The Rise of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  Cato is unsentimental. He wants the laborers to be well enough looked after to function efficiently, but that’s all. They should be either at work or asleep. Failure or illness, even old age, is not to be tolerated:

  Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit.

  We can blame Cato for his mean-spiritedness and intellectual dishonesty, but the fact is that the heyday of the independent smallholder, tilling his own soil and sending his sons to war, was over. Sixteen years of burning, looting, and destruction by Hannibal’s army had emptied much of the Italian countryside and swelled the population of Rome. It would take many years for the land to recover, and in some parts of the south it never did.

  POVERTY WAS PARTLY alleviated by fun, albeit in the cause of religion. Throughout the year, groups of days were dedicated to the gods and set aside as holidays. In the city, public and commercial business was suspended, the Senate did not meet, and the city’s routine was interrupted by festivals, or “games.” The oldest were the ludi Romani (Roman Games), founded in the days of the kings and celebrated in September. They featured pantomime dances set to flute music, which doubled as both ritual and entertainment, and from 240 B.C. plays were added to the schedule. The other games were founded during the nerve-racked time of the war with Hannibal and its aftermath, and were attempts either to placate the menacing supernatural order or to express heartfelt thanks for victory.

  As already noted, the ludi Plebeii, or People’s Games, were established in 221 by the plebeian leader Gaius Flaminius. The ludi Apollinares, the games of Apollo, followed in 208; the ludi Cereales, the games of Ceres, in 202; and in 194 the ludi Megalenses, held in honor of the Magna Mater in front of her new temple on the Palatine.

  Antiquarians like Varro were fascinated by the origins of live performance. They posited archaic rituals in the countryside, with dances and crude verses. Italians, wrote Virgil on the back of antiquarian speculation, were

  accustomed to hold a

  Beano, their poems unpolished and unrestrained their jokes:

  They wear the most hideous wooden

  Masks, and address the Wine-god in jovial ditties, and hang

  Wee images of the god to sway from windy pine-boughs.

  Professional dance companies were imported from Etruria, but (we are told) the Roman youths began to imitate them, adding obscene verses of their own composition. This blend of words, music and gesture was cleaned up and professionalized, and led to the presentation of written comedies, which were performed at the ludi. (The young amateurs maintained their tradition of ribald songs regardless.)

  The first proper plays to appear at the Games were written by Livius Andronicus, a half-Greek who was sold into slavery when Rome captured Tarentum after the defeat of King Pyrrhus. He tutored his master’s son and wrote a translation into Latin of Homer’s Odyssey; Cicero thought it poor stuff, but it became a set text that hapless schoolboys had to learn by rote. Little of his work survives except for a few titles—farces inspired by Greek models such as “The Gambler” and “The Dagger.” His plots centered on rich young men’s love affairs with prostitutes (who invariably turned out to be wellborn) and clever slaves who ran rings around their masters. His more famous successors, Plautus (Latin for “flatfoot,” c. 254–184), a stage carpenter and sceneshifter from Umbria, and a young Carthaginian slave, Terence (195/185–159), used much the same kind of material.

  Tragedies on Greek mythological themes (the adventures of Trojan heroes, for example) were also popular, as was an authentic Roman form, fabulae praetextae, poetic dramas about “documentary” or real-life subjects. These celebrated great moments in Republican history, such as the devotio of Decius Mus at Sentinum and Manlius’s duel with a Gallic chieftain.

  Plays were presented in the open air, and the audience sat on the grass or on temporary bleachers in front of a wooden stage. They fulfilled a useful social function, for they appealed to all classes, each of which was allocated special seating. A Roman could look around the audience and see all Rome represented, from a senior senator to a slave who had been given some time off.

  Conservative politicians felt that the performing arts were a decadent, Hellenic innovation and blocked all attempts to build a permanent theater with more convenient and comfortable facilities. At one point, a senatorial decree was passed banning the erection of seats for shows on the risible grounds that “mental relaxation should go together with the virility of a standing posture proper to the Roman nation.”

