A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (31 page)

At this point, his valet enters with water in a silver bowl for him to wash his hands and face and helps him to dress – his underwear, which he exchanges for what he had been sleeping in;
his tunic with a broad purple stripe running down
the middle, which indicates his senatorial rank, his black patrician shoes, each with a little silver or ivory crescent on
the instep with the same significance. Next he is shaved – in soapless Ancient Rome, a barbarous and agonizing daily event but obligatory for gentlemen (for custom dictated a beardless
countenance) and though the iron razor (none, of course, extant) was sharp, facial cuts were common and hair was often removed with tweezers or some other depilatory. Julius Caesar, a strict dandy,
suffered particularly. Nero had the world’s best barber. Quintus has his own but most Romans went to the neighbourhood shop, sometimes in the open air, and bled when the barber was jostled by
the crowd; indeed, there are lawsuits arising from such injury – and, contrariwise, stories of successful practitioners retiring with a fortune. When the Emperor Hadrian grew a beard to
conceal a scar and the fashion was allowed, upper-class Romans, who for centuries had been painfully clean-shaven, must have been mightily relieved. His barber also dresses his hair, not as
complicated a procedure as that for his wife, whose hair might be piled elaborately on her head, like Marie Antoinette (the times that an angry matron had hit her hairdresser with a mirror or had
her flogged for fumbling over a kiss-curl were already part of Roman folklore). Bald men wore wigs and Sulla, once so handsome but suffering from psoriasis, as painful as it was unsightly, had one
of ginger curls which, until they realized who he was, made people laugh; alternatively imitation hair was painted on bare parts of the head; but let us give Quintus a reasonable head of hair and
allow him to have his simple breakfast – milk, honey and bread – in peace. His valet helps him with his toga, also obligatory for any citizen of standing (only a full Roman citizen
could wear one), but often, especially in hot weather, an affliction and needing a certain amount of skill to arrange the
impressive folds. Quintus is now ready to meet his
clientes,
which have assembled in his reception hall.

These are citizens, sometimes poor relations, who have difficulty in making ends meet without a private dole from a great man. Quintus is not dangerously rich or powerful, nor does he have the
patronage of some great office of state – controlling the water supply or the corn, or being about to govern a province – but he is important enough to have, and in a sense to
need, hangers-on for mutual support. His money, which he does not handle himself, comes from rents of property in Rome, estates in Sicily and North Africa and farms dotted all over Italy and is
enough to enable him to keep up a
train de vie
as elegant as any eighteenth-century nobleman, including the maintenance of villas in Puteoli and Antium, the occasional heavy flutter on the
horses, the purchase of jewels for his wife, the odd visit (in an anonymous sedan chair) to the most expensive brothel in Rome (for although a good man he is not a puritan) and finally, but
crucially, the daily gifts to his clients. Originally these came in the shape of parcels of food, which the hungry client might cook in the street outside, but nowadays money was the form. In
return for this patronage, which might be brutal and mean or tender and generous, according to the mood and disposition of the patron (clients were not allowed moods), Quintus was applauded
whenever and wherever – he would be an unusual Roman if he did not enjoy declaiming his own verse – he spoke, be it at a law court as a character witness or on the floor of the
Senate.

Quintus has dealt with his clients – all, like him, in togas but some quite threadbare and in colours which do not show marks – one by one, according to teir status. A typical
reception of a
patronus
might include a
praetor
(to help in an election campaign), a tribune, a knight (offering an investment
in a shipload of silk), a poet, an
artist (who had heard that Quintus planned to build a private bath), an architect (ditto), a bum or two, one or two freedmen and even a slave. All would have addressed him as
‘dominus’
(Lord); all would have received something, if only an invitation to dinner; a few would have been told to return to the
domus
to receive their present because
Quintus needs their presence during the day to help him with his shopping, which today involves the purchase of a new slave. In Rome the men, at all social levels, were responsible for purchases
and also the collection of the corn dole. They always left the house, the women rarely did. The wives of the poor had their chores but those of the rich had nothing to do save gossip, intrigue
(socially and sexually), look after their money and contemplate divorce, which was often instigated by them.
⁶⁰

Quintus is now ready to go to the Forum, a mile away. He does not take the sedan chair, nor the litter with the six hunky Germans in scarlet livery, but decides, it being a fine day, if cold, to
walk. This, in a toga, is no light undertaking
⁶¹
and Quintus, a favourite client on either side, an
accountant to hold his purse,
servants to clear the way for him, is the centre of an impressive little procession. Should a consul pass, preceded by his
lictors
, he will stop and, if he is wearing a hat, remove it. If he
sees a friend and equal, he will embrace him effusively. (In this way, it was often objected, Romans of rank passed their colds on to each other.)

