion of the time, his right to choose the manner of a death which could not be evaded. But Tacitus, here and there, gives glimpses of self-sacrifice, courageous loyalty and humanity, which save his picture of society from utter gloom. The love and devotion of women shine out more brightly than ever against the background of baseness. Tender women follow their husbands or brothers into exile, or are found ready to share their death.279 Even the slave girls of Octavia brave torture and death in their hardy defence of her fair fame.280 There is no more pathetic story of female heroism than that of Politta, the daughter of L. Vetus. He had been colleague of the emperor in the consulship, but he had the misfortune to be father-in-law [pg 49]of Rubellius Plautus, whose lofty descent and popularity drew down the sentence of death, even in distant exile.281 Politta had clasped the bleeding neck of Plautus in her arms, and nursed her sorrow in an austere widowhood.282 She now besieged the doors of Nero with prayers, and even menaces, for her father’s acquittal. Vetus himself was of the nobler sort of Roman men, who even then were not extinct. When he was advised, in order to save the remnant of his property for his grandchildren, to make the emperor chief heir, he spurned the servile proposal, divided his ready money among his slaves, and prepared for the end.283 When all hope was abandoned, father, grandmother, and daughter opened their veins and died together in the bath. Plautius Lateranus met his end with the same stern dignity. Forbidden even to give a last embrace to his children, and dragged to the scene of servile executions, he died in silence by the hand of a man who was an undiscovered partner in the plot.284 Even the mob of Rome, for whose fickle baseness Tacitus has a profound scorn, now and then reveal a wholesome moral feeling. When Octavia, on a trumped-up charge of adultery, was divorced and banished by Nero, the clamour of the populace forced him to recall her for a time, and the mob went so far in their virtuous enthusiasm as to overthrow the statues of the adulteress Poppaea, and crown the images of Octavia with flowers.285 Perhaps even more striking is the humane feeling displayed towards the slaves of the urban prefect, Pedanius Secundus. He had been murdered by a slave, and the ancient law required, in such a case, the execution of the whole household. The proposal to carry out the cruel custom drove the populace almost to revolt. And it is a relief to find that a strong minority of the Senate were on the side of humanity.286 But the army, above all other classes, still bred a rough, honest virtue. It was left, amid the general effeminate cowardice, for a tribune of a pretorian cohort to tell Nero to his face that he loathed him as a murderer and an incendiary.287 Again and again, in that terrible year, when great nobles were flattering the Emperor, whom in a few days or hours they meant to desert, the common soldiers remained true to the death of [pg 50]their unworthy chiefs. When Otho redeemed a tainted life by a not ignoble end, the pretorians kissed his wounds, bore him with tears to burial, and many killed themselves over his corpse.288 In the storming of the pretorian camp by the troops of Vespasian, the soldiers of Vitellius, outnumbered and doomed to certain defeat, fell to a man with all their wounds in front.289
To these faithful, though often bloodthirsty, warriors the senators and knights of those days offered a contemptible contrast. Often the inheritors of great names and great traditions, the mass of them knew nothing of arms or the military virtue of their ancestors.290 Sunk in sloth and enervated by excess, they followed Otho to the battlefield on the Po with their cooks and minions and all the apparatus of luxury.291 In the rapid changes of fortune, from Galba to Otho, from Otho to Vitellius, from Vitellius to Vespasian, the great nobles had one guiding principle, the determination to be on the winning side. It was indeed a puzzling and anxious time for a calculating selfishness, when a reign might not last for a month, and when the adulation of Otho or Vitellius in the Senate-house was disturbed by the sound of the legions advancing from East and West. But the supple cowards of the Senate proved equal to the strain. They had the skill to flatter their momentary master without any compromising word against his probable successor. They soothed the anxieties of Vitellius with unstinted adulation, yet carefully refrained from anything reflecting on the Flavianist leaders.292 Within a few months, full of joy and hope, which were now at last well founded, they were voting all the customary honours of a new principate to Vespasian.293 The terror of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero had done its work effectually. And its worst result was the hopeless self-abandonment and sluggish cowardice of a class, whose chief raison d’être in every age is to maintain a tradition of gallant dignity. It is true that many of the scions of great houses were mere mendicants, ruined by confiscation or prodigality, and compelled to live on the pension by which the emperor kept them in shameful dependence,294 or on the meaner dole of some [pg 51]wealthy patron.295 A Valerius Messala, grandson of the great Corvinus, had to accept a pension from Nero.296 A grandson of Hortensius had to endure the contempt of Tiberius in obtaining a grant for his sons.297 Others were unmanned by the voluptuous excesses of an age which had carried the ingenuity of sensual allurement to its utmost limits. The hopelessness of any struggle with a power so vast as that of the emperor, so ruthless and wildly capricious as that of the Claudian Caesars, reduced many to despairing apathy.298 And while, from a safe historic distance, we pour our contempt on the cringing Senate of the first century, it might be well to remind ourselves of their perils and their tortures. There was many a senatorial house, like that of the Pisos, whose leading members were never allowed to reach middle age.299 Much should be forgiven to a class which was daily and hourly exposed to such danger, so sudden in its onsets, so secret and stealthy, so all-pervading. It might come in an open circumstantial indictment, with all the forms of law and the weight of suborned testimony; it might appear in a quiet order for suicide; the stroke might descend at the farthest limits of the Empire,300 in some retreat in Spain or Asia. The haunting fear of death had an unnerving effect. But not less degrading were the outrages to Roman, or ordinary human dignity to which the noble order had to submit for more than a generation. They had seen their wives defiled or compelled to expose themselves as harlots in a foul spectacle, to gratify the diseased prurience of the emperor.301 They had been forced to fight in the arena or to exhibit themselves on the tragic stage.302 Men who had borne the ancient honours of the consulship had been ordered to run for miles beside the chariot of Caligula, or to wait at his feet at dinner.303 Fathers had had to witness without flinching the execution of their sons, and drink smilingly to the emperor on the evening of the fatal day.304 The only safety at such a court lay in calmly accepting insults with affected gratitude. The example of Nero’s debauchery, and the seductive charm which he undoubtedly possessed, were [pg 52]probably as enfeebling and demoralising as the Terror. He formed a school, which laughed at all virtue and made self-indulgence a fine art. Men who had shared in these obscene revels were the leaders in the awful scenes of perfidy, lust, and cruelty which appropriately followed the death of their patron.305 Some of them, Petronius, Otho, Vitellius, closed their career appropriately by a tragic death. But others lived on into the age of reformation, to defame the stout Sabine soldier who saved the Roman world.306
In spite of the manly virtue and public spirit of Vespasian, the Roman world had to endure a fierce ordeal before it entered on the peace of the Antonine age. Even Vespasian’s reign was troubled by conspiracy.307 His obscure origin moved the contempt of the great senatorial houses who still survived. His republican moderation gave the philosophic doctrinaires a chance of airing their impossible dream of restoring a municipal Republic to govern a world. His conscientious frugality, which was absolutely needed to retrieve the bankruptcy of the Neronian régime, was despised and execrated both by the nobles and the mob. Another lesson was needed both by the Senate and the philosophers. Society had yet to be purged as by fire, and the purging came with the accession of Domitian.
The inner secret of that sombre reign will probably remain for ever a mystery. There is the same question about Domitian as there is about Tiberius. Was he bad from the beginning, or was he gradually corrupted by the consciousness of immense power,308 and the fear of the great order who might challenge it? Our authorities do not furnish a satisfying answer. We know Domitian only from the narrative of men steeped in senatorial traditions and prejudices,309 and, some of them, intoxicated by the vision of a reconciliation of the principate with the republican ideals. The dream was a noble one, and it was about to be partially realised [pg 53]for three generations, under a succession of good emperors. But the men inspired with such an ideal were not likely to be impartial judges of an emperor like Domitian. And even from their narrative of his reign, we can see that he was not, at least in the early years of his reign,310 the utter monster he has been painted. Even severe judges in modern days admit that he was an able and strenuous man, with a clear, cold, cynical intellect,311 which recognised some of the great problems of the time, and strove to solve them. He was indefatigable in judicial work.312 In spite of the sneers at his mock triumphs,313 his military and provincial administration was probably guided by a sound conception of the resources and the dangers of the Empire. His recall of Agricola, after a seven years’ command in Britain, was attributed to jealousy and fear.314 It is more probable that it was dictated by a wish to stop a campaign which was diverting large sums to the conquest of barren mountains. Domitian was an orator and verse writer of some merit, and he gave his patronage, although not in a very liberal way, to men like Quintilian, Statius, and Martial.315 Like Nero, he felt the force of the new Hellenist movement, and, under forms sanctioned by Roman antiquarians, he established a quinquennial festival in which literary genius was pompously rewarded.316 He had the public libraries, which had been devastated by fires in the previous reigns, liberally restocked with fresh stores of MSS. from Alexandria.317 He gave close attention, whatever we may think of his science, to the economic problems of the Empire. And his discouragement of the vine, in favour of a greater acreage of corn, would find sympathy in our own time, as it was applauded by Apollonius of Tyana.318 The man who decimated the Roman aristocracy towards the end of his reign, advanced to high positions some of those who were destined to be his bitterest defamers. Pliny and Tacitus and Trajan’s father rose to high office in the [pg 54]earlier part of Domitian’s reign.319 He designated to the consulship such men as Nerva, Trajan, Verginius Rufus, Agricola, and the grandfather of Antoninus Pius.320 This strange character was also a moral reformer of the antiquarian type. He punished erring Vestals, more majorum. He revived the Scantinian law against those enormities of the East, of which Statius shows that the emperor was not guiltless himself.321 Yet a voluptuary, with a calm outlook on his time, may have a wish to restrain vices with which he is himself tainted. A statesman may be a puritan reformer, both in religion and morals, without being personally severe and devout. Domitian may have had a genuine, if a pedantic, desire to restore the old Roman tone in morals and religion. He was, after all, sprung from a sober Sabine stock,322 although he may have sadly degenerated from it in his own conduct. And his attempt to reform Roman society may perhaps have been as sincere as that of Augustus.
But there can be little doubt that Domitian, although he was astute and able, was also a bad man, with the peculiar traits which always make a man unpopular. He was disloyal as a son and as a brother. He was morose, and he cultivated a suspicious solitude,323 around which evil rumour is sure to gather. The rumour in his case may have been well-founded, although we are not bound to believe all the tales of prurient gossip which Suetonius has handed down. It is the penalty of high place that peccadilloes are magnified into sins, and sins are multiplied and exaggerated. It was a recognised and effective mode of flattering a new emperor to blacken the character of his predecessors; Domitian himself allowed his court poets to vilify Caligula and Nero.324 And Pliny in his fulsome adulation of Trajan, finds his most effective resource in a perpetual contrast with Domitian. Tacitus could never forgive the recall and humiliation of his father-in-law. The Senate as a whole bore an implacable hatred to the man who carried to its furthest point the assertion of imperial prerogative.325 [pg 55]Still the authorities are so unanimous that we are bound to believe that Domitian, with some strength and ability, had many execrable qualities. He shows the contradictions of a nature in which the force of a sturdy rural ancestry has not been altogether sapped by the temptations of luxury and power. He had a passionate desire to rival the military glory of his father and brother, yet he was too cautious and self-indulgent to attain it. He had some taste for literature, but he kept literature in leading-strings, and put one man to death for his delight in certain speeches in Livy, and another for a too warm eulogy of Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus.326 He threw his whole strength into a moral and religious reaction, while he was the bitterest enemy of the republican pretensions and dreams of the Senate. Great historical critics have called him a hypocrite.327 It may be doubted whether any single phrase or formula could express the truth about such a twisted and perverse character. Probably his dominant passion was vanity and love of grandiose display. He assumed the consulship seventeen times, a number quite unexampled.328 His pompous triumphs for unreal victories were a subject of common jest. He filled the Capitol with images of himself, and a colossal statue towered for a time over the temple roofs.329 The son and brother of emperors, already exalted to divine honours, he went farther than any of his predecessors in claiming divinity for himself, and he allowed his ministers and court poets to address him as “our Lord God.”330 His lavish splendour in architecture was to some extent justified by the ravages of fire in previous reigns. But the £2,400,000 expended on the gilding of a temple on the Capitol,331 was only one item in an extravagance which drained the treasury. Its radiance, which dazzled the eyes of Rutilius in the reign of Honorius,332 was paid for in blood and tears. The emperor, who was the ruthless enemy of the nobles, like all his kind, was profusely indulgent to the army and the mob. The legions had their pay increased by a fourth. The populace of Rome were pampered [pg 56]with costly and vulgar spectacles,333 as they were to the end of the Western Empire. Domitian’s indulgence of that fierce and obscene proletariat was only a little more criminal than that of other emperors, because it ended in a bankruptcy which was followed by robbery and massacre. While the rich and noble were assailed on any trivial accusation, in order to fill an empty treasury, the beasts of Numidia were tearing their victims, gladiators were prostituting a noble courage in dealing inglorious wounds in the arena, and fleets of armed galleys charged and crashed in mimic, yet often deadly, battle in the flooded Flavian amphitheatre.334
To repair this waste the only resource was plunder. But Domitian was a pettifogger as well as a plunderer; he would fleece or assassinate his victims under forms of law. The law of majesty, and the many laws for restoring old Roman morality, needed only a little ingenuity and effrontery to furnish lucrative grounds for impeachment.335 The tribe of delators were ready to his hand. He had punished them for serving Nero; they were now to reap a richer harvest under Domitian. Every fortune which rose above mediocrity, every villa with rich pastures and woodlands in the Apennines, or on the northern lakes, was marked for plunder.336 Domitian was the first and only emperor who assumed the censorship for life.337 The office made him absolute master of the lives and fortunes of his nobles. A casual word, a thoughtless gesture, might be construed into an act of treason; and the slave households furnished an army of spies. Nay, even kindred and near friends were drawn into this vast conspiracy against domestic peace and security. It may be admitted that Domitian had to face a real peril. The rebellion of Antonius Saturninus was an attempt which no prince could treat lightly, and the destruction of the correspondence in which so many men of rank were involved, may well have heightened Domitian’s alarm.338 He struck out blindly and savagely. He compelled the Senate to bear a part in the massacre, and Tacitus has confessed, with pathetic humiliation, his silent share in the murder of the upright and innocent.339 Yet the imperial [pg 57]inquisitor was himself racked with terror in his last hours. He walked in a corridor where the walls were lined with mirrors,340 so that no unseen hand might strike him from behind. On his last morning he started in terror from his bed and called for the diviner whom he had summoned from Germany.341 But, amid all his terror, Domitian had a deep natural love of cruelty. He was never more dangerous than when he chose to be agreeable;342 he loved to play with his victims. What a grim delight in exquisite torture, what a cynical contempt for the Roman nobles, are revealed in the tale of his funereal banquet!343 The select company were ushered into a chamber draped from floor to ceiling in black. At the head of each couch stood a pillar like a tombstone, with the guest’s name engraved upon it, while overhead swung a cresset such as men hang in vaults of the dead. A troop of naked boys, black as all around, danced an awful measure, and then set on the dismal meal which was offered, by old Roman use, to the spirits of the departed. The guests were palsied with terror, expecting every moment to be their last. And the death-like silence was only broken by the voice of the Emperor as he told a gruesome tale of bloody deaths. In such cynicism of lawless power, in such meek degradation of a once proud order, did the tyranny of the first century reach its close.
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CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST
Juvenal and Tacitus, although they moved in different circles and probably never met, have much in common. Both were released from an ignominious silence by the death of Domitian. Both were then at the age which combines the ripeness of experience and reflection with a fire and energy still unflagging.344 They were, from different causes, both filled with hatred and disgust for the vices of their time, and their experience had engendered in both a pessimism which darkened their faith. Tacitus belonged to the senatorial order who had held high office, and had seen its ranks decimated and its dignity outraged under the tyranny. Juvenal sprang from the lower middle class, which hated alike the degenerate noble and the insolent parvenu far more than it hated even a Domitian. Yet both Juvenal and Tacitus are united in a passionate admiration for the old Roman character. Their standards and ideals are drawn from the half-mythical ages of the simple warriors and farmer-statesmen of the old Republic. And their estimate of their time needs to be scrutinised in the light both of their hatreds and of their ideals.
