A History of the Roman World (53 page)

This reaction against
palliatae
favoured the production of
togatae
. Titinius, a late rival of Plautus, solved the difficult problem of presenting the love story of Greek comedy in a Roman setting without offending Roman taste by choosing for his scene the free society of Italian village communities. The recovery of his lost plays, such as
The Lady of the Dye Shop
or
The Dancing Girl of Ferentinum
, would throw a welcome light on social conditions on which we have little contemporary evidence.

At Rome, as elsewhere, prose developed more slowly than poetry. It served law and government, legal and annalistic purposes, but it was long before history was written in Latin. The first Roman historian, Fabius Pictor, wrote an account of Rome from its origins in Greek, partly because his own language had not become flexible and partly as propaganda to impress the Greek world with the growing importance of the Roman people. His example was followed by Cincius Alimentus, who had been captured by Hannibal, by the son of Scipio Africanus, by Albinus the consul of 151, and by Acilius. Some of these works were later translated into Latin. Poetry might be left to freedmen, but those who had contributed to the making of Roman history naturally wished to leave some record of Rome’s struggles.

The father of Latin prose was Cato the Censor. He wrote a history in Latin, thereby setting an example which was followed by the annalists of the Gracchan era. This account of Rome’s development from early times down to Cato’s own time was called the
Origines
(see p. 370). Cato wrote other books, including an encyclopaedia which contained treatises on rhetoric, medicine and agriculture, and probably also on military affairs and law. His only surviving work is the
De agri cultura
, a practical manual of household economy and estate management; its style, modernized by later copyists, was prosaic, terse and simple. Of his speeches about 150 were known to Cicero; the style
is blunt, vigorous and vivid, and Cato followed the advice which he gave to his son: ‘
rem tene, verba sequentur
.’ We hear of orators who preceded him: for instance, the stirring speech in which Appius Claudius denounced treating with Pyrrhus remained a Roman classic. Appius’ other literary activities included the authorship of
Sayings
inspired by Pythagorean doctrine, and a reform of Roman writing. Reference is made to the funeral speeches delivered by Fabius Cunctator for his son and by Q. Caecilius Metellus for his father. Ennius hailed Cethegus, the consul of 204, as ‘the very heart of persuasion’ (
suadae medulla
), while the elder Scipio, Sempronius Gracchus and Aemilius Paullus had good reputations as orators. Sextus Aelius Paetus, consul of 198, composed a legal handbook named
Tripertita
, which contained the text of the Twelve Tables, their interpretation, and forms of lawsuits. The work was regarded as the ‘cradle of the law’ (
cunabula iuris
).

That early Roman prose was as formless as the English prose of Chaucer is shown by early inscriptions, the rambling Duilian inscription or a passage from Ennius’
Euhemerus
quoted by Lactantius. But the necessity of public debate in the Senate-house, Forum and law courts forced men to argue lucidly and to dignify their expressions in accord with the gravity of their themes. Cato might care little for the sound or rhythm of his words, but his earnestness to drive home his points must have shaped his words more keenly than a mere academic study of Greek rhetoric would have done. It was Roman public life, more than the inspiration of Greek models, that moulded the early prose into a language which under Cicero’s genius became ‘the prose of the human race’.

The enthusiasm for Greek art in the nineteenth century obscured the existence of Roman art, which was regarded as a pale and debased reflection of its Hellenic prototype. Even after Wickhoff’s discovery that Roman art had a separate existence, it was usually identified with the art of the Empire. But this is no longer possible. The existence of the primitive Italic stock, on which Etruscan and Greek shoots were grafted, has been recognized, though it is not always easy to see it distinctly through the luxuriant foreign growth. The Romans were not an artistic people in the same sense that the Athenians had been; their individualistic instincts might offend Greek aesthetic canons, but their realism was no less an expression of national character than was Greek idealism. The products of the Bronze Age and the Villanovans may not have reached a high standard of artistic perfection, but at least they contained the germs of a native art. This was fertilized by the Etruscans whose art had developed rapidly as a result of wider foreign contacts. But the evolution of Etruscan art was carried through on Italian soil and it is impossible to determine the
share taken in this process by peoples of early Italic stock. Even if Etruscan art is set at its lowest level as deriving its whole vitality from Greece (and many would demur from so harsh a criticism), yet it cannot be denied that by fidelity to Ionic models it stimulated artistic production in many parts of Italy; and others would concede that the Italic background gave it something of value.
⁹
It was through the Etruscans that Rome first came into contact with Greek art, but early in the fifth century she saw something of it first-hand. During the fifth and most of the fourth century Etruscan art was depressed, but it revived towards the end of the fourth. Rome’s widening influence then brought her first into Campania, where a flourishing Osco-Samnite variety of Italic art had succeeded the earlier culture of Etruscans and Greeks, and secondly into Magna Graecia and Sicily. But though ‘captive Greece overcame her savage conqueror and introduced the arts into rustic Latium’ she did not entirely overwhelm native characteristics.

