Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

The election of a patron was an event of great moment, especially to a poor college. And it was conducted with a formal preciseness, and an assumption of dignity, which, at this distance of time, are sometimes rather ludicrous. In a little town of Cisalpine Gaul in the year 190, the college of smiths and clothworkers met in solemn session in their temple. Their quaestors, who may have had the financial condition of the college in view, made a formal proposal that the college should set an example of the judicious reward of merit, by electing one Tutilius Julianus, a man distinguished by his modesty and liberality, as the patron of their society. The meeting [pg 275]commended the sage proposal of the quaestors, and formally resolved that the honourable Julianus should be requested to accept the distinction, with an apology for so tardy a recognition of his merits, and that a brass plate, containing a copy of this decree, should be placed above his door.[1527]

It is significant that the patrons were, in very many cases, Seviri and Augustales, a body which in the provinces, as we have seen, was generally composed of new men of the freedman class. Although they were steadily rising in importance and in strength of organisation, the provincial Augustales always ranked after the decurions of a town. They often displayed boundless liberality to their city and to their own order.[1528] But the leading Augustales seem to have been quite as generous to the other corporations who placed themselves under their patronage. And they were not unfrequently patrons of several colleges.[1529] It is no long task to find men who were the titular protectors of two or three, of eight, or even of as many as twelve or fifteen colleges. One inscription to Cn. Sentius of Ostia would seem to include among his dependents almost every industrial college in that busy port.[1530] Sentius must have been a very wealthy and a very generous man to accept the patronage of so many societies, which in those days expected or demanded that their honours should be paid for in solid cash. The crowning distinction of a statue, or a durable inscription, was often solemnly decreed with all seemly forms of deference or unstinted flattery in a full meeting of the society. But in a great majority of cases we are amused or disgusted to read that, after all his other liberalities, the benefactor or his heir is permitted to pay for the record of popular gratitude.[1531] This fact may explain the extraordinary abundance of these honours, if it somewhat lowers their value in the eyes of posterity.

But, besides the benefactions which sprang either from ambition or real generosity, a vast number were inspired by the Roman passion for long remembrance, and for the continuity of funerary ritual. The very position of so many tombs by the side of the great roads beyond the city gates, was a silent [pg 276]appeal to the passing traveller not to forget the departed. The appeal is also often expressly made on the stone by those who had no other means of prolonging their own memory or that of some one they loved. It is impossible to read without some emotion the prayer of an old Spanish soldier, that his brethren of the college may never suffer grief like his, if they will only keep the lamp burning for ever over the tomb of his child.[1532] The more opulent took more elaborate measures to provide for the guardianship of their “last home.”[1533] They often attached to the tomb a field or gardens of considerable extent, to be cultivated for profit, or to bear the roses for the annual offering. The whole area, the dimensions of which, in many inscriptions, are defined with mathematical precision, would be surrounded by a wall. Within the enclosure there would be a little shrine containing statues of the dead, an arbour and a well, and a hall in which the kindred of coming generations might hold their annual banquet, till the tie was dissolved by the cruel oblivion of time.[1534] There will be a cottage (taberna) in which a freedman or dependent of the house may be lodged, to watch over the repose of the dead.[1535] But all these precautions, as the testator feels, were likely to be defeated in the end by the vicissitudes of human fortunes.[1536] He had, indeed, before his eyes the fate of many a forsaken and forgotten tomb of old worthies of the Republic. Families die out; faithful freedmen and their children cannot keep their watch for ever. The garden will grow wild, a time may come when no kindly hand will pour the libation or scatter the roses on the natal day. Families will die out, but a college may go on for ever by the perpetual renewal of its members. Inspired with this idea, a worthy of Nîmes created a funerary college to dine regularly in his honour.[1537] It was to consist of thirty persons, and the number was to be maintained by co-optation into the places of deceased members. Members of the college who were obliged to be absent might send one of their friends to join in the repast. Thus the dead man, who had taken such care to prolong his [pg 277]memory, would at no distant date be festively celebrated by people who barely knew his name. Many another left a bequest to a college to be spent in a feast on the testator’s memorial day.[1538] A freedman of Mevania leaves a tiny legacy of HS.1000 to the guild of clothworkers, of whom he is patron, with the condition that not less than twelve of their number shall feast once a year in memory of him.[1539] A more liberal provision for convivial enjoyment was left to a college of Silvanus in honour of Domitian. It consisted of the rents of four estates, with their appurtenances, which were to be spent on the birthdays of the emperor and his wife, “for all time to come,” with the sacrifices proper to such a holy season.[1540] Due provision is often made for the seemly and impressive performance of a rite which was at once a religious duty and a convivial pleasure. There is a curious letter of the time of Antoninus Pius containing a deed of gift to the college of the fabri at Narbo, in return for their constant favours to the donor. One Sextus Fadius presents them with the sum of 16,000 sesterces, the interest of which is to be divided every year at the end of April for ever, at a banquet on his birthday; the guests on this festive occasion are to be habited in their handsomest attire.[1541]

