Money matters

The houses on Astura and at Tusculum were only two of some twenty properties that Cicero owned in Italy in 45 BCE. Some were elegant residential mansions. In Rome he had a large house on the lower slopes of the Palatine Hill, a couple of minutes’ walk from the Forum, where many of the top-most drawer of the Roman elite, Clodia included, were his neighbours; his other houses were dotted throughout the peninsula, from Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, where he entertained Caesar to that rather crowded dinner party, to Formiae further north, where he had another seaside villa. Some were small rest houses or lodges strategically sited on roads between his far-flung larger properties, where he could stay overnight to avoid sleeping in seedy inns or lodging houses or imposing on friends. Some, including his family estates at Arpinum, were working farms, even if they had a luxury residence attached. Others were straightforward moneymaking rental properties, such as the low-grade building from which ‘even the rats’ had fled; two large, and even more lucrative, blocks to let in central Rome had been part of Terentia’s dowry and in 45 BCE must recently have been returned on the divorce.

The total value of this property portfolio was something in the order of 13 million sesterces. In the eyes of ordinary Romans this was a vast holding, worth enough to keep more than 25,000 poor families alive for a year or to provide more than thirty men with the minimum wealth qualification for standing for political office. But it did not put Cicero into the bracket of the super-rich. In reflecting on the history of extravagance, Pliny the Elder states that in 53 BCE Clodius bought for almost 15 million sesterces the house of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, one of Cicero’s friends and a somewhat disreputable officer of Pompey’s in Judaea in the 60s BCE. The remains of its basement have tentatively been identified, also on the Palatine slopes, near where the Arch of Titus still stands; they comprise about fifty small rooms and a bath, probably for slaves, and earlier generations of archaeologists confidently (and wrongly) identified them as a city-centre brothel. At yet another level up, the property of Crassus was worth 200 million sesterces; with that, he could indeed have paid for his own army (p. 26).

Despite some imaginative attempts, not a single one of Cicero’s properties has been firmly identified on the ground. Yet it is possible to get some idea of what they were like from his accounts, including his plans for improvement, and from contemporary archaeological remains. The rich residences of the late Republican elite on the Palatine Hill are generally very poorly preserved, for the simple reason that over the first century CE the imperial palace that soon came to dominate the hill was built on top of them. Some of the most impressive traces from the earlier period are in the so-called House of the Griffins. These include several rooms of what must have been the ground floor of an impressive early first-century BCE house, still partly visible within the foundations of the palatial structures on top, complete with brightly painted walls and simple mosaic pavements. In overall plan and design, this and the other Palatine houses were probably not all that different from the much better preserved remains at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The point about the residences of the Roman elite, whether of senators in Rome or of local bigwigs outside it, is that they were not private houses in modern terms; they did not (or not only) represent a place to escape from the public gaze. To be sure, there were some hideaways, such as Cicero’s retreat on Astura, and some parts of the house were more private than others. But in many ways domestic architecture was meant to contribute to the public image and reputation of the prominent Roman, and it was in his house that much public business was done. The great hall, or atrium, the first room a visitor normally entered after walking through the front door, was a key location. Usually double volume, open to the sky and designed to impress, with stuccoes, paintings, sculpture and impressive vistas off, it provided the backdrop to many encounters between the master of the house and a variety of subordinates, petitioners and clients – from ex-slaves needing help to that visiting delegation from Teos who went from atrium to atrium trying to kiss the Romans’ feet (pp. 194–5, 197–9). Beyond that, on the standard plan, the house stretched back, with more entertaining rooms, dining areas, parlours-cum-bedrooms (cubicula) and covered walkways and gardens if there was space – the walls featuring decoration to match their function, from large display paintings to intimate panels and erotica. For visitors, the further they were welcomed into the less public parts of the house, the more honoured they were. Business with one’s closest friends and colleagues might be done, as Romans put it, in cubiculo, that is, in one of those small, intimate rooms where one might sleep, though not exactly bedrooms in the modern sense. It is where, we might guess, the Gang of Three made their deals.

53. Here the later foundations of the buildings above (on the right) have cut through what was once a splendid room of a Republican house, the ‘House of the Griffins’ on the Palatine. The house gets its name from the figures of griffins made in stucco; one is visible at the far end. The mosaic floor is a simple diamond decoration, the walls are painted with plain panels of colour, as if to imitate marble. Earlier generations of archaeologists speculated that this was the house of Catiline himself.

