by Will Durant
The language, like the people, was practical and economical, martially sharp and brief; its sentences and clauses marched in disciplined subordination to a determined goal. A thousand similarities allied it, within the Indo-European family, with Sanskrit and Greek and the Celtic tongues of ancient Gaul, Wales, and Ireland. Latin was poorer than Greek in imagery, flexibility, and ready formation of compounds; Lucretius and Cicero complained of its limited vocabulary, its lack of subtle shadings. Nevertheless, it had a sonorous splendor and masculine strength that made it ideal for oratory, and a compactness and logical sentence form that made it an apt vehicle for Roman law. The Latin alphabet came from Euboean Chalcis via Cumae and Etruria.41 In the oldest Latin inscription known to us, ascribed to the sixth century B.C., all the letters are Greek in form. C was sounded like our K, J like Y, V like U or W, the vowels as in Italian. Caesar’s contemporaries knew him as Yooleoos Keyssar, and Cicero was Keekero.
The Romans wrote in ink with a slit metal reed (calamus, stilus), at first upon leaves (folia), whence our words folio and leaf (two pages); then upon strips of inner bark (liber); often upon white (album) tablets of waxed wood; later upon leather, linen paper, and parchment. As the written forms of Latin resisted change more than the spoken words, the language of literature diverged more and more from the speech of the people, as in modern America or France. The melodious Romance languages—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Rumanian—evolved from the crude popular Latin brought to the provinces, not by poets and grammarians, but by soldiers, merchants, and adventurers. So the words for horse in the Romance languages—caballo, cavallo, cheval, cal—were taken from the spoken Latin caballus, not from the written equus. In popular Latin ille (he) was one syllable, like French and Italian il; and final -s and -m were, as in those languages, dropped or not pronounced. The best came from a corruption of the worst: corruptio pessimi optima.
What literature did the young Roman read in those first three centuries of the Republic? There were religious hymns and chants, such as the song of the Arval Brethren, and there were popular lays of Rome’s historic or legendary past. There were official—usually priestly—records of elections, magistracies, events, portents, and holidays.II On the basis of these archives Q. Fabius Pictor compiled (202 B.C.) a respectable History of Rome—but in Greek; Latin was not yet thought fit for literary prose and was not used by historians until Cato. There were farragoes of prose called saturae—medleys of merry nonsense and erotic banter—out of which Lucilius would forge a new form for Horace and Juvenal. There were boisterously obscene burlesques or mimes, usually acted by players from Etruria; some of these performers, coming from the town of Istria, were named istriones, and gave the word histrio (actor) to Latin, and its derivatives to modern tongues. There were also, on holidays or market days, crude, half-impromptu farces that gave their stock characters to thousands of Italian comedies, ancient and modern: the rich and stupid father, the extravagant love-entangled youth, the maligned virgin, the clever intriguing servant, the glutton always maneuvering for a meal, the rollicking, tumbling clown. Already the last flaunted the gaily colored patches, the long expansive trousers, the large-sleeved doublet, and the shorn head, still familiar to our youth. An exact likeness of Punchinello, or Punch, has been found on the frescoes of Pompeii.42
Literature came formally to Rome about 272 B.C. in the person of a Greek slave. In that year Tarentum fell; many of its Greek citizens were slaughtered, but Livius Andronicus had the luck to be merely enslaved. Brought to Rome, he taught Latin and Greek to his master’s children and some others, and translated the Odyssey for them into Latin “Saturnian” verse—lines of loose and irregular rhythm, scanned by accent rather than quantity. Freed for his services, he was commissioned by the aediles to produce a tragedy and a comedy for the ludi, or games, of 240 B.C. He composed them on Greek models, directed them, acted the main parts, and sang them to the accompaniment of a flute till his voice gave out; then he had another sing the lines while he acted them—a method followed in many later plays at Rome, and influential in generating the pantomime. The government was so well pleased by this introduction of the literary drama that in honor of Andronicus it gave poets the right to incorporate, and allowed them to hold their meetings in the Temple of Minerva on the Aventine. Henceforth it became the fashion to present such ludi scenici, or scenic plays, at the public festivals.43
Five years after this historic première a plebeian ex-soldier from Campania, Cnaeus Naevius, shocked the conservatives by producing a comedy in which he satirized with Aristophanic freedom the political abuses that were flourishing in the capital. The old families complained, and Naevius was jailed. He apologized and was freed, wrote another satire as sharp a the first, and was banished from Rome. In exile and old age he composed, with undiscourageable patriotism, an epic poem on the First Punic War, in which he had fought; it began with the founding of Rome by Trojan refugees, and provided Virgil with a theme and several scenes. His condemnation was a double misfortune: the vitality and originality of Roman comedy suffered from a censorship that made libel a capital crime, and Roman politics lost the purge of a public critique. Naevius wrote also a poetic drama based on Roman history; this experiment too ended with him, and thereafter Roman tragedy circled vainly in the cropped pastures of Greek myth. Only a few fragments survive to reveal Naevius’ quality. One describes a coquettish girl:
As if playing ball in a ring she skips from one to another, and is all things to all men with her words and winks, her caresses and embraces; now a squeeze of the hand or a pressure of the foot; her ring to look at, her lips to blow an inviting kiss; here a song, there the language of signs.44
It is pleasant to see that women were then as charming as now, that not all Romans were Catos, and that under the shadow of the Porch even virtue might take a holiday.
