16
Writers who have passed on to us the ancient customs of Rome say that our ancestors washed only their arms and legs every day, since these parts of the body were covered with dirt from farm work. The rest of the body was washed only once a week. Of course, someone will at this point, say, ‘Sure, but they were very smelly men.’ And what do you think they smelled of? Of the army, of farm work, and of manliness!
Seneca the Younger, Letters 86.1.111
The Roman Baths
The Romans had not always been addicted to the baths: Hannibal’s nemesis Scipio Africanus bathed in rather muddy water, and didn’t do it every day. Yet by the fourth century CE there were almost 1,000 public bath buildings (thermae) in Rome alone, and almost every small town in the Empire had at least one communal bath suite. These functioned not unlike twenty-first-century gyms or health spas, and often had areas for ball games, jogging, working out, swimming, sun-bathing and massage, as well as the baths proper, which were all about getting sweaty in the nude.
Baths varied in size from domestic bath suites providing the bare essentials of what scholars call the calidarium (a hot room), tepidarium (warm room) and frigidarium (cold room) to enormous complexes like the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, where you might find a laconicum (‘Spartan bath’ – a dry-heat sweat room), a destrictorium (where oil and perspiration were removed with strigils – scrapers), snack bars, libraries, meeting halls, gardens, fountains and possibly prostitution (although there is some dispute about this at Pompeii, where the decoration of the Suburban Baths included some rather athletic erotic scenes). Essentially the thermae offered a holistic approach to well-being and acted as social centres. On the whole, the entrance fees were low, and many people visited the baths on a daily basis.
The Forum Thermae at Pompeii are an excellent example of a Roman public bath suite. They date to c.80 BCE, and, although they are relatively small, they survive in very good condition. There are separate sections for men and women, which was normal. The men’s section gave the option of three entrances from different streets, and your first port of call would be the apodyterium (changing room), a rectangular, barrel-vaulted chamber with seating on three sides that was lit by a glazed window. The walls were adorned with a figured frieze in stucco relief, and the window was decorated with an Oceanus head and Tritons. Guide books often tell us that there was a rigid sequence of events for Roman bathing – cold to warm to hot (or vice versa; the guide books disagree) then a cold plunge – but there is no evidence for this, and the layout of the buildings is determined more by economic use of energy than anything else. The forum’s apodyterium gave access to the frigidarium, the tepidarium, the palaestra (open-air exercise area) and, down a corridor, to the praefurnium (the ‘heating plant’). This was located so that the hot rooms are closest to it, and then the warm rooms, thus making efficient use of the heat it generated. Its hot-water tanks were fed from a well that was equipped with a machine for hoisting water, as well as a large reservoir across the street.
The frigidarium was a circular room with a conical ceiling and four semi-domed niches painted with shrubs and trees, and was almost entirely filled by a circular sea-blue plunge pool. The barrel-vaulted tepidarium has similar dimensions to the apodyterium. It was warmed by braziers, rather than being equipped with a stateof-the-art under-floor heating system (hypocaust), where hot-air flues beneath a hollow pavement were supported on small pillars of tile (suspensurae). The room provided niches for storing clothes, separated from one another by terracotta Telamons (figures rather like Atlas, who hold up the entablature above them). A glazed window with a bronze frame provided the light, and the ceiling was elaborately decorated in stucco relief.
The calidarium was the largest room, barrel vaulted, with an apsidal, semi-domed end. It was lit by three windows in the southern end of the vault and a circular window in the semi-dome. The floor was raised on suspensurae and paved with black and white mosaic; the walls were covered with tegulae mammatae (‘breasted-tiles’: flat, rectangular tiles with small breast-like protuberances near the four corners of one side), which created a space between themselves and the walls that acted as a flue. The hot air would rise from hypocaust system, warm the walls and escape through vents at the top. Other bath suites used square flues set into the wall to create the same result. The vault was stuccoed in a rib pattern, the semi-dome with figured reliefs.
In the apse was a fine marble labrum (wash-basin); its bronze lettered inscription records that it was installed at the cost of 5,420 sestertii in 3/4 CE, while at the opposite end of the room there was a marble-lined hot-water pool fed from the praefurnium next door. The small porticoed palaestra had a masonry bench running along the back wall, and a deep barrel-vaulted exedra, which looks like a suitable venue for intimate conversation.
The women’s section looks like a later addition, since it is a completely independent building that encroaches on the surrounding pavements. As a woman you would get similar, but smaller, facilities to those of the men, but no palaestra. From an entrance lobby provided with benches you went down a short corridor to the apodyterium, where the frigidarium was simply a small square basin in an alcove. But both the tepidarium and calidarium were raised on suspensurae, and had hollow walls.
Bread and Circuses
The poet Juvenal famously wrote:
The public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and Circuses.2
Although he was attacking the general political apathy of his day, rather than ranting against the games or the grain handouts, he wasn’t the first to express the idea. More than 100 years before, the Republican Varro had complained about the heads of families abandoning the sickle and the plough in favour of the theatre and the Circus.3
What these complaints don’t do, however, is prove that the Roman plebs sat in the Circus day in, day out, scrounging off the State: the number of public entertainment events, the size of the buildings, and the level of the corn dole, all show that this could not have been the reality. The corn doles provided generously for a single person, but not enough for a family, and they were designed so as not to divert people too much from their normal occupations. Neither was the corn dole free until 58 BCE, when Publius Clodius made it so. Taken literally, the ‘Circuses’ part of Juvenal’s comment implies chariot-racing, but he is really talking about public entertainments in general. Giving to receive was part of Roman politicians’ stock-in-trade, and they promoted spectacular games and entertainments from the first century BCE to the end of the fourth century CE, and whereas corn doles were directed at the plebs, games and shows brought the entire community together: all classes attended.