The life of Juvenal is wrapt in obscurity, although nine lives of him are extant.345 Scholars are still at variance as to the date of his birth, the date of many of his satires, and especially as to the time and circumstances of his banishment, about which there is so uniform a tradition. But, for our purpose, some facts are clear enough. Juvenal was the son of [pg 59]a well-to-do freedman of Aquinum, and rose to the highest magisterial office in his native town at some time of his career.346 He carefully hides his personal history from us; but we might gather from his Satires that he belonged to the lower middle class,347 that he was in temper and tone an old plebeian of the times of the Republic, although vividly touched by the ideas of a new morality which had been afloat for more than two generations. But, like Tacitus, he has little sympathy with the great philosophic movement which was working a silent revolution. He had the rhetorical training of the time, with all its advantages and its defects. And he is more a rhetorician than a poet. We can well believe the report that his early literary enthusiasm found vent in declamation on those mythical or frivolous themes which exercised the youth in the Roman schools for many centuries. Although he was hardly a poor man348 in the sense in which Martial, his friend, was poor, yet he had stooped to bear the ignominy and hardships of client dependence. He had hurried in rain and storm in the early morning to receptions at great houses on the Esquiline, through the squalor and noises and congested traffic of the Suburra.349 He had doubtless often been a guest at those “unequal dinners,” where the host, who was himself regaled with far-fetched dainties and old crusted Alban or Setine wine, insulted his poorer friends by offering them the cheapest vintage and the meanest fare.350 He had been compelled, as a matter of social duty, to sit through the recitation of those ambitious and empty Theseids and Thebaids, with which the rich amateur in literature in those days afflicted his long-suffering friends.351 He may have been often elbowed aside by some supple, clever Greek, with versatile accomplishments and infinite audacity. He may have been patronised or insulted by a millionaire parvenu, like the Trimalchio of Petronius, tainted with the memories of a shameful servitude. He saw new vulgar wealth everywhere triumphant, while the stiff, yet, in many ways, wholesome conventionality of old Roman life was defied and trampled upon by an aggressive vulgarity. In such a world there was little room for the man whose wealth is [pg 60]in his genius, and who clings to the traditions of ages which believed that men had a soul as well as a body. A man like Juvenal, living in such a society, almost necessarily becomes embittered. Like Johnson, in his Grub Street days, he will have his hours when bitterness passes into self-abandonment, and he will sound the depths of that world of corruption which in his better moods he loathes. Some of the associates of Juvenal were of very doubtful position, and more than doubtful morals;352 and the warmth of some of his realistic painting of dark sides of Roman life arouses the suspicion that he may have at times forgotten his moral ideal. He certainly knows the shameful secrets of Roman life almost as well as his friend Martial does. But his knowledge, however gained, was turned to a very different purpose from that which inspired Martial’s brilliant prurience.353
The Satires of Juvenal were probably not given to the world till after the death of Domitian.354 The date of the earliest is about 100 A.D., that of the latest probably 127. Juvenal cautiously disguises his attacks on his own time. He whets his sword against the sinners whose ashes have long reposed beside the Flaminian and the Latin ways.355 Very few of his contemporaries appear in his pages,356 and the scenery is often that of the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, or Nero. But his deepest and most vivid impressions must have come to Juvenal in that period which has been photographed with such minute exactness by Martial. And there is a striking correspondence between the two writers, not only in many of the characters whom they introduce, but in their pictures of the whole state of morals and letters.357 They both detested that frigid epic which laboriously ploughed the sands of conventional legend, and they turned with weariness from the old-world tales of Thebes or Argos to the real tragedy or comedy of Roman life around them. Although they were friends and companions, it is needless to [pg 61]assume any close partnership in their studies. Starting with the same literary impulse, they deal to a large extent with the same vices and follies, some of them peculiar to their own age, others common to all ages of Rome, or even of the world of civilisation. A long list might easily be compiled of their common stock of subjects, and their common antipathies. In both writers we meet the same grumbling of the needy client against insolent or niggardly patrons, the complaints of the struggling man of letters about the extravagant rewards of low vulgar impostors. Both are bored to death, like the patient Pliny, by the readings of wealthy scribblers, or by tiresome pleadings in the courts, measured by many a turn of the clepsydra. They feel an equal disgust for the noise and squalor of the narrow streets, an equal love for the peace and freshness and rough plenty of the country farm. In both may be seen the scions of great houses reduced to mendicancy, ambitious poverty betaking itself to every mean or disreputable device, the legacy-hunter courting the childless rich with flattery or vicious compliance. You will often encounter the sham philosopher, as you meet him sixty years afterwards in the pages of Lucian, with his loud talk of virtue and illustrious names, while his cloak covers all the vices of dog and ape. Both deal rather ungently with the character of women,—their intrigues with actors, gladiators, and slaves, their frequent divorces and rapid succession of husbands, their general abandonment of antique matronly reserve. Both have, in fact, with different motives, uncovered the secret shame of the ancient world; and, more even than by that shame, was their indignation moved by the great social revolution which was confusing all ranks, and raising old slaves, cobblers, and auctioneers to the benches of the knights.
Yet with this resemblance in the subjects of their choice, there is the widest difference between the two writers in their motive and mode of treatment. Martial, of course, is not a moralist at all; the mere suggestion excites a smile. He is a keen and joyous observer of the faults and follies, the lights and shades, of a highly complex and artificial society which is “getting over-ripe.” In the power of mere objective description and minute portraiture of social life, Martial is almost unique. Through his verses, we know the society of Domitian [pg 62]as we know hardly any other period of ancient society. But this very vividness and truthfulness is chiefly due to the fact that Martial was almost without a conscience. He was indeed personally, perhaps, not so bad as he is often painted.358 He knows and can appreciate a good woman;359 he can love, with the simplest, unsophisticated love, an innocent slave-child, the poor little Erotion,360 whom he has immortalised. He can honour a simple manly character, free from guile and pretence.361 He has a genuine, exuberant love of the fresh joys of country life, sharpened, no doubt, by the experience of the client’s sordid slavery, amid the mingled poverty and lavish splendour of the capital.362 Where could one find a fresher, prettier idyll than his picture of the farm of Faustinus, with its packed granaries, and its cellars fragrant with the juice of many an old autumn vintage, the peacock spreading his jewelled plumage, and the ring-dove cooing overhead from the towers? The elegant slaves of the great house in the city are having a holiday, and busy, under the bailiff’s care, with rural toils, or fishing in the stream. The tall daughters of the neighbouring cottages bring in their well-stocked baskets to the villa, and all gather joyously at evening to a plenteous meal.363 Martial has, moreover, one great virtue, which is a powerful antidote for many moral faults, the love of the far-off home of his childhood, the rugged Bilbilis, with its iron foundries near the sources of the Tagus, to which he retreated from the crush and din of plebeian life at Rome, and where he rests.364 But when charity or justice has done its best for Martial, and no scholar will repudiate the debt, it still remains true that he represents, perhaps better than any other, that pagan world, naked and unabashed, and feels no breath of inspiration from the great spiritual movement which, in paganism itself, was setting towards an ideal of purity and self-conquest.
Juvenal, at least in his later work, reveals a moral standard and motive apparently unknown to Martial.365 It may [pg 63]be admitted, indeed, that Juvenal did not always write under the same high impulse. He had the rhetorician’s love of fine, telling phrases, and startling effects. He had a rare gift of realistic painting, and he exults in using it. He has also burning within him an old plebeian pride which looked down at once on the degenerate son of an ancient house, and on the nouveaux riches, whose rise seemed to him the triumph of vulgar opulence without the restraint of traditions or ideals. Conscious of great talents, with a character almost fierce in its energy, he felt a burning hatred of a society which seemed to value only material success, or those supple and doubtful arts which could invent some fresh stimulus for exhausted appetite. In Juvenal a great silent, sunken class, whom we hardly know otherwise than from the inscriptions on their tombs,366 finds for once a powerful voice and a terrible avenger. But, along with this note of personal or class feeling, there is in Juvenal a higher moral intuition, a vision of a higher life, which had floated before some Roman minds long before his time,367 and which was destined to broaden into an accepted ideal. Juvenal, indeed, was no philosopher, and he had, like Tacitus, all the old Roman distrust of the theories of the schools.368 He had probably little respect for such teaching as Seneca’s.369 Yet in important points he and Seneca belong to the same order of the elect. Although, perhaps, a less spotless character than Tacitus, he is far more advanced and modern in his breadth of sympathy and moral feeling. He feels acutely for the conquered provinces which have been fleeced and despoiled of their wealth and artistic treasures, and which are still exposed to the peculation and cruelty of governors and their train.370 He denounces, like Seneca, the contempt and cruelty often shown to slaves. The man whose ideal seems often to be drawn from the hard, stern warriors who crushed the Samnites and baffled the genius of Hannibal, in his old age has come to glorify pity and tenderness for suffering as the best gift of God, the gift that separates him most widely from the brute [pg 64]creation.371 He preaches sympathy and mutual help, in an age torn by selfish individualist passions. He denounces the lust for revenge almost in the tones of a Christian preacher.372 What heathen moralist has painted more vividly the horrors of the guilty conscience, that unseen inquisitor, with sterner more searching eyes than Rhadamanthus? Who has taught with greater power that the root of sin is in the evil thought?373 Juvenal realises, like Tacitus and Quintilian, the curse of a tainted ancestry, and the incalculable importance of pure example in the education of youth.374 He, who knew so well the awful secrets of Roman households, sets an immense value on the treasure of an untainted boyhood, like that of the ploughman’s son, who waits at Juvenal’s simple meal “and sighs for his mother, and the little cottage, and his playmates the kids.”375 Observation of character had also taught him the fatal law that the downward path in conduct, once entered on, is seldom retraced. And this moral insight seems to come to Juvenal not from any consciously held philosophic doctrine, nor from a settled religious faith. His faith, like that of many of his time, was probably of the vaguest. He scorns and detests the Eastern worships which were pouring in like a flood, and carrying away even loose women of the world.376 He pillories the venal star-reader from the East and the Jewish hag who interprets dreams. But he has also scant respect for classic mythologies, and regrets the simple, long-gone age, before heaven became crowded with divinities, before Saturn had exchanged the diadem for the sickle, when Juno was still a little maid,377 when the terrors of Tartarus, the wheel, the vulture, and the lash of the Furies had not taken the place of a simple natural conscience.378
Juvenal’s moral tone then appears to unite the spirit of two different ages. In some of his later Satires you catch the accent of the age which was just opening when Juvenal began to write, its growing sense of the equality and brotherhood of man, its cosmopolitan morality, its ideals of spiritual culture. But there are other elements in Juvenal, derived from old Roman [pg 65]prejudice and conventionality, or the result of personal temperament and experience, which are quite as prominent. Juvenal is an utter pessimist about his time, more extreme even than Tacitus. His age, if we believe him, has attained the climax of corruption, and posterity will never improve upon its finished depravity.379 His long practice as a declaimer had given him a habit of exaggeration, and of aiming rather at rhetorical brilliancy than truth. Whole passages in his poems read like declamatory exercises turned into verse.380 A mere hanger-on of great society, one of the obscure crowd who flocked to the rich man’s levée, and knowing the life of the aristocracy only by remote observation or the voice of scandalous gossip, he hardly deserves the implicit trust which has been often accorded to his indictments of the society of his day. His generalisations are of the most sweeping kind; the colours are all dark. He thinks that the number of decent people in his day is infinitesimally small. And yet we may reasonably suspect, from his own evidence, that he often generalised from single cases, that he treated abnormal specimens as types. His moral ideals cannot have been a monopoly of his own. In the palace of Nero in the worst days, there was a pure Octavia as well as a voluptuous Poppaea. The wife and mother of the gross Vitellius were women of spotless fame.381 And in reading the fierce, unmeasured declamation of Juvenal, we should never forget that he knew nothing personally of Pliny or Tacitus, or of the circle which surrounded Verginius Rufus and Spurinna. He has the same pessimist theory of human declension which was held by Seneca and by Tacitus. Every form of crime and sensuality has been rampant since Rome lost the treasure of poverty, since the days when silver shone only on the Roman’s arms.382 Juvenal’s ideal lies in that mythical past when a Curius, thrice consul, strode homeward from the hills, mattock on shoulder, to a meal of home-grown herbs and bacon served on earthenware.383 It is the luxury of the conquered lands which has relaxed the Roman fibre, which has introduced a false standard of [pg 66]life, degraded great houses, and flooded the city with an alien crew of astrologers and grammarians, parasites and pimps.
Modern criticism has laboured hard to correct some of the harsher judgments on the luxury and self-indulgence of the period of the early Empire. Perhaps the scholarly reaction against an indictment which had degenerated sometimes into ignorant commonplace, may have been carried here and there too far. The testimony of Tacitus is explicit that the luxury of the table reached its height in the hundred years extending from the battle of Actium to the accession of Vespasian.384 It was a period of enormous fortunes spent in enormous waste. Seneca or Pallas or Narcissus had accumulated wealth probably three or four times greater than even the fortune of a Crassus or a Lucullus. The long peace, the safety of the seas, and the freedom of trade, had made Rome the entrepôt for the peculiar products and the delicacies of every land from the British Channel to the Ganges. The costly variety of these foreign dainties was vulgarly paraded at every great dinner-party. Palaces, extending almost over the area of a town, were adorned with marbles from the quarries of Paros, Laconia, Phrygia, or Numidia,385 with gilded ceilings and curious panels changing with the courses of the banquet,386 with hundreds of tables of citrus-wood, resting on pillars of ivory, each costing a moderate fortune, with priceless bronzes and masterpieces of ancient plate. Nearly a million each year was drained away to the remoter East, to purchase aromatics and jewels for the elaborate toilette of the Roman lady.387 Hundreds of household slaves, each with his minute special function, anticipated every want, or ministered to every passion of their masters. Every picturesque or sheltered site on the great lakes, on the Anio, or the Alban hills, in the Laurentine pine forests, or on the bays of Campania, was occupied by far-spreading country seats. Lavish expenditure and luxurious state was an imperious duty of rank, even without the precept of an emperor.388 The senator who paid too low a rent, or rode along the Appian or Flaminian Way with too scanty a train, [pg 67]became a marked man, and immediately lost caste.389 These are the merest commonplace of the social history of the time.
Yet in spite of the admitted facts of profusion and self-indulgence, we may decline to accept Juvenal’s view of the luxury of the age without some reserve. It is indeed no apology for the sensuality of a section of the Roman aristocracy in that day, to point out that the very same excesses made their appearance two centuries before him, and that they will be lamented both by Pagan and Christian moralists three centuries after his death. But these facts suggest a doubt whether the cancer of luxury had struck so deep as satirists thought into the vitals of a society which remained for so many centuries erect and strong. Before the end of the third century B.C., began the long series of sumptuary laws which Tiberius treated as so futile.390 The elder Pliny and Livy date the introduction of luxurious furniture from the return of the army in 188 B.C., after the campaign in Asia.391 Crassus, who left, after the most prodigal expenditure, a fortune of £1,700,000, had a town house which cost over £60,000.392 The lavish banquets of Lucullus were proverbial, and his villa at Misenum was valued at £24,000. It was an age when more than £1000 was given for a slave-cook or a pair of silver cups.393 Macrobius has preserved the menu of a pontifical banquet, at which Julius Caesar and the Vestals were present, and which in its costly variety surpassed, as he says, any epicurism of the reign of Honorius.394 And yet Ammianus and S. Jerome level very much the same charges against the nobles of the fourth century,395 which satire makes against the nobles of the first. When we hear the same anathemas of luxury in the days of Lucullus and in the reign of Honorius, separated by an interval of more than five centuries, in which the Roman race stamped itself on the page of history and on the face of nature by the most splendid achievements of military virtue and of civilising energy, we are inclined to question either the report of our authorities, or the satirist’s interpretation of the social facts.
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The good faith of the elder Pliny, of Seneca and Juvenal, need not, indeed, be called in question. But the first two were men who led by preference an almost ascetic life. The satirist was a man whose culinary tastes were satisfied by the kid and eggs and asparagus of his little farm at Tibur.396 And the simple abstemious habits of the south, which are largely the result of climate, tended to throw into more startling contrast any indulgence of superfluous appetite. It is true that the conquests which unlocked the hoarded treasures of eastern monarchies, gave a great shock to the hardy frugality and self-restraint of the old Roman character, just as the stern simplicity of Spartan breeding was imperilled by contact with the laxer life of the Hellespontine towns and the wealth of the Persian court.397 The Roman aristocracy were for two centuries exposed to the same temptations as the treasures of the Incas offered to Pizarro,398 or the treasures of the Moguls to Clive. In the wild licence, which prevailed in certain circles for more than a century, many a fortune and many a character were wrecked. Yet the result may easily be exaggerated. Extravagant luxury and self-indulgence is at all times only possible to a comparatively small number. And luxury, after all, is a relative term. The luxuries of one age often become the necessities of the next. There are many articles of food or dress, which free-trade and science have brought to the doors of our cottagers, which would have incurred the censure of the elder Pliny or of Seneca. There are aldermanic banquets in New York or the city of London in our own day, which far surpass, in costliness and variety, the banquets of Lucullus or the pontiff’s feast described by Macrobius. The wealth of Pallas, Narcissus, or Seneca, was only a fraction of many a fortune accumulated in the last thirty years in the United States.399 The exaggerated idea of Roman riches and waste has been further heightened by the colossal extravagance of the worst emperors and a few of their boon companions and imitators. But we are apt to forget that these were the outbreaks of morbid and eccentric character, in which the last feeble restraints were sapped and swept away by the sense of [pg 69]having at command the resources of a world. Nero is expressly described by the historian as a lover of the impossible;400 and both he and Caligula had floating before their disordered imaginations the dream of astounding triumphs, even over the most defiant forces and barriers of nature. There was much in the extravagance of their courtiers and imitators, springing from the same love of sensation and display. Rome was a city of gossip, and the ambition to be talked about, as the inventor of some new freak of prodigality, was probably the only ambition of the blasé spendthrift of the time.
Yet, after all the deductions of scrupulous criticism, the profound moral sense of Juvenal has laid bare and painted with a realistic power, hardly equalled even by Tacitus, an unhealthy temper in the upper classes, which was full of peril. He has also revealed, alongside of this decline, a great social change, we may even call it a crisis, which the historian, generally more occupied with the great figures on the stage, is apt to ignore. The decay in the morale and wealth of the senatorial order, together with the growing power of a new moneyed class, the rise to opulence of the freedman and the petty trader, the invasion of Greek and Oriental influences, and the perilous or hopeful emancipation, especially of women, from old Roman conventionality, these are the great facts in the social history of the first century which, under all his rhetoric, stand out clearly to the eye of the careful student of the satirist.
The famous piece, in which Juvenal describes an effeminate Fabius or Lepidus, before the mutilated statues and smoke-stained pedigree of his house, rattling the dice-box till the dawn, or sunk in the stupor of debauch at the hour when his ancestors were sounding their trumpets for the march,401 has, for eighteen centuries, inspired many a homily on the vanity of mere birth. Its moral is now a hackneyed one. But, when the piece was written, it must have been a powerful indictment. For the respect for long descent was still deep in the true Roman, and was gratified by fabulous genealogies to the end. Pliny extols Trajan for reserving for youths of illustrious birth the honours due to their race.402 Suetonius recounts the twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships, seven [pg 70]censorships, and many triumphs which were the glory of the great Claudian house,403 and the similar honours which had been borne by the paternal ancestors of Nero.404 Tacitus, although not himself a man of old family, has a profound belief in noble tradition, and sometimes speaks with an undisguised scorn of a low alliance.405 As the number of the “Trojugenae” dwindled, the pride of the vanishing remnant probably grew in proportion, and a clan like the Calpurnian reluctantly yielded precedence even to Tiberius or Nero.406 It is a sign of the social tone that the manufacture of genealogies for the new men, who came into prominence from the reign of Vespasian, went on apace. A Trojan citizen in the days of Apollonius traced himself to Priam.407 Herodes Atticus claimed descent from the heroes of Aegina,408 just as some of the Christian friends of S. Jerome confidently carried their pedigree back to Aeneas or Agamemnon.409 Juvenal would certainly not have accepted such fables, but he was no leveller. He had a firm belief in moral heredity and the value of tradition. Plebeian as he was, he had, like Martial, his own old Roman pride, which poured contempt on the upstarts who, with the stains of servile birth or base trade upon them, were crowding the benches of the knights. He would, indeed, have applauded the mot of Tiberius, that a distinguished man was his own ancestor;410 he recalls with pride that one humble son of Arpinum had annihilated the hordes of the Cimbri, and another had crushed the rising of Catiline.411 But he had the true Roman reverence for the Curii, Fabii, and Scipios, and would gladly salute any of their descendants who reproduced their virtues.
