by Mary Beard
There are more than fifty quotations from the poetry of Virgil scrawled as graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. That certainly does not mean that the Aeneid or his other poems were widely read in their entirety. The majority of the quotes are of the first words of the first book of the Aeneid (‘Arma virumque cano’, ‘Arms and the man I sing’) or the first words of the second book (‘Conticuere omnes’, ‘Everyone fell silent’) – lines that had probably become as quotable as ‘To be or not to be’. And many of them might have been the work of rich lads, for whom Virgil was a school textbook; it is a fallacy to imagine that only the poor write on walls. But it would be implausible to suppose that all of these scrawlings had a rich pedigree.
The signs are that, even if in bite-sized chunks, Virgil’s poetry was one shared cultural commodity, to be quoted, adapted and even used for jokes and play. The façade of one Pompeian laundry was decorated with a scene taken from the story of the Aeneid, showing the hero Aeneas leading his father and son from the wreckage of Troy, on their way to found the new Troy in Italy. Just nearby some joker scrawled, in a parody of the famous first line of the poem, ‘Fullones ululamque cano, non arma virumque’ – ‘The fullers and their owl I sing, not arms and the man’ (referring to the bird that was a trade mascot of the laundry business). It was hardly high culture, but it does point to a shared frame of reference between the world of the street and the world of classic literature.
An even more striking case of that is found in the decoration of a bar designed in the second century CE in the port town of Ostia. The main theme of the painting is the standard ancient line-up of Greek philosophers and gurus traditionally grouped under the title of ‘The Seven Sages’: they include Thales of Miletus, the sixth-century BCE thinker famous for claiming that water was the origin of the universe, and his rough contemporaries Solon of Athens, an almost legendary lawgiver, and Chilon of Sparta, another early luminary and intellectual. Some of the paintings have not survived, but originally the full seven would have been there, shown seated on elegant chairs and carrying scrolls. But there was a surprise. For each of them was accompanied by a slogan not on their specialist subjects of politics, science, law or ethics – but on defecation, and running along a familiar scatological theme (see plate 15).
Above Thales ran the words ‘Thales advised those who shit hard to really work at it’; above Solon, ‘To shit well Solon stroked his belly’; and above Chilon, ‘Cunning Chilon taught how to fart without making a noise.’ Beneath the Sages there was another row of figures, all sitting together on a communal multiseater lavatory (a normal arrangement in the Roman world). They too are uttering lavatorial mottoes: for example, ‘Jump up and down and you’ll go quicker’ and ‘It’s coming’.
One way of explaining this is as an aggressive popular joke against elite culture. The ordinary boys in the bar were enjoying some scatological fun against the pillars of the elite intellectual establishment, by seeing their wisdom in terms of the lavatory. And that must be one side of it: bringing high thoughts down to the level of defecation. But it was more complicated than that. These slogans do not only assume a literate audience, or at least enough literates among the customers to be able to read the slogans to the non-literates. In order to devise and to get the joke here you also had to know something about the Seven Sages; if Thales of Miletus meant absolutely nothing to you, then his advice on defecation was hardly funny. In order to take a swipe against the pretensions of intellectual life, you had to have some knowledge of it.
There are many ways to imagine the life in this bar: the rowdy guffawing at the lavatorial humour, the occasional discussion about what exactly Chilon’s claim to fame was, the bantering with the landlord, the flirtation with the waiting staff. The customers would have come for all kinds of reasons: to get a good, hot meal, to enjoy an evening in jollier and warmer surroundings than they had at home or simply to get drunk. Some would have been the sort to dream of the riches that came with a lucky throw of the dice. Others would have believed that it was better to put up with your lot in life rather than lose the little extra you had on the gaming board. Many would have resented the arrogance and disdain, the double standards and the lifestyle of their rich neighbours; lack of zoning in Roman cities may have had its equitable side, but it also meant that the poor constantly had their noses rubbed in the privilege of others.
