In his home the noble Roman lived like a king, waited upon by an enormous retinue. There was much luxury and little comfort. The houses of the Romans were on a far more luxurious scale than those of the Greeks. The only genuine Roman taste that can be called liberal was the hobby of collecting beautiful town houses and country seats. Cicero, who was a man of modest income and tastes, seems to have possessed about eighteen different estates, and gave nearly £30,000 for his town house. The qualities prized in the choice of a mansion were space and coolness, and the Romans of this age were by no means insensible to the charms of scenery. The coast round Naples and Baiæ was dotted with sumptuous villas, and the gay world spent its summer there in much the same way as the cosmopolitan crowds at Biarritz. Besides his great town house and his family mansion at Arpinum, and his country houses at Tusculum and elsewhere, Cicero had marine villas all along the coast at Antium, Formiæ, Cumæ, Puteoli, and Pompeii, and all along the Campanian road were his private “inns,” where he lodged on his journeys. His favourite villa was the one at Tusculum, the scene of many of his literary labours, and among others of the famous Tusculan Disputations. It had previously belonged to Sulla, and was adorned with paintings in commemoration of Sulla’s victories. It was situated on the top of a hill along with many other villas of the aristocracy, and commanded a delightful view of the city about twelve miles away. The park attached to it was extensive, and through it there ran a broad canal. He had books everywhere, but his principal library was deposited at Antium. At Puteoli he constructed a cloister and a grove on the model of Plato’s Academy.
The principal feature of the Roman house was its large colonnaded hall, with a roof open in the middle to admit light and air. This roof sloped inwards, and allowed the rain to fall into a central tank, delightful for coolness, no doubt, but probably very unwholesome. In old days the atrium had been the common room of the Roman family. It still retained a symbolical marriage-bed, a symbolical spinning-wheel, the portraits of the ancestors, and the ceremonial altar to the family gods, who were now stored away in a cupboard close at hand. Most of the rooms opened directly out of the atrium. As they are seen in the ruins of Roman villas, they appear to have been comparatively small and ill-lighted. The larger houses themselves were generally built of local limestone with facings of stucco, though the greater part of Rome was still in this first century b.c. constructed of sun-baked bricks. It was considered unheard-of luxury when Mamurra faced his walls with marble slabs. The floors were generally tessellated. It was an innovation of the Roman architect to build houses of three or more stories, but it was probably only a starveling poet who would live on the fourth floor. A noble’s house would spread over the ground regardless of space, but the bedrooms and sometimes the dining-room were upstairs. Externally the Roman house was a little finer than the Greek, being fronted with a pillared forecourt and a dwelling for the concierge. At the back the atrium opened into a colonnaded garden with a fountain, flower-beds, and shrubbery.
As the Roman’s house was built mainly with a view to coolness, so his daily life was that of a southerner. Rome was never a healthy city in the summer, and all who could afford it fled to the country or the sea-side. Almost every Roman known to us in literature was either an invalid or a valetudinarian. Malarial fever in its periodic form was very widely spread, and most of our distinguished friends pursued a medical regimen. Cæsar was subject to fits of epilepsy, Cicero was of weak constitution, Horace was a martyr to ophthalmia as well as malaria, Augustus was always ailing and often at death’s door. The Roman’s most amiable idiosyncrasy was his devotion to the bath. Every considerable house had an elaborate bathing department with at least a hot room built over a furnace, and a cold room with a swimming-tank. But there were also public baths, on an ever-increasing scale of magnificence. Agrippa alone built 170 of them at Rome. Rich and poor alike made it their daily practice to bathe after exercise, just before their principal meal in the early afternoon. The custom of the noon-tide siesta was universal, except with prodigies of industry like Cicero. A great deal of time was spent in lounging abroad through the streets or under shady colonnades. The streets of Rome, as of all ancient cities, were extremely narrow, but in the busy parts of the city all wheeled traffic was forbidden.
