Eventually guests’ hands were given a good wash and dishes were cleared away for some after-dinner enjoyment. This might be a session of drinking and conversation. One of the diners would be appointed to decide how much watered wine everyone could have without them becoming maudlin, aggressive or simply drunk. Also carefully controlled were the subjects discussed, and conversation would be halted if it grew too argumentative. Guests could recline and settle into some storytelling, or they could play a game, from backgammon, draughts and dice to something sillier, like trying to sink a little boat floating in a bucket by hurling wine at it.
The delights of a grand dinner, needless to say, were known to few Romans in AD 408. For most, life was very different. Ordinary Romans lived in apartment blocks that were not too different in structure and appearance from central Rome’s apartment blocks today, though in terms of comfort they were far more basic. Beneath the main stairway was a shared latrine and residents regularly trudged up the stairs, carrying water, and down, carrying chamber pots. Five, six and even seven floors high, a single block contained a rainbow of social layers. The wealthiest residents – who might own the building – lived on the ground floor, where the haulage of fluids was fairly painless and where they probably had their meals prepared in a small, slave-run kitchen. The higher up the stairway one climbed, the worse everything became. A second-floor apartment had balconies and perhaps a simple portable stove or two on which to cook. Higher again and cooking became all but impossible, so people relied on the hot food bars that lined every street and which offered simple dishes similar to those consumed by early republicans eight centuries earlier: porridge, bread, bean stew and vegetables. The top floor was a slum crowded with inhabitants who endured leaking roofs and flimsy wooden walls that left them baking in summer and frozen in winter. And, of course, there was the constant fear of fire. The higher you lived, the less chance you had of saving yourself.
Another constant cause of fear was disease. Here, the Romans had some reasons to be thankful. The city’s streets were kept fairly clean, its aqueducts left Romans relatively safe from waterborne diseases, and its baths would have reduced infestation by parasites. Still, the picture was far from good. Rome stank. As we have seen, apartment blocks were built above cesspits, and poorer Romans’ homes were filthy. The city’s six main sewers, filled with the discharges of baths, latrines, food stalls and every kind of workshop, flowed directly into the Tiber, which was so polluted that fish caught at sea within miles of its estuary were all but inedible. At dawn the air was fresh but it soon became filled with odours, dust and, most of all, with smoke that poured from the city’s hot-food shops, from stoves and from its 800 bathhouses, large and small.
Mostly, Rome was unhealthy because it was large, crowded and cramped. Its huge population meant that measles, mumps, tuberculosis and smallpox were endemic. The city’s greatest scourge, though, was malaria. A poem by the first-century AD satirist Juvenal reveals that Romans commonly became infected with three forms of malaria simultaneously. When, after months of dangerous fevers, they came down with quartan fever – the least dangerous, which until then had been masked by the other two – they knew they were finally on the mend. Judging by better documented times the city would have been struck by an intense malaria epidemic every half-dozen years, usually after heavy summer rainstorms. The disease was worst near the river, where mosquitoes thrived and which, naturally, was where the poorest Romans lived. Children were particularly at risk, as were visitors from the north, who lacked immunity.
All in all, Rome was not a healthy place. Figures from the early modern era reveal it was a population sieve, that needed constant replenishing with immigrants to keep up its numbers, and this was almost certainly true also at the start of the fifth century. Studies have estimated that classical Romans lived on average to around the age of 25 but it is probably more useful to distinguish two quite separate life expectancies. Most poor Romans would have lived considerably less long while the rich – many of whom lived far away from the malarial lowlands, on one of the seven hills, and who could leave the city for their country homes when the disease was at its worst in August and September – would have lived longer.
If sick, Romans who could afford it would visit a doctor. In AD 408 there were large numbers of these, from well-informed professionals to quacks. The better ones had studied the medical writings of Hippocrates and Galen, who, though they had some misleading notions, and claimed that bad health stemmed from an imbalance of the four humours, each of which could be too hot or too cold and too wet or too dry, also offered some good advice based on careful observation. Some doctors had studios in their homes, others had a shop on a street. Others again visited patients in their homes, carrying bronze boxes with sliding lids that were filled with remedies (of which some four-fifths have been calculated as having no medical value). Or one could bypass the medical profession entirely. The temple to Asclepius might be closed but one could turn to his successors and pray to a saint in his church.
Despite their city’s unhealthiness, there were plenty of Romans. It is generally thought that at its height in the second century, Rome probably had a little over a million inhabitants, and possibly as many as a million and a half. The population is thought to have declined after AD 150, as the city was struck first by a plague (possibly smallpox) and then by political chaos and inflation during the Third Century Crisis, but then it appears to have recovered. Studies of records of food dole rations indicate that in the late fourth century the city still had a vast population, of at least 800,000, making it the largest city on earth.