What all would have agreed, both rich and poor, was that to be rich was a desirable state, that poverty was to be avoided if you possibly could. Just as the ambition of Roman slaves was usually to gain freedom for themselves, not to abolish slavery as an institution, so the ambitions of the poor were not radically to reconfigure the social order but to find a place for themselves nearer the top of the hierarchy of wealth. Apart from a very few philosophical extremists, no one in the Roman world seriously believed that poverty was honourable – until the growth of Christianity, which we shall explore further in the next chapter. The idea that the rich man might have a problem entering the kingdom of heaven would have seemed as preposterous to those hanging out in our Ostian bar as to the plutocrat in his mansion.
CHAPTER TWELVE
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ROME OUTSIDE ROME
Pliny’s province
IN 109 CE, Pliny the Younger left Italy and his lavish country villa to travel for at least four weeks, over almost 2,000 miles, to the province of Bithynia. Lawyer, advocate and ex-consul, then in his late forties, he was the new provincial governor, appointed by the emperor Trajan, with a special mandate to look into the condition of the cities there. His was a large territory, stretching along much of the southern shore of the Black Sea and covering more than 15,000 square miles, including the rump of Mithradates’ old kingdom of Pontus. As his companion, Pliny took his third wife, Calpurnia, some twenty-five years his junior (there were no living children from any of his marriages). She went home a couple of years later, on receiving news of the death of her grandfather. Pliny never returned to Italy. The likelihood is that he died in post not long after Calpurnia left.
What Pliny did as governor is known from roughly a hundred surviving letters he exchanged with the emperor during his time in Bithynia, on the organisation and administration of the province, on legal disputes, urban regeneration, financial management and imperial protocol. Whoever selected and edited these for public circulation (for they are certainly not the random contents of Pliny’s filing cabinet) was concerned to present him as a safe pair of hands, a man of probity with an eye for detail who took the business of provincial administration seriously. He often comes across as a bit too good to be true.
The letters show him scrupulously inspecting the finances of the local towns, reporting to the emperor on the state of their public services and asking for architects and engineers to be sent from Rome. Pliny was worried about the state of the aqueduct at Nicomedia, the baths at Claudiopolis and the theatre and gymnasium at Nicaea; even the 6-metre-thick walls in this new gymnasium were not structurally sound, he suspected, but a specialist opinion was needed. At Nicomedia he considered establishing a local fire brigade, though Trajan advised against the plan, on the revealing grounds that such organisations could turn into political pressure groups, and suggested simply providing some firefighting equipment instead. Pliny fretted too about how to punish slaves who had tried to enrol in the army, which was strictly open to the freeborn only, about whether the town council of Nicaea should be allowed to appropriate the property of anyone who died without making a will and about whether Trajan would mind having his statue put up in a building where human remains were buried.
Any advice from the emperor would have taken at least two months to get back to Pliny, even assuming an instant turnaround at the palace end. But Trajan did regularly reply, and an occasional tone of irritation suggests that the letters were dictated or drafted by the man himself rather than simply passed across the desk of some underling. Of course, he growls, he would not mind the proximity of human remains to his statue; how on earth could Pliny e
ver have imagined that he would take that as an insult?
It would probably have surprised both Pliny and Trajan to discover that 2,000 years later the most famous of their exchanges is to do with an apparently insignificant, but awkward and time-consuming, new religious group: the Christians. Pliny admitted that he was not sure how to handle them. To start with he had given them several opportunities to recant and executed only those who would not do so (‘their stubbornness and unbending obstinacy certainly ought to be punished’). But then many more names were brought to his attention, as people started to settle old scores by accusing their enemies of being Christian. Pliny continued to allow those under investigation to recant, so long as they proved their sincerity by pouring wine and incense in front of statues of the emperor and the true gods. But in order to find out what was at the bottom of all this, he had two Christian slave women tortured and questioned (in both ancient Greece and Rome, slaves were allowed to give legal evidence only under torture) and concluded that Christianity was ‘nothing other than a perverse and unruly superstition’. He still wanted Trajan to confirm that this had been the right method of approach. And that is more or less what the emperor did, though he added a note of caution: ‘Christians should not be sought out,’ he wrote, ‘but if they are accused and found guilty, they must be punished.’ This is the earliest surviving discussion of Christianity outside Jewish or Christian literature.
