But meanwhile Cæsar, by his clemency no less than by his bold resolution, was winning all Italy to his side. Only one member of his army—his old lieutenant-general Labienus—deserted him, while fresh recruits even from the senatorial party daily joined him. Cool and methodical as ever, he left Rome to recover from its panic, and the East to wait until he had secured his hold upon the West. He knew the value of a veteran army, and therefore turned his march first to Spain. It took him but a short time to secure the capitulation of Pompeius’s lieutenants in that province, and then at last he returned to Rome. He was only in the city for eleven days, but in that time he was able to remove the panic and disorder there. He restored credit, assured the supply of corn, and got a grant of citizen rights for his faithful provincials of Cisalpine Gaul.
Meanwhile the Pompeian army was gathering in northern Greece, and the senators were breathing death and damnation against Cæsar. The final struggle on the Albanian coast and in Thessaly, which culminated in the great battle of Pharsalus (48 B.C.), decided the fate of the world. The troops were fairly equal, if numbers and training are taken into account; in numbers alone Cæsar was far inferior. But Cæsar’s men had extraordinary devotion to their general, as he had to his beloved legions. Never was there completer confidence between an army and its leader than between Cæsar and his veterans. He could be merciless in discipline. Once he had to decimate the Ninth Legion, but he could move his grim legionaries to tears by a reproach. He shared all their labours, he starved with them, and marched those prodigious forced marches by their side. They trusted in his generalship, and they were not disappointed. Pompeius showed, when at last he roused himself, that he too had not forgotten the military art. It was a battle of giants; Pompeius the more orthodox tactician, Cæsar incredibly bold, rapid, and far-seeing. More than once it was touch and go. Cæsar had terrible difficulties to face, above all in the necessity of transporting his army across the wintry Adriatic in face of the enemy when he had no fleet. The feat was accomplished by sheer audacity, and then he had to face and contain a larger army, thoroughly well prepared and supplied, with no base and no communications for his own men. He actually tried to fling a line of earthworks round the Pompeian army while his own men were starving. Yet it was by generalship that the battle of Pharsalus was won.
Pompeius fled to Egypt for refuge, and was murdered there by treacherous Alexandrians and renegade Romans. Cæsar, who had received the submission of the whole provincial world with the exception of King Juba’s African realm, followed Pompeius to Egypt, and on landing was presented with his rival’s head. In Alexandria itself Cæsar had to face one of the most serious crises of his life. For six months he held the royal palace against a host of infuriated Orientals. In the palace was Cleopatra, the wife and sister of the reigning Ptolemy, and then a brilliant and fascinating young woman of twenty. Let us believe that she was beautiful, and that the portrait-painters and coin-engravers of her day were incompetent or disloyal.[18] But if rumour spoke truly, Cæsar was by no means exclusive in his devotion to female charms. Her son was named Cæsarion.
When at length Julius Cæsar escaped from the twofold entanglements of love and battle at Alexandria, he had more fighting still before he could make the earth his footstool. He spent a few days in Syria to arrange the affairs of the East, and among other things gave orders to build up the wall of Jerusalem, which had been thrown down by the orders of Pompeius. Then he passed over to Asia Minor, and at Zela crushed the rebellion of a Pontic successor of Mithradates. So back to Italy for a few weeks, and there he found all in disorder, and his legions, including the faithful Tenth, mutinying for their pay. He settled the disorder at Rome by his mere presence, enacted laws to relieve the economic distress there, and, having no money to pay his soldiers, quelled their mutiny by sheer sleight of speech. Meanwhile the broken Pompeians had gathered in thousands at the court of King Juba, who himself had a formidable host. As soon as he could find time, the restless conqueror crossed straight to Africa with as many soldiers as he could muster, leaving the main force to follow. That was always Cæsar’s way—to dart straight upon the scene of danger was his first instinct. At his coming the marrow oozed out of the very bones of his foe. He had a Scipio and a Cato, and a host of notable Romans arrayed against him. At Thapsus, in April of the year 46, he smote them, and slew (it is said) fifty thousand men—fourteen legions of Romans. There at Utica, Cato died his famous Stoic death, far the noblest scene of his mistaken life, and so became a theme for the glorification of Stoic Republicanism for all time. Afranius, Scipio, King Juba, Faustus Sulla, and many others, died also. A few stragglers found their way to Spain, to continue the fight there under the two sons of Pompeius. Thither in the next year, so soon as he had leisure, Cæsar followed them, and in a last great battle at Munda he finished the resistance. Only Sextus Pompeius was left of the Pompeian party, and he escaped for a time to begin an interesting career as a gentleman-pirate.
