It is easy to form a general conception of the aspect which under such economic conditions the social relations must have assumed; but to follow out in detail the increase of luxury, of prices, of fastidiousness and frivolity is neither pleasant nor instructive. Extravagance and sensuous enjoyment formed the main object with all, among the parvenus as well as among the Licinii and Metelli; not the polished luxury which is the acme of civilization, but that sort of luxury which had developed itself amidst the decaying Hellenic civilization of Asia Minor and Alexandria, which degraded everything beautiful and significant to the purpose of decoration and studied enjoyment with a laborious pedantry, a precise punctiliousness, rendering it equally nauseous to the man of fresh feeling as to the man of fresh intellect. As to the popular festivals, the importation of transmarine wild beasts prohibited in the time of Cato[48] was, apparently about the middle of this century, formally permitted anew by a decree of the burgesses proposed by Gnaeus Aufidius; the effect of which was, that animal-hunts came into enthusiastic favour and formed a chief feature of the burgess-festivals. Several lions first appeared in the Roman arena about 651, the first elephants about 655; Sulla when praetor exhibited a hundred lions in 661. The same holds true of gladiatorial games. If the forefathers had publicly exhibited representations of great battles, their grandchildren began to do the same with their gladiatorial games, and by means of such leading or state performances of the age to make themselves a laughing-stock to their descendants. What sums were spent on these and on funeral solemnities generally, may be inferred from the testament of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (consul in 567, 579; 602); he gave orders to his children, forasmuch as the true last honours consisted not in empty pomp but in the remembrance of personal and ancestral services, to expend on his funeral not more than 1,000,000 asses (4000 pounds). Luxury was on the increase also as respected buildings and gardens; the splendid town house of the orator Crassus (663), famous especially for the old trees of its garden, was valued with the trees at 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), without them at the half; while the value of an ordinary dwelling-house in Rome may be estimated perhaps at 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds)[49]. How quickly the prices of ornamental estates increased, is shown by the instance of the Misenian villa, for which Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, paid 75,000 sesterces (750 pounds), and Lucius Lucullus, consul in 680, thirty-three times that price. The villas and the luxurious rural and sea-bathing life rendered Baiae and generally the district around the Bay of Naples the El Dorado of noble idleness. Games of hazard, in which the stake was no longer as in the Italian dice-playing a trifle, became common, and as early as 639 a censorial edict was issued against them. Gauze fabrics, which displayed rather than concealed the figure, and silken clothing began to displace the old woollen dresses among women and even among men. Against the insane extravagance in the employment of foreign perfumery the sumptuary laws interfered in vain.
But the real focus in which the brilliance of this genteel life was concentrated was the table. Extravagant prices - as much as 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds) - were paid for an exquisite cook. Houses were constructed with special reference to this object, and the villas in particular along the coast were provided with salt-water tanks of their own, in order that they might furnish marine fishes and oysters at any time fresh to the table. A dinner was already described as poor, at which the fowls were served up to the guests entire and not merely the choice portions, and at which the guests were expected to eat of the several dishes and not simply to taste them. They procured at a great expense foreign delicacies and Greek wine, which had to be sent round at least once at every respectable repast. At banquets above all the Romans displayed their hosts of slaves ministering to luxury, their bands of musicians, their dancing-girls, their elegant furniture, their carpets glittering with gold or pictorially embroidered, their purple hangings, their antique bronzes, their rich silver plate.
Against such displays the sumptuary laws were primarily directed, which were issued more frequently (593, 639, 665, 673) and in greater detail than ever; a number of delicacies and wines were therein totally prohibited, for others a maximum in weight and price was fixed; the quantity of silver plate was likewise restricted by law, and lastly general maximum rates were prescribed for the expenses of ordinary and festal meals; these, for example, were fixed in 593 at 10 and 100 sesterces (2 shillings and 1 pound) in 673 at 30 and 300 sesterces (6 shillings and 3 pounds) respectively. Unfortunately truth requires us to add that, of all the Romans of rank, not more than three - and these not including the legislators themselves - are said to have complied with these imposing laws; and in the case of these three it was the law of the Stoa, and not that of the state, that curtailed the bill of fare.
It is worth while to dwell for a moment on the luxury that went on increasing in defiance of these laws, as respects silver plate. In the sixth century silver plate for the table was, with the exception of the traditionary silver salt-dish, a rarity; the Carthaginian ambassadors jested over the circumstance, that at every house to which they were invited they had encountered the same silver plate[50]. Scipio Aemilianus possessed not more than 32 pounds (120 pounds) in wrought silver; his nephew Quintus Fabius (consul in 633) first brought his plate up to 1000 pounds (4000 pounds), Marcus Drusus (tribune of the people in 663) reached 10,000 pounds (40,000 pounds); in Sulla's time there were already counted in the capital about 150 silver state-dishes weighing 100 pounds each, several of which brought their possessors into the lists of proscription. To judge of the sums expended on these, we must recollect that the workmanship also was paid for at enormous rates; for instance Gaius Gracchus paid for choice articles of silver fifteen times, and Lucius Crassus, consul in 659, eighteen times the value of the metal, and the latter gave for a pair of cups by a noted silversmith 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds). So it was in proportion everywhere.
