The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  Since there were no public vehicles to transport workers from their homes to their toil, most of the plebs lived in brick tenements near the heart of the town, or in rooms behind or above their shops. A tenement usually covered an entire square, and was therefore called an insula, or island. Many of these buildings were six or seven stories high, and so flimsily built that several collapsed, killing hundreds of occupants. Augustus limited the frontal height of buildings to seventy Roman feet, but apparently the law permitted greater elevations in the rear, for Martial tells of “a poor devil whose attic is 200 steps up.”6 Many tenements had shops on the ground floor; some had balconies on the second; a few were connected at the top with tenements across the street by arched passages containing additional rooms—precarious penthouses for particular plebeians. Such insulae almost filled the Nova Via, the Clivus Victoriae (Victory Hill) on the Palatine, and the Subura—a noisy brothel-ridden district between the Viminal and the Esquiline. In them dwelt the longshoremen of the Emporium, the butchers of the Macellum, the fishmongers of the Forum Piscatorium, the cattlemen of the Forum Boarium, the vegetable vendors of the Forum Holitorium, and the workers in Rome’s factories, clerkships, and trades. The slums of Rome lapped the edges of the Forum.

  The streets off the Forum were lined with shops and resounded with labor and bargaining. Fruit sellers, booksellers, perfumers, milliners, dyers, florists, cutlers, locksmiths, apothecaries, and other caterers to the needs, foibles, and vanities of mankind blocked the thoroughfares with their projecting booths. Barbers plied their trade in the open air, where all could hear; wine taverns were so numerous that Rome seemed to Martial one vast saloon.7 Each trade tended to center in some quarter or street and often gave the locality a name; so the sandalmakers were gathered in the Vicus Sandalarius, the harnessmakers in the Vicus Lorarius, the glassblowers in the Vicus Vitrarius, the jewelers in the Vicus Margaritarius.

  In such shops the artists of Italy did their work—all but the greatest of them, who drew high fees and lived in peripatetic luxury. Lucullus gave Arcesilaus a million sesterces to make a statue of the goddess Felicitas, and Zenodorus received 400,000 for a colossus of Mercury.8 Architects and sculptors were ranked with physicians, teachers, and chemists as pursuing artes liberales, arts of freemen; but the men who did most of the artwork of Rome were or had been slaves. Some owners had their bondsmen trained in carving, painting, and like skills, and sold their products in Italy and abroad. In such shops labor was sharply divided: some specialized in votive figures, others in decorative cornices; some cut glass eyes for statues; different painters made arabesques or flowers or landscapes or animals or men, and worked in turn on the same picture. Several artists were expert forgers, producing antiques of any marketable age.9 The Romans of the last century B.C.. were easily deceived in these matters, for, like most nouveaux riches, they tended to value objects according to cost and rarity rather than by beauty and use. During the Empire, when it was no longer a distinction to be wealthy, taste improved, and a sincere love of excellence brought to many thousands of families a refinement of utensils and ornaments such as only a very few had known in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. Art was to antiquity what industry is to modernity. Men could not then enjoy the lavish abundance of useful products now poured forth by our machines; but they could, if they cared enough, gradually surround themselves with objects whose zealously finished form gave to all who lived with them the subtle and quiet happiness of beautiful things.

  III. THE HOMES OF THE GREAT

  The visitor seeking to study the dwellings of the middle class would have found them away from the city’s center on the main diverging roads. Their brick-and-stucco exteriors were still built, as before, in the plain and solid style dictated by insecurity and heat; the Roman bourgeois wasted no art on passers-by. Few houses rose to more than two stories. Cellars were rare; roofs sparkled with red tiles; windows were fitted with shutters or, occasionally, panes of glass. The entrance was usually a double door, each half turning on metal pivots. Floors were of concrete or tile, often of mosaic squares; there were no carpets. Around the central atrium were grouped the main rooms of the house: this is the architectural origin of the cloister and the college quadrangle. In the richer houses one or more rooms would be used for bathing, usually in tubs much like our own. Plumbing was carried by the Romans to an excellence unmatched before the twentieth century. Lead pipes brought water from the aqueducts and mains into most tenements and homes; fittings and stopcocks were of bronze, and some were molded into highly ornamental designs.10 Leaders and gutters of lead carried rain from the roof. Most rooms were heated, if at all, by portable charcoal braziers; a few homes, many villas and palaces, and the public baths enjoyed central heating from wood- or charcoal-burning furnaces supplying hot air to various rooms through tile pipes or passages in floors and walls.II