In this manner the amazing Cæsar conquered the world. Now it was unquestionably his. What was he to make of it? This story has been told in vain unless it has shown that the city of Rome was rotten to the core, with no sound elements left in it. Cæsar himself was a solitary prodigy; he had no supporters worthy of his confidence. Labienus had deserted him, Quintus Cicero, another of his legates in Gaul, had also fought against him. Mark Antony was perhaps his right-hand man, but Antony was nothing but a brilliant orator and a fair soldier; of character or reputation he had not a shred. Brutus, to whom Cæsar was personally devoted, had fought against him, and was—in spite of Shakespeare and republican tradition—a vain and shallow egoist. Cæsar had no brother and no legitimate son. Across in Apollonia his little great-nephew Octavius was still at school. Julius Cæsar had to reorganise a broken world alone. For a hundred years there had been no peace in Rome, and no proper government in the empire. Every year of its lingering agony, the Republic had drawn closer to the inevitable issue in Monarchy. Even Cicero, when he tried to console himself for the horrible disorders of Roman life by depicting an ideal commonwealth, had been compelled to build it round a princeps who should maintain order, and thus allow liberty to exist. In practice also the last century had seen a succession of “princes”—Gracchus, Marius, Cinna, Sulla, Pompeius—all from the necessity of the case forced into unconstitutional positions. And now Cæsar had succeeded without a rival. Sulla had resigned power, and his work had almost immediately fallen to pieces. There was now, even more than then, no chance of building up a senatorial party, and indeed Cæsar had been the lifelong victim of senatorial arrogance and folly. It was equally impossible to build up a Roman democracy out of the demoralised loungers in the forum.
Obviously monarchy was the only solution. Cæsar was fifty-five years old, spent with war and labour, and, as I have said, quite alone. He was a man without beliefs or illusions or scruples. Not a bad man: for he preferred justice and mercy to tyranny and cruelty, and he had a passion for logic and order. He was not the sort of man to make compromises. His sudden successes had taught him to despise his enemies. He was not, of course, ignorant that the Romans (if there were any true Romans left) had it in their blood to hate the title of Rex. Every Roman schoolboy was brought up to declaim in praise of regicides. But possibly in time they could be accustomed to the hideous idea. For the present, old-fashioned titles like Dictator, Consul, and Tribune would suffice. But the office must be made hereditary, and the boy Octavius was already marked for adoption and succession. The title of Rex could wait. Cæsar would feel his way gently.
But patience was not one of his virtues. Actually fortune only left him less than two years, and those broken by tedious campaigns in the Spanish provinces, for the regeneration of Roman society. In that time he restored the finances, rearranged the provincial system, abolished the political clubs which had been centres of disorder at Rome, reformed the Calendar, dedicated a new forum and new temples, restored and revised the senate, founded a system of municipal government for Italy, settled his veterans on the land, and was preparing a great expedition to chastise the Parthians.
Most of these acts were wisely done, but in one thing Cæsar miscalculated. His brilliant successes and the adulation with which he was surrounded led him to despise his enemies. He would not stoop to flatter antiquarian prejudices or to cast a decent veil over his monarchical position. You may treat people as slaves and they will admire you for it, but when you call them slaves they will begin to resent it. Cæsar failed to rise from his chair to receive the senators. In his reformed senate he included representatives of the equestrian class, provincials and even distinguished soldiers of quite humble birth. He allowed his statue to be set up beside the Seven Kings of Rome. He accepted a gilt chair, he permanently retained the triumphant general’s laurel-crown, partly because he was bald and keenly sensitive about it; and then either through his orders or by their own officiousness his friends began to throw up ballons d’essai in the direction of kingship. At the Lupercalia Antony offered him a crown of gold. It was spread abroad that an ancient Sibylline prophecy had foretold that the Parthians could only be conquered by a king and that Cæsar was to adopt the title for the purpose of his Eastern expedition. It was trifles like these, and trivial jealousies, trivial requests declined in the name of justice, that led to the great conspiracy. No doubt the influence of rhetorical patriotism had its effect upon many of the conspirators. An unknown hand wrote “O that thou wert living!” upon the statue of old Brutus the Liberator. But neither Brutus nor Cassius deserves our admiration. It was pique not patriotism that sharpened their daggers. Sixty senators conspired together, and on the eve of setting out for Parthia—the Ides of March, 44 B.C.—Julius Cæsar was slain.
