HUMANITARIAN MEASURES OF AUGUSTUS—LIFE IN THE IMPERIAL CITY—FIRST ATTEMPTS OF THE STATE TO CHECK INFANTICIDE—TRAJAN AND THE VELEIA LOAN—STOIC SPIRIT IN PLINY’S CHARITY.

ASTONISHING depravity marked the last days of the Republic, to the point where it was even said that annual divorces were as much the fashion in Rome as voluntary celibacy.335 Seneca says there were women who reckoned their years by their husbands. In the severe, early period of the Republic, celibacy was considered censurable and even guilty,336 whereas later it was not only condoned but wittily approved, to judge by the quips of the dramatist, Plautus, whose cynical references to marriage and the burden of a wife read not unlike our own scoffing and immoral dramatists of the eighteenth century.337

Civil wars and proscriptions had left great voids in Roman families; more prolific foreigners, freedmen, and slaves began to dominate the noisy city now beginning to earn her title of Mistress of the World. The visitor to Pompeii today, noting the large and heavy paving blocks, the narrow sidewalks, the deep ruts made in these solid streets by the heavy wagons, the open shops, the indecent signs, sees Rome in miniature. All this cosmopolitan disorder marked the greater town that had not twenty thousand inhabitants but a million; the noise and the congestion increased out of all proportion to its size because of the character of its dwellers, for Rome had a large foreign population. As in modern New York or London, it was in the foreign quarters that were found the discomforts, the loud misunderstandings, and the noisy, tragic fights for small things.

The stranger arriving in Rome had hardly entered its gates when he was being jostled and shoved. The narrow streets were filled with pedlars calling their wares of all kinds, from matches (sulphurata), in exchange for broken glass where money was scarce, to a dish of boiled peas for an as, or fine smoking sausages for those who had more money. Idlers filled the streets at all hours, but especially at the lunch hour (the sixth) when business ceased and those who patronized the cafÉs (tabernÆ) were hurrying to get to their accustomed tables.338

Around billboards (programmata) announcing new plays or exhibitions, crowds gathered while other groups watched acrobats, who beat themselves for the comic effects produced; dancers, jugglers, snake charmers, and performers of every kind and nation abounded. Heavily loaded wagons rumbled noisily along while their drivers cursed and lashed the tired beasts of burden, or the appearance of a tamed bear threw an entire street into wild and joyous confusion. Or perhaps a new troupe of gladiators entered town, to the complete cessation of all business and pastimes.339 Here and there in the streets, money-changers and others set up tables in convenient places where they were least apt to be driven away, and hawked loudly the bargains that they offered. Money from all the world was then flowing Romeward, and in nothing was this shown more than in expensive funerals, with their hired and vociferous mourners, blocking the streets and putting an end for the time being, to other business—and amusements.340 Narrow as were the streets, they were made more so by the tabernÆ, built up against the houses, this practice becoming so much of a nuisance (as in modern times) that the Emperor Domitian caused a decree to be issued against them, forcing the owners to remove the encroachments and confine themselves to the area of the house.341

A drunken man taking the entire via in his navigation—to the amusement of the crowd; a member of the city guard hurrying some offender to the court; or, reclining in his lectica, a noble, carried by six uniformed slaves, his other numerous attendants clearing the way for him—all these added to the noise and confusion—while through it all children crowded the curb with their games.

Such was the Rome that Augustus found, its proud citizens masters of the world, luxurious, sensual, disdainful of the very idea of duty, idling days away while they scoffed at marriage. But the foreigners, the freedmen, and the slaves married, and when the burden of a new child was too much for the small income made by amusing or serving some Roman citizen, the little newcomer was thrown into the Tiber or left unmarked on a busy thoroughfare. One of the first undertakings of Augustus was to try to remedy these evil conditions by laws and fiscal measures, his principal endeavour being to put an end to the corruption of morals and the exhaustion of the legitimate population.

From the day of the battle of Actium (B. C. 31) when the Roman world practically lay at his feet, Octavius, or Augustus as he was afterward called, while gratifying his ambition in adding to his power, studiously and ostentatiously observed the forms of popular government. In this he was paying heed to the fate of his uncle and also conciliating the people, though with every ingratiating move he increased his power.

