Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

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.

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 Nero[439] 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]