And then, having slain the tyrant and liberated the republic, the patriots were helpless. A doctrinaire like Cicero might still dream of restoring the commonwealth; but the only real question was who should succeed. The people only cried for peace. It was not so much the speech of Mark Antony as the funeral of Cæsar, cleverly stage-managed by Calpurnia, and the genuine sorrow of his veterans, which gradually turned the popular feeling against the conspirators. The senate did not venture to declare Cæsar a tyrant, they confirmed his acts, but there was no proposal to punish the murderers. The whole conclusion was a feeble compromise.
The man who should have grasped the helm was Mark Antony. He was left sole consul, there was a legion and the prætorian cohort under arms only waiting the word. The conspirators had only a few gladiators in their pay. Antony had every right to arrest them. But Antony was not the man for the part. With all his talents his character was feeble. He was always dependent on his surroundings and generally under feminine influence. Once it had been the dancer Cytheris, at present it was the aggressive Fulvia; for a time Octavia almost reformed him, but Cleopatra easily ensnared him. He was a rake and a spendthrift, always in debt. He was timid of public opinion: just now the aristocratic society in which he moved was prating of tyrannicide. Antony wanted to be in the fashion. There were dramatic embracements between Antony and Brutus.
Now the testament of Cæsar, which had just been confirmed by the senate, named young Gneius Octavius as heir to three-quarters of his estate. At the end of the will was a codicil adopting him. Henceforth until he gets the title of Augustus this young Cæsar must be called Octavianus, though he never accepted that name for himself. The “second heirs” named in case the first should fail or decline to succeed included D. Brutus, one of the murderers, and Mark Antony himself. Whosoever should accept the heirship would be bound by all Roman ideas of honour to undertake the chastisement of the murderers. Antony seems to have assumed that the obscure young man would not be likely to accept the inheritance. He therefore got together all Cæsar’s papers, and began to spend Cæsar’s immense fortune as only Antony could. He began also to manipulate Cæsar’s papers, inserting anything he liked among Cæsar’s “acts,” selling honours, raising taxes, recalling exiles to please Fulvia. For some time no one ventured to complain. Leading senators like Cicero retired to the country remarking that the tyrant was dead but the tyranny still alive. Then, of course, Antony had to provide himself with a province to ensure his future safety. Moreover, the cry of the veterans for revenge began to move him to play the Cæsarian. Thus Antony was virtually master of the Roman world and the sky was dark with menace.
Into this dangerous arena steps the nineteen-year-old Octavian. His guardian advised him to have nothing to do with his perilous inheritance. Historians have often dubbed him a coward. But alone and unfriended this youth left his tutors at Apollonia and came to Rome to take up his trust. It meant, first, revenge upon the conspirators; and secondly, a quarrel with Antony. It meant, in fact, two more civil wars, and Octavian had seen nothing of warfare. He set to work coolly and warily. There was still a magic in the name of Cæsar, and the veterans rallied to him and besought him to march against Brutus and Cassius. Part of his duties as executor was to pay a million sterling in donations to the Roman people. He sold his property and began to distribute the largess, man by man, tribe by tribe, until the sum was paid. He gave magnificent games in his “father’s” honour, with the lucky star of Julius publicly exhibited. He bought an army of 10,000 men with borrowed money. Two of Antony’s legions deserted to him bodily, and the very veterans of Antony’s bodyguard offered to murder their general if young Cæsar would give the signal.
But there was no haste in his method. Antony was to be used first and then destroyed. Octavian tried for a time to work with the senate, and even marched against Antony under their orders, but the incredible folly of the senate, who were persuaded by Cicero that “the boy” was negligible, drove him into the famous triple alliance of Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus. These three were appointed under threat of their armies to a kind of dictatorship in commission, “a triumvirate to reorganise the state.” Revenge was the explicit motive of this league. They began with the usual horrid proscription of all the senatorial aristocrats to be found in Rome. This was mainly Antony’s work. His creditors, his enemies and his wife’s enemies were slain wholesale, and, among them, Cicero. Eighteen towns of Italy were destroyed to provide lands for the veterans.
