Bar culture
Elite Romans were often even more dismissive – and anxious – about what the rest of the population got up to when they were not working. Their keenness for shows and spectacles was one thing, but even worse were the bars and cheap cafés and restaurants where ordinary men tended to congregate. Lurid images were conjured up of the types of people you were likely to meet there. Juvenal, for example, pictures a seedy drinking den at the port of Ostia patronised, he claims, by cut-throats, sailors, thieves and runaway slaves, hangmen and coffin makers, plus the occasional eunuch priest (presumably off duty from the sanctuary of the Great Mother in the town). And writing later, in the fourth century CE, one Roman historian complained that the ‘lowest’ sort of person spent the whole night in bars, and he picked out as especially disgusting the snorting noise the dice players made as they concentrated on the board and drew in breath through their snotty noses.
There are also records of repeated attempts to impose legal restrictions or taxes on these establishments. Tiberius, for example, apparently banned the sale of pastries; Claudius is supposed to have abolished ‘taverns’ entirely and to have forbidden the serving of boiled meat and hot water (presumably to be mixed, in the standard Roman fashion, with wine – but then why not ban the wine?); and Vespasian is said to have ruled that bars and pubs should sell no form of food at all except peas and beans. Assuming that all this is not a fantasy of ancient biographers and historians, it can only have been fruitless posturing, legislation at its most symbolic, which the resources of the Roman state had no means to enforce.
Elites everywhere tend to worry about places where the lower orders congregate, and – though there was certainly a rough side and some rude talk – the reality of the normal bar was tamer than its reputation. For bars were not just drinking dens but an essential part of everyday life for those who had, at best, limited cooking facilities in their lodgings. As with the arrangement of apartment blocks, the Roman pattern is precisely the reverse of our own: the Roman rich, with their kitchens and multiple dining rooms, ate at home; the poor, if they wanted much more than the ancient equivalent of a sandwich, had to eat out. Roman towns were full of cheap bars and cafés, and it was here that a large number of ordinary Romans spent many hours of their non-working lives. Pompeii is again one of the best examples. Taking account of the still unexcavated parts of the town and resisting the temptation (as some archaeologists have not) to call any building with a serving counter a bar, we can reckon that there were well over a hundred such places there, for a population of perhaps 12,000 residents, and travellers passing through.
84. Looking out from a typical Roman bar, in Pompeii. A counter faces the street with large bowls, from which food or drink could be served to takeaway customers. The steps on the left acted as a display stand for more food.
85. A brawl in a bar over a game of dice. In this nineteenth-century copy of some of the paintings from the Bar of Salvius in Pompeii, the argument starts in the left–hand panel. ‘Exsi’ shouts one of the players, ‘I’ve won, I’m out’, while his opponent disputes the throw. In the next scene, the landlord, on the right, is not only telling them to get out, but man-handling them towards the door.
They were built to a fairly standard plan: a counter facing the pavement, for the ‘takeaway’ service; an inner room with tables and chairs for the eat-in, waiter service; and usually a display stand for food and drink, as well as a brazier or oven for preparing hot dishes and drinks. In a couple of cases at Pompeii, in the same way as in the fullery, their decoration includes a series of paintings depicting scenes – part fantasy, part real – of life in the bar itself. There is not much evidence of the terrible moral turpitude that Roman writers feared. One image shows the wine supplies being delivered in a large vat, another some snacks being consumed underneath sausages and other delicacies strung from the ceiling. The ‘worst’ signs are one full-on image of sex (hard to make out now because some modern moralist has defaced it), a number of graffiti along the lines of ‘I fucked the landlady’ (whether statement of fact, boast or insult is impossible to say) and several paintings which show customers playing dice games, presumably for money, snorting or not. On the walls of one bar, where speech bubbles accompany the pictures to flesh out what is going on, the game is leading to a fight and to some decidedly ungentlemanly language. After a disputed throw (‘It was a two, not a three’), the landlord has to intervene: ‘If you want to fight, get outside,’ he is saying, as landlords always do, while the pair start to foul-mouth each other (‘Scumbag, I had the three, I won’, ‘No, come on, cocksucker, I did’).
Gambling and board games were one of the most extreme cases of Roman elite double standards. Some of the loftiest aristocrats were keen gamers. According to Suetonius, the emperor Claudius was such an enthusiast that he wrote a book on dice games and had his carriage specially adapted so that he could continue playing on the move, while the first Augustus was so addicted to gaming – but so mindful of the purses of his friends – that he would simply give his guests large quantities of cash to use as their stake (though Suetonius hints at his own disapproval when he observes that Augustus did not seek to deny his habit, and compares it archly to another of the emperor’s supposed hobbies: deflowering virgins). Board games were not only a man’s pastime, either. They were a favourite recreation of the elderly Ummidia Quadratilla too – whether played for money or not, Pliny does not say. But, as Juvenal observes, on this occasion pointing a well-directed finger at Roman hypocrisy, when the ordinary people indulged in these games, the elite were outraged and thought it ‘a disgrace’.