Although this is an ordinary day, with no festival and no Games, the Forum is crowded – with gamblers playing dice, beggars (including a soldier with a wooden leg), a hired claque
applauding unconvincingly, a man declaiming some verse plagiarized from Virgil, a group of noisy fellows, linen-clad and with shaven heads, proclaiming the end of the world, a man carrying a tray
of loaves, another pushing a tiny cart containing an enormous turbot. On an impulse Quintus buys it. Apart from mullet, turbot is the most expensive fish known in Rome and it will impress his chief
dinner guest, a
quaestor
who has just returned
⁶²
from a tour in Britain and is now at the treasury in Rome.

Rome pullulated with people of every race, voluntary emigrants attracted to the great city from the provinces but also the descendants of prisoners-of-war brought in as slaves, some of whom
Quintus might have among his
clientes
and who could only litigate through his sponsorship. Indeed the crowd in the Forum would be a macrocosm of his own household – Gauls, Spaniards,
Thracians, Cappadocians (from eastern Turkey), Syrians, Greeks, Galatians,
Numidians, Macedonians; Jews he would not have employed because of their odd habits, strange diet
and unavailability to work every seventh day, licensed by their first protector, Julius Caesar.

Quintus sends a servant for a copy of the
Daily News,
posted up by the rostra in the Forum; he is going to attend upon Nero and should know what is (officially) happening. Presently, with
his little retinue, he climbs the Palatine Hill to the palace of Nero and makes his way through the curious crowd by the gates – who had nothing to fear from the rapacity and jealousy of
their Emperor; indeed they liked him. Quintus hoped Nero would be in a good mood and wondered if he would be searched for a concealed weapon, since the Emperor had taken such a hatred for men of
his class. (We are in early AD 64, when the death of his mentors, Seneca and Burrus, and the murder of his mother had removed any restraint from the twenty-seven-year-old
ruler of the world.) Quintus is officially a ‘friend of the Emperor’, who likes to see him at court, and even more, Quintus remembers uneasily, likes to see him applaud his increasingly
common performances in his theatre. Our friend is handed to a freedman, who acts as usher, and presented unsearched to the Emperor, who receives him graciously enough with a kiss and even remembers
his name. Nero is wearing not a toga but a sort of silk dressing-gown with a kerchief round a fattish neck. His eyes are grey-blue and slightly protuberant, his legs are slender but he is
developing a paunch, his hair is yellowish, his fingers are covered with rings, his skin is blotchy and he stinks of perfume, but, one has to admit, as Quintus will to his dinner guests that
evening (omitting, because there are spies everywhere, the other details), the man has charm.

Nero apparently has no need of Quintus’ counsel this morning, nor (and Quintus thanks his favourite god, Apollo)
has he been bidden to dine at the palace, the meal
being a marathon which started at noon and often did not end before midnight. Normal Romans had their
cena
(supper) at the end of the working day, which incidentally, for all the 150 types
of artisan differentiated by the great Professor Waltzing, lasted no longer than that of the average worker in the European Community today. The
prandium
(lunch) was no more than a snack of
bread, cold meat, fruit and vegetables with a glass of wine, served with little ceremony, but for which Quintus returns home, as he could not be seen in any of the thousands of wine shops in the
city of Rome. Lunch is not substantial enough nor is the weather hot enough for Quintus to take a siesta, so he returns to the Forum to attend to his business. He tells his banker in the Basilica
to send a draft to a nephew studying in Rhodes – the money will be in Athens in four days – and asks him whether, in his view, silk is a good investment these days? (It is; hasn’t
he noticed the number of weddings announced in today’s gazette?) Which reminds him, he must not forget to go to a betrothal at the Temple of Julia for a granddaughter of the great Caesar; he
witnesses the signing and sealing of a will, taken for safekeeping to the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, he attends the manumission, before a magistrate, of a friend’s slave who had been his
secretary for six years, he decides not to appear as a character witness for an official charged with extortion in Syria, because he has heard the jurors have been satisfactorily bribed, and he
also funks attending a declamation by an actor of a another friend’s poems at a hall he has hired for the occasion, but he goes to the street of booksellers, just behind the Forum, in search
of a little light pornography. Books, or more properly, scrolls, on rollers like the Torah in synagogues, were more plentiful in Ancient Rome than printed books in eighteenth-century Europe and
cost
less. Quintus is not a great scholar but he shares the view that a gentleman should have a well-stocked library.

