298. Roman Court Procedure Highly Scientific.—If Publius Calvus does not have to attend the Senate, two places will assuredly devour a great part of his normal day—the court-house and the public baths. Even if he is not plaintiff, defendant, or witness, like every man of his class he delights in listening to oratory, and etiquette requires that, whenever one of his numerous friends argues a case, he, with as many other senators and equites as possible should sit in the front of the audience, to “lend their distinguished influence,” to lead the salvos of applause, and even to stand up conspicuously behind the orator at critical points in his argument.

Roman courts are not like the Athenian dicasteries, huge juries of many hundreds,[187] with tumultuous appeals from the letter of the law to the emotions of the members. Personal influence has its part, but everything is regulated, orderly, scientific. Cases which do not involve the safety of the state or the fate of distinguished personages are usually argued coldly, and with a nice attention to technicalities. Your Roman jurisconsult (expert in the law) is as much superior to an Athenian in developing the science of formal justice, as another Athenian might be to a Roman, in breathing life into chiseled marble. The administration of law is intricate. There are courts behind courts, with final appeal either to the Senate (as we have just seen) or to the Emperor.[188] The “law’s delays” are perfectly well understood by adroit advocates; and Martial records a case that took twenty years while dragging through three successive courts—to the ruin of both sets of litigants.

299. The Great Tribunals in the Basilicas.—If we visit the great basilicas, we find two kinds of tribunals steadily functioning. For much civil business there is the great “Court of the Centumviri,” a board not of “One Hundred” but actually of one hundred and eighty distinguished citizens, who sit sometimes all together, sometimes divided into four groups for conducting trials simultaneously. Their stronghold is the Basilica Julia. It is a great honor to argue before the Centumviri, and every advocate exhausts his wiles to induce the grave judges to pay him the highest compliment (as they did to Pliny the Younger) by “suddenly leaping to their feet and applauding him as if they could not help themselves.”

The most of the higher litigation, however, goes before judices. A judex may be one of the great panel of 4000 citizens,—senators, equites, and plebeians of substance who can be called upon to serve as a kind of jury for ordinary trials of importance. The size of such a jury depends on the nature of the case as provided by statute,—you can have from 32 members up to a full 100. There is a high judge over the entire body, either the prætor, or a professional expert in the law, the judex quæstionis, who controls the presentation of evidence and the strictly technical parts of the trial.

After the evidence has been submitted, orally or in writing, and the orators have exhausted themselves, the jurors take small wax-covered tablets and vote, each man marking simply letters: A = absolvo, “Not guilty,” C = Condemno, “Guilty,” N.L. = Non Liquet, “No verdict.” A bare majority can either acquit or condemn, but, of course, no man is condemned on a plurality, and a tie means acquittal. If “No verdict” is the decision, the case can still go to another trial. Roman juries, therefore, do not have to be locked up for days to compel them to agree.

However, this jury system is often inconvenient and does not adapt itself to that very technical justice in which the Roman jurisconsults increasingly delight. More and more cases are being tried by a single judex, or a small bench of judices, men highly trained in the law, and especially appointed by the prætor or other high official, to investigate a given case and report their findings. Under the later Empire the large juries will disappear altogether, and a few professional judges will become arbiters alike of the law and the evidence—an excellent system from the standpoint of scientific jurisprudence, but not so excellent if these judges become corrupt, pliable, or subject to class prejudices.

300. Great Stress on Advocacy.—Whatever the tribunal may be, great is the stress laid on the arts of the advocate. Calvus has served a long probation arguing in the basilicas before his day of glory came in the Senate. All the young Ciceros in the rhetoric schools dream of the hour when they can stand in flowing togas before the high raised platform of the judices, wave their arms, throw out their voices, and plead the cause of some widow, or arraign some embezzler or extortioner. The mere fact that senatorial speeches have to be extremely careful, lest they trench upon imperial prerogative, puts a greater premium upon private argument in the courts where usually “Cæsar” has no interests.