Our early republican would be mystified by talk of dole rations. Rome had become a city of handouts. Food distribution centres across the town offered grain, oil, wine and pork. To modern eyes the logic of who was included in the lists of recipients seems odd, if not bizarre. Food was given out not to feed the desperate but rather to honour ordinary Romans for being Romans. The very poorest Romans were not on the lists and for them life would have been a grim round of begging, hunger and sleeping rough. Though change was beginning to come. During the last decades of the fourth century a new patron had begun to help them out: the Church.
But what, our early republican might ask, of the plebeians? What of their impressive political organization, their state within a state, that had had its own temples, archives, and strategy of strike action? All of this vanished during the later Republic and ordinary Romans had become politically neutered centuries before AD 408. Only when their food dole was cut, because of bad weather at sea or perhaps a usurping general in Africa, did they come to life, rioting, or burning down the house of the city prefect.
The root cause of their political powerlessness walked beside them: slaves. In the early Republic slaves were still relatively scarce – except after the capture of Veii – but at the height of the Empire they abounded. They came from across the Roman state and from far beyond its borders. Together with the city’s free immigrants they made Rome as cosmopolitan as today’s London or New York: a city where one might hear a dozen languages on a single street, from German to Syrian to Scythian. Slaves were found everywhere and did everything: they worked as house servants and house builders, as water haulers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, cooks, concierges, decorators, entertainers, jewellery makers and just about anything else one could think of. In the country, armies of slaves manned huge farming estates. Free Romans found their role undermined in all activities except warfare, and with it their political power.
In AD 406, just two years before Alaric appeared outside Rome, the city’s slave markets would have been crowded. A large group of Goths, whose leader Radagaisus was less cautious than Alaric, raided Tuscany only to be trapped, starved and captured en masse by Stilicho. Though some had ended up in Stilicho’s armies and, after his death, fled the anti-German pogroms to join Alaric, others remained captives inside the walls. This slave glut, though, was exceptional. In this era, as the Empire struggled to win battles and take
prisoners, Rome’s slave economy was firmly in decline. If very rich Romans had no difficulty procuring slaves, their poorer compatriots struggled to afford them. Romans were forced to look after themselves as they had been in republican times, six centuries earlier.
Another area where time seemed to be moving backwards was the family. A stroll through the city during its heyday in the first and second centuries AD would have given the impression that, in terms of the power balance between men and women, Romans’ views had not changed much since the days of the harsh laws of the Twelve Tables in the fifth century BC. Few women would have been visible on the streets, while affluent Roman women rarely worked, and spent most of their time at home or visiting the homes of friends. Men, or their slaves, even did the shopping at the market and those women who did venture out often wore a veil, so Rome would have felt a little like some Middle Eastern cities today. Yet this impression would be misleading, as in many respects Roman society in its prime was quite modern. Rome’s laws had changed greatly since its early days and women – or at least well-off women – frequently controlled their own inheritance, and kept it if they divorced. Many had no husbands to tell them what to do, as it was common for women to marry at around fifteen years of age, to men who were a decade or so older, so widowhood was common. Children, too, were much better off than they had been in early times. Affluent children were treated kindly by their parents, if not downright spoiled.
Yet by AD 408, as with the city’s statues and inscriptions, family life was regressing. From the Third Century Crisis onwards a new traditionalism became fashionable. Women were again expected to behave modestly and with subservience towards men. One might ascribe this change to the rise of Christianity, whose values were intensely conservative but, curiously enough, it began several decades before Christianity’s triumph. In fact, Christianity may have appealed in part because it matched a deeper cultural shift. As Rome was assailed by enemies, confidence became fragile and fears grew, and so people of the Empire turned to the past.
A similar transformation also occurred in sexual attitudes. At the height of the Empire, three centuries before Alaric’s Visigoths appeared, Romans’ views on sex seem to modern eyes both refreshingly open and lamentably brutal. Romans viewed sex positively, as a pleasure given to them by the gods that should be enjoyed. The enjoying of it was even thought to produce healthier children. Nor were Romans much troubled by what kind of sex it was, whether between males and females or males and males (though they were uneasy when it came to females and females). Compared to society today, Romans were uninterested in sexual categorization. If a man slept with a woman or a man that did not mean he was expected to keep doing the same thing. He could seek out pleasure wherever he saw it.
Yet Romans did have sexual taboos and, like so much else in classical Rome, these were all about class. For a rich Roman to sleep with another aristocrat’s wife was adultery, but he was free to sleep with a social inferior. That was so long as the aristocrat was the active partner and the inferior an object of exploitation. Nobody greatly cared if a master, or mistress, made sexual use of their slaves, as they were his or her property. There were instances – regarded at the time as rather humorous – of Romans who saved on trips to the slave market by fathering their whole slave household. Likewise, Romans were not much bothered by the thought of men sexually abusing children so long as they were not the children of aristocrats.