According to legend, Rome’s founder Romulus introduced the first games (probably) in the eighth century BCE. Then, in 364 BCE, a plague struck Rome, and the Romans vowed to hold theatrical festivals in honour of the gods. In the course of the next century, the Roman entertainment industry expanded dramatically, partly influenced by contact with the Greeks, and partly because games were pledged to the gods in times of war – during the war with Hannibal, for instance, the Romans instituted the Ludi Plebeii(Plebeian Games) in honour of Jupiter, which featured chariot-racing. The process was given impetus by Rome’s imperial success, as their burgeoning power also generated a desire for display that partly manifested itself in the foundation of new festivals.
Animal hunts and fights between animals (venationes) were first seen by the Romans in 186 BCE, when lions and panthers fought, but many Senators initially disapproved of this, and the import of wild animals from Africa was prohibited. The ban was soon lifted, though.
The English word ‘virtue’ comes from the Latin virtus (= ‘manliness’). Gladiatorial combat was the ultimate expression of that ideal, and the historian Livy tells us the date of the first of these contests: 264 BCE, at the funeral of Decimus Junius Pero. So gladiatorial contests were not originally part of the public games (ludi); at first they normally took place in the Forum, and were held in honour of influential dead Romans. The fulfilment of the instructions about Pero’s funeral that the deceased left in his will was an important duty of his heirs, and was known as the munus. So the term for a gladiatorial contest was munus (plural: munera), as opposed to the games (ludi), which were dedicated to a deity and organized by representatives of the state. The idea of shedding human blood beside a dead man’s grave is very old, and actually occurs in most ancient Mediterranean cultures. This religious origin of the munera was never forgotten in Rome. Fourth-century BCE frescoes from Paestum, south of Naples, depict funeral games, including a duel between two warriors with a referee beside them, implying that they were participating in contests in honour of the dead, very like the munera of Rome. It is usually assumed that the Naples area (Campania) was where gladiatorial fights originated.
One obvious question is: ‘How did it all get out of hand in a way that even struck the Romans?’ When Livy talked about the origins of the Roman theatrical festivals he concluded that by his day (he lived from 59 BCE to 17 CE) things had reached a point where ‘opulent kingdoms could hardly support their mad extravagance’.4 The answer is that it was a gradual process. As Rome expanded in the Mediterranean, vast wealth flooded into Rome at a time when only a few leading families held all the major public offices. The rivalries between these families were intense, and the Senate vainly tried to control extravagance by passing new laws: the lex Fannia of 161 BCE limited expenditure on a banquet to 25 sestertii; by 81 BCE the sum had risen to 300; and a generation later L. Licinius Lucullus spent 50,000 on one. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the social scale, Rome’s urban plebs lobbied for cheap grain, and were often supported by politicians, either out of a genuine desire to solve social problems, or because they saw it as a way of acquiring influence over potential voters. Or both.
The career of Julius Caesar is a perfect example of this. He was a shrewd investor of money for political gain, but was also a big fan of gladiatorial combat. He actually maintained a gladiatorial school of his own, and the fights he staged in honour of his late father put everything of the kind seen before into the shade, prompting his opponents to pass a law limiting the number of pairs of gladiators that any one person might engage at 320, and so giving Caesar the publicity he craved. Once he had established his dominance at Rome, the festivities he presented in 46 BCE went further still: every citizen received generous allocations of grain and oil, 400 sestertii, plus Caesar paid them all a year’s rent. His public shows included a gladiatorial contest, stage-plays, chariot-races, athletic competitions, a mock naval battle on an artificial lake, five consecutive days of wild-beast hunts, and culminated with a battle between two armies of 500 infantry, 20 elephants and 30 cavalry. Suetonius tells us that such huge numbers of visitors flocked to these shows that the pressure of the crowd crushed people to death.5
Caesar had raised the bar very high, but this was as nothing compared with Augustus, who boasted of eight gladiatorial spectacles featuring some 10,000 men, 27 state games, and 26 wild-beast hunts in which some 3,500 beasts were killed. A novelty occurred when Emperor Gaius (Caligula) transgressed all social norms by performing as a gladiator, charioteer and dancer, singing along with the actors at the theatre, and supposedly having an affair with the actor Mnester. However, chariot-racing was his real passion. He had a favourite horse called Incitatus, and he instructed his troops to enforce absolute silence on the day before the races. Incitatus was endorsed with a marble stable, an ivory stall, purple blankets, a jewelled collar, a house, furniture and slaves, and was made a Senator.6
As with Gaius, the picture we have of Emperor Nero comes from hostile sources, all of which concur that he was trained in singing and in playing the lyre. During his debut in Rome he surrounded himself with a claque of 5,000 supporters who showered him with adulation, and he allegedly sang an epic on the Fall of Troy during the Great Fire at Rome in 64 CE. This story of Nero ‘fiddling while Rome burned’ is most likely bogus, but there is reliable evidence for his persecution of the Christians, and althoughdamnatio ad bestias (condemnation to being killed by wild beasts) was a pretty standard sentence for any criminal, not just Christians, Nero devised such sadistic methods of execution (torn apart by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set on fire and burned alive to provide light at night7), that even the most hard-nosed Romans felt sympathy for the victims.