Beyond the essentials of arithmetic, and enough geometry to plot a farm or plan a temple, science played as yet no part in the education or culture of the Roman citizen. The boy counted on his fingers (digita), and the figures he used were imitations of an extended digit (I), a hand (V), or two hands joined at their apexes (X); and he was content to form the other numerals by repeating these symbols (II, III), and prefixing (IV, IX) or suffixing (VI, XII) digits to V or X to lessen or increase them. Out of this manual arithmetic came the decimal system, constructed on parts and multiples of ten—i.e., the ten fingers. The Romans used geometry well in building and engineering, but added not one theorem to that rounded achievement of the Greek mind. We hear nothing of Roman astronomy in this period except in its presperous sister or mother—astrology.
Medicine, till the third century, was largely a matter of family herbs, magic, and prayer; the gods alone could heal; and to make cure certain a special god was invoked for each disease 45—as one now invokes a specialist. Against the mosquitoes of the Roman campagna appeal was made to the goddesses Febris and Mephitis, as, until our century, the Romans petitioned La Madonna della Febbre, Our Lady of the Fever.46 Healing shrines and sacred waters were as common as today. The temple of Aesculapius was a busy center of religious healing, where diet and hydrotherapy, peaceful surroundings and a quiet routine, prayer and the soothing ritual of worship, the aid of practical physicians and the cheerfulness of skilled attendants, conspired to restore confidence and to effect apparently miraculous cures.47 Nevertheless, there were slave doctors and quacks in Rome five centuries before Christ; and some of these practiced dentistry, for the Twelve Tables forbade the burial of gold with the dead except where gold had been used to wire teeth.48 In 219 we hear of the first freeman physician in Rome—Archagathus the Peloponnesian. His surgical operations so delighted the patricians that the Senate voted him an official residence and the freedom of the city; later his “mania for cutting and burning” won him the name of Carnifex, butcher.49 From that time onward Greek physicians flocked to Rome, and made the practice of medicine there a Greek monopoly.
V. THE GROWTH OF THE SOIL
; The Roman of those centuries had little need of medicine, for his active life in farming or soldiering kept him healthy and strong. He took to the land as the Greek to the sea; he based his life on the soil, built his towns as meeting places for farmers and their products, organized his armies and his state on his readiness to defend and extend his holdings, and conceived his gods as spirits of the living earth and the nourishing sky.