It is a melancholy certainty that a great many of the senatorial class in Juvenal’s day had fallen very low in all things essential to the strength of a great caste. Their numbers had long been dwindling,412 owing to vicious celibacy or the cruel proscriptions of the triumvirate and the four Claudian Caesars, or from the unwillingness or inability of many to support the [pg 71]burdens of their rank. It was a rare thing in many great houses to reach middle age.413 Three hundred senators and two thousand knights had fallen in the proscription of the second triumvirate.414 The massacre of old and young of both sexes, which followed the fall of Sejanus, must have extinguished many an ancient line; not a day passed without an execution.415 Three hundred knights and thirty-five senators perished in the reign of Claudius.416 Very few of the most ancient patrician houses were left when Claudius revised the lists of the Senate, and introduced a fresh element from Gaul.417 Who can tell the numbers of those who fell victims to the rage or greed or suspicion of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian? The list must have been enormously swelled by the awful year of the four emperors. Vespasian found it necessary to recruit the ranks of the aristocracy from Italy and the provinces.418
At the same time, prodigality or confiscation had rendered many of those who survived unable to maintain their rank, and to bear the social and official burdens which, down to the end of the Western Empire were rigorously imposed on the great order. The games of the praetorship in the first century, as in the fifth,419 constituted a tax which only a great fortune could easily bear. Aristocratic poverty became common. As early as the reign of Augustus, the emperor had found it politic to subsidise many great families.420 The same policy had been continued by Tiberius, Nero, and Vespasian.421 Tiberius, indeed, had scrutinised and discouraged some of these claims on grounds which the treasury officials of every age would applaud.422 A grandson of the great orator Hortensius once made an appeal in the Senate for the means of supporting the dignity of his name. He had received a grant from Augustus to enable him to rear a family, and four sons were now waiting at the doors of the Curia to second his prayer. Hortensius, who was the great rival of Cicero, had possessed immense wealth. He had many splendid villas, he used to give dinners in his park, around which the deer would troop [pg 72]to the lute of a slave-Orpheus; he left 10,000 casks of old Chian in his cellars. His mendicant and spiritless descendant had to go away with a cold withering refusal from Tiberius, softened by a contemptuous dole to his sons. The revision of the senatorial roll by Claudius in 48 A.D., revealed a portentous disappearance of old houses of the Republic, and the gaps had to be filled up from the provinces in the teeth of aristocratic exclusiveness.423 Among the boon companions of Nero there must have been many loaded with debt, like Otho and Vitellius. The Corvinus in Juvenal who is keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm, and his probable kinsman who obtained a subsidy from Nero, the Fabii and Mamerci who were dancing and playing the harlequin on the comic stage, or selling their blood in the arena, must represent many a wreck of the great houses of the Republic.424 Among the motley crowd who swarm in the hall of the great patron to receive the morning dole, the descendants of houses coeval with the Roman State are pushed aside by the freedmen from the Euphrates.425 But aristocratic poverty knew no lower depth of degradation than in the hungry adulation which it offered to the heirless rich. Captation became a regular profession in a society where trade, industry, and even professional skill, were treated as degrading to the men of gentle blood.426 It is characteristic of Juvenal that he places on the same level the legacy-hunter, who would stoop to any menial service or vicious compliance, with the honest tradesfolk, in whose ranks, if we may judge by their funerary inscriptions, was to be found, perhaps, the wholesomest moral tone in the society of the early Empire.
In a satire written after Domitian’s death,427 Juvenal has described a scene of fatuous adulation which, if not true in fact, is only too true to the character of the time. A huge mullet, too large for any private table, had been caught in a bay of the Adriatic. Its captor hastens through winter storms to lay his spoil at the emperor’s feet. The kitchen of the Alban palace had no dish large enough for such a monster, and [pg 73]a council of trembling senators is hastily summoned to consult on the emergency. Thither came the gentle Crispus, that Acilius, whose son was to be the victim of the despot’s jealousy, Rubrius tainted with a nameless crime, the bloated Montanus, and Crispinus, once an Egyptian slave, now a vulgar exquisite, reeking with unguents. There, too, was the informer whose whisper stabbed like a stiletto, the lustful, blind Catullus, and the arch flatterer Veiento, who had revelled at the Gargantuan feasts of Nero from noon till midnight. These are worthy brethren of the assembly who stabbed Proculus to death with their stiles at the nod of the freedman of Caligula,428 and led Nero home in triumphal procession after his mother’s murder.429
Many things had contributed to the degradation of the senatorial character. The dark and tortuous policy of Tiberius tended, indeed, to absolutism; yet he still maintained a tone of deference to the Senate, and sometimes, with cold good sense, repelled a too eager adulation.430 But, in the reigns of Caligula and Nero, the great order had to submit to the deepest personal degradation, and were tempted, or compelled by their masters to violate every instinct of Roman dignity. The wild epileptic frenzy of Caligula, who spared not the virtue of his sisters,431 as he boasted of his own incestuous birth,432 who claimed divine honours,433 temples, and costly sacrifices, who, as another Endymion, called the Moon to his embraces, who dreamt of obliterating the memory of Homer and Virgil and Livy, was not likely to spare the remnant of self-respect still left in his nobles.434 He gave an immense impetus to the rage for singing, dancing, and acting,435 for chariot-driving and fighting in the arena, not unknown before, which Juvenal and Tacitus brand as the most flagrant sign of degenerate morals. There was indeed a great conflict of sentiment under the early Empire as to some of these arts. Julius Caesar had encouraged or permitted Roman senators and knights to fight in the gladiatorial combats, and a Laberius [pg 74]to act in his own play.436 But a decree of the Senate, not long afterwards, had placed a ban on these exhibitions by men of noble rank.437 Tiberius, who was, beyond anything, a haughty aristocrat, at a later date intervened to save the dignity of the order.438 But the rage of the rabble for these spectacles had undoubtedly caught many in the ranks of the upper class. And Caligula and Nero439 found, only too easily, youths of birth and breeding, but ruined fortune, who were ready to exhibit themselves for a welcome douceur, or to gain the favour of the prince, or even to bring down the applause of the crowded benches of the amphitheatre or the circus. Yet the old Roman feeling must have been very persistent, when a man like Domitian, who posed as a puritan, found it politic to remove from the Senate one who had disgraced his order by dancing in the pantomime, and even laid his interdict on all public theatrical performances.440 The revels and massacres and wild debauchery of Nero did not so much to hasten his destruction as his singing his catches to the lute, or appearing in the parts of the incestuous Canace and the matricide Orestes.441 From every part of the world, in all the literature of the time, there is a chorus of astounded indignation against the prince who could stoop to pit himself against Greek players and singers at Delphi or Olympia. Juvenal has been reproached for putting the chariot-driving of Damasippus in the same category with the Verrine plunder of provinces.442 He is really the exponent of old Roman sentiment. And it may be doubted whether, from the Roman point of view, Juvenal might not justify himself to his critics. Even in our own emancipated age, we might be pardoned for feeling a shock if an English prime minister rode his own horse at the Derby, or appeared in a risky part on the boards of the Gaiety. And the collective sense of senatorial self-respect was too precious to a Roman patriot and moralist, to be flung away for mere love of sport, or in a fit of spurious artistic enthusiasm. Nero, and in an even lower fashion Caligula, were rebels against old Roman conventional restraints, [pg 75]and it is possible that some of the hideous tales about them, which were spread in the “circuli,” may have been the vengeance of Roman pride on shameless social revolutionaries, who paraded their contempt for old-fashioned dignity and for social tradition. Nero was never so happy as when he was deafened with applause, and smothered with roses at the Greek festivals. He had once predicted for him a monarchy in those regions of the East,443 where he would have escaped from the tradition of old Roman puritanism, and combined all the ingenious sensuality of Syria with the doubtful artistic taste of a decadent Hellenism. The cold haughty refinement of senatorial circles of the old régime, and the rude honest virtue of the plebeian soldiery,444 rightly mistrusted this false sensational artist on the throne of the world.
Art, divorced from moral ideals, may become a dangerous thing. The emperor might spend the morning with his favourites in patching up lilting verses which would run well to the lute.445 But the scene soon changed to a revel, where the roses and music hardly veiled the grossness of excess. The “noctes Neronis” made many a debauchee and scattered many a senatorial fortune.446 And amid all this elaborate luxury and splendour of indulgence, there was a strange return to the naturalism of vice and mere blackguardism. A Messalina or a Nero or a Petronius developed a curious taste for the low life that reeks and festers in the taverns and in the stews. Bohemianism for a time became the fashion.447 Its very grossness was a stimulant to appetites jaded with every diabolical refinement of vicious ingenuity. The distinguished dinner party, with the emperor at their head, sallied forth to see how the people were living in the slums. Many a scene from these midnight rambles has probably been preserved in the tainted, yet brilliant, pages of the Satiricon. Petronius had probably often plunged with Nero after night-fall into those low dens, where slave minions and sailors and the obscene priests of the great Mother were roistering together, or sunk in the slumber [pg 76]of debauch.448 These elegant aristocrats found their sport in rudely assaulting quiet citizens returning from dinner, or plundering some poor huckster’s stall in the Suburra, or insulting a lady in her chair. In the fierce faction fights of the theatre, where stones and benches were flying, the Emperor had once the distinction of breaking a praetor’s head.449 It was nobles trained in this school, experts in vice, but with no nerve for arms, who encumbered the train of Otho on his march to the sanguinary conflict on the Po.450
The demoralisation of a section of the upper class under the bad emperors must have certainly involved the degradation of many women. And one of the most brilliant and famous of Juvenal’s Satires is devoted to this unsavoury subject. The “Legend of Bad Women” is a graphic picture, and yet it suffers from a defect which spoils much of Juvenal’s work. Full of realistic power, with an undoubted foundation of truth, it is too vehement and sweeping in its censures to gain full credence. It is also strangely wanting in balance and due order of idea.451 The problem of marriage is illustrated by a series of sketches of female manners, which are very disconnected, and, indeed, sometimes inconsistent. Thorough depravity, superstition, and ignorant devotion, interest in literature and public affairs, love of gymnastic and decided opinions on Virgil—in fact, vices, innocent hobbies, and laudable tastes are all thrown together in a confused indictment. The bohemian man of letters had heard many a scandal about great ladies, some of them true, others distorted and exaggerated by prurient gossip, after passing through a hundred tainted imaginations. In his own modest class, female morality, as we may infer from the Inscriptions and other sources, was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age.452 There were aristocratic families, too, where the women were as pure as Lucretia or Cornelia, or any matron of the olden days.453 The ideal of purity, both in men and women, in some circles was actually rising. In the families of Seneca, of Tacitus, of Pliny and Plutarch, there were, not [pg 77]only the most spotless and high minded women, there were also men with a rare conception of temperance and mutual love, of reverence for a pure wedlock, to which S. Jerome and S. Augustine would have given their benediction. Even Ovid, that “debauchee of the imagination,” writes to his wife, from his exile in the Scythian wilds, in the accents of the purest affection.454 And, amid all the lubricity of his pictures of gallantry, he has not lost the ideal of a virgin heart, which repels and disarms the libertine by the spell of an impregnable purity.455 Plutarch’s ideal of marriage, at once severe and tender, would have satisfied S. Paul.456 Favorinus, the friend and contemporary of Plutarch, thought it not beneath the dignity of philosophic eloquence to urge on mothers the duty of suckling and personally caring for their infants.457 Seneca and Musonius, who lived through the reign of Nero, are equally peremptory in demanding a like continence from men and from women. And Musonius severely condemns concubinage and vagrant amours of every kind, the man guilty of seduction sins not only against another, but against his own soul.458 Dion Chrysostom was probably the first of the ancients to raise a clear voice against the traffic in frail beauty which has gone on pitilessly from age to age. Nothing could exceed the vehemence with which he assails an evil which he regards as not only dishonouring to human nature, but charged with the poison of far spreading corruption.459 Juvenal’s ideal of purity, therefore, is not peculiar to himself. The great world was bad enough, but there was another world beside that whose infamy Juvenal has immortalised.
It is also to be observed that Juvenal seems to be quite as much under the influence of old Roman conventionality as of permanent moral ideals. He condemns eccentricities, or mere harmless aberrations from old-fashioned rules of propriety, as ruthlessly as he punishes lust and crime. The blue-stocking who is a purist in style, and who balances, with deafening [pg 78]volubility, the merits of Homer and Virgil,460 the eager gossip who has the very freshest news from Thrace or Parthia, or the latest secret of a tainted family,461 the virago who, with an intolerable pride of virtue, plays the household tyrant and delivers curtain lectures to her lord,462 seem to be almost as detestable in Juvenal’s eyes as the doubtful person who has had eight husbands in five years, or one who elopes with an ugly gladiator,463 or tosses off two pints before dinner.464 We may share his disgust for the great ladies who fought in the arena and wrestled in the ring,465 or who order their poor tire-women to be flogged for deranging a curl in the towering architecture of their hair.466 But we cannot feel all his contempt for the poor penitent devotee of Isis who broke the ice to plunge thrice in the Tiber on a winter morning, and crawled on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius, or brought a phial of water from the Nile to sprinkle in the fane of the goddess.467 Even lust, grossness, and cruelty, even poisoning and abortion, seem to lose some of their blackness when they are compared with an innocent literary vanity, or a pathetic eagerness to read the future or to soothe the pangs of a guilty conscience.
The truth is that Juvenal is as much shocked by the “new woman” as he is by the vicious woman. He did not understand, or he could not acquiesce in the great movement for the emancipation of women, which had set in long before his time, and which, like all such movements, brought evil with it as well as good. There is perhaps nothing more striking in the social history of Rome than the inveterate conservatism of Roman sentiment in the face of accomplished change. Such moral rigidity is almost necessarily prone to pessimism. The Golden Age lies in the past; the onward sweep of society seems to be always moving towards the abyss. The ideal past of the Roman woman lay more than two centuries and a half behind the time when Juvenal was born. The old Roman matron was, by legal theory, in the power of her husband, yet assured by religion and sentiment a dignified position in the family, and treated with profound, if somewhat cold, respect; she was busied with household cares, [pg 79]and wanting in the lighter graces and charms, austere, self-contained, and self-controlled. But this severe ideal had begun to fade even in the days of the elder Cato.468 And there is hardly a fault or vice attributed by Juvenal to the women of Domitian’s reign, which may not find parallel in the nine or ten generations before Juvenal penned his great indictment against the womanhood of his age. The Roman lady’s irritable pride of birth is at least as old as the rivalry of the two Fabiae in the fourth century.469 The elder Cato dreaded a rich wife as much as Juvenal,470 and satirised as bitterly the pride and gossip and luxury of the women of his time. Their love of gems and gold ornaments and many-coloured robes and richly adorned carriages, is attested by Plautus and the impotent legislation of C. Oppius.471 Divorce and ghastly crime in the noblest families were becoming common in the days of the Second Punic War. About the same time began that emancipation of women from the jealous restraints of Roman law, which was to be carried further in the Antonine age.472 The strict forms of marriage, which placed the wife in the power of her husband, fell more and more into desuetude. Women attained more absolute control over their property, and so much capital became concentrated in their hands that, about the middle of the second century B.C., the Voconian law was passed to prohibit bequests to them, with the usual futile result of such legislation.473 Yet the old ideal of the industrious housewife never died out, and Roman epitaphs for ages record that the model matron was a wool-worker and a keeper at home. A senator of the reign of Honorius praises his daughter for the same homely virtues.474 But from the second century B.C. the education of the Roman girl of the higher classes underwent a great change.475 Dancing, music, and the higher accomplishments were no longer under a ban, although they were still suspected by people of the old-fashioned school. Boys and girls received the same training from the grammarian, and read their Homer and Ennius together.476 There were women in the time of [pg 80]Lucretius, as in the time of Juvenal, who interlarded their conversation with Greek phrases.477 Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, was trained in literature and mathematics, and even had some tincture of philosophy.478 The daughter of Atticus, who became the wife of Agrippa, was placed under the tuition of a freedman, who, as too often happened, seems to have abused his trust.479 Even in the gay circle of Ovid, there were learned ladies, or ladies who wished to be thought so.480 Even Martial reckons culture among the charms of a woman. Seneca maintained that women have an equal capacity for cultivation with men.481 Thus the blue-stocking of Juvenal, for whom he has so much contempt, had many an ancestress for three centuries, as she will have many a daughter till the end of the Western Empire.482 Even in philosophy, usually the last study to attract the female mind, Roman ladies were asserting an equal interest. Great ladies of the Augustan court, even the empress herself, had their philosophic directors,483 and the fashion perhaps became still more general under M. Aurelius. Epictetus had met ladies who were enthusiastic admirers of the Platonic Utopia, but the philosopher rather slyly attributes their enthusiasm to the absence of rigorous conjugal relations in the Ideal Society.484 Even in the field of authorship, women were claiming equal rights. The Memoirs of Agrippina was one of the authorities of Tacitus.485 The poems of Sulpicia, mentioned by Martial,486 were read in Gaul in the days of Sidonius.487 Greek verses, of some merit in spite of a pedantic affectation, by Balbilla, a friend of the wife of Hadrian, can still be read on the Colossus of Memnon.488 Calpurnia, the wife of Pliny, may not have been an author; but she shared all Pliny’s literary tastes; she set his poems to music, and gave him the admiration of a good wife, if not of an impartial critic.
Juvenal feels as much scorn for the woman who is interested in public affairs and the events on the frontier,489 as he feels for the woman who presumes to balance the merits of Virgil and Homer. And here he is once more at war with a [pg 81]great movement towards the equality of the sexes. From the days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence on public affairs. The politic Augustus discussed high matters of state with Livia.490 The reign of Claudius was a reign of women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Caractacus.491 Nero emancipated himself from the grasping ambition of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of Caenis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame.492 The influence of women in provincial administration was also becoming a serious force. In the reign of Tiberius, Caecina Severus, with the weight of forty years’ experience of camps, in a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom of the wives of generals and governors accompanying them abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not always favourable to pure administration.493 In the inscriptions of the first and second centuries, women appear in a more wholesome character as “mothers of the camp,” or patronesses of municipal towns and corporations.494 They have statues dedicated to them for liberality in erecting porticoes or adorning theatres or providing civic games or feasts.495 And on one of these tablets we read of a Curia mulierum at Lanuvium.496 We are reminded of the “chapter of matrons” who visited Agrippina with their censure,497 and another female senate, under Elagabalus, which dealt with minute questions of precedence and graded etiquette.498 On the walls of Pompeii female admirers posted up their election placards in support of their favourite candidates.499 Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle, lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the first and second centuries were making themselves a power.