Constantine the Great made Christianity a State-tolerated religion under the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, and this enabled bishops openly to campaign against theatrical performances, chiefly on the grounds that they presented lewd and pornographic material, which were a temptation to sin. In 314 CE the Council of Arles excommunicated actors. Constantine also banned criminals being sentenced to gladiatorial training, but there were still gladiators; in fact Pope Damasius engaged a whole troop as his bodyguard in 367 CE. However, the end of the gladiatorial contests was not far off: the emperor Honorius formally abolished them in 404 CE.
On the other hand, chariot-racing and venationes continued to be very popular even under the Christian emperors. The official intolerance of pagan cults under Theodosius did not really affect them, and chariot-racing flourished through to Byzantine times. It wasn’t until the crusaders captured Constantinople in 1204 CE that the great age of chariot-racing came to an end.
So, what happened at these events? Gladiatorial schools were commercial enterprises, run by a lanista, who hired out fighters. Some gladiators were condemned criminals, others were volunteers, but all were trained to a high level of fitness and received a well-balanced diet and proper medical attention. Success enhanced a gladiator’s market value, and the Romans were great keepers of statistics, be this on the programmes of the games, graffiti or tombstones: ‘To the spirits. Asiaticus, first fighter, released after 53 combats.’8
We also have the remains of nearly 200 amphitheatres. These should never be confused with theatres (tourist guides often wrongly use ‘amphitheatre’ when they mean ‘a big theatre’). An amphitheatre is an oval, or occasionally circular, arena surrounded by rising tiers of seats, and the earliest surviving example is at Pompeii, built after 80 BCE. A Pompeiian wall painting shows this amphitheatre, and what might be the great riot of 59 CE between the Pompeians and the Nucerians, which led to it being closed for ten years on Nero’s orders. It is unusual in having external stairways rather than the internal stairs that were common later on, and the painting suggests that its exterior was covered in stucco. We can also see the large awning that provided shade for the spectators.
The Colosseum at Rome (also known as the Flavian Amphitheatre) was built in less than ten years by the Flavian emperors and opened in 80 CE. Its enormous structure was designed to accommodate some 50,000 spectators, and its structural success stems from superb foundations combined with judicious selection of materials: the main load-bearing skeleton is dressed stone masonry – travertine for the external facade, tufa on the inside – and the vaults and upper internal walls are of concrete; timber seating was used to reduce the stress on the unsupported outer wall. The orders decorating the outer facade are ‘applied’, i.e. purely decorative: Doric on the lower level, Ionic, Corinthian and then Composite (an Ionic/Corinthian hybrid) on the top, which is the normal way of stacking up the orders. The whole edifice depends on a very Roman combination of concrete, arches and vaults, which is then clothed in Greek architectural form.
The arena floor had a sandy surface (harena = ‘sand’, giving the English ‘arena’), and in many amphitheatres it stood on wooden staging above a complex underground substructure called the hypogeum. The hypogeum contained storerooms, dressing rooms, and passages into the arena for the gladiators, wild beasts and ancillary staff, as well as lifts to bring the participants up into the arena. A few amphitheatres had large basins of water dug into the arena, which could be covered for normal performances, but then used for special events such as hunting crocodiles and hippopotamuses, or for titillating mythological tableaux featuring bathing nymphs. However, these basins were far too small to stage naval battles (naumachiae), and the often stated cliché that the whole arena could be flooded to stage naval battles is wrong: these were not staged in the amphitheatres, but on artificial or natural lakes. The largest of these events was held by in 52 CE by Claudius on Lake Fucino, where 19,000 condemned prisoners manned the ships. These men hailed Claudius with the words, ‘Ave Caesar; morituri te salutamus!’ (‘Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you!’),9 but there is no evidence that these famous words were ever shouted by gladiators in the amphitheatre.
Health and safety was also a prime concern – at least for the spectators. Gladiators, wild animals, prisoners and criminals are potentially dangerous, so they were strictly managed and only given access to weapons once they were in the arena itself. Crowd trouble at the munera seems to have been relatively rare and, apart from the Pompeii riot, we hear little about hooliganism of the kind familiar from modern football. Fans of the Circus and the theatre seem to have been far more violent than those of the amphitheatre.
Gladiatorial combat is unique in that the surrender of the loser is not the end of the event. That person’s ultimate fate was decided by the editor, although he usually followed the audience’s desires: they would either wave the hems of their togas and shoutmissumor mitte (‘release him!’), or turn their thumbs (pollice verso – up or down? We don’t know for certain, although most commentators think up = death) and scream iugula! (‘kill him!’). The defeated gladiator would then kneel, with his arms clasped behind his back, or embrace the legs of his conqueror, and ‘take the iron’ (ferrum recipere). As he died, the audience yelled habet! (‘he has it!’), and his body was taken away on a covered stretcher to the mortuary, where his throat was cut to make sure that the bout had not been rigged. Gladiators were never dragged out of the arena by a hook, as many writers assert – that was the fate of criminals.
To the victor the spoils: a palm branch and a cash prize, even if he was a slave. Successful gladiators could live well on the proceeds of their celebrity, and we know that such prospects tempted volunteers. The winner would take a lap of honour, waving the palm branch. The ultimate aspiration was to win the wooden sword (rudis), a symbol of no longer being under the obligation to fight again. We also have evidence for female gladiators: a marble relief now at the British Museum in London commemorates themissio(discharge) of two women fighters, ‘Amazon’ and ‘Achillia’, who won their freedom through giving consistently outstanding performances.
