Profit did not exclude a passion for display. Hence the impressive tombs of Pompeian families extend outside the town gates along the main roads: they are most visible outside the south wall, where they are now known to run for more than a mile along the road towards Nuceria. These tomb-monuments were introduced to the locals by the Roman settlers. Some of the smarter ones commemorate whole families, even including a few of their slaves. As the tombs' public siting reminds us, life was an open-air existence, where important people wished to be seen to be important: the boasting and social competition would surprise even New Yorkers.
Culturally, the theatres in the town did matter, although mimes and pantomimes would be important in the programme. As for literary taste, the inscriptions may mislead us. The Virgil graffiti are not all evidence for bookishness or a deeply literate society. Many of them come from the opening lines of a book or poem (known through writing exercises?) and able inscribers were commissioned to write them elegantly (had the customer only heard them from others or in a theatrical recitation?). Lines from Virgil's homosexual eclogue (a pastoral poem) are particularly favoured, no doubt because of their sexual reference. One painting even parodies Aeneas and his family as dog-headed figures with huge penises.
Among the electoral posters, some, too, are rather contrived. They give ostentatious praise of a candidate who has already been elected, rather than support for a bid for electoral power. The town was headed by two magistrates (duumviri), with two lesser ones (the aediles), and their election was annual in March. In the last days of the town, the jobs of lesser magistrates are the ones which appear to be the most contested. The few posters which cite women's names proclaim them as supporters, or cheerleaders, but naturally not as candidates: they may sometimes even be satirical, implying that a candidate is 'fit only for women'. Candidates had to be male, free-born and elected members already of the town council (a life appointment). As the councillors had had to pay for their election (sometimes offering gladiatorial games) they, and therefore the magistrates, would be the richer citizens. But the aediles' elections, at least, were still lively: about a hundred electoral posters have been recovered from the election-campaign for one Helvius Sabinus as an aedile in what was probably the last, fateful year of 79. They have been found on most of the main streets and they allude to the usual wide range of supporters: trademen's groups, households, a woman or two and even the 'dice-throwers'. 'Are you asleep?' one poster for him says. 'Vote for Helvius Sabinus as aedile'.' These posters are all in Latin, but not in our classical Latin. The Bay of Naples was still multi-cultural in 79, a place where Greek was widely spoken along with Latin and the south Italian language, Oscan. All three would be heard in Pompeii, where the Oscan, which our Latin literature conceals, was still being inscribed in the first century ad.
The town was so very close to the luxurious villa life on the Bay: were Pompeii's 'last days' nonetheless indicative of steadier 'Italian values'? The last days had in fact been quite long. In 62 the town had already been badly damaged by an earthquake whose aftershocks continued into the 70s. A final phase, from 62. to 79, has been isolated by excavators, allowing us to see 'little Italy' in action during Vespasian's rise to power. In this phase, the need to repair and restore certainly did not kill off the urge to decorate, paint and fresco; houses were enlarged, and sometimes took over new plots: shops, apartments and work-spaces sometimes turned basic house-plans at an angle to their main entrance. Among all this activity, were the previous owners moving out of town and selling or developing their former urban homes for new purposes? The earthquake has been widely blamed for their departure, but so far as there was a change, it was probably longer-term, and social. Even without an earthquake, no governing class of a town remained stable in this age of early death and uncertainty. Up and down Italy, 'new blood' always had to be exploited for money, after a time in which its 'newness' could tone down. Part of the story may be that a new class of parvenus, freedmen by origin, were taking over old houses in Pompeii and showing off by over-doing them up. In several properties, there is evidence of this change, and there are also signs in this period of that designer-disaster, the 'small town garden'. Like the gardens of the Chelsea Flower Show, it crams in a jumble of scaled-down grandeur, including painted trompe I'ceil on the walls, pergolas arid third-rate sculpture. The style is not so much that of a 'villa in miniature' (big villa gardens were an agglomeration of features, anyway) as a distinctive town-garden fantasy, which often evoked quite other landscapes (woodlands, waterfalls and even Egypt and the Nile). A similar taste is visible indoors: after 62 new paintings proliferated in houses such as the 'House of the Tragic Poet', where they smothered the walls with episodes from Greek myths. Only some of the paintings evoke theatrical scenes which might be known from nights out in the town. Like prints and wallpapers from a modern pattern book or a newspaper special offer, most of these big panels evoke a world of culture which the owners themselves did not have to comprehend. Outside and inside, there was a taste for pretty, decorating style for its own sake.