One of the first laws he proposed was the lex Julia (de maritandis ordinibus) which was rejected by the comitia tributa, B. C. 18, but was adopted in A. D. 4. To this was added as a supplement the lex Papia PoppÆa, the two being known as the lex Julia et Papia or as novÆ leges, or simply leges, the latter reference indicating that they were referred to as the laws par excellence. Not only marriage, but everything connected with it was treated in these two laws, which really constituted a code, the most extensive after the laws of the Twelve Tables.

These laws made a great impression on Roman society. How completely customs had swung to extremes since the days of Romulus is shown in this lex Papia, as Gaius calls it. Instead of securing the father in his right over the life of children, as the stern head of the house who might decide at will whether he should let his offspring live, the law now decreed that it was through the children that he gained a status in the community. Persons who were not married and had no children were unable to inherit; the unmarried person not being able to take any part of what had been left to him, and the married person without children (orbus) being able to take only one half.342 Among the provisions of the lex Julia, or the leges, were those entitling that candidate for office who had the greatest number of children to preference. Of the two consuls it was decreed that he should be the senior whose children were the most numerous; a relief from all personal taxes and burdens was granted to citizens who had three children if they lived in Rome, four if they lived in Italy, and five if they lived in the provinces.

With the establishment of the caduca, by which there was instituted a punishment for sterility and a reward for legitimate procreation, it can be seen that there would follow some diminution in the number of children exposed, though according to Tacitus,343 “marriages and the rearing of children did not become more frequent, so powerful are the attractions of the childless state.”

By giving the people, or the common treasury, the benefit of the clause forfeiting the inheritance on account of sterility, the law was recognizing the populus as the common father, a legal concept that is becoming more and more the attitude of the twentieth century, and was then first trenchantly expressed.

Suppressed in part by the constitution of Caracalla as to the privileges of paternity to the claim upon the caduca, and by Constantine as to the penalties for celibacy, these laws were not completely and textually abrogated until Justinian. They were the beginning, however, of the new movement; out of the degeneration and degradation of the waning days of the Republic there had come at least this forward step, though the patricians complained that these provisions gave rise to despised informers and opportunities for tyrannical misuse of power.

The child now had some other than a future use; it had an immediate value. Occasionally, in times past, strangers had picked up children exposed by their parents and had reared them as slaves, or maimed and blinded them for the profession of begging. Augustus set aside a reward of two thousand sesterces (about $40.00) for the person who would rear an orphan. This was the seed of a growing humanity, the first intimation of an inclination to treat children with kindness, though it contrasts with Augustus’s own personal conduct when his anger was aroused. Both his daughter and granddaughter were so profligate that he banished them; when his granddaughter Julia was delivered of a child after sentence, he ordered that the child be “neither owned as a relative nor brought up.”344

From the death of Augustus, 14 A. D., to the reign of Nerva, 96 A. D., the violent sway of the army and the tragic fate of successive emperors cloud the history of Roman law and progress.

The Emperor Claudius distinguished himself by ordering that Claudia, a child by his first wife, “who was in truth the daughter of his freedman Boter, be thrown naked at her mother’s door.”345

There were no successors to the great jurists of the type of Capito and Labeo, whose opinions in Augustan days were accepted by even the emperor himself. With the coming of Nerva there was a great change in the attitude toward children. Despite a short reign of two years and a reputation for a weak will, it was to his initiative that the State owed the movement to put an end to the practice of abandoning infants, by having the government subsidize poor parents.

Apparently there was no other way of stopping this ruinous custom in a degenerate day. It was useless to appeal to the rich to rear families, and the poor who were still producing children were becoming poorer. One of Nerva’s noteworthy acts to alleviate conditions was the founding of colonies, and it was in accordance with the same general plan that, a few months before he died, he ordered that assistance should be given parents who found themselves without the means of bringing up their offspring.

This order was issued in the year 97, and so successful was the experiment under his successor, who accepted and enlarged the plan, that in the year 100, five thousand children were receiving aid from the State. Much credit is given to Trajan for following up the ideas of Nerva, but it was to Nerva that Rome owed Trajan, one of the most humane of her emperors.

Another evidence of the humanity of Nerva was the fact that he prohibited the making of eunuchs, a practice that had met with the disfavour of the Emperor Domitian years before, and a practice that led the Pope Clement XIV., to decree, centuries later, that no more castrats should sing in churches. And these things he did when the extravagance of his predecessors had made it necessary for him to sell the imperial furniture and jewels in order to replenish the treasury. One of his coins shows him seated in the curule chair, dispensing charity to a boy and girl, the mother standing near, with the legend “Tutela Italia.”

