by Mary Beard
On several occasions in his letters, Cicero can be found worrying about how to decorate his properties appropriately, how to project an image of himself as a man of taste, learning and Greek culture, and how to source the artworks that he needed in order to do that, not always successfully. A tricky problem he faced in 46 BCE reveals some of his slightly fussy concerns. One of his unofficial agents had acquired for him in Greece a small collection of statues that was both too expensive (he could have bought a new lodge, he explains, for the price) and quite unfit for the purposes he had in mind. For a start, there was a statue of the god of war Mars, when Cicero was supposed to be presenting himself as the great advocate of peace. Worse, there was a group of Bacchantes, the uninhibited, ecstatic, drunken followers of the god Bacchus, which could not possibly be used to decorate a library as he wanted: you needed Muses for a library, he explained, not Bacchantes.
54. The plan of the ‘House of the Tragic Poet’ at Pompeii gives a good idea of the basic layout of a moderately wealthy Roman house, of the second and first centuries BCE. The narrow entrance runs between two shops (a) facing onto the street, and leads into the main hall, or atrium (b). The principal formal reception room (c) faced onto the atrium; beyond was a dining area (d) and a small colonnaded garden (e). The other small rooms, some upstairs, included the parlourscum-bedrooms where the most favoured guests would be invited, for business as well as pleasure.
Whether Cicero managed to sell these sculptures on, as he hoped, or whether they ended up in a storeroom on one of his estates is not recorded. But the story is a pointer to the way the domestic, as well as the public, environment of Rome sucked in artworks, both antiques and replicas, in a brisk trade with the Greek world. The material remains of that trade are now best documented by the cargoes that did not make it, in a series of shipwrecks of Roman trading vessels that divers have discovered on the bed of the Mediterranean. One of the most stunning, probably to be dated sometime in the 60s BCE, to judge from the coins it was carrying, sank between Crete and the southern tip of the Peloponnese, near the island of Antikythera – hence its modern name, ‘the Antikythera wreck’. It was carrying bronze and marble sculptures, including one exquisite miniature bronze figure on a wind-up revolving base; luxury furniture; elegant bowls in glass and mosaic; and most famous of all, the ‘Antikythera Mechanism’. This was an intricate bronze device with a clockwork mechanism, apparently designed to predict the movements of the planets and other astronomical events. Though rather a long way from the world’s first computer, as it has occasionally been dubbed, it must have been destined for the library of some keen Roman scientist.
The relationship between leading late Republicans and their properties was in some ways, however, a curious one. Cicero and his friends strongly identified with their houses. Beyond the carefully planned arrangements of sculpture and artworks, the wax masks of their ancestors (imagines) that were worn in funeral processions were displayed in the atria of aristocratic families, who sometimes had different sets or copies for their different properties. On the atrium wall, a painted family tree was one standard feature, and the spoils a man had taken in battle, the ultimate mark of Roman achievement, might also be pinned up there for admiration. Conversely, if the political tide turned, the house could become almost a surrogate for aggression against its owner, or an additional target. When Cicero went into exile in 58 BCE, not only did Clodius and his gangs destroy his property on the Palatine, but considerable damage was done to his properties at Formiae and Tusculum too. And he was not the first who was said to have suffered this kind of punishment. Towards the mythical beginning of a long line of such cases, a radical called Spurius Maelius in the mid fifth century BCE was executed and his house pulled down when – in a classic conservative Roman inference – his generosity to the poor raised suspicions that he was aiming at tyranny.
55. Some of the sculptures from the Antikythera wreck offer haunting images of partial decay. As in this once beautiful specimen, some parts of their marble flesh have corroded, other parts have been preserved in pristine condition – depending on where they lay in the sea and whether they were protected by the sand on the sea bed.
Yet in another way, the connection between family and house was surprisingly loose. Quite unlike, for example, the British aristocracy, whose traditions put great store by the continuity of ownership of their country houses, the Roman elite were always buying, selling and moving. It is true that Cicero hung on to some family property in Arpinum, but he bought his Palatine house only in 62 BCE, from Crassus, who may have owned it as an investment opportunity rather than as a residence; and before that the house of Livius Drusus, where he was assassinated in 91 BCE, had stood on the site. Cicero’s estate at Tusculum had passed from Sulla to a deeply conservative senator, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, and finally to a rich ex-slave, known to us only as Vettius, in the twenty-five years before Cicero bought it in the early 60s BCE. Presumably any masks in the atrium were packed up on the occasion of a sale and moved to the new property. But strangely it was the custom that the spoils of victory stayed with the house and did not move with the family of the man who had won them. In one of Cicero’s later attacks on Mark Antony, he complains that Antony was living and drunkenly carousing in a house that had once belonged to Pompey, with rams from captured ships, probably seized in the campaign against the pirates, still adorning the entranceway.
This pattern of property transfer raises several basic questions. The sums involved were very large. In 62 BCE Cicero had to hand over 3.5 million sesterces for his new house on the Palatine, and there is almost no information about how this kind of payment was organised in practice. It is unlikely that Cicero’s slaves simply wheeled truckloads of cash through the streets under armed guard. The whole transaction points instead either to the use of gold bullion, which would at least have required fewer trucks, or more likely to some system of paper finance or bonds, and so to a relatively sophisticated banking and credit system underpinning the Roman economy, for which only fleeting evidence now survives.