Such redecoration was bright and, in its way, luxurious. This 'luxury' was not morally problematic. It was not that it was somehow distanced safely from its spectators by its faraway fantasy, nor was it 'acceptable' because it could be perceived as a celebration of 'abundance'.6 The point was that, by Roman or Julio-Claudian standards, it was relatively minor luxury, and what we see at Pompeii was not a dangerous, enervating sort of luxury, one for moralists to deplore. To our eyes, the representations of 'sex' are the licentious element. However, no local protest is known about them, and not all of them belong to the town's last days, either. On doorbells, lamps or doorposts there had long been images of erect penises: there had also been sexual scenes, very explicit, on the surrounds of personal hand-mirrors and so forth. Some of them may be coarse jokes, like modern souvenirs, while others may be unfussed images of 'fertility' or apt erotica suitable for the walls of a specialized brothel. But when we find paintings of a naked woman on top of a man in the colonnade round a central peristyle garden or numbered paintings of oral sex between men and women, including foursomes, in the changing-room of a set of public baths, we cannot explain them somehow as paintings to avert the 'evil eye' and assure good fortune.7 They are simply sexy. The changing-room scenes, above the clothes-lockers, might even (like the mirrors) have been seen by women.
Pompeian values, then, were not 'Victorian values'. But was the most blatantly coarse or erotic art in the 6os and 70s mostly displayed by a particular social class? In this era, the big House of the Vettii is famous for its painting of a man weighing an enormous penis on scales against gold coins: the Vettii were evidently freedmen. The painting of a woman having sex on top of a man in the garden colonnade was installed by the son of a moneylender who was himself the son of a freedman. Perhaps these newly rich patrons liked to show off this sort of thing, like modern bankers who buy female nudes. The vulgarity of freedmen in the Naples area is immortalized in the most remarkable prose work of this era, the Satyricon, written by Nero's witty and elegant courtier, Petronius. Only a fragment survives, but it tells of the adventures of three Greek companions, self-styled homosexual 'brothers' in their various sexual interrelationships. The most remarkable adventure is their dinner with the flamboyant Trimalchio and his freedmen-guests in his vulgar villa in a town which is surely the harbour-town Puteoli, also on the Bay of Naples. Petronius characterizes the freedmen-speakers by a distinctive Latin style, rich in proverbs (the mark of the uneducated) and cultural howlers. They are exaggerated characters and are only seen through his fictitious narrator, but Trimalchio's dinner artfully conjures up a showy vulgarity, a coarse love of money and extremely bad taste. The episode is a highly civilized man's satire on preposterous freedmen at large. The excruciating music, the theatricality and stage effects, the hilariously common wives (who compete over the weight of their gold bracelets) are easily imagined in embryo at an evening with Pompeii's Vettii or with fellow freedmen
in the town, people like Fabius Eupor or Cornelius Tages. Some of Trimalchio's instructions for the decoration of his tomb actually match details of a known tomb which was built at Pompeii by a wife, Naevoleia Tycho, for her dead husband.