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Although he was probably a very light believer in the old mythology,500 and treated its greatest figures with scant respect, Juvenal had all the old Roman prejudice against those eastern worships which captivated so many women of his day. And, here again, the satirist is assailing a movement which had set in long before he wrote, and which was destined to gain immense impetus and popularity in the two following centuries. The eunuch priests of the Great Mother, with their cymbals and Phrygian tiaras, had appeared in Italy in the last years of the Hannibalic War.501 The early years of the second century B.C. were convulsed by the scandals and horrors of the Dionysiac orgies, which fell on Rome like a pestilence.502 The purity of women and the peace of families were in serious danger, till the mischief was stamped out in blood. The worship of Isis found its way into the capital at least as early as Sulla, and defied the hesitating exclusion of Augustus.503 At this distance, we can see the raison d’être of what the satirist regarded as religious aberrations, the full treatment of which must be reserved for another chapter. The world was in the throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly in quest of some fresh vision of the Divine, from whatever quarter it might dawn. The cults of the East seemed to satisfy cravings and emotions, which found no resting-place in the national religion. Their ritual appealed to the senses and imagination, while their mysteries seemed to promise a revelation of God and immortality. Their strange mixture of the sensuous and the ascetic was specially adapted to fascinate weak women who had deeply sinned, and yet occasionally longed to repent. The repentance indeed was often shallow enough; the fasting and mortification were compatible with very light morals.504 There were the gravest moral abuses connected with such worships as that of Magna Mater. It is well known that the temples of Isis often became places of assignation and guilty intrigue.505 An infatuated Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius had been seduced by her lover in the pretended guise of the god Anubis.506 The Chaldaean seer or the Jewish hag might often [pg 83]arouse dangerous hopes, or fan a guilty passion by casting a horoscope or reading a dream.507 But Juvenal’s scorn seems to fall quite as heavily on the innocent votary who was striving to appease a burdened conscience, as on one who made her superstition a screen for vice.
In spite of the political extinction of the Jewish race, its numbers and influence grew in Italy. The very destruction of the Holy Place and the external symbols of Jewish worship threw a more impressive air of mystery around the dogmas of the Jewish faith, of which even the most cultivated Romans had only vague conceptions.508 The Jews, from the time of the first Caesar, had worked their way into every class of society.509 A Jewish prince had inspired Caligula with an oriental ideal of monarchy.510 There were adherents of Judaism in the household of the great freedmen of Claudius, and their growing influence and turbulence compelled that emperor to expel the race from the capital.511 The worldly, pleasure-loving Poppaea had, perhaps, yielded to the mysterious charm of the religion of Moses.512 But it was under the Flavians, who had such close associations with Judaea, that Jewish influences made themselves most felt. And in the reign of Domitian, two members of the imperial house, along with many others, suffered for following the Jewish mode of life.513 Their crime is also described as “atheism,” and Clemens is, in the old Roman spirit, said to have been a man of the most “contemptible inactivity.” In truth, the “Jewish life” was a description which might cover many shades of belief and practice in religion, including Christianity itself. The secret worship of a dim, mysterious Power, Who was honoured by no imposing rites, a spirit of detachment and quietism, which shrank from games and spectacles and the scenes of fashion, and nursed the dream of a coming kingdom which was not of this world, excited the suspicion and contempt of the coarse, strenuous Roman nature. Yet, in the gloom and deep corruption of that sombre time, such a life of retreat and renunciation had a strange charm for naturally [pg 84]pious souls, especially among women. There were indeed many degrees of conformity to the religion of Palestine. While some were attracted by its more spiritual side, others confined themselves to an observance of the Sabbath, which became very common in some quarters of Rome under the Empire. The children, as Juvenal tells us, were sometimes trained to a complete conformity to the law of Moses.514 But Juvenal is chiefly thinking of the mendicant population from Palestine who swarmed in the neighbourhood of the Porta Capena and the grove of the Muses, practising all the arts which have appealed in all ages to superstitious women. Thus the Judaism of the times of Nero or Domitian might cover anything from the cunning of the gipsy fortune-teller to the sad, dreaming quietism of Pomponia Graecina.515
Yet it must be admitted that, although Juvenal, in his attacks on women, has mixed up very real vice with superstition and mere innocent eccentricity, or the explosive energy of a new freedom, the real vices of many women of his time are a melancholy fact. The Messalinas and Poppaeas had many imitators and companions in their own class. It is true that even the licentious fancy of Ovid and Martial generally spares the character of the unmarried girl. She was, in the darkest times, as a rule, carefully guarded from the worst corruptions of the spectacles,516 or from the reckless advances of the hardened libertine, although an intrigue with a tutor was not unknown.517 Her marriage was arranged often in mere childhood, seldom later than her seventeenth year. A girl was rarely betrothed after nineteen.518 Her temptations and danger often began on her wedding-day. That there was a high ideal of pure and happy marriage, even in the times of the greatest licence, we know from Pliny and Plutarch, and from Martial himself.519 But there were serious perils before the child-bride, when she was launched upon the great world of Roman society. A marriage of convenience with some member of a tainted race, blasé with precocious and [pg 85]unnatural indulgence, and ready to concede the conjugal liberty which he claimed, was a perilous trial to virtue. The bonds of old Roman marriage had, for ages, been greatly relaxed, and the Roman lady of independent fortune and vigorous, highly trained intellect, could easily find consolation for marital neglect. From Seneca to S. Jerome, the foppish procurator of the great lady was a dangerous and suspected person,520 and not always without good cause. Surrounded by an army of slaves and the other obsequious dependents of a great house, treated with profound deference, and saluted with the pompous titles of domina and regina, the great lady’s lightest caprice became law.521 Costly jewels and the rarest luxuries of the toilet poured in upon her from regions which were only visited by the captains of Red Sea merchantmen, or by some Pythagorean ascetic seeking the fountains of the wisdom of the East.522
The political life of Rome had been extinguished by a jealous despotism, but social life in the higher ranks was never so intense and so seductive, and women had their full share in it. Ladies dined out regularly with their husbands, even at the emperor’s table,523 and they were liable to be assailed by the artistic wiles of which Ovid taught the secret, or by the brutal advances of the lawless Caligula.524 It was a time when people loved to meet anywhere, under the trees of the Campus Martius, in the colonnades of the theatre, or round the seats of the public squares. Everywhere were to be seen those groups which spared no reputation, not even the emperor’s. And behind the chair of the young matron often hovered the dangerous exquisite, who could hum in a whisper the latest suggestive song from Alexandria or Gades,525 who knew the pedigree of every racehorse and the secret of every intrigue. It is at such scenes that Tacitus is probably glancing when he says that in Germany no one makes a jest of vice, or calls the art of corruption the fashion of the world;526 chastity is not sapped by the seductions of the spectacles. [pg 86]Augustus had, indeed, set apart the upper seats for women in the theatre and amphitheatre,527 but on the benches of the circus the sexes freely mingled. It was there, while the factions of the red and blue were shouting themselves hoarse, Ovid pointed out to his pupil in gallantry, that he had his fairest chance of making a dangerous impression.528 Yet even Ovid is half inclined to be shocked at the scenes on the stage which were witnessed by women and young boys.529 The foulest tales of the old mythology, the loves of Pasiphae or the loves of Leda, were enacted to the life, or told with a nakedness of language, compared with which even Martial might seem chaste.530 Not less degrading were the gladiatorial shows, so lavishly provided by Augustus and Trajan, as well as by Caligula and Domitian, at which the Vestals had a place of honour.531 It is little wonder that women accustomed to take pleasure in the sufferings and death of brave men, should be capable of condemning their poor slave women to torture or the lash for a sullen look, or a half-heard murmur. The grossness with which Juvenal describes the effect of the stage on the morals of women savours of the Suburra.532 But of the poisonous character of these performances there can be no doubt. And actors, musicians, and gladiators became a danger to the peace of households, as well as to the peace of the streets. The artistes of the pantomime were sternly suppressed both by Tiberius and Domitian, and not without good cause.533 One famous dancer had the fatal honour of captivating Messalina.534 The empress of Domitian was divorced for her love of Paris.535 And the scandals which darkened the fame of the younger Faustina, and impeached the legitimacy of Commodus, even if they were false, must have rested on a certain ground of probability.536 It is melancholy to hear that M. Aurelius had to restrain the excesses of Roman matrons even under the reign of the philosophers.537 To all these perils must be added the allurements of household slavery. While a Musonius or a Seneca [pg 87]was demanding equal chastity in man and woman, the new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to her husband’s.538 The testimony of Petronius is tainted by a suspicion of prurient imagination. But the student of other sources can hardly doubt that, in the first century, as in the fourth, the Roman lady of rank sometimes degraded herself by a servile liaison. A decree of Vespasian’s reign, which his biographer tells us was called for by the general licence, punished the erring matron with the loss of her rank.539
These illustrations from other authorities may serve towards a judicial estimate of Juvenal’s famous satire on women. That it is not a prurient invention is proved by the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius and the records of Roman morals for more than two centuries. On the other hand, it must be read with some reservations. Juvenal is a rhetorician with a fiery temperament, who will colour and exaggerate, if he will not invent. He is intensely prejudiced and conventional, a man to whom desertion of ancient usage is almost as bad as a breach of the moral law, a man incapable of seeing that the evils of a new social movement may be more than compensated by the good which it brings. Moreover, the graver vices which he depicts with so much realistic power were certainly not so general as he implies. It is to be suspected that single instances of abnormal depravity have swelled in his heated imagination till they have become types of whole classes of sinners. At the worst, these vices infected only a comparatively small class, idle, luxurious, enervated by the slave system, depraved by the example of a vicious court. The very scorn and indignation with which Juvenal pillories the aristocratic debauchee reveal the existence of a higher standard of virtue. Both the literature and the inscriptions of that age make us acquainted with a very different kind of woman. Over against the Hippia or Saufeia or Messalina of Juvenal we must set the pure and cultivated women whom we meet in the pages of Pliny or Tacitus, or the poor soldier’s concubine in the Inscriptions, who has all the self-denying love and virtue of our own cottagers’ wives.540
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Just as Juvenal misunderstood the movement of female emancipation, which was to culminate in the legislation of the Antonine age, so has he misconceived some other great social movements of his time. Two in particular, the invasion of the new Hellenism and the rise of the Freedmen, he anathematises with the scorn and old Roman prejudice of the elder Cato.
There was nothing new in the invasion of Hellenism in the time of Juvenal. Nearly three hundred years before his day, the narrow conservatism of ancient Rome was assailed by the cosmopolitan culture of Hellas, which it alternately hated and admired. The knowledge of Greek was widely diffused in Italy in the time of the Hannibalic war.541 Almost the last Roman of the ancient breed stooped in his old age to learn Greek, in order to train his son in the culture of the world.542 But there were two different aspects of Hellenism. There was the Hellenism represented by Homer and Plato and Chrysippus; and there was the Hellenism of the low comic stage, of the pimp and parasite. And there were reactions against the lower Greek influences long before the days of Juvenal. Cicero, who did more than any man of his race to translate Greek thought into Roman idiom, yet expressed as bitter a contempt as Juvenal’s for the fickle, supple, histrionic Greek adventurer.543 Juvenal is not waging war with that nobler Hellenism which had furnished models and inspiration to the great writers of the Augustan age, and which was destined to refashion Italian culture in the generation following his death. The emperors, from Julius Caesar to M. Aurelius, were, with few exceptions, trained in the literature of Greece, and some of them gave a great impetus to Greek culture in the West. Augustus delighted in the Old Comedy, entertained Greek philosophers in his house, and sprinkled his private letters to Tiberius with Greek quotations.544 Tiberius, although he had lived at Rhodes in his youth, seems to show less sympathy for the genius of Greece.545 Caligula also can hardly be claimed as a Hellenist. Although he had once a wild dream of restoring the palace of Polycrates, and one, more sane, of a canal through the Corinthian Isthmus, he also [pg 89]thought of wiping out the memory of the poems of Homer.546 Dr. Mahaffy is probably right in treating Claudius as the first really Hellenist emperor.547 Like our own James I., Claudius was a learned and very ludicrous person. Yet he was perhaps not so contemptible a character as he is painted by Suetonius. He had, at any rate, the merit of being a lover of Greek literature,548 and he heaped honour on the country which gave it birth.549 He used to quote Homer in his speeches in the Senate, and he composed histories in the Greek language, which, by an imperial ordinance, were to be read aloud regularly in the Museum of Alexandria.550 In spite of the vices and pompous follies of Nero, his phil-Hellenism seems to have been a genuine and creditable impulse. His visits to the Greek festivals, and his share in the competitions, were not all mere vanity. He had a futile passion for fame as an artist, and he sought the applause of the race which had a real artistic tradition.551 When we reach the plebeian Flavian race, Hellenism is still favoured. The bluff soldier, Vespasian, had an adequate command of the Greek language, and was the first emperor who gave liberal endowments to Greek rhetoric.552 His son Domitian, that puzzling enigma, the libertine who tried to revive the morality of the age of Cato, the man who was said, but most improbably, to confine his reading to the memoirs of Tiberius, founded a quinquennial festival, with competitions, on the Greek model, in music, gymnastic, and horsemanship. By drawing on the inexhaustible stores of Alexandria, he also repaired the havoc which had been wrought in the Roman libraries by fire.553 Already in Juvenal’s life the brilliant sophistic movement had set in which was destined to carry the literary charm of Hellenism throughout the West. From the close of the first century there appeared in its full bloom that ingenious technique of style, that power of conquering all the difficulties of a worn-out or trifling subject, that delicate command of all varieties of rhythm, which carried the travelling sophist through a series of triumphs wherever he wandered. Classical Latin literature about the same time came [pg 90]to a mysterious end. The only authors of any merit in the second century wrote in both languages indifferently.554 And the great Emperor, who closes our period, preferred to leave his inner thoughts to posterity in Greek.
Juvenal, however, was not thinking of this great literary movement. Like so many of his literary predecessors, who had been formed by the loftier genius of the Greek past, like Plautus and Cicero, he vented his rage on a degenerate Hellenism. His shafts were levelled at the suttlers and camp-followers of the invading army from the East. The phenomena of Roman social history are constantly repeating themselves for centuries. And one of the most curious examples of perpetuity of social sentiment is the hatred and scorn for the Greek or Levantine character, from the days of Plautus and the elder Cato to the days of the poet Claudian.555 For more than 600 years, the Roman who had borrowed his best culture, his polish and ideas from the Greek, was ready to sneer at the “Greekling.” The conquerors of Macedon could never forgive their own conquest by Greek knowledge and versatility, by which old Roman victories in the field had been avenged. And, as the pride of the imperial race grew with the consciousness of great achievements, the political degradation and economic decay of Greece and Greek-speaking lands produced a type of character which combined the old cleverness and keenness of intellect with the moral defects of an impoverished and subject race. Something of Roman contempt for the Greek must be set down to that national prejudice and difference of temperament, which made our ancestors treat the great French nation, with all its brilliant gifts and immense contributions to European culture, as a race of posturing dancing-masters.556 Such prejudices are generally more intense in the lower than in the upper and the cultivated classes. Juvenal, indeed, was a cultivated man, who knew Greek literature, and had been formed by Greek rhetors in the schools. But he was also a Roman plebeian, with that pride of race which is often as deep in the plebeian as in the aristocrat. He gives voice to the [pg 91]feeling of his class when he indignantly laments that the true-born Roman, whose infancy has drunk in the air of the Aventine, should have to yield place to the supple, fawning stranger, who has come with the same wind as the figs and prunes. The Orontes is pouring its pollutions into the Tiber.557 Every trade and profession, from the master of the highest studies down to the rope-dancer and the pander, is crowded with hungry, keen-witted adventurers from the East. Every island of the Aegean, every city of Asia, is flooding Rome with its vices and its venal arts.558 Quickness of intellect and depravity of morals, the brazen front and the ready tongue are driving into the shade the simple, unsophisticated honesty of the old Roman breed. At the morning receptions of the great patron, the poor Roman client, who has years of honest, quiet service to show, even the impoverished scion of an ancient consular line, are pushed aside by some sycophant from the Euphrates,559 who can hardly conceal the brand of recent servitude upon him. These men, by their smooth speech, their effrontery and ready wit, their infinite capacity for assuming every mood and humouring every caprice of the patron, are creeping into the recesses of great houses, worming out their secrets, and mastering their virtue.560 Rome is becoming a Greek town,561 in which there will soon be no place for Romans.
Much of this indictment, as we have said, is the offspring of prejudice and temperament. But there was a foundation of truth under the declamation of Juvenal. The higher education of Roman youth had for generations been chiefly in the hands of men of Greek culture, from the days of Ennius and Crates of Mallus, before the third Punic War.562 The tutor’s old title literatus had early given place to that of grammaticus.563 And, of the long line of famous grammatici commemorated by Suetonius, there are few who were not by origin or culture connected with the Greek east. Most of them had been freedmen of savants or great nobles.564 Some had [pg 92]actually been bought in the slave market.565 The profession was generally ill-paid and enjoyed little consideration, and it was often the last resort of those who had failed in other and not more distinguished callings. Orbilius, the master of Horace, had been an attendant in a public office.566 Others had been pugilists or low actors in pantomime.567 Q. Remmius Palaemon, whose vices made him infamous in the reign of Tiberius and Claudius, had been a house-slave, and was originally a weaver.568 He educated himself while attending his young master at school, and by readiness, versatility, and arrogant self-assertion, rose to an income of more than £4000 a year. Sometimes they attained to rank and fortune by being entrusted with the tuition of the imperial children.569 But the grammarian, to the very end, as a rule never escaped the double stigma of doubtful origin and of poverty.
The medical profession, according to the elder Pliny, was a Greek art which was seldom practised by Romans.570 Julius Caesar, by giving civic rights to physicians from Egypt and Hellenic lands,571 while he raised the status of the medical calling, also stimulated the immigration of foreign practitioners. The rank and fortune attained by the court physicians of the early Caesars, Antonius Musa, the Stertinii,572 and others, which almost rivalled the medical successes of our own day, seemed to offer a splendid prize. Yet the profession was generally in low repute.573 It was long recruited from the ranks of old slaves, and men of the meanest callings. Carpenters and smiths and undertakers flocked into it, often with only a training of six months.574 Galen found most of his medical brethren utterly illiterate, and recommends them to pay a little attention to grammar in dealing with their patients.575 They compounded in their own shops, and touted for practice.576 They called in the aid of spells and witchcraft to reinforce their drugs. We need not believe all the coarse insinuations of Martial against their morality, any more than the sneers of Petronius against [pg 93]their skill. But we are bound to conclude that the profession held a very different place in public esteem from that which it enjoys and deserves in our own time.