Meanwhile the tyrannicides had gathered in the East, and now Antony and the young Cæsar set out in pursuit of them. In the two battles of Philippi the luck of Octavian and the skill of Antony triumphed over their dispirited adversaries. Brutus and Cassius fell. A few of the “patriots” survived and joined Sextus Pompeius who was still at large in the Mediterranean. In the warfare at Philippi Octavian’s inexperience and real want of talent for generalship had been very apparent in contrast to Antony. Lepidus was already a nonentity. Antony went off to the East; and while he was holding his court of justice in Cilicia there sailed into harbour the splendid royal yacht of Cleopatra. The people left the judgment seat to see the famous Queen, and Antony too was soon at her feet. Signor Ferrero would have us believe, relying partly on the mature age of Cleopatra, that it was policy, not love, which made Antony dally at Alexandria. Policy no doubt was there, but everything that we know of Antony leads us to believe that he was just the man to be captured by a celebrated courtesan, particularly if she were also a queen. Certainly his sojourn in the East lowered his character both as a politician and as a soldier.
Octavian had to face Rome and the West. His task was full of perils but also full of possibilities. The soldiers were mutinous, he himself was grievously sick, and the redoubtable Fulvia, who was her husband’s real agent at Rome, very soon perceived that he was an enemy to be fought. Octavian had to fight another small civil war at Perugia before he could call himself master even of Italy, and then fight Sextus Pompeius in the Sicilian waters. Luckily he had at his side a splendid soldier—general and admiral by turns as were all good Roman fighting-men—Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.[19] He had also as his agent at Rome Mæcenas, an astute diplomatist and man of business. So though he himself often displayed feebleness and was often in danger he accomplished his task and became master of the West. Thus the lordship of the world was reduced to a plain duel.
Antony had actually married Cleopatra after Fulvia’s death and Octavia’s divorce, and as consort of the Egyptian queen reigned in Oriental majesty. He had marched against the Parthians and failed ignominiously. He was assigning provinces and princedoms to Cleopatra and her dubious offspring. It was easy for Octavian to represent Antony as a renegade Roman threatening to introduce Oriental monarchy into Rome. When at last it came to the final civil war Octavian appeared as fighting in the public cause of Rome against Egypt, with Antony as a mere deserter on the Egyptian side. The great naval battle of Actium (31 B.C.), which decided the mastery of the world for Octavian, was thus a triumph for the Roman arms over the barbarians. Actually it was a degenerate Antony who sailed away at the crisis of the battle in the wake of the queen’s yacht. The glory of the day was Agrippa’s. The luck as usual was the young Cæsar’s. He was able to inaugurate his reign at Rome by presenting her with Egypt, the richest country in the world. In 29 B.C. he came home to celebrate a glorious triple triumph and to open a new era as the first Roman Emperor.
Such is a brief sketch of the hundred and four years from the day when Tiberius Gracchus first arose to challenge the senatorial oligarchy to the day when the Empire was established upon the ruins of the Republic. It is perhaps the most terrible century in the history of the world. Rome had become the centre of the world, the only hope for civilisation, and Rome was filled with bloodshed and corruption. For the provinces there was no decent government, only a succession of licensed plunderers. In the city itself there was a long series of personal struggles for the mastery; politics meant organised rioting by gangs of roughs, questions were solved by the dagger or by the swords of senators. At intervals there came from each side alternately the murderous proscriptions, in which every man of spirit or eminence on the opposing side was marked down for destruction. Often their sons and grandsons perished with them, and in any case their fortunes were destroyed. Besides the proscriptions there had been of late a series of civil wars on a great scale in which thousands of the bravest Romans perished by each other’s swords. A successful foreign war may have some compensating effect in stiffening the moral fibre of a nation and exalting its spirit. But civil war is disastrous in every way. It is only the meanest who survive and the evil passions which it arouses have no compensation.
In such a period it is wonderful that civilisation should have been able to make any advances at all. But in spite of the public turmoil private citizens were amassing enormous fortunes out of the plunder of the world, and living, though always on the edge of a volcano, in state and luxury like kings. It is now our task to see something of private life and culture in the Rome of the expiring Republic.
