CHAPTER EIGHT

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THE HOME FRONT

Public and private

ONE SIDE OF the history of Rome is a history of politics, of war, of victory and defeat, of citizenship and of everything that went on in public between prominent men. I have outlined one dramatic version of that history, as Rome transformed from a small, unimpressive town next to the Tiber into first a local and eventually an international power base. Almost every aspect of that transformation was contested and sometimes literally fought over: the rights of the people against the senate, the questions of what liberty meant and how it was to be guaranteed, the control that was, or was not, to be exercised over conquered territory, the impact of empire, for good or bad, on traditional Roman politics and values. In the process, a version of citizenship was somehow invented that was new in the classical world. Greeks had occasionally shared citizenship, on an ad hoc basis, between two cities. But the idea that it was the norm, as the Romans insisted, to be a citizen of two places – to count two places as home – was fundamental to Roman success on the battlefield and elsewhere, and it has proved influential right up into the twenty-first century. This was a Roman revolution, and we are its heirs.

There are nevertheless some elusive sides to this story. It is only occasionally possible to discover the part in the grand narrative of Roman history up to the first century BCE that ordinary people, the women, the poor or the slaves played. We have found just a few cameo appearances: the frightened comedian on the stage at Asculum, the loud-mouthed servant who unwisely abused the supporters of Gaius Gracchus, the eunuch priest who worried about his friend in the civil war, even the poor cat trapped in the fire that destroyed the hut at Fidenae. There is much more evidence for all these groups in later periods, and they figure more prominently in the rest of this book. But what survives for the early centuries of Roman history tends to offer a one-sided picture of the priorities even of the elite Roman man. It is easy to get the impression that the main characters in the story were concerned with the big issues of Roman political power to the exclusion of anything else, as if the proud conquests, military prowess and election to political office that are blazoned on their tombstones were the be-all and end-all of their existence.

They were not. We have already glimpsed a few other aspects of their lives and interests, enjoying boy-meets-girl comedies on the stage, writing and learning poetry and listening to literary lectures given by visiting Greek ambassadors. It is not hard to imagine something of the day-to-day world of Polybius in Rome, as he pondered on the funerals he attended or shrewdly decided to claim sickness on the day a fellow hostage made his escape attempt. Nor is it hard to recapture something of the fun that the elder Cato must have had thinking up his stunt with the Carthaginian figs dropping out of his toga. But it is only in the first century BCE that we begin to have rich evidence for all the things that preoccupied the Roman elite beyond war and politics.

These range from curiosity about the language they spoke (one prolific scholar devoted twenty-five books to a history of Latin, its grammar and etymology) to intense scientific speculation on the origins of the universe and theological debate on the nature of the gods. The eloquent discussion of the folly of fearing death by Titus Lucretius Carus, in his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), is one of the highlights of classical literature and a beacon of good sense even now (those who do not exist cannot regret their nonexistence, as part of the argument runs). But by far the most sustained insight into the interests, concerns, pleasures, fears and problems of one notable Roman comes from the thousand or so private letters to and from Cicero that were collected, edited and made public after his death in 43 BCE and have been read and studied ever since.

They contain, as we have seen, plenty of gossip from the highest echelons of Roman politics, and they throw rare light on the front line of provincial government as Cicero experienced it in Cilicia. But no less important, they reveal what else was claiming Cicero’s attention while he was facing down Catiline, dealing with the Gang of Three, planning military strikes on troublesome locals or deciding where his loyalties lay in civil war. Alongside those political and military crises, at the same time he was worrying about money, dowries and marriages (his daughter’s and his own), grieving at the death of those he loved, divorcing his wife, complaining about an upset stomach after an unusual menu at dinner, attempting to track down runaway slaves and trying to acquire some nice statues to decorate one of his many houses. For the first, and almost the only, time in Roman history these letters allow us to take a close look at what was going on behind one Roman front door.

This chapter follows up some of those themes in Cicero’s letters. We will start with his experience of civil war and of the dictatorship of Julius Caesar – by turns messy and darkly funny, and about as far from the ringing public slogans of libertas and clementia as you could imagine – then move on to some fundamental questions that can get lost in all the political controversies, diplomatic negotiations and military campaigns. How long did Romans expect to live? At what age did people get married? What rights did women have? Where did the money come from to support the lavish lifestyles of the rich and privileged? And what about the slaves?