In the 6os and 70s then, freedmen were among those who were active in redecorating big houses in Pompeii. Yet they were still socially excluded from civic office (as freedmen) and the older, more restrained families at Pompeii had certainly not all vanished from the town just because the ground had started to quake. In this period, we also find the well-planned trompe l'oeil painting of a nude 'marine Venus' in the so-called House of Venus: it was installed for the Lucretii Valentes, important citizens under Nero. The 'House of the Tragic Poet' was also redecorated for the colony's 'first citizen' (although he did then rent it out). It was not, then, that Venus and profit were attractive only to freedmen. But perhaps (a guess) it took men on the make to flaunt sex-scenes more openly on their house walls. For people in the earlier Pompeii had echoed the steadier patriotic values of Augustus' new age. The east side of its central forum had been transformed in the age of emperors: temples to their cult had been built, while the statues outside one big civic building, paid for by the prominent priestess Eumachia, showed heroes like Romulus and father Aeneas. They evoked the moral sculptures in Augustus' new programmatic Forum in Rome.
'Thrift' and 'restraint' are relative terms. To the new intake of Italians into the Roman Senate of the 70s, they meant that they were not extravagant Julio-Claudians or those senators (often provincials) who had the very biggest fortunes. By 70 there had certainly been families in Pompeii who would have adapted well to the prodigal theatricality of Nero's court. But nobody gave them the chance: none of the excavated houses belonged to someone who rose anywhere near as high as the Roman Senate. The only possible exception is Nero's beautiful Poppaea, who probably did own the huge villa at nearby Oplontis, though perhaps not the Pompeian houses which have sometimes been ascribed to her too.8 When given scope, Pompeii's Poppaea was as luxurious as the best of them. But the trophy-wife of an emperor was exceptional. In the 60s and 70s there were plenty of others in Pompeii, perhaps the majority, who still saw themselves upholding 'traditional' values. The freedmen were only part of the story. In the colonnade of one garden-space for dining outside, verses
told guests to 'divert your lascivious looks and sweet little eyes from somebody else's wife'.9 On the Street of Abundance, the big letters of one inscription do proclaim 'Sodom and Gomorrah', perhaps as a biblical warning to Pompeians of the perils of sexual misbehaviour. But Pompeii did not collapse in a final torrent of orgies.
52
A New Man in Action
It is extraordinary how an account can be given (or seem to
be given) of single days spent, at Rome, but none of several
days put together . . . It all seems essential on the actual day
on which you did it, but if you reflect that you have done the
same things every day, it seems pointless, much more so when
you retreat from it all. This always happens to me when I am
down at my Laurentum and I'm reading or writing something
. . . The sea, the shore, they're a true and private 'seat of
the Muses'; how much they inspire, how much they dictate
to me . . . Pliny, Letters 1.9
Pompeii and the Bay of Naples were by no means all of Italy. For an insight into the values of the Roman Senate's 'new intake' from much further north, we are lucky to have a priceless survival. From the 90s until 112, from Domitian to the reign of Hadrian's predecessor Trajan, we have texts which present the values of just such a new man in the Senate, the younger Pliny.
Pliny was the adopted son of the elder Pliny, his uncle, whom he admired as a famous polymath (the elder is best known to us for his long work on natural history, part of which is concerned to list 'corrupting' luxuries). The younger Pliny published nine books of his own letters, but they are not private letters like those nowadays 'made available' to modern biographers. Most of them uphold particular ways of behaving or showing discrimination. They are intended to be both examples to others and artful proofs of Pliny's own 'modesty' in action. The literary letter, like satire, is a special distinction of Latin literature, but no letters (not even Cicero's) are more elegant and more artful than those which Pliny released. They are the nearest we have to a Roman's autobiography.
A tenth book of letters was published after Pliny's death, containing letters which he had written in iii/z during his governorship of Bithynia, a province in north-western Asia. One of his subjects there, unknown to him, was the young Antinous, Hadrian's future lover. This tenth book is uniquely valuable because it survives with replies written by or for the Emperor Trajan. They are classics of Roman government in action. Some fifty years earlier the governor of this province had been Petronius, the master of elegant wit and luxury. His letters home to Nero would have been so very different.
