"They contend with each other in the empty vanity of titles and surnames. They affect to multiply their likenesses in statues of bronze or marble; nor are they satisfied unless these statues are covered with plates of gold. They boast of the rent-rolls of their estates; they measure their rank and consequence by the loftiness of their chariots and the weighty magnificence of their dress; their long robes of silk and purple float in the wind, and as they are agitated by art or accident they discover the under garments, the rich tunics embroidered with the figures of various animals. Followed by a train of fifty servants, and tearing up the pavement, they move along the streets as if they travelled with post-horses; and the example of the senators is boldly imitated by the matrons and ladies, whose covered carriages are continually driving round the immense space of the city and suburbs. Whenever they condescend to enter the public baths, they assume, on their entrance, a tone of loud and insolent command, and maintain a haughty demeanor, which perhaps might have been excused in the great Marcellus after the conquest of Syracuse. Sometimes these heroes undertake more arduous achievements: they visit their estates in Italy, and procure themselves, by servile hands, the amusements of the chase. And if at any time, especially on a hot day, they have the courage to sail in their gilded galleys from the Lucrine Lake to their elegant villas on the sea-coast of Puteoli and Cargeta, they compare these expeditions to the marches of Caesar and Alexander; yet should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of their gilded umbrellas, should a sunbeam penetrate through some unguarded chink, they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament, in affected language, that they were not born in the regions of eternal darkness. In the exercise of domestic jurisdiction they express an exquisite sensibility for any personal injury, and a contemptuous indifference for the rest of mankind. When they have called for warm water, should a slave be tardy in his obedience, he is chastised with a hundred lashes; should he commit a wilful murder, his master will mildly observe that he is a worthless fellow, and shall be punished if he repeat the offence. If a foreigner of no contemptible rank be introduced to these senators, he is welcomed with such warm professions that he retires charmed with their affability; but when he repeats his visit, he is surprised and mortified to find that his name, his person, and his country are forgotten. The modest, the sober, and the learned are rarely invited to their sumptuous banquets, only the most worthless of mankind,--parasites who applaud every look and gesture, who gaze with rapture on marble columns and variegated pavements, and strenuously praise the pomp and elegance which he is taught to consider as a part of his personal merit. At the Roman table the birds, the squirrels, the fish, which appear of uncommon size, are contemplated with curious attention, and notaries are summoned to attest, by authentic record, their real weight. Another method of introduction into the houses of the great is skill in games, which is a sure road to wealth and reputation. A master of this sublime art, if placed at a supper below a magistrate, displays in his countenance a surprise and indignation which Cato might be supposed to feel when refused the praetorship. The acquisition of knowledge seldom engages the attention of the nobles, who abhor the fatigue and disdain the advantages of study; and the only books they peruse are the 'Satires of Juvenal,' or the fabulous histories of Marius Maximus. The libraries they have inherited from their fathers are secluded, like dreary sepulchres, from the light of day; but the costly instruments of the theatre--flutes and hydraulic organs--are constructed for their use. In their palaces sound is preferred to sense, and the care of the body to that of the mind. The suspicion of a malady is of sufficient weight to excuse the visits of the most intimate friends. The prospect of gain will urge a rich and gouty senator as far as Spoleta; every sentiment of arrogance and dignity is suppressed in the hope of an inheritance or legacy, and a wealthy, childless citizen is the most powerful of the Romans. The distress which follows and chastises extravagant luxury often reduces the great to use the most humiliating expedients. When they wish to borrow, they employ the base and supplicating style of the slaves in the comedy; but when they are called upon to pay, they assume the royal and tragic declamations of the grandsons of Hercules. If the demand is repeated, they readily procure some trusty sycophant to maintain a charge of poison or magic against the insolent creditor, who is seldom released from prison until he has signed a discharge of the whole debt. And these vices are mixed with a puerile superstition which disgraces their understanding. They listen with confidence to the productions of haruspices, who pretend to read in the entrails of victims the signs of future greatness and prosperity; and this superstition is observed among those very sceptics who impiously deny or doubt the existence of a celestial power."
Such, in the latter days of the empire, was the leading class at Rome, and probably also in the cities which aped the fashions of the capital. Frivolity and luxury loosened all the ties of society. They were bound up in themselves, and had no care for the people except as they might extract more money from them.