Of the individual arts reference has been made elsewhere to architecture: to the development of temple and city architecture under the Etruscans at Rome, where the high Italic
podium
and round hut-like temples were not entirely superseded; to the Greek style used for the temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera; and to the victory of the Hellenistic over the Tuscan style in the second century when Greek basilicas and temples began to adorn the city. The appearance of early Roman statues, the
ars statuaria vetustissima
mentioned by Pliny, may be judged from the Etruscan Apollo of Veii, which despite its Ionian inspiration and technique retains an Italic accentuation of force and violent effort. Besides gods whom the Etruscans anthropomorphized in statuary, men and women were modelled. The great merit of Roman portraiture under the Empire was not achieved in a day; indeed the origin of the portrait bust and the portrait statue goes back to the ‘canopic’ urns from Chiusi which were roughly shaped into human busts. The Etruscan sarcophagi of the early period and of the third and second centuries and the peculiar ash-chests of Volterra afford numerous examples of vivid portraiture. There are many Italic portrait heads of terracotta, limestone and bronze, which are ‘examples of naturalism untouched as yet by Greek idealism or by the Roman insistence upon detail’ (E. Strong,
CAH
, IX, 812). The famous bronze head of Brutus, the first consul, illustrates the Roman love of realism. The production of such works was stimulated by the custom, practised by the noble houses of preserving wax
imagines
of their ancestors in the halls of their houses. These portrait galleries must have greatly influenced the development of Roman portraiture, which was marked by a pitiless realism, far remote from the idealistic strivings of the Greeks to portray a type. The carvings, no less than the figures, on Etruscan sarcophagi and ash-chests influenced Roman work in relief which attempted to grapple with the third dimension; where the Greeks had used a background as a mere screen, the Etrusco-Italic reliefs used it to
emphasize the corporeity of the figures. The fondness for human everyday subjects and the beginnings of the fresco-like ‘continuous’ style go back to the pre-Roman period of Italic art. The achievement of native Roman art, freed from specifically Etruscan and Greek influences, is seen in an alabaster urn of the third or second century, now in the British Museum, depicting in relief an equestrian procession, perhaps the parade of Roman Knights which commemorated the battle of Lake Regillus.

How far the excellence of Etruscan metal work was imitated at Rome is uncertain, but we know that the Ficorini
cista
was made there, and its engravings, though Greek in subject and manner, contain Latin details. Many of the Praenestine mirrors and
cistae
depict scenes from Greek mythology, but others show homelier or comic episodes of Latin life: a girl and youth playing draughts or the kitchen scene of the
cista
Tyszkiewicz. Among the minor arts a series of engraved gems shows distinct Italic workmanship, differing from the Etruscan and Graeco-Roman gems.
¹⁰
The subjects are often religious and reproduce votive pictures set up in shrines or temples as thank-offerings.

The numerous references to painting in Plautus show that in his day this art was popular in Rome. Pliny records seeing paintings in the Latin temple at Ardea which he declared to be older than Rome itself, while only its friable plaster prevented the emperor Claudius from removing a painting from a temple at Lanuvium. The appearance of these early paintings may be guessed from surviving Etruscan paintings which it is often difficult to distinguish from the different Italic groups. Our earliest Roman example is the military fresco from the Esquiline (? third century); in draughtsmanship and arrangement it displays Hellenic influence, but its details are Italic.
¹¹
It is akin to the work of the Osco-Samnite school of Campania, which is illustrated by the splendid Samnite Knight from Capua (
c.
300), the gaily-caparisoned cavaliers with plumed helmets and cloaks returning home from war from Paestum, or the two gladiators, fighting to the last gasp, from Capua. Painting became increasingly popular when in the third century generals set up in temples mural pictures of themselves as triumphator or of their military exploits. Portable pictures of victories were carried in triumphal processions and were also used as political propaganda by electioneering candidates. The poet Pacuvius was famed as a painter, while Demetrius of Alexandria, who came to Rome in the second century, started a vogue in maps and geographical pictures, which may have encouraged the growth of a school of landscape painters; the demand for such work, however, probably did not become extensive until the first century. Further, the claims of religion were answered by votive pictures from the humble, as well as by the self-advertising magnificence of the nobility. Naevius caustically refers to a certain Theodotus who painted with an ox’s tail figures of dancing Lares on altars of the Compitalia; recent excavations at Delos have revealed examples of such rough but vigorous
little sketches of the Lares. The poster advertisement for gladiatorial shows, which Horace’s slaves admired, may have been used before the end of our period (Horace,
Sat.
, ii, 7, 96). But it is difficult to determine whether all these efforts represent the influence of a distinctive Italic national school of painting or, as is perhaps more likely, merely reflect contemporary Hellenistic art.

