Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius Part 2

Yet, after all the deductions of scrupulous criticism, the profound moral sense of Juvenal has laid bare and painted with a realistic power, hardly equalled even by Tacitus, an unhealthy temper in the upper cla.s.ses, which was full of peril. He has also revealed, alongside of this decline, a great social change, we may even call it a crisis, which the historian, generally more occupied with the great figures on the stage, is apt to ignore. The decay in the morale and wealth of the senatorial order, together with the growing power of a new moneyed cla.s.s, the rise to opulence of the freedman and the petty trader, the invasion of Greek and Oriental influences, and the perilous or hopeful emanc.i.p.ation, especially of women, from old Roman conventionality, these are the great facts in the social history of the first century which, under all his rhetoric, stand out clearly to the eye of the careful student of the satirist.

The famous piece, in which Juvenal describes an effeminate Fabius or Lepidus, before the mutilated statues and smoke-stained pedigree of his house, rattling the dice-box till the dawn, or sunk in the stupor of debauch at the hour when his ancestors were sounding their trumpets for the march,(401) has, for eighteen centuries, inspired many a homily on the vanity of mere birth. Its moral is now a hackneyed one. But, when the piece was written, it must have been a powerful indictment. For the respect for long descent was still deep in the true Roman, and was gratified by fabulous genealogies to the end. Pliny extols Trajan for reserving for youths of ill.u.s.trious birth the honours due to their race.(402) Suetonius recounts the twenty-eight consuls.h.i.+ps, five dictators.h.i.+ps, seven censors.h.i.+ps, and many triumphs which were the glory of the great Claudian house,(403) and the similar honours which had been borne by the paternal ancestors of Nero.(404) Tacitus, although not himself a man of old family, has a profound belief in n.o.ble tradition, and sometimes speaks with an undisguised scorn of a low alliance.(405) As the number of the "Trojugenae" dwindled, the pride of the vanis.h.i.+ng remnant probably grew in proportion, and a clan like the Calpurnian reluctantly yielded precedence even to Tiberius or Nero.(406) It is a sign of the social tone that the manufacture of genealogies for the new men, who came into prominence from the reign of Vespasian, went on apace. A Trojan citizen in the days of Apollonius traced himself to Priam.(407) Herodes Atticus claimed descent from the heroes of Aegina,(408) just as some of the Christian friends of S. Jerome confidently carried their pedigree back to Aeneas or Agamemnon.(409) Juvenal would certainly not have accepted such fables, but he was no leveller. He had a firm belief in moral heredity and the value of tradition. Plebeian as he was, he had, like Martial, his own old Roman pride, which poured contempt on the upstarts who, with the stains of servile birth or base trade upon them, were crowding the benches of the knights. He would, indeed, have applauded the _mot_ of Tiberius, that a distinguished man was his own ancestor;(410) he recalls with pride that one humble son of Arpinum had annihilated the hordes of the Cimbri, and another had crushed the rising of Catiline.(411) But he had the true Roman reverence for the Curii, Fabii, and Scipios, and would gladly salute any of their descendants who reproduced their virtues.

It is a melancholy certainty that a great many of the senatorial cla.s.s in Juvenal's day had fallen very low in all things essential to the strength of a great caste. Their numbers had long been dwindling,(412) owing to vicious celibacy or the cruel proscriptions of the triumvirate and the four Claudian Caesars, or from the unwillingness or inability of many to support the burdens of their rank. It was a rare thing in many great houses to reach middle age.(413) Three hundred senators and two thousand knights had fallen in the proscription of the second triumvirate.(414) The ma.s.sacre of old and young of both s.e.xes, which followed the fall of Seja.n.u.s, must have extinguished many an ancient line; not a day pa.s.sed without an execution.(415) Three hundred knights and thirty-five senators perished in the reign of Claudius.(416) Very few of the most ancient patrician houses were left when Claudius revised the lists of the Senate, and introduced a fresh element from Gaul.(417) Who can tell the numbers of those who fell victims to the rage or greed or suspicion of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian? The list must have been enormously swelled by the awful year of the four emperors. Vespasian found it necessary to recruit the ranks of the aristocracy from Italy and the provinces.(418)

At the same time, prodigality or confiscation had rendered many of those who survived unable to maintain their rank, and to bear the social and official burdens which, down to the end of the Western Empire were rigorously imposed on the great order. The games of the praetors.h.i.+p in the first century, as in the fifth,(419) const.i.tuted a tax which only a great fortune could easily bear. Aristocratic poverty became common. As early as the reign of Augustus, the emperor had found it politic to subsidise many great families.(420) The same policy had been continued by Tiberius, Nero, and Vespasian.(421) Tiberius, indeed, had scrutinised and discouraged some of these claims on grounds which the treasury officials of every age would applaud.(422) A grandson of the great orator Hortensius once made an appeal in the Senate for the means of supporting the dignity of his name.

He had received a grant from Augustus to enable him to rear a family, and four sons were now waiting at the doors of the Curia to second his prayer.

Hortensius, who was the great rival of Cicero, had possessed immense wealth. He had many splendid villas, he used to give dinners in his park, around which the deer would troop to the lute of a slave-Orpheus; he left 10,000 casks of old Chian in his cellars. His mendicant and spiritless descendant had to go away with a cold withering refusal from Tiberius, softened by a contemptuous dole to his sons. The revision of the senatorial roll by Claudius in 48 A.D., revealed a portentous disappearance of old houses of the Republic, and the gaps had to be filled up from the provinces in the teeth of aristocratic exclusiveness.(423) Among the boon companions of Nero there must have been many loaded with debt, like Otho and Vitellius. The Corvinus in Juvenal who is keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm, and his probable kinsman who obtained a subsidy from Nero, the Fabii and Mamerci who were dancing and playing the harlequin on the comic stage, or selling their blood in the arena, must represent many a wreck of the great houses of the Republic.(424) Among the motley crowd who swarm in the hall of the great patron to receive the morning dole, the descendants of houses coeval with the Roman State are pushed aside by the freedmen from the Euphrates.(425) But aristocratic poverty knew no lower depth of degradation than in the hungry adulation which it offered to the heirless rich. Captation became a regular profession in a society where trade, industry, and even professional skill, were treated as degrading to the men of gentle blood.(426) It is characteristic of Juvenal that he places on the same level the legacy-hunter, who would stoop to any menial service or vicious compliance, with the honest tradesfolk, in whose ranks, if we may judge by their funerary inscriptions, was to be found, perhaps, the wholesomest moral tone in the society of the early Empire.

In a satire written after Domitian's death,(427) Juvenal has described a scene of fatuous adulation which, if not true in fact, is only too true to the character of the time. A huge mullet, too large for any private table, had been caught in a bay of the Adriatic. Its captor hastens through winter storms to lay his spoil at the emperor's feet. The kitchen of the Alban palace had no dish large enough for such a monster, and a council of trembling senators is hastily summoned to consult on the emergency.