The house and its decoration contributed to the image of its owner. But impressive display had to be carefully calibrated against the possible taint of excessive luxury. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Scaurus decided to use in the atrium of his Palatine house some of the 380 columns that he had bought to decorate a temporary theatre he had commissioned for public shows. They were made of Lucullan marble, a precious Greek stone known in Rome after the man who first imported it, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, Pompey’s immediate predecessor in the war against Mithradates, and they were each over 11 metres high. Many Romans felt that Scaurus had made a serious mistake in adorning his house in a luxurious style more appropriate to fully public display. Sallust was not the only one to imagine that immoral extravagance somehow underlay many of Rome’s problems.

On several occasions in his letters, Cicero can be found worrying about how to decorate his properties appropriately, how to project an image of himself as a man of taste, learning and Greek culture, and how to source the artworks that he needed in order to do that, not always successfully. A tricky problem he faced in 46 BCE reveals some of his slightly fussy concerns. One of his unofficial agents had acquired for him in Greece a small collection of statues that was both too expensive (he could have bought a new lodge, he explains, for the price) and quite unfit for the purposes he had in mind. For a start, there was a statue of the god of war Mars, when Cicero was supposed to be presenting himself as the great advocate of peace. Worse, there was a group of Bacchantes, the uninhibited, ecstatic, drunken followers of the god Bacchus, which could not possibly be used to decorate a library as he wanted: you needed Muses for a library, he explained, not Bacchantes.

54. The plan of the ‘House of the Tragic Poet’ at Pompeii gives a good idea of the basic layout of a moderately wealthy Roman house, of the second and first centuries BCE. The narrow entrance runs between two shops (a) facing onto the street, and leads into the main hall, or atrium (b). The principal formal reception room (c) faced onto the atrium; beyond was a dining area (d) and a small colonnaded garden (e). The other small rooms, some upstairs, included the parlourscum-bedrooms where the most favoured guests would be invited, for business as well as pleasure.

Whether Cicero managed to sell these sculptures on, as he hoped, or whether they ended up in a storeroom on one of his estates is not recorded. But the story is a pointer to the way the domestic, as well as the public, environment of Rome sucked in artworks, both antiques and replicas, in a brisk trade with the Greek world. The material remains of that trade are now best documented by the cargoes that did not make it, in a series of shipwrecks of Roman trading vessels that divers have discovered on the bed of the Mediterranean. One of the most stunning, probably to be dated sometime in the 60s BCE, to judge from the coins it was carrying, sank between Crete and the southern tip of the Peloponnese, near the island of Antikythera – hence its modern name, ‘the Antikythera wreck’. It was carrying bronze and marble sculptures, including one exquisite miniature bronze figure on a wind-up revolving base; luxury furniture; elegant bowls in glass and mosaic; and most famous of all, the ‘Antikythera Mechanism’. This was an intricate bronze device with a clockwork mechanism, apparently designed to predict the movements of the planets and other astronomical events. Though rather a long way from the world’s first computer, as it has occasionally been dubbed, it must have been destined for the library of some keen Roman scientist.

The relationship between leading late Republicans and their properties was in some ways, however, a curious one. Cicero and his friends strongly identified with their houses. Beyond the carefully planned arrangements of sculpture and artworks, the wax masks of their ancestors (imagines) that were worn in funeral processions were displayed in the atria of aristocratic families, who sometimes had different sets or copies for their different properties. On the atrium wall, a painted family tree was one standard feature, and the spoils a man had taken in battle, the ultimate mark of Roman achievement, might also be pinned up there for admiration. Conversely, if the political tide turned, the house could become almost a surrogate for aggression against its owner, or an additional target. When Cicero went into exile in 58 BCE, not only did Clodius and his gangs destroy his property on the Palatine, but considerable damage was done to his properties at Formiae and Tusculum too. And he was not the first who was said to have suffered this kind of punishment. Towards the mythical beginning of a long line of such cases, a radical called Spurius Maelius in the mid fifth century BCE was executed and his house pulled down when – in a classic conservative Roman inference – his generosity to the poor raised suspicions that he was aiming at tyranny.

55. Some of the sculptures from the Antikythera wreck offer haunting images of partial decay. As in this once beautiful specimen, some parts of their marble flesh have corroded, other parts have been preserved in pristine condition – depending on where they lay in the sea and whether they were protected by the sand on the sea bed.

Yet in another way, the connection between family and house was surprisingly loose. Quite unlike, for example, the British aristocracy, whose traditions put great store by the continuity of ownership of their country houses, the Roman elite were always buying, selling and moving. It is true that Cicero hung on to some family property in Arpinum, but he bought his Palatine house only in 62 BCE, from Crassus, who may have owned it as an investment opportunity rather than as a residence; and before that the house of Livius Drusus, where he was assassinated in 91 BCE, had stood on the site. Cicero’s estate at Tusculum had passed from Sulla to a deeply conservative senator, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, and finally to a rich ex-slave, known to us only as Vettius, in the twenty-five years before Cicero bought it in the early 60s BCE. Presumably any masks in the atrium were packed up on the occasion of a sale and moved to the new property. But strangely it was the custom that the spoils of victory stayed with the house and did not move with the family of the man who had won them. In one of Cicero’s later attacks on Mark Antony, he complains that Antony was living and drunkenly carousing in a house that had once belonged to Pompey, with rams from captured ships, probably seized in the campaign against the pirates, still adorning the entranceway.