How it fared with marriage and the rearing of children, is shown by the Gracchan agrarian laws, which first placed a premium on these[51]. Divorce, formerly in Rome almost unheard of, was now an everyday occurrence; while in the oldest Roman marriage the husband had purchased his wife, it might have been proposed to the Romans of quality in the present times that, with the view of bringing the name into accordance with the reality, they should introduce marriage for hire. Even a man like Metellus Macedonicus, who for his honourable domestic life and his numerous host of children was the admiration of his contemporaries, when censor in 623 enforced the obligation of the burgesses to live in a state of matrimony by describing it as an oppressive public burden, which patriots ought nevertheless to undertake from a sense of duty[52].
There were, certainly, exceptions. The circles of the rural towns, and particularly those of the larger landholders, had preserved more faithfully the old honourable habits of the Latin nation.
In the capital, however, the Catonian opposition had become a mere form of words; the modern tendency bore sovereign sway, and though individuals of firm and refined organization, such as Scipio Aemilianus, knew the art of combining Roman manners with Attic culture, Hellenism was among the great multitude synonymous with intellectual and moral corruption. We must never lose sight of the reaction exercised by these social evils on political life, if we would understand the Roman revolution. It was no matter of indifference, that of the two men of rank, who in 662 acted as supreme masters of morals to the community, the one publicly reproached the other with having shed tears over the death of a -muraena- the pride of his fishpond, and the latter retaliated on the former that he had buried three wives and had shed tears over none of them. It was no matter of indifference, that in 593 an orator could make sport in the open Forum with the following description of a senatorial civil juryman, whom the time fixed for the cause finds amidst the circle of his boon-companions. "They play at hazard, delicately perfumed, surrounded by their mistresses. As the afternoon advances, they summon the servant and bid him make enquiries on the Comitium, as to what has occurred in the Forum, who has spoken
in favour of or against the new project of law, what tribes have voted for and what against it. At length they go themselves to the judgment-seat, just early enough not to bring the process down on their own neck. On the way there is no opportunity in any retired alley which they do not avail themselves of, for they have gorged themselves with wine. Reluctantly they come to the tribunal and give audience to the parties. Those who are concerned bring forward their cause. The juryman orders the witnesses to come forward; he himself steps aside. When he returns, he declares that he has heard everything, and asks for the documents. He looks into the writings; he can hardly keep his eyes open for wine. When he thereupon withdraws to consider his sentence, he says to his boon-companions, 'What concern have I with these tiresome people? why should we not rather go to drink a cup of mulse mixed with Greek wine, and accompany it with a fat fieldfare and a good fish, a veritable pike from the Tiber island?' Those who heard the orator laughed; but was it not a very serious matter, that such things were subjects for laughter?"
Chapter XII
Nationality, Religion, and Education
Paramount Ascendency of Latinism and Hellenism
In the great struggle of the nationalities within the wide circuit of the Roman empire, the secondary nations seem at this period on the wane or disappearing. The most important of them all, the Phoenician, received through the destruction of Carthage a mortal wound from which it slowly bled to death. The districts of Italy which had hitherto preserved their old language and manners, Etruria and Samnium, were not only visited by the heaviest blows of the Sullan reaction, but were compelled also by the political levelling of Italy to adopt the Latin language and customs in public intercourse, so that the old native languages were reduced to popular dialects rapidly decaying. There no longer appears throughout the bounds of the Roman state any nationality entitled even to compete with the Roman and the Greek.
Latinism
On the other hand the Latin nationality was, as respected both the extent of its diffusion and the depth of its hold, in the most decided ascendant. As after the Social war any portion of Italian soil might belong to any Italian in full Roman ownership, and any god of an Italian temple might receive Roman gifts; as in all Italy, with the exception of the region beyond the Po, the Roman law thenceforth had exclusive authority, superseding all other civic and local laws; so the Roman language at that time became the universal language of business, and soon likewise the universal language of cultivated intercourse, in the whole peninsula from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. But it no longer restricted itself to these natural limits. The mass of capital accumulating in Italy, the riches of its products, the intelligence of its agriculturists, the versatility of its merchants, found no adequate scope in the peninsula; these circumstances and the public service carried the Italians in great numbers to the provinces[1]. Their privileged position there rendered the Roman language and the Roman law privileged also, even where Romans were not merely transacting business with each other[2]. Everywhere the Italians kept together as compact and organized masses, the soldiers in their legions, the merchants of every larger town as special corporations, the Roman burgesses domiciled or sojourning in the particular provincial court-district as "circuits" (conventus civium Romanorum) with their own list of jurymen and in some measure with a communal constitution; and, though these provincial Romans ordinarily returned sooner or later to Italy, they nevertheless gradually laid the foundations of a fixed population in the provinces, partly Roman, partly mixed, attaching itself to the Roman settlers.
