The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

But there was no haste in his method. Antony was to be used first and then destroyed. Octavian tried for a time to work with the senate, and even marched against Antony under their orders, but the incredible folly of the senate, who were persuaded by Cicero that “the boy” was negligible, drove him into the famous triple alliance of Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus. These three were appointed under threat of their armies to a kind of dictatorship in commission, “a triumvirate to reorganise the state.” Revenge was the explicit motive of this league. They began with the usual horrid proscription of all the senatorial aristocrats to be found in Rome. This was mainly Antony’s work. His creditors, his enemies and his wife’s enemies were slain wholesale, and, among them, Cicero. Eighteen towns of Italy were destroyed to provide lands for the veterans.

Meanwhile the tyrannicides had gathered in the East, and now Antony and the young Cæsar set out in pursuit of them. In the two battles of Philippi the luck of Octavian and the skill of Antony triumphed over their dispirited adversaries. Brutus and Cassius fell. A few of the “patriots” survived and joined Sextus Pompeius who was still at large in the Mediterranean. In the warfare at Philippi Octavian’s inexperience and real want of talent for generalship had been very apparent in contrast to Antony. Lepidus was already a nonentity. Antony went off to the East; and while he was holding his court of justice in Cilicia there sailed into harbour the splendid royal yacht of Cleopatra. The people left the judgment seat to see the famous Queen, and Antony too was soon at her feet. Signor Ferrero would have us believe, relying partly on the mature age of Cleopatra, that it was policy, not love, which made Antony dally at Alexandria. Policy no doubt was there, but everything that we know of Antony leads us to believe that he was just the man to be captured by a celebrated courtesan, particularly if she were also a queen. Certainly his sojourn in the East lowered his character both as a politician and as a soldier.

Octavian had to face Rome and the West. His task was full of perils but also full of possibilities. The soldiers were mutinous, he himself was grievously sick, and the redoubtable Fulvia, who was her husband’s real agent at Rome, very soon perceived that he was an enemy to be fought. Octavian had to fight another small civil war at Perugia before he could call himself master even of Italy, and then fight Sextus Pompeius in the Sicilian waters. Luckily he had at his side a splendid soldier—general and admiral by turns as were all good Roman fighting-men—Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.[19] He had also as his agent at Rome Mæcenas, an astute diplomatist and man of business. So though he himself often displayed feebleness and was often in danger he accomplished his task and became master of the West. Thus the lordship of the world was reduced to a plain duel.

Antony had actually married Cleopatra after Fulvia’s death and Octavia’s divorce, and as consort of the Egyptian queen reigned in Oriental majesty. He had marched against the Parthians and failed ignominiously. He was assigning provinces and princedoms to Cleopatra and her dubious offspring. It was easy for Octavian to represent Antony as a renegade Roman threatening to introduce Oriental monarchy into Rome. When at last it came to the final civil war Octavian appeared as fighting in the public cause of Rome against Egypt, with Antony as a mere deserter on the Egyptian side. The great naval battle of Actium (31 B.C.), which decided the mastery of the world for Octavian, was thus a triumph for the Roman arms over the barbarians. Actually it was a degenerate Antony who sailed away at the crisis of the battle in the wake of the queen’s yacht. The glory of the day was Agrippa’s. The luck as usual was the young Cæsar’s. He was able to inaugurate his reign at Rome by presenting her with Egypt, the richest country in the world. In 29 B.C. he came home to celebrate a glorious triple triumph and to open a new era as the first Roman Emperor.

Late Republican Civilisation

Such is a brief sketch of the hundred and four years from the day when Tiberius Gracchus first arose to challenge the senatorial oligarchy to the day when the Empire was established upon the ruins of the Republic. It is perhaps the most terrible century in the history of the world. Rome had become the centre of the world, the only hope for civilisation, and Rome was filled with bloodshed and corruption. For the provinces there was no decent government, only a succession of licensed plunderers. In the city itself there was a long series of personal struggles for the mastery; politics meant organised rioting by gangs of roughs, questions were solved by the dagger or by the swords of senators. At intervals there came from each side alternately the murderous proscriptions, in which every man of spirit or eminence on the opposing side was marked down for destruction. Often their sons and grandsons perished with them, and in any case their fortunes were destroyed. Besides the proscriptions there had been of late a series of civil wars on a great scale in which thousands of the bravest Romans perished by each other’s swords. A successful foreign war may have some compensating effect in stiffening the moral fibre of a nation and exalting its spirit. But civil war is disastrous in every way. It is only the meanest who survive and the evil passions which it arouses have no compensation.

In such a period it is wonderful that civilisation should have been able to make any advances at all. But in spite of the public turmoil private citizens were amassing enormous fortunes out of the plunder of the world, and living, though always on the edge of a volcano, in state and luxury like kings. It is now our task to see something of private life and culture in the Rome of the expiring Republic.