This pattern of property transfer raises several basic questions. The sums involved were very large. In 62 BCE Cicero had to hand over 3.5 million sesterces for his new house on the Palatine, and there is almost no information about how this kind of payment was organised in practice. It is unlikely that Cicero’s slaves simply wheeled truckloads of cash through the streets under armed guard. The whole transaction points instead either to the use of gold bullion, which would at least have required fewer trucks, or more likely to some system of paper finance or bonds, and so to a relatively sophisticated banking and credit system underpinning the Roman economy, for which only fleeting evidence now survives.

Even more basically, where did all the money come from in the first place? Just after buying the Palatine house, Cicero joked in a letter to his friend Publius Sestius that he was so up to his ears in debt ‘that I’d be keen to join a conspiracy if there was one that would have me’ – a wry allusion to the Catilinarian conspiracy of the previous year. Loans certainly must have been part of it, but most of them had to be repaid, sometimes sooner rather than later; Cicero was, for example, keen to pay off a large loan of almost a million sesterces to Julius Caesar before the outbreak of civil war made it embarrassing. So what were the sources of Cicero’s income? How had he moved from a reasonably affluent local background to being one of the rich, even if far from the richest, at Rome? Some hints in the letters help to sketch out part of the picture.

First a negative. There is no sign that Cicero had any major trading or commercial interests. Strictly speaking, senators were banned from overseas trade, and the wealth of the political elite at Rome was always officially defined by, and rooted in, land. Nonetheless, some senatorial families profited from commercial ventures indirectly, whether through non-senatorial relations or by using their ex-slaves as front men. The family of the same Publius Sestius, the senator with whom Cicero joked about his debt, is one of the best examples of this. Thousands of wine amphorae of the early to mid first century BCE stamped ‘SES’ or ‘SEST’ have been discovered across the Mediterranean from Spain to Athens, with a particular concentration in southern Gaul, including some 1,700 in a shipwreck off Marseilles. These are the clear traces of a large commercial export business associated with some members of the Sestius family, who are known to have had estates near the northern Italian town of Cosa, where another concentration of the same kind of amphorae with the same stamp has been found. Whoever was formally in charge of the business, the profits surely seeped through to the senatorial Sestii too. But there are no hints that Cicero had any involvement in anything like that, apart from a few snobbish and inaccurate slurs made by his enemies that his father had been in the laundry business.

Some of Cicero’s money came, quite traditionally, from rents and from the products of his agricultural land, boosted by the property that was part of Terentia’s dowry. But he had two other main sources of substantial funds. The first was inheritances from outside his immediate family. In 44 BCE he claimed to have received in all a vast 20 million sesterces by that route. It is impossible now to identify all of the benefactors. But many of these legacies must have been paybacks from those he had helped in various ways, ex-slaves who had made their own fortunes or satisfied clients whom he had represented in court. Roman lawyers were expressly forbidden to receive fees for their service, and it is often rightly said that what Cicero gained by pleading in high-profile cases was public prominence. Yet often there were financial returns in some indirect form too. Publius Sulla, the nephew of the dictator, can hardly have been unusual in rewarding Cicero for a successful defence in court. He lent 2 million sesterces towards the purchase of the Palatine house, and repayment seems not to have been demanded.

56. The site of the wreck off Marseilles was explored in the 1950s by a team of divers working with Jacques Cousteau. This is just part of the cargo of amphorae from Italy that the ship was carrying.

The other source was Cicero’s province. While boasting, maybe correctly, that he had never broken the law in extorting money from the provincials, he still left Cilicia in 50 BCE with more than 2 million sesterces in local currency in his luggage. How exactly it was acquired is not certain: a combination perhaps of Cicero’s meanness with his expense allowance and the profits from his minor victory, including selling off the captives into slavery afterwards. Rather than transport this money back to Italy, he deposited it on his way home with a company of publicani in Ephesus, apparently envisaging some form of cashless transfer of funds. But the civil war soon derailed whatever long-term plans he had for it. In early 48 BCE Pompey’s war fund needed all the cash it could get, and Cicero agreed to lend this 2 million sesterces to him, which presumably went some way towards making up for his irritating behaviour in the camp. There is no suggestion that he ever got the money back. This profit of a war against a foreign enemy had ended up, as many others did, bankrolling a war of Roman against Roman.