As far back as we can reach into Rome’s past we find private property.50 Part of the land, however, was ager publicus—public acreage usually acquired by conquest and owned by the state. The peasant family of the early Republic owned two or three acres, tilled them with all hands and occasionally a slave, and lived abstemiously on the product. They slept on straw,51 rose early, stripped to the waist,52 and plowed and harrowed behind leisurely oxen whose droppings served as fertilizer, and their flesh as a religious offering and a festival food. Human offal was also used to enrich the soil, but chemical fertilizers were rare in Italy before the Empire. Manuals of scientific agriculture were imported from Carthage and Greece. Crops were rotated between grains and legumes, and lands were turned periodically to pasturage to prevent their exhaustion. Vegetables and fruits were grown in abundance, and formed, next to grains, the chief articles of food. Garlic was already a favorite seasoning. Some aristocratic families derived their names in part from the vegetables traditionally favored in their plantings: Lentuli, Caepiones, Fabii, from lentils, onions, beans. Culture of the fig, olive, and grape gradually encroached upon cereal and vegetable crops. Olive oil took the place of butter in the diet and of soap in the bath; it served as fuel in torches and lamps and was the chief ingredient in the unguents made necessary for hair and skin by the dry winds and fiery sun of the Mediterranean summer. Sheep were the favorite herd, for the Italians preferred clothing of wool. Swine and poultry were raised in the farmyard, and almost every family nursed a garden of flowers.54
War transformed this picture of rural toil. Many of the farmers who changed plowshares for swords were overcome by the enemy or the town and never returned to their fields; many others found their holdings so damaged by armies or neglect that they had not the courage to begin anew; others were broken by accumulated debt. Such men sold their lands at depression prices to aristocrats or agricultural capitalists who merged the little homesteads into latifundia (literally, broad farms), turned these vast areas from cereals to flocks and herds, orchards and vines, and manned them with war-captured slaves under an overseer who was often himself a slave. The owners rode in now and then to look at their property; they no longer put their hands to the work, but lived as absentee landlords in their suburban villas or in Rome. This process, already under way in the fourth century B.C., had by the end of the third produced a debt-ridden tenant class in the countryside, and in the capital a propertyless, rootless proletariat whose sullen discontent would destroy the Republic that peasant toil had made.
VI. INDUSTRY
The soil was poor in minerals—a fact that would write much economic and political history in Italy. There was no gold and little silver; there was a fair supply of iron, some copper, lead, tin, and zinc, but too scarce to support an industrial development. The state owned all mines in the empire, but leased them to private operators, who worked them profitably by using up the lives of thousands of slaves. Metallurgy and technology made few advances. Bronze was still employed more frequently than iron, and only the best and latest mines were equipped with the winches, windlasses, and chain buckets that Archimedes and others had set up in Sicily and Egypt. The chief fuel was wood; trees were cut also for houses and ships and furniture; mile by mile, decade by decade, the forest retreated up the mountainside to meet the timber line. The most prosperous industry was the manufacture of weapons and tools in Campania. There was no factory system, except for armament and pottery. Potters made not only dishes but bricks and tiles, conduits and pipes; at Arretium and elsewhere the potters were copying Greek models and learning to make artistic wares. As early as the sixth century the textile industry, in the design, preparation, and dyeing of linen and wool, had grown beyond the domestic stage despite the busy spinning of daughters, wives, and slaves; free and unfree weavers were brought together in small factories, which produced not only for the local market but also for export trade.
Industrial production for nonlocal consumption was arrested by difficulties of transport. Roads were poor, bridges unsafe, oxcarts slow, inns rare, robbers plentiful. Hence traffic moved by choice along canals and rivers, while coastal towns imported by sea rather than from their hinterland. By 202, however, the Romans had built three of their great “consular roads”—so called because usually named after the consuls or censors who began them. Soon these highways would far surpass in durability and extent the Persian and Carthaginian roads that had served them as models. The oldest of them was the via Latina which, about 370 B.C., brought Romans out to the Alban hills. In 312 Appius Claudius the Blind, with the labor of thousands of criminals,55 started the via Appia, or Appian Way, between Rome and Capua; later it reached out to Beneventum, Venusia, Brundisium, and Tarentum; its 333 English miles bound the two coasts, eased trade with Greece and the East, and collaborated with the other roads to make Italy one nation. In 241 the censor Aurelius Cotta began the Aurelian Way from Rome through Pisa and Genoa to Antibes. Caius Flaminius in 220 opened the Flaminian Way to Ariminum; and about the same time the Valerian Way connected Tibur with Corfinium. Slowly the majestic network grew: the Aemilian Way climbed north from Ariminum through Bononia and Mutina to Placentia (187); the Postumian Way linked Genoa with Verona (148); and the via Popilia led from Ariminum through Ravenna to Padua (132). In the following century roads would dart out from Italy to York, Vienna, Thessalonica, and Damascus, and would line the north African coast. They defended, unified, and vitalized the Empire by quickening the movement of troops, intelligence, customs, and ideas; they became great channels of commerce, and played no minor role in the peopling and enrichment of Italy and Europe.