As for the miserable class whom the patricians oppressed, their condition became worse every day from the accession of the Emperors. The plebeians had ever disdained those arts which now occupied the middle classes; these were intrusted to slaves. Originally, they employed themselves upon the lands which had been obtained by conquest; but these lands were gradually absorbed or usurped by the large proprietors. The small farmers, oppressed with debt and usury, parted with their lands to their wealthy creditors. Even in the time of Cicero, it was computed that there were only about two thousand citizens possessed of independent property. These two thousand persons owned the world; the rest were dependent and powerless, and would have perished but for largesses. Monthly distributions of corn were converted into daily allowance for bread. The people were amused with games and festivals, fed like slaves, and of course lost at last even the semblance of manliness and independence. They loitered in the public streets, and dissipated in gaming their miserable pittance; they spent the hours of the night in the lowest resorts of crime and misery; they expired in wretched apartments without attracting the attention of government; pestilence, famine, and squalid misery thinned their ranks, and they would have been annihilated but for constant accession to their numbers from the provinces.
In the busy streets of Rome might be seen adventurers from all parts of the world, disgraced by all the various vices of their respective countries. They had no education, and but small religious advantages; they were held in terror by both priests and nobles,--the priest terrifying them with Egyptian sorceries, the nobles crushing them by iron weight; like lazzaroni, they lived in the streets, or were crowded into filthy tenements; a gladiatorial show delighted them, but the circus was their peculiar joy,--here they sought to drown the consciousness of their squalid degradation; they were sold into slavery for trifling debts; they had no homes. The poor man had no ambition or hope; his wife was a slave; his children were precocious demons, whose prattle was the cry for bread, whose laughter was the howl of pandemonium, whose sports were the tricks of premature iniquity, whose beauty was the squalor of disease and filth; he fled from a wife in whom he had no trust, from children in whom he had no hope, from brothers for whom he felt no sympathy, from parents for whom he felt no reverence; the circus was his home, the fights of wild beasts were his consolation; the future was a blank, death was the release from suffering. There were no hospitals for the sick and the old, except one on an island in the Tiber; the old and helpless were left to die, unpitied and unconsoled. Suicide was so common that it attracted no attention.
Superstition culminated at Rome, for there were seen the priests and devotees of all the countries that it governed,--"the dark-skinned daughters of Isis, with drum and timbrel and wanton mien; devotees of the Persian Mithras; emasculated Asiatics; priests of Cybele, with their wild dances and discordant cries; worshippers of the great goddess Diana; barbarian captives with the rites of Teuton priests; Syrians, Jews, Chaldaean astrologers, and Thessalian sorcerers.... The crowds which flocked to Rome from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean brought with them practices extremely demoralizing. The awful rites of initiation, the tricks of magicians, the pretended virtues of amulets and charms, the riddles of emblematical idolatry with which the superstition of the East abounded, amused the languid voluptuaries who had neither the energy for a moral belief nor the boldness requisite for logical scepticism."
We cannot pass by, in this enumeration of the different classes of Roman society, the number and condition of slaves. A large part of the population belonged to this servile class. Originally brought in by foreign conquest, it was increased by those who could not pay their debts. The single campaign of Regulus introduced as many captives as made up a fifth part of the whole population. Four hundred were maintained in a single palace, at a comparatively early period; a freedman in the time of Augustus left behind him forty-one hundred and sixteen; Horace regarded two hundred as the suitable establishment for a gentleman; some senators owned twenty thousand. Gibbon estimates the number of slaves at about sixty millions,--one-half of the whole population. One hundred thousand captives were taken in the Jewish war, who were sold as slaves, and sold as cheap as horses. William Blair supposes that there were three slaves to one freeman, from the conquest of Greece to the reign of Alexander Severus. Slaves often cost two hundred thousand sesterces, yet everybody was eager to possess a slave. At one time the slave's life was at the absolute control of his master; he could be treated at all times with brutal severity. Fettered and branded, he toiled to cultivate the lands of an imperious master, and at night was shut up in a subterranean cell. The laws hardly recognized his claim to be considered a moral agent,--he was secundum hominum genus; he could acquire no rights, social or political,--he was incapable of inheriting property, or making a will, or contracting a legal marriage; his value was estimated like that of a brute; he was a thing and not a person, "a piece of furniture possessed of life;" he was his master's property, to be scourged, or tortured, or crucified. If a wealthy proprietor died under circumstances which excited suspicion of foul play, his whole household was put to torture. It is recorded that on the murder of a man of consular dignity by a slave, every slave in his possession was condemned to death. Slaves swelled the useless rabbles of the cities, and devoured the revenues of the State. All manual labor was done by slaves, in towns as well as the country; they were used in the navy to propel the galleys. Even the mechanical arts were cultivated by the slaves. Nay more, slaves were schoolmasters, secretaries, actors, musicians, and physicians, for in intelligence they were often on an equality with their masters. Slaves were procured from Greece and Asia Minor and Syria, as well as from Gaul and the African deserts; they were white as well as black. All captives in war were made slaves, also unfortunate debtors; sometimes they could regain their freedom, but generally their condition became more and more deplorable. What a state of society when a refined and cultivated Greek could be made to obey the most offensive orders of a capricious and sensual Roman, without remuneration, without thanks, without favor, without redress! What was to be expected of a class who had no object to live for? They became the most degraded of mortals, ready for pillage, and justly to be feared in the hour of danger.