We have already mentioned that it was in Spain, where the Roman army first became a standing one, that distinct provincial towns with Italian constitution were first organized - Carteia in 583[3], Valentia in 616[4], and at a later date Palma and Pollentia[5]. Although the interior was still far from civilized, - the territory of the Vaccaeans, for instance, being still mentioned long after this time as one of the rudest and most repulsive places of abode for the cultivated Italian - authors and inscriptions attest that as early as the middle of the seventh century the Latin language was in common use around New Carthage and elsewhere along the coast.
Gracchus first distinctly developed the idea of colonizing, or in other words of Romanizing, the provinces of the Roman state by Italian emigration, and endeavoured to carry it out; and, although the conservative opposition resisted the bold project, destroyed for the most part its attempted beginnings, and prevented its continuation, yet the colony of Narbo was preserved, important even of itself as extending the domain of the Latin tongue, and far more important still as the landmark of a great idea, the foundation-stone of a mighty structure to come. The ancient Gallic, and in fact the modern French, type of character, sprang out of that settlement, and are in their ultimate origin creations of Gaius Gracchus. But the Latin nationality not only filled the bounds of Italy and began to pass beyond them; it came also to acquire intrinsically a deeper intellectual basis. We find it in the course of creating a classical literature, and a higher instruction of its own; and, though in comparison with the Hellenic classics and Hellenic culture we may feel ourselves tempted to attach little value to the feeble hothouse products of Italy, yet, so far as its historical development was primarily concerned, the quality of the Latin classical literature and the Latin culture was of far less moment than the fact that they subsisted side by side with the Greek; and, sunken as were the contemporary Hellenes in a literary point of view, one might well apply in this case also the saying of the poet, that the living day-labourer is better than the dead Achilles.
Hellenism
But, however rapidly and vigorously the Latin language and nationality gain ground, they at the same time recognize the Hellenic nationality as having an entirely equal, indeed an earlier and better title, and enter everywhere into the closest alliance with it or become intermingled with it in a joint development. The Italian revolution, which otherwise levelled all the non-Latin nationalities in the peninsula, did not disturb the Greek cities of Tarentum, Rhegium, Neapolis, Locri[6]. In like manner Massilia, although now enclosed by Roman territory, remained continuously a Greek city and, just as such, firmly connected with Rome. With the complete Latinizing of Italy the growth of Hellenizing went hand in hand. In the higher circles of Italian society Greek training became an integral element of their native culture. The consul of 623, the pontifex maximus Publius Crassus, excited the astonishment even of the native Greeks, when as governor of Asia he delivered his judicial decisions, as the case required, sometimes in ordinary Greek, sometimes in one of the four dialects which had become written languages. And if the Italian literature and art for long looked steadily towards the east, Hellenic literature and art now began to look towards the west. Not only did the Greek cities in Italy continue to maintain an active intellectual intercourse with Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and confer on the Greek poets and actors who had acquired celebrity there the like recognition and the like honours among themselves; in Rome also, after the example set by the destroyer of Corinth at his triumph in 608, the gymnastic and aesthetic recreations of the Greeks - competitions in wrestling as well as in music, acting, reciting, and declaiming - came into vogue[7]. Greek men of letters even thus early struck root in the noble society of Rome, especially in the Scipionic circle, the most prominent Greek members of which - the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius - belong rather to the history of Roman than of Greek development. But even in other less illustrious circles similar relations occur; we may mention another contemporary of Scipio, the philosopher Clitomachus, because his life at the same time presents a vivid view of the great intermingling of nations at this epoch. A native of Carthage, then a disciple of Carneades at Athens, and afterwards his successor in his professorship, Clitomachus held intercourse from Athens with the most cultivated men of Italy, the historian Aulus Albinus and the poet Lucilius, and dedicated on the one hand a scientific work to Lucius Censorinus the Roman consul who opened the siege of Carthage, and on the other han
d a philosophic consolatory treatise to his fellow-citizens who were conveyed to Italy as slaves. While Greek literary men of note had hitherto taken up their abode temporarily in Rome as ambassadors, exiles, or otherwise, they now began to settle there; for instance, the already-mentioned Panaetius lived in the house of Scipio, and the hexameter-maker Archias of Antioch settled at Rome in 652 and supported himself respectably by the art of improvising and by epic poems on Roman consulars. Even Gaius Marius, who hardly understood a line of his carmen and was altogether as ill adapted as possible for a Maecenas, could not avoid patronizing the artist in verse. While intellectual and literary life thus brought the more genteel, if not the purer, elements of the two nations into connection with each other, on the other hand the arrival of troops of slaves from Asia Minor and Syria and the mercantile immigration from the Greek and half-Greek east brought the coarsest strata of Hellenism - largely alloyed with Oriental and generally barbaric ingredients - into contact with the Italian proletariate, and gave to that also a Hellenic colouring. The remark of Cicero, that new phrases and new fashions first make their appearance in maritime towns, probably had a primary reference to the semi-Hellenic character of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium, where with foreign wares foreign manners also first found admission and became thence more widely diffused.
The history of Rome. Book IV Page 51