A History of Rome, Vol 1 by A H.J. Greenidge

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There were other objects, valued for their intrinsic worth as much as
for the distinction conveyed by their possession, which attracted the
ambition and strained the revenues of the fashionable man. Works of art
must once have been cheap on the Roman market; for, even if we refuse to
credit the story of Mummius' estimate of the prize which fallen Corinth
had delivered into his hands,[48] yet the transhipment of cargoes of the
priceless treasures to Rome is at least an historic fact, and the
Gracchi must themselves have seen the trains of wagons bearing their
precious freight along the Via Sacra to the Capitol. The spoils of the
generous conqueror were lent to adorn the triumphs, the public buildings
and even the private houses, of others; but much that had been yielded
by Corinth had become the property neither of the general nor of the
State. Polybius had seen the Roman legionaries playing at draughts on
the Dionysus of Aristeides and many another famous canvas which had been
torn from its place and thrown as a carpet upon the ground;[49] but many
a camp follower must have had a better estimate of the material value of
the paintings of the Hellenic masters, and the cupidity of the Roman
collector must often have been satisfied at no great cost to his
resources. The extent to which a returning army could disseminate its
acquired tastes and distribute its captured goods had been shown some
forty years before the fall of Corinth when Manlius brought his legions
back from the first exploration of the rich cities of Asia. Things and
names, of which the Roman had never dreamed, soon gratified the eye and
struck the ear with a familiar sound. He learnt to love the bronze
couches meant for the dining hall, the slender side tables with the
strange foreign name, the delicate tissues woven to form the hangings of
the bed or litter, the notes struck from the psalter and the harp by the
fingers of the dancing-women of the East.[50] This was the first
irruption of the efflorescent luxury of Eastern Hellenism; but some
five-and-twenty years before this date Rome had received her first
experience of the purer taste of the Greek genius in the West. The whole
series of the acts of artistic vandalism which marked the footsteps of
the conquering state could be traced back to the measures taken by
Claudius Marcellus after the fall of Syracuse. The systematic plunder of
works of art was for the first time given an official sanction, and the
public edifices of Rome were by no means the sole beneficiaries of this
new interpretation of the rights of war. Much of the valuable plunder
had found its way into private houses,[51] to stimulate the envious
cupidity of many a future governor who, cursed with the taste of a
collector and unblessed by the opportunity of a war, would make subtle
raids on the artistic treasures of his province a secret article of his
administration. When the ruling classes of a nation have been
familiarised for the larger part of a century with the easy acquisition
of the best material treasures of the world, things that have once
seemed luxuries come to fill an easy place in the category of accepted
wants. But the sudden supply has stopped; the market value, which
plunder has destroyed or lessened, has risen to its normal level;
another burden has been added to life, there is one further stimulus to
wealth and, so pressing is the social need, that the means to its
satisfaction are not likely to be too diligently scrutinised before they
are adopted.

More pardonable were the tastes that were associated with the more
purely intellectual elements in Hellenic culture--with the influence
which the Greek rhetor or philosopher exercised in his converse with the
stern but receptive minds of Rome, the love of books, the new lessons
which were to be taught as to the rhythmic flow of language and the
rhythmic movement of the limbs. The Greek adventurer was one of the most
striking features of the epoch which immediately followed the close of
the great wars. Later thinkers, generally of the resentfully national,
academic and pseudo-historical type, who repudiated the amenities of
life which they continued to enjoy, and cherished the pleasing fiction
of the exemplary _mores_ of the ancient times, could see little in him
but a source of unmixed evil;[52] and indeed the Oriental Greek of the
commoner type, let loose upon the society of the poorer quarters, or
worming his way into the confidence of some rich but uneducated master,
must often have been the vehicle of lessons that would better have been
unlearnt. But Italy also saw the advent of the best professors of the
age, golden-mouthed men who spoke in the language of poetry, rhetoric
and philosophy, and who turned from the wearisome competition of their
own circles and the barren fields of their former labours to find a
flattering attention, a pleasing dignity, and the means of enjoying a
full, peaceful and leisured life in the homes of Roman aristocrats,
thirsting for knowledge and thirsting still more for the mastery of the
unrivalled forms in which their own deeds might be preserved and through
which their own political and forensic triumphs might be won. Soon towns
of Italy--especially those of the Hellenic South--would be vying with
each other to grant the freedom of their cities and other honours in
their gift to a young emigrant poet who hailed from Antioch, and members
of the noblest houses would be competing for the honour of his
friendship and for the privilege of receiving him under their roof.[53]
The stream of Greek learning was broad and strong;[54] it bore on its
bosom every man and woman who aimed at a reputation for elegance, for
wit or for the deadly thrust in verbal fence which played so large a
part in the game of politics; every one that refused to float was either
an outcast from the best society, or was striving to win an eccentric
reputation for national obscurantism and its imaginary accompaniment of
honest rustic strength.