Thither came the gentle Crispus, that Acilius, whose son was to be the victim of the despot's jealousy, Rubrius tainted with a nameless crime, the bloated Monta.n.u.s, and Crispinus, once an Egyptian slave, now a vulgar exquisite, reeking with unguents. There, too, was the informer whose whisper stabbed like a stiletto, the l.u.s.tful, blind Catullus, and the arch flatterer Veiento, who had revelled at the Gargantuan feasts of Nero from noon till midnight. These are worthy brethren of the a.s.sembly who stabbed Proculus to death with their stiles at the nod of the freedman of Caligula,(428) and led Nero home in triumphal procession after his mother's murder.(429)

Many things had contributed to the degradation of the senatorial character. The dark and tortuous policy of Tiberius tended, indeed, to absolutism; yet he still maintained a tone of deference to the Senate, and sometimes, with cold good sense, repelled a too eager adulation.(430) But, in the reigns of Caligula and Nero, the great order had to submit to the deepest personal degradation, and were tempted, or compelled by their masters to violate every instinct of Roman dignity. The wild epileptic frenzy of Caligula, who spared not the virtue of his sisters,(431) as he boasted of his own incestuous birth,(432) who claimed divine honours,(433) temples, and costly sacrifices, who, as another Endymion, called the Moon to his embraces, who dreamt of obliterating the memory of Homer and Virgil and Livy, was not likely to spare the remnant of self-respect still left in his n.o.bles.(434) He gave an immense impetus to the rage for singing, dancing, and acting,(435) for chariot-driving and fighting in the arena, not unknown before, which Juvenal and Tacitus brand as the most flagrant sign of degenerate morals. There was indeed a great conflict of sentiment under the early Empire as to some of these arts. Julius Caesar had encouraged or permitted Roman senators and knights to fight in the gladiatorial combats, and a Laberius to act in his own play.(436) But a decree of the Senate, not long afterwards, had placed a ban on these exhibitions by men of n.o.ble rank.(437) Tiberius, who was, beyond anything, a haughty aristocrat, at a later date intervened to save the dignity of the order.(438) But the rage of the rabble for these spectacles had undoubtedly caught many in the ranks of the upper cla.s.s. And Caligula and Nero(439) found, only too easily, youths of birth and breeding, but ruined fortune, who were ready to exhibit themselves for a welcome _douceur_, or to gain the favour of the prince, or even to bring down the applause of the crowded benches of the amphitheatre or the circus. Yet the old Roman feeling must have been very persistent, when a man like Domitian, who posed as a puritan, found it politic to remove from the Senate one who had disgraced his order by dancing in the pantomime, and even laid his interdict on all public theatrical performances.(440) The revels and ma.s.sacres and wild debauchery of Nero did not so much to hasten his destruction as his singing his catches to the lute, or appearing in the parts of the incestuous Canace and the matricide Orestes.(441) From every part of the world, in all the literature of the time, there is a chorus of astounded indignation against the prince who could stoop to pit himself against Greek players and singers at Delphi or Olympia. Juvenal has been reproached for putting the chariot-driving of Damasippus in the same category with the Verrine plunder of provinces.(442) He is really the exponent of old Roman sentiment. And it may be doubted whether, from the Roman point of view, Juvenal might not justify himself to his critics.

Even in our own emanc.i.p.ated age, we might be pardoned for feeling a shock if an English prime minister rode his own horse at the Derby, or appeared in a risky part on the boards of the Gaiety. And the collective sense of senatorial self-respect was too precious to a Roman patriot and moralist, to be flung away for mere love of sport, or in a fit of spurious artistic enthusiasm. Nero, and in an even lower fas.h.i.+on Caligula, were rebels against old Roman conventional restraints, and it is possible that some of the hideous tales about them, which were spread in the "circuli," may have been the vengeance of Roman pride on shameless social revolutionaries, who paraded their contempt for old-fas.h.i.+oned dignity and for social tradition.

Nero was never so happy as when he was deafened with applause, and smothered with roses at the Greek festivals. He had once predicted for him a monarchy in those regions of the East,(443) where he would have escaped from the tradition of old Roman puritanism, and combined all the ingenious sensuality of Syria with the doubtful artistic taste of a decadent h.e.l.lenism. The cold haughty refinement of senatorial circles of the old regime, and the rude honest virtue of the plebeian soldiery,(444) rightly mistrusted this false sensational artist on the throne of the world.

Art, divorced from moral ideals, may become a dangerous thing. The emperor might spend the morning with his favourites in patching up lilting verses which would run well to the lute.(445) But the scene soon changed to a revel, where the roses and music hardly veiled the grossness of excess.

The "noctes Neronis" made many a debauchee and scattered many a senatorial fortune.(446) And amid all this elaborate luxury and splendour of indulgence, there was a strange return to the naturalism of vice and mere blackguardism. A Messalina or a Nero or a Petronius developed a curious taste for the low life that reeks and festers in the taverns and in the stews. Bohemianism for a time became the fas.h.i.+on.(447) Its very grossness was a stimulant to appet.i.tes jaded with every diabolical refinement of vicious ingenuity. The distinguished dinner party, with the emperor at their head, sallied forth to see how the people were living in the slums.

Many a scene from these midnight rambles has probably been preserved in the tainted, yet brilliant, pages of the _Satiricon_. Petronius had probably often plunged with Nero after night-fall into those low dens, where slave minions and sailors and the obscene priests of the great Mother were roistering together, or sunk in the slumber of debauch.(448) These elegant aristocrats found their sport in rudely a.s.saulting quiet citizens returning from dinner, or plundering some poor huckster's stall in the Suburra, or insulting a lady in her chair. In the fierce faction fights of the theatre, where stones and benches were flying, the Emperor had once the distinction of breaking a praetor's head.(449) It was n.o.bles trained in this school, experts in vice, but with no nerve for arms, who enc.u.mbered the train of Otho on his march to the sanguinary conflict on the Po.(450)

The demoralisation of a section of the upper cla.s.s under the bad emperors must have certainly involved the degradation of many women. And one of the most brilliant and famous of Juvenal's Satires is devoted to this unsavoury subject. The "Legend of Bad Women" is a graphic picture, and yet it suffers from a defect which spoils much of Juvenal's work. Full of realistic power, with an undoubted foundation of truth, it is too vehement and sweeping in its censures to gain full credence. It is also strangely wanting in balance and due order of idea.(451) The problem of marriage is ill.u.s.trated by a series of sketches of female manners, which are very disconnected, and, indeed, sometimes inconsistent. Thorough depravity, superst.i.tion, and ignorant devotion, interest in literature and public affairs, love of gymnastic and decided opinions on Virgil-in fact, vices, innocent hobbies, and laudable tastes are all thrown together in a confused indictment. The bohemian man of letters had heard many a scandal about great ladies, some of them true, others distorted and exaggerated by prurient gossip, after pa.s.sing through a hundred tainted imaginations. In his own modest cla.s.s, female morality, as we may infer from the Inscriptions and other sources, was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age.(452) There were aristocratic families, too, where the women were as pure as Lucretia or Cornelia, or any matron of the olden days.(453) The ideal of purity, both in men and women, in some circles was actually rising. In the families of Seneca, of Tacitus, of Pliny and Plutarch, there were, not only the most spotless and high minded women, there were also men with a rare conception of temperance and mutual love, of reverence for a pure wedlock, to which S.