  In the early Empire a Hellenistic addition was made to the rich Roman’s house. To provide a privacy not always possible in the atrium, he built behind it a peristylium, a court open to the sky, planted with flowers and shrubs, adorned by statues, surrounded by a portico, and centering about a fountain or a bathing pool. Around this court he raised a new set of rooms: a triclinium or dining room, an oecus (“house”) for the women, a pinacotheca for his art collection, a bibliotheca for his books, and a lararium for his household gods; there might also be extra bedrooms, and little alcoves called exedrae—“sitting-out” nooks. Less expensive homes substituted a garden for the peristylium; and if even that could find no ground, the Romans placed flower boxes in the windows or grew flowers and shrubs on the roof. Some large roofs, says Seneca, had grape arbors, fruit trees, and shade trees planted in boxes of soil;12 not a few had solaria for baking bellies in the sun.

  Many Romans wearied of the roar and rush of Rome and fled to the peace and boredom of the countryside. Rich and poor alike developed a feeling for nature beyond anything discernible in ancient Greece. Juvenal thought a man foolish to live in the capital when, for the annual rental of a dark garret in Rome, he might buy a pretty house in some quiet Italian town and surround it with “a trim garden fit to feast a hundred Pythagoreans.”13 The well to do moved out of Rome in early spring to villas in the foothills of the Apennines or on the shores of lakes or the sea. The younger Pliny has left us a pleasant description of his country house at Laurentum on the coast of Latium. He calls it “large enough for my convenience, without being expensive to maintain”; but as he goes on we suspect a pose in his modesty. He describes “a small porch sheltered by glazed windows and overhanging eaves . . . a handsome dining room gently washed by the edge of the last breakers,” and so bright with spacious windows as to give “a view in three directions, as if of three different seas”; an atrium “whence the prospect ends in woods and mountains”; two drawing rooms; a “semicircular library whose windows receive the sun all day long”; a bedchamber, and several rooms for servants. In an opposite wing were “an elegant parlor,” a second dining room, and four small rooms; a bathroom suite consisting of “a pleasant undressing room,” a frigidarium or cold bath, a tepidarium with three pools heated to different degrees, and a calidarium or hot bath; all centrally heated by hot-air pipes. Outside were a swimming pool, a ball court, a storehouse, a variegated garden, a private study and banquet hall, and an observation tower with two apartments and a dining room. “Tell me now,” Pliny concludes, “have I not just cause to bestow my time and affection upon this agreeable retreat?”14

  If a senator could have such a villa on the sea, and another on Como, we may begin to imagine the sprawling luxury of Tiberius’ estate at Capri, or Domitian’s at Alba Longa—not to speak of the one that Hadrian would soon build at Tibur. To match this cubicular extravagance the visitor would have to find entry to the palaces of millionaires and emperors on the Palatine. In domestic architecture the Romans did not care to imitate classic Greece, where homes were modest and only temples were great; they modeled their palaces upon the residences of the half-Orientalized H
ellenistic kings; Ptolemaic styles came to Rome with Cleopatra’s gold, and royal architecture accompanied monarchical politics. The palace of Augustus, receiving the name from the hill it stood on, spread with extensions as the administrative functions of the imperial household increased. Most of his successors built additional palaces for themselves and their staffs: Tiberius his domus Tiberiana, Caligula his domus Gaiana, Nero his domus aurea.

  This Golden House became the passing wonder of Rome. Its buildings alone covered 900,000 square feet, and yet were but a small part of a mile-square villa that overflowed from the Palatine upon the neighboring hills. A great park surrounded the palace, with gardens, meadows, fish ponds, game preserves, aviaries, vineyards, streams, fountains, waterfalls, lakes, imperial galleys, pleasure houses, summerhouses, flower houses, and porticoes 3000 feet long. An angry wit scratched a representative comment on a wall: “Rome has become the habitation of one man. It is time, citizens, to emigrate to Veii—unless, indeed, Veii itself is to be comprised in Nero’s home.”15 The interior of the palace gleamed with marble, bronze, and gold, with the gilded metal of countless Corinthian capitals, and with thousands of statues, reliefs, paintings, and objects of art bought or looted from the classic world; among them was the Laocoön. Some of the walls were inlaid with mother-of-pearl and various costly gems. The ceiling of the banquet hall was covered with ivory flowers from which, at a nod of the emperor, a perfumed spray would fall upon his guests. The dining room had a spherical ceiling of ivory painted to represent the sky and the stars, which was kept in constant slow rotation by hidden machines. A suite of rooms provided hot baths, cold baths, tepid baths, salt-water baths, and sulphur baths. When the Roman architects Celer and Severus had nearly finished the immense structure and Nero moved in, he remarked, “At last I am lodged.” A generation later this Roman Versailles, too costly and dangerous to maintain amid surrounding poverty, had fallen into neglect. Over its ruins Vespasian built the Colosseum, Titus and Trajan their enormous public baths.