Acquaintance with professors and poets led to a knowledge of books; and
it was as necessary to store the latter as the former under the
fashionable roof. The first private library in Rome was established by
Aemilius Paulus, when he brought home the books that had belonged to the
vanquished Perseus;[55] and it became as much a feature of conquest
amongst the highly cultured to bring home a goodly store of literature
as to gather objects of art which might merely please the sensuous taste
and touch only the outer surface of the mind.[56]

But it was deemed by no means desirable to limit the influences of the
new culture to the minds of the mature. There was, indeed, a school of
cautious Hellenists that might have preferred this view, and would at
any rate have exercised a careful discrimination between those elements
of the Greek training which would strengthen the young mind by giving it
a wider range of vision and a new gallery of noble lives and those which
would lead to mere display, to effeminacy, nay (who could tell?) to
positive depravity. But this could not be the point of view of society
as a whole. If the elegant Roman was to be half a Greek, he must learn
during the tender and impressionable age to move his limbs and modulate
his voice in true Hellenic wise. Hence the picture which Scipio
Aemilianus, sane Hellenist and stout Roman, gazed at with astonished
eyes and described in the vigorous and uncompromising language suited to
a former censor. "I was told," he said, "that free-born boys and girls
went to a dancing school and moved amidst disreputable professors of the
art. I could not bring my mind to believe it; but I was taken to such a
school myself, and Good Heavens! What did I see there! More than fifty
boys and girls, one of them, I am ashamed to say, the son of a candidate
for office, a boy wearing the golden boss, a lad not less than twelve
years of age. He was jingling a pair of castanets and dancing a step
which an immodest slave could not dance with decency." [57] Such might
have been the reflections of a puritan had he entered a modern
dancing-academy. We may be permitted to question the immorality of the
exhibition thus displayed, but there can be no doubt as to the social
ambition which it reveals--an ambition which would be perpetuated
throughout the whole of the life of the boy with the castanets, which
would lead him to set a high value on the polish of everything he called
his own--a polish determined by certain rigid external standards and to
be attained at any hazard, whether by the ruinous concealment of honest
poverty, or the struggle for affluence even by the most
questionable means.

