Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar

by Colleen McCullough

  gens A man’s clan or extended family. It was indicated by his nomen, such as Cornelius or Julius, but was feminine in gender, hence they were the gens Cornelia and the gens Iulia.

  gladiator A soldier of the sawdust, a professional military athlete who fought in a ring before an audience to celebrate funeral games in honor of the dead. During Republican times there were only two kinds of gladiator, the Gaul and the Thracian; these were styles of combat, not nationalities. Under the Republic, gladiatorial bouts were not fought to the death. Gladiators then were not State owned; few of them were slaves. They were owned by private investors, and cost a great deal of money to acquire, train and maintain—far too much money, indeed, to want to see them dead. The thumbs-up, thumbs-down brutality of the Empire did not exist. A gladiator was recruited young, and fought between five and six bouts a year to a total of thirty bouts maximum. After this he was free to retire (though not automatically endowed with the Roman citizenship) and usually drifted to a big city, where he hired himself out as a bouncer, a bodyguard or a bully-boy. During the Republic almost all gladiators were racially Roman, mostly deserters or mutineers from the legions; occasionally a free man took up the profession for the sheer pleasure of it (he was not compelled to give up his citizenship if he did).

  Gold of Tolosa Perhaps several years after 278 B.C., a segment of the tribe Volcae Tectosages returned from Macedonia to their homeland around Aquitanian Tolosa (modern Toulouse) bearing the accumulated spoils from many sacked temples. These were melted down and stored in the artificial lakes which dotted the precincts of Tolosa’s temples; the gold was left lying undisturbed beneath the water, whereas the silver was regularly hauled out—it had been formed into gigantic millstones which were used to grind the wheat. In 106 B.C. the consul Quintus Servilius Caepio was ordered during his consulship to make war against migrating Germans who had taken up residence around Tolosa. When he arrived in the area he found the Germans gone, for they had quarreled with their hosts, the Volcae Tectosages, and been ordered away. Instead of fighting a battle, Caepio the Consul found a vast amount of gold and silver in the sacred lakes of Tolosa. The silver amounted to 10,000 talents (250 imperial tons) including the millstones, and the gold to 15,000 talents (370 imperial tons). The silver was transported to the port of Narbo and shipped to Rome, whereupon the wagons returned to Tolosa and were loaded with the gold; the wagon train was escorted by one cohort of Roman legionaries, some 520 men. Near the fortress of Carcasso the wagon train of gold was attacked by brigands, the soldier escort was slaughtered, and the wagon train disappeared, together with its precious cargo. It was never seen again. At the time no suspicion attached to Caepio the Consul, but after the odium he incurred over his conduct at the battle of Arausio a year later, it began to be rumored that Caepio the Consul had organized the attack on the wagon train and deposited the gold in Smyrna in his own name. Though he was never tried for the Great Wagon Train Robbery, he was tried for the loss of his army, convicted, and sent into exile. He chose to spend his exile in Smyrna, where he died in 100 B.C. The story of the Gold of Tolosa is told in the ancient sources, which do not state categorically that Caepio the Consul stole it. However, it seems logical. And there is no doubt that the Servilii Caepiones who succeeded Caepio the Consul down to the time of Brutus (the last heir) were fabulously wealthy. Nor is there much doubt that most of Rome thought Caepio the Consul responsible for the disappearance of more gold than Rome had in the Treasury.

  governor A very useful English term to describe the promagistrate—proconsul or propraetor—sent to direct, command and manage one of Rome’s provinces. His term was set at one year, but very often it was prorogued, sometimes (as in the case of Metellus Pius in Further Spain) for many years.