He has promised his wife that he will buy another cupbearer to replace the current incumbent (called, not too originally, Ganymede), who is growing too hairy and can be sent to the help the
gardener, who is growing too old. In the slave market, still accompanied by his little suite of attendants, Quintus notices without interest the adult slaves, chained and naked, shivering in the
courtyard with their nationalities, professions and recommendations written on a board round their necks. Having declared his requirement, he is ushered by the dealer into an inner room, where a
brazier is alight and the choicest merchandise (equally unclothed, indeed with genitalia scrupulously shaved) is displayed. He is shocked by the price of a fair-haired blue-eyed boy – from
Britain perhaps? – and remembers his wife’s warning not to bring back anything too pretty, as ‘they spell trouble’. The slave dealer comments: ‘You can see, my lord,
that the boy has been very well looked after.’ ‘Perhaps a little too well,’ Quintus replies. ‘I find him on the plump side; a few pounds lighter and he’ll fetch a
fortune’, and with this excuse he chooses a plain but friendly, smiling, fine-boned Numidian, who will match one of his wife’s bedroom slaves. The accountant, since blacks are cheaper
than whites, nods in approval. (Even so this purchase sets him back the equivalent of £8,000 in modern money.) The new slave will also be called Ganymede.

On the way to the baths he orders nine garlands from a shop which only sells this commodity, a minor industry in Rome; but first he sends the new boy to his
domus
with a slave and a note
saying he wants his litter to be at the baths in two hours’ time, hoping to be sufficiently fatigued not to face the climb back up the hill. With his valet, Quintus then
makes his way to the gymnasium attached to the baths to work out with his wrestler and play with a heavy stuffed ball. This will give him an appetite and keep him in trim. Like all
Romans of his class, he has a horror of corpulence, the characteristic of gladiator trainers, slave dealers – and Emperors.

In 33 BC Agrippa made a census of the
thermae
of Rome and counted 170. While a city
aedile
he subsidized the entrance fee to the level of a quarter of an
‘as’
– the smallest coin – so that citizens could luxuriate in these palaces of pleasure for little money and for hours of their day. In Quintus’ time the grandest of these
establishments, the baths of Diocletian and Caracalla, spreading over thirteen and seventeen hectares respectively, were not yet built. The baths behind the Pantheon were favourite with patricians,
so it is there he goes, the new baths of Nero being too hot for his taste.

When first introduced, the concept of nudity offended the Romans’ sensibilities, smacking, they thought, of Greek decadence and exhibitionism, but the practice soon caught on (though the
sexes were separated, not by rooms but by hours of attendance). To wrestle, Quintus strips and is covered with an unguent of wax and oil, then with a layer of dust. He can play a variety of games,
a sort of fives or
pelota,
or punch a heavy stuffed ball or exercise with dumb-bells. Quite senior citizens, even sometimes the Emperor, cavorted with their friends, indistinguishably equal
in their sports tunics, save that a rich old man might have a slave to hand him a ball he had dropped and would certainly bring his own man to rub him down. Dirty and sweaty, Quintus goes to a
dressing room, sumptously decorated, unlike the clinical changing rooms of our era, then to one of the
sudatoria
or dry baths to work up a sweat, and on to the
caldarium
where he lies
down and is sprinkled with hot water before his body is
scraped with the strigil. Last he runs to the
frigidarium
and dives into the cold pool. The Elder Pliny, Martial
and Petronius, who adds that his hero (or villain) Trimalchio picks up his dinner guests somewhere along the routine, all recommend this procedure as conducive to the Roman ideal of
mens sana in
corpore sano;
indeed the comfort and grandeur and cleanliness of the Roman baths, egalitarian and almost free, must have offset the horror and stink of much of everyday life in the world
outside.