But the burdens on the wealth of the great were by no means limited to
those imposed by merely social canons. Political life at Rome had always
been expensive in so far as office was unpaid and its tenure implied
leisure and a considerable degree of neglect of his own domestic
concerns in the patriot who was willing to accept it. But the State had
lately taken on itself to increase the financial expenditure which was
due to the people without professing to meet the bill from the public
funds. The 'State' at Rome did not mean what it would have meant in such
a context amongst the peoples of the Hellenic world. It did not mean
that the masses were preying on the richer classes, but that the richer
classes were preying on themselves; and this particular form of
voluntary self-sacrifice amongst the influential families in the senate
was equivalent to the confession that Rome was ceasing to be an
Aristocracy and becoming an Oligarchy, was voluntarily placing the
claims of wealth on a par with those of birth and merit, or rather was
insisting that the latter should not be valid unless they were
accompanied by the former. The chief sign of the confession that
political advancement might be purchased from the people in a legitimate
way, was the adoption of a rule, which was established about the time of
the First Punic War, that the cost of the public games should not be
defrayed exclusively by the treasury.[58] It was seldom that the people
could be brought to contribute to the expenses of the exhibitor by
subscriptions collected from amongst themselves;[59] they were the
recipients, not the givers of the feast, and the actual donors knew that
the exhibition was a contest for favour, that reputations were being won
or lost on the merits of the show, and that the successful competitor
was laying up a store-house of gratitude which would materially aid his
ascent to the highest prizes in the State. The personal cost, if it
could not be wholly realised on the existing patrimony of the
magistrate, must be assisted by gifts from friends, by loans from
money-lenders at exorbitant rates of interest and, worst but readiest of
all methods, by contributions, nominally voluntary but really enforced,
from the Italian allies and the provincials. As early as the year 180
the senate had been forced to frame a strong resolution against the
extravagance that implied oppression;[60] but the resolution was really
a criticism of the new methods of government; the roots of the evil (the
burden on the magistracy, the increase in the number of the regularly
recurring festivals) they neither cared nor ventured to remove. The
aedileship was the particular magistracy which was saddled with this
expenditure on account of its traditional connection with the conduct of
the public games; and although it was neither in its curule nor plebeian
form an obligatory step in the scale of the magistracies, yet, as it was
held before the praetorship and the consulship, it was manifest that the
brilliant display given to the people by the occupant of this office
might render fruitless the efforts of a less wealthy competitor who had
shunned its burdens.[61] The games were given jointly by the respective
pairs of colleagues,[62] the _Ludi Romani_ being under the guidance of
the curule,[63] the _Ludi Plebeii_ under that of the plebeian
aediles.[64] Had these remained the only annual shows, the cost to the
exhibitor, although great, would have been limited, But other festivals,
which had once been occasional, had lately been made permanent. The
games to Ceres (_Cerialia_), the remote origins of which may have dated
back to the time of the monarchy, first appear as fully established in
the year 202;[65] the festival to Flora (_Floralia_) dates from but 238
B.C.,[66] but probably did not become annual until 173;[67] while the
games to the Great Mother (_Megalesia_) followed by thirteen years the
invitation and hospitable reception of that Phrygian goddess by the
Romans, and became a regular feature in their calendar in 191.[68] This
increase in the amenities of the people, every item of which falls
within a term of fifty years, is a remarkable feature of the age which
followed Rome's assumption of imperial power. It proved that the Roman
was willing to bend his austere religion to the purposes of
gratification, when he could afford the luxury, that the enjoyment of
this luxury was considered a happy means of keeping the people in good
temper with itself and its rulers, and that the cost of providing it was
considered, not merely as compatible with the traditions of the existing
regime, but as a means of strengthening those traditions by closing the
gates of office to the poor.