The contrast with Cicero’s letters sent from Cilicia 150 years earlier could hardly be starker. For Cicero, the province presented the opportunity for military exploits and offered dreams of Alexander the Great – and it was a man’s world (in the Republic, governors’ wives seem to have been expressly prohibited from accompanying their husbands abroad). He paints a picture of uncertainty and disorganisation that, for all his good intentions, he could only mitigate, not solve. And that was combined with persistent, low-level exploitation of the local population by many of the Roman provincial staff, including Caesar’s assassin Brutus, whose high political principles did not apply to all: he had been trying to extract 48 per cent interest from the unfortunate Cypriots. Pliny appears to have had no aspiration to armed heroics, and he was there with his wife, though what young Calpurnia spent her time doing we can only guess. His province comes across as an ordered place, where good financial practices were enforced and corruption sniffed out, where the local amenities were high on the governor’s agenda and disputes were resolved within a clear legal framework.
It would be wrong to take this contrast entirely at face value. Dispatches back to the emperor are almost bound to have had a different flavour, and give a different impression, from letters like Cicero’s, to close friends and confidants. Besides, some of the specific legal framework within which Pliny was operating went back to the era of Cicero; for it was Pompey who had established the regulations for the new province after his defeat of Rome’s long-standing enemy Mithradates in the 60s BCE, and Pliny on several occasions refers back to them explicitly (as the lex Pompeia, or ‘Pompeian code’). And even Cicero occasionally turned his attention to the irregularities going on in the provincial towns. Nevertheless, there was a new style of government in the provinces from the reign of Augustus onwards, and Pliny’s correspondence captures this well.
There was a new clarity of command. Pliny had gone out to Bithynia with specific instructions from Trajan, and he knew exactly to whom he should report. It is clear too that the emperor could make decisions about matters in the provinces, right down to detailed questions on particular buildings in particular towns, in a way that the senate of the Republic never had. Some rogue governors might have liked to behave as mini-autocrats, acting on their own initiative, laying down their own law and living a lavish lifestyle, largely out of touch with the capital; and not all of them were entirely loyal to the man on the throne. There was, however, a new sense that governors were officials directly answerable to a higher authority back in Rome. As we shall see, the palace administration, although several weeks’ journey from many provinces, had ways of keeping track of what these officials were up to far from home.
This was a new world of ‘Rome outside Rome’, and Pliny is a good guide to it. His letters raise questions about how far the empire under the emperors was different from the empire under the Republic, whether for the governed or the governing, victors or victims. They point to wider dilemmas over official relations with the Christians, which eventually became one of the most divisive conflicts across the Roman world, and hint at many important issues in the infrastructure of imperial rule at this period, from the role of soldiers in provincial administration to the organisation of official transport. But Pliny had his blind spots too.
He had little eye for any general sources of opposition to the Romans or for the commercial opportunities of this huge empire, and none at all for the cultural differences between his province and his home. No one would guess from the correspondence that the main language of his province was Greek, not Latin. Trajan at one point does pass an opinion on Greek fitness regimes: ‘Greeklings,’ he writes, meaning the Greek-speaking provincials, ‘do love their gymnasia.’ But the closest Pliny comes to remarking on cultural variety is when he deems Christianity ‘a perverse and unruly superstition’ and tries to get to the bottom of its rituals and ceremonies.