Astrology, which was the aristocratic form of divination, and involved in many a dark intrigue of the early Empire, was a Greek as well as a Chaldaean art. The name of the practitioner often reveals his nationality. The Seleucus577 and Ptolemaeus who affected to guide the fate of Otho, and the Ascletarion of Domitian’s reign,578 are only representatives of a nameless crowd. And their strange power is seen in that tale of a Greek diviner, Pammenes, in the last years of Nero, whose horoscopes led to the tragic end of P. Anteius and Ostorius Scapula.579 In other countless arts of doubtful repute, which ministered to the pleasure or amusement of the crowd, the Greek was always an adept. But it was his success as a courtier and accomplished flatterer of the great, which chiefly roused the scornful hatred of Juvenal and his fellows. The “adulandi gens prudentissima,” would hardly have been guilty of the simple and obvious grossness of flattery which the rhetoric of Juvenal attributes to them.580 They knew their trade better than the Roman plebeian. It was an old and highly rewarded profession in Greece, and had often been the theme of Greek moralists. Plutarch wrote an elaborate treatise on the difference between the sycophant and the true friend, in which he seems almost to exhaust the wily resources of the pretender. Lucian, with his delicate irony, seems almost to raise the Greek skill in adulation to the level of a fine art.581 And the polished and versatile Greek, with his lively wit, his delicate command of expression, his cool audacity, and his unscrupulousness, was a formidable rival of the coarser Roman parasite celebrated in Latin comedy. We can well imagine that the young Greek, fresh from the schools of Ionia, was a livelier companion at dinner than the proud Roman man of letters who snatched the dole and disdained himself for receiving it.
There is perhaps no phase of Roman society in Domitian’s day which we know more intimately than the life of the client. It is photographed, in all its sordid slavery, by both Juvenal and Martial. And Martial himself is perhaps the best example [pg 94]of a man of genius submitting, with occasional intervals of proud rebellion,582 to a degradation which in our eyes no poverty could excuse. The client of the early Empire was a totally different person from the client of Republican times. In the days of freedom, the tie of patron and client was rather that of clansman and chief; it was justified by political and social necessity, and ennobled by feelings of loyalty and mutual obligation. Under the Empire, the relation was tainted by the selfish materialism of the age; it had seldom any trace of sentiment. The rich man was expected to have a humble train of dependents to maintain his rank and consequence. There was a host of needy people ready to do him such service. The hungry client rushed to his patron’s morning reception, submitted to all his coldness and caprice, or to the insolence of his menials, followed his chair through the streets, and ran on his errands, for the sake of a miserable alms in money or in kind.583 The payment was sometimes supplemented by a cast-off cloak, or an invitation at the last moment to fill a place at dinner, when perhaps it could not be accepted.584 In the train which the great man gathered about him, to swell his importance, were to be seen, not only the starving man of letters, the loafer and mere mendicant, but the sons of ruined houses “sprung from Troy,” and even senators and men of consular rank who had a clientèle of their own.585
Nothing throws a more lurid light on the economic condition of Italy in the time of the early Empire than this form of pensioned dependence. The impression which we derive from Juvenal and Martial is that of a society divided between a small class of immensely wealthy people, and an almost starving proletariat.586 Poverty seems almost universal, except in the freedman class, who by an industrial energy and speculative daring, which were despised by the true-born Roman, were now rapidly rising to opulence. The causes of this plebeian indigence can only be glanced at here. The agricultural revolution, which ruined the small freeholders and created the plantation system,587 had driven great numbers of [pg 95]once prosperous farmers to the capital, to depend on the granaries of the State, or on the charity of a wealthy patron. Such men were kept in poverty and dependence by that general contempt for trade and industrial pursuits which always prevails in a slave-owning society. Many of the greatest families had been reduced to poverty by proscription and confiscation. A great noble might be keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm, if he could not win a pension from the grace of the Emperor. At the same time, from various causes, what we should call the liberal professions, with the doubtful exception of medicine, tortured those engaged in them by the contrast between ambitious hopes and the misery of squalid poverty. “Make your son an auctioneer or an undertaker rather than an advocate or a man of letters” is the advice of Martial and Juvenal, and of the shrewd vulgar guests of Trimalchio.588 Any mean and malodorous trade will be more lucrative than the greatest knowledge and culture. The rich literary amateur, who should have been a Maecenas, in that age became an author himself, composed his own Thebaid or Codrid, and would only help the poor man of genius by the loan of an unfurnished hall for a reading.589 The unabashed mendicancy of Martial shows the mean straits to which the genuine literary man was reduced.590 The historian will not earn as much as the reader of the Acta Diurna.591 It is the same with education. What costs the father least is the training of his son. The man who will expend a fortune on his baths and colonnades, can spare a Quintilian only a fraction of what he will give for a pastry cook.592 The grammarian, who is expected to be master of all literature, will be lucky if he receives as much for the year as a charioteer gains by a single victory.593 If the rhetor, weary of mock battles, descends into the real arena of the courts, he fares no better.594 The bar is overcrowded by men to whom no other career of ambition is open, by old informers who find their occupation gone, by the sons of noble houses who parade the glory of their ancestors in order to attract vulgar clients. They are carried in a litter, surrounded by [pg 96]slaves and dependents, down to the courts of the Centumviri. The poor pleader must hire or borrow purple robes and jewelled rings, if he is to compete with them. And in the end, he may find his honorarium for a day’s hard pleading to be a leg of pork, a jar of tunnies, or a few flasks of cheap wine. In this materialised society all the prizes go to the coarser qualities; there is nothing but neglect and starvation before taste and intellect. And poverty is punished by being forced to put on the show of wealth.595 That stately person in violet robes who stalks through the forum, or reclines in a freshly decorated chair, followed by a throng of slaves, has just pawned his ring to buy a dinner.596 That matron, who has sold the last pieces of her ancestral plate, will hire splendid dress, a sedan chair, and a troop of attendants, to go in proper state to the games.597 Thus you have the spectacle of a society divided between the idle, luxurious rich and the lazy, hungry poor, who imitate all the vices of the rich, and although too proud to work, are not ashamed to borrow or to beg.
In such a society, where the paths of honest industry seemed closed to the poor, or as yet undiscovered, the great problem was how to secure without labour a share of the wealth which was monopolised by the few. The problem was solved by the obsequiousness of the client, or by the arts of the will-hunter. Owing to celibacy and vice, childlessness in that age was extraordinarily common in the upper class. In a society of “ambitious poverty,” a society where poverty was unable, or where it disdained, to find the path to competence through honest toil, the wealthy, without natural heirs, offered a tempting prey to the needy adventurer. Captation by every kind of mean flattery, or vicious service, became a recognised profession. In the Croton of Petronius there are only two classes, the rich and the sycophant, the hunters and the hunted.598 Even men of high position, with no temptation from want, would stoop to this detestable trade.599 And the social tone which tolerated the captator, made it almost an honour to be beset on a sick-bed by these rapacious sycophants. One of the darkest and most repulsive features in that putrescent society was the [pg 97]social value which attached to a vicious and shameful childlessness. A morose and unlovely old age could thus gather around it a little court of dependents and pretended friends, such as a career of great achievement would hardly attract. There have been few more loathsome characters than the polished hypocrite by the sick-bed of his prey, shedding tears of feigned sympathy, while with eager eyes he is noting every symptom of the approaching end.600
Juvenal and Petronius, the embittered plebeian, and the cynical, fastidious epicure of Nero’s court, alike treat their age as utterly corrupted and vulgarised by the passion for money; “inter nos sanctissima divitiarum Majestas.”601 No virtue, no gifts, no eminence of service, will be noticed in the poor.602 A great fortune will conceal the want of talent, sense, or common decency. Everything is forgiven to the master of money bags, even the brand of the slave prison.603 In Juvenal and Martial probably the most resonant note is the cry of the poor—“How long.” Yet, after all, it is not a fierce cry of revolt; against that highly organised and centralised society the disinherited never dreamed of rebellion, even when the Goths were under the walls. It is rather an appeal, though often a bitter and angry appeal, for pity and a modest share in a wasted abundance. In the poems of Juvenal and Martial, as in the sentiment of the colleges and municipalities for generations, the one hope for the mass of helpless indigence lay in awaking the generosity and charity of the rich. The rich, as we shall see in another chapter, admitted the obligation, and responded to the claim, often in the most lavish fashion. A long line of emperors not only fed the mob of the capital, but squandered the resources of the State in providing gross and demoralising amusements for them.604 Under the influence of the Stoic teaching of the brotherhood of man and the duty of mutual help, both private citizens and benevolent princes, from Nero to M. Aurelius, created charitable foundations for the orphan and the [pg 98]needy.605 Public calamities were relieved again and again by imperial aid and private charity.606 The love of wealth was strong, but a spirit of benevolence was in the air, even in the days of Juvenal; and the constant invectives of poet or philosopher against wealth and luxury are not so much the sign of a growing selfishness, as of a spreading sense of the duty of the fortunate to the miserable. Although the literary men seem never to have thought of any economic solution of the social problem, through the tapping of fresh sources of wealth from which all might draw, yet there can be no doubt that there was, at least in provincial cities, a great industrial movement in the Antonine age, which gave wealth to some, and a respectable competence to many. The opulent freedman and the contented artisan have left many a memorial in the inscriptions. Yet the movement had not solved the social problem in the days of Lucian, as it has not solved it after seventeen centuries. The cry of the poor against the selfish rich, which rings in the ears of the detached man of letters at the end of the Antonine age, will still ring in the ears of the ascetic Salvianus, when the Germans have passed the Rhine.607
The scorn and hatred of Juvenal for wealth and its vices is natural to a class which was too proud to struggle out of poverty, by engaging in the industries which it despised. And the freedman, who occupied the vacant field, and rose to opulence, is even more an object of hatred to Juvenal and Martial than the recreant noble or the stingy patron. He was an alien of servile birth, and he had made himself wealthy by the usual method of thinking of nothing but gold. These men, who were not even free Romans, had mastered the power which commands the allegiance of the world. The rise of this new class to wealth and importance probably irritated men of Juvenal’s type more than any other sign of social injustice in their time. And the Trimalchio of Petronius, a man of low, tainted origin, the creature of economic accident, whose one faith is in the power of money, who boasts of his fortune as if it had been won by real talent or honourable [pg 99]service, who expends it with coarse ostentation and a ludicrous affectation of cultivated taste, may be tolerated in literature, if not in actual life, for the charm of a certain kindly bonhomie and honest vulgarity, which the art of Petronius has thrown around him. Yet, after all, we must concede to Juvenal and Martial, that such a person is always a somewhat unpleasing social product. But the subject is so important that it claims a chapter to itself. And, fortunately for us and our readers, the new freedmen were not all of the type of Trimalchio.
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CHAPTER III
THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN
The historian, who is occupied with war and politics, and the fate of princes and nobles, is apt to lose sight of great silent movements in the dim masses of society. And, in the history of the early Empire, the deadly conflict between the Emperor and the Senate, the carnival of luxury, and the tragic close of so many reigns, have diverted attention from social changes of immense moment. Not the least important of these was the rise of the freedmen, in the face of the most violent prejudice, both popular and aristocratic. And literature has thrown its whole weight on the side of prejudice, and given full vent alike to the scorn of the noble, and to the hate and envy of the plebeian. The movement, indeed, was so swift and far spreading that old conservative instincts might well be alarmed. Everywhere in the inscriptions freedmen are seen rising to wealth and consequence throughout the provinces, as well as in Italy, and winning popularity and influence by profuse benefactions to colleges and municipalities. In almost every district of the Roman Empire the order of the Augustales, which was composed to a great extent of wealthy freedmen,608 has left its memorials. “Freedman’s wealth” in Martial’s day had become a proverb.609 Not only are they crowding all the meaner trades, from which Roman pride shrank contemptuously, but, by industry, shrewdness, and speculative daring, they are becoming great capitalists and landowners on a senatorial scale. The Trimalchio of Petronius, who has not [pg 101]even seen some of his estates,610 if we allow for some artistic exaggeration, is undoubtedly the representative of a great class. In the reign of Nero, a debate arose in the Senate on the insolence and misconduct of freedmen.611 And it was argued by those opposed to any violent measures of repression, that the class was widely diffused; they were found in overwhelming numbers in the city tribes, in the lower offices of the civil service, in the establishments of the magistrates and priests; a considerable number even of the knights and Senate drew their origin from this source. If freedmen were marked off sharply as a separate grade, the scanty numbers of the freeborn would be revealed. In the reigns of Claudius and Nero especially, freedmen rose to the highest places in the imperial service, sometimes by unquestionable knowledge, tact, and ability, sometimes by less creditable arts. The promotion of a Narcissus or a Pallas was also a stroke of policy, the assertion of the prince’s independence of a jealous nobility. The rule of the freedmen was a bitter memory to the Senate.612 The scorn of Pliny for Pallas expresses the long pent-up feelings of his order; it is a belated vengeance for the humiliation they endured in the evil days when they heaped ridiculous flattery on the favourite, and voted him a fortune and a statue.613 Some part of the joy with which the accession of Trajan was hailed by the aristocracy was due to the hope that the despised interlopers would be relegated to their proper obscurity. Tacitus is undoubtedly glancing at the Claudian régime when he grimly congratulates the Germans on the fact that their freedmen are little above the level of slaves, that they have seldom any power in the family, and never in the State.614
It shows the immense force of old Roman conservatism and of social prejudice which is the same from age to age, when men so cultivated, yet of such widely different temperament and associations as Pliny and Tacitus, Juvenal and Martial615 and Petronius, denounce or ridicule an irresistible social movement. We can now see that the rise of the [pg 102]emancipated slave was not only inevitable, but that it was, on the whole, salutary and rich in promise for the future. The slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring class. But, unlike the mass of our artisans, it contained many who, from accident of birth and education, had a skill and knowledge which their masters often did not possess.616 The slaves who came from the ancient seats of civilisation in the East are not to be compared with the dark gross races who seem to be stamped by nature as of an inferior breed. This frequent mental and moral equality of the Roman slave with his master had forced itself upon men of the detached philosophic class, like Seneca, and on kindly aristocrats, like Pliny.617 It must have been hard to sit long hours in the library beside a cultivated slave-amanuensis, or to discuss the management of lands and mines and quarries with a shrewd, well-informed slave-agent, or to be charmed by the grace and wit of some fair, frail daughter of Ionia, without having some doubts raised as to the eternal justice of such an institution. Nay, it is certain that slaves were often treated as friends,618 and received freedom and a liberal bequest at their master’s death. Many educated slaves, as we have seen, rose to distinction and fortune as teachers and physicians.619 But the field of trade and industry was the most open and the most tempting. The Senator was forbidden, down to the last age of the Empire, both by law and sentiment, to increase his fortune by commerce.620 The plebeian, saturated with Roman prejudice, looking for support to the granaries of the state or the dole of the wealthy patron, turned with disdain from occupations which are in our days thought innocent, if not honourable. Juvenal feels almost as much scorn for the auctioneer and undertaker as he has for the pander, and treats almost as a criminal the merchant who braves the wintry Aegean with a cargo of wine from Crete.621 His friend Umbricius, worsted in the social struggle, and preparing to quit Rome for a retreat in Campania, among the other objects of his plebeian scorn, is [pg 103]specially disgusted with the low tribe who contract for the building of a house, or who farm the dues of a port or undertake to cleanse a river-bed.622 There is no room left in Rome for men who will not soil themselves with such sordid trades. Manifestly, if the satirist is not burlesquing the feeling of his class, there was plenty of room left for the vigorous freedman who could accept Vespasian’s motto that no gain is unsavoury.623 But those men had not only commercial tact and ability, the wit to see where money was to be made by seizing new openings and unoccupied fields for enterprise; they had also among them men of great ambitions, men capable of great affairs. It required no common deftness, suppleness, and vigilant energy for an old slave to work his way upwards through the grades of the imperial chancery, to thread the maze of deadly intrigue, in the reigns of Claudius or Nero, and to emerge at last as master of the palace. Yet one of these freedmen ministers, when he died, had served ten emperors, six of whom had come to a violent end.624 That a class so despised and depressed should rise to control the trade, and even the administration of the Empire, furnishes a presumption that they were needed, and that they were not unworthy of their destiny.
Yet however inevitable, or even desirable, this great revolution may seem to the cool critic of the twentieth century, it is possible that, had he lived in the first, he might have denounced it as vigorously as Juvenal. The literary and artistic spirit, often living in a past golden age, and remotely detached from the movements going on around it, is prone to regard them with uneasy suspicion. It is moved by sacred sentiment, by memories and distant ideals, by fastidious taste, which expresses itself often with passionate hatred for what seems to it revolutionary sacrilege. It is also apt to fasten on the more grotesque and vulgar traits of any great popular movement, and to use a finished skill in making it ridiculous. It was in this way that literature treated the freedmen. They had many gross and palpable faults; they were old slaves and Orientals; as they rose in the world they were eager for money, and they got it; they were, many of them, naturally vulgar, and they paraded their new wealth with execrable taste, and [pg 104]trampled on better, though poorer, men than themselves, Juvenal and Martial, by birth and associations, have little in common with that accomplished exquisite of the Neronian circle who has painted with the power of careless genius the household of the parvenu Trimalchio. Yet they have an equal scorn or detestation for the new man who was forcing his way from the lowest debasement of servile life to fortune and power. But the embittered man of letters, humiliated by poverty, yet brimful of Roman pride, avenges his ideals with a rougher, heavier hand than the Epicurean noble, who had joined in the “Noctes Neronis” with a delicate, scornful cynicism, who was too disillusioned, and too fastidiously contemptuous, to waste anger on what he despised. Juvenal would blast and wither the objects of his hatred. Petronius takes the surer method of making these people supremely ridiculous. The feeling of men like Juvenal and Martial is a mixture of contempt and envy and outraged taste. The Grub Street man of letters in those days despised plodding industry because he dearly loved fits of idleness; he hated wealth because he was poor. The polished man of the world was alternately amused and disgusted by the spectacle of sudden fortune accumulated by happy chance or unscrupulous arts, with no tradition of dignity to gild its grossness, yet affecting and burlesquing the tastes of a world from which it was separated by an impassable gulf. There is more moral sentiment, more old Roman feeling, in the declamation of Juvenal than in the cold artistic scorn of the Satiricon; there is also more personal and class feeling. The triumph of mere money is to Juvenal a personal affront as well as a moral catastrophe. Poverty now makes a man ridiculous.625 It blocks the path of the finest merit. The rich freedman who claims the foremost place at a levée is equally objectionable because he was born on the Euphrates, and because he is the owner of five taverns which yield HS.400,000 a year.626 The impoverished knight must quit his old place on the benches to make way for some auctioneer or pimp, some old slave from the Nile who stalks in with purple robes and bejewelled fingers, and hair reeking with unguents.627 The only refuge [pg 105]will soon be some half-deserted village on old-fashioned Sabine ground, where the country folk sit side by side in the same white tunics with their aediles in the grassy theatre.628 It is evident from Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius that the popular hostility to the new men was partly the result of envy at their success, partly of disgust at their parade of it. Juvenal and Martial are often probably dressing up the rough epigrams of the crowd. We can almost hear the contemptuous growl as one of these people, suspected of a dark crime, sweeps by in his downy sedan. That other noble knight used to hawk the cheap fish of his native Egypt, and now possesses a palace towering over the Forum, with far-spreading colonnades and acres of shady groves.629 A eunuch minister has reared a pile which out-tops the Capitol.630 Fellows who used to blow the horn in the circus of country towns now give gladiatorial shows themselves.631 Prejudice or envy may not improbably have invented some of the tales of crime and turpitude by which these fortunes had been won. Rome was a city of poisonous rumour. Yet slavery was not a nursery of virtue, and the Satiricon leaves the impression that the emancipated slave too often imitated the vices of his master. The poisoner, the perjurer, the minion, were probably to be found in the rising class. After their kind in all ages, they looked down with vulgar insolence on those less fortunate or more scrupulous. When they rose to the highest place, the imperial freedmen were often involved in peculation and criminal intrigue.632 Yet, after all reservations, the ascent of the freedmen remains a great and beneficent revolution. The very reasons which made Juvenal hate it most are its best justification to a modern mind. It gave hope of a future to the slave; by creating a free industrial class, it helped to break down the cramped social ideal of the slave-owner and the soldier; it planted in every municipality a vigorous mercantile class, who were often excellent and generous citizens. Above all, it asserted the dignity of man. The vehement iteration of Juvenal is the best testimony to the sweep and force of the movement. And [pg 106]the later student of Roman society cannot afford to neglect a great social upheaval which, in an aristocratic society, dominated by pride of class and race, made an Oriental slave first minister of the greatest monarchy in history, while it placed men of servile origin in command of nearly all the industrial arts and commerce of the time.
