Plate LXXXI. BRIDGE OF ALCÁNTARA, SPAIN
which testify to the industry fostered by the provincial government of the emperors. Along the sea-coast of Campania there were sea-fronts of continuous villas whose marble fragments are still washed up in the Bay of Naples. It tasks the imagination of genius to conjure up that glowing world of the past out of the ruined foundations which remain. Turner’s famous picture of Baiæ represents a successful attempt to do so. Pompeii, wonderful as it is, was only a very small and obscure country town. Yet it was lavishly provided with temples, baths, theatre, and amphitheatre.
On the coast of North Africa, where nothing but man’s labour organised under a good government is required to make the desert blossom as a rose, there was a teeming population which prospered on agriculture. Timgad (Thamugadi) was founded in the year 100 as a colony by Trajan, and it was the head-quarters of the Third Legion. Here, in the blank desert of to-day, the French explorers have revealed porticoes and colonnades, a forum, a municipal senate-house, a theatre, a capitol, rostra, a triumphal arch, baths, shrines, and temples, together with the aqueduct and fountains which alone made all this splendour possible.[69] For public munificence this age is unequalled in history. It must have been a very powerful sense of patriotism which compelled every rich man to devote so large a part of his fortune to the embellishment of his native town. The benefactions of the modern millionaire seem miserly in comparison. Pliny, who was not a very rich man as wealth was accounted in his day, presented his native town of Como with a library at a cost of nearly £9000, and maintained it with an annual endowment of more than £800. He offered to contribute one-third to the cost of a secondary school, and made the wise provision that the parents of the boys should contribute the rest, in order that they might feel an interest in the school and take pains in the choice of suitable teachers. He gave nearly £5000 more for the support of poor children. He bequeathed more than £4000 for public baths and nearly £16,000 to his freedmen and for public feasts. And, as Dr. Dill has pointed out, the inscriptions of every municipal town prove that this princely generosity and patriotism were by no means the exception. “There was in those days an immense civic ardour, an almost passionate rivalry, to make the mother city a more pleasant and a more splendid home.” Among the most princely of these benefactors was the Athenian Professor of Rhetoric, Herodes Atticus, who added a new quarter to Athens in the reign of Hadrian.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of life in the Roman Empire under the good emperors of the second century is the growth of a lower class with occupations and ideals of its own. We have already remarked that the poor free Roman of republican days scarcely emerges into the light except as a soldier. But now the inscriptions show us a happy and industrious class of artisans and humble tradesmen, grading down through the freedmen to the slaves, many of whom now lived and worked under quite tolerable conditions of life. Especially noteworthy is the social tendency of the day. Every occupation and craft was forming its guilds or “collegia” about which the inscriptions give us full and most interesting details. The collegia were not quite Friendly Societies, and still less Trade Unions, though they undoubtedly claimed political privileges and perhaps even made some attempt at collective bargaining with the public. Sometimes they obtained exemption from taxation. They dined together, they had their chapels and festivals, their colours and processions. They had officers modelled on the old Roman magistracy, with senators as committee and a quæstor as treasurer. They had their list of patrons who were expected to earn the honour by generosity. In the main they were burial clubs. Even slaves, and even gladiators, the most despised of slaves, had their guilds and fraternities: of course they were regulated by the state.
As yet, in spite of its growing centralisation and spirit of paternal despotism, the Roman government was true to its ancient principle of allowing full local autonomy. The municipal
Plate LXXXII. TOMB OF HADRIAN, ROME