History is more than the study of wars and governmental institutions. As I said in my first lecture, history is essentially the story of people in their eternal confrontation with each other and with the forces of nature. So, today let us take a close look at the everyday life of the Romans. To understand fully the Roman standards of living, we need to compare Pompeii with Rome, the Eternal city.
Pompeii and Herculaneum are museums to prove the high standard of living in third rate towns during the first century of the Roman empire. At Pompeii three municipal baths, two theatres, a basilica for the law-courts, a temple of Jupiter, and an amphitheater are luxurious public buildings for any town of 20,000 people in any age. The shops, the taverns, the bakeries, and the houses reinforce the picture of a solid comfort and prosperity. The House of Pansa is 319 feet by 124, that of the Dancing Faun is 262 feet by 115, and these are big houses for any town or city.
All Pompeian houses face inward. When you walk into the House of Pansa today you come first into the atrium. This is a tall room with an opening to the sky in the center of the roof. Beneath the opening is a rectangular pool to catch the rain-water. At the sides are rooms opening off the atrium, At the back is a room called the tablinum. This was a step above the atrium and could be closed off from it by curtains.
This atrium complex of rooms was, originally, the house in which the early republican Romans had eaten, slept, and washed dishes. By the last century of the republic, the atrium had become the reception hall, while the rooms off it bad been transformed into expensively-equipped salons. If the family was noble, as in the case of Pansa, statues of the ancestors stood along the walls of the atrium, and in a cabinet in one of the wings of it were their waxen death-masks.
Behind the atrium and tablinum was a formal garden with a colonnade around it. Thus, if todays visitor to Pompeii walks through the atrium of the House of the Vettii--the Vettii were two rich bachelor-merchants--he will find himself in a delightful garden which is once more planted with shrubs and flowers, while all around him the fountains of 79 AD spout water, just as they used to do. Opening off the colonnade are the rooms in which the family lived. Let the visitor enter the room of the amorini, and there he will see Psyches floating on the wall; while, just above the dado, in a continuous frieze, are winged and tiny Cupids--Cupids weaving or buying garlands ff flowers, Cupids at the wine-press, Cupids as goldsmiths and metalsmiths, Cupids racing in little chariots drawn by goats, and the like.
The Pompeian houses were sumptuously furnished. The floors were of tesselated marble. The wall-paintings were vivid. There were fountains, statues, tapestries, stand-lamps and candelabra, rich tables of bronze or wood or mosaic. In the new excavations there is one house with an outdoor dining-room. The Romans reclined at dinner on three couches, so arranged around a serving-stand as to leave one end open for slaves to come and go' ln this particular outdoor dining room, a series of pierced pipes flung a cooling spray of water over the guests as they ate.
In the dining room of the House of the Moralist there is a vomitorium at the near end of the left-hand couch; for as Seneca commented once about the Romans, ''they vomit so that they may eat and eat so that they may vomit''. On the walls of this dining-room are written, too, pieces of advice for the guests. One of them translates as follows: "Do not cast wanton glances or ogling eyes at another man's wife; be modest in your language."
It is easy to re-create ancient Pompeii in one's imagination as the home of a prosperous, gay, and materialistic people, working and playing with no suspicion that Vesuvius, which had been a dead volcano for centuries on end, would suddenly erupt.
Yet Pompeii was only a small, sleepy, and backward town as compared to the teeming, hurrying cities which, from Londinium in Britain and Lugdunum in Gaul to Antioch in the East, dotted the smiling and peaceful face of the empire. Great amphitheaters still stand at Verona in Italy and at Mimes in France as well as in scores of other places. In Switzerland and Austria are to be found the remains of Roman towns, camps, and theatres. Here and there, as at Segovia in Spain or at the Pont du Gard in France, one realizes the mighty arches of Roman aqueducts. ln Crete, today, villagers still drink from fountains the Romans built. As engineers and architects, no people surpassed the Romans until the Americans of the twentieth century.
But what about life at the center, in Rome itself?
Long before the Caesars, Rome was a huge city. Under the empire it housed over a million people. At its peak, under the Antonines in the second century AD, the population was probably about a million and a half. It was a city of great parks, of monumental public buildings, of great palaces, and of tall apartment blocks.