This last attitude, which we find entirely unacceptable, probably did not exist at the time of the Gauls’ sack of Rome in 387 BC. It appears to have been imported a couple of centuries later from the Greek east. Yet its acceptability was already waning by AD 408, as Christianity brought Near Eastern morality westwards. As exploitation of children became taboo, though, so did sexual openness. Saint Paul’s Christianity regarded all but the plainest and most functional sexual activity as abhorrent, and all sex – let alone its enjoyment – was seen as highly doubtful. Devout early Christians idealized virginity, chastity and sexless marriages. The change could hardly have been more extreme.
Not that everybody thought in this way. Rome’s rulers had been Christians for almost a century and, as we have seen, it was now a city of great churches, whose temples were shut for more than a decade, yet closed temples did not mean that pagan belief was dead. In all the Empire, Rome was the city where the old religions still survived most strongly. They held sway particularly among aristocrats who saw Rome’s greatness and their own prestige as inseparable from her ancient beliefs.
As it happened, Alaric and his Visigoths arrived outside Rome at a fascinating moment. Though public pagan worship had been banned for more than a decade, both paganism and Christianity still had strong adherents among the city’s elite. And in wealthy families, Christians and non-Christians dined side by side. There must have been tensions, especially when a family member changed loyalties, as the thinking of the two groups could hardly have been more different. While pagans looked to logic and philosophical argument, Christians looked to faith and their own intense emotion. Each side had good reason to view the other with a certain amount of disgust. To Christians, pagans were worshippers of demons who possessed and ruled them. To pagans, Christians defiled themselves with their love of cadavers. As the short-lived last pagan emperor, Julian, complained, ‘You keep adding many corpses newly dead to the corpse of long ago. You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres.’3
Yet struggles between the pagans and Christians in Rome seem to have been relatively civil (it was very different elsewhere). Battles were fought, most of all, over that favourite deity of early Rome, Victory. The Senate had an ancient tradition that before beginning the day’s business they had to offer a sacrifice on an altar to Victory. Emperor Constantius II, Constantine’s son and successor, had the statue of Victory removed, but when he visited Rome in AD 357 he was so impressed by the city’s monuments that he ordered the statue to be brought back. A generation later, in AD 382, the emperor Gratian had Victory removed again. A leading pagan of the time, Symmachus, begged Gratian to change his mind, and became embroiled in a debate with the bishop of Milan, but he got nowhere. Victory did not return.
Some Roman Christians probably viewed Symmachus’ efforts with sympathy. If both churchmen and devout pagans saw no room for compromise, many Romans strove to find a kind of religious middle ground, in which Christianity was seen as compatible, if not with pagan beliefs, then with a patriotic nostalgia for old pagan ways. Though the Empire had been ruled by Christians for a century – with a brief interlude under pagan Julian – in AD 408 paganism was still widely present in Romans’ lives. To the disgust of zealous Bishop Ambrose in Milan, crowds of Romans, including Christians, continued to enjoy taking part in the city’s old pagan festivals. Especially popular was Lupercalia, during which groups of young men ran round the city, honouring the she-wolf by striking young women with thongs, which was believed to make them fertile. Also hugely popular was the old midwinter pagan festival of Saturnalia, when Romans gave one another gifts, and servants and masters briefly exchanged roles. Likewise, most Romans saw nothing wrong with living surrounded by images of pagan gods, which still decorated the city’s great monuments and stood in its closed temples. Schoolchildren continued to learn by heart the patriotic prophecy of the pagan god Jupiter, from Virgil’s Aeneid, which foretold that Rome would endure without end. Even the emperors who acted against paganism had a contradictory attitude. Theodosius, who ordered Rome’s old temples closed, also issued decrees ordering them to be protected. Churchmen might see these buildings as the devil’s work but to Theodosius they were an important part of the Empire’s heritage and his own prestige.
The greatest tensions, at least within Rome’s aristocracy, were often not between pagans and Christians, but between both of them and a small group of intensely devout Christians. These were Christian ascetics: a circle, mostly female, that formed in the early 380s AD around an anti-materialist priest, Jerome, whose views even some Roman chur
chmen found extreme. Jerome (later Saint Jerome) was disgusted by the way Rome’s wealthy Christians paid lip service to their beliefs while taking care to look after their dynastic needs. If they gave one daughter to Christ as a virgin they would keep another firmly in the world and, if need arose, they felt no qualms at taking Christ’s virgin back and putting her on the market for a good marriage. Similarly, they saw nothing wrong in holding lavish dinner parties, using a handsome set of antique plates decorated with pagan symbols. And while they were delighted to give money to the poor – preferably in public view, outside St Peter’s – they made sure to preserve their real wealth to pass on to the next generation.
Under Jerome’s encouragement, women in his circle spurned such compromises. When widowed, they refused to remarry, even if this meant they left no heir, and they sought to give away their fortunes to the Church and the poor. Naturally this behaviour went down badly with their families, who saw it as a threat to all they held most dear: the continuance of their dynastic power. The first of Rome’s ascetics, Marcella, was disinherited by her own mother in the 380s AD, to prevent her from disposing of the family’s fortune. When Jerome’s patron and protector, Bishop Damasus, died, Jerome was all but hounded out of the city.
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