The rewards of successful eloquence are great;[189] and if the legal fees are small, rich clients, at least, never fail with big New Year’s presents, and with legacies in their wills. Besides there are no governmental prosecuting attorneys. Criminal actions can be started by any citizen against any possible offender. To reward such zeal, a good part of the fines or confiscated property of convicted criminals goes to the self-appointed prosecutor. It is thus easy to see how, under Tiberius, Nero, and Domitian, the delators (“professional accusers”) grew fat prosecuting wealthy senators for “treason.” These good days for the profession seem over, but the incomes of certain of the leading advocates are princely, some almost vying with those of the earlier Vibius Crispus and Epirius Marcellus, who had over 200,000,000 sesterces ($8,000,000) apiece.

301. Cheap Pettifogging Lawyers.—On the other hand Rome is infested with starving pettifoggers, pretentious wretches, sleeping in dirty tenements, and with hardly a decent toga to wear when they argue on petty cases in the præfect’s court. Sometimes they get a better class of client, hire a good robe and ring to wear at the trial, and win the case in the Basilica. Their client will very likely decorate the stairs to their tenement with palm leaves, but as the only fee[190] send them a quantity of uncertain edibles—“a dried-up ham, a jar of sprats, some veteran onions, or five flagons of [very cheap] wine that has just sailed down the Tiber!” If any money is actually paid, lucky the advocate who does not have to split his fee with some agent who has secured the case for him!

302. Character Witnesses; Torture of Slave Witnesses.—One thing more concerning these trials must be noted: the testimony of Roman citizens carries much greater weight than that of aliens, and the unreliability of Græco-Levantines is notorious. Freeborn men, Roman or provincial, testify under oath. Only accusers have the right to compel the attendance of unwilling witnesses, but the defense can bring not merely voluntary witnesses to the facts, but can present as many as ten laudatores, character witnesses, and if men of high standing are vigorous in their friends’ praises, their opinions will offset very many ugly facts in the testimony.

Frequently enough, however, the statements of slaves have to be taken. These wretches, having little better status before the law than animals, can only testify under torture. No master, nevertheless, except in cases of treason, can ordinarily be compelled to let his slaves testify against him, but it is assumed that torture is necessary if a master voluntarily offers his slave as witness,—for what slave would dare uncompelled to say anything unwelcome to his master in view of the terrific flogging waiting after he gets home? The situation in short as to slave testimony is substantially as in Athens.[191] This use of the rack and flogging post is one of the worst blots upon the highly scientific and usually reasonable and humane judicial system of Rome.

303. Written Evidence; High Development of the Advocate’s Art.—On the other hand much weight is given to reliable written evidence. Public documents from the record office, and the careful entries on bankers’ ledgers are continually being introduced as testimony. Much of the forensic oratory also is of a high order. The rhetoric schools have not taught their better pupils in vain; despite much silly display, “appeals to the emotions,” and artificiality, the art of advocacy has never completely lost touch with the promotion of justice; and usually the verdict goes still to him who best meets Cato the Elder’s pungent definition of the true orator, vir bonus, dicendi peritus (“the good man versed in the art of speech”), and who recalls that great republican’s classic injunction for all advocates—rem tene, verba sequentur (“Grasp the subject and the words will follow”).[192]

In all matters not touching certain high interests the Roman courts are perhaps as disinterested and clean as human tribunals can well be, and the average judex is charged with a passionate desire to do that which is formally right. In the courts the spirit of Rome is often to be seen at its best.

304. Popularity and Necessity of the Baths.—As the afternoon advances, however, unless the case is extremely urgent, or the advocates unwontedly skilful, the impassive toga-clad figures upon the high seats of the tribunals begin to show signs of uneasiness. The pleaders themselves reach in turn a suitable climax, as the last filling of the water clocks runs out;—if necessary they can finish their castigations or their excuses to-morrow. The courts are adjourned, and judges, litigants, advocates, spectators, all hasten from the Basilicas possessed with the thought which is common to nigh every man in Rome not of the most unfortunate class—“To the Baths!”

The warm Italian climate makes frequent ablutions not merely comfortable but necessary, but in the stern old days of the earlier Republic Seneca specifically assures us that the fathers of Rome were not wont to wash all over oftener than once a week (nundinæ).[193] Long before the age of Hadrian, however, a daily bath became a personal necessity. No dinner can be enjoyed without it. No respectable man can feel comfortable deprived of it.

