Gaius Julius Zoilos
It is with the story of one of those bilinguals that we end this chapter. Gaius Julius Zoilos is not a familiar name. He was no Polybius, Scipio Barbatus, Cicero or Pliny; he has left no writing (except a few words on stone) and is never once mentioned in the surviving literature of the Roman world. But different periods of Roman history are captured by different kinds of people. Zoilos, an ex-slave, imperial agent and wealthy benefactor of his home town, stands for many of the themes of the Roman Empire. At the same time he is a powerful reminder of those many Roman life stories that are almost hidden from history and are still being pieced together.
All we know about Zoilos has been revealed in excavations, mostly over the past fifty years, of the small Roman town of Aphrodisias, in what is now southern Turkey, which must have been his original – and final – home. His elaborate tomb has been discovered there, which gives a glimpse of his appearance, though tantalisingly most of his face has not survived. He is mentioned in a letter from the future emperor Augustus, written in 39 or 38 BCE and inscribed on stone by the Aphrodisians in their city centre: ‘You know how fond I am of my Zoilos’ are the exact words. And building projects that Zoilos sponsored in the town, from a new stage at the theatre to a major restoration of the main temple, blazoned his name as benefactor and philanthropist. From all these it is possible to reconstruct the outline of his career.
He was almost certainly born free, just plain Zoilos, sometime in the first half of the first century BCE but was taken into slavery – likely by pirates or people traffickers but possibly as a prisoner of war in one of the many conflicts of the period. He ended up in Rome as a slave, and agent, of Julius Caesar, who gave him his freedom and with it Roman citizenship and the Roman name of Gaius Julius Zoilos. He went on to work closely with the first Augustus, who knew him well enough to claim fondness, before returning to his home town as an extremely wealthy man, probably enriched by the booty from Caesar’s campaigns, which trickled down even to slaves and ex-slaves. There he built himself into prominence in the traditional way and at his death, probably sometime in the reign of Augustus, was given a monumental tomb at public expense. If an epitaph found in Rome to a ‘son of Zoilos’ refers to his son (there were other men called Zoilos in the Roman world), then some of his family did not return to Aphrodisias with their father. For this ‘Tiberius Julius Pappus, son of Zoilos’ is commemorated as the head librarian of the emperor’s libraries in the mid first century CE, through the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius and Claudius.
102. A reconstruction of the sculpture of Zoilos’ tomb, with the best preserved figure of the man himself (left). On the left hand side of the sculpture he appears in markedly Roman idiom (orating and clad in a toga). On the right hand side he is very much the Greek.
It is Zoilos’ tomb at Aphrodisias that captures the culture of empire best, a vast square pile decorated with an elaborate sculptured frieze around its base, which even in the fragments that survive features Zoilos more than once, in crucially different guises. On the best-preserved side of the monument were two images of the dead man, clearly named, being crowned. On the left, he is being honoured by the very Roman figures of Virtus, with her shield, and Honos (‘Manly Heroism’ or ‘Prestige’). On the right, it is the turn of his local ‘people’ and his ‘city’. But it is the differences between the two outfits of Zoilos that are the key. On the left he is dressed in a distinctively Roman toga, one arm is raised as if to address an audience, and in the other hand he probably held a scroll. On the right he is shown in a Greek cloak, or chlamys, with a characteristically Greek hat on his head.
The monument underlines Zoilos’ success, his wealth, his social mobility and his mobility across the Roman world. But most of all it shows him creating his identity in two very different forms, here seen side by side. In the culture of the Roman Empire, it was possible to be both Greek and Roman.
1. Maccari depicts an implausibly lavish senate house for Cicero’s appearance on 8 November 63 BCE. It emphasises the isolation of Catiline (bottom right), from whom all the other senators keep a careful distance. That evening he left Rome to join his army.
2. Cicero’s conflict with Catiline has been the source of modern humour. Thirty years before Maccari’s tribute to Cicero, under the same title ‘Cicero denounces Catiline’, the scene was given a comic spin. Cicero is a parody of nineteenth-century political outrage, Catiline a gangster – and a few of the senators are already asleep.
3. In Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the ‘Rape of the Sabines’ (1637–8), Romulus on the left calmly commands the scene from above. But Poussin makes clear the terrified and resistant women are being dragged off in what is little short of a violent battle. Pablo Picasso (1962) intensifies the horror of the story. The almost disintegrating bodies of the woman make a bitter contrast with the larger than life Roman warriors and their trampling horses.
4. Titian’s version of ‘Tarquin and Lucretia’ (1571) confronts, rather than sanitises, the brutality of rape. Lucretia is presented as vulnerable, with tears in her eyes; Tarquin as a violent aggressor (with his jabbing knee and glinting dagger). Just emerging from the curtain in the background is the hand of the young slave whom Tarquin threatened to kill along with his victim, to make them look guilty of shameful adultery.
5. A glimpse into the world of Rome in the fourth century BCE – and a rare example of high quality artistic production at that period. These are the handles of the ‘Ficoroni Cista’, an elaborate bronze casket, so-called after its eighteenth-century collector. The inscription on the object records that it was made at Rome by Novios Plautios, and was given to her daughter by a woman called Dindia Macolnia.