  The atmosphere at the ludi could be rowdy. Terence was furious that noise and commotion made a play of his, in which he was acting, fail:

  When I first began to perform it, there was talk of a boxing match, and there were hopes of a tightrope walker, too. Slaves were arriving; there was a din, women were shouting—these things made me leave the stage before I’d reached the end.

  When he revived the play, the first part went well, but then the performance was disrupted by the rumor of a gladiatorial show, a spectacle that was much in demand.

  Fights to the death as public display were akin to human sacrifice. Their origin is uncertain; perhaps Rome borrowed them from funeral rites in Etruria (along with wild-animal hunts) or came across them in Campania. The killing of prisoners of war to mark the passing of great men was not unknown. Homer, that universal maker of classical precedents, reports that the grief-stricken Achilles “hacked to pieces with his bronze [sword]” twelve young Trojans at the pyre of his dead friend or lover, Patroclus.

  However, physical combat was unusual. The first report we have of it dates from 264, the year that the First Punic War began. At the funeral of a former consul, Decimus Junius Brutus Pera, his sons presented three pairs of slaves, selected from a group of prisoners of war, who fought one another in the Forum Boarium. By 216, the number of fights in a single program had risen to twenty-two, and in 174 seventy-four men fought over a period of three days.

  As we saw with drama, entertainment and religion marched hand in hand, and it was not for nothing that a gladiatorial show was called in Latin a munus—a service or gift to a man’s ancestors and to the gods. Until the first century, it always marked the death of a male relative, and was often staged in the Forum in a temporary arena. As violent death became an increasingly popular spectator sport, Romans offered a rational justification of its purpose. Gladiators were expected to act bravely and give up their lives with grace. They were an inspiring example of bravery, it was said, which citizens were to learn from and imitate. They were a metaphor for Rome’s martial spirit—in a word, for virtus.

  Munera were regularly programmed in December, especially during the festival of Saturnalia. This prototype of Christmas was the celebration to end all celebrations, and was introduced in 217. It had about it more than a whiff of misrule. Whereas the ludi affirmed social class, the Saturnalia temporarily subverted it. For up to a week, beginning on December 17, the ordinary rules of social interaction were turned upside down. Slaves were excused from work, and their owners would serve them a meal (often actually prepared by the slaves). They were allowed to gamble. Even Cato gave his slaves an extra ration of wine. Citizens were not obliged to dress in togas and everyone wore the pileus, the felt bonnet denoting a slave’s manumission. Gifts were exchanged—wax candles and small pottery figurines, or sigillaria.

  Rome’s frequent festivities certainly mitigated the pain of life, but to the slave and the jobless citizen or part-timer the city was a cramped, crowded, smelly, unhealthy habitat. The rich and powerful enjoyed a high level of comfort and ease, but wisely kept a weather eye on the discontents that surrounded them in every street, alley, or crossroads.

  IF THERE WAS one man Cato could not stand, who was the epitome of the decadent Greekness of which he so passionately disapproved, it was the hero of Zama, the all-conquering Scipio Africanus. Cato
devoted much of his time attempting to discredit him.

  There was an annoying grandeur about Scipio. He came from an extremely distinguished patrician family with many consulships to its credit. As we have seen, his father and uncle had been distinguished generals. Since being given command of an army himself at the early age of twenty-five, he had never lost a battle or seen a Roman force defeated. When abroad on foreign commissions, he tended to give himself the airs and graces of a Hellenistic monarch. He did not have the patience or the moral flexibility to thrive in the noisy rivalry of the marketplace; the first-rate general was a third-rate politician.

  Worst of all, from Cato’s point of view, Scipio was an unrepentant lover of Hellenic culture. He enjoyed wearing Greek fashions (and when he did put on a toga he draped it in an unusual and, unfriendly commentators said, effeminate manner). He wrote a memoir in Greek and spoke the language fluently. He gave his two sons a Greek education, and probably his two daughters, too, for one of them, Cornelia, the wife of that stickler for religious rules, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, had a reputation in adult life as a highly cultivated woman and an intellectual.