But the fullest and minutest arrangements for these modest meals are to be found in the document relating to the foundation of the poor college of Diana and Antinous, to which reference has already been made. The master of the feast was taken in regular order from the roll of the society. Each brother had to accept this office in his turn, or pay a fine of five shillings of our money. The regular festivals of the club were six in the year, on the natal days of Diana and Antinous, and those of the founder and some of his relatives. There is some obscurity in the regulations for these common feasts, and at first sight they are a ludicrous contrast to the pontiff’s famous banquet in the days of Julius Caesar, described by Macrobius.[1542] M. Boissier naturally refuses to imagine that even the poor brethren of the club of Diana and Antinous would be contented with bread, four sardines, a bottle of good wine, with hot water and the [pg 278]proper table service. The slave steward of Horace probably found much better fare in his popina.[1543] Dr. Mommsen has resolved the mystery. It is evident, from several inscriptions, that sportulae were sharply distinguished from distributions of bread and wine.[1544] The sportula was a gift of richer food or dainties, which in public distributions might be carried home; it was sometimes an equivalent in money. If those who received the sportula preferred to enjoy it at a common table, an appointed member of the college would have the food prepared, or convert the money into dishes for the feast. The bread and wine he might add from his own pocket, if they were not provided by the foundation. How much for these meals came from the club funds, and how much out of the pocket of the magister coenae, is not always clearly stated. But we may be sure, from the tone of the times, that additions to a modest menu were often made by the generosity of patrons and officers of the club.

It would be futile and uninteresting to pursue into all its minute details throughout the inscriptions, the system of sportulae founded by so many patrons and benefactors. Any one who wishes can temperately regale himself for hours at these shadowy club-feasts of the second century. Perhaps the clearest example of such distributions is the donation of Marcellina and Aelius Zeno to the little college of Aesculapius, to which reference has been made for another purpose.[1545] On seven different anniversaries and festivals, sums of money, with bread and wine, were distributed to the brethren of the college in due proportions, according to their official dignity and social rank. Thus, in the division on the 4th of November, the fête-day of the society, the shares in money, according to the various grades, from the father of the college downwards, are six, four, and two. The division of the wine, according to social rank, follows the proportion of nine, six, and three. A slightly different scale is followed on the birthday of the Emperor Antoninus Pius in September, and on the day for New Year’s gifts in January. But in these benefactions the difference of grade is always observed, the patron and the chief magistrates and [pg 279]magnates of the society always receiving a larger share than the obscure brethren at the bottom of the list. In the college of Aesculapius, Marcellina herself, and Aelius Zeno, the two great benefactors of the society, along with the highest of its dignitaries, are allotted three times as much as the plebeian brother. The excellent Marcellina, who, in the fourth century might perhaps have followed S. Jerome and Paula to Bethlehem, was the widow of a good and tender husband, who had been curator of the imperial picture galleries.[1546] Had she been drawn into the ranks of that hidden society, who were beginning to lay their dead in the winding vaults beneath the Appian Way, she would certainly have dealt out her bounty on a different scale and on different principles. Her bequest to the college of Aesculapius reveals how deep in the soul of a charitable pagan woman, who was probably sprung from servile stock, lay that aristocratic instinct of the Roman world which survived the advent of the Divine Peasant and the preaching of the fishermen of Galilee, for far more than four hundred years.