Despite these highways, trade never flourished in Italy as in the eastern Mediterranean. The upper classes looked with contempt upon buying cheap and selling dear, and left trade to Greek and Oriental freedmen; while the countryside contented itself with occasional fairs, and “ninth-day” markets in the towns. Foreign commerce was similarly moderate. Sea transport was risky; ships were small, made only six miles an hour sailing or rowing, hugged the coast, and for the most part kept timidly in port from November to March. Carthage controlled the western Mediterranean, the Hellenistic monarchies controlled the east, and pirates periodically swept out of their lairs upon merchants relatively more honest than themselves. The Tiber was perpetually silting its mouth and blocking Rome’s port at Ostia; two hundred vessels foundered there in one gale; besides, the current was so strong that the voyage upstream to Rome hardly repaid the labor and the cost. About 200 B.C.. vessels began to put in at Puteoli, 150 miles south of Rome, and ship their goods overland to the capital.
To facilitate this external and internal trade it became necessary to establish a state-guaranteed system of coinage, measures, and weights.III Till the fourth century B.C. cattle were still accepted as a medium of exchange, since they were universally valuable and easily moved. As trade grew, rude chunks of copper (aes) were used as money (ca. 330 B.C.); estimate was originally aes tumare, to value copper. The unit of value was the as (one)—i.e., one pound of copper by weight; ex-pend meant weighed out. When, about 338 B.C., a copper coinage was issued by the state, it often bore the image of an ox, a sheep, or a hog, and was accordingly called pecunia (pecus, cattle). In the First Punic War, says Pliny, “the Republic, not having means to meet its needs, reduced the as to two ounces of copper; by this contrivance a saving of five sixths was effected, and the public debt was liquidated.”56 By 202 the as had fallen to an ounce; and in 87 B.C. it was reduced to half an ounce to help finance the Social War. In 269 two silver coins were minted: the denarius, equal to ten asses, and corresponding to
the Athenian drachma in the latter’s depreciated Hellenistic form; and the sestertius, representing two and a half asses, or a quarter of a denarius. In 217 appeared the first Roman gold coins—the aurei—with values of twenty, forty, and sixty sesterces. In metallic equivalence the as would equal two, the sesterce five, the denarius twenty, cents in the currency of the United States; but as precious metals were much less plentiful than now, and therefore had a purchasing power several times greater than today,57 we shall, ignoring price fluctuations before Nero, roughly equate the as, sesterce, denarius, and talent (6000 denarii) of the Roman Republic with six, fifteen, and sixty cents, and $3600 respectively, in terms of United States currency in 1942.IV
The issuance of this guaranteed currency promoted the profession and operations of finance. The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples; and the state continued to the end to use its strongly built shrines as repositories for public funds, perhaps on the theory that religious scruples would help discourage robbery. Moneylending was an old business, for the Twelve Tables had forbidden interest above eight and one third per cent per annum.60 The legal rate was lowered to five per cent in 347, and to zero in 342, but this Aristotelian prohibition was so easily evaded that the actual minimum rate averaged twelve per cent. Usury (above twelve per cent) was widespread, and debtors had periodically to be rescued from their accumulating obligations by bankruptcy or legislation. In 352 B.C. the government used a very modern method of relief: it took over such mortgages as offered a fair chance of repayment, and persuaded mortgagees to accept a lower interest rate on the others.61 One of the streets adjoining the Forum became a banker’s row, crowded with the shops of the moneylenders (argentarii) and money-changers (trapezitae). Money could be borrowed on land, crops, securities, or government contracts, and for financing commercial enterprises or voyages. Co-operative lending took the place of industrial insurance; instead of one banker completely underwriting a venture, several joined in providing the funds. Joint-stock companies existed chiefly for the performance of government contracts let out on bids by the censor; they raised their capital by selling their stocks or bonds to the public in the form of partes or particulae—“little parts,” shares. These companies of “publicans”—i.e., men engaged on public or state undertakings—played an active role in supplying and transporting materials for the army and navy in the Second Punic War—not without the usual attempts to cheat the government.62 Businessmen (equites) directed the larger of these enterprises, freedmen the smaller. Nongovernmental business was carried on by negotiatores, who usually provided their own funds.