One need only to read the gentle replies of the Emperor Trajan to the younger Pliny, to see that, in that reign at least, there was a great change and that the conception of duty in the modern sense was creeping into a military world. Pliny himself, in a letter to Cannius, describes how he settled five hundred thousand sesterces (about $20,000) on the city of Como for the maintenance of children, “who were born of good families”—an act as traceable to the growing protective tendency as to Pliny’s patriotism and love of glory.

According to the tablet of Velia346 to the Emperor Trajan, the landed proprietors of the place received on mortgage at five per cent.,347 less than half the usual rate of that time, what would be about $50,000 of our money, the interest of which was to go to the maintenance of three hundred poor children.

The means employed to help parents and prevent them from exposing their children were skilfully contrived. Through the municipality, Trajan lent money to certain proprietors to improve their land, and the interest paid on this loan constituted a benevolent fund by which the children were taken care of, or rather, by which their parents were rewarded for not murdering them. From the table of Velia we learn also that fifty-one proprietors of that section received on land twelve times the value of the loan, or 1,116,000 sesterces ($52,820) the annual interest of which, 55,800 sesterces ($2,650), constituted a fund for the support of three hundred children, two hundred and sixty-four boys and thirty-six girls. The boys received annually 192 sesterces, and the girls 144 sesterces. Illegitimate children were given less, the boys 144 sesterces, and the girls 120 sesterces, although in the tablet there were only two illegitimate children, one boy and one girl. The fact that the number of girls assisted was only one-tenth the number of boys, goes to show, that this new institution was not due so much to the fact that the sentiment of charity had infiltrated through pagan society, as to the fact that pagan society was endeavouring to repair the ravages of degenerate and pauperistic days, shown in the diminution of the class of freedmen in Rome.348

Writing to Pliny at Bithynia, to which place he had been sent by Trajan as imperial legate, the Emperor mildly answers an inquiry as to what the law shall be in that province regarding deserted children. Trajan rules that deserted children, who are found and brought up, shall be allowed their freedom without being obliged to repay the money expended for their maintenance.

“The question concerning such children who were exposed by their parents,” says Trajan, “and afterward preserved by others, and educated in a state of servitude, though born free, has been frequently discussed; but I do not find in the constitutions of the princes, my predecessors, any general regulation upon this head extending to all the provinces. There are, indeed, some rescripts of Domitian to Avidius Niguinus and Armenius Brocchus, which ought to be observed; but Bithynia is not comprehended in the provinces therein mentioned. I am of opinion, therefore, that the claims of those who assert their right of freedom upon this principle, should be allowed, without compelling them to purchase their liberty by repaying the money advanced for their maintenance.”349

A new note this, for in order to encourage the saving of children who had been exposed, the custom had been rigidly followed that the person who saved a child was able to regard it as his slave, without regard to what its condition had been previous to exposure.

As shown in the correspondence of Pliny and Trajan, there is much truth, in the contention that the Emperor shows up better than the philosopher and poet.

The noteworthy thing about this remarkable exchange of letters is that a new spirit is revealed. It is a living, working philosophy that we discover, practical results of that philosophy bringing a kindlier treatment of slaves, a greater respect for women, a more thoughtful regard for the education of the young, and a gentler assistance of the helpless and distressed.

True, Cicero, a century and a half before had preached doctrines that paved the way, and for generations earlier there had been such a kindlier spirit in the air. But not until now do we find a man of Pliny’s dominating prominence, or nearness to power, suggesting that he will pay a third of the expenses of the cost of founding a university in his own town. His reason, he says, is to save youths from going to Milan for their education and thereby getting away from the proper home influences.

Tracing the thin thread of child progress through these livid days we are brought in touch with the little known but better side of Roman life; for despite the general debauchery of the upper classes and the unwholesome pictures of Juvenal, there is evidence that there were Roman families untouched by the general immorality where women of the type of Marcia or Helvia, addressed in the letters of Seneca, presided over homes in which there was an atmosphere of virtue and self-restraint, and where tales of deeds of the Romans of the earlier days still had their charm and their influence.