Money was easily made in those days and lavishly spent. Even an honest man like Cicero, governing a comparatively poor province like Cilicia, made at least £20,000 by his year of office while he remitted to the provincials a million, which, as he says, any governor of average morality would have retained. Legacies were a very frequent source of revenue especially to pleaders, and it was customary for a rich testator at Rome to make large bequests to his friends. Cicero gained £200,000 by such legacies. Foreign kings and states paid handsomely for legal advice or support. Although a barrister was supposed to give his services for nothing yet gifts and legacies were not refused. For the financier or business man there were many channels to affluence. There were mines all over the empire to be financed and exploited. Although there was little genuine industry at Rome, yet the training and use of slaves for various undertakings was a lucrative business. Crassus trained a salvage brigade for Rome and went about to fires with them in order to make bids for the purchase of the burning property. Atticus trained a company of copying clerks and made money by the sale of books. He also kept gladiators and hired them out to magistrates for the games. Fortunes were made, as in the case of Crassus, by buying up the confiscated property of the proscribed. Land speculation was rendered extremely profitable by the frequent assignation of farm-lands to veteran soldiers who were generally glad to sell them at once. The extravagance of the Roman nobles led to a very brisk traffic in loans at high interest. There was a great deal of genuine commercial speculation in ships and cargoes, generally by companies, and Cato advises the investor to put his money in fifty different enterprises rather than in one at a time. Commerce overseas was, however, forbidden to the senators by the Claudian law, and these speculated chiefly in land, on which they made a profit by slave-labour. But the most profitable business of all was tax-farming, in which the equestrian classes joined together in capitalist rings. In these and other ways prodigious fortunes were accumulated. The stored-up capital of the Roman world is astounding in its magnitude compared even to that of modern times. The real property of Pompeius sold for £700,000. Æsopus, the popular actor, left £200,000. After the most lavish donations to the public Crassus left nearly two millions sterling by will. On the death of Cæsar the treasury contained eight millions in bullion of which a million was the dictator’s own property.
But all the wealth of the Roman empire was shared by a very narrow circle. The gulf between rich and poor was far deeper than it is to-day. We hear of poor nobles and rich upstarts, but of a respectable middle class with traditions of its own there is little trace. There is an aristocracy of a few thousand families, and nothing else but a vast proletariat, silent and hungry, dependent on their bounty, bribed with money, bribed with free corn, and bribed with bloody spectacles. They lived miserably in huge tenement blocks or in hovels on the outskirts of the city. The only career open to them was in the army, and that was chiefly filled by the stronger rustics. They had nothing to do but lounge in the streets, gape at gladiators and actors and shout for the most generous politicians of the day. No doubt there were honest citizen cobblers, but Roman history is silent about them.
That section of the city which is to be styled Society was as proud and reckless as the French aristocracy before the Revolution. The senate had now become almost literally a hereditary rank. A child born into one of these princely houses was tended by a multitude of slaves. By this time there was some attempt at a liberal education. Attended by a slave pedagogue the boy would go daily to the school of some starved Greek, who would teach him his letters and his figures. The staple of education was the delivery of artificial declamation on the model of Isocrates or Demosthenes. After this stage a young man would commonly be sent abroad to Athens or Rhodes to finish his education with a little philosophy or mathematics, but chiefly with oratory. Returned to Rome, his destiny placed him in a circle of foppish youths, who devoted their principal attention to dress and manicure. Bejewelled and scented, they practised every vice, natural and unnatural. In due course, with no effort but a few bribes from the parental purse, they became priests and augurs, thus entering what were in reality aristocratic dining-clubs. Dining was now the principal art of Rome. Macrobius has preserved the menu of one of these priestly dinners of the Republic, at which the priests and vestals were present. The party began with a prolusion like the Russian or Swedish system of hors d’œuvres, in which seventeen dishes of fish and game were presented. The dinner itself contained ten more courses, “sow’s udder, boar’s head, fish-pasties, boar-pasties, ducks, boiled teals, hares, roasted fowls, starch-pastry, Pontic-pastry.” Such was the State religion of Rome in the first century before Christ. At intervals the young noble’s father’s friends would invite him to join their staff on foreign service. If he had the good fortune to serve with Pompeius or Lucullus in the East or with Cæsar in Gaul, he might get a taste of real manliness, and serve his country as tribune of the soldiers. But more often in a peaceful province like Sicily or Africa he was merely initiated into the arts of extortion, and enjoyed all the vicious opportunities of the younger sons of princes. Thus fortified by experience he would return to Rome to seek the suffrages of his fellow-citizens for the quæstorship, the first rung on the ladder of office. Votes were to be won by bribery, direct or indirect. One candidate would spread a banquet for a whole tribe; another would seek to outshine his rivals by providing strange beasts from Africa—among Cicero’s correspondence there is an urgent appeal for Cilician panthers to be slain in the arena—or by dressing his gladiators in silver armour. Similar requirements accompanied his progress through all the stages of office on a progressively lavish scale. As quæstor he would be a judge or a comptroller of the treasury for a single year. Then as ædile he would conduct the public festivals, preside in the ædile’s court, control the markets and streets of Rome. So he rose to be consul, commander of legions and president of the state, and then in due course governor of an enormous province. From his quæstorship onwards his seat in the senate was assured.