The province of Bithynia and Pontus, as it was technically known, was a world away from Rome, with a dazzling and sometimes ‘exotic’ mix of Greek and other local traditions, as some other ancient writers were keen to underline. The essayist and satirist Lucian – himself a striking example of cultural hybridity, being a Roman citizen from Syria whose first language was Greek – devoted a whole skit to an unforgettably weird new oracle that emerged in the province just fifty years after Pliny’s death. It featured a prophetic snake with a human head and was hugely popular, attracting the attention of elite Romans from the emperor Marcus Aurelius down. Lucian ridiculed it as a moneymaking fraud, with a homemade puppet at its centre.
87. The snake god Glycon is vividly imagined in this second-century CE sculpture. Lucian’s sceptical skit on the cult of the god tells of a range of unbelievable stunts that he pulled off for a gullible crowd.
For historians now, one of the most pressing questions of the Roman Empire is precisely how cultural differences and oddities of this kind were debated, how ‘Roman’ those outside Rome and Italy became and how people in the provinces related their traditions, religions, languages and, in some cases, literatures to those of the imperial power – and vice versa. Pliny does not seem to have been the slightest bit interested in this.
The boundaries of empire
The expansion of the empire by the first Augustus had come to an abrupt end in 9 CE when, in the course of stabilising Roman conquests in Germany, the Roman commander Publius Quinctilius Varus lost most of three legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, just north of the modern town of Osnabrück. It was a defeat that ranked in Roman imagination with the disaster at Cannae during the war against Hannibal, and lurid stories were told of how captured soldiers were sacrificed in barbaric rituals and how the gales and pouring rain made the massacre worse. It was said that the helpless Romans could not fire their arrows, throw their javelins or even wield their soaking shields. In the end, the casualties came to not far short of 10 per cent of the Roman armed forces; the remains of some of them, plus their pack animals, have recently been discovered on the site, including skulls with traces of deep head wounds. The victorious enemy was a German rebel, Arminius (‘Herman the German’, as he is now affectionately known), a man who had served in the Roman army and whom Varus had trusted as a loyal friend; Arminius tricked Varus into the ambush after saying that he was going off to raise local support for the Romans. As on other occasions, the most effective opponents of the legions were those whom the Roman themselves had trained.
Augustus had been planning to expand Roman territory into eastern Germany beyond the river Rhine. Clear signs of his intentions have been
discovered over the past twenty years in the excavations of a half-finished Roman town, at Waldgirmes, 60 miles east of the river; its central Forum was already constructed, complete with a gilded statue of the emperor on horseback. It was never finished because after the disaster Augustus gave up plans for more conquests, withdrew westwards and at his death left instructions that the empire should not be extended any further.
Those instructions were not, however, quite so simple. For, as we have seen, Augustus also left a template for imperial power that was founded on conquest and on traditional Roman military prowess. And he bequeathed to his successors, and to the Roman people, a vision of the Roman Empire extending over the whole world. Could Jupiter’s prophecy in Virgil’s Aeneid, that the Romans would have power ‘without limit’, be conveniently shelved just because of a single disaster? That was hardly the spirit of Cannae.
For the next 200 years, until the end of the second century CE, those two incompatible visions of empire – consolidation versus expansion – coexisted surprisingly easily. There were a few additions to Roman territory. Claudius, for example, compensated for his decidedly unmilitary image by taking the credit for conquering Britain and celebrated the event with a triumphal procession in 44 CE, the first in almost thirty years. This had considerable symbolic value. It was the first Roman conquest in those strange lands that lay beyond the Ocean (otherwise known, in this case, as the English Channel) and turned Julius Caesar’s temporary foray on to the island a hundred years earlier into permanent occupation. But it was hardly expansion on a grand scale, and over the next decades it proceeded northwards to Scotland very slowly indeed. The careful assessment by the geographer Strabo, writing in the early first century CE, of the viability of annexing Britain is in fact a telling illustration of a newly cautious imperial culture. After reviewing the characteristics of the Britons (tall, bandy-legged and weird) and the resources of the island (including grain, cattle, slaves and hunting dogs), he argues that the cost of the garrison would outweigh any tax revenue that would accrue. But Claudius needed the kudos.