Roman art owed much to Greece, but it was not purely imitative. It was eclectic and adapted to its own genius what others might offer. Greek architects were primarily concerned with religious buildings, but the Romans devoted as much attention to secular. In two branches the Roman spirit was pre-eminent: in portraiture and later in historical monuments. Thus it is possible to trace, though dimly, the strivings of a practical, but not altogether unimaginative people to assimilate the glories of Greek art: that the waves of Hellenism did not entirely overwhelm the impulses of the native spirit testifies to a rugged independence that developed realistic tendencies which an idealistic Greek might have despised.

During the centuries that separated the early beginnings of the peoples of Italy from the days of their supremacy in the Mediterranean their religious experience was naturally varied. From an animistic stage in which many traces of magic and taboo survived they passed to anthropomorphism and polytheism, and the state relieved the individual of many of his responsibilities to the unseen powers of the universe. There was no prolonged period of national suffering, such as the Jewish Captivity, to break down the barriers of formalism which state ritual erected around real religious feeling, but gradually foreign ideas and rites overlaid the old Roman religion and men sought refuge from scepticism or an empty formalism in the more emotional and mystic beliefs of Greece and the Orient or in the nobler teaching of the later Greek philosophers.

Roman religion was so free from the baser forms of magic and taboo that it is probable that these were deliberately excluded by the state. Yet some traces of earlier beliefs survived in historical times. Totemism, which belongs to a tribal form of society in which family life is unknown, was naturally absent from a people whose life centred around the family. Like the Jews, the Roman authorities tried to eradicate magic as a social factor, but they could not prevent individuals from practising it except under those forms which were harmful to the community. For instance, a spell which aimed at transferring the fertility of the lands of a neighbour to a man’s own fields was expressly forbidden in the Twelve Tables, which also banned anyone who ‘chanted an evil charm’ (‘
Qui fruges excantassit, qui malum carmen incantasset
’, Pliny,
N.H.
, xxviii, 17). But individuals still continued to inscribe spells (
carmina
) and curses
(
dirae
) on tablets (
tabellae defixionum
) for the undoing of their enemies, and Cato could advocate a process of sympathetic magic accompanied by a charm to cure a dislocated limb. Another form of harmless private magic was the survival of the use of amulets, particularly the
bulla
worn by children to avert such danger as the evil eye, and the little swinging figures (
oscilla
) which were hung up at certain festivals to protect the crops. It is improbable that these figures were substitutes for an original human sacrifice, a rite from which the Romans were mainly free. Magical practices also managed to survive here and there in public ceremonies, as, for instance, two forms of sympathetic magic designed originally to procure rain: at the
aquaelicium
a stone (
lapis manalis
) was carried in procession to form the centre of a ‘rain-making’ rite, and on the Ides of May straw puppets were thrown into the Tiber by the Vestal Virgins from the Pons Sublicius. A magical method of increasing fertility survived in the ceremonial whipping during the Lupercalia, well known from Shakespearean allusion; and ‘telepathic’ magic is seen in the reputed power of the Vestal Virgins to stop a runaway slave from leaving Rome by a spell. A belief also in taboo, that a mysterious power in certain objects made them dangerous or unclean, survived at Rome in some aspects, together with the corresponding need for purification or disinfection. Though few traces are found of a blood taboo, many things were considered unclean or holy: new-born children, corpses, strangers, iron, certain places such as shrines or spots struck by lightning, and certain days, particularly thirty-six in the year (
dies religiosi
). The unlucky priest of Jupiter (Flamen Dialis) was subjected to numerous taboos: amongst others he might not touch a goat, horse, dog, raw meat, a corpse, beans, ivy, wheat, or leavened bread: his nails and hair must not be cut with an iron knife, and he must have no knot on his person. But such primitive beliefs in taboo or magic were scarce in historical Rome.