In his home the noble Roman lived like a king, waited upon by an enormous retinue. There was much luxury and little comfort. The houses of the Romans were on a far more luxurious scale than those of the Greeks. The only genuine Roman taste that can be called liberal was the hobby of collecting beautiful town houses and country seats. Cicero, who was a man of modest income and tastes, seems to have possessed about eighteen different estates, and gave nearly £30,000 for his town house. The qualities prized in the choice of a mansion were space and coolness, and the Romans of this age were by no means insensible to the charms of scenery. The coast round Naples and Baiæ was dotted with sumptuous villas, and the gay world spent its summer there in much the same way as the cosmopolitan crowds at Biarritz. Besides his great town house and his family mansion at Arpinum, and his country houses at Tusculum and elsewhere, Cicero had marine villas all along the coast at Antium, Formiæ, Cumæ, Puteoli, and Pompeii, and all along the Campanian road were his private “inns,” where he lodged on his journeys. His favourite villa was the one at Tusculum, the scene of many of his literary labours, and among others of the famous Tusculan Disputations. It had previously belonged to Sulla, and was adorned with paintings in commemoration of Sulla’s victories. It was situated on the top of a hill along with many other villas of the aristocracy, and commanded a delightful view of the city about twelve miles away. The park attached to it was extensive, and through it there ran a broad canal. He had books everywhere, but his principal library was deposited at Antium. At Puteoli he constructed a cloister and a grove on the model of Plato’s Academy.
The principal feature of the Roman house was its large colonnaded hall, with a roof open in the middle to admit light and air. This roof sloped inwards, and allowed the rain to fall into a central tank, delightful for coolness, no doubt, but probably very unwholesome. In old days the atrium had been the common room of the Roman family. It still retained a symbolical marriage-bed, a symbolical spinning-wheel, the portraits of the ancestors, and the ceremonial altar to the family gods, who were now stored away in a cupboard close at hand. Most of the rooms opened directly out of the atrium. As they are seen in the ruins of Roman villas, they appear to have been comparatively small and ill-lighted. The larger houses themselves were generally built of local limestone with facings of stucco, though the greater part of Rome was still in this first century b.c. constructed of sun-baked bricks. It was considered unheard-of luxury when Mamurra faced his walls with marble slabs. The floors were generally tessellated. It was an innovation of the Roman architect to build houses of three or more stories, but it was probably only a starveling poet who would live on the fourth floor. A noble’s house would spread over the ground regardless of space, but the bedrooms and sometimes the dining-room were upstairs. Externally the Roman house was a little finer than the Greek, being fronted with a pillared forecourt and a dwelling for the concierge. At the back the atrium opened into a colonnaded garden with a fountain, flower-beds, and shrubbery.
As the Roman’s house was built mainly with a view to coolness, so his daily life was that of a southerner. Rome was never a healthy city in the summer, and all who could afford it fled to the country or the sea-side. Almost every Roman known to us in literature was either an invalid or a valetudinarian. Malarial fever in its periodic form was very widely spread, and most of our distinguished friends pursued a medical regimen. Cæsar was subject to fits of epilepsy, Cicero was of weak constitution, Horace was a martyr to ophthalmia as well as malaria, Augustus was always ailing and often at death’s door. The Roman’s most amiable idiosyncrasy was his devotion to the bath. Every considerable house had an elaborate bathing department with at least a hot room built over a furnace, and a cold room with a swimming-tank. But there were also public baths, on an ever-increasing scale of magnificence. Agrippa alone built 170 of them at Rome. Rich and poor alike made it their daily practice to bathe after exercise, just before their principal meal in the early afternoon. The custom of the noon-tide siesta was universal, except with prodigies of industry like Cicero. A great deal of time was spent in lounging abroad through the streets or under shady colonnades. The streets of Rome, as of all ancient cities, were extremely narrow, but in the busy parts of the city all wheeled traffic was forbidden.