The types of spectacle, in which the masses took most delight, were also
new and expensive creations. These types were chiefly furnished by the
gladiatorial shows and the hunting of wild beasts. Even the former and
earlier amusement had had a history of little more than a hundred years.
It was believed to be a relic of that realistic view of the after life
which lingered in Italy long after it had passed from the more spiritual
civilisation of the Greeks. The men who put each other to the sword
before the eyes of the sorrowing crowd were held to be the retinue which
passed with the dead chieftain beyond the grave, and it was from the
sombre rites of the Etruscans that this custom of ceremonial slaying was
believed to have been transferred to Rome. The first year of the First
Punic War witnessed the earliest combat that accompanied a Roman
funeral,[69] and, although secular enjoyment rapidly took the place of
grim funereal appreciation, and the religious belief that underlay the
spectacle may soon have passed away, neither the State nor the relatives
were supposed to have done due honour to the illustrious dead if his own
decease were not followed by the death-struggle of champions from the
rival gladiatorial schools, and men who aspired to a decent funeral made
due provision for such combats in their wills. The Roman magistrate
bowed to the prevalent taste, and displays of gladiators became one of
the most familiar features of the aediles' shows. Military sentiment was
in its favour, for it was believed to harden the nerves of the race that
had sprung from the loins of the god of war,[70] and humane sentiment
has never in any age been shocked at the contemporary barbarities which
it tolerates or enjoys. But a certain element of coarseness in the
sport, and perhaps the very fact that it was of native Italian growth,
might have given it a short shrift, had the cultured classes really
possessed the power of regulating the amusements of the public. Leaders
of society would have preferred the Greek _Agon_ with its graceful
wrestling and its contests in the finer arts. But the Roman public would
not be hellenised in this particular, and showed their mood when a
musical exhibition was attempted at the triumph of Lucius Anicius Gallus
in 167. The audience insisted that the performers should drop their
instruments and box with one another.[71] This, although not the best,
was yet a more tolerable type of what a contest of skill should be. It
was natural, therefore, that the professional fighting man should become
a far more inevitable condition of social and political success than the
hunter or the race-horse has ever been with us. Some enterprising
members of the nobility soon came to prefer ownership to the hire system
and started schools of their own in which the _lanista_ was merely the
trainer. A stranger element was soon added to the possessions of a Roman
noble by the growing craze for the combats of wild beasts. The first
recorded "hunt" of the kind was that given in 186 by Marcus Fulvius at
the close of the Aetolian war when lions and panthers were exhibited to
the wondering gaze of the people.[72] Seventeen years later two curule
aediles furnished sixty-three African lions and forty bears and
elephants for the Circensian games.[73] These menageries eventually
became a public danger and the curule aedile (himself one of the chief
offenders) was forced to frame an edict specifying the compensation for
damage that might be committed by wild beasts in their transit through
Italy or their residence within the towns.[74] The obligation of wealth
to supply luxuries for the poor--a splendid feature of ancient
civilisation in which it has ever taken precedence of that of the modern
world--was recognised with the utmost frankness in the Rome of the day;
but it was an obligation that had passed the limits at which it could be
cheerfully performed as the duty of the patriot or the patron; it had
reached a stage when its demoralising effects, both to giver and to
receiver, were patent to every seeing eye, but when criticism of its
vices could be met by the conclusive rejoinder that it was a vital
necessity of the existing political situation.[75]

The review which we have given of the enormous expenditure created by
the social and political appetites of the day leads up to the
consideration of two questions which, though seldom formulated or faced
in their naked form, were ever present in the minds of the classes who
were forced to deem themselves either the most responsible authors, or
the most illustrious victims, of the existing standards both of politics
and society. These questions were "Could the exhausting drain be
stopped?" and "If it could not, how was it to be supplied?" A city in a
state of high fever will always produce the would-be doctor; but the
curious fact about the Rome of this and other days is that the doctor
was so often the patient in another form. Just as in the government of
the provinces the scandals of individual rule were often met by the
severest legislation proceeding from the very body which had produced
the evil-doers, so when remedies were suggested for the social evils of
the city, the senate, in spite of its tendency to individual
transgression, generally displayed the possession of a collective
conscience. The men who formulated the standard of purity and
self-restraint might be few in number; but, except they displayed the
irritating activity and the uncompromising methods of a Cato, they
generally secured the support of their peers, and the sterner the
censor, the more gladly was he hailed as an ornament to the order. This
guardian of morals still issued his edicts against delicacies of the
table, foreign perfumes and expensive houses;[76] as late as the year
169 people would hastily put out their lights when it was reported that
Tiberius Sempronius Graccus was coming up the street on his return from
supper, lest they should fall under the suspicion of untimely
revelry,[77] and the sporadic activity of the censorship will find ample
illustration in the future chapters of our work. Degradation from the
various orders of the State was still a consequence of its
animadversions; but a milder, more universal and probably far more
efficacious check on luxury--the system, pursued by Cato, of adopting an
excessive rating for articles of value[78] and thus of shifting the
incidence of taxation from the artisan and farmer to the shoulders of
the richest class[79]--had been taken out of its hands by the complete
cessation of direct imposts after the Third Macedonian War.[80]