The most curious and interesting among the regulations for these club entertainments are those relating to order and decorum. The club of Diana and Antinous was not very select, being probably composed of poor freedmen and slaves.[1547] The manners of this class, if we may judge by the picture given by Petronius, were, to say the least, wanting in reserve and self-restraint. The great object of such reunions was, as the founder tells us, that the brethren might dine together cheerfully and quietly.[1548] Hence he most wisely orders that all serious proposals and complaints shall be reserved for business meetings. If any member quits his place or makes a disturbance, he is to pay a fine of four sesterces. Twelve sesterces is the penalty for insulting a fellow-guest. The man who, under the influence of good wine, so far forgot himself as to insult the chief officer of the society, was to be punished by a forfeit of twenty sesterces, which would probably be a powerful discouragement of bad manners to most of the brotherhood of Antinous.

Many another gift or bequest, of the same character as [pg 280]Marcellina’s, meets the eye of the student of the inscriptions The motives are singularly uniform—to repay the honours conferred by a college, to celebrate the dedication of a statue, to save from forgetfulness a name which to us is only a bit of the wreckage of time. Everything is conventional about these bequests. The money is nearly always left for the same purpose, an anniversary repast in honour of the humble dead, of the emperor, or of the patron gods. Sometimes the burial fee is refunded to the college, with the prayer that on the natal day the poor pittance derived from the gift be spent on pious rites, with roses strewn upon the grave.[1549] Another will beg only that the lamp in the humble vault may be kept for ever burning. These pieties and longings, which have their roots in a rude pagan past before the dawn of history, were destined to prolong their existence far into Christian times. The lamp will be kept burning over many a tomb of saint or martyr in the fourth or fifth century. And the simple feasts which the clothworkers of Brescia, or the boatmen of Ostia or Lyons, observed to do honour to some departed patron, will be celebrated, often in riotous fashion, over the Christian dead in the days of S. Augustine and S. Paulinus of Nola.[1550]