Jerome and S. Augustine would have given their benediction. Even Ovid, that "debauchee of the imagination," writes to his wife, from his exile in the Scythian wilds, in the accents of the purest affection.(454) And, amid all the lubricity of his pictures of gallantry, he has not lost the ideal of a virgin heart, which repels and disarms the libertine by the spell of an impregnable purity.(455) Plutarch's ideal of marriage, at once severe and tender, would have satisfied S. Paul.(456) Favorinus, the friend and contemporary of Plutarch, thought it not beneath the dignity of philosophic eloquence to urge on mothers the duty of suckling and personally caring for their infants.(457) Seneca and Musonius, who lived through the reign of Nero, are equally peremptory in demanding a like continence from men and from women. And Musonius severely condemns concubinage and vagrant amours of every kind, the man guilty of seduction sins not only against another, but against his own soul.(458) Dion Chrysostom was probably the first of the ancients to raise a clear voice against the traffic in frail beauty which has gone on pitilessly from age to age. Nothing could exceed the vehemence with which he a.s.sails an evil which he regards as not only dishonouring to human nature, but charged with the poison of far spreading corruption.(459) Juvenal's ideal of purity, therefore, is not peculiar to himself. The great world was bad enough, but there was another world beside that whose infamy Juvenal has immortalised.

It is also to be observed that Juvenal seems to be quite as much under the influence of old Roman conventionality as of permanent moral ideals. He condemns eccentricities, or mere harmless aberrations from old-fas.h.i.+oned rules of propriety, as ruthlessly as he punishes l.u.s.t and crime. The blue-stocking who is a purist in style, and who balances, with deafening volubility, the merits of Homer and Virgil,(460) the eager gossip who has the very freshest news from Thrace or Parthia, or the latest secret of a tainted family,(461) the virago who, with an intolerable pride of virtue, plays the household tyrant and delivers curtain lectures to her lord,(462) seem to be almost as detestable in Juvenal's eyes as the doubtful person who has had eight husbands in five years, or one who elopes with an ugly gladiator,(463) or tosses off two pints before dinner.(464) We may share his disgust for the great ladies who fought in the arena and wrestled in the ring,(465) or who order their poor tire-women to be flogged for deranging a curl in the towering architecture of their hair.(466) But we cannot feel all his contempt for the poor penitent devotee of Isis who broke the ice to plunge thrice in the Tiber on a winter morning, and crawled on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius, or brought a phial of water from the Nile to sprinkle in the fane of the G.o.ddess.(467) Even l.u.s.t, grossness, and cruelty, even poisoning and abortion, seem to lose some of their blackness when they are compared with an innocent literary vanity, or a pathetic eagerness to read the future or to soothe the pangs of a guilty conscience.

The truth is that Juvenal is as much shocked by the "new woman" as he is by the vicious woman. He did not understand, or he could not acquiesce in the great movement for the emanc.i.p.ation of women, which had set in long before his time, and which, like all such movements, brought evil with it as well as good. There is perhaps nothing more striking in the social history of Rome than the inveterate conservatism of Roman sentiment in the face of accomplished change. Such moral rigidity is almost necessarily p.r.o.ne to pessimism. The Golden Age lies in the past; the onward sweep of society seems to be always moving towards the abyss. The ideal past of the Roman woman lay more than two centuries and a half behind the time when Juvenal was born. The old Roman matron was, by legal theory, in the power of her husband, yet a.s.sured by religion and sentiment a dignified position in the family, and treated with profound, if somewhat cold, respect; she was busied with household cares, and wanting in the lighter graces and charms, austere, self-contained, and self-controlled. But this severe ideal had begun to fade even in the days of the elder Cato.(468) And there is hardly a fault or vice attributed by Juvenal to the women of Domitian's reign, which may not find parallel in the nine or ten generations before Juvenal penned his great indictment against the womanhood of his age. The Roman lady's irritable pride of birth is at least as old as the rivalry of the two Fabiae in the fourth century.(469) The elder Cato dreaded a rich wife as much as Juvenal,(470) and satirised as bitterly the pride and gossip and luxury of the women of his time. Their love of gems and gold ornaments and many-coloured robes and richly adorned carriages, is attested by Plautus and the impotent legislation of C. Oppius.(471) Divorce and ghastly crime in the n.o.blest families were becoming common in the days of the Second Punic War. About the same time began that emanc.i.p.ation of women from the jealous restraints of Roman law, which was to be carried further in the Antonine age.(472) The strict forms of marriage, which placed the wife in the power of her husband, fell more and more into desuetude. Women attained more absolute control over their property, and so much capital became concentrated in their hands that, about the middle of the second century B.C., the Voconian law was pa.s.sed to prohibit bequests to them, with the usual futile result of such legislation.(473) Yet the old ideal of the industrious housewife never died out, and Roman epitaphs for ages record that the model matron was a wool-worker and a keeper at home. A senator of the reign of Honorius praises his daughter for the same homely virtues.(474) But from the second century B.C. the education of the Roman girl of the higher cla.s.ses underwent a great change.(475) Dancing, music, and the higher accomplishments were no longer under a ban, although they were still suspected by people of the old-fas.h.i.+oned school. Boys and girls received the same training from the grammarian, and read their Homer and Ennius together.(476) There were women in the time of Lucretius, as in the time of Juvenal, who interlarded their conversation with Greek phrases.(477) Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, was trained in literature and mathematics, and even had some tincture of philosophy.(478) The daughter of Atticus, who became the wife of Agrippa, was placed under the tuition of a freedman, who, as too often happened, seems to have abused his trust.(479) Even in the gay circle of Ovid, there were learned ladies, or ladies who wished to be thought so.(480) Even Martial reckons culture among the charms of a woman. Seneca maintained that women have an equal capacity for cultivation with men.(481) Thus the blue-stocking of Juvenal, for whom he has so much contempt, had many an ancestress for three centuries, as she will have many a daughter till the end of the Western Empire.(482) Even in philosophy, usually the last study to attract the female mind, Roman ladies were a.s.serting an equal interest. Great ladies of the Augustan court, even the empress herself, had their philosophic directors,(483) and the fas.h.i.+on perhaps became still more general under M. Aurelius. Epictetus had met ladies who were enthusiastic admirers of the Platonic Utopia, but the philosopher rather slyly attributes their enthusiasm to the absence of rigorous conjugal relations in the Ideal Society.(484) Even in the field of authors.h.i.+p, women were claiming equal rights. The _Memoirs of Agrippina_ was one of the authorities of Tacitus.(485) The poems of Sulpicia, mentioned by Martial,(486) were read in Gaul in the days of Sidonius.(487) Greek verses, of some merit in spite of a pedantic affectation, by Balbilla, a friend of the wife of Hadrian, can still be read on the Colossus of Memnon.(488) Calpurnia, the wife of Pliny, may not have been an author; but she shared all Pliny's literary tastes; she set his poems to music, and gave him the admiration of a good wife, if not of an impartial critic.

Juvenal feels as much scorn for the woman who is interested in public affairs and the events on the frontier,(489) as he feels for the woman who presumes to balance the merits of Virgil and Homer. And here he is once more at war with a great movement towards the equality of the s.e.xes. From the days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence on public affairs. The politic Augustus discussed high matters of state with Livia.(490) The reign of Claudius was a reign of women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Caractacus.(491) Nero emanc.i.p.ated himself from the grasping ambition of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of Caenis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame.(492) The influence of women in provincial administration was also becoming a serious force. In the reign of Tiberius, Caecina Severus, with the weight of forty years' experience of camps, in a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom of the wives of generals and governors accompanying them abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not always favourable to pure administration.(493) In the inscriptions of the first and second centuries, women appear in a more wholesome character as "mothers of the camp," or patronesses of munic.i.p.al towns and corporations.(494) They have statues dedicated to them for liberality in erecting porticoes or adorning theatres or providing civic games or feasts.(495) And on one of these tablets we read of a _Curia mulierum_ at Lanuvium.(496) We are reminded of the "chapter of matrons" who visited Agrippina with their censure,(497) and another female senate, under Elagabalus, which dealt with minute questions of precedence and graded etiquette.(498) On the walls of Pompeii female admirers posted up their election placards in support of their favourite candidates.(499) Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle, lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the first and second centuries were making themselves a power.

Although he was probably a very light believer in the old mythology,(500) and treated its greatest figures with scant respect, Juvenal had all the old Roman prejudice against those eastern wors.h.i.+ps which captivated so many women of his day. And, here again, the satirist is a.s.sailing a movement which had set in long before he wrote, and which was destined to gain immense impetus and popularity in the two following centuries. The eunuch priests of the Great Mother, with their cymbals and Phrygian tiaras, had appeared in Italy in the last years of the Hannibalic War.(501) The early years of the second century B.C. were convulsed by the scandals and horrors of the Dionysiac orgies, which fell on Rome like a pestilence.(502) The purity of women and the peace of families were in serious danger, till the mischief was stamped out in blood. The wors.h.i.+p of Isis found its way into the capital at least as early as Sulla, and defied the hesitating exclusion of Augustus.(503) At this distance, we can see the _raison d'etre_ of what the satirist regarded as religious aberrations, the full treatment of which must be reserved for another chapter. The world was in the throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly in quest of some fresh vision of the Divine, from whatever quarter it might dawn. The cults of the East seemed to satisfy cravings and emotions, which found no resting-place in the national religion. Their ritual appealed to the senses and imagination, while their mysteries seemed to promise a revelation of G.o.d and immortality. Their strange mixture of the sensuous and the ascetic was specially adapted to fascinate weak women who had deeply sinned, and yet occasionally longed to repent.

The repentance indeed was often shallow enough; the fasting and mortification were compatible with very light morals.(504) There were the gravest moral abuses connected with such wors.h.i.+ps as that of Magna Mater.

It is well known that the temples of Isis often became places of a.s.signation and guilty intrigue.(505) An infatuated Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius had been seduced by her lover in the pretended guise of the G.o.d Anubis.(506) The Chaldaean seer or the Jewish hag might often arouse dangerous hopes, or fan a guilty pa.s.sion by casting a horoscope or reading a dream.(507) But Juvenal's scorn seems to fall quite as heavily on the innocent votary who was striving to appease a burdened conscience, as on one who made her superst.i.tion a screen for vice.

In spite of the political extinction of the Jewish race, its numbers and influence grew in Italy. The very destruction of the Holy Place and the external symbols of Jewish wors.h.i.+p threw a more impressive air of mystery around the dogmas of the Jewish faith, of which even the most cultivated Romans had only vague conceptions.(508) The Jews, from the time of the first Caesar, had worked their way into every cla.s.s of society.(509) A Jewish prince had inspired Caligula with an oriental ideal of monarchy.(510) There were adherents of Judaism in the household of the great freedmen of Claudius, and their growing influence and turbulence compelled that emperor to expel the race from the capital.(511) The worldly, pleasure-loving Poppaea had, perhaps, yielded to the mysterious charm of the religion of Moses.(512) But it was under the Flavians, who had such close a.s.sociations with Judaea, that Jewish influences made themselves most felt. And in the reign of Domitian, two members of the imperial house, along with many others, suffered for following the Jewish mode of life.(513) Their crime is also described as "atheism," and Clemens is, in the old Roman spirit, said to have been a man of the most "contemptible inactivity." In truth, the "Jewish life" was a description which might cover many shades of belief and practice in religion, including Christianity itself. The secret wors.h.i.+p of a dim, mysterious Power, Who was honoured by no imposing rites, a spirit of detachment and quietism, which shrank from games and spectacles and the scenes of fas.h.i.+on, and nursed the dream of a coming kingdom which was not of this world, excited the suspicion and contempt of the coa.r.s.e, strenuous Roman nature. Yet, in the gloom and deep corruption of that sombre time, such a life of retreat and renunciation had a strange charm for naturally pious souls, especially among women. There were indeed many degrees of conformity to the religion of Palestine. While some were attracted by its more spiritual side, others confined themselves to an observance of the Sabbath, which became very common in some quarters of Rome under the Empire. The children, as Juvenal tells us, were sometimes trained to a complete conformity to the law of Moses.(514) But Juvenal is chiefly thinking of the mendicant population from Palestine who swarmed in the neighbourhood of the Porta Capena and the grove of the Muses, practising all the arts which have appealed in all ages to superst.i.tious women. Thus the Judaism of the times of Nero or Domitian might cover anything from the cunning of the gipsy fortune-teller to the sad, dreaming quietism of Pomponia Graecina.(515)

Yet it must be admitted that, although Juvenal, in his attacks on women, has mixed up very real vice with superst.i.tion and mere innocent eccentricity, or the explosive energy of a new freedom, the real vices of many women of his time are a melancholy fact. The Messalinas and Poppaeas had many imitators and companions in their own cla.s.s. It is true that even the licentious fancy of Ovid and Martial generally spares the character of the unmarried girl. She was, in the darkest times, as a rule, carefully guarded from the worst corruptions of the spectacles,(516) or from the reckless advances of the hardened libertine, although an intrigue with a tutor was not unknown.(517) Her marriage was arranged often in mere childhood, seldom later than her seventeenth year. A girl was rarely betrothed after nineteen.(518) Her temptations and danger often began on her wedding-day. That there was a high ideal of pure and happy marriage, even in the times of the greatest licence, we know from Pliny and Plutarch, and from Martial himself.(519) But there were serious perils before the child-bride, when she was launched upon the great world of Roman society. A marriage of convenience with some member of a tainted race, _blase_ with precocious and unnatural indulgence, and ready to concede the conjugal liberty which he claimed, was a perilous trial to virtue. The bonds of old Roman marriage had, for ages, been greatly relaxed, and the Roman lady of independent fortune and vigorous, highly trained intellect, could easily find consolation for marital neglect. From Seneca to S. Jerome, the foppish procurator of the great lady was a dangerous and suspected person,(520) and not always without good cause.

Surrounded by an army of slaves and the other obsequious dependents of a great house, treated with profound deference, and saluted with the pompous t.i.tles of _domina_ and _regina_, the great lady's lightest caprice became law.(521) Costly jewels and the rarest luxuries of the toilet poured in upon her from regions which were only visited by the captains of Red Sea merchantmen, or by some Pythagorean ascetic seeking the fountains of the wisdom of the East.(522)

The political life of Rome had been extinguished by a jealous despotism, but social life in the higher ranks was never so intense and so seductive, and women had their full share in it. Ladies dined out regularly with their husbands, even at the emperor's table,(523) and they were liable to be a.s.sailed by the artistic wiles of which Ovid taught the secret, or by the brutal advances of the lawless Caligula.(524) It was a time when people loved to meet anywhere, under the trees of the Campus Martius, in the colonnades of the theatre, or round the seats of the public squares.

Everywhere were to be seen those groups which spared no reputation, not even the emperor's. And behind the chair of the young matron often hovered the dangerous exquisite, who could hum in a whisper the latest suggestive song from Alexandria or Gades,(525) who knew the pedigree of every racehorse and the secret of every intrigue. It is at such scenes that Tacitus is probably glancing when he says that in Germany no one makes a jest of vice, or calls the art of corruption the fas.h.i.+on of the world;(526) chast.i.ty is not sapped by the seductions of the spectacles.

Augustus had, indeed, set apart the upper seats for women in the theatre and amphitheatre,(527) but on the benches of the circus the s.e.xes freely mingled. It was there, while the factions of the red and blue were shouting themselves hoa.r.s.e, Ovid pointed out to his pupil in gallantry, that he had his fairest chance of making a dangerous impression.(528) Yet even Ovid is half inclined to be shocked at the scenes on the stage which were witnessed by women and young boys.(529) The foulest tales of the old mythology, the loves of Pasiphae or the loves of Leda, were enacted to the life, or told with a nakedness of language, compared with which even Martial might seem chaste.(530) Not less degrading were the gladiatorial shows, so lavishly provided by Augustus and Trajan, as well as by Caligula and Domitian, at which the Vestals had a place of honour.(531) It is little wonder that women accustomed to take pleasure in the sufferings and death of brave men, should be capable of condemning their poor slave women to torture or the lash for a sullen look, or a half-heard murmur. The grossness with which Juvenal describes the effect of the stage on the morals of women savours of the Suburra.(532) But of the poisonous character of these performances there can be no doubt. And actors, musicians, and gladiators became a danger to the peace of households, as well as to the peace of the streets. The artistes of the pantomime were sternly suppressed both by Tiberius and Domitian, and not without good cause.(533) One famous dancer had the fatal honour of captivating Messalina.(534) The empress of Domitian was divorced for her love of Paris.(535) And the scandals which darkened the fame of the younger Faustina, and impeached the legitimacy of Commodus, even if they were false, must have rested on a certain ground of probability.(536) It is melancholy to hear that M. Aurelius had to restrain the excesses of Roman matrons even under the reign of the philosophers.(537) To all these perils must be added the allurements of household slavery. While a Musonius or a Seneca was demanding equal chast.i.ty in man and woman, the new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to her husband's.(538) The testimony of Petronius is tainted by a suspicion of prurient imagination.

But the student of other sources can hardly doubt that, in the first century, as in the fourth, the Roman lady of rank sometimes degraded herself by a servile _liaison_. A decree of Vespasian's reign, which his biographer tells us was called for by the general licence, punished the erring matron with the loss of her rank.(539)

These ill.u.s.trations from other authorities may serve towards a judicial estimate of Juvenal's famous satire on women. That it is not a prurient invention is proved by the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius and the records of Roman morals for more than two centuries. On the other hand, it must be read with some reservations. Juvenal is a rhetorician with a fiery temperament, who will colour and exaggerate, if he will not invent. He is intensely prejudiced and conventional, a man to whom desertion of ancient usage is almost as bad as a breach of the moral law, a man incapable of seeing that the evils of a new social movement may be more than compensated by the good which it brings. Moreover, the graver vices which he depicts with so much realistic power were certainly not so general as he implies. It is to be suspected that single instances of abnormal depravity have swelled in his heated imagination till they have become types of whole cla.s.ses of sinners. At the worst, these vices infected only a comparatively small cla.s.s, idle, luxurious, enervated by the slave system, depraved by the example of a vicious court. The very scorn and indignation with which Juvenal pillories the aristocratic debauchee reveal the existence of a higher standard of virtue. Both the literature and the inscriptions of that age make us acquainted with a very different kind of woman. Over against the Hippia or Saufeia or Messalina of Juvenal we must set the pure and cultivated women whom we meet in the pages of Pliny or Tacitus, or the poor soldier's concubine in the Inscriptions, who has all the self-denying love and virtue of our own cottagers' wives.(540)

Just as Juvenal misunderstood the movement of female emanc.i.p.ation, which was to culminate in the legislation of the Antonine age, so has he misconceived some other great social movements of his time. Two in particular, the invasion of the new h.e.l.lenism and the rise of the Freedmen, he anathematises with the scorn and old Roman prejudice of the elder Cato.

There was nothing new in the invasion of h.e.l.lenism in the time of Juvenal.

Nearly three hundred years before his day, the narrow conservatism of ancient Rome was a.s.sailed by the cosmopolitan culture of h.e.l.las, which it alternately hated and admired. The knowledge of Greek was widely diffused in Italy in the time of the Hannibalic war.(541) Almost the last Roman of the ancient breed stooped in his old age to learn Greek, in order to train his son in the culture of the world.(542) But there were two different aspects of h.e.l.lenism. There was the h.e.l.lenism represented by Homer and Plato and Chrysippus; and there was the h.e.l.lenism of the low comic stage, of the pimp and parasite. And there were reactions against the lower Greek influences long before the days of Juvenal. Cicero, who did more than any man of his race to translate Greek thought into Roman idiom, yet expressed as bitter a contempt as Juvenal's for the fickle, supple, histrionic Greek adventurer.(543) Juvenal is not waging war with that n.o.bler h.e.l.lenism which had furnished models and inspiration to the great writers of the Augustan age, and which was destined to refas.h.i.+on Italian culture in the generation following his death. The emperors, from Julius Caesar to M.

Aurelius, were, with few exceptions, trained in the literature of Greece, and some of them gave a great impetus to Greek culture in the West.

Augustus delighted in the Old Comedy, entertained Greek philosophers in his house, and sprinkled his private letters to Tiberius with Greek quotations.(544) Tiberius, although he had lived at Rhodes in his youth, seems to show less sympathy for the genius of Greece.(545) Caligula also can hardly be claimed as a h.e.l.lenist. Although he had once a wild dream of restoring the palace of Polycrates, and one, more sane, of a ca.n.a.l through the Corinthian Isthmus, he also thought of wiping out the memory of the poems of Homer.(546) Dr. Mahaffy is probably right in treating Claudius as the first really h.e.l.lenist emperor.(547) Like our own James I., Claudius was a learned and very ludicrous person. Yet he was perhaps not so contemptible a character as he is painted by Suetonius. He had, at any rate, the merit of being a lover of Greek literature,(548) and he heaped honour on the country which gave it birth.(549) He used to quote Homer in his speeches in the Senate, and he composed histories in the Greek language, which, by an imperial ordinance, were to be read aloud regularly in the Museum of Alexandria.(550) In spite of the vices and pompous follies of Nero, his phil-h.e.l.lenism seems to have been a genuine and creditable impulse. His visits to the Greek festivals, and his share in the compet.i.tions, were not all mere vanity. He had a futile pa.s.sion for fame as an artist, and he sought the applause of the race which had a real artistic tradition.(551) When we reach the plebeian Flavian race, h.e.l.lenism is still favoured. The bluff soldier, Vespasian, had an adequate command of the Greek language, and was the first emperor who gave liberal endowments to Greek rhetoric.(552) His son Domitian, that puzzling enigma, the libertine who tried to revive the morality of the age of Cato, the man who was said, but most improbably, to confine his reading to the memoirs of Tiberius, founded a quinquennial festival, with compet.i.tions, on the Greek model, in music, gymnastic, and horsemans.h.i.+p. By drawing on the inexhaustible stores of Alexandria, he also repaired the havoc which had been wrought in the Roman libraries by fire.(553) Already in Juvenal's life the brilliant sophistic movement had set in which was destined to carry the literary charm of h.e.l.lenism throughout the West. From the close of the first century there appeared in its full bloom that ingenious technique of style, that power of conquering all the difficulties of a worn-out or trifling subject, that delicate command of all varieties of rhythm, which carried the travelling sophist through a series of triumphs wherever he wandered. Cla.s.sical Latin literature about the same time came to a mysterious end. The only authors of any merit in the second century wrote in both languages indifferently.(554) And the great Emperor, who closes our period, preferred to leave his inner thoughts to posterity in Greek.

Juvenal, however, was not thinking of this great literary movement. Like so many of his literary predecessors, who had been formed by the loftier genius of the Greek past, like Plautus and Cicero, he vented his rage on a degenerate h.e.l.lenism. His shafts were levelled at the suttlers and camp-followers of the invading army from the East. The phenomena of Roman social history are constantly repeating themselves for centuries. And one of the most curious examples of perpetuity of social sentiment is the hatred and scorn for the Greek or Levantine character, from the days of Plautus and the elder Cato to the days of the poet Claudian.(555) For more than 600 years, the Roman who had borrowed his best culture, his polish and ideas from the Greek, was ready to sneer at the "Greekling." The conquerors of Macedon could never forgive their own conquest by Greek knowledge and versatility, by which old Roman victories in the field had been avenged. And, as the pride of the imperial race grew with the consciousness of great achievements, the political degradation and economic decay of Greece and Greek-speaking lands produced a type of character which combined the old cleverness and keenness of intellect with the moral defects of an impoverished and subject race. Something of Roman contempt for the Greek must be set down to that national prejudice and difference of temperament, which made our ancestors treat the great French nation, with all its brilliant gifts and immense contributions to European culture, as a race of posturing dancing-masters.(556) Such prejudices are generally more intense in the lower than in the upper and the cultivated cla.s.ses. Juvenal, indeed, was a cultivated man, who knew Greek literature, and had been formed by Greek rhetors in the schools. But he was also a Roman plebeian, with that pride of race which is often as deep in the plebeian as in the aristocrat. He gives voice to the feeling of his cla.s.s when he indignantly laments that the true-born Roman, whose infancy has drunk in the air of the Aventine, should have to yield place to the supple, fawning stranger, who has come with the same wind as the figs and prunes. The Orontes is pouring its pollutions into the Tiber.(557) Every trade and profession, from the master of the highest studies down to the rope-dancer and the pander, is crowded with hungry, keen-witted adventurers from the East. Every island of the Aegean, every city of Asia, is flooding Rome with its vices and its venal arts.(558) Quickness of intellect and depravity of morals, the brazen front and the ready tongue are driving into the shade the simple, unsophisticated honesty of the old Roman breed. At the morning receptions of the great patron, the poor Roman client, who has years of honest, quiet service to show, even the impoverished scion of an ancient consular line, are pushed aside by some sycophant from the Euphrates,(559) who can hardly conceal the brand of recent servitude upon him. These men, by their smooth speech, their effrontery and ready wit, their infinite capacity for a.s.suming every mood and humouring every caprice of the patron, are creeping into the recesses of great houses, worming out their secrets, and mastering their virtue.(560) Rome is becoming a Greek town,(561) in which there will soon be no place for Romans.

Much of this indictment, as we have said, is the offspring of prejudice and temperament. But there was a foundation of truth under the declamation of Juvenal. The higher education of Roman youth had for generations been chiefly in the hands of men of Greek culture, from the days of Ennius and Crates of Mallus, before the third Punic War.(562) The tutor's old t.i.tle _literatus_ had early given place to that of _grammaticus_.(563) And, of the long line of famous _grammatici_ commemorated by Suetonius, there are few who were not by origin or culture connected with the Greek east. Most of them had been freedmen of savants or great n.o.bles.(564) Some had actually been bought in the slave market.(565) The profession was generally ill-paid and enjoyed little consideration, and it was often the last resort of those who had failed in other and not more distinguished callings. Orbilius, the master of Horace, had been an attendant in a public office.(566) Others had been pugilists or low actors in pantomime.(567) Q. Remmius Palaemon, whose vices made him infamous in the reign of Tiberius and Claudius, had been a house-slave, and was originally a weaver.(568) He educated himself while attending his young master at school, and by readiness, versatility, and arrogant self-a.s.sertion, rose to an income of more than 4000 a year. Sometimes they attained to rank and fortune by being entrusted with the tuition of the imperial children.(569) But the grammarian, to the very end, as a rule never escaped the double stigma of doubtful origin and of poverty.

The medical profession, according to the elder Pliny, was a Greek art which was seldom practised by Romans.(570) Julius Caesar, by giving civic rights to physicians from Egypt and h.e.l.lenic lands,(571) while he raised the status of the medical calling, also stimulated the immigration of foreign pract.i.tioners. The rank and fortune attained by the court physicians of the early Caesars, Antonius Musa, the Stertinii,(572) and others, which almost rivalled the medical successes of our own day, seemed to offer a splendid prize. Yet the profession was generally in low repute.(573) It was long recruited from the ranks of old slaves, and men of the meanest callings. Carpenters and smiths and undertakers flocked into it, often with only a training of six months.(574) Galen found most of his medical brethren utterly illiterate, and recommends them to pay a little attention to grammar in dealing with their patients.(575) They compounded in their own shops, and touted for practice.(576) They called in the aid of spells and witchcraft to reinforce their drugs. We need not believe all the coa.r.s.e insinuations of Martial against their morality, any more than the sneers of Petronius against their skill. But we are bound to conclude that the profession held a very different place in public esteem from that which it enjoys and deserves in our own time.

Astrology, which was the aristocratic form of divination, and involved in many a dark intrigue of the early Empire, was a Greek as well as a Chaldaean art. The name of the pract.i.tioner often reveals his nationality.

The Seleucus(577) and Ptolemaeus who affected to guide the fate of Otho, and the Ascletarion of Domitian's reign,(578) are only representatives of a nameless crowd. And their strange power is seen in that tale of a Greek diviner, Pammenes, in the last years of Nero, whose horoscopes led to the tragic end of P. Anteius and Ostorius Scapula.(579) In other countless arts of doubtful repute, which ministered to the pleasure or amus.e.m.e.nt of the crowd, the Greek was always an adept. But it was his success as a courtier and accomplished flatterer of the great, which chiefly roused the scornful hatred of Juvenal and his fellows. The "adulandi gens prudentissima," would hardly have been guilty of the simple and obvious grossness of flattery which the rhetoric of Juvenal attributes to them.(580) They knew their trade better than the Roman plebeian. It was an old and highly rewarded profession in Greece, and had often been the theme of Greek moralists. Plutarch wrote an elaborate treatise on the difference between the sycophant and the true friend, in which he seems almost to exhaust the wily resources of the pretender. Lucian, with his delicate irony, seems almost to raise the Greek skill in adulation to the level of a fine art.(581) And the polished and versatile Greek, with his lively wit, his delicate command of expression, his cool audacity, and his unscrupulousness, was a formidable rival of the coa.r.s.er Roman parasite celebrated in Latin comedy. We can well imagine that the young Greek, fresh from the schools of Ionia, was a livelier companion at dinner than the proud Roman man of letters who s.n.a.t.c.hed the dole and disdained himself for receiving it.

There is perhaps no phase of Roman society in Domitian's day which we know more intimately than the life of the client. It is photographed, in all its sordid slavery, by both Juvenal and Martial. And Martial himself is perhaps the best example of a man of genius submitting, with occasional intervals of proud rebellion,(582) to a degradation which in our eyes no poverty could excuse. The client of the early Empire was a totally different person from the client of Republican times. In the days of freedom, the tie of patron and client was rather that of clansman and chief; it was justified by political and social necessity, and enn.o.bled by feelings of loyalty and mutual obligation. Under the Empire, the relation was tainted by the selfish materialism of the age; it had seldom any trace of sentiment. The rich man was expected to have a humble train of dependents to maintain his rank and consequence. There was a host of needy people ready to do him such service. The hungry client rushed to his patron's morning reception, submitted to all his coldness and caprice, or to the insolence of his menials, followed his chair through the streets, and ran on his errands, for the sake of a miserable alms in money or in kind.(583) The payment was sometimes supplemented by a cast-off cloak, or an invitation at the last moment to fill a place at dinner, when perhaps it could not be accepted.(584) In the train which the great man gathered about him, to swell his importance, were to be seen, not only the starving man of letters, the loafer and mere mendicant, but the sons of ruined houses "sprung from Troy," and even senators and men of consular rank who had a clientele of their own.(585)

Nothing throws a more lurid light on the economic condition of Italy in the time of the early Empire than this form of pensioned dependence. The impression which we derive from Juvenal and Martial is that of a society divided between a small cla.s.s of immensely wealthy people, and an almost starving proletariat.(586) Poverty seems almost universal, except in the freedman cla.s.s, who by an industrial energy and speculative daring, which were despised by the true-born Roman, were now rapidly rising to opulence.

The causes of this plebeian indigence can only be glanced at here. The agricultural revolution, which ruined the small freeholders and created the plantation system,(587) had driven great numbers of once prosperous farmers to the capital, to depend on the granaries of the State, or on the charity of a wealthy patron. Such men were kept in poverty and dependence by that general contempt for trade and industrial pursuits which always prevails in a slave-owning society. Many of the greatest families had been reduced to poverty by proscription and confiscation. A great n.o.ble might be keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm, if he could not win a pension from the grace of the Emperor. At the same time, from various causes, what we should call the liberal professions, with the doubtful exception of medicine, tortured those engaged in them by the contrast between ambitious hopes and the misery of squalid poverty. "Make your son an auctioneer or an undertaker rather than an advocate or a man of letters" is the advice of Martial and Juvenal, and of the shrewd vulgar guests of Trimalchio.(588) Any mean and malodorous trade will be more lucrative than the greatest knowledge and culture. The rich literary amateur, who should have been a Maecenas, in that age became an author himself, composed his own Thebaid or Codrid, and would only help the poor man of genius by the loan of an unfurnished hall for a reading.(589) The unabashed mendicancy of Martial shows the mean straits to which the genuine literary man was reduced.(590) The historian will not earn as much as the reader of the _Acta Diurna_.(591) It is the same with education. What costs the father least is the training of his son. The man who will expend a fortune on his baths and colonnades, can spare a Quintilian only a fraction of what he will give for a pastry cook.(592) The grammarian, who is expected to be master of all literature, will be lucky if he receives as much for the year as a charioteer gains by a single victory.(593) If the rhetor, weary of mock battles, descends into the real arena of the courts, he fares no better.(594) The bar is overcrowded by men to whom no other career of ambition is open, by old informers who find their occupation gone, by the sons of n.o.ble houses who parade the glory of their ancestors in order to attract vulgar clients. They are carried in a litter, surrounded by slaves and dependents, down to the courts of the Centumviri. The poor pleader must hire or borrow purple robes and jewelled rings, if he is to compete with them. And in the end, he may find his honorarium for a day's hard pleading to be a leg of pork, a jar of tunnies, or a few flasks of cheap wine. In this materialised society all the prizes go to the coa.r.s.er qualities; there is nothing but neglect and starvation before taste and intellect. And poverty is punished by being forced to put on the show of wealth.(595) That stately person in violet robes who stalks through the forum, or reclines in a freshly decorated chair, followed by a throng of slaves, has just p.a.w.ned his ring to buy a dinner.(596) That matron, who has sold the last pieces of her ancestral plate, will hire splendid dress, a sedan chair, and a troop of attendants, to go in proper state to the games.(597) Thus you have the spectacle of a society divided between the idle, luxurious rich and the lazy, hungry poor, who imitate all the vices of the rich, and although too proud to work, are not ashamed to borrow or to beg.