As the bathing habit grows, its luxury and elaboration grow correspondingly. The daily bath becomes a social ceremony, and the bathing place becomes almost as indispensable as the forum, or the triclinium. Other peoples and ages may equal or surpass the Romans in actual cleanliness; none can develop institutions really corresponding to the enormous public thermæ scattered over the capital.[194]

305. Luxurious Private Baths.—Probably every senator and all the more pretentious equites have sumptuous private baths in their own mansions. Here they can go when visits to the public thermæ are inconvenient, or to refresh themselves between the long courses of their great dinner parties.

The luxury of these private baths can be so prodigious as to afford constant texts for the Stoical philosophers. Seneca has waxed almost frantic telling how an aristocrat feels somewhat poverty-stricken unless “the walls [of his bath] shine with great costly slabs, and marbles of Alexandria tricked out with reliefs in stone from Numidia, and with the whole ceiling elaborately covered with all varieties of paintings, and unless Thasian marbles inclose the swimming pool, and the water gushes out of silver taps”; likewise “how many a rich freedman adorns his baths with fine collections of statues and a multitude of pillars supporting nothing but serving only as ornaments.” Essential, too, are such private baths for those so devoted to the enjoyment that they insist on bathing several times a day.

306. Government and Privately Owned Public Baths: Both Very Popular.—Even great nobles, however, enjoy the society and recreations afforded by the public establishments; and there is often no better way for a rich senator to display pomp and circumstance than to enter one of the huge thermæ followed by a long train of slaves, freedmen, and clients. Men of business, and, of course, mere toilers must visit the baths when their duties give temporary leisure, but for everybody who can control his time there is one preferable period—the eighth or ninth hour, two or three P.M. It is around this time that the bath attendants heat all their huge tanks to boiling and make ready with an endless supply of anointing oils and “strigils” (metal scrapers) to care for the onrush of the multitudes.

There are about sixteen enormous public baths in Rome owned by the government, although often their care is leased to contractors. Small baths, privately owned, opened to anybody at a tolerable fee and managed solely for profit, exist in addition all over the city, and nearly nine hundred stand licensed on the City Præfect’s books. Some of these privately owned baths are elegant establishments, offering great luxuries at corresponding prices.

The keepers of a bath-house (balneatores) rank low in social estimation, for many of their places are the scenes of gross reveling and debauchery; but there is excellent money in the business. Their baths have names something like inns, and going about the metropolis, we have noticed the “Baths of Daphne,” “The Æolian,” “The Diana,” “The Mercury,” or they are simply called from the names of the owners, as “Faustinian Baths” or “The Crassian.” On a signboard one can read that the “Thermæ of Marcus Crassus” offer both salt- and fresh-water baths.[195]

307. The Great Baths of Trajan: Baths, Club-House, and Café.—However, if one would see and meet the world, a visit to the great public baths is absolutely necessary. Some of these are located on the outskirts of the capital; for example, the magnificent Baths of Agrippa stand near the Pantheon in the Campus Martius; but only a short distance from Publius Calvus’s mansion on the Esquiline rise what are, perhaps, the finest public thermæ as yet existing in Rome, those of Trajan, which were rebuilt on the site of a similar establishment earlier erected by Titus.[196]

The Baths of Trajan constitute more than a vast establishment where perhaps a thousand persons can bathe in the various tanks and pools simultaneously. They supply many of the needs which another age will meet partly by the club-house and partly by the café. They are frequented by women as well as men, although the former are expected to make their visits particularly during the morning hours and certain special rooms are set aside for their use. These rules, however, are often violated, and scenes can take place at the Baths of Trajan which from the standpoint of a later time are simply indescribable.

308. Heterogeneous Crowds in the Great Baths.—One of the glories of the great thermæ is their apparent democracy. Any freedman is entitled to make use of them, although there are doubtless special recreation and reposing rooms reserved for the rich elect. In theory the public baths are free, but except on gala occasions when the Emperor wishes to win popularity, there is usually a standard charge for admission of a quadrans, a small copper coin (about ¼ cent). This simply covers the expense of the attendants who look after one’s clothes, and provides the oil for anointing—the use of the magnificent building goes for nothing.