The reign of the freedman in public affairs began with the foundation of the Empire, when Julius Caesar installed some of his household as officers of the mint.633 The emperor in the first century was, theoretically at least, only the first citizen, and his household was modelled on the fashion of other great houses. In the management of those vast senatorial estates, which were often scattered over three continents, there was need of an elaborate organisation, and freedmen of education and business capacity were employed to administer such private realms. And in the organisation of a great household, there was a hierarchy of office which offered a career to the shrewd and trustworthy slave. Many such careers can be traced in the inscriptions, from the post of valet or groom of the bedchamber, through the offices of master of the jewels and the wardrobe, superintendent of the carriages or the vineyards, up to the highest financial control.634
During the first century the same system was transferred to the imperial administration. It suited the cautious policy of Augustus to disguise his vast powers under the quiet exterior of an ordinary noble; and the freedmen of his household carried on the business of the State. He sternly punished any excesses or treachery among his servants.635 Tiberius gave them little power, until his character began to deteriorate.636 Under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, the imperial freedmen attained their greatest ascendency. Callistus, Narcissus, and Pallas rose to the rank of great ministers, and, in the reign of Claudius, were practically masters of the world. They accumulated enormous wealth by abusing their power, and making a traffic in civic rights, in places or pardons. Polyclitus, who was sent to compose the troubles in Britain in 61 A.D., travelled with an enormous train, and gave the provinces an exhibition of the arrogance of their servile masters.637 [pg 107]Helius was left to carry on the government during Nero’s theatrical travels, and the exhibitions of his artistic skill in Greece.638 Galba put to death two of the great freedmen of Nero’s reign, but himself fell under the influence of others as corrupt and arrogant, and he showered the honours of rank on the infamous Icelus.639
It is curious that it was left for Vitellius to break the reign of the freedmen by assigning offices in the imperial bureaux to the knights, the policy which was said to have been recommended by Maecenas,640 and which was destined to prevail in the second century. But the change was very incomplete, and the brief tragic reign of Vitellius was disgraced by the ascendency for a time of his minion Asiaticus, whom the Emperor raised to the highest honours, then sold into a troop of wandering gladiators, and finally received back again into freedom and favour.641 The policy of the Flavian dynasty in the employment of freedmen is rather ambiguous. Vespasian is charged with having elevated Hormus, a disreputable member of the class, and with having appointed to places of trust the most rapacious agents.642 But this is probably a calumny of the Neronian and Othonian circle who defamed their conqueror. Under Domitian, the freedmen, Entellus and Abascantus, held two of the great secretaryships. But it is distinctly recorded that Domitian distributed offices impartially between the freedmen and the knights.643 On the accession of Trajan, Pliny, in his Panegyric, exults in the fall of the freedmen from the highest place.644 Yet Hadrian is said to have procured his selection as emperor by carefully cultivating the favour of Trajan’s freedmen. Hadrian, in reorganising the imperial administration, and founding the bureaucratic system, which was finally elaborated by Diocletian and Constantine, practically confined the tenure of the three great secretaryships to men of equestrian rank. Among his secretaries was the historian Suetonius.645 Antoninus Pius severely repressed men of servile origin in the interest of pure [pg 108]administration;646 but they regained some influence for a time under M. Aurelius, and rose still higher under his infamous son.
The position of freedmen in the imperial administration was partly, as we have seen, a tradition of aristocratic households. The emperor employed his freedmen to write his despatches and administer the finances of the Empire, as he would have used them to write his private letters or to manage his private estates. But, in the long conflict between the prince and the Senate, the employment of trusted freedmen in imperial affairs was also a measure of policy. It was meant to teach the nobles that the Empire could be administered without their aid.647 Nor was the confidence of the Emperor in his humble subordinates unjustified. The eulogies of the great freedmen in Seneca and Statius, even if they be exaggerated, leave the impression that a Polybius, a Claudius Etruscus, or an Abascantus were, in many respects, worthy of their high place. The provinces were, on the whole, well governed and happy in the very years when the capital was seething with conspiracy, and racked with the horrors of confiscation and massacre. This must have been chiefly due to the knowledge, tact, and ability of the great officials of the palace. Although of servile origin, they must have belonged to that considerable class of educated slaves who, along with the versatility and tact of the Hellenic East, brought to their task also a knowledge and a literary and linguistic skill which were not common among Roman knights. The three imperial secretaryships, a rationibus, a libellis, and ab epistulis, covered a vast field of administration, and the duties of these great ministries could only have been performed by men of great industry, talent, and diplomatic adroitness.648 The Polybius to whom Seneca, from his exile in Sardinia, wrote a consolatory letter on the death of his brother, was the successor of Callistus, as secretary of petitions, in the reign of Claudius, and also the emperor’s adviser of studies. Seneca magnifies the dignity, and also the burden, of his great rank, which demands an abnegation of all the ordinary pleasures of life.649 A man has no time to indulge a private grief who has to study and arrange for the Emperor’s decision thousands of appeals [pg 109]coming from every quarter of the world. Yet this busy man could find time for literary work, and his translations from the Greek are lauded by the philosopher with an enthusiasm of which the cruelty of time does not allow us to estimate the value.650 The panegyric on Claudius Etruscus, composed by Statius, records an even more remarkable career.651 Claudius Etruscus died at the age of eighty, in the reign of Domitian, having served in various capacities under ten emperors,652 six of whom had died by a violent death. It was a strangely romantic life, to which we could hardly find a parallel in the most democratic community in modern times. Claudius, a Smyrniote slave,653 in the household of Tiberius, was emancipated and promoted by that Emperor. He followed the train of Caligula to Gaul,654 rose to higher rank under Claudius, and, probably in Nero’s reign, on the retirement of Pallas, was appointed to that financial office of which the world-wide cares are pompously described by the poet biographer.655 The gold of Iberian mines, the harvests of Egypt, the fleeces of Tarentine flocks, pearls from the depths of Eastern seas, the ivory tribute of the Indies, all the wealth wafted to Rome by every wind, are committed to his keeping. He had also the task of disbursing a vast revenue for the support of the populace, for roads and bulwarks against the sea, for the splendour of temples and palaces.656 Such cares left space only for brief slumber and hasty meals; there was none for pleasure. Yet Claudius had the supreme satisfaction of wielding enormous power, and he occasionally shared in its splendour. The poor slave from the Hermus had a place in the “Idumaean triumph” of Vespasian, which his quiet labours had prepared, and he was raised by that emperor to the benches of the knights.657 The only check in that prosperous course seems to have been a brief exile to the shores of Campania in the reign of Domitian.658
Abascantus,659 the secretary ab epistulis of Domitian’s reign, has also been commemorated by Statius. That great office which controlled the imperial correspondence with all parts of [pg 110]the world, was generally held by freedmen in the first century. Narcissus, in the reign of Claudius, first made it a great ministry.660 Down to the reign of Hadrian the despatches both in Greek and Latin were under a single superintendence. But in the reorganisation of the service in the second century, it was found necessary, from the growing complication of business, to create two departments of imperial correspondence.661 Men of rank held the secretaryship from the end of the first century. Titinius Capito, one of Pliny’s circle, filled the office under Domitian; Suetonius was appointed by Hadrian.662 And during the Antonine age, the secretaries were often men of literary distinction.663 Abascantus, the freedman secretary in the Silvae, had upon his shoulders, according to the poet, the whole weight of the correspondence with both East and West.664 He received the laurelled despatches from the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine; he had to watch the distribution of military grades and commands. He must keep himself informed of a thousand things affecting the fortunes of the subject peoples. Yet this powerful minister retained his native modesty with his growing fortune. His household was distinguished by all the sobriety and frugality of an Apulian or Sabine home.665 He could be lavish, however, at the call of love or loyalty. He gave his wife Priscilla an almost royal burial.666 Embalmed with all the spices and fragrant odours of the East, and canopied with purple, her body was borne to her last stately home of marble on the Appian Way.667
Some of the great imperial freedmen were of less unexceptionable character than Claudius Etruscus and Abascantus, and had a more troubled career. Callistus, Narcissus, and Pallas, were deeply involved in the intrigues and crimes connected with the history of Messalina and Agrippina. Callistus had a part in the murder of Caligula, and prolonged his power in the following reign. Narcissus revealed the shameless marriage of Messalina with Silius, and, forestalling the vacillation of Claudius, had the imperial harlot ruthlessly struck down as she lay grovelling in the gardens of Lucullus.668 [pg 111]But he incurred the enmity of a more formidable woman even than Messalina, and his long career of plunder was ended by suicide.669 Pallas had an even longer and more successful, but a not less infamous and tragic career.670 Of all the great freedmen, probably none approached him in magnificent insolence. When he was impeached along with Burrus, on a groundless charge of treason, and when some of his freedmen were called in evidence as his supposed accomplices, the old slave answered that he had never degraded his voice by speaking in such company.671 Never, even in those days of self-abasement, did the Senate sink so low as in its grovelling homage to the servile minister. At a meeting of the august body in the year 52, the consul designate made a proposal, which was seconded by a Scipio, that the praetorian insignia, and a sum of HS.15,000,000, should be offered to Pallas, together with the thanks of the state that the descendant of the ancient kings of Arcadia had thought less of his illustrious race than of the common weal, and had deigned to be enrolled in the service of the prince!672 When Claudius reported that his minister was satisfied with the compliment, and prayed to be allowed to remain in his former poverty, a senatorial decree, engraved on bronze, was set up to commemorate the old-fashioned frugality of the owner of HS.300,000,000! His wealth was gained during a career of enormous power in the worst days of the Empire. He was one of the lovers of Agrippina,673 and, when he made her empress on the death of Messalina, two kindred spirits for a time ruled the Roman world. He gratified his patroness by securing the adoption of Nero by Claudius, and he was probably an accomplice in that emperor’s murder. But his fate was involved with that of Agrippina. When Nero resolved to shake off the tyranny of that awful woman, his first step was to remove the haughty freedman from his offices.674 Pallas left the palace in the second year of Nero’s reign. For seven years he lived on undisturbed. But at last his vast wealth, which had become a proverb, became too tempting to the spendthrift prince, and Pallas was quietly removed by poison.675
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The wealth of freedmen became proverbial, and the fortunes of Pallas and Narcissus reached a figure hardly ever surpassed even by the most colossal senatorial estates.676 The means by which this wealth was gained might easily be inferred by any one acquainted with the inner history of the times. The manner of it may be read in the life of Elagabalus, whose freedman Zoticus, the son of a cook at Smyrna, piled up vast riches by levying a payment, each time he quitted the presence, for his report of the emperor’s threats or promises or intentions.677 In the administration of great provinces, in the distribution of countless places of trust, in the chaos of years of delation, confiscation, and massacre, there must have been endless opportunities for self-enrichment, without incurring the dangers of open malversation. Statius extols the simple tastes and frugality of his heroes Abascantus and Claudius Etruscus, and yet he describes them as lavishing money on baths and tombs and funeral pomp. The truth is that, as a mere matter of policy, these wealthy aliens, who were never loved by a jealous aristocracy, had to justify their huge fortunes by a sumptuous splendour. The elder Pliny has commemorated the vapour baths of Posides, a Claudian freedman, and the thirty pillars of priceless onyx which adorned the dining saloon of Callistus.678 A bijou bath of the younger Claudius Etruscus seems to have been a miracle of costly beauty. The dome, through which a brilliant light streamed upon the floor, was covered with scenes in rich mosaic. The water gushed from pipes of silver into silver basins, and the quarries of Numidia and Synnada contributed the various colours of their marbles.679 The gardens of Entellus, with their purple clusters which defied the rigours of winter, seemed to Martial to outrival the legendary gardens of Phaeacia.680 In the suburbs, hard by the Tiburtine way, rose that defiant monument of Pallas, bearing the decree of the Senate, which aroused the angry scorn of the younger Pliny.681
The life of one of these imperial slave ministers was a strangely romantic career which has surely been seldom matched in the history of human fortunes. Exposed and sold [pg 113]in early youth in the slave markets of Smyrna, Delos, or Puteoli, after an interval of ignominious servitude, installed as groom of the chambers, thence promoted, according to his aptitudes, to be keeper of the jewels, or tutor of the imperial heir, still further advanced to be director of the post, or to a place in the financial service, the freedman might end by receiving the honour of knighthood, the procuratorship of a province, or one of those great ministries which placed him in command of the Roman world. Yet we must not deceive ourselves as to his real position.682 To the very end of the Empire, the fictions on which aristocratic power is largely based, retained their fascination. In the fifth century a Senate, whose ancestors were often originally of servile race, could pour their scorn on the eunuch ministers of the East.683 And the decaying or parvenu Senate of the Flavians had, when they were free to express it, nothing but loathing for the reign of the freedmen.684 These powerful but low-born officials are a curious example of what has been often seen in later times, the point-blank refusal, or the grudging concession, of social status to men wielding vast and substantial power. The younger Pliny, in his Panegyric on Trajan, glories in the preference shown under the new régime for young men of birth, and in his letters he vents all the long-suppressed scorn of his order for the Claudian freedmen. Even the emperors who freely employed their services, were chary of raising them to high social rank. Freedmen ministers were hardly ever admitted to the ranks of the Senate685; they were rarely present at its sittings, even at the very time when they were governing the world. Sacerdotal and military distinctions were seldom conferred upon any of them. They were sometimes invested with the insignia of praetorian or quaestorian rank.686 A few were promoted to the dignity of knighthood, Icelus, Asiaticus, Hormus, and Claudius Etruscus687; but many a passage in Martial or Juvenal seems to show that ordinary equestrian rank was in those days a very doubtful distinction.688 The emperors, as raised above all ranks, might not [pg 114]have been personally unwilling to elevate their creatures to the highest social grade.689 But even the emperors, in matters of social prejudice, were not omnipotent.
Still, the men who could win the favours of an Agrippina and a Messalina, could not be extinguished by the most jealous social prejudice. The Roman Senate were ready, on occasion, to fawn on a Pallas or a Narcissus, to vote them money and insignia of rank, nor did they always refuse them their daughters in marriage. In the conflict which is so often seen between caste pride and the effective power of new wealth, the wealth and power not unfrequently prevail. The lex Julia prohibited the union of freedmen with daughters of a senatorial house.690 Yet we know of several such marriages in the first century. The wife of the freedman Claudius Etruscus, was the sister of a consul who had held high command against the Dacians.691 Priscilla, the wife of Abascantus, another minister of servile origin, belonged to the great consular family of the Antistii. Felix, the brother of Pallas, had married in succession three ladies of royal blood, one of them the granddaughter of Cleopatra.692
The women of this class, for generations, wielded, in their own way, a power which sometimes rivalled that of the men. These plebeian Aspasias are a puzzling class. With no recognised social position, with the double taint of servile origin and more than doubtful morals, they were often endowed with many charms and accomplishments, possessing a special attraction for bohemian men of letters. Their morals were the result of an uncertain social position, combined with personal attractions and education. To be excluded from good society by ignoble birth, yet to be more than its equal in culture, is a dangerous position, especially for women. Often of oriental extraction, these women were the most prominent votaries of the cults or superstitions which poured into Rome from the prolific East. Loose character and religious fervour were easily combined in antiquity. And the demi-monde of those days were ready to mourn passionately for Adonis and keep all the feasts of Isis or Jehovah, without [pg 115]scrupling to make a temple a place of assignation.693 The history of the early Empire, it has been rather inaccurately said, shows no reign of mistresses. Yet some of the freedwomen have left their mark on that dark page of history. Claudius was the slave of women, and two of his mistresses lent their aid to Narcissus to compass the ruin of Messalina.694 The one woman whom Nero really loved, and who loved him in return, was Acte, who had been bought in a slave market in Asia. She captured the heart of the Emperor in his early youth, and incurred the fierce jealousy of Agrippina, as she did, at a later date, that of the fair, ambitious Poppaea.695 Acte was faithful to his memory even after the last awful scene in Phaon’s gardens.696 And, along with his two nurses, the despised freedwoman guarded his remains and laid the last of his line beside his ancestors. Caenis, the mistress who consoled Vespasian after his wife’s death, without any attractions of youth or beauty, suited well the taste of the bourgeois Emperor. It was a rather sordid and prosaic union. And Caenis is said to have accumulated a fortune, and besmirched the honest Emperor’s name, by a wholesale traffic in State secrets and appointments.697 In the last years of our period a very different figure has been glorified by the art of Lucian. Panthea, the mistress of L. Verus, completely fascinated the imagination of Lucian when he saw her at Smyrna, during the visit of her lover to the East.698 Lucian pictures her delicately chiselled beauty and grace of form by recalling the finest traits in the great masterpieces of Pheidias and Praxiteles and Calamis, of Euphranor and Polygnotus and Apelles; Panthea combines them all. She has a voice of a marvellous and mellow sweetness, which lingers in the ear with a haunting memory. And the soul was worthy of such a fair dwelling-place. In her love of music and poetry, combined with a masculine strength of intellect capable of handling the highest problems in politics or dialectic, she was a worthy successor of those elder daughters of Ionia whose [pg 116]charm and strength drew a Socrates or a Pericles to their feet.699 Surrounded by luxury and the pomp of imperial rank, and linked to a very unworthy lover, Panthea never lost her natural modesty and simple sweetness.