Gladiators were expensive, so the question arises as to how many duels actually ended in a fatality, particularly as the promoters were under considerable pressure to turn their thumbs. We have evidence that in the first century CE you had about an 11 per cent chance of death at the start of the fight, going up to 25 per cent if you lost, but that the death rate rose in the second and third centuries: at the start of your fight you had a 33 per cent chance of dying, rising to 50 per cent if you lost. On the positive side, though, it seems that a normal gladiator didn’t fight too often; we even hear complaints that they were wasting the best years of their lives because so few contests were held. It stands to reason that most gladiators were killed at the start of their careers: (a) you got better with experience, and (b) once you got famous your supporters wouldn’t dispatch you if you suffered an unexpected defeat. This helps to explain the fact that some gladiators boast 100 victories on their tombstones, monuments which suggest that gladiators lived to an average age of 27.
Despite one or two dissenting voices – the Stoic philosopher Epictetus10 deplored the fact that respectable citizens enjoyed discussing incidents in the arena – it seems that the amphitheatre was popular across all social classes, and we certainly know that Roman women found gladiators very attractive: Juvenal tells us about the upper-class lady Eppia lusting after one particular fighter:
There was a huge wart on the middle of his nose which was rubbed by his helmet, and a bitter matter dripped continually from one eye. But he was a gladiator … She preferred this to her children and her country … What these women love is the sword. 11
The venationes (hunts) originated during the Punic Wars, when the Romans took elephants and other exotic animals as war-booty, and by the Imperial period they had become a regular feature of the munera. Being inferior to gladiators in prestige, the huntsmen and animal fighters (venatores) – who were recruited from among prisoners of war, slaves, condemned criminals and volunteers – featured on the morning agenda. Some venatores hunted deer, ostriches and wild asses, while others fought on foot with lions, tigers, leopards and bears. They had to fight a continuous series of animals, despite injury or exhaustion, until the audience thought they had done enough, but, in contrast to modern bull-fighting, the animal itself was sometimes granted the missio – some lions killed a whole series of venatores during their ‘careers’.
Executions were regularly carried out in the context of the venationes. Noxii, prisoners condemned ad gladium (to the sword) or ad bestias (to the wild beasts) were allocated to editores, who dreamed up various ways of killing them, often in the form of grotesquely horrific dramatic productions of a mythological character. The noxii never had a chance. They were, for instance, exposed to the big cats naked (apart from a loincloth), unarmed, bound and carrying placards that listed their crimes. Christians were ‘thrown to the lions’, although other beasts were also used, and the reality was more complex and often even more gruesome. Usually the Christian had been denounced by an informer after a disaster caused by divine anger – drought, famine, plague, etc. Christians were held responsible because of their ‘impious’ attitudes and practices, and because they rejected the Roman traditions for appeasing the wrath of the gods. If the Christians were prepared to honour the gods, they would be released, although many refused the offer. The martyrdoms of SS Perpetua and Felicitas show us how an execution took place in three clearly defined stages:
1. Preparation and exhibition of the prisoners, including dressing them in the robes of a priest of Saturn or a priestess of Ceres, and flogging;
2. Exposure to the beasts of the men, and then the women;
3. Survivors exposed to more beasts, or killed by a gladiator.
The crowd’s responses seem to have varied between hostility towards the martyrs, compassion, boredom and blood lust.
On a different sector of the moral compass, chariot-races attracted would-be exponents by offering fabulous amounts of prize money, and valuable gifts in kind, at far less risk. We hear of purses of between 30,000 and 50,000 sestertii at a time when a highly educated tutor was earning 100,000 sestertii per annum at best,12 and there were charioteers with more than a thousand victories to their credit. A Circus usually comprised a flat elongated racecourse, rounded at one end and open or square at the other, with the central axis (spina) marked by monuments. The largest track was the fourth century CE Circus Maximus, 610 m long and 198 m wide, which could hold 250,000 spectators who were quite tribalistic. The names of the different factions reflected the colours of the clothing worn by the charioteers – Reds, Blues, Greens and Whites – and, although the drivers always regarded money as more important than loyalty to any one faction, the spectators never changed sides. As with football team supporters today, once they had decided which colour to support, they were fanatical.
Roman emperors invested enormous sums of money on ludi and munera because it helped to keep the populace out of politics. M. Cornelius Fronto, tutor of Marcus Aurelius, described the cosy relationship between him and his people like this:
The emperor did not neglect even actors and the other performers of the stage, the circus, or the amphitheatre, knowing as he did that the Roman people are held fast by two things above all, the corn-dole and the shows.13
The ‘corn-dole and the shows’, like the stereotypically luxurious baths, banquets, and orgies, are central to the modern popular perception of Imperial Rome as a culture devoted to luxury and pleasure, and doomed by its decadence. But the reality is more nuanced, and we have to remember the traditional and religious basis of some of these activities, which were also indicators of a very prosperous society, albeit not of a politically dynamic one. ‘Bread and Circuses’ were one way in which the Emperors tried to maintain the support of all sections of society: they were important elements in social control, just like alcohol and reality TV are in 2010.
