Yet Pliny, as we have said, is only a shining example of a numerous class of more obscure benefactors. For a thousand who know his Letters, there are few who have read the stone records of similar generosity. Yet these memorials abound for those who care to read them. And any one who will spend a few days, or even a few well-directed hours, in examining the [pg 195]inscriptions of the early Empire, will find many a common, self-complacent prejudice melting away. He will discover a profusion of generosity to add to the beauty, dignity, or convenience of the parent city, to lighten the dulness of ordinary life, to bring all ranks together in common scenes of enjoyment, to relieve want and suffering among the indigent. The motives of this extraordinary liberality were indeed often mixed, and it was, from our point of view, often misdirected. The gifts were sometimes made merely to win popularity, or to repay civic honours which had been conferred by the populace. They were too often devoted to gladiatorial shows and other exhibitions which only debased the spectators. Yet the greatest part of them were expended on objects of public utility—baths, theatres, markets, or new roads and aqueducts, or on those public banquets which knitted all ranks together. 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. The endless foundations for civic feasts to all orders, in which even children and slaves were not forgotten, with a distribution of money at the close, softened the sharp distinctions of rank, and gave an appreciable relief to poverty. Other foundations were more definitely inspired by charity and pity. In remote country towns, there were pious founders who, like Pliny and Trajan, and the Antonines, provided for the nurture of the children of the poor. Bequests were left to cheapen the main necessaries of life.[1113] Nor were the aged and the sick forgotten. In Lorium, near the old home of the Antonines, a humble spice dealer provided in his will for a free distribution of medicines to the poor people of the town.[1114] The countless gifts and legacies to the colleges, which were the refuge of the poor in that age, in every region of the Roman world, are an irresistible proof of an overflowing charity. Pliny’s love of the quiet town where his infancy was passed, and the record of a like patriotism or benevolence in so many others, draw us on to the study of that free and generous municipal life which was the great glory of the Antonine age.
CHAPTER II
MUNICIPAL LIFE
Nearly all the intimate friends of Pliny were, like himself, bred in the country, and, as we have seen, he has left us a priceless picture of that rural aristocracy in the calm refinement of their country seats. But of the ordinary life of the provincial town we learn very little from Pliny. Indeed, the silence of Roman literature generally as to social life outside the capital is very remarkable.[1115] In the long line of great Latin authors from Ennius to Juvenal, there is hardly one whose native place was Rome. The men who are the glory of Roman letters in epic and lyric poetry, in oratory and history, in comedy and satire, were born in quiet country towns in Italy or the remoter provinces. But the reminiscences of the scenes of their infancy will generally be found to be faint and rare. Horace, indeed, displays a tender piety for that borderland of Apulia, where, in the glades of Mount Vultur as a child, he drank inspiration from the witchery of haunted groves.[1116] And Martial, the hardened man about town, never forgot the oak groves and iron foundries of Bilbilis.[1117] But for the municipal system and life, the relations of its various social grades, the humdrum routine of the shops and forums, the rustic rites and deities,[1118] the lingering echoes of that dim common life with its vices and honest tenderness, its petty ambitions or hopeless griefs, we must generally go to the records in stone, and the remains of buried cities which the spade has given back to the light.
This silence of the literary class is not due to any want of love in the Roman for the calm and freshness and haunting charm of country scenes, still less to callousness towards old associations. Certainly Virgil cannot be charged with any such lack of sensibility. In the Eclogues and the Georgics, the memory of the old farm at Andes breaks through the more conventional sentiment of Alexandrian tradition. In the scenery of these poems, there are “mossy fountains and grass softer than sleep,” the hues of violet, poppy, and hyacinth, the shade of ancient ilex, and the yellow wealth of cornfield. We hear the murmur of bees, “the moan of doves in immemorial elms,” the rush of the river, the whispering of the wind. The pastoral charm of the midsummer prime is there, from the freshness of fields under the morning star, through the hours alive with the song of the cicala and the lowing of the herds around the pool, through the still, hot, vacant noontide, till the moonbeams are glinting on the dewy grasses of the glades.[1119] Nor can any lover of Virgil ever forget the fire of old sentiment in the muster of Italian chivalry in the seventh book of the Aeneid.[1120] Tibur and Praeneste, Anagnia, Nomentum, and Amiternum, and many another old Sabine town, which send forth their young warriors to the fray, are each stamped on the imagination by some grace of natural beauty, or some glory of ancient legend. In the Flavian period, as we have seen, the great nobles had their villas on every pleasant site, wherever sea or hill or woodland offered a fair prospect and genial air. To these scenes they hastened, like emancipated schoolboys, when the dog-days set in. They had a genuine love of the unspoilt countryside, with its simple natural pleasures, its husbandry of the olden time, its joyous plenty, above all its careless freedom and repose.