  Gracchi The Brothers Gracchi, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and his younger brother, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus. The sons of Cornelia (daughter of Scipio Africanus and Aemilia Paulla) and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (consul in 177 and 163 B.C., censor in 169 B.C.), they had the consulship, high military command and the censorship as their birthright. Neither man advanced beyond the tribunate of the plebs, due to a peculiar combination of high ideals, iconoclastic thinking, and a tremendous sense of duty to Rome. Tiberius Gracchus, a tribune of the plebs in 133 B.C., set out to right the wrongs he saw in the way the Roman State was administering its ager publicus; his aim was to give these lands to the civilian poor of Rome, thus encouraging them by dowering them with land to breed sons and work hard. When the end of the year saw his work still undone, Tiberius Gracchus flouted custom by attempting to run for the tribunate of the plebs a second time. He was clubbed to death on the Capitol. Gaius Gracchus, ten years Tiberius’s junior, was elected a tribune of the plebs in 123 B.C. More able than his brother, he had also profited from Tiberius’s mistakes, and bade fair to alter the whole direction of the ultraconservative Rome of his time. His reforms were much wider than Tiberius’s, and embraced not only the ager publicus but also cheap grain for the populace (a measure not exclusively aimed at the poor, for he adopted no means test), regulation of service in the army, the founding of Roman citizen colonies abroad, public works throughout Italy, removal of the courts from the Senate, a new system to farm the taxes of Asia Province, and an enhancement of citizen status for Latins and Italians. When his year as a tribune of the plebs finished, Gaius Gracchus emulated his brother and ran for a second term. Instead of being killed for his presumption, he got in. At the end of his second term he determined to run yet again, but was defeated in the elections. Helpless to intervene, he had to see all his laws and reforms begin to topple. Prevented from availing himself of peaceful means, Gaius Gracchus resorted to violence. Many of his partisans were killed when the Senate passed its first-ever “ultimate decree” (q.v. senatus consultum de re publica defendenda) but Gaius Gracchus himself chose to commit suicide before he could be apprehended. The glossary attached to The Grass Crown contains a much a fuller article on the Gracchi.

  gromaPlural, gromae. An instrument used in surveying.

  harpy A mythical Greek monster. If Virgil is to be believed, Romans thought harpies were birds with the heads of women, though the Greeks thought of them as women with wings and talons. They stole people and food, and left their faeces behind as an insult.

  Head Count The capite censi or proletarii : the lowly of Rome. Called the Head Count because at a census all the censors did was to “count heads.” Too poor to belong to a Class, the urban Head Count usually belonged to an urban tribe, and therefore owned no worthwhile tribal votes either. This rendered them politically useless beyond ensuring that they were fed and entertained enough not to riot. Rural Head Count, though usually owning a valuable tribal vote, rarely could afford to come to Rome at election time. Head Count were neither politically aware nor interested in the way Rome was governed, nor were they oppressed in- an Industrial Revolution context. I have sedulously avoided the terms “the masses” and “the proletariat” because of post-Marxist preconceptions not applicable to the ancient lowly. In fact, they seem to have been busy, happy, rather impudent and not at all servile people who had an excellent idea of their own worth and scant respect for the Roman great. However, they had their public heroes; chief among them seems to have been Gaius Marius--until the advent of Caesar, whom they adored. This in turn might suggest that they were not proof against military might and the concept of Rome as The Greatest.

  Hellenic, Hellenized Terms relating to the spread of Greek culture and customs after the time of Alexander the Great. It involved life-style, architecture, dress, industry, government, commercial practices and the Greek language.

  horse, Nesaean The largest kind of horse known to the ancients. How large it was is not known, but it seems to have been at least as large as the mediaeval beast which carried an armored knight, as the kings of Armenia and the Parthians both relied on Nesaeans to carry their cataphracts (cavalry clad in chain mail from head to foot, as were the horses). Its natural home was to the south and west of the Ca
spian Sea, in Media, but by the time of the late Republic there were some Nesaean horses in most part of the ancient world.

  Horse, October On the Ides of October (this was about the time the old campaigning season finished), the best war-horses of that year were picked out and harnessed in pairs to chariots. They then raced on the sward of the Campus Martius, rather than in one of the Circuses. The right-hand horse of the winning team was sacrificed to Mars on a specially erected altar adjacent to the course of the race. The animal was killed with a spear, after which its head was severed and piled over with little cakes, while its tail and genitalia were rushed to the Regia in the Forum Romanum, and the blood dripped onto the altar inside the Regia. Once the ceremonies over the horse’s cake-heaped head were concluded, it was thrown at two competing crowds of people, one comprising residents of the Subura, the other residents of the Via Sacra. The purpose was to have the two crowds fight for possession of the head. If the Via Sacra won, the head was nailed to the outside wall of the Regia; if the Subura won, the head was nailed to the outside wall of the Turris Mamilia (the most conspicuous building in the Subura). What was the reason behind all this is not known; the Romans of the late Republic may well not have known themselves, save that it was in some way connected with the close of the campaigning season. We are not told whether the war-horses were Public Horses or not, but we might be pardoned for presuming they were Public Horses.