One of their main objections was that dicing was a gateway to crime. The brawl depicted in the Pompeian bar points to that on a very small scale; on a grander scale, the prominence of ‘dicers’ (aleatores) among Catiline’s followers suggested a connection with conspiracy and treason. But, in the heads of the rich and powerful, the destabilising effect of gambling was a major factor too. In a world where the hierarchy of wealth had always directly correlated with political power and social status, the possibility, however remote, of the established order being upturned by money that was obtained solely by chance was dangerously disruptive. The riches of Trimalchio were bad enough; the idea that a fortune might be obtained by a throw of the dice was far worse. So there were attempts to control gambling among the general population, to restrict it to particular times or occasions and to limit the legal responsibility for recovering the debts incurred. This legislation had about as much effect as the restrictions on bars. Gaming boards are found all over the Roman world. Those that survive are in durable stone and come from tombs, bars and army barracks or are carved into pavements and into the steps of public buildings – presumably intended as an amusement for people with time on their hands.
Dice games had different names and were played by different rules and on different designs of board. No one has ever managed to reconstruct quite how any of these games worked in detail (it is rather like trying to figure out how to play Monopoly without the instructions or any of the pieces or the cards). But, despite that, one common type of board offers some memorable glimpses of the atmosphere of play and the attitudes of the players. These boards were made for a game that clearly involved moving pieces across thirty-six points, arranged in three rows of twelve, each row divided into two groups of six. But taking the place of the ‘squares’ that are usually found on a modern board are letters of the alphabet, and the players moved their pieces from letter to letter. The letters are often carefully arranged to read as words, so that the boards proclaim some snappy slogans: in six words of six letters each. These were some of the mottoes of bar culture and of the gamers themselves.
A few are slightly dourly moralising, reflecting on the downsides of the very activity that the boards were designed for. ‘The nasty dots on the dice compel even the skilled player to play by luck’ (INVIDA PUNCTA IUBENT FELICE LUDERE DOCTUM) or ‘The board is a circus. Retire when you’re beaten. You don’t know how to play’ (TABULA CIRCUS BICTUS RECEDE LUDERE NESCIS). More are triumphalist in a very Roman way, even if they hark back to rather old triumphs. ‘The Parthians have been slaughtered, the Briton conquered, play on, Romans’ (PARTHI OCCISI BRITTO VICTUS LUDITE ROMANI), as one board probably of the third century CE proclaims. Others stress a down-to-earth popular hedonism, referring to the races in the Circus Maximus (‘The circus is packed, the people shout, the citizens are having fun’, CIRCUS PLENUS CLAMOR POPULI GAUDIA CIVIUM) or to even simpler pleasures of life. On the steps of the Forum at Timgad, one board sums it all up with ‘Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that’s living’ (VENARI LAVARE LUDERE RIDERE OCCEST VIVERE).
These slogans undercut some of the stern disapproval of the Roman elite, capturing the banter and zest of bar life, the pleasure that ordinary people could take in being Roman (from circuses to conquest), and a no-nonsense view of what amounted to good living and contentment. It was with slogans like these that the average Pompeian laundry worker sat down in the evening in his local bar, with a glass or two of wine (mixed with hot water), a friend, a board and some dice – and dreamt about gambling his way into a better life.
86. Another variant on ‘The Circus is packed …’ Here the last line (now broken on the right) reads IANUAE TENSAE – ‘the doors are heaving’.
One or two did get lucky. A scrawled graffito at Pompeii records the delight of one winner at his gaming victory in a nearby town: ‘I won at Nuceria, playing dice, 855 1/2 denarii. Honestly, it’s true.’ It was, as the excitement of the scrawler makes clear, an almost unbelievable win and a substantial sum; at four sesterces to the denarius, it amounted to almost 4,000 sesterces, or roughly four times the annual salary of a Roman soldier. It must have made a big difference to the winner. He cannot have been desperately poor in the first place. As the shrewd Augustus realised, gambling always required a stake and, even in the bars and on street corners, was the pastime of those with a bit of spare cash. Presumably a win of this size would have meant improved lodgings, new clothes, faster transport (500 sesterces would buy a new mule) and better food and wine (one sesterce, according to a surviving Pompeian price list, would buy a glass, or pitcher, of the best Falernian vintage, four times the cost of the local plonk). But, whatever the paranoia of the elite, none of this was likely to undermine the foundation of the social order.