CHAPTER ELEVEN
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THE HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS
Rich and poor
RICH ROMANS HAD a lifestyle that was luxurious by any standards, ancient or modern. The emperor, with his palatial residences, acres of parkland, the occasional revolving dining room (how well these worked, or by what mechanism, is another question), jewelled walls and consumption on a scale that mesmerised most Roman observers, was at the very top of the spectrum, outbidding even the super-rich. His fortune was founded on the proceeds of vast imperial estates, across the Roman world, that passed from one ruler to the next and included mines and industrial properties as well as farms; on the blurred lines between the finances of the state and of the emperor himself; and, so it was sometimes alleged, on various forms of extractions, such as forced legacies, if ready cash ran short (see plate 13).
But many well-off inhabitants of the empire also led lives of privileged comfort. Vociferous Roman disapproval of ‘luxury’ and admiration of the simple, old-fashioned peasant life coexisted, as they often do, with massive expenditure and luxurious habits. Disapprovers always need something to disapprove of; and, in any case, the distinction between exquisite good taste (mine) and vulgar ostentation (yours) is necessarily a subjective one.
Pliny the Younger – whose uncle ‘the Elder’ was one of the most strident critics of extravagance, in everything from one-legged tables to wearing several rings on the same finger – described his own country villa, a few miles outside Rome, in one of his letters. It was, he explained, ‘fit for purpose and not too expensive to maintain’. Despite that modest description, it was actually a vast pile, with dining rooms for use in different seasons, a private bathing suite and swimming pool, courtyards and shady porticoes, central heating, ample running water, a gymnasium, sunny lounges with picture windows overlooking the sea, and garden hideaways where Pliny, who was not a man for raucous fun, could escape the noise of the parties on those rare days when the slaves took a holiday.
All over the empire the rich paraded their wealth in large and expensive accommodations for themselves, measured not by floor area but by the number of tiles on the roof (to qualify as a local councillor, one law states, you needed to have a house with 1,500 roof tiles). And they indulged in the many pleasures that money could buy, from silks to oriental spices, skilled slaves to pricey antiques. They also paraded their wealth in sponsoring amenities for their local communities. The emperor had a monopoly on public building in Rome, but in the towns of Italy and the provinces, the elite, both men and women, built themselves into prominence in much the same way.
Pliny was typical in ploughing some of his money into construction projects in his home town of Comum in northern Italy, including a new public library, which cost a million sesterces to construct (that is the equivalent of the minimum fortune required to be a senator). His elderly friend Ummidia Quadratilla, who died around 107 CE, did similar things in her home town south of Rome. Though Pliny wrote her up as a tough old lady with a fondness for board games, surviving inscriptions show that she also sponsored a new amphitheatre and temple, and restored the theatre and funded a public banquet (‘for the local council, the people and the women’) in celebration of the new facilities. As far away as the small town of Timgad in North Africa, originally established on the edges of the Sahara in 100 CE as a settlement of veteran Roman soldiers, one local married couple around 200 CE were building themselves a mini-palace on at least two floors, not so grand as Pliny’s villa but still equipped with multiple dining rooms, a private bathhouse, internal gardens, fancy water features, expensive mosaic floors and central heating for the cold African winters. And they sponsored a huge new temple and a splendid new market, decorated with a dozen statues – of themselves.
Money could not protect the rich from all the discomforts and harsher sides of ancient life. Although in Rome the emperor lived at a safe remove from the masses, and the wealthy tended to favour one or two areas in particular (the Palatine Hill before the imperial palace encroached is an obvious example), for the most part ancient cities were not zoned as modern cities are. Rich and poor lived side by side, large houses with many tiles sharing the same streets and districts with tiny hovels. The Romans had no Mayfairs or Fifth Avenues. Travel in a curtained sedan chair, carried by a team of hefty slaves, might have protected a few ladies and gentlemen from the worst aspects of the public highway in any big city of the empire. But the lack of any organised refuse collection, the use of the road as a public lavatory (with the contents of chamber pots chucked on all comers from upper-floor windows, as the poet Juvenal pictures the scene, probably with some satiric exaggeration) and the noise and congestion of carts and carriages fighting for space in streets often too narrow for two-way traffic would have been at the very least an assault on the senses of rich and poor alike, and sometimes dangerous. Although it is often claimed that, among notable pieces of Roman enlightenment, wheeled transport was banned from city streets during the daytime (as if in some modern pedestrian precinct), this applied at most to heavy transport, or the ancient equivalent of juggernaut lorries. And that itself, as Juvenal also complains, could make the noise at night almost intolerable for anyone of any rank: ‘it would even steal sleep from a drowsy emperor’.
75. A moody reconstruction of Pliny’s palatial villa by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1841). It has been a favourite scholarly pastime for centuries to take Pliny’s own description of the place (Letters 2, 17) and to try to re-create an image or plan of it.
76. The town of Timgad in modern Algeria, looking across the ruins of the city to a large temple sponsored by the rich couple with their mini-palace. Timgad is one of the most evocative Roman sites in the world, with everything from a very smart set of public lavatories to one of the few libraries actually to survive from antiquity.