The wealthy Romans have a name for abominable luxury and gluttony. As to the general question of its influence in destroying the morality of Rome I have already ventured to express disbelief in the popular view. From all that we read, it does not appear that the ordinary Roman was naturally addicted to intemperance either in eating or drinking. The praise of wine is with Horace a literary pose; personally he had a poor head and a poor stomach. The Italian is not, and probably never was a great natural eater or drinker judged by northern standards. But rhetoricians and satirists have delighted to dwell upon the immensity of Roman dinner-parties which often lasted all day and included a hideous series of curious and exotic dainties. This was the form which, in default of any nobler ideals, wealth at Rome had chosen for its display. Time hung heavily on this slave-tended aristocracy: to dine from dawn to daylight was one of the ways of killing it. So the guests reclined on their couches, dancers jigged before them, musicians played, occasionally a tumbler or a tight-rope walker would appear, in literary households a slave would read philosophy; and all the time the soft-footed slaves were coming and going with dishes of strange morsels gathered from the ends of the earth, and rare wines from the four corners of the globe. A dish of nightingales’ tongues is not the sort of thing to please one who is a gourmet by conviction or natural taste. Eating was for most of these poor starved imaginations the only form of culture they understood. It was, however, conducted with tremendous ceremony. There was a “tricliniarch” to marshal his “decuries” of slaves as each dish came into the room. There was a special “structor” to arrange the dishes, a special “analecta” to pick up the fragments that the diners dropped. Carving was a science with various branches, as in old England, and the skilful carver had his scheme of gesticulations for each kind of dish. There was another slave specially appointed to cry out the name and quality of each plat. In addition to these every guest had his own footman standing behind his couch. The most characteristic and the most unpleasant feature of a Roman banquet was the manner in which the diners assisted nature to provide them with an appetite. Even Julius Cæsar “took his vomit” both before and after his dinner-party with Cicero.
The public shows, which formed the chief recreation of rich and poor alike, grew yearly more brutal and bloody. As they were the means by which ambitious candidates for office sought to canvass popularity, the principal aim was to present something novel and startling. No doubt the more refined spectators regarded the butchery of wild beasts or paid gladiators with disgust, but the populace at large only shouted for more blood. Five hundred lions were slaughtered on one day at the triumphal games given by Pompeius. Cicero writes that the wholesale destruction of elephants in the arena actually moved the people to pity. There were still some real theatrical performances in Rome. Actors and mimics, indeed, if they were handsome and graceful, made large fortunes. Most Roman nobles of a literary bent amused themselves with writing tragedies. Cicero’s soldier brother composed four on a fortnight’s journey to Gaul. But these were only employed to bore one’s friends at dinner. Original literary dramas were even less often staged at Rome than they are in London. Plautus and Terence for comedy, and Pacuvius, Attius, and Ennius for tragedy, had already become classics and were still regularly performed. The drama died stillborn at Rome.
Historians of Rome, fortified by Juvenal and Petronius, love to depict the vices of the emperors and the imperial period. The later Republic can show us a morality no more exalted. The fragments of Varro’s satires written in the heyday of the Republic are in precisely the same strain of despondency as are the satires of Juvenal. For him, too, virtue is a thing of the past. Sober fact compels us to see that the aristocratic society of Republican Rome was hideously immoral. Voluntary celibacy and “race-suicide” were already rife. The family was a decaying institution, divorce was common, and the sterility of wickedness had long been at work to sap the ranks of the nobility. Even Cicero divorced his wife Terentia upon a trivial pretext after a long period of happy conjugal life in order to marry an heiress. Cæsar had four wives of his own, not to mention Cleopatra, without begetting a single legitimate son. Cato, the strict censor of morals, having been jilted in his youth, married a wife, divorced her for adultery after she had borne him two sons, married another, lent her for six years to the orator Hortensius, and on his death resumed her again. Mark Antony married Fadia, then Antonia, then divorced her and lived publicly with Cytheris the actress, then married Fulvia, who had already been twice a widow, then married Octavia, then Cleopatra. These marriages were made and dissolved freely for political reasons. A large part of Roman politics was carried on in the salons of the Roman ladies, and if half of what Cicero alleges be true Messalina herself had her republican prototypes in women like Clodia and Fulvia. Beside almost promiscuous relations between the sexes, the darker forms of Oriental vice were extremely fashionable among the gilded youth of Rome.
Religion was almost purely formal or political. Augurships and priesthoods still existed as the perquisite of aristocratic families. People still uttered the formulæ of oaths and vows. There was still some belief in omens and prodigies, the altars still smoked with sacrifice when triumphant generals went up to the capitol, but few prayers ascended to Jupiter in sincerity. Instead the importation of strange deities continued. Again and again in this first century before Christ the senate tried to expel the worship of Isis from the precincts of Rome, but it always returned, and eventually the triumvirs built a temple to Isis and Serapis as a measure to court popular favour. The Magna Mater of the Phrygian corybants had long been firmly established at Rome.