  IN 204, THE two men’s paths crossed for the first time. Scipio was in Sicily, assembling his consular army for the invasion of Africa. Cato was one of his quaestors, a junior elected official with financial duties. He argued that his commander was indulging in typically lavish personal expenditure and overpaying his troops. (Many of them were volunteers, so, if there was truth in the claim, the high command was very probably conceding to market forces.) They received much more money than was needed for the necessaries of life, it was said, and were spending the surplus on luxuries and the pleasures of the senses. In other words, Scipio was corrupting the “natural simplicity of his men”; the phrase is Plutarch’s, but it rings true of Cato’s self-serving self-righteousness.

  Scipio replied tartly that he had no use for a cheese-paring quaestor, and Cato returned home to stir things up at Rome. He helped Fabius to attack the consul’s waste of immense sums of money. They deplored Scipio’s “boyish addiction to Greek gymnasia and theatrical performances. It was as if he had been appointed the director of an arts festival, not a commander on active service.” A board of inquiry was sent to Sicily, but found nothing to substantiate the charges. The army was in excellent shape, as Scipio showed when he quickly went on to destroy the power of Carthage. He had won this round against his critics, but they would return. The squabbles and maneuvers of domestic politics bored and irritated him. His enemies were always lying in wait for any slip they could exploit.

  And, reluctant though some might be to admit it, the suspicion in which Cato and his friends held Scipio was by no means irrational. So great now and so far-flung were the challenges and opportunities facing the triumphant Republic that a general could spend years away from Rome and the picky oversight of the Senate. (Scipio fought in Spain and Africa for almost all of a decade starting in 211.) He commanded soldiers who expected to spend many seasons far from home; in the past, they had been farmers who would leave their fields for only a few months, but now their link with the soil was becoming more and more tenuous. When Scipio demobilized his forces, he was obliged to ask the Senate to give them smallholdings from the ager publicus (state-owned land) so that they had somewhere to live and some means of making a living. If their general did not look after his landless legionaries, who would?

  Scipio posed a potential danger to the state, given that he was the master of a great army whose first loyalty was to him. Had he so wished, he could have overshadowed the Senate and even established a formal or an informal despotism. In fact, he did not so wish. He remained at heart loyal to the constitution, that haphazard cocktail of oligarchy moderated by democracy and peopled by an annual procession of temporary monarchs. But it must have occurred to observant senators that a less scrupulous man could accumulate sufficient power with which to subvert the Republic.

  It was also true that Rome’s transformation from a middling Italian city-state into an invincible superpower had a coarsening impact on standards in public life. Vast quantities of wealth began to flow not only into the treasury but also into the pockets of the senatorial élite. Bribery during elections began to be widespread, and elected officials recouped the expenditure by extorting money from the provinces—to begin with, the two Spains (Near and Further), Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily—which they went on to govern after their year of office as consul or praetor was over.

  As censor in 184, Cato did his best to discourage high living and set punitive taxes on expensive clothing, carriages, women’s ornaments, furniture and plate. Many young men paid fortunes for a rent boy or for highly fashionable pickled fish. In a public speech, Cato said, “Anybody can see that the Republic is going downhill when a pretty lad can cost more than a plot of land and jars of fish more than plowmen.” In no way did Scipio and his family have anything to do with that kind of behavior, but to judge by Polybius’s account of his wife’s appearances in public at religious services there was little attempt to cut costs:

  [It was] her habit to appear in great state.… Apart from the magnificence of her personal attire and of the decorations of her carriage, all the baskets, cups and sacrificial vessels or utensils were made of gold or of silver, and were carried in her train on such ceremonial occasions, while the retinue of her maids and manservants who accompanied her was proportionally large.

