Swallows and serpents

Given the huge gulf between the haves and the have-nots in the Roman world, why was there not more open social and political conflict? How was it that in the city of Rome, the emperor and a few thousand of the wealthy, plus their slave staff, managed to monopolise acres of land, including sprawling mansions and spacious pleasure parks around the city’s edge, when close to a million people were crammed into the space left over? Why, to put it in terms of the fable, did the swallows not rise up in revolt against the serpents?

One answer is that there was probably more conflict than is recorded, even if it was for the most part guerrilla warfare rather than outright revolt: rotten eggs thrown at the curtains of passing sedan chairs rather than coordinated assaults on the gates of the imperial palace. Roman writers did not have much of an eye for moderate levels of unrest. But emperors were certainly anxious about the kind of reception they would receive when they went to public games and spectacles. And, although public order did not repeatedly break down under the rule of the emperors as it had in the conflicts of the late Republic, there is evidence of occasional violent riots in Rome and in other towns of the empire. The main cause was disruption to the food supply. In 51 CE Claudius was pelted with bread in the Forum (an odd weapon in a food shortage, you might think) and had to be smuggled into the palace by a back door. At roughly the same time, in Aspendus in modern Turkey, one local official only narrowly escaped being burned alive by an angry crowd protesting against the landowners who had locked their grain away, intending it for export. But food was not the only issue.

In 61 CE, a leading senator was murdered by one of his slaves, and the senate decided to follow the traditional rules for such a crime, which insisted that all of the victim’s slaves be put to death along with the guilty party (the threat of such a punishment was meant to encourage slaves to inform on one another). On this occasion, there were 400 of them altogether, all innocent. The people took to the streets in outrage at the severity of what was proposed and in a display of solidarity between the slaves and the free population, many of whom would have once been slaves themselves. But even though a significant number of senators were on the side of the rioters, the emperor Nero brought the troops in to prevent trouble and had the sentence carried out.

Another answer is that, despite the vast disparities of wealth, the disdain of the elite for the less fortunate, and the glaring double standards, there was a greater cultural overlap between the rich and at least the ‘middling’ people of Rome, or those on the lower floors of the insula blocks, than we might imagine. Scratch the surface, and the two cultures prove to be more permeable than they first seem, the outlook of the swallows not always so drastically different from the outlook of the serpents.

We have already seen some hints of that. The speech bubbles in the bar and the cleverly written epitaphs (sometimes composed as poetry, with all the complex rules governing that in Latin) suggest a world where the ability to read and write was taken for granted. There have been endless, inconclusive debates in recent years about exactly how many of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were literate. Across the Roman world as a whole, country and town, the number may have been very low, well under 20 per cent of adult men. But it must have been much higher than that in urban communities, where many small traders, craftsmen and slaves would have needed some level of basic literacy and numeracy to function successfully in their jobs (taking the orders, counting the cash, organising deliveries and so on). There are indications too that ‘functional literacy’ of that sort gave even the ‘middling’ people some stake in what we would think of as high classical culture.

There are more than fifty quotations from the poetry of Virgil scrawled as graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. That certainly does not mean that the Aeneid or his other poems were widely read in their entirety. The majority of the quotes are of the first words of the first book of the Aeneid(‘Arma virumque cano’, ‘Arms and the man I sing’) or the first words of the second book (‘Conticuere omnes’, ‘Everyone fell silent’) – lines that had probably become as quotable as ‘To be or not to be’. And many of them might have been the work of rich lads, for whom Virgil was a school textbook; it is a fallacy to imagine that only the poor write on walls. But it would be implausible to suppose that all of these scrawlings had a rich pedigree.

The signs are that, even if in bite-sized chunks, Virgil’s poetry was one shared cultural commodity, to be quoted, adapted and even used for jokes and play. The façade of one Pompeian laundry was decorated with a scene taken from the story of the Aeneid, showing the hero Aeneas leading his father and son from the wreckage of Troy, on their way to found the new Troy in Italy. Just nearby some joker scrawled, in a parody of the famous first line of the poem, ‘Fullones ululamque cano, non arma virumque’ – ‘The fullers and their owl I sing, not arms and the man’ (referring to the bird that was a trade mascot of the laundry business). It was hardly high culture, but it does point to a shared frame of reference between the world of the street and the world of classic literature.

An even more striking case of that is found in the decoration of a bar designed in the second century CE in the port town of Ostia. The main theme of the painting is the standard ancient line-up of Greek philosophers and gurus traditionally grouped under the title of ‘The Seven Sages’: they include Thales of Miletus, the sixth-century BCE thinker famous for claiming that water was the origin of the universe, and his rough contemporaries Solon of Athens, an almost legendary lawgiver, and Chilon of Sparta, another early luminary and intellectual. Some of the paintings have not survived, but originally the full seven would have been there, shown seated on elegant chairs and carrying scrolls. But there was a surprise. For each of them was accompanied by a slogan not on their specialist subjects of politics, science, law or ethics – but on defecation, and running along a familiar scatological theme (see plate 15).

Above Thales ran the words ‘Thales advised those who shit hard to really work at it’; above Solon, ‘To shit well Solon stroked his belly’; and above Chilon, ‘Cunning Chilon taught how to fart without making a noise.’ Beneath the Sages there was another row of figures, all sitting together on a communal multiseater lavatory (a normal arrangement in the Roman world). They too are uttering lavatorial mottoes: for example, ‘Jump up and down and you’ll go quicker’ and ‘It’s coming’.

One way of explaining this is as an aggressive popular joke against elite culture. The ordinary boys in the bar were enjoying some scatological fun against the pillars of the elite intellectual establishment, by seeing their wisdom in terms of the lavatory. And that must be one side of it: bringing high thoughts down to the level of defecation. But it was more complicated than that. These slogans do not only assume a literate audience, or at least enough literates among the customers to be able to read the slogans to the non-literates. In order to devise and to get the joke here you also had to know something about the Seven Sages; if Thales of Miletus meant absolutely nothing to you, then his advice on defecation was hardly funny. In order to take a swipe against the pretensions of intellectual life, you had to have some knowledge of it.

There are many ways to imagine the life in this bar: the rowdy guffawing at the lavatorial humour, the occasional discussion about what exactly Chilon’s claim to fame was, the bantering with the landlord, the flirtation with the waiting staff. The customers would have come for all kinds of reasons: to get a good, hot meal, to enjoy an evening in jollier and warmer surroundings than they had at home or simply to get drunk. Some would have been the sort to dream of the riches that came with a lucky throw of the dice. Others would have believed that it was better to put up with your lot in life rather than lose the little extra you had on the gaming board. Many would have resented the arrogance and disdain, the double standards and the lifestyle of their rich neighbours; lack of zoning in Roman cities may have had its equitable side, but it also meant that the poor constantly had their noses rubbed in the privilege of others.

What all would have agreed, both rich and poor, was that to be rich was a desirable state, that poverty was to be avoided if you possibly could. Just as the ambition of Roman slaves was usually to gain freedom for themselves, not to abolish slavery as an institution, so the ambitions of the poor were not radically to reconfigure the social order but to find a place for themselves nearer the top of the hierarchy of wealth. Apart from a very few philosophical extremists, no one in the Roman world seriously believed that poverty was honourable – until the growth of Christianity, which we shall explore further in the next chapter. The idea that the rich man might have a problem entering the kingdom of heaven would have seemed as preposterous to those hanging out in our Ostian bar as to the plutocrat in his mansion.