6. This painting from an early third-century tomb at Rome offers a contemporary glimpse of the Samnite Wars. Fighting on the lowest register includes a figure (on the right) with a large plumed helmet. Above the apparent scenes of ‘surrender’ outside the battlement have sometimes been differently interpreted. Is perhaps the toga-clad ‘Fabius’ on the right giving some kind of military decoration to a Roman – not a Samnite – soldier on the left?
7. Scenes of fighting from the François Tomb at Vulci (mid fourth century BCE) hint at an Etruscan view of some of the characters in Roman history. Written labels identify the figure on the far left as ‘Macstrna’ or Mastarna who was, according to the emperor Claudius identical with Servius Tullius. On the far right ‘Aule Vipenas’ or Aulus Vivenna (perhaps a lost Roman king) dispatches an enemy.
8. Remnants of the First Punic War raised from the bottom of the sea off Sicily: here one of the rams of the warships. Several of these have writing stamped into the bronze. On the Roman rams we can read traces of officialdom: ‘Lucius Quinctius the son of Gaius, the quaestor, approved this ram.’ On the one surviving inscribed Carthaginian ram, we read: ‘We pray to Baal that this ram will go into this enemy ship and make a big hole.’ It is a clear contrast in national ‘style’.
9. The most famous modern reconstruction of the Roman triumphal procession is by Andrea Mantegna, whose series of ‘The Triumphs of Caesar’ was painted for the Gonzaga family of Mantua in the late fifteenth century. This panel shows Caesar on his Renaissance-style triumphal chariot. Behind him stands the slave whose job was to whisper in the triumphant general’s ear to remind him that he was, despite the glory, just a man.
10. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, the pair and rival of the more famous Column of Trajan, still stands almost forty metres high in central Rome. Spiralling all around it are scenes from the emperor’s wars on the Danube that went on for most of his reign (161–180 CE). On the lowest level the bearded emperor is shown sacrificing. On the third level (above) a battle is waged around a German hut.
11. The emperor Caracalla’s family. This painted wooden panel shows his father the emperor Septimius Severus with his mother Julia Domna behind. In front on the right is the young Caracalla; on the left the face of his brother, the murdered Geta, has been rubbed out.
12. A characteristic image of Livia, the wife of the first Augustus, sculpted in shiny – and expensive – black basalt from Egypt. Her hairstyle, with a roll of hair at the front and a bun at the back, was highly traditional, signalling old-fashioned Roman virtues.
13. One vivid trace of the luxury of the imperial court are the remains of the pleasure barges that the emperor Gaius had constructed on Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills, between 37 and 41 CE. Though they were heavily damaged in World War II, some of the extravagant fitments and interior decoration still survive – like this bronze head of the snake-haired Medusa, which fitted over the end of one the wooden beams.
14. One image of Roman dining. This painting from Pompeii captures the hierarchies of a Roman party (note the small figure of a slave at the bottom left removing the guest’s shoe) and the fantasies of excess (on the right another guest is already being sick). Although this particular occasion appears to be an all-male gathering, that was not the Roman norm.
15. The Bar of the Seven Sages at Ostia. Here the great thinker ‘Solon … of Athens’ (his name is written in Greek on either side of him) watches the scene from his lavatory, while his advice on defecation appears above: ‘To shit well (ut bene cacaret) Solon stroked his belly’.
16. A Roman slave collar. The tag offers a reward if the slave should have escaped: ‘I have run away, catch me. Take me back to my master Zoninus and you will get a reward.’ It is possible that some of these collars were intended for animal rather than human property. But the fact that we cannot now be certain of the difference between them tells its own story.
17. A gold bracelet found near Pompeii, inscribed ‘Dominus suae ancillae’ – ‘From the master to his slave girl’. It may be a touching token of the man’s affection and a hint at intimacy between the two. What the slave girl’s attitude was to the present (and to the giver) we can only guess.
18. Three scenes from life in a laundry at Pompeii. At the top, workers are treading the cloth. In the centre, one man is brushing a piece of cloth, another carries a frame with an owl on top (a mascot of the laundry trade), while in the corner a customer waits with her maid. At the bottom, a woman on the left is collecting some article of clothing, and other garments hang on a line overhead.
19. A seal stone in carnelian commemorating the victory at Actium in 31 BCE. It shows Octavian in the guise of the god Neptune, carrying a trident and mounting a sea-chariot. The name of the engraver, or the owner, Popil(ius) Alb(anus) is written in Greek letters across the top.
20. The ‘Great Cameo of France’ dates to the reign of Tiberius and represents the imperial world order. Augustus, now a god, is reclining in heaven. In the middle register, Tiberius sits on the throne, flanked by his mother Livia. At the bottom, the conquered barbarians are in their place. It has been in France since the thirteenth century (hence the name), and was then misidentified as a biblical scene of Joseph at the Court of the Egyptian Pharaoh.
21. The ‘Peutinger Table’ (so called after one of its early owners) is a version of a map of the Roman empire made in the thirteenth century, but very likely based ultimately on the map displayed in first-century BCE Rome by Augustus and Agrippa. In our terms, it is more a route diagram than a map, almost seven metres long, showing the roads, rivers and towns of the empire. This section shows the Nile delta, with part of Crete to the left, and Asia Minor above.