Let's look briefly at the Forum, the heart of Rome. Today, there are only somewhat melancholy fragments of its former grandeur, such as the Arch of Titus, the serene ruins of the House of the Vestal virgins, the restored Senate-House, the remains of the Rostra, the foundations of the great basilica built by Julius Caesar, and a few pillars here and there, pointing toward the Roman sky. To see it as it was in the days of the empire, we must visualize that Forum as paved and as glittering with marble, bronze, and gold. we must re-create the litters and sedan-chairs of high-born women carried aloft by Nubian slaves, the conscious tread of senators and magistrates, and the milling about of a mob of people from every known land-- blond Germans, wide-eyed Britons, stocky Spaniards, dark Egyptians, burly Thracians, liquid-eyed Syrians, and the rest. In front of us, if we are looking north-west, will be the temples on the twin peaks of the Capitoline. Behind us and to our left, on the Palatine Hill, will rise the palaces of the emperors.
Beyond the Forum to the east and north were the fora constructed by the emperors. Of these the most striking remnant is the column of Trajan. That column was erected from the spoils of the conquest of Dacia, which is now Rumania. Including the base, it is 127.5 feet high. That height was to commemorate to what extent the spur of the Quirinal Hill had been levelled by the engineers. To the right and left of that column rose a Greek library and a Roman library. There was also a huge basilica reached by three steps of yellow marble. Its entire floor was paved with marble and its roof glittered with tiles of gilded bronze: while today's traveller can still stare at the remains of the five stories which, on the eastern flank, housed the 150 shops of Trajan's market.
Such is a brief hint of the magnificence of the Roman fora. There were other marvels for the second-century AD visitor to see. There were miles of parks and gardens along both banks of the Tiber and on hills, such as the Pincian Hill, where the Borghese Gardens are the successor to the Gardens of Sallust. There was the Colosseum, which seated at least 45,000 spectators, and the Circus Maximus, which had 385,000 places. Even if one allows for exaggeration, it must have seated at least 200,000 people. There were also the great public baths.
Today's traveller stares in wonder at the colossal arches of the ruined Baths of Caracalla. If he could see them in their original splendor, he would marvel the more. Those baths covered twenty-seven acres. The vast domes were resplendent with mosaics. The walls were lined with precious and colored marbles from Egypt and Numidia. Many of the pipes, taps, and fittings were of silver and bronze' The floors were of marble. In the halls and porticoes stood famous sculptures, such as the Farnese Bull and the Farnese Hercules. The baths of Cracalla could accommodate l,600 bathers at one time.
There were almost a thousand public baths in Rome. Their primary purpose was for the daily bath, which was part of every respectable Roman.s life. The usual procedure was to reach the baths at from two to three o'clock in the afternoon, take exercise at bowling or some form of ball, then bathe. In bathing, a Roman undressed in the apodyterium, where his clothes were put in a locker. Next he entered the warm bath. after this, he took a sweat bath, and finished off by a plunge in the cold pool. Heating was provided by hot air flues in the walls and under the floors. Up until the time of Hadrian women often bathed and swam nude with the men.
The baths were much more than baths. In addition to the exercise grounds, they contained promenades, gardens, libraries, restaurants, concert and lecture rooms, massage-rooms, and even rooms for medical men. Their outer walls were flanked by civic centers: the smaller one, community halls.
Rome was, like some of the great cities of North America, a mass of palaces, apartment blocks, and tall tenements. The palaces were scattered through the city, chiefly on the hills, except that the Capitoline Hill was reserved for the two great temples of Jupiter Capitolinus and Juno of the Mint, the Records Office; while the Palatine Hill was occupied by the emperors. The palaces were as luxurious and as spacious as the tenements were crowded and poverty-striken.
Some of the apartment-blocks, as we know from the excavations at Ostia, the port of Rome, were as roomy and comfortable as their modern counterparts. Such blocks were built round a central garden as at present. But the hollows and valleys of Rome were crowded with tall tenements in which people were hived like bees or ants. The ground floor was often given over to shops or taverns, as is again illustrated by the remains of Ostia. Above, two rooms or one, as in our modern slums, housed a whole family: while lp under the tiles were lodged the poorest--so high up, says the satirist Juvenal, that if a fire breaks out down below they will not know about it until they are being burnt alive. These apartments and tenements were constructed basically of concrete; but heavy beams were used to support the flOoring of the five or six stories, and wood and brick were used for projecting balconies. Wood, rubble and stone were utilized to make attractive facings. The stairs were of stone or wood. Windows and balconies were decked with pots of flowers.
As to the height of these blocks which were called insulae, which means islands, we know that the Emperor Augustus passed a law limiting them to seventy feet, which suggests that some were higher, and we know that law was broken. Fires were apparently, continually breaking out and though there was a combined police and fire-fighting force of 7,000, the firefighting equipment was not adequate. The great fire of 64 :O in the reign of Nero devastated ten of the fourteen regions of Rome and, of those ten, three were almost completely destroyed. Since the tenements were often jerry-built, and since] by law the walls could not be more than eighteen inches in thickness, the buildings sometimes collapsed under their own weight. Roman builders, so excellent in their public structures, paid little attention to permanence in lower-class housing.
