Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero

by W. Warde Fowler

The father of this Rabirius, says Cicero, had been a distinguished member of the equestrian order, and "fortissimus et maximus publicanus"; not greedy of money, but most liberal to his friends—in other words, he was not a miser, for that character was rare in this age, but lent his money freely in order to acquire influence and consideration. The son took up the same line of business, and engaged in a wide sphere of financial operations. He dealt largely in the stock of the tax-companies; he lent money to cities in several provinces; he lent money to Ptolemy Auletes, King of Egypt, both before he was expelled from his kingdom by sedition, and afterwards when he was in Rome in 59 and 58, intriguing to induce the senate to have him restored. Rabirius never doubted that he would be so restored, and seems to have failed to see the probability of such a policy being contested or quarrelled about, as actually happened in the winter of 57-56. He lent, and persuaded his friends to lend:[146] he represented the king's cause as a good investment; and then, like the investing agent of to-day who slips so easily from carelessness into crime, he had to go on lending more and more, because he feared that if he stopped the king might turn against him.

He had staked the mass of his substance on a desperate venture. But time went on and Ptolemy was not restored, and without the revenues of his kingdom he of course could not pay his creditors. At last, at the end of the year 56, Gabinius, then governor of Syria, had pressure put on him by the creditors—among them perhaps both Caesar and Pompeius—to march into Egypt without the authority of the senate. He took Rabirius with him, and, in order to secure the repayment, the latter was made superintendent (dioikaetaes) of the Egyptian revenues[147]. Unluckily for him, his wily debtor did after all turn against him, and he escaped from Egypt with difficulty and with the loss of all his wealth. When Gabinius was accused de repetundis and found guilty of accepting enormous sums from Ptolemy, Rabirius was involved in the same prosecution as having received part of the money; Cicero defended him, and as it seems with success, on the plea that equites were not liable to prosecution under the lex Julia. Towards the end of his speech he drew a clever picture of his unlucky client's misfortunes, and declared that he would have had to quit the Forum, i.e. to leave the Stock Exchange in disgrace, if Caesar had not come to his rescue by placing large sums at his disposal.

What Rabirius did was simply to gamble on a gigantic scale, and get others to gamble with him. The luck turned against him, and he came utterly to grief. There seems indeed to have been a perfect passion for dealing with money in this wild way among the men of wealth and influence; it was the fancy of the hour, and no disgrace attached to it if a man could escape ruin. Thus the vast capital accumulated—the sources of which were almost entirely in the provinces and the kingdoms on the frontiers—was hardly ever used productively. It never returned to the region whence it came, to be used in developing its resources; the idea of using it even in Italy for industrial undertakings was absent from the mind of the gambler. Those numberless villas, of which we shall speak in another chapter, were homes of luxury and magnificence, not centres of agricultural industry. There are indeed some signs that in this very generation the revival of Italian agriculture was beginning, and more especially the cultivation of the olive and the vine; Varro, some twenty years later, could claim that Italy was the best cultivated country in the world.[148] It may be that the din of the "insanum forum" and its wild speculation has prevented our hearing of the quiet efforts in the country to put capital to a legitimate productive use. But of the social life of the city the Forum was the heart, and of any prudent or scientific use of capital the Forum knew hardly anything.

Of the two classes of business men we have been describing, the tax-farmers and the money-lenders, it is hard to say which wrought the most mischief in the Empire; they played into each other's hands in wringing money out of the helpless provincials. Together too they did incalculable harm, morally and socially, among the upper strata of Roman society at home. Economic maladies react upon the mental, and moral condition of a State. Where the idea of making money for its own sake, or merely for the sake of the pleasure derivable from excitement, is paramount in the minds of so large a section of society, moral perception quickly becomes warped. The sense of justice disappears, because when the fever is on a man he does not stop to ask whether his gains are ill-gotten; and in this age the only restriction on the plundering of the subjects of the Empire was a legal one, and that of no great efficacy. There are many repulsive things in the exquisite poetry of Catullus, but none of them jar on the modern mind quite so sharply as his virulent attacks on a provincial governor in whose suite he had gone to Bithynia in the hope of enriching himself, and under whose just administration he had failed to do so. There is lost also the sense of a duty arising out of the possession of wealth—the feeling that it should do some good in the world, or at least be in part applied to some useful purpose. Lastly, the exciting pursuit of wealth helps to produce a curious restlessness and instability of character, of which we have many examples in the age we are studying. "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," are words that might be applied to many a young man among Cicero's acquaintance, and to many women also.