Slavery undoubtedly proved the most destructive canker of the Roman State. It was this social evil, more than political misrule, which undermined the empire. Slavery proved at Rome a monstrous curse, destroying all manliness of character, creating contempt of honest labor, making men timorous yet cruel, idle, frivolous, weak, dependent, powerless. The empire might have lasted centuries longer but for this incubus, the standing disgrace of the Pagan world. Paganism never recognized what is most noble and glorious in man; never recognized his equality, his common brotherhood, his natural rights. It had no compunction, no remorse in depriving human beings of their highest privileges; its whole tendency was to degrade the soul, and to cause forgetfulness of immortality. Slavery thrives best when the generous instincts are suppressed, when egotism, sensuality, and pride are the dominant springs of human action.
The same influences which tended to rob man of the rights which God has given him, and produce cruelty and heartlessness in the general intercourse of life, also tended to degrade the female sex. In the earlier age of the republic, when the people were poor, and life was simple and primitive, and heroism and patriotism were characteristic, woman was comparatively virtuous and respected; she asserted her natural equality, and led a life of domestic tranquillity, employed upon the training of her children, and inspiring her husband to noble deeds. But under the Emperors these virtues had fled. Woman was miserably educated, being taught by a slave, or some Greek chambermaid, accustomed to ribald conversation, and fed with idle tales and silly superstitions; she was regarded as more vicious in natural inclination than man, and was chiefly valued for household labors; she was reduced to dependence; she saw but little of her brothers or relatives; she was confined to her home as if it were a prison; she was guarded by eunuchs and female slaves; she was given in marriage without her consent; she could be easily divorced; she was valued only as a domestic servant, or as an animal to prevent the extinction of families; she was regarded as the inferior of her husband, to whom she was a victim, a toy, or a slave. Love after marriage was not frequent, since woman did not shine in the virtues by which love is kept alive. She became timorous or frivolous, without dignity or public esteem; her happiness was in extravagant attire, in elaborate hair-dressings, in rings and bracelets, in a retinue of servants, in gilded apartments, in luxurious couches, in voluptuous dances, in exciting banquets, in demoralizing spectacles, in frivolous gossip, in inglorious idleness. If virtuous, it was not so much from principle as from fear. Hence she resorted to all sorts of arts to deceive her husband; her genius was sharpened by perpetual devices, and cunning was her great resource. She cultivated no lofty friendships; she engaged in no philanthropic mission; she cherished no ennobling sentiments; she kindled no chivalrous admiration. Her amusements were frivolous, her taste vitiated, her education neglected, her rights violated, her sympathy despised, her aspirations scorned. And here I do not allude to great and infamous examples that history has handed down in the sober pages of Suetonius and Tacitus, or that unblushing depravity which stands out in the bitter satires of those times; I speak not of the adultery, the poisoning, the infanticide, the debauchery, the cruelty of which history accuses the Messalinas and Agrippinas of imperial Rome; I allude not to the orgies of the Palatine Hill, or the abominations which are inferred from the paintings of Pompeii,--I mean the general frivolity and extravagance and demoralization of the women of the Roman empire. Marriage was considered inexpedient unless large dowries were brought to the husband. Numerous were the efforts of Emperors to promote honorable marriages, but the relation was shunned. Courtesans usurped the privileges of wives, and with unblushing effrontery. A man was derided who contemplated matrimony, for there was but little confidence in female virtue or capacity, and woman lost all her fascination when age had destroyed her beauty; even her very virtues were distasteful to her self-indulgent husband. When, as sometimes happened, the wife gained the ascendency by her charms, she was tyrannical; her relatives incited her to despoil her husband; she lived amid incessant broils; she had no care for the future, and exceeded man in prodigality. "The government of her house is no more merciful," says Juvenal, "than the court of a Sicilian tyrant." In order to render herself attractive, she exhausted all the arts of cosmetics and elaborate hair-dressing; she delighted in magical incantations and love-potions. In the bitter satire of Juvenal we get an impression most melancholy and loathsome:--
"'T were long to tell what philters they provide,
What drugs to set a son-in-law aside,--