  Scipio’s critics regarded the extravagant splendor of his lifestyle as part of the same general picture of moral decline.

  Cato was disgusted by the abuses of power he came across as censor and ruthlessly weeded out the unworthy when he scrutinized the membership lists of the Senate and the class of equites. One particular case that Cato exposed concerned a former consul, Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, and horrified public opinion. Flamininus was conducting an affair with an expensive and notorious male prostitute named Philippus the Carthaginian. He persuaded Philippus to join him on campaign in Cisalpine Gaul (today’s Po Valley). The boy used to tease his lover for having made him leave Rome just before the gladiatorial games, which, as a result, he had had to miss. One evening they were having a dinner party and were flushed with wine when a senior Celtic deserter arrived in the camp. He asked to see the consul, with a view to winning his personal protection.

  The man was brought into the tent and began to address Flamininus through an interpreter. While he was speaking, the consul turned to his lover and said, “Since you missed the gladiatorial show, would you like to see this Celt dying?”

  The boy nodded, not taking the offer seriously. Flamininus then drew his sword, which was hanging above his couch, struck the Celt’s head while he was still speaking, and ran him through as he tried to escape. This breach of good faith toward someone seeking Rome’s friendship was shocking enough, but what was really dreadful to the Roman mind was the casual ending of a life at a convivium, a boozy party.

  Had the virtuous Republic of Cincinnatus come to this?

  AS THE GLORIOUS victory over Hannibal receded into history, Cato and his friends sought every occasion to muddy the reputation of the Scipios. Africanus responded to these attacks with the clumsiness of a hurt lion trying to fend off a pack of hyenas. Matters came to a head when he and his brother Lucius returned to Rome in 190 after a successful campaign against Antiochus the Great of Syria. (I describe this in the next chapter.)

  A few years later, during a meeting of the Senate, a hostile tribune, eager to stir up trouble, asked Lucius to account for the sum of five hundred talents, the first installment of a vast Syrian indemnity of fifteen thousand talents. There seems to have been no real suspicion of fraud; the money probably went to pay the soldiers’ wages. In any event, while Lucius, as consul and commander-in-chief, was under a legal obligation to account for state funds, he was much less accountable for moneys won from the enemy.

  Whoever was in the right, Africanus—then princeps senatus, or honorary leader of the Senate—lost his temper. Real
izing that he was the indirect target of the intervention, he asked for the campaign books to be brought to him and tore them up in front of the Senate. The affair was allowed to drop, but the Scipios had been shown to be high-handed and possibly light-fingered. The opposition under Cato soon resumed their assault; another tribune was found who laid the question before the People. When Lucius still refused to account for the five hundred talents, he was fined, with a threat of imprisonment if he declined to pay. However, yet another tribune entered a veto. Cato was satisfied that enough had been done to discredit the brothers and no further action was taken.

  When the Bacchanalia scandal broke in 186, Cato (of course) blamed Scipio and his circle for having opened the doors to Greek cults and influences, which now posed such great danger to the security of the Republic.

  The final onslaught came in 184, and this time Scipio himself was accused (with a farrago of old charges). A huge crowd of clients and friends accompanied him to the Forum. According to Polybius, he spoke only briefly and with typically lofty sangfroid: “The Roman People are not entitled to listen to anyone who speaks against Publius Cornelius Scipio, for it is thanks to him that they have the power of speech at all.”

  The hearing was adjourned to a new date, which happened to be the anniversary of the Battle of Zama. This was too good an opportunity to be missed. Scipio arrived in court and announced that he was going to climb up to the Capitol to render thanks to the gods for the victory. Anyone who wished to accompany him would be very welcome. With one accord, the crowd left the Forum and followed in Scipio’s footsteps. The master publicist did not stop at the Capitol but spent the rest of the day visiting other temples in the city. It was indeed as if Rome were celebrating a festival, with Scipio Africanus as its impresario. Cato’s old insult had become reality.