In such a place persons of every station can be seen mingling together, social barriers partially break down, and a delightful informality prevails. It is recorded of Hadrian that when he is in the city, he proves his “liberal” habits by frequenting the public baths and bathing in the great pools along with the meanest of his subjects. Every afternoon, therefore, the thermæ are the scenes of intensely bustling life. The noise rising from their great halls is terrific—the shouting, laughing, splashing, running, exercising, going on continuously.[197]

The Romans are preëminently a sociable people. They delight in the free and easy contacts of the baths. What place has witnessed more financial bargains struck, quarrels started or abated, lawsuits arranged, marriage treaties negotiated, philosophical theories spun, artistic points discussed, or even matters of imperial policy promoted than the thermæ of Trajan? At the thermæ are continued all those matters you talked over in the Forum this morning and which you will finish on the supper couches to-night. The place, however, to a stranger is utterly bewildering in its hugeness, its noise and the hurrying of its crowds and its complexity, and few scenes in Rome could be more novel to a visitor from another civilization.

309. Entering the Thermæ.—We can follow Calvus as he approaches by the great southern portal which looks down from the slopes of the Esquiline upon the great gray cylinder of the Flavian Amphitheater. Before us stretches an enormous portico, fronting a high masonry wall, of course crowned at many points with statues. The entrance is relatively narrow in order to control the thousands of persons streaming inside, each passing his copper to the attendants at the gate. But once past the barrier, we see before us the vista, apparently not of a bathing establishment, but of an ample, inclosed park, girded on every side with handsome porticoes, scattered with trees, bright shrubbery, and groups of sculpture, but with the domes seemingly of a magnificent palace rising from the middle of the area.

This park is teeming with life; young men in the scantiest of costume are running races on a long sandy track, others are tossing ball, others engaged in a wrestling contest, Greek fashion, before a crowd of spectators wedged upon seats along a kind of stadium. In a kind of kiosk, or small temple, in a remote corner behind the shrubbery a venerable man with the long beard of a philosopher is expounding the theory of atoms to a small but select audience. We are told that there are also aulæ for learned conventicles, likewise excellent libraries within the central building.

310. Interior of the Baths: the Cold Room (Frigidarium).—This building itself is an enormous mass of brick and concrete, formed into correspondingly enormous vaulted apartments and domes, their entire surface covered with polished marbles or at least with brilliantly colored stucco. At every point there are statues, singly and in groups, historical and mythological, in the round or in high reliefs, in stone and in bronze. Particularly to be noted is a marvelous if overrealistic Laocoön group destined to be celebrated through the coming ages.[198]

It boots little to describe all the special chambers and features of the Baths of Trajan; we can only notice those prime features common to all public thermæ even in the provincial cities. The great mass of visitors makes for the hall of the frigidarium (“cold room”), a vast unheated space, albeit comfortable enough on a warm Italian afternoon. Here they toss off their garments, to their own personal slaves if they are visitors of consequence, although there is a great force of regular attendants (capsarii) whose prime business it is to take charge of togas and tunics. For all their pains, thefts of clothes in the baths are very common and give rise to frequent uproars.

Once stripped, even the gravest and oldest visitors are likely to indulge in all kinds of gymnastics and horseplay. If they do not go outside to limber themselves with tossing ball at trigon (see p. 206) or with amateur races in the stadium, there are plenty of diversions in the frigidarium itself. One can behold the “Very Noble” Varus, the presiding consul, forgetful of all official dignity, competing with an imperial legatus, both with their hands tied behind them and trying by leaning backward to touch their heads against the tips of their toes; while a prætor, an hour earlier an austere judge in the Basilica Æmilia, is leaping up and down “murdering a good song by trying to sing it.”[199]

311. The Great Swimming Pool and the Tepidarium.—All this is usually preliminary to a splashing plunge into the clear cool natatio, the great swimming pool of unheated water, which is nearly 200 feet long by 100 broad, and in which scores of Rome’s noblest dignitaries now are to be seen splashing, swimming, and cavorting, with perfect self-respect beside a much greater number of the plebeians. For the many who do not prefer a warm bath, this is sufficient refreshment on a summer day, and presently they will call their attendants to bring towels, strigils, and ointments and hasten home. But your true habitué makes almost as much of his baths as of his dinners. He delights in hot baths and all the refreshments that go with them. “People want to be parboiled,” once declared Seneca disgustedly.