The great freedmen, who held the highest offices in the imperial service till the time of Hadrian with almost undisputed sway, are interesting by reason of the strangely romantic career of some of them. But these are very exceptional cases. In the bureaux of finance, it has been discovered from the inscriptions that the officials were all of equestrian rank. On the other hand, a great number of the provincial procurators were freedmen. And the agents of the Emperor’s private fisc seem to have been nearly always drawn from this class. The lower grades of the civil service were full of them.700 But to the student of society, the official freedmen are, as a class, not so interesting as their brethren who in these same years were making themselves masters of the trade and commercial capital of the Roman world. And the interest is heightened by the vivid art with which Petronius has ushered us into the very heart of this rather vulgar society. The Satiricon is to some extent a caricature. There were hosts of modest, estimable freedmen whose only record is in two or three lines on a funeral slab. Yet a caricature must have a foundation of truth, and a careful reader may discover the truth under the humorous exaggeration of Petronius.
The transition from the status of slave to that of freedman was perhaps not so abrupt and marked as we might at first sight suppose. It is probable that many a slave of the better and more intelligent class found little practical change in the tenor of his life when he received the touch of the wand before the praetor. Some, like Melissus, the free-born slave of Maecenas, actually rejected the proffered boon.701 There was, of course, much cruelty to slaves in many Roman households, and the absolute power of a master, unrestrained by principle or kindly feeling, was an unmitigated curse till it was limited by the humane legislation of the second century.702 But there must have been many houses, like that of the younger Pliny, where the slaves were treated, in Seneca’s [pg 117]phrase, as humble friends and real members of the family, where their marriages were fêted with general gaiety,703 where their sicknesses were tenderly watched, and where they were truly mourned in death. The inscriptions reveal to us a better side of slave life, which is not so prominent in our literary authorities. There is many an inscription recording the love and faithfulness of the slave husband and wife, although not under those honoured names. And it is significant that on many of these tablets the honourable title of conjunx is taking the place of the old servile contubernalis. The inscriptions which testify to the mutual love of master and servant are hardly less numerous. In one a master speaks of a slave-child of four years as being dear to him as a son.704 Another contains the memorial of a learned lady erected by her slave librarian.705 Another records the love of a young noble for his nurse,706 while another is the pathetic tribute of the nurse to her young charge, who died at five years of age. The whole city household of another great family subscribe from their humble savings for an affectionate memorial of their young mistress.707 Seneca, in his humanitarian tone about slavery, represents a great moral movement, which was destined to express itself in legislation under the Antonines. And the energy with which Seneca denounced harsh or contemptuous conduct to these humble dependents had evidently behind it the force of a steadily growing sentiment. The master who abused his power was already beginning to be a marked man.708
Frequent manumissions were swelling the freedman class to enormous dimensions. The emancipation of slaves by dying bequest was not then, indeed, inspired by the same religious motive as in the Middle Ages. But it was often dictated by the natural, human wish to make some return to faithful servants, and to leave a memory of kindness behind. But without the voluntary generosity of the master, the slave could easily purchase his own freedom. The price of slaves varied enormously, according to their special aptitude and grade of service. It might range from £1700, in rare cases, to £10, or even less, in our money.709 But taking the average price of [pg 118]ordinary slaves, one careful and frugal might sometimes save the cost of his freedom in a few years. The slave, especially if he had any special gift, or if he occupied a prominent position in the household, had many chances of adding to his peculium. But the commonest drudge might spare something from the daily allowance of food.710 Others, like the cooks in Apuleius, might sell their perquisites from the remains of a banquet.711 The door-keepers, a class notorious for their insolence in Martial’s day,712 often levied heavy tolls for admission to their master’s presence. And good-natured visitors would not depart without leaving a gift to those who had done them service. It must also be remembered that the slave system of antiquity covered much of the ground of our modern industrial organisation. A great household, or a great estate, was a society almost complete in itself. And intelligent slaves were often entrusted with the entire management of certain departments.713 The great rural properties had their quarries, brickworks, and mines; and manufactures of all kinds were carried on by servile industry, with slaves or freedmen as managers. The merchant, the banker, the contractor, the publisher, had to use, not only slave labour, but slave skill and superintendence.714 The great household needed to be organised under chiefs. And on rural estates, down to the end of the Western Empire, the villicus or procurator was nearly always a man of servile origin.715 In these various capacities, the trusted slave was often practically a partner, with a share of the profits, or he had a commission on the returns. Such a fortunate servant, by hoarding his peculium, might soon become a capitalist on his own account, and well able, if he chose, to purchase his freedom. His peculium, like that of the son in manu patris, was of course by law the property of his master. But the security of the peculium was the security for good service.716 Thus a useful and favourite slave often easily became a freedman, sometimes by purchase, or, as often happened in the case of servants of the imperial house, by the free gift of [pg 119]the lord. There are even cases on record where a slave was left heir of his master’s property. Trimalchio boasted that he had been made by his master joint heir with the Emperor.717
The tie between patron and freedman was very close. The emancipated slave had often been a trusted favourite, and even a friend of the family, and his lord was under an obligation to provide for his future. The freedman frequently remained in the household, with probably little real change in his position. His patron owed him at least support and shelter. But he often gave him, besides, the means of an independent life, a farm, a shop, or capital to start in some trade.718 In the time of Ovid, a freedman of M. Aurelius Cotta had more than once received from his patron the fortune of a knight, besides ample provision for his children.719 A similar act of generosity, which was recklessly abused, is recorded by Martial.720 By ancient law, as well as by sentiment, senators were forbidden to soil themselves by trade or usury.721 But so inconvenient a prohibition was sure to be evaded. And probably the most frequent means of evasion was by entrusting senatorial capital to freedmen or clients, or even to the higher class of slaves.722 When Trimalchio began to rise in the social scale, he gave up trade, and employed his capital in financing men of the freedman class.723 These people, generally of Levantine origin, had the aptitude for commerce which has at all times been a characteristic of their race. And, in the time of the Empire, almost all trade and industry was in their hands. The tale of Petronius reveals the secret of their success. They value money beyond anything else; it is the one object of their lives. They frankly estimate a man’s worth and character in terms of cash.724 Keen, energetic, and unscrupulous, they will “pick a farthing out of a dung-heap with their teeth”; “lead turns to gold in their hands.”725 They are entirely of Vespasian’s opinion that gold from any quarter, however unsavoury, “never smells.” Taking the world as it was, in many respects they deserved to succeed. They were not, indeed, encumbered with dignity or self-respect. They [pg 120]had one goal, and they worked towards it with infinite industry and unfailing courage and self-confidence. Nothing daunts or dismays them. If a fleet of merchantmen, worth a large fortune, is lost in a storm, the freedman speculator will at once sell his wife’s clothes and jewels, and start cheerfully on a fresh venture.726 When his great ambition has been achieved, he enjoys its fruits after his kind in all ages. Excluded from the great world of hereditary culture, these people caricature its tastes, and imitate all its vices, without catching even a reflection of its charm and refinement. The selfish egotism of the dissipated noble might be bad enough, but it was sometimes veiled by a careless grace, or an occasional deference to lofty tradition. The selfishness and grossness of the upstart is naked and not ashamed, or we might almost say, it glories in its shame. Its luxury is a tasteless attempt to vie with the splendour of aristocratic banquets. The carver and the waiter perform their tasks to the beat of a deafening music. Art and literature are prostituted to the service of this vulgar parade of new wealth, and the divine Homer is profaned by a man who thinks that Hannibal fought in the Trojan War.727 The conversation is of the true bourgeois tone, with all its emphasis on the obvious, its unctuous moralising, its platitudes consecrated by their antiquity.
It is this society which is drawn for us with such a sure, masterly hand, and with such graceful ease, by Petronius. The Satiricon is well known to be one of the great puzzles and mysteries in Roman literature. Scholars have held the most widely different opinions as to its date, its author, and its purpose. The scene has been laid in the reign of Augustus or of Tiberius, and, on the strength of a misinterpreted inscription, even as late as the reign of Alexander Severus.728 Those who have attributed it to the friend and victim of Nero have been confronted with the silence of Quintilian, Juvenal, and Martial, with the silence of Tacitus as to any literary work by Petronius, whose character and end he has described with a curious sympathy and care.729 It is only late critics of the lower empire, such as Macrobius,730 and a dilettante aristocrat like Sidonius Apollinaris,731 who pay any attention to this re[pg 121]markable work of genius. And Sidonius seems to make its author a citizen of Marseilles.732 Yet silence in such cases may be very deceptive. Martial and Statius never mention one another, and both might seem unknown to Tacitus. And Tacitus, after the fashion of the Roman aristocrat, in painting the character of Petronius, may not have thought it relevant or important to notice a light work such as the Satiricon, even if he had ever seen it. He does not think it worth while to mention the histories of the Emperor Claudius, the tragedies of Seneca, or the Punica of Silius Italicus.733 Tacitus, like Thucydides, is too much absorbed in the social tragedy of his time to have any thought to spare for its artistic efforts. The rather shallow, easy-going Pliny has told us far more of social life in the reigns of Domitian and Trajan, its rural pleasures and its futile literary ambitions, than the great, gloomy historian who was absorbed in the vicissitudes of the deadly duel between the Senate and the Emperors. One thing is certain about the author of this famous piece—he was not a plebeian man about town, although it may be doubted whether M. Boissier is safe in maintaining that such a writer would not have chosen his own environment of the Suburra as the field for his imagination.734 It is safer to seek for light on the social status of the author in the tone of his work. The Satiricon is emphatically the production of a cultivated aristocrat, who looks down with serene and amused scorn on the vulgar bourgeois world which he is painting. He is interested in it, but it is the interest of the detached, artistic observer, whose own world is very far off. Encolpius and Trimalchio and his coarse freedman friends are people with whom the author would never have dined, but whom, at a safe social distance, he found infinitely amusing as well as disgusting. He saw that a great social revolution was going on before his eyes, that the old slave minion, with estates in three continents, was becoming the rival of the great noble in wealth, that the new-sprung class were presenting to the world a vulgar caricature of the luxury in the palaces on the Esquiline. Probably he thought it all bad,735 but the bad [pg 122]became worse when it was coarse and vulgar. The ignorant assumption of literary and artistic taste in Trimalchio must have been contrasted in the author’s mind with many an evening at the palace, when Nero, in his better moods, would recite his far from contemptible verses, or his favourite passages from Euripides, and when the new style of Lucan would be balanced against that of the great old masters.736 And the man who had been charmed with the sprightly grace of the stately and charming Poppaea may be forgiven for showing his hard contempt for Fortunata, who, in the middle of dinner, runs off to count the silver and deal out the slaves’ share of the leavings, and returns to get drunk and fight with one of her guests.737
The motive of the work has been much debated. It has been thought a satire on the Neronian circle, and again an effort to gratify it, by a revelation of the corruptions of the plebeian world, the same impulse which drove Messalina to the brothel, and Nero to range the taverns at midnight.738 It has been thought a satire on the insolence and grossness of Pallas and the freedmen of the Claudian régime which Nero detested, to amuse him with all their vulgar absurdities. Is it not possible that the writer was merely pleasing himself—that he was simply following the impulse of genius? Since the seventh century the work has only existed in fragments.739 Who can tell how much the lost portions, if we possessed them, might affect our judgment of the object of the work? One thing is certain, its author was a very complex character, and would probably have smiled at some of the lumbering efforts to read his secret. Even though he may have had no lofty purpose, a weary man of pleasure may have wished to display, in its grossest, vulgarest form, the life of which he had tasted the pleasures, and which he had seen turning into Dead Sea fruit. He was probably a bad man in his conduct, worse perhaps in his imagination; and yet, by a strange contradiction, which is not unexampled in the history of character, he may have had dreams of a refined purity and temperance which tortured and embittered him by their contrast with actual life.
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Out of the smoke of controversy, the conclusion seems to have emerged that the Satiricon is a work of Nero’s reign, and that its author was in all probability that Caius Petronius who was Nero’s close companion, and who fell a victim to the jealousy of Tigellinus. Not the least cogent proof of this is the literary criticism of the work. It is well known that Lucan, belonging to the Spanish family of the Senecas, had thrown off many of the conventions of Roman literature, and discarded the machinery of epic mythology in his Pharsalia. He had also incurred the literary jealousy of Nero. The attack in the Satiricon on Lucan’s literary aberrations can hardly be mistaken. The old poet Eumolpus is introduced to defend the traditions of the past. And he gives a not very successful demonstration, in 285 verses, of the manner in which the subject should have been treated, with all the scenery and machinery of orthodox epic.740 This specimen of conservative taste is the least happy part of the work.
Such evidence is reinforced by the harmony of the whole tone of the Satiricon with the clear-cut character of Petronius in Tacitus. There was evidently a singular fascination about this man, which, in spite of his wasted, self-indulgent life, was keenly felt by the severe historian. Petronius was capable of great things, but in an age of wild licence he deliberately devoted his brilliant talent to making sensuality a fine art. Like Otho, who belonged to the same circle, he showed, as consul and in the government of Bithynia, that a man of pleasure could be equal to great affairs.741 After this single digression from the scheme of the voluptuary, he returned to his pleasures, and became an arbiter in all questions of sensual taste, from whose decision there was no appeal. His ascendency over the Emperor drew upon him the fatal enmity of Tigellinus. Petronius was doomed. It was a time when not even the form of justice was used to veil the caprices of tyranny, and Petronius determined not to endure a long suspense when the issue was certain. He had gone as far as [pg 124]Cumae to attend the Emperor. There he was stopped. He retired to his chamber and had his veins alternately opened and rebound, meanwhile conversing with his friends or listening to light verses, not, as the fashion then was, seeking consolation from a Stoic director on the issues of life and death. He rewarded some of his slaves; others he had flogged before his eyes. After a banquet he fell calmly into his last sleep In his will there was none of the craven adulation by which the victim often strove to save his heirs from imperial rapacity. He broke his most precious myrrhine vase, to prevent its being added to Nero’s treasures.742 His only bequest to the Emperor was a stinging catalogue of his secret and nameless sins.743
The Satiricon, as we have it, is only a fragment, containing parts of two books, out of a total of sixteen. It is full of humorous exaggeration and wild Aristophanic fun, along with, here and there, very subtle and refined delineation of character. But, except in the famous dinner of Trimalchio, there are few signs of regular construction or closeness of texture in plot and incident. Even if we had the whole, it might have been difficult to decipher its motive or to unlock the secret of the author’s character. We can only be sure that he was a man of genius, and that he was interested in the intellectual pursuits and tendencies of his time, as well as in its vices and follies. We may perhaps surmise that he was at once perverted and disillusioned, alternately fascinated and disgusted by the worship of the flesh and its lusts in that evil time. He is not, as has been sometimes said, utterly devoid of a moral sense. Occasionally he shows a gleam of nobler feeling, a sense of the lacrimae rerum, as in that passage where the corpse of the shipwrecked Lichas is washed ashore. “Somewhere a wife is quietly awaiting him, or a father or a son, with no thought of storm; some one whom he kissed on leaving.... He had examined the accounts of his estates, he had pictured to himself the day of his return to his home. And now he lies, O ye gods, how far from the goal of his hopes. But the sea is not the only mocker of the hopes of men. If you reckon well, there is [pg 125]shipwreck everywhere.”744 There is also a curious note of contempt for his own age in a passage on the decay of the fine arts. The tone is, for the moment, almost that of Ruskin. The glories of the golden age of art were the result of simple virtue. An age like the Neronian, an age abandoned to wine and harlotry, which dreams only of making money by any sordid means, cannot even appreciate what the great masters have left behind, much less itself produce anything worthy. Even the gods of the Capitol are now honoured by an offering of crude bullion, not by the masterpieces of a Pheidias or an Apelles. And the race which created them are now for us, forsooth, silly Greeklings!745
Yet side by side with a passage like this, there are descriptions of abnormal depravity so coarsely realistic that it has often been assumed, and not unnaturally, that the writer rioted in mere filth. It should be remembered, however, that there was a tradition of immorality about the ancient romance,746 and Petronius, had he cared to do so, might have made the same apology as Martial, that he provided what his readers demanded.747 That Petronius was deeply tainted is only too probable from his associations, although Tacitus implies that he was rather a fastidious voluptuary than a gross debauchee. Yet a sensualist of the intellectual range of Petronius may have occasionally visions of a better world than that to which he has sunk. Is it not possible that the gay elegant trifler may sometimes have scorned himself as he scorned his time? Is it not possible that, along with other illusions, he had parted with the illusions of vice, and that in the “noctes Neronis” he had seen the adder among the roses? He has written one of the keenest satires ever penned on the vulgarity of mere wealth, its absurd affectations, its vanity, its grossness. May he not also have wished, without moralising in a fashion which so cultivated a trifler would have scorned, to reveal the abyss towards which a society lost to all the finer passions of the spirit was hurrying? In the half comic, half ghastly scene in which Trimalchio, in a fit of maudlin sentiment, [pg 126]has himself laid out for dead, while the horns blare out his funeral lament, we seem to hear the knell of a society which was the slave of gold and gross pleasure, and seemed to be rotting before its death.
But it need hardly be said that the prevailing note of the Satiricon is anything but melancholy. The author is intensely amused with his subject, and the piece is full of the most riotous fun and humour. It belongs formally to the medley of prose and verse which Varro introduced into Roman literature on the model of Menippus of Gadara.748 It contains disquisitions on literary tendencies of the day in poetry and oratory, anecdotes and desultory talk. But Petronius has given a new character to the old “Satura,” more in the manner of the Greek romance. There probably was no regular plot in the complete work, no central motive, such as the wrath of Priapus,749 to bind it together. Yet there is a certain bond of union in the narrative of lively, and often questionable, adventures through which Petronius carries his very disreputable characters. In this life and movement, this human interest, the Satiricon is the distant ancestor of Gil Blas, Roderick Random, and Tom Jones.
