Читать книгу Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius - Dill Samuel - Страница 13

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 [pg 81]great movement towards the equality of the sexes. 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 emancipated 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 municipal 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.

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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 worships which captivated so many women of his day. And, here again, the satirist is assailing 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 worship 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’être 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 God 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 worships as that of Magna Mater. It is well known that the temples of Isis often became places of assignation 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 god Anubis.506 The Chaldaean seer or the Jewish hag might often [pg 83]arouse dangerous hopes, or fan a guilty passion 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 superstition 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 worship 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 class 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 associations 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 worship 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 fashion, and nursed the dream of a coming kingdom which was not of this world, excited the suspicion and contempt of the coarse, 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 [pg 84]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 superstitious 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 superstition 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 class. 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, blasé with precocious and [pg 85]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 titles 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 assailed 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 fashion of the world;526 chastity is not sapped by the seductions of the spectacles. [pg 86]Augustus had, indeed, set apart the upper seats for women in the theatre and amphitheatre,527 but on the benches of the circus the sexes freely mingled. It was there, while the factions of the red and blue were shouting themselves hoarse, 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 [pg 87]was demanding equal chastity 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 illustrations 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 classes of sinners. At the worst, these vices infected only a comparatively small class, 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

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Just as Juvenal misunderstood the movement of female emancipation, 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 Hellenism 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 Hellenism in the time of Juvenal. Nearly three hundred years before his day, the narrow conservatism of ancient Rome was assailed by the cosmopolitan culture of Hellas, 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 Hellenism. There was the Hellenism represented by Homer and Plato and Chrysippus; and there was the Hellenism 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 nobler Hellenism which had furnished models and inspiration to the great writers of the Augustan age, and which was destined to refashion 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 Hellenist. Although he had once a wild dream of restoring the palace of Polycrates, and one, more sane, of a canal through the Corinthian Isthmus, he also [pg 89]thought of wiping out the memory of the poems of Homer.546 Dr. Mahaffy is probably right in treating Claudius as the first really Hellenist 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-Hellenism seems to have been a genuine and creditable impulse. His visits to the Greek festivals, and his share in the competitions, were not all mere vanity. He had a futile passion 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, Hellenism 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 competitions, on the Greek model, in music, gymnastic, and horsemanship. 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 Hellenism 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. Classical Latin literature about the same time came [pg 90]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 Hellenism. 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 classes. 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 [pg 91]feeling of his class 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 assuming 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 title 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 nobles.564 Some had [pg 92]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-assertion, 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 Hellenic lands,571 while he raised the status of the medical calling, also stimulated the immigration of foreign practitioners. 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 coarse insinuations of Martial against their morality, any more than the sneers of Petronius against [pg 93]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 practitioner often reveals his nationality. The Seleucus577 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 amusement 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 coarser 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 snatched 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 [pg 94]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 ennobled 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 clientèle 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 class of immensely wealthy people, and an almost starving proletariat.586 Poverty seems almost universal, except in the freedman class, 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 [pg 95]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 noble 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 noble houses who parade the glory of their ancestors in order to attract vulgar clients. They are carried in a litter, surrounded by [pg 96]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 coarser 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 pawned 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 class. 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 classes, 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 [pg 97]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 passion 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 municipalities for generations, the one hope for the mass 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 fashion. 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 amusements 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 [pg 98]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 Salvianus, when the Germans have passed the Rhine.607

The scorn and hatred of Juvenal for wealth and its vices is natural to a class 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 noble 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 class 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 [pg 99]service, who expends it with coarse 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.