Roman Religion(s)
The history and nature of the Roman games show that the Romans didn’t really make the clear-cut religious/secular distinctions that we often do. Our word ‘temple’ comes from the Latin templum, probably derived from the Greek temenos, a sacred enclosure. However, templum did not refer primarily to what we call a temple-building, but to the circuit of the heavens or ‘a space marked out’, particularly a ritually defined space, set aside through sacred words or gestures for the purpose of taking auspices. A priest called an augur would mark out a portion of the sky and then watch it (‘contemplate’ it) for omens, which often meant observing the flight of birds or monitoring their eating habits. Romans seldom undertook a major project without taking the auspices, and would call it off if their interpretation indicated divine displeasure. However, the process could be cynically manipulated, as happened when L. Calpurnius Bibulus invalidated all of Julius Caesar’s legislation by retiring to his house ‘to take the auspices’ in 59BCE. Yet it did not always pay to be too sceptical, as Claudius Pulcher found out to his cost: he took the auspices and discovered that the sacred chickens would not eat, so he threw them into the sea, saying: ‘If they won’t eat, let them drink’. He then engaged the enemy in a naval battle and, of course, he lost.14
The templum on the ground had to allow you to mark out the semicircular templum of the sky. This ‘ritualization of space’ is characteristically Roman: whereas most Greek temples face east towards the dawn, most Roman temples simply face away from natural obstacles, to give a good view. The essential elements of a proper templum were: an open viewing space called the area; some sort of boundary wall; an altar for making sacrifices; and, optionally, an aedes (= ‘house’, what we call a temple) to house the objects dedicated to the god, including the cult image, if there was one. Many official activities had to take place in a templum, most notably meetings of the Senate – the Curia (Senate House), and the Rostra (speaker’s platform) were templa. Again this shows how closely religious life was integrated into politics.
The appearance and arrangement of early Roman temples owed a great deal to Etruscan prototypes, and their primary characteristics may be summed up as:
· axiality: the aedes was often placed at the far end of a rectangular area, centred on an axis running from the sanctuary entrance;
· elevation: the building was placed on a relatively high podium;
· frontality: the temple was usually approached by a flight of steps, and could only be entered from the front.
Yet, there is also a Greek influence at work, because the Etrusco-Italic structure appears to be wearing Greek dress: the architectural ornament (columns, entablature, detailing, etc.) is derived from the Greek tradition.
A very fine example of a Roman temple is the Maison Carrée at Nîmes: we can date it accurately (16 BCE); its external preservation is excellent; and its style seems to be purely Roman. It is a fairly small (about 13.4 × 26.2 m) pseudoperipteral-hexastyle Corinthian temple (which means it has sham colonnades at the sides and six leafy columns at the front), built out of good quality local limestone. It stands on a stepped podium, at the top of which there is a deep prostyle porch (i.e. one with columns at the front) with three open bays on each side. The columns have richly carved capitals with an elegant egg-and-dart motif on the top. The arrangement is equivalent to that of a temple with 6 × 11 columns, but eight of the columns on each side, and the six at the back are engaged (set into the wall). The architrave is in three bands, separated by bead-and-reel motifs, and crowned by egg-and-dart. The frieze provides a good example of the floral ‘Roman scroll’ motif, except on the facade, which carried an inscription in bronze letters that read:
C. CAESARI. AVGVSTI. F. COS. L. CAESARI. AVGVSTI. F.
COS. DESIGNATO.
PRINCIPIBVS. IVVENTVTIS.
This is a reference to Gaius and Lucius Caesar, the Emperor Augustus’ grandsons. The pediment has a much steeper pitch than a Greek temple, and, as is usual in a Corinthian temple, has no sculpture. The temple faced the Forum, and the podium is reached by fifteen steps. Under the podium were rooms for the sanctuary’s archives and the treasure.
The Maison Carrée has survived so well because of almost continuous use since Antiquity; so has what is perhaps the most influential building in Western architecture: the Pantheon in Rome. When it was built, you would have approached via a colonnaded forecourt that was much lower than the modern pavement level, and the porch would have stood on a five-stepped platform. This would have accentuated the key elements of preparation, tension and release that make entering the building such an incredibleexperience: you initially think it is large, but otherwise quite ordinary.
The porch, on the north side of the building, is 105 Roman feet wide, and on it stand eight monolithic unfluted Corinthian columns, 5 Roman feet wide, made originally from grey Egyptian granite, with a slight entasis in their shafts, and white marble bases and capitals. The front row of columns is connected to the main building by four more pairs of reddish Egyptian granite columns. The outer columns carry a normal entablature surmounted by a very steep pediment that may have been adorned with an imperial eagle. The level of the horizontal cornice of the columned porch lies between those of the lower and middle cornices of the circular wall behind it (the wall of ‘the rotunda’). The roof of the porch was supported by some 200 tonnes of bronze framework.
Between the columned porch and the rotunda is a solid structure (‘the block’) that acts as a transition to the interior. It is as wide as the porch and as high as the wall that it joins at the back. It has a large arched opening that leads to the door to the temple, withsemidomed niches on either side, which probably carried statues of Augustus and M. Agrippa. The uppermost cornice of the rotunda runs along the top of the block, and the cornice below that is also carried across it, until it meets the gabled roof of the columned porch: this cornice serves as the lower limit of another pediment, which is slightly less steep than the one of the porch and stands at a higher level. The entire entablature of the columned porch is carried on marble pilasters that stop at the rotunda wall. Between these pilasters was some elaborate marble veneering. The lowest cornice of the rotunda also terminates when it meets the block.
The rotunda exterior was, for most of its circumference, probably veneered, stuccoed or done in a combination of the two. It was crowned by a cornice of which the terracotta and stone elements were stuccoed, and divided by two similar lower cornices into three bands, of which the lowest is the tallest. Above the crowning cornice lies a flattish dome, the lower portion of which comprises a series of large steps that were once clad with gilt-bronze tiles. Overall, the exterior detailing of the rotunda and the portico, and the way they interrelate, looks a bit of a mess.