Meanwhile sumptuary laws continued to be promulgated from the Rostra and
accepted by the people. All that are known to have been initiated or to
have been considered valid after the close of the great wars have but
one object--an attack on the expenses of the table, a form of sensuous
enjoyment which, on account of the ease and barbaric abundance with
which wealth may vaunt itself in this domain, was particularly in vogue
amongst the upper classes in Rome. Other forms of extravagance seem for
the time to have been left untouched by legislation, for the Oppian law
which had been due to the strain of the Second Punic War had been
repealed after a fierce struggle in 193, and the Roman ladies might now
adorn themselves with more than half an ounce of gold, wear robes of
divers colours and ride in their carriages through any street they
pleased.[81] The first enactment which attempted to control the
wastefulness of the table was an Orchian law of 181, limiting the number
of guests that might be invited to entertainments. Cato was consistent
in opposing the passing of the measure and in resisting its repeal. He
recognised a futile law when he saw it, but he did not wish this
futility to be admitted.[82] Twenty years later[83] a Fannian law grew
out of a decree of the senate which had enjoined that the chief men
(_principes_) of the State should take an oath before the consuls not to
exceed a certain limit of expense in the banquets given at the
Megalesian Games. Strengthened with a measure which prescribed more
harassing details than the Orchian law. The new enactment actually
determined the value and nature of the eatables whose consumption was
allowed. It permitted one hundred asses to be spent on the days of the
Roman Games, the Plebeian Games and the Saturnalia, thirty asses on
certain other festival occasions, and but ten asses (less than twice the
daily pay of a Roman soldier) on every other meal throughout the year;
it forbade the serving of any fowl but a single hen, and that not
fattened; it enjoined the exclusive consumption of native wine.[84] This
enactment was strengthened eighteen years later by a Didian law, which
included in the threatened penalties not only the giver of the feast
which violated the prescribed limits, but also the guests who were
present at such a banquet. It also compelled or induced the Italian
allies to accept the provisions of the Fannian law[85]--an unusual step
which may show the belief that a luxury similar to that of Rome was
weakening the resources of the confederacy, on whose strength the
leading state was so dependent, or which may have been induced by the
knowledge that members of the Roman nobility were taking holiday trips
to country towns, to enjoy the delights which were prohibited at home
and to waste their money on Italian caterers.[86]

The frequency of such legislation, which we shall find renewed once
again before the epoch of the reforms of Sulla[87] seems to prove its
ineffectiveness,[88] and indeed the standard of comfort which it desired
to enjoin was wholly incompatible with the circumstances of the age. The
desire to produce uniformity[89] of standard had always been an end of
Roman as of Greek sumptuary regulation, but what type of uniformity
could be looked for in a community where the extremes of wealth and
poverty were beginning to be so strongly marked, where capital was
accumulating in the hands of the great noble and the great trader and
being wholly withdrawn from those of the free-born peasant and artisan?
The restriction of useless consumption was indeed favourable to the more
productive employment of capital; but we shall soon see that this
productive use, which had as its object the deterioration of land by
pasturage and the purchase of servile labour, was as detrimental to the
free citizen as the most reckless extravagance could have been. There is
no question, however, that both the sumptuary laws and the censorian
ordinances of the period did attempt to attain an economic as well as a
social end; and, however mistaken their methods may have been, they
showed some appreciation of the industrial evils of the time. The
provision of the Fannian law in favour of native wines suggests the
desire to help the small cultivator who had substituted vine-growing for
the cultivation of cereals, and foreshadows the protective legislation
of the Ciceronian period.[90] Much of this legislation, too, was
animated by the "mercantile" theory that a State is impoverished by the
export of the precious metals to foreign lands[91]--a view which found
expression in a definite enactment of an earlier period which had
forbidden gold or silver to be paid to the Celtic tribes in the north of
Italy in exchange for the wares or slaves which they sold to Roman
merchants.[92]

Another series of laws aimed at securing the purity of an electorate
exposed to the danger of corruption by the overwhelming influence of
wealth. Laws against bribery, unknown in an earlier period,[93] become
painfully frequent from the date at which Rome came into contact with
the riches of the East. Six years after the close of the great Asiatic
campaign the people were asked, on the authority of the senate, to
sanction more than one act which was directed against the undue
influence exercised at elections;[94] in 166 fresh scandals called for
the consideration of the Council of State;[95] and the year 159 saw the
birth of another enactment.[96] Yet the capital penalty, which seems to
have been the consequence of the transgression of at least one of these
laws,[97] did not deter candidates from staking their citizenship on
their success. The still-surviving custom of clientship made the object
of largesses difficult to establish, and the secrecy of the ballot,
which had been introduced for elections in 139, made it impossible to
prove that the suspicious gift had been effective and thus to construct
a convincing case against the donor.