No sudden operation could cure these evils—they needed the careful and gradual treatment of a wise physician. As in so many other ways, so here Augustus showed his wonderful instinct as a social reformer. The first requisite of all was an age of comparative peace—a healthy atmosphere in which the patient could recover his natural tone. Next in importance was the removal of the incitement to enrich yourself and to spend illegally or unprofitably, and the revival of a sense of duty towards the State and its rulers. Provincial governors were made more really responsible, and a scientific census revealed the actual tax-paying capacity of the provincials; tax-farming was more closely superintended and gradually disappeared. It is true enough that even under the Empire great fortunes were made and lost, but the gambling spirit, the wild recklessness in monetary dealings, are not met with again. The Roman Forum ceased to be insane, and Italy became once more the home of much happy and useful country life. The passionate and reckless self-consciousness of Catullus is succeeded in the next generation by the calm sweet hopefulness of Virgil; in passing from the one poet to the other, we feel that we are leaving behind us an age of over-sensitive self-seeking and entering on one in which duty and honour, labour on the land and hard work for the State, may be reckoned as things more likely to make life worth living than all the accumulated capital of a Crassus.

CHAPTER IV

THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY

Above the men of business of equestrian rank, in social standing though not necessarily in wealth, there was in Cicero's time an aristocracy which a Roman of that day would perhaps have found it a little difficult to explain or define to a foreigner. Fortunately all foreigners coming to Rome would know what was meant by the senate, the great council which received envoys from all nations outside the Empire; and the stranger might be told in the first place that all members of that august assembly, with their families, were considered as elevated above the equestrian order, and as forming the main body of the aristocracy proper. But if the informant were by chance a conservative Roman of old family, he might proceed to qualify this definition. "There are now in the senate," he might say, "plenty of men who are only there because they have held the quaestorship, which Sulla made the qualification for a seat, and there are many equites whom Sulla made into senators by the form of a vote of the people; such men, even the great orator Cicero himself, I do not reckon as really members of the nobility, because they do not belong to old families who have done the State good service in past time. They have no images of their ancestors in their houses; they come from municipal towns, or spring from some low family in the city; they may have raised themselves by their talents, perhaps only by their money, but they have no guarantee of antiquity, their names are not in our annals. All we true conservative Romans (and a, Roman is hardly a Roman if not conservative) profoundly believe that a man whose family has once attained to high public honour and done good public service, will be a safer person to elect as a magistrate than one whose family is unknown and untried—a belief which is surely based on a truth of human nature. I should count a man who happens not to be in the senate himself, for want of wealth or inclination, but whose family has its images and its traditions of great ancestors, as far more truly an "optimate" than most of these new men. Fortunately our most famous families, whose names are known all over the Empire, are still to be found in the senate, and indeed form a powerful body there, capable of resisting to the last the revolutionary dangers that threaten us. The people still elect to magistracies the Aemilii, Lutatii, Claudii, Cornelii, Julii, and many more families that have been famous in our history, and will, I trust, continue to elect them so long as our Republic lasts."[149]

There was indeed a glamour about these splendid names, as there is about the titles of our ancient noble families; their holders may almost be said to have claimed high office as a right, like the Whig families Of the Revolution for a century after their triumph. Though we may use the word in a wider sense in this chapter, these grand old families were the true aristocracy, and inspired just that respect in the minds of men outside their circle which is still so familiar to us in England. Cicero was to such men an "outsider," a novus homo; and the close reader of Cicero's letters, if he is looking out (as he should be) for Cicero's constantly changing attitude of mind as he addresses himself to various correspondents, cannot fail to see how comparatively awkward and stilted he often is when writing to one of these great nobles, with whom he has never been really intimate; and how easily his pen glides along when he is letting himself talk to Atticus, or Poetus, or M. Marius, men who were outside the pale of nobility. It is true that he is sometimes embarrassed in other ways when writing to great personages, as, for example, Lentulus Spinther, consul in 57, or to Appius Claudius, consul in 53; but had they been men of his own kind he never would have felt that embarrassment in the same degree. When writing to such men he rarely or never indulges in those little sportive jokes or allusions which enliven his more intimate correspondence, nor does he tell the truth so strictly, for they might not always care to hear it.

Here is a specimen which will give some idea of his manner in writing to an aristocrat: he is congratulating L. Aemilius Paullus, who secured his election to the consulship in the summer of 51 B.C.: