There are many religious questions submitted to the emperor in these celebrated despatches, especially those relating to the toleration of Christians.1269 But, however profoundly interesting, they lie beyond the scope of this chapter. We are occupied with the secular life of the provincial town. And the Letters of Pliny place some things in a clear light. In the first place, the state has begun in the reign of Trajan to control the municipality, especially in the management of its finances; but the control is rather invited than imposed. At any rate, it has become necessary, owing to malversation or incompetence.1270 Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the civic bungling exposed by Pliny, and the clear, patient wisdom of the distant emperor. And in another point we can see that the municipalities have entered on that disastrous decline which was to end in the ruin of the fifth century. Wasteful finance is already making its pressure felt on the members of the Curia, and membership is beginning to be thought a burden rather than an honour. From the reign of Trajan we begin to hear of the Curatores, who were imperial officers, appointed at first to meet a special emergency, but who became permanent magistrates, with immense powers, especially over finance.1271 The free civic life of the first century is being quietly drawn under the fatal spell of a bureaucratic despotism.

The cities did much for themselves out of the public revenues.1272 But there are many signs that private ambition or munificence did even more. The stone records of Pompeii confirm these indications in a remarkable way. Pompeii, in spite of the prominence given to it by its tragic fate, was only a third-rate town, with a population probably of not more than 20,000.1273 Its remains, indeed, leave the impression that a considerable class were in easy circumstances; but it may be doubted whether Pompeii could boast of any great capitalists among its citizens. Its harbour, at the mouth of the Sarno, was the outlet for the trade of Nola and Nuceria. [pg 223]There were salt works in a suburb near the sea. The fish sauces of Umbricius Scaurus had a great celebrity.1274 The vine and the olive were cultivated on the volcanic offshoot from Vesuvius; but the wine of Pompeii was said by the elder Pliny to leave a lingering headache. Mill-stones were made from the lava of the volcano. The market gardeners drove a flourishing trade, and the cabbage of Pompeii was celebrated. On the high ground towards Vesuvius many wealthy Romans, Cicero, and Drusus, the son of Claudius, built country seats, in that delicious climate where the winters are so short, and the summer heats are tempered by unfailing breezes from the mountains or the western sea. All these things made Pompeii a thriving and attractive place; yet its trade hardly offered the chance of the huge fortunes which could be accumulated in those days at Puteoli or Ostia.1275

Nevertheless, a large number of the public buildings of Pompeii were the gift of private citizens. The Holconii were a great family of the place in the reign of Augustus. M. Holconius Rufus had been ordinary duumvir five times, and twice quinquennial duumvir; he was priest of Augustus, and finally was elected patron of the town.1276 Such dignities in those days imposed a corresponding burden. And an inscription tells that, on the rebuilding of the great theatre, probably about 3 B.C., Holconius Rufus and Holconius Celer defrayed the expense of the crypt, the tribunals, and the whole space for the spectators. Women did not fall behind men in their public benefactions. On the eastern side of the forum of Pompeii there is a building and enclosure, with the remains of porticoes, colonnades, and fountains, which are supposed to have been a cloth market. In a niche stood a marble statue, dedicated by the fullers of Pompeii to Eumachia, a priestess of the city. And Eumachia herself has left a record that she and her son had erected the building at their own expense.1277 The dedication probably belongs to the reign of Tiberius. The visitor who leaves the forum by the arch, at the north-east corner, and turns into the broadest thoroughfare of the town, soon reaches the small temple of Fortuna Augusta, erected in the reign of Augustus. Both the site and the building were [pg 224]the gift of one M. Tullius, who had, like M. Holconius, borne all the honours which the city could bestow.1278 The amphitheatre in the south-east corner of the town, the scene of so many gladiatorial combats recorded in the inscriptions, was erected by two men of the highest official rank, C. Quinctius Valgus and M. Porcius, probably the same men who bore at least part of the cost of the smaller theatre of Pompeii.1279 The last instance of this generous public spirit which we shall mention is of interest in many ways. It is well known that in the year 63 A.D. an earthquake overthrew many buildings, and wrought great havoc in Pompeii. Among other edifices, the temple of Isis was thrown down. The temple, of which we can now study the remains, had been built by a boy of six years of age, Numerius Popidius Celsinus, who, in acknowledgment of his own, or rather of his father’s liberality, was at that unripe age co-opted a member of “the splendid order.”1280 This mode of rewarding a father by advancing his infant son to premature honours is not unknown in other inscriptions.1281

The literature of the age contains many records of profuse private liberality of the same kind. The circle and family of Pliny were, as we have seen in this, as in other respects, models of the best sentiment of the time. Pliny was not a very rich man, according to the standard of an age of colossal fortunes; yet his benefactions, both to private friends and to the communities in which he was interested, were on the scale of the largest wealth. It has been calculated that he must have altogether given to his early home and fatherland, as he calls it, a sum of more than £80,000; and the gifts were of a thoroughly practical kind—a library, a school endowment, a foundation for the nurture of poor children, a temple of Ceres, with spacious colonnades to shelter the traders who came for the great fair.1282 A great lady, Ummidia Quadratilla, known to us not altogether favourably in Pliny’s letters, built a temple and amphitheatre for Casinum.1283 From the elder Pliny we learn that the distinguished court physicians, the two Stertinii, whose professional income is said to have ranged from £2000 to £5000 a year, exhausted their ample fortune in their benefactions to [pg 225]the city of Naples.1284 A private citizen bore the cost of an aqueduct for Bordeaux, at an expenditure of £160,000.1285 Another benefactor, one Crinas, spent perhaps £80,000 on the walls of Marseilles.1286 The grandfather of Dion Chrysostom devoted his entire ancestral fortune to public objects.1287 Dion, himself, according to his means, followed the example of his ancestor. The site alone of a colonnade, with shops and booths, which he presented to Prusa, cost about £1800. When Cremona was destroyed by the troops of Vespasian in A.D. 69, its temples and forums were restored by the generous zeal of private citizens, after all the horror and exhaustion of that awful conflict.1288

But the prince of public benefactors in the Antonine age was the great sophist Herodes Atticus, the tutor of M. Aurelius, who died in the same year as his pupil, 180 A.D. He acted up to his theory of the uses of wealth on a scale of unexampled munificence.1289 His family was of high rank, and claimed descent from the Aeacidae of Aegina. They had also apparently inexhaustible resources. His father spent a sum of nearly £40,000 in supplementing an imperial grant for the supply of water to the Troad. The munificence of the son was extended to cities in Italy, as well as to Corinth, Thessaly, Euboea, Boeotia, Elis, and pre-eminently to Athens. He gave an aqueduct to Canusium and Olympia, a racecourse to Delphi, a roofed theatre to Corinth.1290 He provided sulphur baths at Thermopylae for the visitors from Thessaly and the shores of the Maliac gulf. He aided in the restoration of Oricum in Epirus, and liberally recruited the resources of many another decaying town in Greece. He was certainly benevolent, but he had also a passion for splendid fame, and cherished an ambition to realise the dream of Nero, by cutting a canal across the Corinthian Isthmus.1291 But Attica, where he was born, and where he had a princely house on the Ilissus, was the supreme object of his bounty. In his will he left each Athenian citizen an annual gift of a mina. He would offer to the Virgin Goddess a sacrifice of a hundred oxen on a single day; and, when the great festivals came round, he used to [pg 226]feast the people by their tribes, as well as the resident strangers, on couches in the Ceramicus. He restored the ancient shrines and stadia with costly marbles. And, in memory of Rhegilla, his wife, he built at the foot of the acropolis a theatre for 6000 spectators, roofed in with cedar wood, which, to the eye of Pausanias, surpassed all similar structures in its splendour.1292

The liberality of Herodes Atticus, however astonishing it may seem, was only exceptional in its scale. The same spirit prevailed among the leading citizens or the great patroni of hundreds of communities, many of them only known to us from a brief inscription or two; and we have great reason to be grateful on this score to the imperial legislation of later days, which did its best to preserve these stone records for the eyes of posterity.1293 But in forming an estimate of the splendid public spirit evoked by municipal life, it is well to remind ourselves that much has necessarily been lost in the wreck of time, and also that what we have left represents the civic life of a comparatively brief period. Yet the remains are so numerous that it is almost impossible to give any adequate idea of their profusion to those who are unacquainted with the inscriptions. The objects of this liberality are as various as the needs of the community—temples, theatres, bridges, markets, a portico or a colonnade, the relaying of a road or pavement from the forum to the port, the repair of an aqueduct, above all the erection of new baths or the restoration of old ones, with perhaps a permanent foundation to provide for the free enjoyment of this greatest luxury of the south. The boon was extended to all citizens of both sexes, and in some cases, even to strangers and to slaves.1294 There is an almost monotonous sameness in the stiff, conventional record of this vast mass of lavish generosity. It all seems a spontaneous growth of the social system. One monument is erected by the senate and people of Tibur to a man who had borne all its honours, and had left the town his sole heir.1295 On another, an Augustal of Cales, who had received the insignia of the duumvirate, tells posterity that he had laid down a broad road through the town.1296 Another bene[pg 227]factor bore the chief cost of a new meat market at Aesernia, the authorities of the town supplying the pillars and the tiles.1297 A priestess of Calama in Numidia expended a sum of £3400 on a new theatre.1298 Perhaps the commonest object of private liberality was the erection or maintenance of public baths. An old officer of the fourth legion provided free bathing at Suessa Senonum for every one, even down to the slave girls.1299 At Bononia, a sum of £4350 was bequeathed for the same liberal purpose.1300 A magnate of Misenum bequeathed 400 loads of hard wood annually for the furnaces of the baths, but with the stipulation that his son should be made patron of the town, and that his successors should receive all the magistracies.1301

These are only a few specimens taken at random from the countless records of similar liberality to the parent city. The example of the emperors must have stimulated the creation of splendid public works in the provinces. It has been remarked by M. Boissier that the imperial government at all times displayed the politic or instinctive love of monarchy for splendour and magnificence.1302 The Roman Code, down to the end of the Western Empire, gives evidence of a jealous care for the preservation of the monuments and historic buildings of the past, and denounces with very unconventional energy the “foul and shameful” traffic in the relics of ancient glory which prevailed in the last age of the Empire.1303 After great fires and desolating wars, the first thought of the most frugal or the most lavish prince was to restore in greater grandeur what had been destroyed. After the great conflagration of A.D. 64, which laid in ashes ten out of the fourteen regions of Rome, Nero immediately set to work to rebuild the city in a more orderly fashion, with broader streets and open spaces.1304 Vespasian, on his accession, found the treasury loaded with a debt of £320,000,000. Yet the frugal emperor did not hesitate to begin at once the restoration of the Capitol, and all the other ruins left by the great struggle of A.D. 69 from which his dynasty arose.1305 He even undertook some new [pg 228]works on a great scale, the temple of Peace and the amphitheatre, on the plans projected by Augustus. Titus completed the Colosseum, and erected the famous baths.1306 Domitian once more restored the Capitol, and added many new buildings, temples to his “divine” father and brother, with many shrines of his special patroness Minerva; a stone stadium for 30,000 people, and an Odeum for an audience of 10,000.1307 Trajan was lauded by Pliny for his frugal administration of the treasury, combined with magnificence in his public works.1308 Nor was the encomium undeserved. He made docks and erected warehouses at Ostia; he ran a new road through the Pomptine marshes; he lavished money on aqueducts and baths.1309 His most imposing construction was a new forum between the Capitoline and the Quirinal, with stately memorials of the achievements of his reign. But the prince of imperial builders and engineers was Hadrian. Wherever he went he took with him in his journeys a troop of architects to add something to the splendour or convenience of the cities through which he passed. “In almost every city,” says his biographer, “he erected some building.”1310 But the capital was not neglected by Hadrian. He restored historic structures such as the Pantheon and the temple of Neptune, the forum of Augustus, and Agrippa’s baths, with no ostentatious intrusion of his own name.1311 In his own name he built the temples of Venus and Roma, the bridge across the Tiber, and that stately mausoleum, which, as the castle of S. Angelo, links the memory of the pagan Empire with the mediaeval Papacy and the modern world. The example of the imperial masters of the world undoubtedly reinforced the various impulses which inspired the dedication of so much wealth to the public service or enjoyment through all the cities of the Empire.

But the wealthy and public-spirited citizen was also expected to cater for the immediate pleasure or amusement of his neighbours in games and feasts. We have seen that Pliny, during his administration of Bithynia, seems to have regarded the public feasts given to a whole commune on occasions of [pg 229]private rejoicing, as dangerous to the general tranquillity. Yet the usage meets us everywhere in the inscriptions, and even in the literary history of the time. This spacious hospitality was long demanded from the rich and powerful, from the general at his triumph, from the great noble on his birthday or his daughter’s marriage, from the rich burgher at the dedication of a temple or a forum which he had given to the city, from the man who had been chosen patron of a town in expectation of such largesses, not to speak of the many private patrons whose morning receptions were thronged by a hungry crowd, eager for an invitation to dinner, or its equivalent in the sportula.1312 Julius Caesar on his triumph in 46 B.C. had feasted the people at 22,000 tables.1313 Great houses, like the sumptuous seat of Caninius Rufus at Como, had enormous banquet halls for such popular repasts.1314 The Trimalchio of Petronius desires himself to be sculptured on his tomb in the character of such a lavish host.1315 There was in that age no more popular and effective way of testifying gratitude for the honours bestowed by the popular voice, or of winning them, than by a great feast to the whole commune, generally accompanied by a distribution of money, according to social or official grade. It was also the most popular means of prolonging one’s memory to bequeath a foundation for the perpetual maintenance of such repasts in honour of the dead.1316 One P. Lucilius of Ostia had held all the great offices of his town, and had rewarded his admirers with a munificence apparently more than equivalent to the official honours they had bestowed. He had paved a long road from the forum to the arch, restored a temple of Vulcan, of which he was the curator, and the temples of Venus, Spes, and Fortuna; he had provided standard weights for the meat market, and a tribunal of marble for the forum. But probably his most popular benefaction was a great banquet to the citizens, where 217 couches were arrayed for them.1317 The same munificent person had twice entertained the whole of the citizens at luncheon. Elsewhere a veteran, with a long and varied service, had settled at Auximum where he [pg 230]had been elected patron of the community. His old comrades, the centurions of the Second Legion (Traj. Fortis) erected a monument to his virtues, and, at the dedication, he gave a banquet to the townsfolk.1318 One other example, out of the many which crowd the inscriptions, may serve to complete the picture of civic hospitality. Lucius Cornelius of Surrentum received on his death the honour of a public funeral by a vote of the Curia. The inscription on his statue records that, on assuming the garb of manhood, he had provided a meal of pastry and mead for the populace; when he became aedile, he exhibited a contest of gladiators; and, twice reaching the honours of the duumvirate, he repaid the compliment by splendid games and a stately banquet.1319

At these entertainments a gift of money, always graduated according to the social rank of the guests, decurio, augustal, or plebeian, was generally added to the fare.1320 Sometimes the distribution took the form of a lottery. A high official of Beneventum, who had probably inherited a fortune from his father, a leading physician of the capital, once scattered tickets among the crowd, which gave the finder the right to a present of gold, silver, dress, or other smaller prizes.1321 Women appeared sometimes both as hostesses and guests on these occasions. Caesia Sabina of Veii, on the day on which her husband was entertaining all the citizens, invited the female relatives of the decurions to dinner, with the additional luxury of a gratuitous bath.1322 It is curious to observe that at the festivities in which women are entertained, the sharp demarcation of ranks is maintained as strictly as it is among their male relations. Thus, in a distribution at Volceii, the decurions, augustales, and vicani, receive respectively thirty, twenty, and twelve sesterces apiece; while the proportion observed among the ladies of the three social grades is sixteen, eight, and four. Nor were children, even those of the slave class, forgotten on these festive occasions. One kindly magnate of Ferentinum left a fund of about £750 to give an annual feast of pastry and mead upon his birthday for all the inhabitants with their wives, and at the [pg 231]same time, 300 pecks of nuts were provided for the children, bond and free.1323

These provincial societies, as we have already seen, were organised on aristocratic or plutocratic principles. The distinction between honestior and humilior, which becomes so cruel in the Theodosian Code, was, even in the Antonine age, more sharply drawn and more enduring than is agreeable to our modern notions of social justice. The rich have a monopoly of all official power and social precedence; they have even the largest share in gifts and paltry distributions of money which wealth might be expected to resign and to despise. Their sons have secured to them by social convention, or by popular gratitude and expectancy, a position equal to that of their ancestors. The dim plebeian crowd, save for the right of an annual vote at the elections, which was in a few generations to be withdrawn, seem to be of little more consequence than the slaves; they were of far less consequence than those freedmen who had the luck or the dexterity to build up a rapid fortune, and force their way into the chasm between the privileged and the disinherited. Yet this would hardly be a complete and penetrating view of the inner working and the spirit of that municipal society. The apparent rigidity and harshness of the lines of demarcation were often relieved by a social sentiment which, on the one hand, made heavy demands on rank and wealth, and on the other, drew all classes together by the strong bond of fellowship in a common social life. There has probably seldom been a time when wealth was more generally regarded as a trust, a possession in which the community at large has a right to share. There never was an age in which the wealthy more frankly, and even recklessly, recognised this imperious claim. It would indeed be difficult to resolve into its elements the complicated mass of motives which impelled the rich burgher to undertake such enormous, and often ruinous, expenditure for the common good or pleasure. There was of course much of mere selfish ambition and love of popularity. The passion for prominence was probably never stronger. Direct or even veiled corruption of the electors was, indeed, strictly prohibited by law.1324 But it was a recognised [pg 232]principle of public life that the city should honour its benefactors, and that those whom she had raised to her highest distinctions should manifest their gratitude by some contribution to the comfort or the enjoyments of the people. But, when we have admitted all vulgar motives of munificence, a man would show himself a very unobservant, or else a very cynical student of the time, if he failed to recognise that, among these countless benefactors, there were many animated, not only by a sense of duty, but by a real ardour of public spirit, men who wished to live in the love and memory of their fellows, and who had a rare perception of the duties of wealth. Philostratus has left us in his own words a record of the principles which inspired Herodes Atticus in his almost fabulous donations to many cities in Asia, Greece, and Italy. Herodes used to say that the true use of money was to succour the needs of others; riches which were guarded with a niggard hand were only a “dead wealth”; the coffers in which they were stowed away were merely a prison; and the worship of money resembled the sacrifice which the fabled Aloidae offered to a god after putting him in chains.1325 The main characteristics of human nature are singularly fixed from age to age, although the objects of its love and devotion may endlessly vary. The higher unselfish impulses must assert themselves in any society which is not plunging into the abyss. The choicer spirits will be always ready to lavish effort or material wealth on objects which are sacred to their own age, although they may seen chimerical or unworthy to the next. And we may well believe that the man who in the second century built a bath or a theatre for fellow townsmen, might possibly, had he lived in the fifth, have dedicated a church to a patron saint, or bequeathed his lands to a monastery.

The Antonine age was on one side perhaps rather coarse in its ideals, passionately fond of splendour and brilliant display, proud of civic dignity, and keenly alive to the ease and comfort and brightness which common effort or individual generosity might add to the enjoyment of life. It was also an intensely sociable age. Men looked for their happiness to their city rather than to the family or the state. If their city could not play a great part as an independent commonwealth, [pg 233]it might, by the self-sacrifice of its sons, assert its dignity among its rivals. It could make itself a society which men would proudly or affectionately claim as their “patria” and their parent, and on which they would vie with one another in lavishing their time and their gold. And the buildings and banquets and bright festivals, on which so much was lavished, were enjoyed by all citizens alike, the lowest and the highest, although high and low had sometimes by prescriptive usage an unequal share in the largesses. The free enjoyment of sumptuous baths, of good water from the Atlas, the Apennines, or the Alban Hills, the right to sit at ease with one’s fellows when the Pseudolus or the Adelphi was put upon the boards, the pleasure of strolling in the shady colonnades of the forum or the market, surrounded by brilliant marbles and frescoes, with fountains shedding their coolness around; the good fellowship which, for the time, levelled all ranks, in many a simple communal feast, with a coin or two distributed at the end to recall or heighten the pleasure—all these things tended to make the city a true home, to some extent almost a great family circle. There was much selfishness and grossness, no doubt, in all this civic life. Which later age can cast the first stone? Yet a study of the inscriptions of the Antonine age leaves the impression that, amid all the sharply drawn distinctions of rank, with all the petty ambition and self-assertion, or the fawning and expectant servility, there was also a genuine patriotic benevolence on the one hand, and a grateful recognition of it on the other. The citizens record on many a tablet their gratitude to patron or duumvir or augustal, or to some simple old centurion, returned from far frontier camps, who had paved their promenade, or restored their baths, or given them a shrine of Neptune or Silvanus. They also preserved the memory of many a kindly benefactor who left, as he fondly thought for ever, the funds for an annual feast, with all the graduated shares scrupulously prescribed, to save an obscure tomb from the general oblivion. Thus, although that ancient city life had its sordid side, which is laid bare with such pitiless Rabelaisian realism by Petronius, it had its nobler aspect also. Notwithstanding the aristocratic tone of municipal society in the age of the Antonines, it is possible that the separation of classes in our great centres of population is [pg 234]morally more sharp and decided than it was in the days when the gulf between social ranks was in theory impassable.

There is however another side to this picture of fraternal civic life. If some of its pleasures were innocent and even softening and elevating, there were others which pandered to the most brutal and cruel passions. The love of amusement grew upon the Roman character as civilisation developed in organisation and splendour, and unfortunately the favourite amusements were often obscene and cruel. The calendar of the time is sufficiently ominous. The number of days which were annually given up to games and spectacles at Rome rose from 66 in the reign of Augustus, to 135 in the reign of M. Aurelius, and to 175, or more, in the fourth century. In this reckoning no account is taken of extraordinary festivals on special occasions.1326 The Flavian amphitheatre was inaugurated by Titus with lavish exhibitions extending over 100 days.1327 The Dacian triumphs of Trajan were celebrated by similar rejoicings for 123 days, and 10,000 gladiators were sent down into the arena.1328 The rage of all classes of the Roman populace for these sights of suffering and shame continued unabated to the very end of the Western Empire. The lubricity of pantomime and the slaughter of the arena were never more fiercely and keenly enjoyed than when the Germans were thundering at the gates of TrÈves and Carthage.1329

It is difficult for us now to understand this lust of cruelty among a people otherwise highly civilised, a passion which was felt not merely by the base rabble, but even by the cultivated and humane.1330 There was undoubtedly at all times a coarse insensibility to suffering in the Roman character. The institution of slavery, which involves the denial of ordinary human rights to masses of fellow-creatures, had its usual effect in rendering men contemptuously callous to the fate of all who did not belong to the privileged class. Even a man of high moral tone like Tacitus, while he condemns Drusus for gloating over his gladiatorial shows, has only a word of scorn for the victims of the butchery.1331 And the appetite grew with what it fed on. [pg 235]From father to son, for nearly seven centuries, the Roman character became more and more indurated under the influence of licensed cruelty. The spectacle was also surrounded by the emperors, even the greatest and best, for politic reasons, with ever growing splendour. The Flavian amphitheatre, which remains as a monument of the glory of the Empire and of its shame, must have been a powerful corruptor. There, tier above tier, was gathered the concentrated excitability and contagious enthusiasm of 87,000 spectators. The imperial circle and the emperor himself, members of high senatorial houses, the great officers of state, the priests, the vestal virgins, gave an impressive national dignity to the inhuman spectacle. And now and then an Eastern prince or ambassador, or the chief of some half-savage tribe in Germany or Numidia,1332 amused the eyes of the rabble who swarmed on the upper benches. Every device of luxurious art was employed to heighten the baser attractions of the scene. The magnificent pile was brightened with gems of artistic skill.1333 The arena was tesselated with rich colouring from the sunlight which streamed through the awnings. The waters of perfumed fountains shot high into the air, spreading their fragrant coolness; and music filled the pauses in the ghastly conflict. From scenes like these was probably drawn the picture in the Apocalypse: Mulier circumdata purpura et coccino—mater fornicationum—ebria de sanguine sanctorum.

In the first and second centuries the passion for cruel excitement was as strong in the provincial towns as it was even at Rome. This may have been partly due to the monotony of provincial life. It was also stimulated by the ease with which public sentiment extorted the means for these gratifications from the richer citizens. The opinion of the powerful and enlightened class, with rare exceptions, made no effort to purify and humanise the grossness of the masses. Seneca and Demonax indeed display a modern humanity in their view of the degrading influence of these displays.1334 A humane magistrate of Vienne, one Trebonius Rufinus, in the reign of Trajan, having autocratically abolished them in his city, was called upon to [pg 236]defend his conduct before the emperor, and Junius Mauricus had the courage to express before the council a wish that they could be abolished also at Rome.1335 Augustus had, by an imperial edict, restrained the cruel exhibitions of the father of Nero.1336 Vespasian, according to Dion Cassius,1337 had little pleasure in the shows of the arena. But the emperors generally, and not least Vespasian’s sons, encouraged and pandered to the lust for blood.1338 The imperial gladiators were organised elaborately in four great schools by Domitian,1339 with a regular administration, presided over by officers of high rank. The gentle Pliny, who had personally no liking for such spectacles, applauded his friend Maximus for giving a gladiatorial show to the people of Verona, to do honour to his dead wife, in the true spirit of the old Bruti and Lepidi of the age of the Punic Wars.1340 He found in the shows of Trajan a splendid incentive of contempt for death.

It is little wonder that, with such examples and such approval, the masses gloated unrestrained over these inhuman sports. The rag-dealer at Trimalchio’s dinner is certainly drawn to the life.1341 They are going to have a three days’ carnival of blood. There is to be no escape; the butcher is to do his work thoroughly in full view of the crowded tiers of the amphitheatre. It was in Etruria, and in Campania, where Trimalchio had his home, that the gladiatorial combats took their rise. Campanian hosts used to entertain their guests at dinner with them in the days before the second Punic War.1342 And it was in Campanian towns that in the first century was displayed most glaringly the not unusual combination of cruelty and voluptuousness. The remains of Pompeii furnish us with the most vivid and authentic materials for a study of the sporting tastes of a provincial town. It is significant that the amphitheatre of Pompeii, which was capable of holding 20,000 people, was built fifty years before the first stone amphitheatre erected by Statilius Taurus at Rome.1343 It is also remarkable that, although Pompeii is mentioned only twice by Tacitus, one of the references is to a bloody riot [pg 237]arising out of the games of the amphitheatre.1344 In the year 59 A.D. a Roman senator in disgrace, named Livineius Regulus, gave a great gladiatorial show at Pompeii, which attracted many spectators from the neighbouring town of Nuceria. The scenes of the arena were soon reproduced in a fierce street fight between the people of the two towns, in which many Nucerians were left dead or wounded. The catastrophe was brought before the emperor, and referred by him to the Senate, with the result that Pompeii was sternly deprived of its favourite amusement for a period of ten years. But when the interdict was removed, the Pompeians had the enjoyment of their accustomed pleasure for ten years more, till it was finally interrupted by the ashes of Vesuvius.

A building at Pompeii, which was originally a colonnade connected with the theatre,1345 had been converted into barracks for a school of gladiators in the time of the early Empire.1346 Behind the colonnade of more than seventy Doric columns had been built a long row of small cells, with no opening except on the central enclosure. There was a mess room, and the exedra on the southern side served as a retiring room for the trainers and the men in the intervals of exercise. The open area was used for practice. These buildings have yielded many specimens of gladiators’ arms, helmets, and greaves richly embossed in relief, scores of mail-coats, shields, and horse-trappings. In one room there were found the stocks, and four skeletons with irons on their legs. In another, eighteen persons had taken refuge in the last catastrophe, and, among them, a woman wearing costly jewels. The walls and columns were covered with inscriptions and rude sketches of gladiatorial life. Indeed the graffiti relating to it are perhaps the most interesting in Pompeii. On some of the tombs outside the city we can still read the notices of coming games, painted on the walls by a professional advertiser, one Aemilius Celer, “by the light of the moon.”1347 They announce that a duumvir or aedile or flamen will exhibit twenty or thirty pairs of combatants on the calends of May or the ides of April. There will also be a hunt, athletic [pg 238]games, a distribution of gifts, and awnings will be provided. Programmes were for sale in advance, with a list of the events. The contents of one can still be read scratched on a wall, with marginal notes of the results of the competition. In one conflict, Pugnax, in the Thracian arms, had beaten Murranus the Myrmillo, fighting in the arms of Gaul, with the fish upon his helmet; and the fate of Murranus is chronicled in one tragic letter p. (periit). Two others fought in chariots in old British fashion. And the Publius Ostorius who won was, as his name may suggest, a freedman, now fighting as a voluntary combatant, according to the inscription, in his fifty-first conflict.1348 The tomb of Umbricius Scaurus, on the highway outside the Herculaneum gate, was adorned in stucco relief with animated scenes from the arena of hunting and battle. Hunters with sword and cloak, like a modern torÉador, are engaging lions or tigers. Two gladiators are charging one another on horseback. Here, a vanquished combatant, with upturned hand, is imploring the pity of the spectators, while another is sinking in the agony of death upon the sand. The name, the school, and the fighting history of each combatant are painted beside the figure.1349 The universal enthusiasm for the shows is expressed in many a rude sketch which has been traced by boyish hands upon the walls. The record of the heroes of the arena was evidently then as familiar as that of a champion footballer or cricketer is now to our own sporting youth. In the peristyle of a house in Nola Street, the names of some thirty gladiators can be read, with the character of their arms and the number of their conflicts. Portraits of gladiators are figured on lamps and rings and vases of the period. The charm of their manly strength, according to Juvenal, was fatal to the peace of many a Roman matron of the great world. And the humbler girls of Pompeii have left the memorial of their weakness in more than one frank outburst of rather unmaidenly admiration.1350

It is a grave deduction from the admiring judgment of the glory of the Antonine age, that its most splendid remains are the stately buildings within whose enclosure, for centuries, the populace were regaled with the sufferings and the blood of [pg 239]the noblest creatures of the wild animal world and of gallant men. The deserts and forests of Africa and the remotest East contributed their elephants and panthers and lions to these scenes. And every province of the Empire sent its contingent of recruits for the arena, Gaul, Germany, and Thrace, Britain and Dacia, the villages of the Atlas, and the deserts of the Soudan.1351 Just in proportion to the depth of the impress made by Roman civilisation, was the amphitheatre more or less popular in the provinces. In Italy itself the passion was naturally strongest. Quiet little places, buried in the Apennines, or in the mountains of Samnium, had their regular spectacles, and record their gratitude for the pleasure to some magistrate or patron.1352 The little town of Fidenae, in the reign of Tiberius, gained for a moment a sinister fame by the collapse of its amphitheatre, involving the death or mutilation of 50,000 spectators.1353 An augustal of Praeneste endowed his town with a school of gladiators, and received a statue for this contribution to the pleasures of the populace.1354 A. Clodius Flaccus of Pompeii, in his first duumvirate, on the Apollinaria, gave an exhibition in the forum of bull-fighting, pugilism, and pantomime. He signalised his second tenure of the office by a show of thirty-five pairs of gladiators, with a hunting scene of bulls, boars, and bears.1355 At Minturnae, a monument reminds “the excellent citizens” that, in a show lasting for four days, eleven of the foremost of Campanian gladiators had died before their eyes, along with ten ferocious bears.1356 At Compsa in Samnium, a place hardly ever heard of, the common people erected a statue to a priest of Magna Mater, who had given them a splendid show, and he in turn rewarded their gratitude by a feast to both sexes, which lasted over two days.1357 Similar records of misplaced munificence might be produced from Bovianum and Beneventum, from Tibur and Perusia, and many another obscure Italian town. But the brutal insensibility of the age is perhaps nowhere so glaringly paraded as in the days following the short-lived victory of the Vitellian arms at Bedriacum. There, on that ghastly plain, on which his rival had been crushed and had closed a tainted life by a not inglorious death, Vitellius [pg 240]gloated over the wreck of the great struggle. The trees were cut down, the crops trampled into mire; the soil was soaked and festering with blood, while mangled forms of men and horses still lay rotting till the vultures should complete their obsequies. Within forty days of the battle, the emperor attended great gladiatorial combats given by his generals at Cremona and Bononia, as if to revive the memory of the carnage by a cruel mimicry.1358 The grim literary avenger of that carnival of blood has pictured the imperial monster’s end, within a short space, in colours that will never fade, deserted by his meanest servants, shuddering at the ghastly terrors of the vast, silent solitudes of the palace, dragged forth from his hiding, and flung with insults and execrations down the Gemonian Stairs. The dying gladiator of Cremona was more than avenged.1359

The western provinces bordering on the Mediterranean, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, drank deepest of the spirit which created the great amphitheatres of Arles, TrÈves, and Carthage, Placentia and Verona, of Puteoli, Pompeii, and Capua. But the East caught the infection, and gladiatorial combats were held at Antioch in Pisidia, at Nysa in Caria, and at Laodicea; Alexandria had its amphitheatre from the days of Augustus, and a school of gladiators, presided over by a high imperial officer.1360 The Teutonic regions of the north and Greece were almost the only provinces in which the bloody games were not popular. The one Greek town where the taste for them was fully developed was the mongrel city of Corinth, which was a Roman colony. In the novel of Apuleius we meet a high Corinthian magistrate travelling through Thessaly to collect the most famous gladiators for his shows.1361 Yet even in Greece, even at Athens, which had been the home of kindly pity from the days of Theseus, the cruel passion was spreading in the days of the Antonines. Plutarch urges public men to banish or to restrain these exhibitions in their cities.1362 When the Athenians, from an ambition to rival the splendour of Corinth, were meditating the establishment of a gladiatorial show, the gentle Demonax bade them first to overturn their altar of Pity.1363 The apostles of Hellenism, Dion, Plutarch, [pg 241]and Lucian, were unanimous in condemning an institution which sacrificed the bravest men to the brutal passions of the mob.

The games of the arena were sometimes held at the expense of the municipality on great festivals, with a public officer, bearing the title of curator,1364 to direct them. But, perhaps more frequently, they were given by great magistrates or priests at their own expense; or some rich parvenu, like the cobbler of Bologna or the fuller of Modena, who have been ridiculed by Martial, would try by such a display to force an entrance into the guarded enclosure of Roman rank.1365 There were also frequent bequests to create a permanent agonistic foundation. The most striking example of such a legacy is to be found on an inscription in honour of a munificent duumvir of Pisaurum. He left a capital sum of more than £10,000 to the community. The interest on two-fifths of this bequest, perhaps amounting to £500, was to be spent in giving a general feast on the birthday of the founder’s son. The accumulated interest of the remaining three-fifths, amounting, perhaps, to £4000, was to be devoted to a quinquennial exhibition of gladiators.1366 An aedile in Petronius is going to spend between £3000 and £4000 on a three days’ show.1367 The cost of these exhibitions, however, must have widely varied. We hear of one in the second century B.C. which cost over £7000.1368 The number of pairs engaged appears from the inscriptions to have ranged from five to thirty. The shows lasted from one to as many as eight days.1369 And the quality of the combatants was also very various. Tiberius once recalled some finished veterans from their retirement at a fee of about £800 each.1370 On the other hand, a grumbler at Trimalchio’s dinner sneers at a stingy aedile, whose gladiators were “two-penny men,” whom you might knock over with a breath.1371 Besides the great imperial schools at Praeneste, Capua, or Alexandria, and the “families” maintained at all times by some of the great nobles, there [pg 242]were vagrant troops, kept up by speculative trainers for hire, such as that gang into which Vitellius sold his troublesome minion Asiaticus.1372

The profession of gladiator was long regarded as a tainted one, on which social sentiment and law alike placed their ban. It was a calling which included the vilest or the most unfortunate of mankind. Slaves, captives in war, or criminals condemned for serious offences, recruited its ranks.1373 The death in the arena was thus often, really, a deferred punishment for crime. But even from the later days of the Republic, men of free birth were sometimes attracted by the false glory or the solid rewards of the profession. Freedmen sometimes fought at the call of their patrons.1374 And, when Septimius Severus began to recruit the Pretorian guard from the provinces, the youth of Italy, who had long enjoyed the monopoly of that pampered corps, satisfied their combative or predatory instincts by joining the ranks either of the gladiators or of the brigands.1375 The gladiator had, indeed, to submit to fearful perils and a cruel discipline. His oath bound him to endure unflinchingly scourging, burning, or death.1376 His barracks were a closely guarded prison, and, although his fare was necessarily good, his training was entirely directed to the production of a fine fighting animal, who would give good sport in the arena. Yet the profession must have had some powerful attractions. Some of the emperors,1377 Titus and Hadrian, themselves took a pleasure in the gladiatorial exercises. Commodus, as if to confirm the scandal about his parentage, actually descended into the arena,1378 and imperial example was followed by men of high rank, and even, according to the satirist, by matronly viragoes.1379 The splendour of the arms, the ostentatious pomp of the scene of combat, the applause of thousands of spectators on the crowded benches, the fascination of danger, all this invested the cruel craft with a false glory.1380 The mob of all ages are ready to make a hero of the man who can perform rare feats of physical strength or agility. And the [pg 243]skilful gladiator evidently became a hero under the early Empire, like his colleague of the red or green. His professional record was of public interest; the number of his combats and his victories was inscribed upon his tomb.1381 His name and his features were scratched by boys on the street walls. He attracted the unconcealed, and not always discreet, admiration of women,1382 and his praise was sung in classic verse, as his pathetic dignity in death has been immortalised in marble. The memories of a nobler life of freedom sometimes drove the slave of the arena to suicide or mutiny.1383 But he was oftener proud of his skill and courage, and eager to display them. When shows were rare in the reign of Tiberius, a Myrmillo was heard to lament that the years of his glorious prime were running to waste.1384 Epictetus says that the imperial gladiators were often heard praying for the hour of conflict.1385

Great imperial schools were organised on the strictest military principles, and were under the command of a procurator who had often held high office in the provinces or the army.1386 Each school had attached to it a staff of masseurs, surgeon-dressers, and physicians to attend to the general health of the members. There were various grades according to skill or length of service, and a man might rise in the end to be trainer of a troop. Gladiators, like all other callings in the second century, had their colleges. We have the roll of one of these, in the year 177 A.D., a college of Silvanus.1387 The members are divided into three decuries, evidently according to professional rank, and their names and arms are also given. Their comrades often erected monuments to them with a list of their achievements. Thus a dear companion-in-arms commemorates a young Secutor at Panormus, who died in his thirtieth year, who had fought in thirty-four combats, and in twenty-one came off victorious.1388

Our authorities do not often permit us to follow the gladiator into retirement. The stern discipline of the Ludus no doubt made better men even of those condemned to it for grievous crimes. The inscriptions contain a few brief records [pg 244]of their family life, which seems to have been as natural and affectionate as that of any other class; wives and daughters lamenting good husbands and fathers in the usual phrases, and fathers in turn mourning innocent young lives, cut short by the cruelty of the gods.1389 Sometimes the veteran gladiator might be tempted to return to the old scenes for a high fee, or he might become a trainer in one of the schools.1390 His son might rise even to knightly rank;1391 but the career of ambition was closed to himself by the taint of a profession which the people found indispensable to their pleasures, and which they loaded with contempt.

The inscriptions pay all honour to the voluntary, single-minded generosity with which men bore costly charges, and gave time and effort to the business of the city. But there was a tendency to treat public benefactions as the acknowledgment of a debt, a return for civic honours. We can sometimes even see that the gift was extorted by the urgency of the people, in some cases even by menaces and force.1392 The cities took advantage of the general passion for place and social precedence, and, often from sordid motives, crowded their curial lists with patroni and persons decorated with other honorary distinctions. On the famous roll of the council of Canusium, out of a total of 164 members, there are 39 patroni of senatorial or knightly rank, and 25 praetextati, mere boys, who were almost certainly of the same aristocratic class, and were probably destined to be future patrons of the town.1393 In the desire to secure the support of wealth and social prestige, the municipal law as to the age for magisterial office was frequently disregarded, and even mere infants were sometimes raised to the highest civic honours.1394 The position of patron seems to have been greatly prized, as it was heavily paid for. A great man with a liberal soul might be patron of several towns,1395 and sometimes women of rank had the honour conferred on them.1396 The ornamenta or external badges of official rank were frequently bestowed on people who were not eligible by law for the magistracy. A resident alien (incola), [pg 245]or an augustal, might be co-opted into the “splendid order” of the Curia, or he might be allowed to wear its badges, or those of some office which he could not actually hold.1397 But it is plain that such distinctions had to be purchased or repaid. The city seldom made any other return for generous devotion, unless it were the space for a grave or the pageant of a public funeral. It is true that a generous benefactor or magistrate is frequently honoured with a statue and memorial tablet. Indeed, the honour is so frequently bestowed that it seems to dwindle to an infinitesimal value.1398 And it is to our eyes still further reduced by the agreeable convention which seems to have made it a matter of good taste that the person so distinguished by his fellow-citizens should bear the expense of the record himself!1399 Nor did the expectations of the grateful public end even there; for, at the dedication of the monument, it was seemingly imperative to give a feast to the generous community which allowed or required its benefactor to bear the cost of the memorial of his own munificence.1400 It is only fair, however, to say that this civic meanness was not universal, and that there are records to show that even the poorest class sometimes subscribed among themselves to pay for the honour which they proposed to confer.1401

The Antonine age was an age of splendid public spirit and great material achievement. But truth compels us to recognise that even in the age of the Antonines, there were ominous signs of moral and administrative decay. Municipal benefactors were rewarded with local fame and lavish flattery; but the demands of the populace, together with the force of example and emulation, contributed to make the load which the rich had to bear more and more heavy. Many must have ruined themselves in their effort to hold their place, and to satisfy an exacting public sentiment. Men actually went into debt to do so;1402 and as municipal life became less attractive or more burdensome, the career of imperial office opened out and offered far higher distinction. The reorganisation of the [pg 246]imperial service by Hadrian had immense effects in diverting ambition from old channels. It created a great hierarchy of office, which absorbed the best ability from the provinces. Provincials of means and position were constantly visiting the capital for purposes of private business or pleasure, or to represent their city as envoys to the emperor. They often made powerful friends during their stay, and their sons, if not they themselves, were easily tempted to abandon a municipal career for the prospect of a high place in the imperial army or the civil service.1403 It is true that the local tie often remained unbroken. The country town, of course, was proud of the distinction to which its sons rose in the great world; and many a one who had gained a knighthood or some military rank, returned to his birthplace in later years, and was enrolled among its patrons. We may be sure that many a successful man, like the Stertinii of Naples, paid “nurture fees” in the most generous way. But already in the reign of Domitian, as we have seen, legal provision had to be made for the contingency of an insufficient number of candidates for the municipal magistracies. Already, in the reign of Trajan, the cities of Bithynia are compelling men to become members of the Curia, and lowering the age of admission to official rank.1404 Plutarch laments that many provincials are turning their backs on their native cities and suing for lucrative offices at the doors of great Roman patrons.1405 Apollonius of Tyana was indignant to find citizens of Ionia, at one of their great festivals, masquerading in Roman names.1406 The illustrious son of Chaeronea, with a wistful backward glance at the freedom and the glories of the Periclean age, frankly recognises that, under the shadow of the Roman power, the civic horizon has drawn in.1407 It is a very different thing to hold even the highest magistracy at Thebes or Athens from what it was in the great days of Salamis or Leuctra. But Plutarch accepts the Empire as inevitable. He appreciates its blessings as much as Aristides or Dion Chrysostom. He has none of the revolutionary rage which led Apollonius to cast reproaches at Vespasian, or to boast of his complicity [pg 247]in the overthrow of Nero.1408 He has little sympathy with philosophers like Epictetus, who would sink the interests of everyday politics in the larger life of the universal commonwealth of humanity. The Empire has extinguished much of civic glory and freedom, but let us recognise its compensating blessings of an ordered peace. Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna, might be the motto of Plutarch’s political counsels. He himself, with a range of gifts and culture, which has made his name immortal, did not disdain to hold a humble office in the poor little place which was his home. And he appeals to the example of Epameinondas, who gave dignity to the magistracy which was concerned with the duty of the cleansing of the sewers and streets of Thebes.1409 He tells his young pupil that, although we have now no wars to wage, no alliances to conclude, we may wage war on some evil custom, revive some charitable institution, repair an aqueduct, or preside at a sacrifice. Yet Plutarch has a keen insight into the municipal vices of his age, the passion for place and office, the hot unscrupulous rivalry which will stoop to any demagogic arts, the venality of the crowd, and the readiness of the rich to pamper them with largesses and shows, the insane passion for pompous decrees of thanks and memorial statues; above all, the eager servility which abandoned even the poor remnant of municipal liberty, and was always inviting the interference of the prince on the most trivial occasions.1410 Such appeals paralyse civic energy and hasten the inevitable drift of despotism. He exhorts men to strive by every means to raise the tone of their own community, instead of forsaking it in fastidious scorn, or ambition for a more spacious and splendid life.

The growing distaste for municipal honours was to some extent caused by bureaucratic encroachments on the independence of the Curia. As early as the reign of Trajan there are unmistakable signs, as we have seen, of financial mismanagement and decay. The case of Bithynia, in Trajan’s reign, is sometimes treated as an exceptional one. It may be doubted whether it is not a conspicuous example of general disorganisation. The Bithynian towns were probably not alone in their ill-considered expenditure on faultily planned aqueducts [pg 248]and theatres. Apamea was certainly not the only city which called for an imperial auditor of its accounts. Inscriptions of the reign of Trajan show that many towns in Italy, Como, Canusium, Praeneste, Pisa, Bergamum, and Caere, had curators of their administration appointed, some as early as the reigns of Hadrian or Trajan.1411 These officers, who were always unconnected with the municipality, took over the financial control, which had previously belonged to the duumvirs and quaestors. They were often senators or equites of high rank, and a single curator sometimes had the supervision of several municipalities. The case of Caere is peculiarly instructive and interesting.1412 There, an imperial freedman, named Vesbinus, proposed to erect at his own cost a club-house (phretrium), for the augustales, and asked the municipal authorities for a site close to the basilica. At a formal meeting of the Curia, the ground was granted to him, subject to the approval of Curiatius Cosanus, the curator, with a vote of thanks for his liberality. A letter to that official was drawn up, stating the whole case, and asking for his sanction. The curator, writing from Ameria, granted it in the most cordial terms. It is noteworthy that at the very time when Caere was consulting its curator about the proposal of Vesbinus,1413 the Bithynian cities were laying bare their financial and engineering difficulties to Pliny and Trajan. The glory of free civic life is already on the wane. The municipality has invited or submitted to imperial control. The burdens of office have begun to outweigh its glory and distinction. In a generation or two the people will have lost their elective power, and the Curia will appoint the municipal officers from its own ranks. It will end by becoming a mere administrative machine for levying the imperial taxes; men will fly from its crushing obligations to any refuge; and the flight of the curiales will be as momentous as the coming of the Goths.1414

The judgment on that externally splendid city life of the [pg 249]Antonine age will be determined by the ideals of the inquirer. There was a genuine love of the common home, a general pride in its splendour and distinction. And the duty, firmly imposed by public sentiment on the well-endowed to contribute out of their abundance to its material comfort and its glory, was freely accepted and lavishly performed. Nor was this expenditure all devoted to mere selfish gratification. The helplessness of orphanhood and age, the penury and monotonous dulness of the lives of great sunken classes, the education of the young, were drawing forth the pity of the charitable. Munificence was often indeed, in obedience to the sentiment of the time, wasted on objects which were unworthy, or even to our minds base and corrupting. Men seemed to think too much of feasting and the cruel amusement of an hour. Yet when a whole commune was regaled at the dedication of a bath or a temple, there was a healthy social sympathy diffused for the moment through all ranks, which softened the hard lines by which that ancient society was parted.

Yet, in looking back, we cannot help feeling that over all this scene of kindliness and generosity and social good-will, there broods a shadow. It is not merely the doom of free civic life, which is so clearly written on the walls of every curial hall of assembly from the days of Trajan, to be fulfilled in the long-drawn tragedy of the fourth and fifth centuries; three hundred years have still to run before the inevitable catastrophe. It is rather the feeling which seems to lurk under many a sentence, half pitiful, half contemptuous, of M. Aurelius, penned, perhaps, as he looked down on some gorgeous show in the amphitheatre, when the Numidian lion was laid low by a deft stroke of the hunting-spear, or a gallant Myrmillo from the Thames or the Danube sank upon the sand in his last conflict.1415 It is the feeling of Dion, when he watched the Alexandrians palpitating with excitement over a race in the circus, or the cities of Bithynia convulsed by some question of shadowy precedence or the claim to a line of sandhills. It is the swiftly stealing shadow of that mysterious eclipse which was to rest on intellect and literature till the end of the Western Empire. It is the burden of all religious philosophy from Seneca to Epictetus, [pg 250]which was one long warning against the perils of a materialised civilisation. The warning of the pagan preacher was little heeded; the lesson was not learnt in time. Is it possible that a loftier spiritual force may find itself equally helpless to arrest a strangely similar decline?