Even more basically, where did all the money come from in the first place? Just after buying the Palatine house, Cicero joked in a letter to his friend Publius Sestius that he was so up to his ears in debt ‘that I’d be keen to join a conspiracy if there was one that would have me’ – a wry allusion to the Catilinarian conspiracy of the previous year. Loans certainly must have been part of it, but most of them had to be repaid, sometimes sooner rather than later; Cicero was, for example, keen to pay off a large loan of almost a million sesterces to Julius Caesar before the outbreak of civil war made it embarrassing. So what were the sources of Cicero’s income? How had he moved from a reasonably affluent local background to being one of the rich, even if far from the richest, at Rome? Some hints in the letters help to sketch out part of the picture.
First a negative. There is no sign that Cicero had any major trading or commercial interests. Strictly speaking, senators were banned from overseas trade, and the wealth of the political elite at Rome was always officially defined by, and rooted in, land. Nonetheless, some senatorial families profited from commercial ventures indirectly, whether through non-senatorial relations or by using their ex-slaves as front men. The family of the same Publius Sestius, the senator with whom Cicero joked about his debt, is one of the best examples of this. Thousands of wine amphorae of the early to mid first century BCE stamped ‘SES’ or ‘SEST’ have been discovered across the Mediterranean from Spain to Athens, with a particular concentration in southern Gaul, including some 1,700 in a shipwreck off Marseilles. These are the clear traces of a large commercial export business associated with some members of the Sestius family, who are known to have had estates near the northern Italian town of Cosa, where another concentration of the same kind of amphorae with the same stamp has been found. Whoever was formally in charge of the business, the profits surely seeped through to the senatorial Sestii too. But there are no hints that Cicero had any involvement in anything like t
hat, apart from a few snobbish and inaccurate slurs made by his enemies that his father had been in the laundry business.
Some of Cicero’s money came, quite traditionally, from rents and from the products of his agricultural land, boosted by the property that was part of Terentia’s dowry. But he had two other main sources of substantial funds. The first was inheritances from outside his immediate family. In 44 BCE he claimed to have received in all a vast 20 million sesterces by that route. It is impossible now to identify all of the benefactors. But many of these legacies must have been paybacks from those he had helped in various ways, ex-slaves who had made their own fortunes or satisfied clients whom he had represented in court. Roman lawyers were expressly forbidden to receive fees for their service, and it is often rightly said that what Cicero gained by pleading in high-profile cases was public prominence. Yet often there were financial returns in some indirect form too. Publius Sulla, the nephew of the dictator, can hardly have been unusual in rewarding Cicero for a successful defence in court. He lent 2 million sesterces towards the purchase of the Palatine house, and repayment seems not to have been demanded.
56. The site of the wreck off Marseilles was explored in the 1950s by a team of divers working with Jacques Cousteau. This is just part of the cargo of amphorae from Italy that the ship was carrying.
The other source was Cicero’s province. While boasting, maybe correctly, that he had never broken the law in extorting money from the provincials, he still left Cilicia in 50 BCE with more than 2 million sesterces in local currency in his luggage. How exactly it was acquired is not certain: a combination perhaps of Cicero’s meanness with his expense allowance and the profits from his minor victory, including selling off the captives into slavery afterwards. Rather than transport this money back to Italy, he deposited it on his way home with a company of publicani in Ephesus, apparently envisaging some form of cashless transfer of funds. But the civil war soon derailed whatever long-term plans he had for it. In early 48 BCE Pompey’s war fund needed all the cash it could get, and Cicero agreed to lend this 2 million sesterces to him, which presumably went some way towards making up for his irritating behaviour in the camp. There is no suggestion that he ever got the money back. This profit of a war against a foreign enemy had ended up, as many others did, bankrolling a war of Roman against Roman.
Human property
There were also human beings among Cicero’s property. In the letters, he mentions in all just over twenty slaves: a group of six or seven message boys, a few secretaries, clerks and ‘readers’ (who read books or documents aloud for the convenience of their master), as well as an attendant, a workman, a cook, a manservant and an accountant or two. In practice, his household must have been much bigger than this. The servicing of twenty properties suggests an absolute minimum staff of 200, even if some were just small lodges and others were mothballed for months on end: there were gardens to be tended, repairs to be carried out, furnaces to be stoked, security to be arranged, not to mention fields to be tilled on the working farms. It says a lot about the invisibility of slaves to the master that Cicero pays no attention to the vast majority of them. Most of those he does mention in his letters are, like the message boys and secretaries, concerned with the production and delivery of the letters themselves.