Dr. Mommsen believes that the collegiate life which blossomed forth so luxuriantly in the early Empire, was modelled on the sacred union of the Roman family.[1551] And the instinct of the Roman nature for continuity in institutions prepossesses us in favour of the theory. In the college endowed by Marcellina and Zeno, there are a father and a mother, and elsewhere we read of daughters of a college. The members sometimes call themselves brethren and sisters.[1552] One of the feasts of the brotherhood is on the day sacred to “dear kinship,” when relations gathered round a common table, to forget in kindly intercourse any disturbance of affection.[1553] They also met in the early days of January, when presents were exchanged. Above all, like the primal society, they gathered on the birthdays of the revered dead to whom they owed duty and remembrance. And in many cases the members of the society reposed beside [pg 281]one another in death.[1554] The college was a home of fraternal equality in one sense. As M. Boissier has pointed out, the members had equal rights in the full assembly of the club. A quorum was needed to pass decrees and to elect the officers. And, in the full conclave, the slave member had an equal voice with the freeman, and might, perchance, himself even be elected to a place of dignity.[1555] He might thus, in a very humble realm, wield authority for the time over those who were accustomed to despise him. It is true that he needed his master’s leave to join a college, and his master had the legal power to deny to him the last boon of burial by the hands of his collegiate brethren.[1556] Yet it was undoubtedly a great stride in advance when a slave could sit at table or in council on equal terms with free-born men, and might receive pious Roman burial, instead of being tossed like a piece of carrion into a nameless grave. The society of one of these humble colleges must have often for the moment relieved the weariness and misery of the servile life, and awakened, or kept alive, some sense of self-respect and dignity. The slave may have now and then felt himself even on the edge of political influence, as when his college placarded its sympathies in an election contest on the walls of Pompeii. Yet we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by words and appearances. In spite of legislative reform, in spite of a growing humane sentiment, whether in the Porch or the Christian Church, the lot of the slave and of the poor plebeian will be in many respects as hopeless and degraded in the reign of Honorius as it was in the reign of Trajan.[1557] Even in the reign of Trajan, it is true, perhaps even in the reign of Nero, there were great houses like the younger Pliny’s, where the slaves were treated as humble friends, where their weddings were honoured by the presence of the master, where, in spite of legal disabilities, they were allowed to dispose of their savings by will.[1558] And the inscriptions record the gratitude [pg 282]and affection to their masters and mistresses of many who were in actual slavery, or who had but just emerged from it. But these instances cannot make us forget the cruel contempt and barbarity of which the slave was still the victim, and which was to be his lot for many generations yet to run. And therefore the improvement in the condition of the slave or of his poor plebeian brother by the theoretical equality in the colleges, may be easily exaggerated. In the humblest of these clubs, the distribution of good fare and money is not according to the needs of the members, but regulated by their social and official rank. We cannot feel confident that in social intercourse the same distinction may not have been coldly observed. In modern times we often see a readiness to accord an equality of material enjoyment, along with a stiff guardianship of social distinctions which are often microscopic to the detached observer. And it would not be surprising to discover that the “master” or the “mother” of the college of Antinous protected their dignity by an icy reserve at its festive meetings.

The question has been raised whether the ordinary colleges were in any sense charitable institutions for mutual help. And certainly the inscriptions are singularly wanting in records of bequests made directly for the relief of poverty, for widows and orphans or the sick. The donations or bequests of rich patrons seem to have had chiefly two objects in view, the commemoration of the dead and the provision for social and convivial enjoyment. It is true that, just as in municipal feasts, there is often a distribution of money among the members of colleges. But this appears to be deprived of an eleemosynary character by the fact that by far the largest shares are assigned to those who were presumably the least in need of them. Yet it is to be recollected that we probably have left to us the memorial of only a small proportion of these gifts, and that, if we had a full list of all the benefactions bequeathed to some of the colleges, the total amount received by each member in the year might be very considerable, if judged by the standard of ordinary plebeian incomes. To the ambitious slave any addition, however small, to his growing peculium, which might enable him to buy his freedom, would certainly be grateful.

There is one class of colleges, however, which were un[pg 283]doubtedly formed to meet various exigencies in the course of life, as well as to make a provision for decent burial. These are the military clubs, on the objects and constitution of which a flood of light has been thrown by the study of the inscriptions in the great legionary camps of North Africa.[1559] A passage of Vegetius shows us the provident arrangement made by government for the future of the ordinary legionary.[1560] It is well known that, on the accession of each new emperor, or on the occurrence of some interesting event in the history of the prince’s family, or of some great military success, and often without any particular justification, a donative was distributed throughout the army. It sometimes reached a considerable amount, ranging from the 25 denarii granted by Vespasian, to the 5000 of M. Aurelius.[1561] One half of this largess was by orders set aside, and retained under the custody of the standard-bearers, to provide a pension on the soldier’s retirement from the service. Another fund, entirely different, was formed by the soldiers’ own contributions, to furnish a decent burial for those who died on service. But the law against the formation of colleges fell with peculiar severity on the soldier.[1562] Not even for a religious purpose was he permitted to join such a society. This prohibition, however, seems to have been relaxed in the case of the officers, and some of the more highly skilled corps.[1563] And we have among the inscriptions of Lambaesis a few instructive records of these military colleges.[1564]