Religion has been defined as ‘the effective desire to be in right relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe’. This Power seemed to the early Romans to manifest itself in the form of impersonal ‘spirits’ (
numina
), which had local habitations, as springs, rivers, groves or trees.
²
Some dwelt in stones which, however, had probably been worshipped as sacred objects in days before an indwelling spirit was conceived: for instance, boundary stones, the
lapis silex
in the shrine of Jupiter Feretrius, and the
lapis manalis
already mentioned. The
numina
gradually assumed functional as well as local aspects, and then received names in an adjectival form to denote their functions. Later the spirit approached more nearly to a definite personality and the priests drew up ‘forms of invocation’ (
indigitamenta
) assigning minor spirits to all the sub-divided activities of human life from Cunina, the spirit of the cradle, to Libitina, that of burial.

Early religious practice was centred in the family, the economic unit of an agricultural people, and was associated with the house and fields, especially
the boundaries. Every important part of the house had its own spirit. The spirit of fire, Vesta, dwelt in the hearth; each day during the chief meal part of a sacred salt cake was thrown into the fire from a small sacrificial dish. The store-cupboard (
penus
) had its guardian spirits, the Penates. The door was the seat of Janus, who when conceived in the image of man faced both ways. The door was particularly important, since evil spirits might enter the house through it: hence a dead man was carried out of the house by night feet first, so that he might not find his way back. The Genius of the head of the family was also worshipped: this conception was probably that of the procreative power of the family on which it depended for its continuance. The religion of the family was an attempt to maintain peace with these spirits; if the powers were duly propitiated there was nothing to fear from the divine members of the
familia
. Apart from ‘family prayers’ at the beginning of the day and the offering to Vesta, ritual centred around birth, marriage and death. At the birth of a child three men struck the threshold with an axe, pestle and broom, agricultural implements, to keep out the wilder spirits of whom the chief was later named Silvanus. Many ceremonies accompanied marriage; for instance, a bride from another family might offend the household spirits and be dangerous as a stranger; so at the critical moment of entry she smeared the door posts with wolf’s fat and oil and was carried over the threshold. It was necessary to perform certain rites exactly (
iusta facere
) to ensure that the dead did not ‘walk’. Although perhaps even in Palaeolithic times man was thought to survive death, and the Neolithic folk had fairly definite ideas of a future state, the dead had little or no individuality. The great throng of the dead were identified with the Di Manes, the Kindly Gods, who were perhaps originally chthonic deities. At the festival of the Lemuria in May the head of the household could get rid of ghosts by clashing brass vessels and by spitting out black beans from his mouth, saying nine times, ‘With these I redeem me and mine’; when the ghosts behind had gathered up the beans, he expelled them with the ninefold formula ‘
Manes exite paterni
’. In the later Parentalia the element of fear was diminished and graves were decorated by the living members of the family.

The religion of the family, though centred in the house, naturally extended to the fields. Boundary stones not only had to be set up with due ceremony, but were the object of an annual festival, the Terminalia, in which they were garlanded by the farmers whose lands adjoined. It was also necessary to beat the bounds in order to purify, protect and fertilize the fields. This was done at the Ambarvalia in May in a solemn procession which culminated in prayer and the sacrifice of a pig, sheep and bull (
suovetaurilia
). The spirits of the fields, Lares, were placated at the Compitalia at places where paths bounding farms met. This joyful ceremony was shared by the slaves, who had no part in the worship of the house; later they introduced the worship of the Lares into the
house where it was adopted by the whole household.
³
Other festivals were celebrated by the
pagus
as a whole at seed-time and harvest.

It was long before these vague, aniconic spirits were conceived in human form or as personal beings with human characteristics. This development was only finally achieved under foreign influence and through the establishment of state-cults of the various deities. But from the first some emerged above the rest. Apart from Janus and Vesta, Jupiter, the sky-god of the Indo-Europeans, transcended the limits of animism, as did Mars who was originally an agricultural deity as well as a war god and thus manifested two kinds of
numen
: indeed Mars was probably the chief deity of the primitive Romans. With them is linked Quirinus, perhaps the war god of the Quirinal settlement or the god who presided over the assembled citizens; later legend equated him with Romulus.
⁴