The wealthy Romans have a name for abominable luxury and gluttony. As to the general question of its influence in destroying the morality of Rome I have already ventured to express disbelief in the popular view. From all that we read, it does not appear that the ordinary Roman was naturally addicted to intemperance either in eating or drinking. The praise of wine is with Horace a literary pose; personally he had a poor head and a poor stomach. The Italian is not, and probably never was a great natural eater or drinker judged by northern standards. But rhetoricians and satirists have delighted to dwell upon the immensity of Roman dinner-parties which often lasted all day and included a hideous series of curious and exotic dainties. This was the form which, in default of any nobler ideals, wealth at Rome had chosen for its display. Time hung heavily on this slave-tended aristocracy: to dine from dawn to daylight was one of the ways of killing it. So the guests reclined on their couches, dancers jigged before them, musicians played, occasionally a tumbler or a tight-rope walker would appear, in literary households a slave would read philosophy; and all the time the soft-footed slaves were coming and going with dishes of strange morsels gathered from the ends of the earth, and rare wines from the four corners of the globe. A dish of nightingales’ tongues is not the sort of thing to please one who is a gourmet by conviction or natural taste. Eating was for most of these poor starved imaginations the only form of culture they understood. It was, however, conducted with tremendous ceremony. There was a “tricliniarch” to marshal his “decuries” of slaves as each dish came into the room. There was a special “structor” to arrange the dishes, a special “analecta” to pick up the fragments that the diners dropped. Carving was a science with various branches, as in old England, and the skilful carver had his scheme of gesticulations for each kind of dish. There was another slave specially appointed to cry out the name and quality of each plat. In addition to these every guest had his own footman standing behind his couch. The most characteristic and the most unpleasant feature of a Roman banquet was the manner in which the diners assisted nature to provide them with an appetite. Even Julius Cæsar “took his vomit” both before and after his dinner-party with Cicero.
Plate XIX JULIUS CÆSAR
The public shows, which formed the chief recreation of rich and poor alike, grew yearly more brutal and bloody. As they were the means by which ambitious candidates for office sought to canvass popularity, the principal aim was to present something novel and startling. No doubt the more refined spectators regarded the butchery of wild beasts or paid gladiators with disgust, but the populace at large only shouted for more blood. Five hundred lions were slaughtered on one day at the triumphal games given by Pompeius. Cicero writes that the wholesale destruction of elephants in the arena actually moved the people to pity. There were still some real theatrical performances in Rome. Actors and mimics, indeed, if they were handsome and graceful, made large fortunes. Most Roman nobles of a literary bent amused themselves with writing tragedies. Cicero’s soldier brother composed four on a fortnight’s journey to Gaul. But these were only employed to bore one’s friends at dinner. Original literary dramas were even less often staged at Rome than they are in London. Plautus and Terence for comedy, and Pacuvius, Attius, and Ennius for tragedy, had already become classics and were still regularly performed. The drama died stillborn at Rome.
Historians of Rome, fortified by Juvenal and Petronius, love to depict the vices of the emperors and the imperial period. The later Republic can show us a morality no more exalted. The fragments of Varro’s satires written in the heyday of the Republic are in precisely the same strain of despondency as are the satires of Juvenal. For him, too, virtue is a thing of the past. Sober fact compels us to see that the aristocratic society of Republican Rome was hideously immoral. Voluntary celibacy and “race-suicide” were already rife. The family was a decaying institution, divorce was common, and the sterility of wickedness had long been at work to sap the ranks of the nobility. Even Cicero divorced his wife Terentia upon a trivial pretext after a long period of happy conjugal life in order to marry an heiress. Cæsar had four wives of his own, not to mention Cleopatra, without begetting a single legitimate son. Cato, the strict censor of morals, having been jilted in his youth, married a wife, divorced her for adultery after she had borne him two sons, married another, lent her for six years to the orator Hortensius, and on his death resumed her again. Mark Antony married Fadia, then Antonia, then divorced her and lived publicly with Cytheris the actress, then married Fulvia, who had already been twice a widow, then married Octavia, then Cleopatra. These marriages were made and dissolved freely for political reasons. A large part of Roman politics was carried on in the salons of the Roman ladies, and if half of what Cicero alleges be true Messalina herself had her republican prototypes in women like Clodia and Fulvia. Beside almost promiscuous relations between the sexes, the darker forms of Oriental vice were extremely fashionable among the gilded youth of Rome.