Among those apartment and tenement blocks twisted about sixty miles of alleys and streets. Modern Rome has many of the same type. In ancient Rome, with living-space at a premium, there were many lanes which were only six feet in width. Ordinary streets were less than fifteen feet across, though there were a few thoroughfares of from fifteen to twenty feet in breadth. Few of the lanes or streets were paved. Juvenal tells of the pedestrian who returned to his abode, mudcaked to his knees.
Even worse than the mud were the smells. The Romans had a first-class sewage system, and at Ostia, as was true of Rome, there were elaborate public lavatories. But the sewage system did not reach, except in a few cases, beyond the ground floor. So, from the upper floors, slop was emptied into the street. An even greater evil was the constant noise and the continuous mobs pouring through the narrow thoroughfares. This was chiefly foot-traffic as in modern Venice. For Julius Caesar had forbidden wheeled traffic in Rome by day except for the carts of the building contractors.
When night fell, foot-traffic ceased. The streets were unlit and robbers and gangsters lurked in the darkness. No sensible man, we are told, again by Juvenal, went out to dinner at night without making his will; and this exaggeration might be true of the poorer sections. But with night came, too, the rumbling of wagons and carts and the curses of drivers as they brought in all the supplies the great city needed- vegetables, bricks, fish, meat on the hoof, marble, timbers, milk, and similar necessities. lt is small wonder that the epigrammatist, Martial, longed for his simple home at Bilbilis in Spain and finally retired to it.
And what about the people of Rome? Until the end of the republic it was relatively easy to classify them. Citizens were in the main of Roman or Italian stock. They were divided into Senators, knights, and the plebs. The senators, the ruling class, alone had the right to wear a tunic with a broad purple stripe, an iron ring, and a pair of red sandals' The second order, the knights, were the businessmen of Rome and Italy. They wore the tunic with a narrow purple stripe and a gold ring' The common people, the plebs, had no distinguishing mark, except that only a Roman citizen could wear the toga' The toga was a voluminous wrap-around of white wool.
Those who did not have full citizen rights were either foreigners or slaves' There were numerous foreigners, naturally. Slaves had no rights' The number of slaves in the last century of the republic and in the first century of the empire almost passes belief. It is estimated that in Rome alone, under the empire, there were 400,000 slaves. The unemployed had no slaves. But an ordinary man could not make do with less than eight slaves. The upper middle-class and the rich kept hundreds. They were first divided into country and city slaves. City slaves were further classified into indoor and outdoor slaves and then divided into groups of ten, such as the sweepers, the litter-bearers, the cooks, and so on. Pliny the Younger, a gentlemen of moderate tastes, owned at least 500 slaves. A contempOrary of his the freedman Caelius Isidorus, when he died, left behind him 4,116 slaves. The emperors had households of at least 20,000 slaves.
The multitude of slaves corrupted the Romans. It did something more as well. Because of the practice of freeing slaves either during the master's lifetime or after his death--Pliny's will for example, freed 100 slaves--the freedman class became a very important element in the population of Rome and Italy. The Rome of the empire was a completely cosmopolitan city. Apart from hosts of slaves of elderly nationality inside and outside the empire, the old Roman-Italic stock was swamped by swarms of freed slaves and their descendants, who had now become citizens, and by hordes of provincials--Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Egyptians, North Africans, Spaniards, Gauls, Britons--who had flooded into Rome. Many of these, too, had been granted Roman citizenship.
Juvenal, the satirist, a native-born Italian, inveighs bitterly, against the ''hungry Greeklings'. and at the ''mud-laden torrent'' which Syrian Orontes had discharged into The Roman Tiber. Even the purple-striped tunic of a senator or of a knight conveyed no assurance that its wearer was of Roman descent. By the third century AD the emperors themselves were non-Romans. The Roman empire ended by almost obliterating the stock which founded it. At least 80% of the population of Imperial Rome were the descendants of slaves according to one estimate.
The world of the Roman empire in the first two centuries is almost frighteningly similar to ours in its excesses and its wealth, and above all in its devotion to materialistic success at the expense of the spiritual and the intellectual. Yet it retained a hard core of solid, down-to-earth virtues and a prosperous middle-class. It was when that middle-class was squeezed out of existence by high taxes, paternalistic legislation and an ever-increasing bureaucratic control that the abyss between wealth and poverty was, at last, nakedly evident.