A hot bath involves an elaborate process. Often one will omit the frigidarium with its cold shock, or take it later. In any case one goes on to a second enormous chamber, perhaps the finest in the whole building. A majestic dome soars over broad pavement. The pillars and the fretwork on the ceiling and vaulting groan with heavy gilding. The groups of statues flanking each of the huge marble-incrusted piers are themselves of heroic size. The light streams down over the polished marbles of the walls and pendentives, upon hundreds of persons lolling about on stone benches, conversing, or lazily meditating. A warm mist is rising; one feels as if in a plant house of tropical exotics, while the elaborate mosaic designs are pleasantly warm under one’s bare feet.

Such luxury of course is enjoyed in the tepidarium where the bathers are gently warmed before the actual hot bath. It is an oblong hall, nearly as large as the great cold swimming tank,[200] and, as stated, the decorations are almost overpowering in their richness. Anybody will explain that the floors are composed largely of hollow tiles through which warm air of just the right temperature is being continually forced from the great system of charcoal furnaces (“hypocausts”) located in the substructures of the thermæ.

312. The Hot Baths (Caldaria): Their Sensuous Luxury.—At intervals some person rises from the couches and hastens away to one of the smaller chambers located at the four corners of the tepidarium. These are the actual caldaria (hot baths), wherein a perpetual fine steam is rising. The water here is so hot that only experienced bathers can find a plunge in the large porphyry tanks enjoyable. If one can endure the heat, however, soon it becomes a kind of stupid bliss to lie back motionless in the heated water, gazing upward to the vaulted ceiling which is skilfully painted in a deep blue interspersed with trees, foliage, birds, and gilt stars, as if one were dropping off to slumber in the forest some summer evening! If the acme of life is merely sensuous enjoyment, what can existence offer greatly surpassing this!

After you have lain quiescent in the caldarium until its pleasure has begun to pall, the proper thing next is to pass to the laconicum. Here the hypocausts have heated the floor and walls with an intense dry heat. The bathers loll again upon marble slabs, and first are dried off and then burst into a profuse perspiration. The ceremony of the bath is at last over.

Your slaves or the regular attendant now will scrape you down with the thin flexible bronze strigils, rub you thoroughly with towels, and anoint you with unguents, the more costly and highly perfumed the better. In the numerous small chambers around the great laconicum, open for special fees, there is a greater luxury still;—here such elderly magnates as Varus, or even young noblemen of the more effeminate type, will be elaborately massaged and finally rubbed down with very soft woolen blankets, by at least three expert masseurs working together. After such an experience surely body and mind ought to be prepared for the pleasures of the dinner party.

313. Restaurants, Small Shops, and Sports in or around the Baths.—Very much more might be added about the Great Baths. For those people who wish to linger until the edge of meal time, there is no need to go hungry. Close by the entrance are numerous restaurants (popinæ) of more than ordinary elegance. Here you can send your slave for sweet cakes, slices of toasted honey bread, sausages, eggs, and like viands; and in the great frigidarium and tepidarium the peddlers from these restaurants are always going about with trays of such food, crying their wares and making the ordinary bedlam so much the greater. Directly in the thermæ themselves are small shops for the sale of fine perfumes and unguents; and often in the corridors and antechambers you can find crowds gazing at special displays of paintings, or of new statuary—for the public baths are practically the art galleries of Rome.

As for the frequenters of the baths, here even more than in the fora are the trysting spots for parasites. Let an approachable nobleman be seen lolling at ease in the tepidarium and he is instantly spotted by some dinner hunter. Innumerable are the attentions that can then be paid him. Does he wish to play handball?—The parasite retrieves for him. Does he lay aside a fine garment?—At once “his remarkable taste” is praised to the skies. Does he lie perspiring in the laconicum? His “friend” tries to anticipate the slaves in wiping the sweat from his brow. No act is too obsequious—all in hopes of hearing those delightful words, “Come home and dine!” In the halls of the women similar scenes are enacted, but we cannot pursue them.

At last the sun dials that stand in every open spot around the thermæ indicate that the afternoon is well spent. From the laconicum the refreshed bathers return to the milder tepidarium, to recover from the shock of the intense heat and to resume their garments. Then the crowds all hasten out again. Some of the privately owned bathing-places may remain open all night, but the great thermæ, lately the scene of such boisterous life, stand vast, dark, and empty.