  Domitian shared Nero’s architectural madness. For him Rabirius raised the domus Flavia, not quite as elephantine as Nero’s museum, but yielding little to it in gaudy splendor and decoration. One wing alone contained a vast basilica, probably the court where the Emperor tried cases of final appeal; the same wing enclosed a peristylium covering 30,000 square feet. Adjoining this was a banquet hall, whose pavement of red porphyry and green serpentine survives; gone are the delicate marble screens and beautifully columned windows through which the diners might watch the waters splashing over the marble basins of the nymphaea or fountains outside. It should be added that Domitian used this building only for receptions and administration; usually he lived in the more modest quarters of Augustus’ palace. Doubtless these royal edifices were part of the façade of empire, designed to impress natives, visitors, and embassies, while the emperors themselves, perhaps excepting Caligula and Nero, fled from the constraining formality of these ceremonial rooms to the ease and intimacy of their family quarters, and enjoyed, as Antoninus Pius would put it, “the pleasure of being men.”16

  IV. THE ARTS OF DECORATION

  In these palaces, and in the homes of the rich, a hundred arts were employed to make everything if not beautiful, at least expensive. The floors were often of polychrome marble, or mosaics whose patient combination of tiny varicolored cubes (tesserae) resulted in paintings of remarkable realism and permanence. Furniture was less abundant and comfortable than among ourselves, but of generally superior design and workmanship. Tables, chairs, benches, couches, beds, lamps, and utensils were made of lasting materials, and lavishly adorned; the best wood, ivory, marble, bronze, silver, and gold were carefully turned and finished, decorated with plant or animal forms, or inlaid with ivory, tortoise shell, chased bronze, or precious stones. Tables were sometimes cut from costly cypress or citrus woods; some were of gold or silver; many were of marble or bronze. Chairs were of every sort from folding stool to throne, but less calculated than ours to deform the spine. Beds were of wood or metal, with slim but sturdy legs often ending in an animal’s head or foot; a bronze web, instead of a spring, supported a mattress filled with straw or wool. Bronze tripods of elegant form took the place of our end tables; and here and there were cabinets with pigeonholes for rolled books. Bronze braziers warmed the rooms, and bronze lamps lighted them. Mirrors too were of bronze, highly polished, embossed or engraved with floral or mythical designs; some were made horizontally or vertically convex or concave to distort reflections into a humorous slenderness or rotundity.17

  The factories of Campania working with the rich output of Spanish mines, produced silverware on a large scale for a wide market; silver services were now common in the middle and upper classes. In 1895 an excavator found in the cistern of a villa at Boscoreale a remarkable collection of silver, apparently deposited there by its owner before his unsuccessful flight from the embers of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. One of the sixteen cups bears an almost perfect representation of simple foliage; two depict skeletons in high relief; another pictures Augustus enthroned between Venus and Mars, the rival deities of mankind; the sliest shows Zeno the Stoic pointing with scorn at Epicurus, who is helping himself to a huge piece of cake, while a pig, with uplifted foreleg, politely asks for a share.

  The coins and gems of the early Empire prove the progress of the engraver’s art. Those of Augustus show the same good taste, sometimes the same designs, as the Altar of Peace. Precious stones imported from Africa, Arabia, and India were cut and set into rings, brooches, necklaces, bracelets, cups, even into walls. A ring on at least one finger was a social necessity; a few fops wore rings on all fingers but one. The Roman sealed his signature with his ring and therefore liked to have the seal individually designed. Some of the best-paid artists in Rome were gem cutters, like the Dioscurides who made Augustus’ seal. In cutting cameos the Golden Age reached a level never surpassed; the gemma Augusta in Vienna is among the finest in existence. To collect gems and cameos became a hobby of rich Romans—Pompey, Caesar, Augustus; by inheritance the imperial gem cabinet grew till Marcus Aurelius sold it to help pay for his war against the Marcomanni. From the official guardian of the imperial seals and gems England derived her Keeper of the Great, or Privy, Seal.