Justice, freedom and the perils of excessive luxury are important themes for Pliny because he was a Roman barrister, a senator, a governor and also a moralist. He presents the lifestyle of his friends, members of 'our age' whom he confesses, artfully, to favouring almost too much. Many of them come from 'Pliny country', way up in northern Italy, beyond the river Po.1 Places like modern Brescia or Verona or Milan had not even had Roman citizenship by right in the 70s bc. Pliny presents this 'little Italy' from a priceless angle, although some of it is so undistinguished on the bigger stage. But he has a sharp eye for people worth cultivating and a happy way of picking future winners. If Hadrian had ever read the letters in his own villa, he would have found some of his own current appointees described by Pliny in an earlier, pleasant setting in their lives.
Pliny was born in 61/2, some fourteen years before Hadrian. He was too young for the worst of the Julio-Claudians and his family were not living close to Rome. His home town was Comum (modern Como), on the very frontiers of north Italy beside the dazzling beauty of its lake. In the 50s bc Julius Caesar had first put it on the Roman citizen-map. Pliny's father had already been prominent in the town, but he himself was the first in the family to rise up the ladder of a senatorial career. He was acutely aware of this honour, even noting that the great Virgil had not attained it. It relied on a very big fortune, partly his family's, partly acquired by marriage and inheritance. Like other senators, his income came mostly from land, most of which was let to tenants (a return of 6 per cent per year on capital has been inferred, not bad in decades of low inflation). Pliny also went in for moneylending, which was riskier but much more lucrative. Unlike old Cato in the 180s bc, Roman senators could now write quite openly about their involvement in usury. Any minority prejudice was long gone: this openness is one aspect of the Roman majority's frankness about money.
Pliny's career was extremely successful. In the year 100, before the age of forty, he had become a consul and in thanks, as was usual, he delivered a panegyric of the Emperor Trajan in Rome. Pliny then expanded his speech and delivered it again in three separate sessions, two hours long, before selected friends. The over-long lecture is a Roman invention: why, Pliny asks, should hearers not suffer just because they are friends? Roman reciters, like too many modern lecturers, hoped for 'feedback'. Pliny then published his enlarged Panegyric with a final tribute to himself.
Panegyrics were to have a lively future, typifying court-life in the later Empire, but Pliny looked backwards for his literary hero. As a new man, an orator and a public figure, he felt a special affinity with Cicero. From his teacher, the great Quintilian, he learned to imitate Cicero's style and to admire his moral example. These qualities were still socially relevant. At Rome, Pliny's rivals in the courts included amoral 'informers', people who would prosecute men of their own class on slight pretexts. They favoured blunt language and an uneducated style, whereas Pliny, the Ciceronian, was proud to present such a very different image, while not being above an opportunist prosecution hims
elf.2
From the age of eighteen onwards, much of Pliny's public activity concerned cases of inheritance under Roman law. As an advocate, he was restrained by law from taking large fees. Instead, he expected 'favours' as part of the network of 'duties' which made up the mutual obligations of an important Roman's life. As in so much modern business, one good turn was expected to deserve another: Romans are closer to modern life in this respect, to the ethos of social exchanges in modern Manhattan or to 'exhibition loans' between museums, than their critics sometimes realize. Cicero was the apt model for 'duties', for 'dignity' and for law-court speeches, as he also was for Pliny's polished letters. Pliny also wrote short poems and recited them, in long batches, to his long-suffering friends. To our surprise, Cicero was helpful here also. Some of Pliny's short poems were on rather risque subjects, but he discovered a lascivious little poem in which Cicero referred to kissing his male secretary, Tiro. The discovery of this poem helped Pliny, he claims, to overcome his own hesitations. Why, he then wrote in verse, should I not tell of my Tiro too? Some people (Pliny tells us) criticized him for writing naughty poems, but by citing Cicero, he could counter their complaint. To judge from surviving specimens, the literary level of his verses was a greater reason for concern. Pliny presents them as light amusements of his spare time, but he also claims that Greeks were learning Latin in order to enjoy them. They can only have been disappointed.
The Classical World Page 63