At a very rough guess there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population. They shared the single defining characteristic of being human property in someone else’s ownership. But that apart, they were just as varied in background and style of life as free citizens. There was no such thing as a typical slave. Some in Cicero’s possession would have been enslaved abroad after defeat in war. Some would have been the product of a ruthless trade that made its profit by trafficking people from the margins of the empire. Others would have been ‘rescued’ from a rubbish tip or born as slaves, in-house, to slave women. Increasingly over the next centuries, as the scale of the wars of Roman conquest diminished, it was this ‘home breeding’ that became the major source of supply, so consigning slave women to much the same regime of childbearing as their free counterparts. More generally, slaves’ conditions of life and work varied from cruel and cramped to borderline luxury. The fifty poky slave cubicles under the grand house of Scaurus were not the worst a slave would fear. Some, in larger industrial or agricultural operations, would have been more or less kept in captivity. Many would have been beaten. In fact, that vulnerability to corporal punishment was one of the things that made a slave a slave; Whipping Boy was one of their common nicknames. Yet there were also a few, a small minority who bulk largest in the surviving evidence, whose day-to-day lifestyle might have seemed enviable to the poor, free and hungry Roman citizen. By their standards, the slave aides of wealthy men in luxurious mansions, their private doctors or literary advisors, usually educated slaves of Greek origin, lived cosseted lives.
The attitudes of the free population to their slaves and to slavery as an institution were equally varied and ambivalent. For the owners, disdain and sadism sat side by side with a degree of fear and anxiety about their dependence and vulnerability, which numerous popular sayings and anecdotes capture. ‘All slaves are enemies’ was one piece of Roman wisdom. And in the reign of the emperor Nero, when someone had the bright idea to make slaves wear uniforms, it was rejected on the grounds that this would make clear to the slave population just how numerous they were. Yet any attempt to draw clear and consistent lines between slaves and free or to define the inferiority of slaves (were they things rather than people, some ancient theorists rather desperately wondered) was necessarily thwarted by social practice. Slaves and free in many contexts worked closely together. In the ordinary workshop, slaves might be friends and confidants as well as human chattel. And they were part of the Roman family; the Latin word familia always included the non-free and the free members of the household (see plates 16, 17).
For many, slavery was in any case only a temporary status, which added to the conceptual confusion. The Roman habit of freeing so many slaves may have been driven by all kinds of coldly practical considerations: it was certainly cheaper, for example, to give slaves their freedom than to keep them in their unproductive old age. But this was one crucial aspect of the widespread image of Rome as an open culture, and it made the Roman citizen body the most ethnically diverse that there ever was before the modern world – and it was a further cause for cultural anxiety. Were Romans freeing too many slaves? they asked. Were they freeing them for the wrong reasons? And what was the consequence of that for any idea of Romanness?
In most cases when Cicero notices his slaves more than in passing, it is because something has gone wrong, and his reactions reveal some of these ambivalences and tensions in a day-to-day setting. In 46 BCE he wrote to one of his friends, then the governor of the province of Illyricum, on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. He had a problem. His librarian, a slave by the name of Dionysius, had been pilfering his books and then, fearing that he would be exposed, had scarpered. It turned out that Dionysius had been spotted in Illyricum (perhaps near his original home), where he had apparently claimed that Cicero had given him his freedom. ‘It’s not a big thing,’ Cicero admitted, ‘but it’s a weight on my mind.’ He was asking that his friend keep an eye out, to no avail, it seems. A year later he heard from the next governor that ‘your runaway’ had gone to ground among a local people, the Vardaei, but nothing was ever heard of him again, even though Cicero fantasised about seeing him brought back to Rome and led as a captive in a triumphal procession.
He had had the same kind of trouble with an ex-slave a few years earlier, another librarian, he explains in a letter to Atticus. This Chrysippus – with his wonderfully learned Greek name, best known from a third-century BCE philosopher – had been given the job of accompanying Cicero’s son, Marcus, then in his mid teens, and Marcus’ slightly older cousin back to Rome from Cilicia. At some point on the journey Chrysippus
abandoned the young men. Never mind all his minor pilferings, Cicero exploded, it was simply absconding that he could not stand, as ex-slaves even after being granted their freedom were still supposed to have obligations to their ex-master. Cicero’s reaction was to use a legal technicality to cancel Chrysippus’ freedom and re-enslave him. Too little, too late, of course: Chrysippus was already off.
It is hard to judge the accuracy of Cicero’s version of these stories. How easy was it to sell on stolen books in Rome? Had Dionysius used them to finance his escape? Did Cicero believe he still had them with him (there was probably even less of a market among the Vardaei)? Or was the theft more a product of Cicero’s paranoia and obsession with his library? Whatever the truth, these stories offer a useful antidote to the ‘Spartacus model’ of slave discontent and resistance. Very few slaves came head to head with Roman authority, still less with the Roman legions. Most resisted their master like this pair did, by just running away, going to ground and, if challenged, saying to their questioner, who almost certainly knew no better, that they had been freed anyway. On Cicero’s side, this offers the image of a man for whom his slave household really could be the enemy within, even if that mostly came down to light fingers, and for whom the difference between those slaves he had freed and those he had not was narrower than many modern historians want to make it. It should be no surprise that, although libertus (freedman) is the standard Latin term for an ex-slave, on numerous occasions the word servus (slave) is used for both.