However, it is not really the exterior that matters, since the approach through the porch sets you up for a jaw-dropping surprise. On walking through the door you find yourself in an enormous cylindrical space crowned by a hemispherical dome. The internal height (43.2 m) is equal to the diameter. Cornices divide the internal walls into two zones, of which the lower is the taller. Corinthian columns and pilasters at ground level carry an entablature, which is broken at the entrance and at the niche directly opposite it. Above the entablature comes a smooth band of blue-white marble underneath a repeating pattern of pilasters and blind windows, ornamented with veneered circles and rectangles. Above this is another cornice, and above that springs the truly amazing dome. There is not one person who does not stop and look skywards to that dome when they first walk in. It is faced with concrete, and features deep coffering that may originally have been gilded, in five diminishing layers of twenty-eight compartments. At the top is the oculus(central circular hole), about 8.8 m across, lined with a ring of bronze, which provides the only natural light source apart from the door. And a wondrous light it is: in sunny conditions an ellipse of light gradually tracks across the interior.
The construction of the dome was a formidable engineering enterprise, and it is still the largest concrete dome in the world. The architect’s success depends on a number of factors: the enormous strength of the mortar; the corresponding strength of thefoundations; and the clever use of aggregates of different weights and strengths for the concrete of different parts of the building – the Pantheon gets lighter as it gets higher, thereby taking the stress off the rest of the structure. Numerous cavities throughout the body of the rotunda reduce the weight of the masonry: the main wall is in fact eight huge piers joined by curtain walls. Except at the entrance and the niche opposite it, which are crowned with arches, it looks as if the upper wall rests directly on the entablature supported by the Corinthian columns, but all the piers are connected by huge relieving arches (not visible) that displace the pressure away from the columns, and on to the piers. Smaller arches focus the pressure from the space between the main arches and the entablature directly on to the columns. The brilliant use of the arch (with its spin-offs the vault and the dome) and of concrete were the Romans’ great contributions to world architecture, and nowhere were they more effectively combined, structurally or aesthetically, than in the Pantheon.
When you finally bring your eyes downwards, you are standing on a floor paved in squares, and circles within squares, of coloured granite, marble and porphyry.
The cosmic symbolism of the basic design is obvious enough: the dome = the vault of the heavens. Beyond that there is great dispute. Should we try to fit the images of fifteen of the major deities into the apse and niches, or the seven deities of the celestial pantheon (Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, the Sun and Saturn)? Why does the building face north? What is the significance, if any, of the twenty-eight coffers in each ring of the dome? What is not in doubt, however, is the date. It has an inscription that reads:
M. AGRIPPA. L.F. COS. TERTIVM. FECIT
(Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, three times consul, made this)
M. Agrippa had dedicated a sanctuary on the site in c.25 BCE, but it had been burned twice, and it was replaced by Hadrian with the new Pantheon, although he kept the original inscription. Brick stamps from the rotunda allow us to date it to between 118 and 128CE. It is Hadrian’s building.
The religion that these temples were part of can seem very alien to us now. Among the many different religions operating throughout the Roman Empire the citizens of Rome regarded ‘the State Religion’ as definitively their own. It was extremely traditional, and, since its principal function was to keep the State safe and prosperous, the Romans could usually feel that it worked. So they were very keen to maintain it. Priests were state officials; temples were state-funded; individuals could be both magistrates and priests (e.g. Julius Caesar was Consul and Pontifex Maximus) because both had a duty to promote the welfare of the State, and in that context there existed a reciprocal relationship where the State protected the religion and the religion protected the State.15
Roman religion held that all the important processes in the world were divinely activated, and that different gods oversaw particular functions and spheres of activity. Romans saw the working of a divine spirit (numen) where we tend to see the working of science or nature. The historian Polybius summed up the attitude very well:
Those things of which it is impossible to ascertain the causes may reasonably be attributed to a god or to Fortune, if no cause can easily be discovered.16
Early cults show how farmers deified agricultural operations: Pomona (Fruit), Consus (the Storer of Grain), Robigus (Blight) and so on were extremely important divinities and, because the Romans were polytheists, new ones were introduced as need arose: for example, an economic slump in the early fifth century BCE called for the institution of the cult of Mercury, for success in business transactions. Natural objects were also venerated: the Elder Pliny wrote that trees were the temples of spirits. In his day, simple farming communities would still dedicate an outstanding tree to a god. Urban settlements also had patron deities, such as Vulcan at Ostia, Minerva at Falerii and Juno at Veii.
These forces were not naturally sympathetic to humans; they were neutral. However, their effects might be very harmful: hail and crop disease are not deliberately malevolent, but they can ruin a farmer’s livelihood. So Roman religion tried to propitiate these forces and keep them favourable; and since doing so could ensure the success and prosperity of both the individual and the community, it was essential for all citizens to maintain the Pax Deorum (= ‘Peace with the Gods’). This entailed performing the right actions at the right times for the right outcomes; it was a set of formal observances more concerned with the correct procedure of worship than with inner morality: ‘Jupiter is called best and greatest, not because he makes us just or sober or wise but healthy and rich and prosperous.’17 Yet this does not mean that there was no link between morality and Roman religion. Maintaining the Pax Deorum was a constant process in which two Latin concepts were crucial: pietas (the sense of duty to family, state and gods that was Aeneas’ great quality), and cultus (‘cultivation’). In practice cultus deorum, the cultivation of the gods, meant acknowledging them through the methodical performance of traditional, unchanging, precise ritual – because that had been successful in the past. The pius person always does this scrupulously, and so morality and ethics are a function of pietas.