  Horse, Public A horse which belonged to the State—to the Senate and People of Rome. Going all the way back to the kings of Rome, it had been governmental policy to provide the eighteen hundred knights of the eighteen most senior Centuries with a horse to ride into battle—bearing in mind the fact that the Centuriate Assembly had originally been a military gathering, and the senior Centuries cavalrymen. The right of these senior knights to a Public Horse was highly regarded and defended. That a member of the Senate automatically lost his right to a Public Horse is highly debatable.

  Ides The third of the three named days of the month which represented the fixed points of the month. Dates were reckoned backward from each of these points—Kalends, Nones, Ides. The Ides occurred on the fifteenth day of the long months (March, May, July and October), and on the thirteenth day of the other months. The Ides were sacred to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and were marked by the sacrifice of a sheep on the Arx of the Capitol by the flamen Dialis.

  Illyricum The wild and mountainous lands bordering the Adriatic Sea on its eastern side. The native peoples belonged to an Indo-European race called Illyrians, were tribalized, and detested first Greek and then Roman coastal incursions. Republican Rome bothered little about Illyricum unless boiling tribes began to threaten eastern Italian Gaul, when the Senate would send an army to chasten them.

  imago Plural, imagines. An imago was a beautifully tinted mask made of refined beeswax, outfitted with a wig, and startlingly lifelike (anyone who has visited a waxworks museum will understand how lifelike wax images can be made, and there is no reason to think a Roman imago was inferior to a Victorian wax face). When a Roman nobleman reached a certain level of public distinction, he acquired the ius imaginis, which was the right to have a wax image made of himself. Some modern authorities say the ius imaginis was bestowed upon a man once he attained curule office, which would mean curule aedile. Others plump for praetor, still others for consul. I plump for praetor, also the Grass or Civic Crown, a major flaminate, and Pontifex Maximus. All the imagines belonging to a family were kept in painstakingly wrought miniature temples in the atrium of the house, and were regularly sacrificed to. When a prominent man or woman of a family owning the ius imaginis died, the wax masks were brought out and worn by actors selected because they bore a physical resemblance in height and build to the men the masks represented. Women of course were not entitled to the ius imaginis—even Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi. The Chief Vestal Virgin, however, was so entitled.

  imperium Imperium was the degree of authority vested in a curule magistrate or promagistrate. It meant that a man owned the authority of his office, and could not be gainsaid provided he was acting within the limits of his particular level of imperium and within the laws governing his conduct. Imperium was conferred by a lex curiata, and lasted for one year only. Extensions for prorogued governors had to be ratified by the Senate and/or People. Lictors shouldering fasces indicated a man’s imperium; the more lictors, the higher the imperium.

  imperium maius A degree of imperium so high that the holder of it outranked even the consuls of the year.

  in absentia In the context used in these books, describes a candidacy for office approved of by the Senate (and People, if necessary) and an election conducted in the absence of the candidate himself. The candidate in absentia may have been waiting on the Campus Martius because imperium prevented his crossing the pomerium, as with Pompey and Crassus in 70 B.C., or he may have been absent on military service in a province, as with Gaius Memmius when elected quaestor.

  inepte An incompetent fool.

  Insubres One of the Gallic tribes of Italian Gaul, concentrated at its western end around Mediolanum and the river Ticinus. Their lands were to the north of the Padus River (the Po), and they did not receive the full Roman citizenship until 49 B.C., when Caesar enfranchised the whole of Italian Gaul.

  insula An island. Because it was surrounded on all sides by streets, lanes or alleyways, an apartment building was known as an insula. Roman insulae were very tall (up to 100 feet—30 meters—in height) and most were large enough to incorporate an internal light well; many were so large they contained multiple light wells. The insulae to be seen today at Ostia are not a real indication of the height insulae attained within Rome; we know that Augustus tried fruitlessly to limit the height of Roman city insulae to 100 feet. See illustration below.

  insulsus Tasteless, unappetizing, utterly boring.

  in suo anno Literally, “in his year.” The phrase was used of men who attained curule office at the exact age the law and custom prescribed for a man holding that office. To be praetor and consul in suo anno was a great distinction, for it meant that a man gained election at his first time of trying—many consuls and not a few praetors had to stand several times before they were successful, while others were prevented by circumstances from seeking office at this youngest possible age. Those who bent the law to attain office at an age younger than that prescribed were not accorded the distinction of being in suo anno either.