[1121] The great charm of a rural retreat was its distance from the “noise and smoke and wealth” of Rome. The escape from the penalties of fame, from the boredom of interminable dinners, the intrusive importunity of curious busybodies, the malice of jealous rivals, gives a fresh zest to the long tranquil days under the ilex [pg 198]shade among the Sabine hills.[1122] Horace probably felt more keenly than Juvenal the charm of hill and stream and the scenes of rustic toils and gaiety. Yet the exquisite good sense of Horace would have recoiled from the declamatory extravagance with which Juvenal justifies his friend’s retirement from the capital, by a realistic picture of all its sordid troubles and vices and absurdities.[1123] “To love Rome at Tibur and Tibur at Rome” was the expression of the educated Roman’s feelings in a form which he would have recognised to be as just as it was happy. In spite of the charm of the country, to any real man of letters or affairs, the fascination of Rome was irresistible. Pliny, and no doubt hundreds of his class, from Augustus to Theodosius, grumbled at the wasteful fashion in which their lives were frittered away by monotonous social duties, as imperious as they were generally vain.[1124] Yet to Pliny, as to Symmachus, the prospect of never again seeing the city, so seductive and so wearying, would have been absolutely intolerable. Martial, when he retired to Bilbilis, seems to pity his friend Juvenal, wandering restlessly through the noisy Suburra, or climbing the Caelian in hot haste, to hang on the outskirts of a levee.[1125] Yet in the preface to this last book, Martial seems to feel his banishment as keenly as Ovid felt his among the frozen rivers of Scythia.[1126] He misses in the “provincial solitude” the sympathetic public which was eager for his latest epigram, the fine critical judgment to appreciate, the concourse of elegant idlers to supply the matter for his verses.[1127] And worst of all, the most famous wit of Rome is now the mark for the ignorant spite and envy of a provincial clique. Martial evidently feels very much as Dr. Johnson would have felt if he had been compelled to live out his days in Skye. Juvenal may affect to regret the simple ways of those rustic places, where on festal days in the grass-grown theatre the infant in his mother’s arms shudders at the awful masks of [pg 199]the actors, and the aediles take their places in white tunics like the humble crowd.[1128] But, in spite of this sentiment, the true Roman had a certain contempt for municipal life,[1129] for the narrow range of its interests, the ludicrous assumption of dignity by its petty magistrates, and its provincialisms.[1130] It was indeed only natural that the splendour and the vivid energy of life in the capital of the world should throw provincial life into the shade. Yet we can realise now, as a Roman wit or man of fashion could hardly do, that the municipal system, which had overspread the world from the Solway to the edge of the Sahara, was not the least glory of the Antonine age. And in any attempt to estimate the moral condition of the masses in that age, the influence of municipal life should occupy a large place.
It is beyond the scope of this work to trace provincial towns through all their various grades, and their evolution in the hands of Roman statesmanship from the time of Augustus. What we are chiefly concerned with is the spirit and the rapid development of that brilliant civic life, which not only covered the worlds both of East and West with material monuments of Roman energy, but profoundly influenced for good, or sometimes for evil, the popular character. The magical transformation wrought by Roman rule in a century and a half seized the imagination of contemporaries such as the rhetor Aristides. And the mere wreck of that brilliant civilisation which now meets the traveller’s eye, in regions that have long returned to waste, will not permit us to treat his eulogy of Rome as only a piece of rhetoric. Regions, once desert solitudes, are thickly dotted with flourishing cities; the Empire is a realm of cities. The world has laid the sword aside, and keeps universal festival, with all pomp and gladness. All other feuds and rivalries are gone, and cities now vie with one another only in their splendour and their pleasures. Every space is crowded with porticoes, gymnasia, temple fronts, with studios and schools.[1131] [pg 200]Sandy wastes, trackless mountains, and broad rivers present no barriers to the traveller, who finds his home and country everywhere. The earth has become a vast pleasure garden.[1132]