Just as the State took responsibility, on behalf of the community, for keeping good relations with the gods, the paterfamilias assumed responsibility, on behalf of the familia, for doing the same. There were a number of vital household divinities including Vesta, the spirit of fire or of the hearth; the Lares, spirits of the farmland or of dead ancestors; the Penates, the spirits of the store cupboard (penus), who worshipped together with the Lares; Genius, the procreative power that ensured the continuance of the family; and Janus, the two-faced spirit of the door. The door was the focus of great ‘specialization’ in respect of the gods: Janus Patulcius was in charge of opening the door, Janus Clusivius of closing it; Limentinus looked after the threshold (limen); Cardea was the divinity of the hinges (cardes), and you might hang a tintinabulum (a winged phallus with the hind legs of a lion, and with bells on) by the door to ward off evil. Likewise, lands had to be protected: boundary stones (termini) were venerated every year at the Terminalia festival; the land within the boundaries was fertilized at the Ambarvalia; and the spirits of the land (the Lares again) had to be placated at the Compitalia.
There were similar observances concerning crucial stages in the propagation of the family, and so we get rites of passage at birth, puberty, marriage and death. But even then the ritual did not cease: there were family ceremonies such as the Lemuria, in which thedi manes (= ghosts of the dead), were placated and expelled, and the Parentalia, at which the graves of the deceased were decorated with flowers.
Prayers would usually be accompanied by an offering to suit the importance of the occasion. Our word ‘sacrifice’ comes from Latin, sacrificium (= ‘making something holy’). This usually happened in one of two ways: food offerings, comprising salt meal, fruit, honey, milk or wine; or animal sacrifice. Male animals were offered to gods, and female ones to goddesses, with colour, size and age also relevant – black for deities of the Underworld, white for Juno or Jupiter, etc. Professionals were available if desired – e.g. acultarius to make the kill; a flute player to drown out ill-omened sounds – but were not strictly essential. The animal was decorated and led (willingly or not at all) to the altar; everything and everyone had to be ritually clean; the participants covered their heads with their togas; they sprinkled flour on the victim, and on the knife; the prayers were said; one of the attendants (the popa) shouted, ‘Am I to strike?’, and then stunned the animal with a hammer blow; the cultarius would turn the animal’s head first to the sky and then down to the earth, and cut its throat; the entrails would be examined and, if they were good, they would be burnt on the altar and the lean meat eaten. Precision was absolutely crucial and if any slip-ups were made the entire procedure had to be repeated. The deity had to be addressed with all the correct titles, and often with an escape clause, such as, ‘Jupiter Optimus Maximus or by whatever other name you wish to be addressed’, and if the right divinity had been invoked with the correct formula, it would be thought unreasonable and ungodlike for the request not to be granted. Alternatively, the support of the gods could be invoked by means of a vow, where the deity only received the offering if the prayer was answered.
Other ways of interacting with the gods could be by divination, the art of interpreting signs contained in natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning; auspicium (augury, from the Latin avis = bird; specio = ‘I look’), analysing bird behaviour which was interpreted by an augur; or extispicium, checking out the entrails of sacrificial animals, interpreted by a haruspex. This was not about trying to guess the future, but about testing the potential of a given plan by canvassing the gods’ opinions: it simply sought a ‘yes’/‘no’ answer.
The State also took responsibility for renewing the community’s relationship with gods on a regular basis through various festivals. Again, the correct performance of the ritual is what the gods wanted most. Feriae was the name for the Roman festival day (even though it is a plural word), and feriae fell into two main types: feriae privatae observed by individuals and families (such as birthdays or periods of mourning), and feriae publicae. There were three types of public festival: feriae stativae (annual, fixed-date events);feriae conceptivae (annual, but not on a fixed date); and feriae imperativae (one-off events). Roman citizens were not obliged to attend these festivals, however, because the State shouldered that responsibility.
Since religion was a function of the State, priesthoods were occupied by politicians. In the Republic, the Pontifex Maximus was the State priest, the paterfamilias of the community, while his advisers formed the major ‘Colleges’ (collegia) of priests, thepontifices and the augures. By the end of the Republic there were sixteen pontifices, who held office for life, controlled the religious calendar, and arranged the holy days and, until Caesar’s reforms of the calendar, the intercalary months inserted into the calendar to bring the solar and lunar years into synch. The Vestal Virgins were part of the College of Pontiffs. There were six of them, generally from patrician families, who served for thirty years, administering the cult of Vesta, goddess of the hearth fire. They were not allowed to marry while in service, and unchastity could be punished by being buried alive. Also part of the College of Pontiffs were the fifteen flamines, who looked after the cults of individual gods. The three major flamines were attached to the cult of Jupiter (theflamen Dialis), Mars (the flamen Martialis) and Quirinus18 (the flamen Quirinalis).
The college of augures consisted of sixteen official diviners who interpreted whether the gods approved or disapproved of various proposed actions. Other colleges and groups included the fifteen ‘Men for Conducting Sacrifices’, who kept and consulted the Sibylline Books; the twelve Fratres Arvales (who performed ancient agricultural ceremonies); the Luperci (who presided over a festival that culminated in young men rushing around the Palatine Hill in loin-cloths, flagellating anyone in their way with strips of goatskin, particularly young girls who hoped to become fertile because of this); and the twenty Fetiales who handled the declaration of war, which they did by hurling a spear on to a piece of land in front of the Temple of Bellona, which was regarded as enemy territory for the purpose of the ritual.