In such a society, where the paths of honest industry seemed closed to the poor, or as yet undiscovered, the great problem was how to secure without labour a share of the wealth which was monopolised by the few. The problem was solved by the obsequiousness of the client, or by the arts of the will-hunter. Owing to celibacy and vice, childlessness in that age was extraordinarily common in the upper cla.s.s. In a society of "ambitious poverty," a society where poverty was unable, or where it disdained, to find the path to competence through honest toil, the wealthy, without natural heirs, offered a tempting prey to the needy adventurer. Captation by every kind of mean flattery, or vicious service, became a recognised profession. In the Croton of Petronius there are only two cla.s.ses, the rich and the sycophant, the hunters and the hunted.(598) Even men of high position, with no temptation from want, would stoop to this detestable trade.(599) And the social tone which tolerated the captator, made it almost an honour to be beset on a sick-bed by these rapacious sycophants.

One of the darkest and most repulsive features in that putrescent society was the social value which attached to a vicious and shameful childlessness. A morose and unlovely old age could thus gather around it a little court of dependents and pretended friends, such as a career of great achievement would hardly attract. There have been few more loathsome characters than the polished hypocrite by the sick-bed of his prey, shedding tears of feigned sympathy, while with eager eyes he is noting every symptom of the approaching end.(600)

Juvenal and Petronius, the embittered plebeian, and the cynical, fastidious epicure of Nero's court, alike treat their age as utterly corrupted and vulgarised by the pa.s.sion for money; "inter nos sanctissima divitiarum Majestas."(601) No virtue, no gifts, no eminence of service, will be noticed in the poor.(602) A great fortune will conceal the want of talent, sense, or common decency. Everything is forgiven to the master of money bags, even the brand of the slave prison.(603) In Juvenal and Martial probably the most resonant note is the cry of the poor-"How long."

Yet, after all, it is not a fierce cry of revolt; against that highly organised and centralised society the disinherited never dreamed of rebellion, even when the Goths were under the walls. It is rather an appeal, though often a bitter and angry appeal, for pity and a modest share in a wasted abundance. In the poems of Juvenal and Martial, as in the sentiment of the colleges and munic.i.p.alities for generations, the one hope for the ma.s.s of helpless indigence lay in awaking the generosity and charity of the rich. The rich, as we shall see in another chapter, admitted the obligation, and responded to the claim, often in the most lavish fas.h.i.+on. A long line of emperors not only fed the mob of the capital, but squandered the resources of the State in providing gross and demoralising amus.e.m.e.nts for them.(604) Under the influence of the Stoic teaching of the brotherhood of man and the duty of mutual help, both private citizens and benevolent princes, from Nero to M. Aurelius, created charitable foundations for the orphan and the needy.(605) Public calamities were relieved again and again by imperial aid and private charity.(606) The love of wealth was strong, but a spirit of benevolence was in the air, even in the days of Juvenal; and the constant invectives of poet or philosopher against wealth and luxury are not so much the sign of a growing selfishness, as of a spreading sense of the duty of the fortunate to the miserable. Although the literary men seem never to have thought of any economic solution of the social problem, through the tapping of fresh sources of wealth from which all might draw, yet there can be no doubt that there was, at least in provincial cities, a great industrial movement in the Antonine age, which gave wealth to some, and a respectable competence to many. The opulent freedman and the contented artisan have left many a memorial in the inscriptions. Yet the movement had not solved the social problem in the days of Lucian, as it has not solved it after seventeen centuries. The cry of the poor against the selfish rich, which rings in the ears of the detached man of letters at the end of the Antonine age, will still ring in the ears of the ascetic Salvia.n.u.s, when the Germans have pa.s.sed the Rhine.(607)

The scorn and hatred of Juvenal for wealth and its vices is natural to a cla.s.s which was too proud to struggle out of poverty, by engaging in the industries which it despised. And the freedman, who occupied the vacant field, and rose to opulence, is even more an object of hatred to Juvenal and Martial than the recreant n.o.ble or the stingy patron. He was an alien of servile birth, and he had made himself wealthy by the usual method of thinking of nothing but gold. These men, who were not even free Romans, had mastered the power which commands the allegiance of the world. The rise of this new cla.s.s to wealth and importance probably irritated men of Juvenal's type more than any other sign of social injustice in their time.

And the Trimalchio of Petronius, a man of low, tainted origin, the creature of economic accident, whose one faith is in the power of money, who boasts of his fortune as if it had been won by real talent or honourable service, who expends it with coa.r.s.e ostentation and a ludicrous affectation of cultivated taste, may be tolerated in literature, if not in actual life, for the charm of a certain kindly bonhomie and honest vulgarity, which the art of Petronius has thrown around him. Yet, after all, we must concede to Juvenal and Martial, that such a person is always a somewhat unpleasing social product. But the subject is so important that it claims a chapter to itself. And, fortunately for us and our readers, the new freedmen were not all of the type of Trimalchio.

CHAPTER III

THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN

The historian, who is occupied with war and politics, and the fate of princes and n.o.bles, is apt to lose sight of great silent movements in the dim ma.s.ses of society. And, in the history of the early Empire, the deadly conflict between the Emperor and the Senate, the carnival of luxury, and the tragic close of so many reigns, have diverted attention from social changes of immense moment. Not the least important of these was the rise of the freedmen, in the face of the most violent prejudice, both popular and aristocratic. And literature has thrown its whole weight on the side of prejudice, and given full vent alike to the scorn of the n.o.ble, and to the hate and envy of the plebeian. The movement, indeed, was so swift and far spreading that old conservative instincts might well be alarmed.