Money was easily made in those days and lavishly spent. Even an honest man like Cicero, governing a comparatively poor province like Cilicia, made at least £20,000 by his year of office while he remitted to the provincials a million, which, as he says, any governor of average morality would have retained. Legacies were a very frequent source of revenue especially to pleaders, and it was customary for a rich testator at Rome to make large bequests to his friends. Cicero gained £200,000 by such legacies. Foreign kings and states paid handsomely for legal advice or support. Although a barrister was supposed to give his services for nothing yet gifts and legacies were not refused. For the financier or business man there were many channels to affluence. There were mines all over the empire to be financed and exploited. Although there was little genuine industry at Rome, yet the training and use of slaves for various undertakings was a lucrative business. Crassus trained a salvage brigade for Rome and went about to fires with them in order to make bids for the purchase of the burning property. Atticus trained a company of copying clerks and made money by the sale of books. He also kept gladiators and hired them out to magistrates for the games. Fortunes were made, as in the case of Crassus, by buying up the confiscated property of the proscribed. Land speculation was rendered extremely profitable by the frequent assignation of farm-lands to veteran soldiers who were generally glad to sell them at once. The extravagance of the Roman nobles led to a very brisk traffic in loans at high interest. There was a great deal of genuine commercial speculation in ships and cargoes, generally by companies, and Cato advises the investor to put his money in fifty different enterprises rather than in one at a time. Commerce overseas was, however, forbidden to the senators by the Claudian law, and these speculated chiefly in land, on which they made a profit by slave-labour. But the most profitable business of all was tax-farming, in which the equestrian classes joined together in capitalist rings. In these and other ways prodigious fortunes were accumulated. The stored-up capital of the Roman world is astounding in its magnitude compared even to that of modern times. The real property of Pompeius sold for £700,000. Æsopus, the popular actor, left £200,000. After the most lavish donations to the public Crassus left nearly two millions sterling by will. On the death of Cæsar the treasury contained eight millions in bullion of which a million was the dictator’s own property.

But all the wealth of the Roman empire was shared by a very narrow circle. The gulf between rich and poor was far deeper than it is to-day. We hear of poor nobles and rich upstarts, but of a respectable middle class with traditions of its own there is little trace. There is an aristocracy of a few thousand families, and nothing else but a vast proletariat, silent and hungry, dependent on their bounty, bribed with money, bribed with free corn, and bribed with bloody spectacles. They lived miserably in huge tenement blocks or in hovels on the outskirts of the city. The only career open to them was in the army, and that was chiefly filled by the stronger rustics. They had nothing to do but lounge in the streets, gape at gladiators and actors and shout for the most generous politicians of the day. No doubt there were honest citizen cobblers, but Roman history is silent about them.

That section of the city which is to be styled Society was as proud and reckless as the French aristocracy before the Revolution. The senate had now become almost literally a hereditary rank. A child born into one of these princely houses was tended by a multitude of slaves. By this time there was some attempt at a liberal education. Attended by a slave pedagogue the boy would go daily to the school of some starved Greek, who would teach him his letters and his figures. The staple of education was the delivery of artificial declamation on the model of Isocrates or Demosthenes. After this stage a young man would commonly be sent abroad to Athens or Rhodes to finish his education with a little philosophy or mathematics, but chiefly with oratory. Returned to Rome, his destiny placed him in a circle of foppish youths, who devoted their principal attention to dress and manicure. Bejewelled and scented, they practised every vice, natural and unnatural. In due course, with no effort but a few bribes from the parental purse, they became priests and augurs, thus entering what were in reality aristocratic dining-clubs. Dining was now the principal art of Rome. Macrobius has preserved the menu of one of these priestly dinners of the Republic, at which the priests and vestals were present. The party began with a prolusion like the Russian or Swedish system of hors d’œuvres, in which seventeen dishes of fish and game were presented. The dinner itself contained ten more courses, “sow’s udder, boar’s head, fish-pasties, boar-pasties, ducks, boiled teals, hares, roasted fowls, starch-pastry, Pontic-pastry.” Such was the State religion of Rome in the first century before Christ. At intervals the young noble’s father’s friends would invite him to join their staff on foreign service. If he had the good fortune to serve with Pompeius or Lucullus in the East or with Cæsar in Gaul, he might get a taste of real manliness, and serve his country as tribune of the soldiers. But more often in a peaceful province like Sicily or Africa he was merely initiated into the arts of extortion, and enjoyed all the vicious opportunities of the younger sons of princes. Thus fortified by experience he would return to Rome to seek the suffrages of his fellow-citizens for the quæstorship, the first rung on the ladder of office. Votes were to be won by bribery, direct or indirect. One candidate would spread a banquet for a whole tribe; another would seek to outshine his rivals by providing strange beasts from Africa—among Cicero’s correspondence there is an urgent appeal for Cilician panthers to be slain in the arena—or by dressing his gladiators in silver armour. Similar requirements accompanied his progress through all the stages of office on a progressively lavish scale. As quæstor he would be a judge or a comptroller of the treasury for a single year. Then as ædile he would conduct the public festivals, preside in the ædile’s court, control the markets and streets of Rome. So he rose to be consul, commander of legions and president of the state, and then in due course governor of an enormous province. From his quæstorship onwards his seat in the senate was assured.