As polytheists, the Romans were generally open-minded about other religions, and indeed absorbed many foreign beliefs (the process is called syncretism) without ever losing the core values that they adhered to. Bacchus, Cybele (Magna Mater), Isis, Mithras and ultimately even deified emperors rubbed shoulders with the traditional deities without much friction. All of these cults embraced people of all races and social classes. Judaism, however, did not. Yet, as a racially exclusive religion, Judaism did not seek to convert gentiles either: Jews did not involve themselves in the religious life of those around them, and they hoped that no one would interfere with theirs. On the whole, this was the case: Philo reminded the Emperor Gaius that Augustus did not force the Jews to violate their ancestral traditions or abandon their places for prayer meetings, and nor did he forbid them to gather to receive instruction in the laws.19 However, the problem the Romans had with monotheism was down to the fact that they believed that the well-being of the State was dependent on meticulous worship of the State gods. Many people attributed the horrors of the civil wars at the end of the Republic to neglect of religious observance: Horace told his audience ‘You neglected the gods, and they heaped many grievous calamities on Italy.’20 So the refusal of the Jews to worship any god but their own was seen as threatening. Augustus’ successor Tiberius suppressed Egyptian cults and Judaism, and forced those who embraced such ‘superstitions’ to burn their holy objects; young Jews were sent to do military service in provinces with harsher climates; and he banished their compatriots from Rome under threat of slavery. However, he was not exclusively anti-Jewish: he also expelled astrologers.
Christianity posed different challenges to the Roman authorities. It attracted adherents because the Saviour promised them a happy life after death, because ‘God is Love’ and the Olympians weren’t, because Jesus was seen to have fulfilled the scriptures, and because it preached equality between men, women, children, rich and poor. Since they had a sacred mission to spread the ‘good news’, the Christians went out to evangelize in a way that the Jews did not. In its early days Christianity had much in common with the cults of Cybele, Bacchus, Isis and Mithras, in that they all offered the revelation of mysteries, redemption, resurrection and life after death, but Christian teaching was seen as particularly subversive because it threatened social revolution, especially with its emphasis on, and appeal to, the lower classes: tenets like ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ are very frightening to a slave-owning society; the Eucharist, taking the body and blood of Christ, was equated with cannibalism; and Christians insulted the State because they rejected pagan worship.
The third-century CE Christian writer Minucius Felix gives a fascinating catalogue of the accusations that people like himself – the ‘dregs of society’ – had to face: credulous women who had fallen prey because of the natural weakness of their sex; wicked conspirators who gathered for secret nocturnal assemblies and inhuman dinners; adherents to a religion of lust, in which they called one another brothers and sisters so that normal sexual intercourse became incest by the use of the sacred name. Tales circulated about initiations in which infants were wrapped in bread dough that the initiate had to strike, thereby unwittingly killing the child, after which they would lick up the blood and tear its limbs apart. There were rumours of drunken, incestuous orgies. Their secrecy proved their wickedness:
[You] Christians abstain from innocent pleasures. You don’t watch the public spectacles, you don’t take part in the processions, you absent yourselves from the public banquets, you shrink away from sacred games, sacrificial meat, and altar libations. That’s how frightened you are of the gods whose existence you deny!21
Christ was crucified in the reign of Tiberius, but by Claudius’ time, when people who believed that ‘Chrestus’ (as he is designated in Tacitus’ text) was the Messiah were still thought of as Jews, Roman officials were becoming worried about the unrest that the new belief was causing, so ‘Jews’ causing disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus were expelled from Rome. Claudius’ successor Nero came to have a terrible reputation as a persecutor of Christians, using them as a scapegoat for the Great Fire of 64 CE, yet, despite more widespread persecutions under Domitian, Marcus Aurelius, Decius, Diocletian, Galerius and others, Christianity survived to become the dominant religion of the Empire. When Constantine converted to Christianity, won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 CE, and ultimately secured control of the Roman Empire, Christianity’s future was guaranteed: Christians were granted freedom of worship, and from that moment they worked tirelessly to eradicate the pagan cults, which Theodosius achieved officially in 391 CE.
Notes – Chapter 16
1. Trans. J.A. Shelton, As The Romans Did: A Source Book in Roman History, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 312.
2. Juvenal, Satire 10.80 f., trans. A. Bell, in E. Köhne, ‘Bread and Circuses: The Politics of Entertainment’, in E. Köhne, C. Ewiglebe and R. Jackson (eds), The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome: Gladiators and Caesars, London: British Museum, 2000, 8.
3. Varro, De Re Rustica, 37 BCE.
4. Livy, 7.213., trans. B.O. Foster, Livy: History of Rome, Books V–VII, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1924.
5. Suetonius, Caesar 39
6. Suetonius, Caligula 56.
7. Tacitus, Annals 15.44. Note the absence of lions in his account.
8. CIL 12.5837.
9. Suetonius, Claudius 21, 6.
10. Encheiridion 33, 2.
11. Satire 6.110 ff., trans. M. Jenks, in A. Futrell, The Roman Games: A Sourcebook, Oxford 2006, and A. Bell in C. Ewigleben, ‘What TheseWomen Love is the Sword’, in Köhne et al., The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome, 125 ff. There is also a sexual double-entendre in ‘sword’.
12. CIL VI 10047; Suetonius, De grammaticis et rhetoribus 17.2
13. Correspondence 2, p. 216, trans. A. Bell,. 139.
14. Suetonius, Tiberius, 2.2.
15. For the principal State gods and goddesses, see Table 8.1 on p. 149.
16. Polybius, 36.17.
17. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 3.87.
18. Quirinus is the deified Romulus.
19. Philo, The Embassy to Gaius 155 ff.
20. Horace, Odes 3.6.6 f., trans. J. Michie, The Odes of Horace, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
21. Minucius Felix, Octavius 12.5, trans. Shelton, As The Romans Did, 418.