The scene of the earlier part, long since lost, may have been laid at Massilia.750 In the two books partially preserved to us, it lies in southern Italy, at Cumae or Croton, in those Greek towns which had plenty of Greek vice, without much Greek refinement.751 The three strangers, whose adventures are related, Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton, if we may judge by their names, are also Greek, with the literary culture of their time, and deeply tainted with its worst vices. At the opening of our fragment, Encolpius, a beggarly, wandering sophist, is declaiming in a portico on the decay of oratory.752 He is expressing what was probably Petronius’s own judgment, as it was that of Tacitus,753 as to the evil effects of school declamation on musty or frivolous subjects. He is met by a [pg 127]rival lecturer, Agamemnon, who urges, on behalf of the unfortunate teachers of this conventional rhetoric, that the fault lies not with them, but with the parents and the public, the same excuse, in fact, which Plato had long before made for the maligned sophist of the fifth century B.C.754 But Encolpius and his companions, in spite of these literary interests, are the most disreputable adventurers, educated yet hopelessly depraved. They are even more at home in the reeking slums than in the lecture hall. Encolpius has been guilty of murder, theft, seduction. The party are alternately plunderers and plundered. They riot for the moment in foul excesses, and are tortured by jealousy and the miseries of squalid vice. Only those who have a taste for pornography will care to follow them in these dark paths. Reduced to the last pinch of poverty, they are invited to dine at the all-welcoming table of Trimalchio, and this is for us the most interesting passage in their adventures. But, on leaving the rich freedman’s halls they once more pass into scenes where a modern pen cannot venture to follow them. Yet soon afterwards, Encolpius is found in a picture gallery discussing the fate of literature and art with Eumolpus,755 an inveterate poet, as vicious as himself. Presently the party are on shipboard off the south Italian coast. They are shipwrecked and cast ashore in a storm near the town of Croton.756 A friendly peasant informs them that, if they are honest merchants, that is no place for their craft. But if they belong to the more distinguished world of intrigue, they may make their fortune. It is a society which has no care for letters or virtue, which thinks only of unearned gain. There are only two classes, the deceivers and their victims. Children are an expensive luxury, for only the childless ever receive an invitation or any social attention. It is like a city ravaged by the plague; there are only left the corpses and the vultures.757 The adventurers resolve to seize the rare opportunity; they will turn the tables on the social birds of prey. The pauper poet is easily translated into a millionaire with enormous estates in Africa.758 A portion of his wealth has been engulfed [pg 128]in the storm, but a solid HS.300,000,000, with much besides, still remains. He has a cough, moreover, with other signs of debility. There is no more idiotic person, as our Stock Exchange records show, than a man eager for an unearned fortune. The poor fools flocked around Eumolpus, drinking in every fresh rumour about his will. He was loaded with gifts;759 great ladies made an easy offer of their virtue and even that of their children.760 Meanwhile he, or Petronius, plays with their follies or tortures their avidity. In one of his many wills, the heirs of the pretended Croesus are required not to touch their booty till they have devoured his remains before the people!761 The tales of barbarian tribes in Herodotus, the memories of the siege of Saguntum and Numantia, are invoked in brutal irony to justify the reasonableness of the demand. “Close your eyes,” the cynic enjoins, “and fancy that instead of devouring human flesh, you are swallowing a million of money.” Petronius could be very brutal as well as very refined in his raillery. The combined stupidity and greed of the fortune-hunter of all ages are perhaps best met by such brutality of contempt.
The really interesting part of their adventure is the dinner at the house of Trimalchio, a rich freedman, to which these rascals were invited. Trimalchio is probably in many traits drawn from life, but the picture of himself, of his wife and his associates, is a work of genius worthy of Fielding or Smollett or Le Sage. Petronius, it is clear, enjoyed his work, and, in spite of his contempt for the vulgar ambition and the coarseness and commonness of Trimalchio’s class, he has a liking for a certain simplicity and honest good nature in Trimalchio. The freedman tells the story of his own career762 without reserve, and with a certain pride in the virtue and frugality, according to his standards, which have made him what he is. He also exults in his shrewdness and business capacity. His motto has always been, “You are worth just what you have.” “Buy cheap and sell dear.” Coming as a little slave boy from Asia, probably in the reign of Augustus,763 [pg 129]he became the favourite of his master, and more than the favourite of his mistress. He found himself in the end the real master of the household, and, on his patron’s death, he was left joint-heir to his property with the emperor. But he had ambitions beyond even such a fortune. He became a ship-owner on a great scale. He lost a quarter of a million in a single storm, and at once proceeded to build more and larger ships. Money poured in; all his ventures prospered. He bought estates in Italy, Sicily, and Africa. Some of his purchases he had never seen.764 He built himself a stately house, with marble porticoes, four great banqueting-halls, and twenty sleeping-rooms.765 Everything to satisfy human wants was produced upon his lands. He was a man of infinite enterprise. He had improved the breed of his flocks by importing rams from Tarentum. He had bees from Hymettus in his hives. He sent to India for mushroom spawn.766 A gazette was regularly brought out, full of statistics, and all the daily incidents on his estates;767 the number of slave births and deaths; a slave crucified for blaspheming the genius of the master; a fire in the bailiff’s house; the divorce of a watchman’s wife, who had been caught in adultery with the bathman; a sum of HS.100,000 paid into the chest, and waiting for investment—these are some of the items of news. Trimalchio, who bears now, after the fashion of his class, the good Roman name of Caius Pompeius, has risen to the dignity of Sevir Augustalis in his municipality;768 he is one of the foremost persons in it, with an overwhelming sense of the dignity of wealth, and with a ridiculous affectation of artistic and literary culture, which he parades with a delightful unconsciousness of his blunders.
When the wandering adventurers arrive for dinner,769 they find a bald old man in a red tunic playing at ball, with eunuchs in attendance. While he is afterwards being rubbed down with unguents in the bath, his servants refresh themselves with old Falernian. Then, with four richly dressed runners preceding him, and wrapped in a scarlet mantle, he is borne to the house in his sedan along with his ugly minion. On the wall of the vestibule, as you entered, there were frescoes, one of which represented the young Trimalchio, under the leadership [pg 130]of Minerva, making his entry into Rome, with other striking incidents of his illustrious career, while Fortune empties her flowing horn, and the Fates spin the golden thread of his destiny.770 The banquet begins; Alexandrian boys bring iced water and delicately attend to the guests’ feet, singing all the while.771 Indeed, the whole service is accompanied by singing, and the blare of instruments. To a great, deafening burst of music, the host is at last borne in buried in cushions, his bare shaven head protruding from a scarlet cloak, with a stole around his neck, and lappets falling on each side; his hands and arms loaded with rings.772 Not being just then quite ready for dinner, he, with a kindly apology, has a game of draughts, until he feels inclined to eat, the pieces on the terebinthine board being, appropriately to such a player, gold and silver coins.773 The dinner is a long series of surprises, on the artistic ingenuity of which Trimalchio plumes himself vastly. One course represents the twelve signs of the Zodiac, of which the host expounds at length the fateful significance.774 Another dish was a large boar, with baskets of sweetmeats hanging from its tusks. A huge bearded hunter pierced its sides with a hunting knife, and forthwith from the wound there issued a flight of thrushes which were dexterously captured in nets as they flew about the room.775 Towards the end of the meal the guests were startled by strange sounds in the ceiling, and a quaking of the whole apartment. As they raised their eyes, the ceiling suddenly opened, and a great circular tray descended, with a figure of Priapus, bearing all sorts of fruit and bon-bons.776 It may be readily assumed that in such a scene the wine was not stinted. Huge flagons, coated with gypsum, were brought in shoulder high, each with a label attesting that it was the great Falernian vintage of Opimius, one hundred years old.777 As the wine appeared, the genial host remarked with admirable frankness, “I did not give as good wine yesterday, although I had a more distinguished company!”
The amusements of the banquet were as various, and some of them as coarse or fantastic, as the dishes. They are gross [pg 131]and tasteless exaggerations of the prevailing fashion. In a literary age, a man of Trimalchio’s position must affect some knowledge of letters and art. He is a ludicrous example of the dogmatism of pretentious ignorance in all ages. He has a Greek and Latin library,778 and pretends to have once read Homer, although his recollections are rather confused. He makes, for instance, Daedalus shut Niobe into the Trojan horse; Iphigenia becomes the wife of Achilles; Helen is the sister of Diomede and Ganymede.779 One of the more refined entertainments which are provided is the performance of scenes from the Homeric poems, which Trimalchio accompanied by reading in a sonorous voice from a Latin version.780 He is himself an author, and has his poems recited by a boy personating the Bacchic god.781 As a connoisseur of plate he will yield to no one,782 although he slyly confesses that his “real Corinthian” got their name from the dealer Corinthus. The metal came from the fused bronze and gold and silver which Hannibal flung into the flames of captured Troy. But Trimalchio’s most genuine taste, as he naïvely confesses, is for acrobatic feats and loud horn-blowing. And so, a company of rope-dancers bore the guests with their monotonous performances.783 Blood-curdling tales of the wer-wolf, and corpses carried off by witches, are provided for another kind of taste.784 A base product of Alexandria imitates the notes of the nightingale, and another, apparently of Jewish race, equally base, in torturing dissonant tones spouted passages from the Aeneid, profaned to scholarly ears by a mixture of Atellan verses.785 Trimalchio, who was anxious that his wife should display her old powers of dancing a cancan, is also going to give an exhibition of his own gifts in the pantomimic line,786 when the shrewd lady in a whisper warned him to maintain his dignity. How far she preserved her own we shall see presently.
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The company at this strange party were worthy of their host. And Petronius has outdone himself in the description of these brother freedmen, looking up to Trimalchio as the glory of their order, and giving vent to their ill-humour, their optimism, or their inane moralities, in conversation with the sly observer who reports their talk. They are all old slaves like their host, men who have “made their pile,” or lost it. They rate themselves and their neighbours simply in terms of cash.787 The only ability they can understand is that which can “pick money out of the dung-heap,” and “turn lead to gold.”788 These gross and infinitely stupid fellows have not even the few saving traits in the character of Trimalchio. He has, after all, an honourable, though futile, ambition to be a wit, a connoisseur, a patron of learning. His luxury is coarse enough, but he wishes, however vainly, to redeem it by some ingenuity, by interspersing the mere animal feeding with some broken gleams, or, as we may think, faint and distorted reflections, of that great world of which he had heard, but the portals of which he could never enter. But his company are of mere clay. Trimalchio is gross enough at times, but, compared with his guests, he seems almost tolerable. And their dull baseness is the more torturing to a modern reader because it is an enduring type. The neighbour of the Greek observer warns him not to despise his company;789 they are “warm” men. That one at the end of the couch, who began as a porter, has his HS.800,000. Another, an undertaker, has had his glorious days, when the wine flowed in rivers;790 but he has been compelled to compound with his creditors, and he has played them a clever trick. A certain Seleucus, whose name reveals his origin, explains his objections to the bath, especially on this particular morning, when he has been at a funeral.791 The fate of the departed friend unfortunately leads him to moralise on the weakness of mortal men, mere insects, or bubbles on the stream. As for medical aid, it is an imaginary comfort; it oftener kills than cures.792 The [pg 133]great consolation was that the funeral was respectably done, although the wife was not effusive in her grief.793 Another guest will have none of this affected mourning for one who lived the life of his choice and left his solid hundred thousand.794 He was after all a harsh quarrelsome person, very different from his brother, a stout, kindly fellow with an open hand, and a sumptuous table. He had his reverses at first, but he was set up again by a good vintage and a lucky bequest, which he knew, by a sly stroke, how to increase; a true son of fortune, who lived his seventy years and more, as black as a crow, a man who lustily enjoyed all the delights of the flesh to the very end.795
But the most interesting person for the modern student is the grumbler about the management of town affairs, and here a page or two of the Satiricon is worth a dissertation. The price of bread has gone up, and the bakers must be in league with the aediles. In the good old times, when the critic first came from Asia, things were very different.796 “There were giants in those days. Think of Safinius, who lived by the old arch, a man with a sharp, biting tongue, but a true friend, a man who, in the town council, went straight to his point, whose voice in the forum rang out like a trumpet. Yet he was just like one of us, knew everybody’s name, and returned every salute. Why, in those days corn was as cheap as dirt. You could buy for an as a loaf big enough for two. But the town has since gone sadly back.797 Our aediles now think only how to pocket in a day what would be to some of us a fortune. I know how a certain person made his thousand gold pieces. If this goes on, I shall have to sell my cottages. Neither men nor the gods have any mercy. It all comes from our neglect of religion. No one now keeps a fast, no one cares a fig for Jove. In old days when there was a drought, the long-robed matrons with bare feet, dishevelled hair, and pure hearts, would ascend the hill to entreat Jupiter for rain, and then it would pour down in [pg 134]buckets.”798 At this point the maundering, pious pessimist is interrupted by a rag dealer799 of a more cheerful temper. “Now this, now that, as the rustic said, when he lost his speckled pig. What we have not to-day will come to-morrow; so life rubs along. Why, we are to have a three days’ show of gladiators on the next holiday, not of the common sort, but many freedmen among them. And our Titus has a high spirit; he will not do things by halves. He will give us cold steel without any shirking, a good bit of butchery in full view of the amphitheatre. And he can well afford it. His father died and left him HS.30,000,000. What is a paltry HS.400,000 to such a fortune?800 and it will give him a name for ever. He has some tit-bits, too, in reserve, the lady chariot-driver, and the steward of Glyco, who was caught with his master’s wife; poor wretch, he was only obeying orders. And the worthless Glyco has given him to the beasts; the lady deserved to suffer. And I have an inkling that Mammaea is going to give us a feast, where we shall get two denarii apiece. If she does the part expected of her, Norbanus will be nowhere. His gladiators were a wretched, weedy, twopenny-halfpenny lot, who would go down at a mere breath. They were all cut to pieces, as the cowards deserved, at the call of the crowd, ‘give it them.’ A pretty show indeed! When I applauded, I gave far more than I got. But friend Agamemnon, you are thinking ‘what is all this long-winded chatter.’801 Well, you, who dote on eloquence, why won’t you talk yourself, instead of laughing at us feeble folk. Some day I may persuade you to look in at my farm; I daresay, though the times are bad, we shall find a pullet to eat. And I have a young scholar ripening for your trade. He has good wits and never raises his head from his task. He paints with a will. He has begun Greek, and has a real taste for Latin. But one of his tutors is conceited and idle. The other is very painstaking, but, in his excess of zeal, he teaches more than he knows. So I have bought the boy some red-letter volumes, that he may get a tincture of law for domestic purposes. That [pg 135]is what gives bread and butter. He has now had enough of literature. If he gives it up, I think I shall teach him a trade, the barber’s or auctioneer’s or pleader’s,802 something that only death can take from him. Every day I din into his ears, Primigenius, my boy, what you learn you learn for profit. Look at the lawyer Philero. If he had not learnt his business, he could not keep the wolf from the door. Why, only a little ago, he was a hawker with a bundle on his back, and now he can hold his own with Norbanus. Learning is a treasure, and a trade can never be lost.”
To all this stimulating talk there are lively interludes. A guest thinks one of the strangers, in a superior way, is making game of the company, and assails him with a shower of the choicest abuse, in malodorous Latin of the slums, interlarded with proud references to his own rise from the slave ranks.803 Trimalchio orders the house-dog, Scylax, to be brought in, but the brute falls foul of a pet spaniel, and, in the uproar, a lamp is overthrown, the vases on the table are all smashed, and some of the guests are scalded with the hot oil.804 In the middle of this lively scene, a lictor announces the approach of Habinnas, a stone-cutter, who is also a great dignitary of the town. He arrives rather elevated from another feast of which he has pleasant recollections. He courteously asks for Fortunata,805 who happens to be just then looking after the plate and dividing the remains of the feast among the slaves. That lady, after many calls, appears in a cherry coloured tunic with a yellow girdle, wiping her hands with her neckerchief. She has splendid rings on her arms, legs, and fingers, which she pulls off to show them to the stone-cutter’s lady. Trimalchio is proud of their weight, and orders a balance to be brought in to confirm his assertions. It is melancholy to relate that, in the end, the two ladies get hopelessly drunk, and fall to embracing one another in a rather hysterical fashion. Fortunata even attempts to dance.806 In the growing confusion the slaves take their places at table, and the cook begins to give imitations of a favourite actor,807 and lays a wager with his master on the chances of the green at the next races. Trimal[pg 136]chio, who by this time was becoming very mellow and sentimental, determines to make his will, and to manumit all his slaves, with a farm to one, a house to another. He even gives his friend the stone-cutter full directions about the monument which is to record so brilliant a career. There is to be ample provision for its due keeping, in the fashion so well known from the inscriptions, with a fair space of prescribed measurements, planted with vines and other fruit trees. Trimalchio wishes to be comfortable in his last home.808 On the face of the monument ships under full sail are to figure the sources of his wealth.809 He himself is to be sculptured, seated on a tribunal, clothed with the praetexta of the Augustalis, with five rings on his fingers, ladling money from a bag, as in the great banquet with which he had once regaled the people.810 On his right hand there is to be the figure of his wife holding a dove and a spaniel on a leash. A boy is to be graved weeping over a broken urn. And, finally, in the centre of the scene, there is to be a horologe, that the passer-by, as he looks for the hour, may have his eyes always drawn to the epitaph which recited the dignities and virtues of the illustrious freedman. It told posterity that “C. Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus was pious, stout, and trusty, that he rose from nothing, left HS.30,000,000, and never heard a philosopher.” The whole company, along with Trimalchio himself, of course wept copiously at the mere thought of the close of so illustrious a career. After renewing their gastric energy in the bath, the company fell to another banquet. Presently a cock crows, and Trimalchio, in a fit of superstition, spills his wine under the table,811 passes his rings to the right hand, and offers a reward to any one who will bring the ominous bird. The disturber was soon caught and handed over to the cook for execution. Then Trimalchio excites his wife’s natural anger by a piece of amatory grossness, and, in [pg 137]retaliation for her very vigorous abuse, flings a cup at her head. In the scene which follows he gives, with the foulest references to his wife’s early history, a sketch of his own career and the eulogy of the virtues that have made him what he is.812 Growing more and more sentimental, he at last has himself laid out for dead;813 the horn-blowers sound his last lament, one of them, the undertaker’s man, with such a good will, that the town watch arrived in breathless haste with water and axes to extinguish a fire. The strangers seized the opportunity to escape from the nauseous scene. Their taste raised them above Trimalchio’s circle, but they were quite on the level of its morals. Encolpius and his companions are soon involved in other adventures, in which it is better not to follow them.
The lesson of all this purse-proud ostentation and vulgarity, the moral which Petronius may have intended to point, is one which will be taught from age to age by descendants of Trimalchio, and which will be never learnt till a far off future. But we need not moralise, any more than Petronius. We have merely given some snatches of a work, which is now seldom read, because it throws a searching light on a class which was rising to power in Roman society. We have now seen the worst of that society, whether crushed by the tyranny of the Caesars, or corrupted and vulgarised by sudden elevation from ignominious poverty to wealth and luxury. But there were great numbers, both among the nobles and the masses, who, in that evil time, maintained the traditions of old Roman soberness and virtue. The three following chapters will reveal a different life from that which we have hitherto been describing.
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BOOK II
RARA TEMPORUM FELICITAS
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