  Ionic One of the three Greek architectural orders. The capital of an Ionic column (it might be plain or fluted) looked like two partially unrolled scrolls (called volutes).

  irrumator Plural, irrumatores. A man having his penis sucked.

  Italian Gaul See Gaul

  iudex A judge at law.

  iugerum Plural, iugera. The Roman unit of land measurement. In modern terms the iugerum consisted of 0.623 (five eighths) of an acre, or 0.252 (one quarter) of a hectare. The modern reader used to acres will get close enough by dividing the number of iugera in two; if more accustomed to hectares, divide the number of iugera by four.

  iuniores Juniors.

  ius In the sense used in this book, an inalienable right or entitlement at law or under the mos maiorum.

  Jupiter Stator That aspect of Jupiter devoted to halting soldiers who were fleeing the field of battle. It was a military cult of generals. The chief temple to Jupiter Stator was on the corner of the Velia where the Via Sacra turned at right angles to run down the slope toward the Palus Ceroliae; it was large enough to be used for meetings by the Senate.

  Kalends The first of the three named days of each month which represented the fixed points of the month. Dates were reckoned backward from each of these points—Kalends, Nones, Ides. The Kalends always occurred on the first day of the month. They were sacred to Juno, and originally had been timed to coincide with the appearance of the New Moon.

  knights The equites, the members of what Gaius Gracchus named the Ordo Equester. Under the kings of Rome, the equites had formed the ca
valry segment of the Roman army; at this time horses were both scarce and expensive, with the result that the eighteen original Centuries comprising the knights were dowered with the Public Horse by the State. As the Republic came into being and grew, the importance of Roman knight cavalry diminished, yet the number of knight centuries in the First Class increased. By the second century B.C. Rome no longer fielded horse of her own, and the knights became a social and economic group having little to do with military matters. The knights were now defined by the censors in economic terms alone, though the State continued to provide a Public Horse for each of the eighteen hundred most senior equites. The original eighteen Centuries were kept at one hundred men each, but the rest of the ninety-one equestrian Centuries (that is, the First Class) swelled within themselves to contain many more than one hundred men apiece. These seventy-three swollen Centuries were organized differently than the Eighteen; seventy of them were tribal in nature, a Century of Seniors and a Century of Juniors for each tribe. In voting, one of the Eighteen was never given the praerogativa; this went to one of the tribal Centuries of Juniors. Until 123 B.C. all senators were knights as well, but in that year Gaius Gracchus split the Senate off as a separate body of three hundred men. It was at best an artificial kind of process; all non-senatorial members of senatorial families were still classified as knights, while the senators themselves were not put into three senator-only Centuries, but left for voting purposes in whatever Centuries they had always occupied. The insoluble puzzle is: who were the tribuni aerarii? A knight’s census was 400,000 sesterces, presumably income, whereas the tribunus aerarius had a census of 300,000 sesterces. At first I thought they were possibly senior public servants—Treasury supervisors and the like—but I have swung round to thinking that Mommsen was right. He suggested that there were at least two echelons of knights of the First Class: those with a census of 400,000 sesterces, and those with a census of 300,000 sesterces; and that the lesser-incomed knights were the tribuni aerarii. Does that mean only the eighteen hundred knights owning the Public Horse possessed a census of 400,000 sesterces or more? I would doubt that too. There were many thousands of very rich men in Rome, and no census could so neatly divide one income group from another at a round-figure cutoff point. Perhaps it went more that a senior knight dowered with the Public Horse had to have at least 400,000 sesterces’ income for census purposes. Whereas the other seventy-three Centuries of the First Class contained a mixture of full knights and tribuni aerarii. The Centuries of Juniors, one imagines, contained more census-rated tribuni aerarii than the Centuries of Seniors. But no one knows for certain! There was nothing to stop a knight who qualified for the (entirely unofficial) senatorial means test of one million sesterces from becoming a senator under the old system, wherein the censors filled vacancies in the Senate; that by and large knights did not aspire to the Senate was purely because of the knightly love of trade and commerce—forbidden fruit for senators, who could only dabble in land and property.