I think it was general materialism and immorality which killed the old State religion at Rome. Greek philosophy had generally been able to exist amicably by the side of religion. It now came in to fill up the gap left by the absence of real religious feeling. But at Rome, though Stoicism afterwards became a powerful force of inspiration to the noblest minds, philosophy was in the main a form of literary activity for dilettantists. Cato of Utica was a Stoic by temperament before he became one by doctrine. Cicero amused his leisure by recasting and combining the doctrines of the leading Greek schools in a Roman form of dialogue, in imitation of Plato; but with him it was more of a literary exercise than anything else, and Cicero has added little or nothing to the world’s stock of philosophical ideas. Only in the poet Lucretius does the fire of philosophy burn with genuine ardour. Lucretius had before him the task of proselytising at Rome for the doctrines of Epicurus and Democritus. People accustomed to the modern associations of the word “epicure” may wonder what there was to arouse the enthusiasm of a poet in the philosophy of Epicurus. That creed offered a rational explanation of the universe. With its theory of spontaneous atomic creation, and its surprising foreknowledge of some at least of the ideas of natural selection and evolution, it claimed to satisfy the intellect of mankind and to drive out all the grovelling superstition and empty rites which had usurped at Rome, as they tend to do always and everywhere, the throne of religion. All the enthusiasm with which the nineteenth century approached the new discoveries of science glowed in the heart of this rugged poet of the first century before Christ. “Voluptas” was his only goddess, but it was no vulgar pleasure of the body upon earth. It was the spirit soaring to freedom and knowledge. This atheist Epicurean is, in the true sense of the word, the most religious of all poets. He explains the nature of lightning in order that his fellow-creatures may not live in fear of thunderbolts. He explains with the same confident logic the nature of death in order that they may not fear the natural resolution of body and soul into their primordial atoms. He is moved almost to tears by the folly and sorrow of his brother-men, and he pleads with them to suffer the sacred lamp of philosophy to shine upon their darkened minds:
His doctrine is medicine for the feverish unrest of the day:
He has a compassionate scorn for the mourner:
Death has no sting for him:
Lucretius was, of course, set down by Cicero, as was Shakespeare by Dryden, as being rude and unpolished. His poem is indeed sheer didactic argument with occasional digressions, and he strings his points together with the bald transitional words and phrases of argumentative prose. But in virility of thought and expression, even in majesty of sound and force of vivid imagery, he is, when he cares to be, on a plane quite above and away from the ordinary sphere of classic Latin poetry. Almost alone among Roman writers he has a message of his own to deliver. His fellow-countrymen thought little of him, and failed to preserve any details of his biography. The monks of the Middle Ages consigned him to the hell he had flouted, and Jerome provided him, five hundred years after his death, with an end edifying to piety, but quite incredible to any one who has read his work with sympathy. He was said to have died of a love potion, and to have composed his poem in the intervals of delirium. He appears to have lived between 100 and 50 B.C.
In addition to the tragedies and epics which noblemen threw off as an elegant pastime for their superfluous leisure hours, love-poetry, pasquinades, and vers de société travelled merrily from salon to salon. If Lucretius carries the heaviest metal of Latin poets, Catullus has by far the lightest touch. He writes with an ease which makes Horace seem laboured, and with a simplicity which makes Propertius and even Ovid look like pedants, though Catullus himself, like all Romans, thought fit occasionally to adopt the classical pose, and fill his verses with learned allusions. If it were not for the influence of the schoolroom, to which most of Catullus’s work is for the best of reasons unknown, he would be recognised as possessing far more of the vital spark of poetry than Horace. Roman culture, being mainly second-hand, is almost entirely lacking in the quality of fresh youth which we enjoy in such writers as Chaucer and the early Elizabethan singers. Catullus, therefore, the earliest important lyric poet of Rome, is by no means unsophisticated. On the contrary, he is a clever son of the forum—a boulevardier, one might say—with a pretty but savage wit in reviling democrats like Cæsar and Mamurra. But, with his truly Italian scurrility, he combines the quintessence of Italian charm. When the inspiration takes him he is simple, direct, and natural. Indeed, the shorter poems of Catullus seem to me to reveal more of the