  Meanwhile the potters of Capua, Puteoli, Cumae, and Arretium were filling Italian homes with every variety of ceramic art. Arretium had mixing vats with a capacity of 10,000 gallons. Its red-glazed tableware was for a century the most widely spread product of Italy; specimens of it have been found almost everywhere. Iron stamps, hollowed out in relief, were used to impress upon each vase, lamp, or tile the name of the maker, sometimes also the names of the year’s consuls, as a date. To this degree the ancients knew the art of printing; they left it undeveloped because slave copyists were cheap.18

  From pottery the workers of Cumae, Liternum, and Aquileia turned to the production of artistic glass.III The Portland Vase is a famous example of its kind;IV finer still is the “Blue Glass Vase” found at Pompeii, depicting in lively and graceful action a vintage feast of Bacchus.19 In the reign of Tiberius, say Pliny and Strabo,20 the art of glass blowing was brought from Sidon or Alexandria to Rome, and soon produced polychrome phials, cups, bowls, and other forms of such delicate beauty that they became for a time the favorite prey of art collectors and millionaires. In Nero’s reign 6000 sesterces were paid for two small cups of blown glass now known as millefiori, or “thousand flowers,” produced by fusing together differently colored glass rods. Even more prized were the “Murrhine” vases imported from Asia and Africa. They were made by placing white and purple glass filaments side by side to form a desired pattern, and then firing them; or pieces of colored glass were embedded in a transparent white body. Pompey brought some to Rome after his victory over Mithridates; Augustus, though he melted down Cleopatra’s gold plate, kept for himself her goblet of Murrhine glass. Nero paid a million sesterces for one such cup; Petronius, dying, broke another lest it should fall into Nero’s hands. All in al
l, the Romans have had no superior in making glass; and there are few art collections in the world more precious than those of Roman glass in the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  V. SCULPTURE

  Pottery passed into sculpture through baked clay—terra-cotta reliefs and statuettes, toys, imitations of fruit, grapes, fish—at last full-sized statues. Glazed terra cotta—majolica—abounded in the ruins of Pompeii. Temple pediments and eaves were adorned with terra-cotta palmettes, acroteria, gargoyles, and reliefs. The Greeks laughed at these ornaments, and under the Empire they went out of fashion; Augustus was no friend of clay.

  It was probably through his Attic taste that relief and sculpture attained in Rome an excellence comparable with the best Hellenistic work. For a generation the artists of Rome carved fountains, tombstones, arches, and altars with a refinement of feeling, a precision of execution, a quiet dignity of form, a measure of modeling and perspective, that rank Roman reliefs among the masterpieces of the world’s art. In 13 B.C. the Senate celebrated the return of Augustus from the pacification of Spain and Gaul by decreeing that an Ara Pacis Augustae, or “Altar of the Augustan Peace,” should be erected in the Field of Mars. This is the noblest of all the sculptural remains of Rome. Perhaps the monument owed its form to the altar at Pergamum, and its processional motif to the Parthenon frieze; the altar was raised on a platform in an enclosure whose surrounding walls were partly carved in marble relief; the extant pieces are slabs from these walls.V One slab represents Tellus—Mother Earth—with two children in her arms, corn and flowers growing beside her, and animals lying contentedly at her feet. These were the leading ideas of the Augustan reformation: the family restored to parentage, the nation to agriculture, the Empire to peace. The central figure is unsurpassed; indeed, in its union of mature motherhood and womanly beauty, tenderness, and grace, there is a soft perfection unmatched by the stately goddesses of the Parthenon. The frieze of the outer wall had a lower panel of acanthus scrolls, broad-petaled peonies and poppies, and rich clusters of ivy berries; this too is unequaled in its class. Another panel showed two processions moving in opposite directions to meet before the altar of the Goddess of Peace. In these groups are grave and quiet figures, probably of Augustus, Livia, and the imperial family, with nobles, priests, Vestal Virgins, and children. These last are engagingly real in their shy innocence. One is a baby toddling along with no taste for ceremony; another is a boy already proud of his years; another a little girl with a nosegay; another, after some mischief, is being gently admonished by his mother. Henceforth children would play a rising role in Italian art. But never again would Roman sculpture show such mastery of drapery, such natural and effective grouping, such modulations of light and shade. Here, as in Virgil, propaganda had found a perfect medium.