314. The Great Porticoes along the Campus Martius. The Park System towards the Tiber.—The public baths are not the only places for daily enjoyment which a solicitous government has provided for the quirites. The fora are limited and the city proper is very closely built, but around its outskirts and especially to the north and west there is a genuinely magnificent park system. The beginnings of this are reached after you go through the Forum of Trajan and follow along “Broadway.” Here are the great porticoes and promenades of the Sæpta Julia. The famous stores (see p. 228) are mostly on the east side of the avenue verging off towards the slopes of the Quirinal, but the west side, going clear across the broad Campus Martius to the Tiber, is more strictly public property.

This wide level area formed by the great bend in the river has long since ceased to be a mere parade ground for the army. There are broad masses of greenery, grateful shade trees, spreading over neatly graveled walks, as well as literally miles of lofty porticoes stretching in every direction and giving comfortable places for strolling in bad weather. The greatest of these porticoes is, of course, the long Sæpta Julia, but there is a succession of others, so that you can almost wander from the Column of Trajan across the Campus clear to the Ælian Bridge completely defiant of any rain.

In the open pleasure grounds there are always people exercising without the restraints inevitable at the thermæ, playing ball, wrestling, exhibiting horses and chariots, as well as very many children chasing about with hoops. If legionaries are passing through the city, their leathern tents probably stand here, and here, too, can be held all the vast open-air pageants which cannot accommodate themselves inside any building.

315. Public Buildings upon the Campus Martius.—Out of the lofty trees, however, there rise still loftier structures. Two of the great public thermæ, those of Nero and Agrippa, are here upon the Campus Martius. In this region, also, are three of the principal theaters, that of Pompeius, accommodating some 25,000 people, and two others (Theaters of Marcellus and Balbus) only slightly smaller. Here is the Flaminian Circus and the Amphitheater of Taurus for those horse races and gladiator fights which do not demand the huge Circus Maximus or Flavian. Here again is the golden-roofed Pantheon and a great number of other temples to such ill-assorted gods as the Egyptian Serapis and Isis, Neptune, Minerva of the Campus, and the old Latin goddess Juturna. Notable, too, are the triumphal arches raised across several of the broad avenues.

You can in fact wander on across this region from one marvelous structure to another until the eye and brain become weary trying to enumerate, much more to comprehend the succession of buildings every one of which is a triumph of marble and of sculpture. Pressing on to the marge of the Tiber itself, the river above the commercial bridges is seen covered with gay pleasure skiffs plying about under bright flags. The shores are lined with handsome little houses, usually decorated in the doors with potted shrubs or boughs of foliage. Innocent they look in the day time but at night when their windows blaze with lamps they will be veritable traps of iniquity for the enjoyment and then the ruin of the unwary.

316. The Tombs of Hadrian and Augustus.—Across the river near its main bend, can be noticed the green slopes of the hill of the Vatican uncrowned as yet by any temple of fame, but with the suburban Circus of Nero stretching along its slopes. Directly across the current, also, is rising the enormous circular mass of the Mausoleum of Hadrian, with the derricks and staging still above it swinging to place the last of that galaxy of statues which will look down upon the Tiber.[201]

We do not cross over to the new structure, but proceeding along the bank to the point where the Via Flaminia continuing “Broadway” bears down beside the river, we see before us the older but very majestic Mausoleum of Augustus. It lifts itself fully 220 feet in the air, its base composed of a vast cylinder coated with sculptured marbles, above which there is heaped a conical mound of earth, planted with evergreen trees, while on the summit stands a colossal statue of its mighty builder himself. Within repose the urns not merely of Augustus, but of nearly all the worthier members of the imperial families.

These are only some of the features of the Campus Martius which foreign visitors such as Strabo acclaim as the most remarkable section of Rome, if not the one most charged with her past history. Time fails to visit the other great public pleasure-grounds upon the slopes of the Pincian—the “Gardens of Lucullus” and the “Gardens of Sallust,” or that other wide park northeast of the Esquiline, the “Gardens of Mæcenas,” presenting yet other vistas of shrubbery, groves, promenades, and green lawns, interspersed with pleasure pavilions. It behooves us now to return to Rome and to visit some of the most important centers of its life—the theater, the amphitheater, and the circus.