This glowing description of the Roman world of the Antonine age is not perhaps strengthened by the appeal to the doubtful statistics of other contemporaries, such as Aelian and Josephus. We may hesitate to accept the statement that Italy had once 1197 cities, or that Gaul possessed 1200.[1133] In these estimates, if they have any solid foundation, the term “city” must be taken in a very elastic sense. But there are other more trustworthy reckonings which sufficiently support the glowing description of Aristides. When the Romans conquered Spain and Gaul, they found a system of pagi or cantons, with very few considerable towns. The 800 towns which are said to have been taken by Julius Caesar can have been little more than villages. But the Romanisation of both countries meant centralisation. Where the Romans did not find towns they created them.[1134] Gradually, but rapidly, the isolated rural life became more social and urban. In the north-eastern province of Spain, out of 293 communities in the time of the elder Pliny, 179 were in some sense urban, 114 were still purely rustic;[1135] and we may be sure that this is an immense advance on the condition of the country at the time of the conquest. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, only 27 of these rural districts remained without an organised civic centre.[1136] In Gaul, Julius Caesar impressed the stamp of Rome on the province of Narbo, by founding cities of the Roman type, and his policy was continued by Augustus. The loose cantonal system almost disappeared from the province in the south, although it lingered long in the northern regions of Gaul. Yet even in the north, on the borders of Germany, Cologne, from the reign of Claudius, became the envy of the barbarians across the Rhine,[1137] and Trèves, from the days of Augustus, already anticipated its glory as a seat of empire from Diocletian to Gratian and Valentinian.[1138] In the Agri Decumates, between [pg 201]the Rhine and Neckar, the remains of baths and aqueducts, the mosaics and bronzes and pottery, which antiquarian industry has collected and explored, attest the existence of at least 160 flourishing and civilised communities.[1139] Baden was already a crowded resort for its healing waters when, in A.D. 69, it was given up to fire and sword by Caecina in his advance to meet the army of Otho in the valley of the Po.[1140] The Danube was lined with flourishing communities of Roman origin. In the 170 years during which Dacia was included in the Empire, more than 120 towns were organised by the conquering race.[1141] Greek cities, like Tomi on the Euxine, record their gratitude to their patrons in the same formal terms as Pompeii or Venusia.[1142] If we may believe Philostratus, there were 500 flourishing cities in the province of Asia which more than rivalled the splendour of Ionia before the Lydian and Persian conquests.[1143] Many of these were of ancient origin, but many had been founded by Rome.[1144] Laodicea was regarded as an unimportant place in the reign of Tiberius; yet the wealth of its private citizens was celebrated.[1145] One of them had attained a fortune which enabled him to bequeath it a sum of nearly half a million. The elder Pliny could reckon 40 cities of importance in Egypt, which had in his time a population of over seven millions;[1146] and Alexandria, next after Rome herself, was regarded as the most dazzling ornament of the Empire.[1147]
Perhaps nowhere, however, had the “Roman peace” worked greater miracles of civic prosperity than in North Africa. That the population of Roman Africa was in the period of the Empire extraordinarily dense, appears from the number of its episcopal sees, which in the fifth century had reached a total of 297.[1148] The remains of more than 20 amphitheatres can still be traced. There is indeed no more startling proof of the range and sweep of Roman civilisation than the wreck of [pg 202]those capitols, forums, aqueducts, and temples in what are now sandy solitudes, not even occupied by a native village. In the province of Numidia, within a few leagues of the Sahara, the Roman colony of Thamugadi (Timgad) was founded, as an inscription tells, by Trajan in the year 100.[1149] There, in what is now a scene of utter loneliness and desolation, the remains of a busy and well-organised community have been brought to light by French explorers. The town was built by the third legion, which for generations, almost as a hereditary caste, protected Roman civilisation against the restless tribes of the desert. The chief buildings were probably completed in 117. The preservation of so much, after eighteen centuries, is a proof that the work was well and thoroughly done. The ruts of carriage wheels can still be seen in the main street, which is spanned by a triumphal arch, adorned with marble columns. Porticoes and colonnades gave shelter from the heat to the passers-by, and two fountains played at the further end. Water, which is now invisible on the spot, was then brought in channels from the hills, and distributed at a fixed rate among private houses.[1150] The forum was in the usual style, with raised side walks and porticoes, a basilica, a senate-house and rostrum, a shrine of Fortuna Augusta, and a crowd of statues to the emperors from M. Aurelius to Julian.[1151] This petty place had its theatre, where the seats can still be seen rising in their due gradation of rank. An imposing capitol, in which, as at home, the Roman Trinity, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, were duly worshipped, was restored in the reign of Valentinian I., and dedicated by that Publius Caeionius Albinus who was one of the last of the pagan aristocracy, and who figures in the Letters of Symmachus and the Saturnalia of Macrobius.[1152] The inscriptions on the site reveal the regular municipal constitution, with the names of seventy decurions, each of whom probably paid his honorarium of £13 or more when he entered on his office.[1153] The honours of the duumvirate and the aedileship cost respectively £32 and £24.[1154] And here, as elsewhere, the [pg 203]public monuments and buildings were generally erected by private ambition or munificence. A statue and little shrine of Fortuna Augusta were given by two ladies, at a cost of over £200, in the days of Hadrian.[1155]