Germs were no respecters of wealth either. Those rich enough to have secluded country properties had a chance of escaping the periodic epidemics of sickness that blighted all cities, especially Rome, and they made an effort to find relatively mosquito-free places to spend their summer months. A better diet might also have helped the more prosperous to withstand illnesses that those on subsistence rations could not. But the same diseases, and much the same dirt, killed the children of rich and poor alike. And anyone who went to the public baths – and that certainly included on occasion even those who had their own bathing suites at home – risked becoming a victim of those breeding grounds of infection. One sensible Roman doctor got it absolutely right when he wrote that baths were to be avoided if you had an open wound, otherwise deathly gangrene was likely to be the result.
In reality, even in the imperial palace, emperors were killed by disease more often than by poison. For more than a decade from the mid 160s CE, much of the Roman Empire suffered a pandemic, very likely smallpox apparently brought back by soldiers serving in the East. Galen, the most acute and prolific medical writer of the ancient world, discussed individual cases and gave detailed eyewitness descriptions of the symptoms, including a blistering skin rash and diarrhoea. Quite how devastating this outbreak was is still intensely debated. Firm evidence is scanty, and deaths are variously estimated at between 1 per cent and an almost impossibly high 30 per cent of the total population. But in 169 CE the emperor Lucius Verus, who from 161 CE had ruled jointly with Marcus Aurelius, was almost certainly one of the victims.
There was some even-handedness, then, in these few, largely biological, aspects of misfortune. Yet for the most part the great divide in the Roman world was between the haves and the have-nots: between the tiny minority of people with substantial surplus wealth and a lifestyle somewhere on the scale between very comfortable and extravagantly luxurious, and the vast majority of even the non-slave population, who at best had a modest amount of spare cash (for more food, for an extra room, for cheap jewellery, for simple tombstones), and at worst were destitute, jobless and homeless.
About the privileged – the haves – of the Roman world we know a great deal. They were the authors of almost all the literature to survive from antiquity. Even writers like Juvenal, who sometimes cast themselves as among the socially disadvantaged, were actually well off, despite their complaints about cascading chamber pots. And it is the rich who leave by far the biggest footprint in the archaeological record, from grand houses to new theatres. Across the empire, they amounted at a generous estimate to 300,000 people in all, including comparatively wealthy local bigwigs as well as the plutocrats in the big cities – and a rather larger total if you add in their other household members. Assuming that the population of the empire in the first two centuries CE was somewhere between 50 and 60 million, what were the living conditions, the lifestyles and the values of the overwhelming majority, the 99 per cent of Romans?
Elite Roman writers were mostly disdainful of those less fortunate, and less rich, than themselves. Apart from their nostalgic admiration of a simple peasant way of life – a fantasy of country picnics, and lazy afternoons under shady trees – they found little virtue in poverty or in the poor or even in earning an honest day’s wages. Juvenal is not the only one to write off the priorities of the Roman people as ‘bread and circuses’. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, makes exactly the same point when he writes of the emperor Trajan that ‘he understood that the Roman people are kept in line by two things beyond all else: the corn dole and entertainments’. Cicero turned his scorn on those who worked for a living: ‘The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.’ It became a cliché of Roman moralising that a true gentleman was supported by the profits of his estates, not by wage labour, which was inherently dishonourable. Latin vocabulary itself captured the idea: the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much ‘leisure’, as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one’s own time); ‘business’ of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium (‘not otium’).
Those who became wealthy from nothing were equally the objects of snobbish derision, as jumped-up arrivistes. The character of Trimalchio, the nouveau riche ex-slave in Petronius’ Satyricon who has made his fortune trading everything from bacon and perfume to slaves, is a simultaneously engaging and ghastly fictional parody of a man with more cash than good taste, who repeatedly gets proper elite behaviour slightly wrong. He keeps his own slaves in rather too vulgar designer uniforms (the porter at Trimalchio’s front door is dressed in green with a red belt and spends his time shelling peas into a silver bowl); the walls of his house are boastfully decorated with paintings that tell the story of his career, from the slave market to his current splendour, under the protection of Mercury, the god of moneymaking; and the dinner party he hosts is an impossible combination of every Roman fancy food, from dormice, prepared in honey and poppyseeds, to wine that was well over a hundred years old, vintage 121 BCE, ‘when Opimius was consul’. The ignorant Trimalchio presumably does not realise that the name of the diehard conservative who in 121 BCE had 3,000 supporters of Gaius Gracchus put to death is hardly an auspicious name for a vintage, even if wine lasted that long anyway.
The prejudices are obvious, and they tell us more about the world of the writers than of their subjects – especially if, as some modern critics have suggested, Petronius’ parody of the elite lifestyle was meant to make his elite readers wonder quite how different they really were from this vulgar ex-slave. The big question is whether, and how, we can re-create a picture of the lives of ordinary Romans that they themselves might have recognised. If surviving literature produces these disdainful caricatures, where else can we turn?